Kids shouldn't be drinking anyway if it's illegal for them to be! Whoever is buying them said alcohol should go to jail, especially considering that it's usually the kid's own parents.
This is the kind of idiotic reasoning that leads to teenagers' first experiences with alcohol being the day they turn 18 (or 21, or whatever the age is where you live) at a party, bar or club with all their friends egging them on to get as drunk as possible. Often, this coincides with (roughly) the first time they are allowed to get behind the wheel of a car unsupervised, which is why so many of them die in drunken car crashes.
The best way to introduce kids to alcohol is in their mid-teens, in a controlled environment (ie: under parental supervision). Much like sex, ignorance of the effects of alcohol when first partaking of it is a Very Bad Thing.
You can't claim a tax is unfair because people that have the most pay the majority of taxes.
They don't. People say progressive tax regimes are unfair because they tax the rich more both as an absolute and a relative measure than they tax the poor. The numbers merely give a graphic demonstration of this unfairness.
[...] (depending, of course, on how many poor and rich people there were)
Precisely. The only *objectively fair* systems that don't depend "on how many poor and rich people there are" are ones that involve either flat taxation rates or consumption taxes.
Now, having said all that, I do support progressive tax systems (to a degree), just not the current one (sorry, I can only talk about Australia, but I assume the US and UK are similar in principles, if not in details).
* Progressive taxation rates should be a sliding scale up to a maximum amount at a certain income level, not "tax brackets".
* If there must be "tax brackets", then the bracket cutoffs must also be indexed to inflation (to eliminate "bracket creep").
* The top tax level should really be reserved for people who are unquestionably "rich". Here in AU, it cuts in at about $80k (will rise to $125k over the next couple of years - FYI the top tax rate is 48.5%). This is *way* too low to be considered "rich" (the average wage is about $35k IIRC). I don't have the actual data to give an exact figure, but my gut feeling based on the numbers I have seen in the past is that the top level should cut in at about the point where the start of the top 3% - 5% of income earners sit, which I'm guessing will be in the ballpark of 15x the average wage. My understanding is that the US system is much closer to my ideal and that the top tax bracket is substantially higher.
However some wowsers managed to push the government into a zero limit for 'provisional' (ie. 17-20 year old) drivers.
This is because the typical teenager has absolutely NFI how to a) gauge how much they've had to drink, b) know when to stop and c) objectively assess the impact alcohol has had on them. Additionally, most of them refuse to believe the basic facts of alcohol consumption - that even relatively tiny amounts (half a glass of beer) start having an effect within 5 minutes of drinking it and that most of those effects cause you to feel the exact opposite to how you'll actually react (eg: alcohol increases sexual desire but dramatically reduces sexual ability).
Combine this with the typical teenager's - particularly males - lack of ability to assess risk and connect cause and effect, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
Most young adults - once they grow out of it - recognise this, which is why those laws remain. Incidentally, those laws have had a significant impact on drink driving deaths (unlike, say, speeding laws, which have had SFA impact on the road toll).
Personally I'm a supporter of a zero BAC for *everyone*. Not because I think it will stop serious drink drivers, but because it limits the way rich and/or famous people can get off with the "oh, I didn't realise I'd had enough to be over" excuse, in addition to people who are so susceptible to alcohol they can be legless while still under 0.05. Basically, a zero BAC for everyone is both fairer and safer.
I'm hardly a "wowser" either - I'm quite a hard drinker (it's difficult not to be growing up in Central QLD) - and am more than capable of holding my piss. But if you drink, you shouldn't drive.
As if criminalising harmless trace amounts of alcohol is going to solve the drink driving problem. I've heard that people have been booked, gone to court, been fined and had their licence suspended for as little as 0.01 under these stupid laws.
I sincerely doubt that - the legal definition of "zero" is 0.02 or under, precisely *because* there are many non-alcoholic things that can lead to a non-zero BAC, particularly with breathalysers (ie: so people _don't_ get into trouble for "harmless trace amounts of alcohol").
Note also that the evidence of a breathalyser can't get you convicted - a blood test *must* be taken (this is how savvy people get off - by delaying the blood test long enough to allow their BAC to get down to "zero").
It's the guide that's given to us here in Canada. Obviously there's always exceptions (eg. the guy in the thread who can tank 18 beers, or this girl I know who weighs all of 45kg and can drink most 120kg guys under the table, or this guy I know who passes out after breathing bar air for 15 mins), so caution should always rule when in the control seat of 2000KG of steel death.
Note that how a person *feels* is not necessarily indicative of their BAC. Plenty of people who can't handle their drink are unfit to drive while still under the legal limit, and plenty of people who can handle their drink are still fit to drive while over the legal limit.
Well that was pretty weak, why not just jump right to child molesting instead of mere rape?
Personally I don't consider there to be a difference worth making.
If you aren't going to take the argument seriously then why even bother to show up.
I'm not taking your argument seriously because it's 100% presumptive without even a token gesture at believable supporting evidence.
But I might as well bother to gently guide you back into the reality of the situation - where people speed, they also gradually run more lights and so forth.
Evidence ? Note that your evidence must demonstrate a constant trend of ignoring transport laws that grows objectively more dangerous over time. Someone who speeds and runs red lights constantly - but has _always_ does so - is not an example that supports your position (which is nothing more than a variation on the "gateway drug" argument).
It's a matter of degree and of kind, the slippery slope does not lead to the kind of instant Sith-like downfall you so comically put forth but a gentle acceleration down the curve of thinking less of rules laid in front of you.
And now we get to the point I was trying to make - does this "thinking less of rules" apply to *all* rules, or only the ones that are already held in low regard by large chunks of the population ?
If you're going to say people who speed move onto "bigger" crimes (from the perspective of the law) like, say, quietly having a joint at home after work and use that as evidence of the "slippery slope", then I say your argument is bogus. While those sort of drug offences may be treated more harshly by the law, they're no more serious in any objective analysis than speeding or jaywalking.
If, on the other hand, you're going to try and say simple things like speeding lead on to significantly worse crimes - theft, assault, etc - then that's an argument that's going to need some evidence to back it up.
If you're disinclined to believe me just settle down sometime on any busy intersection in America and watch the traffic there for a half hour.
This example is deeply flawed.
Where's the driver history to reference ? How are we to know the long-term driving habits of the drivers passing through that intersection ? How are we to know what other "crimes" they may or may not have committed ?
Your example does *nothing* to supports your "gateway drug" hypothesis. All it does is show isolated incidents of bad driving.
As for P2P, do you not think it a good idea for people to at least respect the copyrights of others?
I think copyright is a broken idea that only existed in the first place as the least worst option. Modern technology has since shattered the fragile grounding it had in pragmatic usefulness and completely obseleted it.
Of course, I also recognise that in today's heavily corporate-sponsored government the logical idea of simply eliminating copyright will never occur, so I'm willing to be pragmatic and say a very limited form of copyright protection is tolerable. However, within my belief of what that model should be, non-profit copying is something that should be considered unavoidable and hence, allowable.
The gravy train for copyright middlemen is over, made unworkable by technology. They should either come up with new business models or fade into irrelevance. They should *not* be buying legislation to keep their obselete business model viable. Their buggy whips aren't needed anymore.
Until someone can point out explicitly which files and processes are IE which are spread out among the various DLL's on my system, I'll reject the argument as arguing separate points because the two cannot be compared on an equal basis.
Have you even bothered to try and find out ? Spent any time looking through MSDN ?
I run FF on all my systems and find it equally suitable on my P3-450 as I do on my 1.8 GHz laptop.
And IE also performs well on such systems.
There is a big difference between integrating them on the basis of techical merit vs. integrating them on the basis of choking Netscape's "air supply" and getting IE to show up at all sorts of wonderfully, irritating ways.
So in what ways are the technical merits of IE's "integration" lacking ? How is it any different to khtml or WebCore ?
It was not done on technical merit, and has repeatedly been a design flaw as someone has escallation rights into the OS itself.
No more than any other piece of user space software.
IE does not run with special privileges. It does not have secret backdoors into the Windows kernel. It doesn't have some magic way of ignoring ACLs. It's just another piece of user space code.
IE was built on the shaky grounds of taking out Netscape at the knees.
Most pieces of software are written to compete with other, similar pieces of software.
And the difference of that from blowing it up and starting over is what?
A much more stereotypical response in the US would be for NASA to pay the family 200% of the value of what they lost, and the scrupulous family would still insist on suing for additional millions for the "emotional damage" resultant from the loss of their goldfish.
And then somehow manage to be back in the poorhouse within two years...
So I laugh whenever some conservative goes off about how America's wealthy are like Atlas, bearing a world of tax burdens on their weary (but capable and compassionate!) shoulders. Let's give them all a hand, and tax cuts!
While I can't say I'm a supporter of constant tax cuts to the rich (although I will argue as to what classifies as "rich" - here in Australia, for example, "rich" is apparently someone earning more than AU$100k per year, or only about 3x the average wage) typically the top 10% of income earners pay something like 2/3 of income tax revenue (and of that, the top ~2% pay about 1/3). This is pretty consistent across the entire developed world.
You are living in your own little Gentoo world. Microsoft doesn't control *you*, so it must not control the *market*, right?
Microsoft don't "control" anyone because anyone can - and always has been able to - buy fully-functional alternative products from multiple different vendors.
Now it is MORE integrated--to the point that they CAN'T possibly make a Windows 2000 version?
The issue is not "can't", the issue is "is it worth spending lots of money on a deprecated product that won't earn much more revenue". The answer is "no".
A company that intentionally breaks compatibility (i.e. MS) deserves a lot more complaints about supporting their older products than most companies.
Except they don't. Microsoft has one of the best track records in the business for backwards compatibility. Heck, 90% of their platform problems come from their overriding desire to provide legacy support.
Ah, but if IE was just another application, it shouldn't matter which OS's it can be used on.
Bollocks. There are numerous examples of "applications" on every platform that are tied to certain versions of the system libararies, tools and kernel.
Safari+WebCore on OS X, to name just one directly comparable example.
When a process tries to access a directory it isn't permissioned to (and it's not permissioned to out-of-the-box!), the OS itself throws up a privileged user auth window.
I think you'll find that this has to be raised by the app, which subsequently must be writtent to know when it needs higher privileges.
Windows applications can do the same thing, by the way - raise a dialog asking for higher privileges if they need them.
Not to mention that this little box is hardly a panacea, either, since all malware need do is pop up a dialog that looks identical to acquire the user's password - fake "Enter your password" prompts have been a tried and true method for decades.
Sure, you could open those applications using the "Run As..." command, but that gets tedious.
If you have an application you use regularly that demands this, you should either setup a shortcut that launches it for you with higher privileges (the easy way out) or find out what it's trying to do that wants higher privileges (usually it's just a filesystem or registry key permission) and fix it (the proper way out).
For all things Firefox is, "small and light" isn't one. It chews up a lot of memory and (depending on what the pages loaded are doing) CPU time.
I don't know what standard you're measuring Firefox against to call it "small and light", but it sure as hell isn't IE.
[...] NOT built into the OS, [...]
This point gets belaboured all the time like it's some major design flaw or abnormality. In fact, IE is no more "built into the OS" than khtml is into KDE, Quicktime is into OS X, or glibc is into Linux. "Part of the OS" just means it's a shared library distributed with the OS - hardly something that sets it apart from the pack.
Microsoft has the ability to fix IE properly, but realistically it's just easier to blow it up and start over.
No it doesn't. The only *major* problem in IE is ActiveX - which in more recent versions has been significant curtailed.
With this kind of capital plus the software cost being distributed to ~90% of all desktops, you would think that at some point that you could get it right.
So which comparable product can you point out that *has* "got it right" ?
It would affect far more than 5% of the internet. At least 30% of servers are linux based.
Servers are very much a minority presence on the internet.
And these are far more interesting target than desktop for crackers.
Not in general, they're not (there are exceptions, of course, but the following caveats apply to them even more). Servers are far more likely to have competent people running them, be up to date with security fixes and have abnormal behaviour quickly identified.
In short, a Linux server is generally *not* an attractive target for crackers. A home-user Windows box is *far* more useful.
Windows is an easy target (just consider how many worms are based on activex).
And most of them are utterly useless if the user isn't running as Administrator. Windows is not the problem here.
Why you would blame Microsoft for HTML email is beyond me. There are plenty of other email clients that support HTML email. Gmail renders html email just fine, maybe it's their fault.
Particularly when Netscape's Mail & News program was the first to make HTML mail the default setting.
In one case you're talking about banning something that was legal to begin with. [...]
In the case of file swapping, even if it's legal, you can violate copyright laws if you're swapping files for which you do not have a distribution license. Not exactly the same thing as not being able to get booze.
It's just a matter of how far back you're prepared to go - copyright has only been around for a couple of hundred years. How is prohibition - "banning something that was legal to begin with" - any different to copyright law that didn't exist a few hundred years ago ?
But, as I said... that article fits drugs perfectly, and should be enough to show all but the densest people that the war on drugs is a complete failure, overloading our prison system and justice system. But that's off topic here...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but that's the thing with alcohol - if you *feel* that way then it's almost certainly not true.
This is the kind of idiotic reasoning that leads to teenagers' first experiences with alcohol being the day they turn 18 (or 21, or whatever the age is where you live) at a party, bar or club with all their friends egging them on to get as drunk as possible. Often, this coincides with (roughly) the first time they are allowed to get behind the wheel of a car unsupervised, which is why so many of them die in drunken car crashes.
The best way to introduce kids to alcohol is in their mid-teens, in a controlled environment (ie: under parental supervision). Much like sex, ignorance of the effects of alcohol when first partaking of it is a Very Bad Thing.
They don't. People say progressive tax regimes are unfair because they tax the rich more both as an absolute and a relative measure than they tax the poor. The numbers merely give a graphic demonstration of this unfairness.
[...] (depending, of course, on how many poor and rich people there were)
Precisely. The only *objectively fair* systems that don't depend "on how many poor and rich people there are" are ones that involve either flat taxation rates or consumption taxes.
Now, having said all that, I do support progressive tax systems (to a degree), just not the current one (sorry, I can only talk about Australia, but I assume the US and UK are similar in principles, if not in details).
* Progressive taxation rates should be a sliding scale up to a maximum amount at a certain income level, not "tax brackets".
* If there must be "tax brackets", then the bracket cutoffs must also be indexed to inflation (to eliminate "bracket creep").
* The top tax level should really be reserved for people who are unquestionably "rich". Here in AU, it cuts in at about $80k (will rise to $125k over the next couple of years - FYI the top tax rate is 48.5%). This is *way* too low to be considered "rich" (the average wage is about $35k IIRC). I don't have the actual data to give an exact figure, but my gut feeling based on the numbers I have seen in the past is that the top level should cut in at about the point where the start of the top 3% - 5% of income earners sit, which I'm guessing will be in the ballpark of 15x the average wage. My understanding is that the US system is much closer to my ideal and that the top tax bracket is substantially higher.
This is because the typical teenager has absolutely NFI how to a) gauge how much they've had to drink, b) know when to stop and c) objectively assess the impact alcohol has had on them. Additionally, most of them refuse to believe the basic facts of alcohol consumption - that even relatively tiny amounts (half a glass of beer) start having an effect within 5 minutes of drinking it and that most of those effects cause you to feel the exact opposite to how you'll actually react (eg: alcohol increases sexual desire but dramatically reduces sexual ability).
Combine this with the typical teenager's - particularly males - lack of ability to assess risk and connect cause and effect, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
Most young adults - once they grow out of it - recognise this, which is why those laws remain. Incidentally, those laws have had a significant impact on drink driving deaths (unlike, say, speeding laws, which have had SFA impact on the road toll).
Personally I'm a supporter of a zero BAC for *everyone*. Not because I think it will stop serious drink drivers, but because it limits the way rich and/or famous people can get off with the "oh, I didn't realise I'd had enough to be over" excuse, in addition to people who are so susceptible to alcohol they can be legless while still under 0.05. Basically, a zero BAC for everyone is both fairer and safer.
I'm hardly a "wowser" either - I'm quite a hard drinker (it's difficult not to be growing up in Central QLD) - and am more than capable of holding my piss. But if you drink, you shouldn't drive.
As if criminalising harmless trace amounts of alcohol is going to solve the drink driving problem. I've heard that people have been booked, gone to court, been fined and had their licence suspended for as little as 0.01 under these stupid laws.
I sincerely doubt that - the legal definition of "zero" is 0.02 or under, precisely *because* there are many non-alcoholic things that can lead to a non-zero BAC, particularly with breathalysers (ie: so people _don't_ get into trouble for "harmless trace amounts of alcohol").
Note also that the evidence of a breathalyser can't get you convicted - a blood test *must* be taken (this is how savvy people get off - by delaying the blood test long enough to allow their BAC to get down to "zero").
Note that how a person *feels* is not necessarily indicative of their BAC. Plenty of people who can't handle their drink are unfit to drive while still under the legal limit, and plenty of people who can handle their drink are still fit to drive while over the legal limit.
Personally I don't consider there to be a difference worth making.
If you aren't going to take the argument seriously then why even bother to show up.
I'm not taking your argument seriously because it's 100% presumptive without even a token gesture at believable supporting evidence.
But I might as well bother to gently guide you back into the reality of the situation - where people speed, they also gradually run more lights and so forth.
Evidence ? Note that your evidence must demonstrate a constant trend of ignoring transport laws that grows objectively more dangerous over time. Someone who speeds and runs red lights constantly - but has _always_ does so - is not an example that supports your position (which is nothing more than a variation on the "gateway drug" argument).
It's a matter of degree and of kind, the slippery slope does not lead to the kind of instant Sith-like downfall you so comically put forth but a gentle acceleration down the curve of thinking less of rules laid in front of you.
And now we get to the point I was trying to make - does this "thinking less of rules" apply to *all* rules, or only the ones that are already held in low regard by large chunks of the population ?
If you're going to say people who speed move onto "bigger" crimes (from the perspective of the law) like, say, quietly having a joint at home after work and use that as evidence of the "slippery slope", then I say your argument is bogus. While those sort of drug offences may be treated more harshly by the law, they're no more serious in any objective analysis than speeding or jaywalking.
If, on the other hand, you're going to try and say simple things like speeding lead on to significantly worse crimes - theft, assault, etc - then that's an argument that's going to need some evidence to back it up.
If you're disinclined to believe me just settle down sometime on any busy intersection in America and watch the traffic there for a half hour.
This example is deeply flawed.
Where's the driver history to reference ? How are we to know the long-term driving habits of the drivers passing through that intersection ? How are we to know what other "crimes" they may or may not have committed ?
Your example does *nothing* to supports your "gateway drug" hypothesis. All it does is show isolated incidents of bad driving.
As for P2P, do you not think it a good idea for people to at least respect the copyrights of others?
I think copyright is a broken idea that only existed in the first place as the least worst option. Modern technology has since shattered the fragile grounding it had in pragmatic usefulness and completely obseleted it.
Of course, I also recognise that in today's heavily corporate-sponsored government the logical idea of simply eliminating copyright will never occur, so I'm willing to be pragmatic and say a very limited form of copyright protection is tolerable. However, within my belief of what that model should be, non-profit copying is something that should be considered unavoidable and hence, allowable.
The gravy train for copyright middlemen is over, made unworkable by technology. They should either come up with new business models or fade into irrelevance. They should *not* be buying legislation to keep their obselete business model viable. Their buggy whips aren't needed anymore.
Have you even bothered to try and find out ? Spent any time looking through MSDN ?
I run FF on all my systems and find it equally suitable on my P3-450 as I do on my 1.8 GHz laptop.
And IE also performs well on such systems.
There is a big difference between integrating them on the basis of techical merit vs. integrating them on the basis of choking Netscape's "air supply" and getting IE to show up at all sorts of wonderfully, irritating ways.
So in what ways are the technical merits of IE's "integration" lacking ? How is it any different to khtml or WebCore ?
It was not done on technical merit, and has repeatedly been a design flaw as someone has escallation rights into the OS itself.
No more than any other piece of user space software.
IE does not run with special privileges. It does not have secret backdoors into the Windows kernel. It doesn't have some magic way of ignoring ACLs. It's just another piece of user space code.
IE was built on the shaky grounds of taking out Netscape at the knees.
Most pieces of software are written to compete with other, similar pieces of software.
And the difference of that from blowing it up and starting over is what?
Probably about 5 years of development.
And then somehow manage to be back in the poorhouse within two years...
Actually I do know what constitutes a legal monopoly, I just don't think Microsoft qualified.
While I can't say I'm a supporter of constant tax cuts to the rich (although I will argue as to what classifies as "rich" - here in Australia, for example, "rich" is apparently someone earning more than AU$100k per year, or only about 3x the average wage) typically the top 10% of income earners pay something like 2/3 of income tax revenue (and of that, the top ~2% pay about 1/3). This is pretty consistent across the entire developed world.
Microsoft don't "control" anyone because anyone can - and always has been able to - buy fully-functional alternative products from multiple different vendors.
Can you expand on "crap", or are you just looking for something to get rhetorical about ?
The issue is not "can't", the issue is "is it worth spending lots of money on a deprecated product that won't earn much more revenue". The answer is "no".
Except they don't. Microsoft has one of the best track records in the business for backwards compatibility. Heck, 90% of their platform problems come from their overriding desire to provide legacy support.
Bollocks. There are numerous examples of "applications" on every platform that are tied to certain versions of the system libararies, tools and kernel.
Safari+WebCore on OS X, to name just one directly comparable example.
I think you'll find that this has to be raised by the app, which subsequently must be writtent to know when it needs higher privileges.
Windows applications can do the same thing, by the way - raise a dialog asking for higher privileges if they need them.
Not to mention that this little box is hardly a panacea, either, since all malware need do is pop up a dialog that looks identical to acquire the user's password - fake "Enter your password" prompts have been a tried and true method for decades.
If you have an application you use regularly that demands this, you should either setup a shortcut that launches it for you with higher privileges (the easy way out) or find out what it's trying to do that wants higher privileges (usually it's just a filesystem or registry key permission) and fix it (the proper way out).
For all things Firefox is, "small and light" isn't one. It chews up a lot of memory and (depending on what the pages loaded are doing) CPU time.
I don't know what standard you're measuring Firefox against to call it "small and light", but it sure as hell isn't IE.
[...] NOT built into the OS, [...]
This point gets belaboured all the time like it's some major design flaw or abnormality. In fact, IE is no more "built into the OS" than khtml is into KDE, Quicktime is into OS X, or glibc is into Linux. "Part of the OS" just means it's a shared library distributed with the OS - hardly something that sets it apart from the pack.
Microsoft has the ability to fix IE properly, but realistically it's just easier to blow it up and start over.
No it doesn't. The only *major* problem in IE is ActiveX - which in more recent versions has been significant curtailed.
So which comparable product can you point out that *has* "got it right" ?
Servers are very much a minority presence on the internet.
And these are far more interesting target than desktop for crackers.
Not in general, they're not (there are exceptions, of course, but the following caveats apply to them even more). Servers are far more likely to have competent people running them, be up to date with security fixes and have abnormal behaviour quickly identified.
In short, a Linux server is generally *not* an attractive target for crackers. A home-user Windows box is *far* more useful.
Windows is an easy target (just consider how many worms are based on activex).
And most of them are utterly useless if the user isn't running as Administrator. Windows is not the problem here.
Particularly when Netscape's Mail & News program was the first to make HTML mail the default setting.
No, that's Windows 2003.
I suspect Longhorn will be enough of a jump to justify Windows NT 6.0.
Windows XP Home.
When doing so doesn't require them to have "rights" to protect their work greatly in excess of other types of workers "right" to protect their work.
In the case of file swapping, even if it's legal, you can violate copyright laws if you're swapping files for which you do not have a distribution license. Not exactly the same thing as not being able to get booze.
It's just a matter of how far back you're prepared to go - copyright has only been around for a couple of hundred years. How is prohibition - "banning something that was legal to begin with" - any different to copyright law that didn't exist a few hundred years ago ? But, as I said... that article fits drugs perfectly, and should be enough to show all but the densest people that the war on drugs is a complete failure, overloading our prison system and justice system. But that's off topic here...