What net neutrality always fails to take into account is that ISPs don't exist on an island. If my ISP starts making things unusable, I will complain loudly and vocally... I will tell my friends. Other customers get pissed. If enough of us get pissed and they refuse to take action, we'll be lobbying our towns to get rid of the local franchise.
Similarly, outside interests will see a market to serve by providing what the current provider isn't. We could very well see Google or another major player offer an alternative high speed access to the net.
Some rural people might not have the leverage against their ISP nor be dense enough to attract the major players but do we really need major legislation begging to invoke the law of unintended consequences without even letting the market try to solve the problems itself at this point?
not quite... they are allowed to give out information but they aren't allowed to promote a specific party or candidate. How many churches have had their tax exemption status revoked for being against abortion? A lot of churches produce a little comparison of politicians, bordering very closely on advocacy, yet very few of them have lost their status as well.
For those who didn't become politically aware until after the republicans gained power in 1994 and thought the democrats actually practiced what they preach about the First Amendment, I welcome you to reality. The Democrats will tell you anything you want to hear to achieve power just like the Republicans do. The only way to fix it is to scale the federal government back to its Constitutional powers and you can be damn sure that they will do anything they can to stop that from happening.
But if the pill was not patented, the pill would have to be sold for $1,000 each and the company would still profit but it would take much longer to get back the $1 billion.... Nobody patented quinine (malaria cure) yet it was discovered and it's available cheap.
Who says it'll sell at $1,000 each if its not patentable? What if it is sold at (cost to manufacture)+5% by a second manufacturer? We'd have a race to the bottom. WONDERFUL for the patients, HORRIBLE for the company who invested the hundreds of millions to get it through clinical trials. At $500 profit per pill, taking your $10 billion cost to develop, they would need to sell 20 million of them. At $5 profit per pill, they'd have to sell 2 billion of them. That is just to break even, it takes 2 billion +1 sales to make your first profit and that's assuming your competitors aren't selling it too since they will make a $5 profit on their first sale. From a business perspective, its an absolutely horrid ROI. You're better off investing that $10 billion in ANYTHING else, even a new idiotic dotcom, er Web 2.0, scheme.
Bartlett immediately corrected her on her phrasing(though I would argue that Kennedy is a hostile enemy, maybe not to the US but to the war effort). Do you complain during the daily televised press briefings when Helen Thomas asks a blatantly loaded question and Tony Snow corrects her question before answering it? Isn't that the exact same thing? And actually, I guess it isn't, because most segues, especially on Fox and Friends, are normally improvised while Helen Thomas deliberately plans her questions ahead of time.
I haven't watched the equivalent programs on the alphabets in, frankly, years... but I'm sure you'll find pretty much the same thing there if their hard news nightly programs are willing to air completely falsified reports. I can just see Meredith Viera making a swipe at Bush in a segue to interview Cindy Sheehan. Or look to The View (ok... ok... so sadly enough, my barber has it on and I've seen it there) just to see how far Barbara Walters has fallen from a serious journalist with her cackle of political hacks.
You do realize that Fox and Friends isn't exactly a hard news program, right? Its more of a breakfast commentary type show unless you count the hosts racing tricycles, showing photos of each other growing up or doing silly things, or having the occasional fashion show to be the hard news.
weekdays (eastern time):
6a-9a Fox and Friends: (general light banter with some interviews of people ranging from politicians to actors to someone who made the world's biggest ball of yarn)
9a-12p Fox News Live: Hard news coverage, though they aren't afraid to have a little fun with each other when moving from story to story
12p-1p Fox News Online: They discuss the news that is on their website and what people have browsed the most
1p-2p The Live Desk: Opinion show on the current news of the day
2p-3p Fox News Live: More hard news
3p-4p Studio B: Hard news, often with a bit of the sillier things of the day
4p-5p Your World: Mostly business coverage of the day. As with all business stuff, opinion comes in time to time... but so do Victoria's Secrets clips:)
5p-6p The Big Story: Mix of hard news and opinion. Lines are pretty clearly delinated
6p-7p Special Report: Straight reporting of the political news of the day. 20 minute commentary period which is plainly claimed as such
7p-8p The Fox Report: Recap of the major news stories of the day
8p-9p The O'Reilly Factor: Pure commentary and labeled as such
9p-10p Hannity and Colmes: Pure commentary and debate
10p-11p On the Record: Commentary on the legal news of the day, often with a little bit of investigative reporting
11p-6a rerurns of the prime time shows
All in all, the hard reporting is usually pretty fair. You can argue that there are too many commentary shows in comparison to pure reporting, but how much actual news is really worth national air time in most given days? I look at my local news broadcasts and the local paper and the vast majority of the local reporting is filler anyway. Just last night and today, they tried to huff up how threatening the snow storm would be... yeah, that whole 2-4 inches is going to shut down half the state when we've been known to get 2 feet and have everything cleared by the time you brush your teeth in the morning.
Or Air America has attempted to demonize the companies on the list such as Walmart, Exxon-Mobile, Philip-Morris, etc. Would you want to give money to the people who are out there criticizing everything you do and who you are? Do you hear HUD or your state dept of social services running their commercials during right wing shows that criticize them?
Further, the couple times I've tried to listen to Air America just to see what it was about, all I heard was a stream of hatred. Retail companies (like Kohl's (founded by the family of Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) or JC Penny) don't want to be associated with that and risk losing a good chunk of their business. After all, buying ads is pretty close to endorsing the show the ads are on (and it used to be a flat out endorsement back in the 50s... Calgon presents The Days of Our Lives or what have you). Similarly, companies like Kraft or Hersheys will fall into the same category as the retailers. If you were a huge Fortune 500 company, would you risk sponsoring a network that can only draw a 1.2 share? You don't hear those companies advertising on Michael Savage's show on the opposite side of the spectrum either.
Say what you will about Rush. He's hardly as controversial as the 10 second out of context soundbites or flat out misinformational attacks (see Osama/Obama, Limbaugh played a clip of Ted Kennedy mixing up the name and it was Limbaugh who got accused of saying it). He has a wide market share precisely because he makes his show fun and entertaining enough that even a number of democrats will listen to it and laugh. That audience is also insanely supportive in buying the products advertised on his show (including startup niche products that weren't really advertised elsewhere... I'm thinking of this board game from a few years ago but can't remember the name right now). If you listen to him for a while, you'll inevitably hear someone complaining that he isn't discussing politics that day and he will remind them that he isn't in the business of speaking politics, he is in the business of providing the largest audience he can to his advertisers.
At the end of the day, to stay on the air, you need to draw an audience. Your ad income is based on the number of listeners you can get to hear the ads. If you alienate potential listeners and you alienate potential advertisers, you're digging your own grave and you'll never break even, much less be profitable. If you figure 5% of people are extreme left wing, 5% are extreme right wing, 25% are center-left, 25% are center-right, and 40% are somewhere in the middle or on a wacky fringe all their own, Rush, being center-right, gives him a potential audience of 70% of the people (actually a little more since some center-left will listen to him for entertainment, even if they disagree. By contrast, Air America targets 5% of the audience and hopes to pick up some of the 25% of the center-left. Railing as hard as they do to the left ensures that 30% of the audience absolutely won't listen to them and of that remaining 40% in the middle, only some of the wacky fringe people will.
You assume that the democrats were elected on their ideas... instead, they were elected because they were the biggest name that weren't republicans. 2006 was more of a revolt against corruption than it was buying into ideas. Since taking office, the dems are already starting to try to ram legislation through without input from the republicans (despite complaining about the republicans doing just that while they were in power), the CBC gave a standing ovation to a Congressman who was pretty obviously taking bribes just a year ago, Pelosi wanted to seat a democrat instead of the republican who won the district in Florida, etc. The next two years, the dems have to do something since they have control - they can't just sit back and complain that everything the republicans do is wrong. Thing is, they weren't elected because of their agenda, so the harder to the left they push, combined with the maturation of their own scandals over the next two years, the harder 2008 is going to be for them to keep control.
Factor in a super-polarizing figure like Hillary Clinton in 2008 and you will see the republican base come out in droves. About the only thing that has a chance to keep the republicans out of power is if the republican nominee is a socially liberal candidate. Even then, a ton of democrats would rather vote for a Rudy Guilliani type over Hillary.
a 20 ounce bottle of water or pop cost us about 55 cents to buy (plus storage, refrigeration, labor, etc once we had it)... Figure probably 65 cents by the time everything went into it. Energy drinks cost about $1.25 directly from the distributor and those we sold for $2.25.
$1.50 for a drink
-$0.65 to put it on the shelf
-$0.55 service charge for your credit card
-$0.12 sales tax
-$0.05 bottle deposit
13 cents profit on that bottle of pop (and ($2.25-1.35-0.55-0.17-.05) 13 cents on an energy drink as well). Granted, margins on fountain drinks are much, much, much higher and that consumed the bulk of our beverage service(instead of a fractional return, it was more like 4 cents for every penny invested). Still, we had to raise the price 25 cents from $1.25 to even make a profit once we factored in people who would come in and want to buy just one bottled drink with a credit card. You'll also note that the state makes just about the same profit margin for taking absolutely none of the risk. The bottling distributor and especially the credit card service are the two winners that are making the bulk of the money.
I recently managed a small family restaurant and two years ago, we finally relented and got a credit card machine service because so many people these days refuse to carry cash on them (sidenote, good luck if a disaster hits and you can't use your credit card for a while due to the electricity/communication systems being out of operation). We were a small 30ish person business with no real leverage to negotiate terms with a credit card company so we're basically told what we could take or have nothing.
Generally speaking, there was a 50 cent charge for every credit card we swiped. Buy a $1.50 drink with a credit card and 33% of the price is that credit card charge. There was a 25 cent charge for invalid cards (account expired, was canceled, someone swiped a card type that we didn't accept, etc). Discover charged the merchants the 50 cent fee plus 3% of the purchase price (again, that $1.50 drink = 50 cent charge + 4.5 cents). American Express was 3% for a personal card and 5% for a business card. We were also charged a $1 service fee every time we ran a statement of how much credit we had been credited (so instead of pulling a credit receipt every time a drawer was counted, it was pulled once a day). There's also the added headache of having to keep signed receipts stored for a period of time just in case they were disputed.
Short story, we took a loss on every credit card transaction under $10 or so. On very large purchases the rewards credit cards took a still pretty good chunk for themselves ($400 party paid for by a corporate AmEx card took $20.50 just for swiping that card). Someone has to pay for the cost the merchants incur for accepting cards and ultimately, it is the patrons who pay. Taking a 5% loss on every transaction and losing money on all transactions until $10 will put most businesses under if they didn't raise prices to compensate... and unfortunately, that means raising prices for cash payers as well (especially on lower end goods that you might by just one of like a 20 ounce Coke).
From the FY05 report on the education levels of military personnel:
Enlisted (1147416 total):
High School: 990041
AA/AS/BA/BS: 134060
MA/MS/PHD/Professional: 5164
Officers (226135 total):
High School: 4196
AA/AS/BA/BS: 132997
MA/MS/PHD/Professional: 81641
So we have 12% of enlisted people with a college degree and 95% of officers with a degree. If you assume all of the unknown and non-high school personnel don't have a high school diploma or GED, that is 2.2% of the military which compares fairly nicely to a 5% or so national dropout rate. I'd also venture to say that the education probably compares pretty well to the private sector too if you compare officers to skilled workers and executives and enlisted to unskilled workers and general laborers. To say that the military is any more uneducated than the general populace shows a lack of education in itself.
Ever been to the midwest? They have the nicest highways, "community centers", police and fire departments.
Now... I don't live in the midwest, I live in a rural part of NY that is a lot like the midwest (7200ish people over 41 square miles). We have one new fire department, one remodeled fire department and one decrepit fire department. All are volunteer organizations and by virtue of not having a huge paid fire staff, the town can afford to put money into buildings and equipment. Care to guess how much money is saved by having roughly 100 volunteer firefighters vs paying them state prevailing wage + retirement to go to two fires a day? THAT is what pays for the fire house.
My town has no police force of its own, just 15 year old substation. We rely on the county sheriff which we pay for through our property taxes. We don't need a significant police force when you consider there has been two murders since the end of WWII. The chief police action around here is traffic violations and as far as calls go, most are minor domestic disputes or petty vandalism. We have a per capita income of just under $20k and that includes corporate execs from the city who live out here to get privacy they just can't have in the suburbs.
We have nice roads and we have crappy roads. The less traffic a road gets, the better condition they're generally in. We also have seasonal dirt roads.
Our schools seem to be remodeled and extended every 5 years. They're BY FAR the biggest drain on our tax dollars. Between federal and state mandates, piss poor building planning and a teacher's union gone wild, my little community has a $30 million school budget for about 2500 kids. We see a 2-5% increase in school taxes every year and the kids have gone from fairly smart to dirt stupid as more and more parents move out here who don't care what their kids know or what problems they cause as long as they continue to pull in As... They grade on a curve now and a valedictorian I know from 5 years ago graduated with a 102 overall average but can't do basic trig.
As for your comments on farm subsidies, I'll simply say this much. We need to keep a certain amount of agriculture production in our country. If we were to become entirely dependent on outside food sources, you'd see the same problems with food that we see with oil today. You want Mexico or Brazil to have that kind of control over us? If we were cut off from oil tomorrow, we've got a decent reserve built up plus some domestic production to go into an emergency mode while we develop alternatives. It might not be pretty but we'd get through it. Have 80% of our food get cut off, good luck waiting months for the domestic stuff to start ripening again. Of course, you could stock extra food in warehouses and silos but then you're subsidizing foreign farmers. Put tariffs up to protect domestic production and you're still indirectly subsidizing farmers.
Defense Department bases with little or no strategic value keep barely-educated young people "employed".
When did Jon Cary start posting on slashdot? Do you know the military has a 99% high school+ education rate with many soldiers holding a bachelor's degree or better? Can we start doing test flights of new jets over LA? Test new bomb systems in downtown Seattle? Train demolition engineers under Boston? If Canada were to attack us for some reason, can we wait for planes from Las Vegas to get to Detroit? Are you going to pick up arms after the next Pearl Harbor or are you going to hope one of those "barely-educated young people" will protect your ass for you?
Midwesterners get hail that destroys their crops, and Uncle Sam is there to hand them a big fat check. Hail damages my house or destroys the car I need to use to get to work in the northeast, and Uncle Sam says "gee, sorry to hear that."
Hurricane floods New Orleans and Uncle Sam says "here's billions of dollars to rebuild in the same place
Its not about a cashier who CAN'T ring you up properly, its about your friend who's a cashier not ringing you up properly. Having managed a few different restaurants, I've caught several employees who would either give things away to their friends for free (sometimes including money from the register. $4.50 sale, friend hands them $10 and they get back $15.50 or $25.50 in change), undercharge their friends for stuff they ordered, and sometimes skim a dollar off every order (McDonald's drivethru... a pie or something at the time came out to $1 even with tax. Add it onto the price when they order, subtract it before they get to the window to pay, pocket the difference).
It doesn't matter if you pay the cashier minimum wage or $50/hr... most people will be honest but there's always that one person here and there who won't be, whether its a $2.50 burger or a $2500 tv.
My local paper has a pretty decent internet presence. Somewhere between 4-5am, the site is updated with most of that day's content and then breaking stories are noted through the day (which generally turns into tomorrow's articles).
The problem is that my paper really doesn't do a lot of investigative reporting and 75% of the content is articles straight off the news wires. Most of the stories they actually write (pretty much everything but the sports page) are written through a prism of narrow bias (usually in subtle ways of framing an issue so only the side they want to look positive does) instead of simply reporting the facts. Finally, the editorial pages are completely self contradicting and filled of the same bias (Years of "There is too much secrecy and corruption in Albany." During the run up to the election "Elliot Spitzer is a great candidate but he speaks in generalities instead of specifics about what he wants to do. He needs to be up front and honest to the voters." A week before the election "Elliot Spitzer is the right man for the job." Now "Spitzer won the election, now he needs to do the things he promised to do and he should start by opening the curtains to how government is run." Hello... you endorsed him even though he wouldn't tell you a single specific thing he was going to do... You did nothing but complain about the problem yet you endorsed perpetuating it and now you're going to complain again even though your guy won.)
I usually check it out once a day just to see if I miss anything... but the local tv stations generally have better investigative reporting and nearly everything important going on in town ends up on one of the various local talk radio shows with people calling in and debating it. I'll opt for the mayor and the police union president coming onto the radio and telling their sides of the crime problem first hand vs what the paper decides to nitpick from interviewing either one. Simply, I don't subscribe to the newspaper anymore because they're more about an agenda than facts these days.
Maybe there isn't enough waste restaurant oil for everyone, but even brand-new vegetable oil from Costco or Sams is often cheaper than regular Diesel fuel depending on price fluctuations.
I pay about 66 cents a gallon in taxes on my gasoline for one thing... if bulk vegetable oil starts getting taxed similarly, that alone will negate the price difference, not to mention that vegetable oil will still be supply limited. Restaurant vegetable oil use will be a drop in the bucket compared to how much demand would be created by large scale consumption and a driving fuel. Fossil fuels aren't all that renewable but it costs nearly nothing to extract it from the ground. Vegetable oil is renewable but requires a large amount of farming which DOES cost money, not to mention it will displace other farming (possibly at the harm of the environment since forest land could be more profitable as farm land) and drive the cost of food up with it.
It is all about scale. Right now, it works because a handful of people do it here and there. As soon as a significant number of people want to do it, the price will skyrocket due to demand and government will come in looking for a new revenue stream to replace their failing one. Its yet another solution that looks nice and makes you feel good on the surface until you look at what it would really mean down the road.
Having just left the restaurant industry (again)...
We paid the disposal company $35 a month for rental of the grease dumpster. In return, they hauled the it away. We got nothing for the oil itself. That's just the way it is around here.
That said, earlier this year, we had a guy ask us if we'd fill his 2.5 gallon buckets with our leftover oil... and we said yes... for a while. Instead of just taking the bucket oil, flipping the lid on the dumpster open, quick pour and closing the lid, we had to spend 5 minutes prying lids off buckets, dumping a little here and a little there, resealing the buckets, etc. It went from a 60 second job to a 10 minute job so we stopped doing it. Figure 4.5 hours of pay a month wasted in messing around with his buckets at about $16/hr by the time you figure in taxes and other hidden fees with the wages and you're looking at it having a cost of $72 a month to fill up his buckets. To top it off, we'd supply him with oil faster than he could use it, which meant we had to keep that $35 dumpster around anyway. He refused to pay anything for the oil, stating that he was doing us a favor by getting rid of it...
I'd estimate that our one little restaurant probably went through... 6-7 gallons of oil per day. Having managed the sole (old, large style) McDonalds in a college town 10 years ago (ie, they probably had the highest oil usage of anyone in the area at the time), I'd guess on memory that we went through about 10 gallons a day there. There isn't enough used oil to fill up the cars of the employees every day, much less have any kind of impact on large scale use.
Restaurants will still need to buy the oil in the first place. It already sells for $10-50 for a 35 pound container depending on the type and quality. Even if they can sell it afterward, the price patrons of the food pay WILL go up as the cost of the oil goes up because the cost of doing business just went up with it. So yeah, owners can get more money out of the higher priced oil and piss off their customers a bit OR they can basically end up at a break even point (can't sell the used oil for more than the fresh stuff or people will just buy the fresh stuff) and keep their customers happy.
The grandparent specifically said that it would be different if the program did those things. All I did was point out that we don't know if it does those things so implied assumptions about facts we don't know is asinine. Blizzard would certainly have standing to sue if the instability of the servers in the past was related to people using this program, would they not? Blizzard has no legal obligation to disclose the reasons the servers were down to their player base.
And once again, I repeat, Blizzard did not sue MDY, MDY sued Blizzard. There is absolutely no legal filing of a crime or civil infringement having taken place at this point.
if this was like, a program or something there of that was designed to say, DDoS a WoW server, then I'd understand. If it was designed to keylog people's WoW account info or auto delete their in-game characters/items yea.
What if a bug ends up in the program that does DDoS a WoW server? What if it DDoS a WoW zone? What if it denies a legitimate user from completing a quest or working on a tradeskill or something because it consumes all the resources as soon as they become available, faster than a player can react? How do you know for sure it isn't keylogging people or copying their account info? How do you know that they haven't found a way to dupe items and are using it to dupe to give the item to one of their own bots so they can sell it?
But since when is creating a "cheat" for a game, againist the law?
I've never played WoW... that said, depending on how Glider works, it could involve intercepting and decrypting an encrypted stream and that could be a violation of the good old DMCA.
dude doesn't charge money for it does he?
Even though he does charge for it, it doesn't really matter. AFAIK, they aren't distributing any Blizzard copyrighted code so its not a fair use case. Further, if I give away free tshirts that I pressed with the Nike swoosh on them and take a loss on it, Nike can still sue me for violating their trademark.
does Major League Baseball punish him and the companies that make those products?
Ben-gay, Tylenol, etc have legal and non-performing enhancing uses and aren't banned in the various substance abuse policies by any sporting group that I know of. Glider serves one purpose, which is to interact with a server, against its terms of service, to enhance the play above what the terms of service allows.
do the major sport companies go after the steroid manufacturers?
See BALCO and Victor Conte for an example.
it's bullshit. I'm sure they'll pull something out of their ass saying his usage of the WoW client to reverse engineer some kind of program has violated their Copyrights yadda yadda yadda but in terms of fair use, assuming he wasn't making profit off of WoW Glider, I think he could get away with it. WoW Players feel free to mod me down , I don't condone cheating in such a manner but at the same time Blizzard has been real asshatery in the last two years abou cheating (Warden, anybody?).
As I said, profit has absolutely nothing to do with it and irregardless, your assumption about not charging for it is false. I hate the DMCA as much as the next guy but its very possible he violated it to create his program. Someone might argue that WoW players may have standing to sue him and his clients (possibly Blizzard depending on if their disclaimer forbids it and stands up) for using a program which interferes with the ability of non-infringing players to enjoy the game. Finally, if you read the article and/or the filing, it is MDY preemptively suing Blizzard to try to seek a judgment that they aren't breaking the law, not Blizzard suing MDY at this point.
Just a tip... before you try to expose something for idiotic, you might want to actually read whats going on first or else you risk exposing yourself. Then again, this is Slashdot.
You do realize there are a LOT more txes than income tax, right?
A low income person is likely to spend every dollar they earn. That means they will have an additional tax beyond income tax on every dollar. Where I live, its 8.25%. Even taking into account that a good chunk of that money is going to non-taxable items (which really amounts to just non-prepared food in my state), probably 5% of their income goes to sales tax.
Then there's the approximate 63 cents per gallon tax on gasoline here. A lot of poor people live out in rural areas and absolutely have to have a car to get to work, the doctor, the grocery store, etc. I generally don't drive unless I have to go somewhere and living 25 miles outside the nearest city, I average about 9000 miles a year. At 22 mpg for my truck (yeah, I need a pickup), that's about 400 gallons of gas a year or $252 in gas taxes. Also, factor in taxes like car registration, license, and inspections. That's another (ballpark) $150 a year.
There are franchise fees, 911 surcharges, luxury taxes, tariffs, USF fees, local recovery charges, etc on utilities. When you pay those bills by mail, there's another 39 cent tax for each bill you're paying.
There are tariffs on some imported products. Even if you buy the products without tariffs, the price you pay reflects the taxes the manufacturer, retailer and middlemen had to pay along the way.
If you drink or smoke, as a LOT of poor people do, you pay hundreds or thousands a year more in sin taxes.
And just because property taxes are low where you live doesn't mean they are low everywhere. This is actually my largest tax here. My house was assessed at $70,000 last year. Even accounting for the STAR discount in NY (which is actually a giant mess that caused taxes to go up), we paid $973 in school taxes and $1145 in town/county for a combined total of $2118 or $176.50 a month. Also note that we're on the low side of the average assessment for my town and there are special tax zones where people pay another level of tax on top of that (the village has an additional tax and there is another tax if you live on the lake rated at per foot of lake front). The town was reassessed this year as well and they wanted to bump my assessment by 50% to $105k, but I talked them into a more reasonable 17% increase to $82k. That will bump my property tax up to $2478 for next year and I'm lucky I didn't get stuck with a $3177 bill instead.
I estimate that I pay roughly 25% of my income into non-income taxes and that number is ever increasing between new taxes, sales tax hikes, etc.
On a side note, if you want to see how to completely destroy the economy of your region, this is just a slice of everything that is wrong with western NY.
In 1997, the Senate, including John Kerry, voted 95-0 against the US participating in what Kyoto was at that time. A year later, Al Gore signed it anyway (a completely meaningless act). Al Gore and Bill Clinton knew it wouldn't pass the Senate so they didn't even bother submitting it to ask for a vote in their remaining 2.5 years in office. GWB still hasn't submitted it to the Senate but he doesn't have to - any Senator can introduce it to force a vote to put people on the record of where they actually stand even if they know its going to get shot down. Still, there's not a single Senator who wants us to participate enough to actually submit it.
So... before you accuse THIS administration of being the one who killed it, look at the administration who participated in the creation of the protocol and then shelved it for three years before this administration came into office.
More facts, less dogma. Wait, its an environmental story. Everything is dogma.
Note: I live in NY and I've never seen a Florida ballot other than the butterfly ballot that got so much attention back in 2000.
Here in NY, all of our parties are listed on the ballot in the same order. Row A is Republican, Row B is Democrat, Row C is Conservative, Row D is Liberal, Row E is Independence, etc (at least I think that's the order off the top of my head). I find it plausible that the touch screen could be out of sync and is thinking you're pointing somewhere else. If you swap Row A and Row B, does the Democrat now get selected instead of the Republican?
The above is a very plausible explanation of what could be causing the problem. A lot of us here are programmers, engineers, etc... why are so many people jumping to conclusions before we even test for what could be causing the problem? Oh, right... because so many here care more about political ideology rather than the truth despite what they claim. Remember back in 1998 when Hillary Clinton went on Good Morning America and said her husband didn't have had an affair, it was just a vast right wing conspiracy./cough open your eyes folks.
I came home from work yesterday to find five messages waiting for me on my answering machine. I got another 3 calls last night. I get called participate in polls 2-3 times a month, a little more than that lately. I get an occasional push poll call. I average 2-3 fliers supporting candidates all over the spectrum a day.
I'm registered to a party, vote in every primary and election... My Dad lives with me and isn't affiliated with any party but is disabled so he receives a permanent automatic absentee ballot. We're completely inundated this time of year because the politicians KNOW that we're going to vote. My Dad's ballot already went out a couple weeks ago and my mind has been made up for a while about how I'm going to vote.
I appreciate that they want to get the word out to voters... but jeez, you'd think they see how often both my dad and I vote and figure out we're likely to already support our own ideologies and not be one of the fence sitters who don't know if they're going to vote much less who they want to vote for.
I think what the grandparent was almost touching on is that if we had a more well-off well-educated population
So put the money in the space program now. The problems with education aren't going to be solved by money. We need to find a way to encourage the people who refuse to be educated to be educated. I have more than thirty cousins on one side of my family. Five of us went as far as to finish high school. The rest dropped out to steal cars, sell drugs, etc. Two are dead, three will be permanent welfare moms and another five are in jail right now for their activities.
What separated me from them? Well, shortly after I was born, my parents moved out of the city. Neither of my parents finished high school but my mom stayed home with me until I started school myself before she got her first job. When I went to school, it was expected that I would work my ass off and if I got any grade less than what they thought I was capable of, there was hell to pay. I got money for every A on my report card. I wasn't allowed to miss school unless I was on my death bed.
My cousins? Well, one had his father die at work and they got a $3 million settlement. He died at 20 due to a.44 to the heart. Having all that money didn't do anything for his family. His mom treated her 5 kids just like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood and just like most of my other cousins got treated. They were allowed to roam free 24/7, nobody said anything when they started bringing someone over to have sex with at 13/14, nobody forced them to go to school and do their best while they were there. They were loved but they weren't cared about. We even tried to convince my aunt to let us bring the one who got shot out here when he was about 12 because he was a smart kid who's failure started at home... Had she let him move out here with us, he'd probably be alive and living a decent life instead of being in the ground with two fatherless kids.
I've got some ideas on how to try to educate those types of people but none of them involve throwing more money at the situation. You could pay the best teachers a million bucks a year and have them work one on one but they'll never get an education because they won't have any desire to be there to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
What net neutrality always fails to take into account is that ISPs don't exist on an island. If my ISP starts making things unusable, I will complain loudly and vocally... I will tell my friends. Other customers get pissed. If enough of us get pissed and they refuse to take action, we'll be lobbying our towns to get rid of the local franchise.
Similarly, outside interests will see a market to serve by providing what the current provider isn't. We could very well see Google or another major player offer an alternative high speed access to the net.
Some rural people might not have the leverage against their ISP nor be dense enough to attract the major players but do we really need major legislation begging to invoke the law of unintended consequences without even letting the market try to solve the problems itself at this point?
you'll also note that all of these senators opposed to 220 are republicans. Oh noes! Won't someone think about the slashdot dogma?
not quite... they are allowed to give out information but they aren't allowed to promote a specific party or candidate. How many churches have had their tax exemption status revoked for being against abortion? A lot of churches produce a little comparison of politicians, bordering very closely on advocacy, yet very few of them have lost their status as well.
Sponsered by Senator Harry Reid(D) on 1/4
Cosponsored by: Bennett(R), Brown(D), Cantwell(D), Collins(R), Durbin(D), Feinstein(D), Lautenburg(D), Leahy(D), Liberman(I), Lott(R), McConnell(R), Menendez(D), McKulski(D), Salazar(D), Schumer(D), Stabenow(D), Webb(D). 17 cosponsors so far.
For those who didn't become politically aware until after the republicans gained power in 1994 and thought the democrats actually practiced what they preach about the First Amendment, I welcome you to reality. The Democrats will tell you anything you want to hear to achieve power just like the Republicans do. The only way to fix it is to scale the federal government back to its Constitutional powers and you can be damn sure that they will do anything they can to stop that from happening.
But if the pill was not patented, the pill would have to be sold for $1,000 each and the company would still profit but it would take much longer to get back the $1 billion.... Nobody patented quinine (malaria cure) yet it was discovered and it's available cheap.
Who says it'll sell at $1,000 each if its not patentable? What if it is sold at (cost to manufacture)+5% by a second manufacturer? We'd have a race to the bottom. WONDERFUL for the patients, HORRIBLE for the company who invested the hundreds of millions to get it through clinical trials. At $500 profit per pill, taking your $10 billion cost to develop, they would need to sell 20 million of them. At $5 profit per pill, they'd have to sell 2 billion of them. That is just to break even, it takes 2 billion +1 sales to make your first profit and that's assuming your competitors aren't selling it too since they will make a $5 profit on their first sale. From a business perspective, its an absolutely horrid ROI. You're better off investing that $10 billion in ANYTHING else, even a new idiotic dotcom, er Web 2.0, scheme.
Looking at what you quoted again...
Bartlett immediately corrected her on her phrasing(though I would argue that Kennedy is a hostile enemy, maybe not to the US but to the war effort). Do you complain during the daily televised press briefings when Helen Thomas asks a blatantly loaded question and Tony Snow corrects her question before answering it? Isn't that the exact same thing? And actually, I guess it isn't, because most segues, especially on Fox and Friends, are normally improvised while Helen Thomas deliberately plans her questions ahead of time.
I haven't watched the equivalent programs on the alphabets in, frankly, years... but I'm sure you'll find pretty much the same thing there if their hard news nightly programs are willing to air completely falsified reports. I can just see Meredith Viera making a swipe at Bush in a segue to interview Cindy Sheehan. Or look to The View (ok... ok... so sadly enough, my barber has it on and I've seen it there) just to see how far Barbara Walters has fallen from a serious journalist with her cackle of political hacks.
You do realize that Fox and Friends isn't exactly a hard news program, right? Its more of a breakfast commentary type show unless you count the hosts racing tricycles, showing photos of each other growing up or doing silly things, or having the occasional fashion show to be the hard news.
:)
weekdays (eastern time):
6a-9a Fox and Friends: (general light banter with some interviews of people ranging from politicians to actors to someone who made the world's biggest ball of yarn)
9a-12p Fox News Live: Hard news coverage, though they aren't afraid to have a little fun with each other when moving from story to story
12p-1p Fox News Online: They discuss the news that is on their website and what people have browsed the most
1p-2p The Live Desk: Opinion show on the current news of the day
2p-3p Fox News Live: More hard news
3p-4p Studio B: Hard news, often with a bit of the sillier things of the day
4p-5p Your World: Mostly business coverage of the day. As with all business stuff, opinion comes in time to time... but so do Victoria's Secrets clips
5p-6p The Big Story: Mix of hard news and opinion. Lines are pretty clearly delinated
6p-7p Special Report: Straight reporting of the political news of the day. 20 minute commentary period which is plainly claimed as such
7p-8p The Fox Report: Recap of the major news stories of the day
8p-9p The O'Reilly Factor: Pure commentary and labeled as such
9p-10p Hannity and Colmes: Pure commentary and debate
10p-11p On the Record: Commentary on the legal news of the day, often with a little bit of investigative reporting
11p-6a rerurns of the prime time shows
All in all, the hard reporting is usually pretty fair. You can argue that there are too many commentary shows in comparison to pure reporting, but how much actual news is really worth national air time in most given days? I look at my local news broadcasts and the local paper and the vast majority of the local reporting is filler anyway. Just last night and today, they tried to huff up how threatening the snow storm would be... yeah, that whole 2-4 inches is going to shut down half the state when we've been known to get 2 feet and have everything cleared by the time you brush your teeth in the morning.
Or Air America has attempted to demonize the companies on the list such as Walmart, Exxon-Mobile, Philip-Morris, etc. Would you want to give money to the people who are out there criticizing everything you do and who you are? Do you hear HUD or your state dept of social services running their commercials during right wing shows that criticize them?
Further, the couple times I've tried to listen to Air America just to see what it was about, all I heard was a stream of hatred. Retail companies (like Kohl's (founded by the family of Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) or JC Penny) don't want to be associated with that and risk losing a good chunk of their business. After all, buying ads is pretty close to endorsing the show the ads are on (and it used to be a flat out endorsement back in the 50s... Calgon presents The Days of Our Lives or what have you). Similarly, companies like Kraft or Hersheys will fall into the same category as the retailers. If you were a huge Fortune 500 company, would you risk sponsoring a network that can only draw a 1.2 share? You don't hear those companies advertising on Michael Savage's show on the opposite side of the spectrum either.
Say what you will about Rush. He's hardly as controversial as the 10 second out of context soundbites or flat out misinformational attacks (see Osama/Obama, Limbaugh played a clip of Ted Kennedy mixing up the name and it was Limbaugh who got accused of saying it). He has a wide market share precisely because he makes his show fun and entertaining enough that even a number of democrats will listen to it and laugh. That audience is also insanely supportive in buying the products advertised on his show (including startup niche products that weren't really advertised elsewhere... I'm thinking of this board game from a few years ago but can't remember the name right now). If you listen to him for a while, you'll inevitably hear someone complaining that he isn't discussing politics that day and he will remind them that he isn't in the business of speaking politics, he is in the business of providing the largest audience he can to his advertisers.
At the end of the day, to stay on the air, you need to draw an audience. Your ad income is based on the number of listeners you can get to hear the ads. If you alienate potential listeners and you alienate potential advertisers, you're digging your own grave and you'll never break even, much less be profitable. If you figure 5% of people are extreme left wing, 5% are extreme right wing, 25% are center-left, 25% are center-right, and 40% are somewhere in the middle or on a wacky fringe all their own, Rush, being center-right, gives him a potential audience of 70% of the people (actually a little more since some center-left will listen to him for entertainment, even if they disagree. By contrast, Air America targets 5% of the audience and hopes to pick up some of the 25% of the center-left. Railing as hard as they do to the left ensures that 30% of the audience absolutely won't listen to them and of that remaining 40% in the middle, only some of the wacky fringe people will.
You assume that the democrats were elected on their ideas... instead, they were elected because they were the biggest name that weren't republicans. 2006 was more of a revolt against corruption than it was buying into ideas. Since taking office, the dems are already starting to try to ram legislation through without input from the republicans (despite complaining about the republicans doing just that while they were in power), the CBC gave a standing ovation to a Congressman who was pretty obviously taking bribes just a year ago, Pelosi wanted to seat a democrat instead of the republican who won the district in Florida, etc. The next two years, the dems have to do something since they have control - they can't just sit back and complain that everything the republicans do is wrong. Thing is, they weren't elected because of their agenda, so the harder to the left they push, combined with the maturation of their own scandals over the next two years, the harder 2008 is going to be for them to keep control.
Factor in a super-polarizing figure like Hillary Clinton in 2008 and you will see the republican base come out in droves. About the only thing that has a chance to keep the republicans out of power is if the republican nominee is a socially liberal candidate. Even then, a ton of democrats would rather vote for a Rudy Guilliani type over Hillary.
a 20 ounce bottle of water or pop cost us about 55 cents to buy (plus storage, refrigeration, labor, etc once we had it)... Figure probably 65 cents by the time everything went into it. Energy drinks cost about $1.25 directly from the distributor and those we sold for $2.25.
$1.50 for a drink
-$0.65 to put it on the shelf
-$0.55 service charge for your credit card
-$0.12 sales tax
-$0.05 bottle deposit
13 cents profit on that bottle of pop (and ($2.25-1.35-0.55-0.17-.05) 13 cents on an energy drink as well). Granted, margins on fountain drinks are much, much, much higher and that consumed the bulk of our beverage service(instead of a fractional return, it was more like 4 cents for every penny invested). Still, we had to raise the price 25 cents from $1.25 to even make a profit once we factored in people who would come in and want to buy just one bottled drink with a credit card. You'll also note that the state makes just about the same profit margin for taking absolutely none of the risk. The bottling distributor and especially the credit card service are the two winners that are making the bulk of the money.
I recently managed a small family restaurant and two years ago, we finally relented and got a credit card machine service because so many people these days refuse to carry cash on them (sidenote, good luck if a disaster hits and you can't use your credit card for a while due to the electricity/communication systems being out of operation). We were a small 30ish person business with no real leverage to negotiate terms with a credit card company so we're basically told what we could take or have nothing.
Generally speaking, there was a 50 cent charge for every credit card we swiped. Buy a $1.50 drink with a credit card and 33% of the price is that credit card charge. There was a 25 cent charge for invalid cards (account expired, was canceled, someone swiped a card type that we didn't accept, etc). Discover charged the merchants the 50 cent fee plus 3% of the purchase price (again, that $1.50 drink = 50 cent charge + 4.5 cents). American Express was 3% for a personal card and 5% for a business card. We were also charged a $1 service fee every time we ran a statement of how much credit we had been credited (so instead of pulling a credit receipt every time a drawer was counted, it was pulled once a day). There's also the added headache of having to keep signed receipts stored for a period of time just in case they were disputed.
Short story, we took a loss on every credit card transaction under $10 or so. On very large purchases the rewards credit cards took a still pretty good chunk for themselves ($400 party paid for by a corporate AmEx card took $20.50 just for swiping that card). Someone has to pay for the cost the merchants incur for accepting cards and ultimately, it is the patrons who pay. Taking a 5% loss on every transaction and losing money on all transactions until $10 will put most businesses under if they didn't raise prices to compensate... and unfortunately, that means raising prices for cash payers as well (especially on lower end goods that you might by just one of like a 20 ounce Coke).
From the FY05 report on the education levels of military personnel:
Enlisted (1147416 total):
High School: 990041
AA/AS/BA/BS: 134060
MA/MS/PHD/Professional: 5164
Officers (226135 total):
High School: 4196
AA/AS/BA/BS: 132997
MA/MS/PHD/Professional: 81641
So we have 12% of enlisted people with a college degree and 95% of officers with a degree. If you assume all of the unknown and non-high school personnel don't have a high school diploma or GED, that is 2.2% of the military which compares fairly nicely to a 5% or so national dropout rate. I'd also venture to say that the education probably compares pretty well to the private sector too if you compare officers to skilled workers and executives and enlisted to unskilled workers and general laborers. To say that the military is any more uneducated than the general populace shows a lack of education in itself.
Here we go with the regular slashdot elitism...
Ever been to the midwest? They have the nicest highways, "community centers", police and fire departments.
Now... I don't live in the midwest, I live in a rural part of NY that is a lot like the midwest (7200ish people over 41 square miles). We have one new fire department, one remodeled fire department and one decrepit fire department. All are volunteer organizations and by virtue of not having a huge paid fire staff, the town can afford to put money into buildings and equipment. Care to guess how much money is saved by having roughly 100 volunteer firefighters vs paying them state prevailing wage + retirement to go to two fires a day? THAT is what pays for the fire house.
My town has no police force of its own, just 15 year old substation. We rely on the county sheriff which we pay for through our property taxes. We don't need a significant police force when you consider there has been two murders since the end of WWII. The chief police action around here is traffic violations and as far as calls go, most are minor domestic disputes or petty vandalism. We have a per capita income of just under $20k and that includes corporate execs from the city who live out here to get privacy they just can't have in the suburbs.
We have nice roads and we have crappy roads. The less traffic a road gets, the better condition they're generally in. We also have seasonal dirt roads.
Our schools seem to be remodeled and extended every 5 years. They're BY FAR the biggest drain on our tax dollars. Between federal and state mandates, piss poor building planning and a teacher's union gone wild, my little community has a $30 million school budget for about 2500 kids. We see a 2-5% increase in school taxes every year and the kids have gone from fairly smart to dirt stupid as more and more parents move out here who don't care what their kids know or what problems they cause as long as they continue to pull in As... They grade on a curve now and a valedictorian I know from 5 years ago graduated with a 102 overall average but can't do basic trig.
As for your comments on farm subsidies, I'll simply say this much. We need to keep a certain amount of agriculture production in our country. If we were to become entirely dependent on outside food sources, you'd see the same problems with food that we see with oil today. You want Mexico or Brazil to have that kind of control over us? If we were cut off from oil tomorrow, we've got a decent reserve built up plus some domestic production to go into an emergency mode while we develop alternatives. It might not be pretty but we'd get through it. Have 80% of our food get cut off, good luck waiting months for the domestic stuff to start ripening again. Of course, you could stock extra food in warehouses and silos but then you're subsidizing foreign farmers. Put tariffs up to protect domestic production and you're still indirectly subsidizing farmers.
Defense Department bases with little or no strategic value keep barely-educated young people "employed".
When did Jon Cary start posting on slashdot? Do you know the military has a 99% high school+ education rate with many soldiers holding a bachelor's degree or better? Can we start doing test flights of new jets over LA? Test new bomb systems in downtown Seattle? Train demolition engineers under Boston? If Canada were to attack us for some reason, can we wait for planes from Las Vegas to get to Detroit? Are you going to pick up arms after the next Pearl Harbor or are you going to hope one of those "barely-educated young people" will protect your ass for you?
Midwesterners get hail that destroys their crops, and Uncle Sam is there to hand them a big fat check. Hail damages my house or destroys the car I need to use to get to work in the northeast, and Uncle Sam says "gee, sorry to hear that."
Hurricane floods New Orleans and Uncle Sam says "here's billions of dollars to rebuild in the same place
Its not about a cashier who CAN'T ring you up properly, its about your friend who's a cashier not ringing you up properly. Having managed a few different restaurants, I've caught several employees who would either give things away to their friends for free (sometimes including money from the register. $4.50 sale, friend hands them $10 and they get back $15.50 or $25.50 in change), undercharge their friends for stuff they ordered, and sometimes skim a dollar off every order (McDonald's drivethru... a pie or something at the time came out to $1 even with tax. Add it onto the price when they order, subtract it before they get to the window to pay, pocket the difference).
It doesn't matter if you pay the cashier minimum wage or $50/hr... most people will be honest but there's always that one person here and there who won't be, whether its a $2.50 burger or a $2500 tv.
My local paper has a pretty decent internet presence. Somewhere between 4-5am, the site is updated with most of that day's content and then breaking stories are noted through the day (which generally turns into tomorrow's articles).
The problem is that my paper really doesn't do a lot of investigative reporting and 75% of the content is articles straight off the news wires. Most of the stories they actually write (pretty much everything but the sports page) are written through a prism of narrow bias (usually in subtle ways of framing an issue so only the side they want to look positive does) instead of simply reporting the facts. Finally, the editorial pages are completely self contradicting and filled of the same bias (Years of "There is too much secrecy and corruption in Albany." During the run up to the election "Elliot Spitzer is a great candidate but he speaks in generalities instead of specifics about what he wants to do. He needs to be up front and honest to the voters." A week before the election "Elliot Spitzer is the right man for the job." Now "Spitzer won the election, now he needs to do the things he promised to do and he should start by opening the curtains to how government is run." Hello... you endorsed him even though he wouldn't tell you a single specific thing he was going to do... You did nothing but complain about the problem yet you endorsed perpetuating it and now you're going to complain again even though your guy won.)
I usually check it out once a day just to see if I miss anything... but the local tv stations generally have better investigative reporting and nearly everything important going on in town ends up on one of the various local talk radio shows with people calling in and debating it. I'll opt for the mayor and the police union president coming onto the radio and telling their sides of the crime problem first hand vs what the paper decides to nitpick from interviewing either one. Simply, I don't subscribe to the newspaper anymore because they're more about an agenda than facts these days.
Maybe there isn't enough waste restaurant oil for everyone, but even brand-new vegetable oil from Costco or Sams is often cheaper than regular Diesel fuel depending on price fluctuations.
I pay about 66 cents a gallon in taxes on my gasoline for one thing... if bulk vegetable oil starts getting taxed similarly, that alone will negate the price difference, not to mention that vegetable oil will still be supply limited. Restaurant vegetable oil use will be a drop in the bucket compared to how much demand would be created by large scale consumption and a driving fuel. Fossil fuels aren't all that renewable but it costs nearly nothing to extract it from the ground. Vegetable oil is renewable but requires a large amount of farming which DOES cost money, not to mention it will displace other farming (possibly at the harm of the environment since forest land could be more profitable as farm land) and drive the cost of food up with it.
It is all about scale. Right now, it works because a handful of people do it here and there. As soon as a significant number of people want to do it, the price will skyrocket due to demand and government will come in looking for a new revenue stream to replace their failing one. Its yet another solution that looks nice and makes you feel good on the surface until you look at what it would really mean down the road.
Having just left the restaurant industry (again)...
We paid the disposal company $35 a month for rental of the grease dumpster. In return, they hauled the it away. We got nothing for the oil itself. That's just the way it is around here.
That said, earlier this year, we had a guy ask us if we'd fill his 2.5 gallon buckets with our leftover oil... and we said yes... for a while. Instead of just taking the bucket oil, flipping the lid on the dumpster open, quick pour and closing the lid, we had to spend 5 minutes prying lids off buckets, dumping a little here and a little there, resealing the buckets, etc. It went from a 60 second job to a 10 minute job so we stopped doing it. Figure 4.5 hours of pay a month wasted in messing around with his buckets at about $16/hr by the time you figure in taxes and other hidden fees with the wages and you're looking at it having a cost of $72 a month to fill up his buckets. To top it off, we'd supply him with oil faster than he could use it, which meant we had to keep that $35 dumpster around anyway. He refused to pay anything for the oil, stating that he was doing us a favor by getting rid of it...
I'd estimate that our one little restaurant probably went through... 6-7 gallons of oil per day. Having managed the sole (old, large style) McDonalds in a college town 10 years ago (ie, they probably had the highest oil usage of anyone in the area at the time), I'd guess on memory that we went through about 10 gallons a day there. There isn't enough used oil to fill up the cars of the employees every day, much less have any kind of impact on large scale use.
Restaurants will still need to buy the oil in the first place. It already sells for $10-50 for a 35 pound container depending on the type and quality. Even if they can sell it afterward, the price patrons of the food pay WILL go up as the cost of the oil goes up because the cost of doing business just went up with it. So yeah, owners can get more money out of the higher priced oil and piss off their customers a bit OR they can basically end up at a break even point (can't sell the used oil for more than the fresh stuff or people will just buy the fresh stuff) and keep their customers happy.
The grandparent specifically said that it would be different if the program did those things. All I did was point out that we don't know if it does those things so implied assumptions about facts we don't know is asinine. Blizzard would certainly have standing to sue if the instability of the servers in the past was related to people using this program, would they not? Blizzard has no legal obligation to disclose the reasons the servers were down to their player base.
And once again, I repeat, Blizzard did not sue MDY, MDY sued Blizzard. There is absolutely no legal filing of a crime or civil infringement having taken place at this point.
if this was like, a program or something there of that was designed to say, DDoS a WoW server, then I'd understand. If it was designed to keylog people's WoW account info or auto delete their in-game characters/items yea.
What if a bug ends up in the program that does DDoS a WoW server? What if it DDoS a WoW zone? What if it denies a legitimate user from completing a quest or working on a tradeskill or something because it consumes all the resources as soon as they become available, faster than a player can react? How do you know for sure it isn't keylogging people or copying their account info? How do you know that they haven't found a way to dupe items and are using it to dupe to give the item to one of their own bots so they can sell it?
But since when is creating a "cheat" for a game, againist the law?
I've never played WoW... that said, depending on how Glider works, it could involve intercepting and decrypting an encrypted stream and that could be a violation of the good old DMCA.
dude doesn't charge money for it does he?
Even though he does charge for it, it doesn't really matter. AFAIK, they aren't distributing any Blizzard copyrighted code so its not a fair use case. Further, if I give away free tshirts that I pressed with the Nike swoosh on them and take a loss on it, Nike can still sue me for violating their trademark.
does Major League Baseball punish him and the companies that make those products?
Ben-gay, Tylenol, etc have legal and non-performing enhancing uses and aren't banned in the various substance abuse policies by any sporting group that I know of. Glider serves one purpose, which is to interact with a server, against its terms of service, to enhance the play above what the terms of service allows.
do the major sport companies go after the steroid manufacturers?
See BALCO and Victor Conte for an example.
it's bullshit. I'm sure they'll pull something out of their ass saying his usage of the WoW client to reverse engineer some kind of program has violated their Copyrights yadda yadda yadda but in terms of fair use, assuming he wasn't making profit off of WoW Glider, I think he could get away with it. WoW Players feel free to mod me down , I don't condone cheating in such a manner but at the same time Blizzard has been real asshatery in the last two years abou cheating (Warden, anybody?).
As I said, profit has absolutely nothing to do with it and irregardless, your assumption about not charging for it is false. I hate the DMCA as much as the next guy but its very possible he violated it to create his program. Someone might argue that WoW players may have standing to sue him and his clients (possibly Blizzard depending on if their disclaimer forbids it and stands up) for using a program which interferes with the ability of non-infringing players to enjoy the game. Finally, if you read the article and/or the filing, it is MDY preemptively suing Blizzard to try to seek a judgment that they aren't breaking the law, not Blizzard suing MDY at this point.
Just a tip... before you try to expose something for idiotic, you might want to actually read whats going on first or else you risk exposing yourself. Then again, this is Slashdot.
You do realize there are a LOT more txes than income tax, right?
A low income person is likely to spend every dollar they earn. That means they will have an additional tax beyond income tax on every dollar. Where I live, its 8.25%. Even taking into account that a good chunk of that money is going to non-taxable items (which really amounts to just non-prepared food in my state), probably 5% of their income goes to sales tax.
Then there's the approximate 63 cents per gallon tax on gasoline here. A lot of poor people live out in rural areas and absolutely have to have a car to get to work, the doctor, the grocery store, etc. I generally don't drive unless I have to go somewhere and living 25 miles outside the nearest city, I average about 9000 miles a year. At 22 mpg for my truck (yeah, I need a pickup), that's about 400 gallons of gas a year or $252 in gas taxes. Also, factor in taxes like car registration, license, and inspections. That's another (ballpark) $150 a year.
There are franchise fees, 911 surcharges, luxury taxes, tariffs, USF fees, local recovery charges, etc on utilities. When you pay those bills by mail, there's another 39 cent tax for each bill you're paying.
There are tariffs on some imported products. Even if you buy the products without tariffs, the price you pay reflects the taxes the manufacturer, retailer and middlemen had to pay along the way.
If you drink or smoke, as a LOT of poor people do, you pay hundreds or thousands a year more in sin taxes.
And just because property taxes are low where you live doesn't mean they are low everywhere. This is actually my largest tax here. My house was assessed at $70,000 last year. Even accounting for the STAR discount in NY (which is actually a giant mess that caused taxes to go up), we paid $973 in school taxes and $1145 in town/county for a combined total of $2118 or $176.50 a month. Also note that we're on the low side of the average assessment for my town and there are special tax zones where people pay another level of tax on top of that (the village has an additional tax and there is another tax if you live on the lake rated at per foot of lake front). The town was reassessed this year as well and they wanted to bump my assessment by 50% to $105k, but I talked them into a more reasonable 17% increase to $82k. That will bump my property tax up to $2478 for next year and I'm lucky I didn't get stuck with a $3177 bill instead.
I estimate that I pay roughly 25% of my income into non-income taxes and that number is ever increasing between new taxes, sales tax hikes, etc.
On a side note, if you want to see how to completely destroy the economy of your region, this is just a slice of everything that is wrong with western NY.
In 1997, the Senate, including John Kerry, voted 95-0 against the US participating in what Kyoto was at that time. A year later, Al Gore signed it anyway (a completely meaningless act). Al Gore and Bill Clinton knew it wouldn't pass the Senate so they didn't even bother submitting it to ask for a vote in their remaining 2.5 years in office. GWB still hasn't submitted it to the Senate but he doesn't have to - any Senator can introduce it to force a vote to put people on the record of where they actually stand even if they know its going to get shot down. Still, there's not a single Senator who wants us to participate enough to actually submit it.
So... before you accuse THIS administration of being the one who killed it, look at the administration who participated in the creation of the protocol and then shelved it for three years before this administration came into office.
More facts, less dogma. Wait, its an environmental story. Everything is dogma.
Note: I live in NY and I've never seen a Florida ballot other than the butterfly ballot that got so much attention back in 2000.
/cough open your eyes folks.
Here in NY, all of our parties are listed on the ballot in the same order. Row A is Republican, Row B is Democrat, Row C is Conservative, Row D is Liberal, Row E is Independence, etc (at least I think that's the order off the top of my head). I find it plausible that the touch screen could be out of sync and is thinking you're pointing somewhere else. If you swap Row A and Row B, does the Democrat now get selected instead of the Republican?
The above is a very plausible explanation of what could be causing the problem. A lot of us here are programmers, engineers, etc... why are so many people jumping to conclusions before we even test for what could be causing the problem? Oh, right... because so many here care more about political ideology rather than the truth despite what they claim. Remember back in 1998 when Hillary Clinton went on Good Morning America and said her husband didn't have had an affair, it was just a vast right wing conspiracy.
I came home from work yesterday to find five messages waiting for me on my answering machine. I got another 3 calls last night. I get called participate in polls 2-3 times a month, a little more than that lately. I get an occasional push poll call. I average 2-3 fliers supporting candidates all over the spectrum a day.
I'm registered to a party, vote in every primary and election... My Dad lives with me and isn't affiliated with any party but is disabled so he receives a permanent automatic absentee ballot. We're completely inundated this time of year because the politicians KNOW that we're going to vote. My Dad's ballot already went out a couple weeks ago and my mind has been made up for a while about how I'm going to vote.
I appreciate that they want to get the word out to voters... but jeez, you'd think they see how often both my dad and I vote and figure out we're likely to already support our own ideologies and not be one of the fence sitters who don't know if they're going to vote much less who they want to vote for.
I think what the grandparent was almost touching on is that if we had a more well-off well-educated population
.44 to the heart. Having all that money didn't do anything for his family. His mom treated her 5 kids just like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood and just like most of my other cousins got treated. They were allowed to roam free 24/7, nobody said anything when they started bringing someone over to have sex with at 13/14, nobody forced them to go to school and do their best while they were there. They were loved but they weren't cared about. We even tried to convince my aunt to let us bring the one who got shot out here when he was about 12 because he was a smart kid who's failure started at home... Had she let him move out here with us, he'd probably be alive and living a decent life instead of being in the ground with two fatherless kids.
So put the money in the space program now. The problems with education aren't going to be solved by money. We need to find a way to encourage the people who refuse to be educated to be educated. I have more than thirty cousins on one side of my family. Five of us went as far as to finish high school. The rest dropped out to steal cars, sell drugs, etc. Two are dead, three will be permanent welfare moms and another five are in jail right now for their activities.
What separated me from them? Well, shortly after I was born, my parents moved out of the city. Neither of my parents finished high school but my mom stayed home with me until I started school myself before she got her first job. When I went to school, it was expected that I would work my ass off and if I got any grade less than what they thought I was capable of, there was hell to pay. I got money for every A on my report card. I wasn't allowed to miss school unless I was on my death bed.
My cousins? Well, one had his father die at work and they got a $3 million settlement. He died at 20 due to a
I've got some ideas on how to try to educate those types of people but none of them involve throwing more money at the situation. You could pay the best teachers a million bucks a year and have them work one on one but they'll never get an education because they won't have any desire to be there to begin with.