What TFA seems to fail at pointing out was that nuclear disarmament isn't happening because of anything the activists or advocates did - it's happening because one of the main cold-war aggressors was forced to give up. When the USSR collapsed, the biggest reason that the US and (let's be honest) China were stockpiling nukes was, well, gone - almost overnight. Without that reason, disarmament could get underway in earnest.
Same story here: until something happens that makes the public at large want to do something about pollution, you're not going to get them to stop polluting as much. In this case, the ideologues aren't going to accomplish jack - like the activists of the 1970's and 1980's, all they'll manage to do is polarize and piss-off the folks whose minds they want to have changed.
Instead, if you want a real solution, how about making a cleaner lifestyle a preferred one? Make green tech cheaper over time, and make it easier to use than the old polluting stuff (and no, not by simply levying a "carbon tax" on the existing stuff, either.) Make the preferred stuff more durable.
For example, look at Germany - they put in some damned nice tax breaks for alternative energies, big enough (and personal enough) for Germans to shingle nearly every damned building and outhouse in the nation with solar panels, and for companies to erect wind farms wherever they could. Make biofuels cheaper than regular gasoline by not charging a federal excise tax on it (and get the states to do the same), and I bet the stuff would suddenly get competitive. Sweeten the deal on alternative fuels a bit by cutting (or eliminating) road use taxes on all vehicles fitted to use only natural gas, electricity, or suchlike.
The idea is to not prohibit, but to entice. To remove the reasons why someone would want to stick with the old, bad ways. If you can do that, you can get somewhere, but I sincerely doubt that activists are going to blaze that trail...
No - just, no. That gives them the excuse to keep the paying customers at ~30mb/sec or so on a semi-permanent basis, while moneybagged interests could get massive boosts - paid for with government incentive funds. Meanwhile, the rural folks would still be borked back to dial-up or satellite.
Only one rule that would prevent this crap. Unfortunately, it would have to come from Congress:
"All Internet Service Providers are required to treat each data packet and/or stream passing within its networks with equal priority, without regard to source, content, or destination. Failure to do so will incur a fine of 1% of the provider's calculated annual revenue for each week this condition is not corrected to the satisfaction of prosecutors, plus an additional 1% of annual revenue for each week the condition has existed from the date it was first reported to the Justice Department, plus an additional 1% of annual revenue to the person or entity which first discovered and credibly reported the infraction."
I suspect that even Verizon and/or Comcast would want that shit solved awful quickly, and the bounty makes sure that any technically-minded customer can keep them honest (I mean, damn - the chance to win 1% of a big ISP's revenue would be enough to get me to script something to monitor that shit...)
...because if you're going to paint someone as a representative of a certain group of people, then proving that the person is indeed a member of that group is a good start.;)
Let me explain it to you: This company is not requiring you to turn in your non-smart gun and get theirs.
That's nice, but let me explain this to you - I was addressing GP's statement, thus: "Why yes! Those kind of people sound *exactly* like the kind of people that should have guns!"
Which, of course, is why gun owners are famous for defending free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of (and from) religion, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to a speedy and fair trial, against unreasonable searches and seizures....
Actually, the vast majority (if not all) are, or can you show proof otherwise?
1.) All people who own guns own a gun, and nearly all own ammunition. This means that simply being around a gun owner or at a gun owner's house I am dramatically more likely to get shot accidentally. This is perhaps not so much a fear of the gun owner as it is fear of the gun itself.
This would only be true if said gun owner started taking his firearms out and handling them carelessly, which is so rare that you stand a better chance (by at least an order of magnitude) of being hit by a car driven recklessly (yet for some odd reason, no one is calling for a ban on automobiles.)
2.) MANY gun owners believe in using their gun for self-defense. This also increases my likelihood of being shot around a gun owner because the gun owner may mistake me for an intruder.
If you break into my house, yes - expect to be shot if it's dark, and held at gunpoint if it's daylight. If you are not an intruder, you have nothing to worry about. Under what condition do you expect to be mistaken for an intruder, anyway?
HARDLY ANY gun owners (and this includes police officers and members of the military) are sufficiently skilled to discharge a firearm in a crowded indoor situation with multiple panicked people and possibly a few assailants in such a way that they correctly identify and harm the assailants but do not harm the bystanders. If an individual has multiple years of experience working as a military sniper they probably fall into this group, but even then they may not fall into this group when using a handgun.
Hardly any human being is sufficiently skilled to safely land a crippled airliner - and yet the odds of either happening are roughly the same, if not slightly in favor of the crippled airliner. Your point?
5.) SOME gun owners believe guns are a good way to solve interpersonal problems besides those involving self-defense. These people WANT their ownership of a gun to be a form of intimidation to some individuals. I rationally consider these people to be a danger to everyone.
Such people are promptly arrested/convicted for assault, brandishing a firearm, etc. They are only a danger once, and once only. After that they are, as convicted felons, no longer allowed to own such things.
Meanwhile, how many people commit DUI, reckless driving, blatant disregard for life/limb in their automobiles (see also the almost-daily police chases in LA), and assorted road rage incidents? Do you therefore also fear automobiles under the rational banner, or is it just that you fear something you have no familiarity with (considering that owning and using a firearm is replete with enforced gun safety demands at the gun range, classes required for hunting, classes/certifications required for concealed-carry permits, etc?)
Explain that to New York City, Chicago, etc. That, or prove that you can buy and keep a pistol in either of those cities without their blessing and permission.
Not sure if you're American or not, so I'll try to explain:
The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees that each citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. There are only a very few obvious prohibitions, namely against convicted felons and those declared mentally incompetent or ill.
Meanwhile, there are people in the US who fear the things so much, they want to restrict who can and cannot have a firearm, and wish to dictate under what conditions they are possessed. There is a route by which this can be accomplished, but it would require amending the US Constitution, which is notoriously hard to do (as it should be - capricious changes are painful, to say the least.) Any other route (including most attempts at federal "gun control" laws) is a circumvention of this process, and IMHO should not be taken, lest it set a dangerous precedent - after all, if you can circumvent one amendment, you can circumvent them all, and down that road lies fascism.
If you wish to live in community that heavily regulates firearms, then band together and do so - nothing restricts a locality/city/region from banning the things of their own initiative (see also Chicago, D.C, New York City, etc.) However, please do not try to impose such things across the whole nation. There is no "reasonable" restriction in the eyes of those who wish to promulgate these laws, save for complete abolition.
As for the people you speak of? As long as they do not commit a felony, so what? The fear of any given law-abiding person owning a firearm is irrational at best.
LG Optimus Black ANDROID 2.3 4" Touch Screen Virtual QWERTY Keyboard 5 MP Camera/Video Recorder w/2MP Front-Facing Camera 3G/Wi-Fi® Connectivity [...] "
That took all of five seconds of looking, there's a lot more in there, and I didn't even touch Cricket, TracFone, Straight Talk, Virgin Prepaid, Boost...
...and notice that I went nowhere near alibaba.com, or otherwise left the US (as I was speaking globally in the first place).
It ain't inherent security so much as it is inherent refusal to patch on the part of manufacturers and carriers.
It would be like putting up a Redhat 9.1 box with all default settings, giving it a public IP addy, and plugging it in directly to the Internet - sure it was very secure for its time, but unpatched and obsolete, it'll become just another victim.
Until manufacturers and carriers realize this (and stop thinking strictly like a damned CE company), this will continue to be the state of things.
fwiw, the NSA has owned all platforms, so it's not like iOS is invincible.
I strongly suspect that it has less to do with any flaws in either OS, than it does in the fact that iPhones get regular updates/patches/etc, whereas the vast majority of Android phones do not.
This is the one thing that Apple really should get props for - they go out of their way to ensure that, within reason, older iPhones get patched/updated along with the newest ones. Meanwhile, all but a relatively tiny fraction of (global) Android users buy models where neither carrier or manufacturer really give a damn if the phones they sell ever see a patch. I mean, seriously - the cheap/low-end Android phones can still be found coming out brand new with 2.2/2.3 installed on the damned things.
Until that paradigm changes, the massive majority of malware and hacks will target the obviously juicy (and mostly obsolete and/or unpatched) Android market.
In other news, at least some apps do well in TFA's regard: For instance, the Waze app will not let you text in-app if it detects itself as moving above a certain speed (5mph or so?), and says so specifically. It does have a button that allows you to say you're a passenger (and then text anyway), and it will take speech-to-text at any speed, but I thought that was cool that it said something along those lines.
Of course, as an app designed to be used while driving, it kinda makes sense, but I don't see why Google doesn't pony up and put something similar in Android itself; it would take a bit of work, but a mode which sense itself above a certain speed and disables the whole keyboard (querty keyboard, not dialpad) except for text-to-speech.
Not really... WWII might have gave Werner Von Braun the street cred, but he was big into rocketry long, long before Hitler put him to work at building V-rockets.
Crap - *now* they tell me. I had to use IE (v.$latest in Windows 7) to get an.iso from MSDN, because the damned site screams and complains if you use anything else.
We live on a physical planet. Unless we change that, the economy must stop growing eventually. The exponential growth we expect has to end quite soon.
One small problem with that - yes we live on a physical planet, but the economy at large does not depend solely on physical assets. Much of our economy is now quite literally information- and idea-based. If we were to count mere physical assets, Microsoft and similar make a living selling rights to manipulate ephemeral magnetic patterns. Funny thing is, even before the so-called information age, books and sheet music were not sold because of the physical goods they were comprised of (paper), but were sold because of the ideas and information they contained - so this isn't even a new concept.
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I'm not sure that's a very good comparison. Nuclear disarmament is not perceived as effecting people in their daily lives.
Well, that and the whole Glasnost/collapse thing the USSR experienced removed the main impetus for stockpiling nukes in the first place...
to the point where I can't leagally buy a shower-head that doesn't have the power of warm snot.
Two seconds and a small screwdriver to pop out that stupid flow restrictor works wonders. Five minutes and a drill handles anything tougher to remove.
What TFA seems to fail at pointing out was that nuclear disarmament isn't happening because of anything the activists or advocates did - it's happening because one of the main cold-war aggressors was forced to give up. When the USSR collapsed, the biggest reason that the US and (let's be honest) China were stockpiling nukes was, well, gone - almost overnight. Without that reason, disarmament could get underway in earnest.
Same story here: until something happens that makes the public at large want to do something about pollution, you're not going to get them to stop polluting as much. In this case, the ideologues aren't going to accomplish jack - like the activists of the 1970's and 1980's, all they'll manage to do is polarize and piss-off the folks whose minds they want to have changed.
Instead, if you want a real solution, how about making a cleaner lifestyle a preferred one? Make green tech cheaper over time, and make it easier to use than the old polluting stuff (and no, not by simply levying a "carbon tax" on the existing stuff, either.) Make the preferred stuff more durable.
For example, look at Germany - they put in some damned nice tax breaks for alternative energies, big enough (and personal enough) for Germans to shingle nearly every damned building and outhouse in the nation with solar panels, and for companies to erect wind farms wherever they could. Make biofuels cheaper than regular gasoline by not charging a federal excise tax on it (and get the states to do the same), and I bet the stuff would suddenly get competitive. Sweeten the deal on alternative fuels a bit by cutting (or eliminating) road use taxes on all vehicles fitted to use only natural gas, electricity, or suchlike.
The idea is to not prohibit, but to entice. To remove the reasons why someone would want to stick with the old, bad ways. If you can do that, you can get somewhere, but I sincerely doubt that activists are going to blaze that trail...
Break up the big providers to ensure meaningful competition.
Even better - regulate them like any other utility, right down to capping their profit margins.
as long as the "slow" lane is "fast enough".
No - just, no. That gives them the excuse to keep the paying customers at ~30mb/sec or so on a semi-permanent basis, while moneybagged interests could get massive boosts - paid for with government incentive funds. Meanwhile, the rural folks would still be borked back to dial-up or satellite.
Only one rule that would prevent this crap. Unfortunately, it would have to come from Congress:
"All Internet Service Providers are required to treat each data packet and/or stream passing within its networks with equal priority, without regard to source, content, or destination. Failure to do so will incur a fine of 1% of the provider's calculated annual revenue for each week this condition is not corrected to the satisfaction of prosecutors, plus an additional 1% of annual revenue for each week the condition has existed from the date it was first reported to the Justice Department, plus an additional 1% of annual revenue to the person or entity which first discovered and credibly reported the infraction."
I suspect that even Verizon and/or Comcast would want that shit solved awful quickly, and the bounty makes sure that any technically-minded customer can keep them honest (I mean, damn - the chance to win 1% of a big ISP's revenue would be enough to get me to script something to monitor that shit...)
Why is evidence required?
...because if you're going to paint someone as a representative of a certain group of people, then proving that the person is indeed a member of that group is a good start. ;)
IIRC, actual and credible death threats are considered a felony, which would fulfill your wish in that regard.
Let me explain it to you: This company is not requiring you to turn in your non-smart gun and get theirs.
That's nice, but let me explain this to you - I was addressing GP's statement, thus:
"Why yes! Those kind of people sound *exactly* like the kind of people that should have guns!"
Which, of course, is why gun owners are famous for defending free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of (and from) religion, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to a speedy and fair trial, against unreasonable searches and seizures....
Actually, the vast majority (if not all) are, or can you show proof otherwise?
Wrong, and here's why:
1.) All people who own guns own a gun, and nearly all own ammunition. This means that simply being around a gun owner or at a gun owner's house I am dramatically more likely to get shot accidentally. This is perhaps not so much a fear of the gun owner as it is fear of the gun itself.
This would only be true if said gun owner started taking his firearms out and handling them carelessly, which is so rare that you stand a better chance (by at least an order of magnitude) of being hit by a car driven recklessly (yet for some odd reason, no one is calling for a ban on automobiles.)
2.) MANY gun owners believe in using their gun for self-defense. This also increases my likelihood of being shot around a gun owner because the gun owner may mistake me for an intruder.
If you break into my house, yes - expect to be shot if it's dark, and held at gunpoint if it's daylight. If you are not an intruder, you have nothing to worry about. Under what condition do you expect to be mistaken for an intruder, anyway?
HARDLY ANY gun owners (and this includes police officers and members of the military) are sufficiently skilled to discharge a firearm in a crowded indoor situation with multiple panicked people and possibly a few assailants in such a way that they correctly identify and harm the assailants but do not harm the bystanders. If an individual has multiple years of experience working as a military sniper they probably fall into this group, but even then they may not fall into this group when using a handgun.
Hardly any human being is sufficiently skilled to safely land a crippled airliner - and yet the odds of either happening are roughly the same, if not slightly in favor of the crippled airliner. Your point?
5.) SOME gun owners believe guns are a good way to solve interpersonal problems besides those involving self-defense. These people WANT their ownership of a gun to be a form of intimidation to some individuals. I rationally consider these people to be a danger to everyone.
Such people are promptly arrested/convicted for assault, brandishing a firearm, etc. They are only a danger once, and once only. After that they are, as convicted felons, no longer allowed to own such things.
Meanwhile, how many people commit DUI, reckless driving, blatant disregard for life/limb in their automobiles (see also the almost-daily police chases in LA), and assorted road rage incidents? Do you therefore also fear automobiles under the rational banner, or is it just that you fear something you have no familiarity with (considering that owning and using a firearm is replete with enforced gun safety demands at the gun range, classes required for hunting, classes/certifications required for concealed-carry permits, etc?)
The above statement is WRONG.
Explain that to New York City, Chicago, etc. That, or prove that you can buy and keep a pistol in either of those cities without their blessing and permission.
Not sure if you're American or not, so I'll try to explain:
The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees that each citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. There are only a very few obvious prohibitions, namely against convicted felons and those declared mentally incompetent or ill.
Meanwhile, there are people in the US who fear the things so much, they want to restrict who can and cannot have a firearm, and wish to dictate under what conditions they are possessed. There is a route by which this can be accomplished, but it would require amending the US Constitution, which is notoriously hard to do (as it should be - capricious changes are painful, to say the least.) Any other route (including most attempts at federal "gun control" laws) is a circumvention of this process, and IMHO should not be taken, lest it set a dangerous precedent - after all, if you can circumvent one amendment, you can circumvent them all, and down that road lies fascism.
If you wish to live in community that heavily regulates firearms, then band together and do so - nothing restricts a locality/city/region from banning the things of their own initiative (see also Chicago, D.C, New York City, etc.) However, please do not try to impose such things across the whole nation. There is no "reasonable" restriction in the eyes of those who wish to promulgate these laws, save for complete abolition.
As for the people you speak of? As long as they do not commit a felony, so what? The fear of any given law-abiding person owning a firearm is irrational at best.
BS
O RLY?
LG Optimus Black /Video Recorder w/2MP Front-Facing Camera
ANDROID 2.3
4" Touch Screen
Virtual QWERTY Keyboard
5 MP Camera
3G/Wi-Fi® Connectivity
[...] "
That took all of five seconds of looking, there's a lot more in there, and I didn't even touch Cricket, TracFone, Straight Talk, Virgin Prepaid, Boost...
It ain't inherent security so much as it is inherent refusal to patch on the part of manufacturers and carriers.
It would be like putting up a Redhat 9.1 box with all default settings, giving it a public IP addy, and plugging it in directly to the Internet - sure it was very secure for its time, but unpatched and obsolete, it'll become just another victim.
Until manufacturers and carriers realize this (and stop thinking strictly like a damned CE company), this will continue to be the state of things.
fwiw, the NSA has owned all platforms, so it's not like iOS is invincible.
I strongly suspect that it has less to do with any flaws in either OS, than it does in the fact that iPhones get regular updates/patches/etc, whereas the vast majority of Android phones do not.
This is the one thing that Apple really should get props for - they go out of their way to ensure that, within reason, older iPhones get patched/updated along with the newest ones. Meanwhile, all but a relatively tiny fraction of (global) Android users buy models where neither carrier or manufacturer really give a damn if the phones they sell ever see a patch. I mean, seriously - the cheap/low-end Android phones can still be found coming out brand new with 2.2/2.3 installed on the damned things.
Until that paradigm changes, the massive majority of malware and hacks will target the obviously juicy (and mostly obsolete and/or unpatched) Android market.
In other news, at least some apps do well in TFA's regard: For instance, the Waze app will not let you text in-app if it detects itself as moving above a certain speed (5mph or so?), and says so specifically. It does have a button that allows you to say you're a passenger (and then text anyway), and it will take speech-to-text at any speed, but I thought that was cool that it said something along those lines.
Of course, as an app designed to be used while driving, it kinda makes sense, but I don't see why Google doesn't pony up and put something similar in Android itself; it would take a bit of work, but a mode which sense itself above a certain speed and disables the whole keyboard (querty keyboard, not dialpad) except for text-to-speech.
War.
Not really... WWII might have gave Werner Von Braun the street cred, but he was big into rocketry long, long before Hitler put him to work at building V-rockets.
He wasn't Gene, but Shatner has pretty much always embraced his role in Trek.
Well, that and TJ Hooker really, really sucked.
The reason why has to do with not what you said, but how you said it. Here, I'll help:
I've been. pretending, to have - SEX - with... green women! For Years!
...and that's why Shatner got one and you didn't.
Crap - *now* they tell me. I had to use IE (v.$latest in Windows 7) to get an .iso from MSDN, because the damned site screams and complains if you use anything else.
Wuss: real men just use wget.
We live on a physical planet. Unless we change that, the economy must stop growing eventually. The exponential growth we expect has to end quite soon.
One small problem with that - yes we live on a physical planet, but the economy at large does not depend solely on physical assets. Much of our economy is now quite literally information- and idea-based. If we were to count mere physical assets, Microsoft and similar make a living selling rights to manipulate ephemeral magnetic patterns. Funny thing is, even before the so-called information age, books and sheet music were not sold because of the physical goods they were comprised of (paper), but were sold because of the ideas and information they contained - so this isn't even a new concept.
Agreed, perfectly, which is why I used Apple's stock price fluctuations versus its actual growth. :)
Wow - Obamabots get mod points and hate it when their lord and savior gets caught - pix at 11!