It has been observed that if you don't have a place to live, the right to vote is a bad joke.
The right to vote may not help the homeless, but homelessness in and of itself doesn't prevent them from saying what they want to say. There was a guy in London camping out between Parliament and Westminster Abbey (I forget the exact name of the square) who was protesting the (then proposed) war on Iraq. He was homeless (as near as I could tell), but still speaking. I see a lot of homeless guys on the corner talking about whatever bugs them.
That this doesn't solve all their problems does not mean that they don't have their rights, or can't excercise them. Hell, they don't have to worry about their Third Amendment rights ever being violated (sorry, really tasteless joke).
In the case of the government denying them voting rights because they don't have an address because its required for the form or whatever, then they really are being denied their right to vote. But it doesn't really cost the government any more, other than 'enforcement costs' which I discuss in another post, to allow the homeless to choose a voting district and register to vote there. Otherwise, requiring a mailing address is not substantially different from the old landowner requirements. Therefor, to deny them the right to vote on those grounds probably would be a civil rights violation, although that may not be illegal as defined by the laws and constitution of the US. The constitution only prohibits denial of voting rights on account of sex, race, color, condition of servitude, or for age, assuming they are at least 18. So if there's a constitutional protection from this sort of thing, it would have to come from the equal protection clause of the 15th(?) amendment. But either way, we tend to believe that for those over the age-of-majority (whatever that is for a given country) you have the right to vote and this could easily be extended to the homeless and hungry. It just won't make them any less homeless or hungry, so they may find it to be a 'bad joke' (as you so delicately put it).
That the right to vote or freely petition government does not put food on the table, or that life is tough without said food does not mean that food on the table is viable as a right, rather than entitlement.
The point that you are making is one of the primary arguments in favor of basic entitlements to ensure basic needs are met. However, to raise these basic needs to the point of rights insures that economics has a hand in wether a government can provide rights. That's a recipe for disaster, as I've mentioned in other posts. We need two teirs to handle this properly - rights and entitlements. Entitlements may still be about as important, but they have some limitations that make them sufficiently different that this difference needs to be recognized. Otherwise you may degrade human rights because a government fails to manage an entitlement program properly.
Please do not misread any of my above comments as lack of concern for the homeless or needy. I'm simply trying to point out that speech and shelter are different problems and require different solutions. Use the human rights tool where that's appropriate and some form of 'basic human dignity' standard, enforced through entitlements, where human rights won't solve the problems.
True, but then they're not failing to protect the right to speech, they're failing to prevent murder. If 90% of the populace decides that people start killing people who tailgate on the freeway, the government has a responsibility to stop the killing, even though tailgating is unlawful. Its the vigilantism that's the problem.
There's a big difference between the obligation to enforce laws, and the obligation to provide a service. Suppose you require the service to be provided, but don't enforce it, that requirement's no good. If you have the right to internet access you have to fund both enforcement of access to the system, and you have to fund the system itself. For free speech you only have to fund enforcement of free speech rules. Let the people do the speaking for themselves.
What is a "right" and what's not is completly dependent on the currently accepted ethics of the society in whose context this right is debated, and as this can change radically. There is no single, fixed definition, it all has to be agreed upon and fought for, and is highly variable.
This is kind of true, but the poster is correct that no matter what societies call 'rights', certain rights will be more absolute than others. We can call medical care or internet access a right till the cows come home, but without cash it doesn't happen. This is not true of more traditional rights. You don't have to put a budget item in for not establishing state religion, or for not coercing self-incriminating testimony. You might have to spend a bit on enforcement, but nothing on the actual line-items.
No God involved, it's all done by mere humans.
This is true, but god/humanism/concensus was not the crux of his argument.
The point is that rights aren't given by anyone, with the philosophical exception of God. They are merely recognized.
First off, just to defray side arguments that will generate a bunch of heat, but no appreciable light - we can rephrase this without the use of 'God' and have the statement be just as valid. The point ArsSineArtificio is trying to make is that to call internet access a 'right' muddles the distinction between 'inalienable rights' (to use the phrase from the Declaration of Independence) and 'entitlements'.
So the question is why would two things - both enshrined in a constitution as 'human rights' be different? By defining internet access, medical care, living wages, or anything else which costs money and requires human endevour as a 'human right' no different from free speech and due process, governments set themselves up for a fall.
Let's start by examining a 'traditional human right', the right to free speech. It costs nothing for the government to not throw someone in jail for saying, for instance, "We should make sure that everyone has access to the internet!" You would be hard pressed to find an example of a situation where a government had to spend money to not throw somebody in jail for speaking his mind.
Now let's examine this 'newfangled human right' to have internet access. If internet access is a human right, then Estonia is already in violation of the rights of some two-thirds of its citizens. So through no fault of its own, the government of Estonia is now guilty of human rights abuses, simply because it hasn't shelled out for every citizen to have internet access. What I typically term as a human right is not something which can be directly abridged by natural circumstances. Is Estonia violating its citizens' rights if an EMP knocks out all the switches in the country? Or if a storm destroys too many phone lines?
Entitlements are elements of government policy which are subject to the economic realities of the day. It may, under extreme circumstances, not be possible to provide entitlements. Rights, on the other hand, are inviolable, regardless of budget crises.
If no one makes a distinction between rights and entitlements, then we're in trouble. First, during economic hardships, the government can't provide internet connectivity. In that case they're violating human rights. However, taking them to court does no good because there simply isn't the money to rebuild the system. So the court might then nullify the 'human right' of internet access. Now some citizens blame the government for screwing things up. The folks in power don't want criticism, so they start locking up their detractors. Now the courts, who have just taken away one right, is asked to defend another right. However, since they've just tossed one out, there's nothing to stop them from tossing the second one except their own judgement. By making the distinction between rights and entitlements at the outset, and preventing entitlements from being enshrined as rights, we make the court's decision much simpler. You can take away entitlements due to economic or technical considerations, but you can't take away rights so easily.
Now if they were saying that this service could not be denied to any citizen who had the means to purchase internet access, this is a gift horse of a different color. It would prohibit the government (and thereby lawyers for the RIAA et al) from disconnecting the internet access of its citizens. This would be an enviable right, and one possibly worthy of addition to the pantheon of Western-style 'Fundamental Human Rights'.
And harsh spankings for MS for making 'hide file extensions' the default. Seriously, this is one of the biggest reasons stuff gets clicked on. Everyone says '.jpg files are safe' and so something comes in.jpg.vbs which MS shows as.jpg, since it hides the file extension, and even somebody who's folloing the instructions regarding.vbs files doesn't realize they're getting duped by the UI.
I know that MS is thinking, 'People don't like to see all those.doc and.ppt and.jpg extensions! People think extensions are confusing!' Which is true. A lot of casual users don't like file extensions. But the answer is not to hide them. If they're bad, they should be replaced with a less confusing system. Whenever I get on a coworker's machine where they're hidden, I usually just quietly unhide them and the say 'make all folders like this one'. Admittedly I'd hate it if somebody changed my UI settings without asking me, but no one has complained, so they probably just hadn't realized they could do it. And since we all use Solaris machines as well, they're all more than capable of coping with a few file extensions.
Re:Go for it anyway...
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A Mighty Wind
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They haven't opposed it, but its pretty rare to hear anyone but ornithologists and the Audobon Society discussing it.
Certainly Sierra Club and Greenpeace are adherents to the precautionary principle, but I've never heard their views on protecting bird species from wind-farms.
If you're going to pick nits demanding specific examples, you might be a bit more rigorous when reading the post. He said 'have not demanded . . . rigorous testing' while you seek examples of those who 'opposed rigorous testing'. Ignoring avian impact is not the same thing as opposing testing.
I doubt you'll find anybody suggesting that Sierra Club start a national ad campaign aimed at this issue, but at least make their efforts in some way proportional to their support of wind-farms over other forms of power generation.
Its entirely possible that we'd find ways to protect raptors without diminishing the benefits of wind-farms, and we'd all be in for a happy day.
You have to understand which unadulterated facts you're getting though. The speedometer readout does not always tell us how fast our cars are going, they tell us how fast the wheels are spinning. In one car that I had it appeared that the speedometer was linked to the drive wheel (although I've never confirmed this objectively). I'd notice that when it was wet, if I overaccelerated and lost traction in that wheel, my speedometer would jump to 100mph when I was pulling away from a stoplight. So anyone who hydroplanes and doesn't take their foot off the accelerator might get hit with a reckless driving charge when all they did was lose traction while going the speed limit, and not react quickly enough.
This kind of tech might be OK, but we need to be careful with it.
I'm assuming that the EDR (and I haven't Read TFA) only records a relatively short period of time, not the entire history of the car's speed. Since the EDR is associated with the airbag diagnostics, they don't really need extensive data storage. the 30 seconds up to the crash should be more than enough.
OK, there are a couple of questions I still have. Not being a chemist or having my chemistry books handy, (assuming that if you aren't that somebody is) do the numbers in that mean that these reactions are likely? The article does not mention H2 as an ozone scavenger, in the manner of the CFCs. It refers to a different mechanism for the depletion of the ozone, based on H2O genesis rather than H2 reactions.
Also, there aren't mentions of H2 reactions specifically, but rather lots of reactions involving H. Since monatomic hydrogen is rare, are they just assuming that its diatomic and ignoring that part of the equation for simplicity, or are they specifically discussing monatomic reactions, which (I think) would otherwise be different from diatomic reactions?
Those equations balance out, but do they actually occur? Obviously, H2 + 203 -> 202 works, and 203 + 2OH -> 402 + H2 but it seems like that ignores the H2 + 2OH -> 2H2O, and does that end up following thermodynamically and so forth? I guess what I'm asking is, is this based on theory or experiment? And does it happen easily in the partial pressures, temperatures, and UV environment of the atmosphere at the ozone layer?
Oh, and from TFA:
...a tripling of hydrogen molecules â" both manmade and from natural sources â" going into the stratosphere, where it would oxidize and form water.
"This would result in cooling of the lower stratosphere and the disturbance of ozone chemistry," the researchers wrote.
So it doesn't sound like its a chemical reaction directly, and only as persistent as the h2o in the atmosphere.
I believe that basic health care is a right and not a priviledge for which one has to pay.
The problem is that most of the things we think of as 'inalienable human rights' - at least in the US - are things like unregulated religion, free speech, protection from unlawful search and seizure, which don't require us to spend a dime to enforce. They are effectively prohibitions on government action. Equal rights laws, despite the whinging about people taking away white men's jobs, are still just limits to both governmental and employer power over individuals.
When you're talking about what we generally term 'entitlements' as 'rights', now you're enshrining as a human right, the right to take something away from somebody. In this case you'd be saying that I have the right to take medical goods/services. At the very least I'm taking a doctor's time. He of course wants to get compensated for that, so he turns to the government.
When you enshrine something that's subject to economic consideration as a 'right' you start treading on nasty ground. A government that's bankrupt can always afford to not coerce testimony, and can afford to not establish religion. However, it cannot pay doctors to give everyone basic health care. This is a fundamental difference, and a serious issue if we are to turn these 'economic rights' into actual governmental policy.
So my point is that there's a fundamental difference between 'the right to keep and bear arms' which you can't run out of and 'the right to antibiotics' which you can.
So if we decide that we want universal health care, that really is a privilege that we as an American society give to ourselves, which we'd have to bankroll through our own taxes. And in a serious economic crisis, there should always be enough right to not quarter soldiers in time of peace without compensation, but there might not be enough right to bandages.
Something about internet taxation because that's the topic.
You're right about the TDMA thing. I was kinda simplifying a bit there, being sloppy and using 'CDMA' as a catch-all for non-GSM systems, which is of course bogus. As you can't be bothered to discuss landlines, I couldn't be bothered to explain all the intricasies(sp?) of the US mobile tech family tree.
I admit that I've never owned or paid for a land-line in europe, but am I right (from something you said in the bluetooth debates) that local/in-town calls were generally toll calls, and unlimited local calls are a relatively recent offering aimed mostly at dial-up internet? (ie, you pay per call or even per minute) If so (which has been my impression) Europeans would be more amenable to the charge-per-minute, even on incoming calls, and also on having local calls to cell-phones be charged. Americans think of their local phone calls as free, and their mobile ones as expensive. Americans have come around on the issue, to a great extent. I don't have a land-line any more, because I don't need one with a cable-modem and a cell-phone - at least, I don't need one enough to justify $20/month.
I think they also got a perception of elitism here, which didn't help matters. "I'm not gonna be one of those smug a**holes being obnoxious in restaurants!" I always thought that was one of the impediments to their adoption in the US.
As for the spectrum issue with UMTS, yeah, we've got to get the broadcast TV guys to stop squatting on their spectrum. That's actually a perverse artifact of cable-tv regulation, IIRC (cable companies are required to re-transmit broadcast signals, and are required to pay for the privilege, so home-shopping networks got cheap UHF licenses to get free cable channels out of it, and a deal in the HDTV legislation means they can squat there for quite some time). That's gonna take some finagleing that I don't think anybody's got the stomach for, so we're screwed there. However, my main thesis was that the poster's contention that the US should ignore 3G and replace our infrastructure with GSM - effectively matching Europe's current voice-mobile system - would leave us in a situation where we'd spend 5 years and billions of dollars to end up 5 years behind Europe. We can be 5 years behind Europe's mobile infrastructure right now, without spending a dime.
I understand why SMS is good in theory. Its IM anywhere. But a new user interface on the phones would make it so much better. an extra set of 4 buttons down one side, which is 'position 1, position 2, position3, or number' would make that work SO MUCH BETTER! To type 'cab' you would hit (p3+2)(p1+2)(p2+2) rather than (222*)(2*)(22). You chose which 'slot' with the left thumb, and then the number with the right thumb. We've got two thumbs, so why not use them? every letter becomes a two-button-press affair, wherease now its between one and five (in the extreme case where you want to follow the letter 's' immediately by the letter 'p', so have to hit (7777*)(777) to get 'sp'. I have no idea if this makes any sense outside my head, but I really do think it would greatly increase the utility of SMS.
And you prove my other point about SMS/3G utilities when you say that email-on-mobile is a killer ap on 'my SonyEricsson P800'. One of my points was that it requires real PDA/Phone convergence before this stuff will be anything more than a novelty gee gaw in the US. (the P800 is touted as one of the first real PDA/phone/camera convergence peices)
OH man, this is a bad idea. Touch-typing, no matter how much experience you have with those damned numberpads, is ALWAYS going to be faster. Seriously. get an instructional course in touchtyping, get some skillz built up with 'The Typing of the Dead' and frickin end your damned love-affairs with doing everything like its SMS. You'll be happier in the long run.
Notwithstanding the other comments regarding wether yours is a representative number, you do understand that instead of paying ~$950/month for insurance, you'd be paying an extra ~$950/month in taxes to cover state-sponsored health-care/insurance right?
Effectively you're removing that cost from the individual, and passing it to the government. 'But we can tax the evil corporations so I won't have to pay!' True, but they're just going to raise their prices to cover the new tax costs, so the stuff you buy will be more expensive, so you're still going to pay for your healthcare no matter what.
I'm not saying that Sweden is good or bad, mind you, I'm just saying that either way there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
If Medicaid (and to a lesser extent, Medicare) worked better, there'd be no need at all for full-on socialized medicine. The folks who can't afford to pay for it get it from the state, and everybody else - everybody who can afford it - pays their own way.
Actually, in line with a post above, Amazon could partner-with/buy Netflix, and add one more revenue stream, adding that to their distribution network, and generally increasing their competiveness vis-a-vis the so called 'clicks-and-mortar' types.
God, I don't think I've heard the term 'clicks-and-mortar' in at least two years. We are truly in a post-internet-bubble world! Ain't it grand?
This is a bit misleading, but you have a point. Quality of service needs to be adressed in the US mobile industry. I get an inexcusable number of dropped calls, largely because Sprint (and their competition) has failed to increase the capacity of their networks to meet demand. However, this has nothing to do with GSM. In fact, to fix what they have, the operators who are starting to transition to GSM should abandon that immediately. Fix the CDMA network and then build a euro-compatible 3G network.
GSM is of course not the dominant technology in the US. Most mobile operators rolled out CDMA-based networks as their first digital networks (PCS-type networks, replacing the old AMPS analog cellular networks). CDMA standards have technological advantages and disadvantages relative to TDMA, which the GSM standard is based on, which can be debated to death with as much relevance as the Vi/Emacs wars. However, since Europe had a single standard, and population about 1.5x as big as the US, and much better population density for mobile purposes, coupled with the perception that Europe's wire-line telco-networks were of poorer quality, mobile was adopted quicker and was more profitable there. In the US, people were more satisfied with their wire-line service, and the lower population density drove up mobile costs, leading to slower adoption, and lower returns on mobile infrastructure investments.
Some of the US providers are transitioning their networks to GSM to take advantage of the uniformity/economies of scale of jumping onto the same standard as Japan and Europe. However, since most implementations of 3G in use in Europe and Japan are compatible with GSM, the US operators would be fools to spend money catching up with where Europe was rather than getting to where they're going especially given that going to modern 3G will solve their 2G problems as well. To lean on the old WWII metaphor as a crutch for a minute - that'd be a bit like trying to win the war in the pacific by building more battleships and ignoring aircraft carriers because, "We need to get our battleship fleet to the point where it can compete with the Japanese before we try and match their carriers!"
Oh, and with SMS, I'm sorry, but that's just not gonna be a killer app for me. I've had some form of that capability in my mobile since I got it, but I've never used it. You know why? I'd just as soon call somebody rather than try and type out a message using the various crappy methods for keying alphanumerics on a number pad. I'm not sure what the pressures are that makes that desireable in Europe, but I'm not interested. Don't get me wrong - I've read my sci-fi, and I want my datasphere. I'm much more interested in true 3G stuff which would probably require an integrated PDA/phone, or even a tablet. But anything less and I'm just not interested. Give me a pretty good web thing, where I can look up directions to bars, shops and restuarants, look up movie times, and maybe even some basic access to google so I can resolve questions on the run, and you've got something. I can even think of some good applications of location-based-services that I'd be interested in. But seriously, Europe, what's the big deal with email-lite from worst typing interface ever?
I don't think unemployment or accepting the current situation are the only options.
From the main article: You get the feeling that the company is just going to take advantage of you no matter how and what happens. (emphasis added)
Have you, as a group, gotten together with your supervisor and his boss (and possibly his boss's boss) and told them that you're unhappy with the situation? Unions don't walk out first and then tell their demands. A strike really is a last resort. Long before you even mention that to your boss, sit down and tell him what's bugging you, and see what they can do for you.
A lot of times you can get at least some of the more onerous crap reduced. Probably there won't be a raise, and there won't be monetary compensation for on-call time. But there could be added vacation time or something like that. There may be other informal things they could do.
It sucks when a good job gets worse, but this happens in a downturn. But that's gonna happen, because your boss's job also got worse. There's more sh*t raining down on him from above (and those above usually either have creditors, shareholders, or auditors raining it down on them). If you really want another job, then follow the time-honored approach of finding your new job before leaving your old one (because it works a lot better). Unless you've got a stockpile of money and want to take a vacation for a while. But be sure to start back into the job hunt a LONG time (at least 6 months) before that runs out, or be prepared to work at McDonalds/Kinkos/WalMart/temp-agency for a while to make ends meet.
Seriously. Don't let your boss think things are ok and then suddenly walk out. And don't fall into the trap of thinking that you're LUCKY to have a job, but don't just throw a job away because you're angry.
They're doing very high-precision work which doesn't look at the code, but the actual waveform, using static (hours-long) occupations of benchmark monuments. Then custom software is used to work out sub centimeter (often 3-5 mm) locations in post-processing.
This sort of thing has been done in a number of locations. I've been involved with studies like this in Nevada and Italy.
It's hardly suprising that Scotland is rising and England is sinking. The phenomenon is known as 'isostatic rebound' and happens any time a substantial load is removed or added to an area. The massive ice-age glaciers over Scandinavia caused that area to sink and the 'low countries' - especially Holland - to rise. Now that the glaciers are gone, Scandinavia is rising again and the Netherlands are sinking into the sea. The same is probably happening on a smaller scale to Great Britain. In the US, the Appalachian Mountains are eroding away, causing them to rise, and the coastal plains and Mississippi delta, where that sediment is being deposited, are sinking.
This is all a very slow process, millimeters per year, but over time it makes a big difference.
There's something to be said for being the bigger man about these things. Let it go...
The same can be said to Ms Johnson. Yeah, his website is puerile and on the offensive side. Yeah, its embarrassing to her. But to send in the legal goons is ridiculous. She needs to grow up and understand that the world isn't all sweetness and light. This guy's a jerk, but sticks-and-stones...
She'd do more good for her cause to acknowledge that she's done the things she's warning against, and that she regrets that behavior. If she can't be honest to her readers, she shouldn't be upset that someone else is willing to tell a different story.
If she sued him for libel, that'd be one thing. Indeed, there's an interesting argument that allowing libel lawsuits as in the UK actually increases the power of legitimate journalism, since it's harder to dismiss something as 'just a pack of lies' when people can then ask, 'so why aren't you suing them?' But just saying 'I don't deny what he says about me, I just don't like it,' is inappropriate.
This guys mistake was not that he labeled anybody. He didn't say that you or any other/.er was a liberal. He was decrying the perception that many/.ers seem to assume that the GOP will always be opposed to liberty freedom and the forces of light, and that the Democrats are better.
To some extent he's right. There are a lot of people posting on/. who assume that anyone in bed with big business is a conservative, ignoring a great number of counterexamples, the most glaring being Senator Disney (D-SC). Heck, even Al Gore has gotten in bed with the RIAA, when he traded Tipper's pet record labeling scheme for effectively legislating DAT to death in the mid 80s.
The real problem with this guys post was that he didn't RTFA. If he had, he'd have found that while two of the caucus's founders were Democrats, the third is from the GOP. This caucus is a bi-partisan group of the ill-informed and influenced. Speaking as one who has voted for members of both major parties and for several independents and at least once a strait-ticket for a third party, neither big-league party is going to be instinctively on-board with the OSS. There will be individuals on either side of the aisle who 'get it' and many more who get what their donors tell them. We've got to make sure we back the good guys and spank the baddies, and not let ourselves get distracted by left/right bickering.
Basically, a dog is smarter than collective humanity - a dog won't shit on its food or bed.
Hmm. Not sure what dogs you've been hanging around with. Dogs might not shit directly on their food, but they will eat their own shit, which has the same effect.
the logging companies' habit of only cutting down the largest trees (most profitable) [contributes to increased severity of forest fires]
It sounds like you're refering to selective harvesting, which is not the most profitable harvesting method. The most profitable method under most circumstances is clearcut and re-seed. The biggest problem is definitely the fire-suppression behaviour. The fact is that even in areas without commercially viable timber forests, fires have been supressed. In these areas, there's been a large build-up of fuel.
And while forest fires may not generally pollute, Kyoto is not about pollution but about greenhouse gas emission. Perchlorate in groundwater does not contribute to global warming, but forest fires do.
However, big-ass coal-fired power plants and a herd of Canyoneros stampeding along the freeway every day for a year will both serve up more greenhouse gas than any but the biggest forest fires. And there are a lot more coal plants than sizeable forest fires.
True, but we're talking about greenhouse gas emissions here. Soot is not a greenhouse gas, but rather a smog agent. Being a particulate, its pretty bad for the lungs, too. But in terms of global warming, it has no effect, and therefore is not an issue with respect to Kyoto.
There are several different types of gaseous polutants, and these tend to get confused. The big ones that get talked about are CFCs, particulates, unburned hydrocarbons, and greenhouse gasses. CFCs are the culprits behind the ozone hole (CFCs are not an evil of the internal combustion engine, but rather from ACs, refrigerators, fire supresssion systems, and aerosol sprays). Particulates are bad for your lungs. Unburned hydrocarbons contribute to ozone polution (ozone is good high in the atmosphere, but bad to breath). And greenhouse gasses tend to absorb thermal IR, preventing the Earth from radiating heat back into space at night, thus causing the global warming. CO2 is the main greenhouse gas. This means that a car which has no particulate emissions, and no unburned hydrocarbons, is considered to be clean, but anything which burns hydrocarbons converts them to CO2 and water, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This happens regardless of how 'clean' the burning process is. Fuel cell cars will emmit as much C02 per gallon as a two stroke.
But ratifying Kyoto might at least have shown the USA's intention to do something about its mass consumption. It might have shown they feel responsible for burning over 25% of worldwide resources...
Yes! It would have let us say one thing, and do another!
Why do I have 'A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rock&Roll' going through my head right now?
I've never really figured out if the Special Olympics is really for all handicapped people or only mentally handicapped people. If the former, then that would be the place for people with prosthetics.
As far as GM people, I'd have to say that you could easily have 'sanctioned' genetic therapies. People with such therapies would then be able to compete in the Olympics. Folks with modifications that have not been sanctioned as theraputic rather than enhancing would then have to compete in another competition, wether a new category in the Special Olympics or in a GM Olympics.
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It has been observed that if you don't have a place to live, the right to vote is a bad joke.
The right to vote may not help the homeless, but homelessness in and of itself doesn't prevent them from saying what they want to say. There was a guy in London camping out between Parliament and Westminster Abbey (I forget the exact name of the square) who was protesting the (then proposed) war on Iraq. He was homeless (as near as I could tell), but still speaking. I see a lot of homeless guys on the corner talking about whatever bugs them.
That this doesn't solve all their problems does not mean that they don't have their rights, or can't excercise them. Hell, they don't have to worry about their Third Amendment rights ever being violated (sorry, really tasteless joke).
In the case of the government denying them voting rights because they don't have an address because its required for the form or whatever, then they really are being denied their right to vote. But it doesn't really cost the government any more, other than 'enforcement costs' which I discuss in another post, to allow the homeless to choose a voting district and register to vote there. Otherwise, requiring a mailing address is not substantially different from the old landowner requirements. Therefor, to deny them the right to vote on those grounds probably would be a civil rights violation, although that may not be illegal as defined by the laws and constitution of the US. The constitution only prohibits denial of voting rights on account of sex, race, color, condition of servitude, or for age, assuming they are at least 18. So if there's a constitutional protection from this sort of thing, it would have to come from the equal protection clause of the 15th(?) amendment. But either way, we tend to believe that for those over the age-of-majority (whatever that is for a given country) you have the right to vote and this could easily be extended to the homeless and hungry. It just won't make them any less homeless or hungry, so they may find it to be a 'bad joke' (as you so delicately put it).
That the right to vote or freely petition government does not put food on the table, or that life is tough without said food does not mean that food on the table is viable as a right, rather than entitlement.
The point that you are making is one of the primary arguments in favor of basic entitlements to ensure basic needs are met. However, to raise these basic needs to the point of rights insures that economics has a hand in wether a government can provide rights. That's a recipe for disaster, as I've mentioned in other posts. We need two teirs to handle this properly - rights and entitlements. Entitlements may still be about as important, but they have some limitations that make them sufficiently different that this difference needs to be recognized. Otherwise you may degrade human rights because a government fails to manage an entitlement program properly.
Please do not misread any of my above comments as lack of concern for the homeless or needy. I'm simply trying to point out that speech and shelter are different problems and require different solutions. Use the human rights tool where that's appropriate and some form of 'basic human dignity' standard, enforced through entitlements, where human rights won't solve the problems.
True, but then they're not failing to protect the right to speech, they're failing to prevent murder. If 90% of the populace decides that people start killing people who tailgate on the freeway, the government has a responsibility to stop the killing, even though tailgating is unlawful. Its the vigilantism that's the problem.
There's a big difference between the obligation to enforce laws, and the obligation to provide a service. Suppose you require the service to be provided, but don't enforce it, that requirement's no good. If you have the right to internet access you have to fund both enforcement of access to the system, and you have to fund the system itself. For free speech you only have to fund enforcement of free speech rules. Let the people do the speaking for themselves.
What is a "right" and what's not is completly dependent on the currently accepted ethics of the society in whose context this right is debated, and as this can change radically. There is no single, fixed definition, it all has to be agreed upon and fought for, and is highly variable.
This is kind of true, but the poster is correct that no matter what societies call 'rights', certain rights will be more absolute than others. We can call medical care or internet access a right till the cows come home, but without cash it doesn't happen. This is not true of more traditional rights. You don't have to put a budget item in for not establishing state religion, or for not coercing self-incriminating testimony. You might have to spend a bit on enforcement, but nothing on the actual line-items.
No God involved, it's all done by mere humans.
This is true, but god/humanism/concensus was not the crux of his argument.
The point is that rights aren't given by anyone, with the philosophical exception of God. They are merely recognized.
First off, just to defray side arguments that will generate a bunch of heat, but no appreciable light - we can rephrase this without the use of 'God' and have the statement be just as valid. The point ArsSineArtificio is trying to make is that to call internet access a 'right' muddles the distinction between 'inalienable rights' (to use the phrase from the Declaration of Independence) and 'entitlements'.
So the question is why would two things - both enshrined in a constitution as 'human rights' be different? By defining internet access, medical care, living wages, or anything else which costs money and requires human endevour as a 'human right' no different from free speech and due process, governments set themselves up for a fall.
Let's start by examining a 'traditional human right', the right to free speech. It costs nothing for the government to not throw someone in jail for saying, for instance, "We should make sure that everyone has access to the internet!" You would be hard pressed to find an example of a situation where a government had to spend money to not throw somebody in jail for speaking his mind.
Now let's examine this 'newfangled human right' to have internet access. If internet access is a human right, then Estonia is already in violation of the rights of some two-thirds of its citizens. So through no fault of its own, the government of Estonia is now guilty of human rights abuses, simply because it hasn't shelled out for every citizen to have internet access. What I typically term as a human right is not something which can be directly abridged by natural circumstances. Is Estonia violating its citizens' rights if an EMP knocks out all the switches in the country? Or if a storm destroys too many phone lines?
Entitlements are elements of government policy which are subject to the economic realities of the day. It may, under extreme circumstances, not be possible to provide entitlements. Rights, on the other hand, are inviolable, regardless of budget crises.
If no one makes a distinction between rights and entitlements, then we're in trouble. First, during economic hardships, the government can't provide internet connectivity. In that case they're violating human rights. However, taking them to court does no good because there simply isn't the money to rebuild the system. So the court might then nullify the 'human right' of internet access. Now some citizens blame the government for screwing things up. The folks in power don't want criticism, so they start locking up their detractors. Now the courts, who have just taken away one right, is asked to defend another right. However, since they've just tossed one out, there's nothing to stop them from tossing the second one except their own judgement. By making the distinction between rights and entitlements at the outset, and preventing entitlements from being enshrined as rights, we make the court's decision much simpler. You can take away entitlements due to economic or technical considerations, but you can't take away rights so easily.
Now if they were saying that this service could not be denied to any citizen who had the means to purchase internet access, this is a gift horse of a different color. It would prohibit the government (and thereby lawyers for the RIAA et al) from disconnecting the internet access of its citizens. This would be an enviable right, and one possibly worthy of addition to the pantheon of Western-style 'Fundamental Human Rights'.
The article is far from clear on this subject.
And harsh spankings for MS for making 'hide file extensions' the default. Seriously, this is one of the biggest reasons stuff gets clicked on. Everyone says '.jpg files are safe' and so something comes in .jpg.vbs which MS shows as .jpg, since it hides the file extension, and even somebody who's folloing the instructions regarding .vbs files doesn't realize they're getting duped by the UI.
.doc and .ppt and .jpg extensions! People think extensions are confusing!' Which is true. A lot of casual users don't like file extensions. But the answer is not to hide them. If they're bad, they should be replaced with a less confusing system. Whenever I get on a coworker's machine where they're hidden, I usually just quietly unhide them and the say 'make all folders like this one'. Admittedly I'd hate it if somebody changed my UI settings without asking me, but no one has complained, so they probably just hadn't realized they could do it. And since we all use Solaris machines as well, they're all more than capable of coping with a few file extensions.
I know that MS is thinking, 'People don't like to see all those
They haven't opposed it, but its pretty rare to hear anyone but ornithologists and the Audobon Society discussing it.
Certainly Sierra Club and Greenpeace are adherents to the precautionary principle, but I've never heard their views on protecting bird species from wind-farms.
If you're going to pick nits demanding specific examples, you might be a bit more rigorous when reading the post. He said 'have not demanded . . . rigorous testing' while you seek examples of those who 'opposed rigorous testing'. Ignoring avian impact is not the same thing as opposing testing.
I doubt you'll find anybody suggesting that Sierra Club start a national ad campaign aimed at this issue, but at least make their efforts in some way proportional to their support of wind-farms over other forms of power generation.
Its entirely possible that we'd find ways to protect raptors without diminishing the benefits of wind-farms, and we'd all be in for a happy day.
You have to understand which unadulterated facts you're getting though. The speedometer readout does not always tell us how fast our cars are going, they tell us how fast the wheels are spinning. In one car that I had it appeared that the speedometer was linked to the drive wheel (although I've never confirmed this objectively). I'd notice that when it was wet, if I overaccelerated and lost traction in that wheel, my speedometer would jump to 100mph when I was pulling away from a stoplight. So anyone who hydroplanes and doesn't take their foot off the accelerator might get hit with a reckless driving charge when all they did was lose traction while going the speed limit, and not react quickly enough.
This kind of tech might be OK, but we need to be careful with it.
I'm assuming that the EDR (and I haven't Read TFA) only records a relatively short period of time, not the entire history of the car's speed. Since the EDR is associated with the airbag diagnostics, they don't really need extensive data storage. the 30 seconds up to the crash should be more than enough.
OK, there are a couple of questions I still have. Not being a chemist or having my chemistry books handy, (assuming that if you aren't that somebody is) do the numbers in that mean that these reactions are likely? The article does not mention H2 as an ozone scavenger, in the manner of the CFCs. It refers to a different mechanism for the depletion of the ozone, based on H2O genesis rather than H2 reactions.
Also, there aren't mentions of H2 reactions specifically, but rather lots of reactions involving H. Since monatomic hydrogen is rare, are they just assuming that its diatomic and ignoring that part of the equation for simplicity, or are they specifically discussing monatomic reactions, which (I think) would otherwise be different from diatomic reactions?
Oh, and from TFA:
So it doesn't sound like its a chemical reaction directly, and only as persistent as the h2o in the atmosphere.
I believe that basic health care is a right and not a priviledge for which one has to pay.
The problem is that most of the things we think of as 'inalienable human rights' - at least in the US - are things like unregulated religion, free speech, protection from unlawful search and seizure, which don't require us to spend a dime to enforce. They are effectively prohibitions on government action. Equal rights laws, despite the whinging about people taking away white men's jobs, are still just limits to both governmental and employer power over individuals.
When you're talking about what we generally term 'entitlements' as 'rights', now you're enshrining as a human right, the right to take something away from somebody. In this case you'd be saying that I have the right to take medical goods/services. At the very least I'm taking a doctor's time. He of course wants to get compensated for that, so he turns to the government.
When you enshrine something that's subject to economic consideration as a 'right' you start treading on nasty ground. A government that's bankrupt can always afford to not coerce testimony, and can afford to not establish religion. However, it cannot pay doctors to give everyone basic health care. This is a fundamental difference, and a serious issue if we are to turn these 'economic rights' into actual governmental policy.
So my point is that there's a fundamental difference between 'the right to keep and bear arms' which you can't run out of and 'the right to antibiotics' which you can.
So if we decide that we want universal health care, that really is a privilege that we as an American society give to ourselves, which we'd have to bankroll through our own taxes. And in a serious economic crisis, there should always be enough right to not quarter soldiers in time of peace without compensation, but there might not be enough right to bandages.
Something about internet taxation because that's the topic.
You're right about the TDMA thing. I was kinda simplifying a bit there, being sloppy and using 'CDMA' as a catch-all for non-GSM systems, which is of course bogus. As you can't be bothered to discuss landlines, I couldn't be bothered to explain all the intricasies(sp?) of the US mobile tech family tree.
I admit that I've never owned or paid for a land-line in europe, but am I right (from something you said in the bluetooth debates) that local/in-town calls were generally toll calls, and unlimited local calls are a relatively recent offering aimed mostly at dial-up internet? (ie, you pay per call or even per minute) If so (which has been my impression) Europeans would be more amenable to the charge-per-minute, even on incoming calls, and also on having local calls to cell-phones be charged. Americans think of their local phone calls as free, and their mobile ones as expensive. Americans have come around on the issue, to a great extent. I don't have a land-line any more, because I don't need one with a cable-modem and a cell-phone - at least, I don't need one enough to justify $20/month.
I think they also got a perception of elitism here, which didn't help matters. "I'm not gonna be one of those smug a**holes being obnoxious in restaurants!" I always thought that was one of the impediments to their adoption in the US.
As for the spectrum issue with UMTS, yeah, we've got to get the broadcast TV guys to stop squatting on their spectrum. That's actually a perverse artifact of cable-tv regulation, IIRC (cable companies are required to re-transmit broadcast signals, and are required to pay for the privilege, so home-shopping networks got cheap UHF licenses to get free cable channels out of it, and a deal in the HDTV legislation means they can squat there for quite some time). That's gonna take some finagleing that I don't think anybody's got the stomach for, so we're screwed there. However, my main thesis was that the poster's contention that the US should ignore 3G and replace our infrastructure with GSM - effectively matching Europe's current voice-mobile system - would leave us in a situation where we'd spend 5 years and billions of dollars to end up 5 years behind Europe. We can be 5 years behind Europe's mobile infrastructure right now, without spending a dime.
I understand why SMS is good in theory. Its IM anywhere. But a new user interface on the phones would make it so much better. an extra set of 4 buttons down one side, which is 'position 1, position 2, position3, or number' would make that work SO MUCH BETTER! To type 'cab' you would hit (p3+2)(p1+2)(p2+2) rather than (222*)(2*)(22). You chose which 'slot' with the left thumb, and then the number with the right thumb. We've got two thumbs, so why not use them? every letter becomes a two-button-press affair, wherease now its between one and five (in the extreme case where you want to follow the letter 's' immediately by the letter 'p', so have to hit (7777*)(777) to get 'sp'. I have no idea if this makes any sense outside my head, but I really do think it would greatly increase the utility of SMS.
And you prove my other point about SMS/3G utilities when you say that email-on-mobile is a killer ap on 'my SonyEricsson P800'. One of my points was that it requires real PDA/Phone convergence before this stuff will be anything more than a novelty gee gaw in the US. (the P800 is touted as one of the first real PDA/phone/camera convergence peices)
OH man, this is a bad idea. Touch-typing, no matter how much experience you have with those damned numberpads, is ALWAYS going to be faster. Seriously. get an instructional course in touchtyping, get some skillz built up with 'The Typing of the Dead' and frickin end your damned love-affairs with doing everything like its SMS. You'll be happier in the long run.
Notwithstanding the other comments regarding wether yours is a representative number, you do understand that instead of paying ~$950/month for insurance, you'd be paying an extra ~$950/month in taxes to cover state-sponsored health-care/insurance right?
Effectively you're removing that cost from the individual, and passing it to the government. 'But we can tax the evil corporations so I won't have to pay!' True, but they're just going to raise their prices to cover the new tax costs, so the stuff you buy will be more expensive, so you're still going to pay for your healthcare no matter what.
I'm not saying that Sweden is good or bad, mind you, I'm just saying that either way there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
If Medicaid (and to a lesser extent, Medicare) worked better, there'd be no need at all for full-on socialized medicine. The folks who can't afford to pay for it get it from the state, and everybody else - everybody who can afford it - pays their own way.
Actually, in line with a post above, Amazon could partner-with/buy Netflix, and add one more revenue stream, adding that to their distribution network, and generally increasing their competiveness vis-a-vis the so called 'clicks-and-mortar' types.
God, I don't think I've heard the term 'clicks-and-mortar' in at least two years. We are truly in a post-internet-bubble world! Ain't it grand?
This is a bit misleading, but you have a point. Quality of service needs to be adressed in the US mobile industry. I get an inexcusable number of dropped calls, largely because Sprint (and their competition) has failed to increase the capacity of their networks to meet demand. However, this has nothing to do with GSM. In fact, to fix what they have, the operators who are starting to transition to GSM should abandon that immediately. Fix the CDMA network and then build a euro-compatible 3G network.
GSM is of course not the dominant technology in the US. Most mobile operators rolled out CDMA-based networks as their first digital networks (PCS-type networks, replacing the old AMPS analog cellular networks). CDMA standards have technological advantages and disadvantages relative to TDMA, which the GSM standard is based on, which can be debated to death with as much relevance as the Vi/Emacs wars. However, since Europe had a single standard, and population about 1.5x as big as the US, and much better population density for mobile purposes, coupled with the perception that Europe's wire-line telco-networks were of poorer quality, mobile was adopted quicker and was more profitable there. In the US, people were more satisfied with their wire-line service, and the lower population density drove up mobile costs, leading to slower adoption, and lower returns on mobile infrastructure investments.
Some of the US providers are transitioning their networks to GSM to take advantage of the uniformity/economies of scale of jumping onto the same standard as Japan and Europe. However, since most implementations of 3G in use in Europe and Japan are compatible with GSM, the US operators would be fools to spend money catching up with where Europe was rather than getting to where they're going especially given that going to modern 3G will solve their 2G problems as well. To lean on the old WWII metaphor as a crutch for a minute - that'd be a bit like trying to win the war in the pacific by building more battleships and ignoring aircraft carriers because, "We need to get our battleship fleet to the point where it can compete with the Japanese before we try and match their carriers!"
Oh, and with SMS, I'm sorry, but that's just not gonna be a killer app for me. I've had some form of that capability in my mobile since I got it, but I've never used it. You know why? I'd just as soon call somebody rather than try and type out a message using the various crappy methods for keying alphanumerics on a number pad. I'm not sure what the pressures are that makes that desireable in Europe, but I'm not interested. Don't get me wrong - I've read my sci-fi, and I want my datasphere. I'm much more interested in true 3G stuff which would probably require an integrated PDA/phone, or even a tablet. But anything less and I'm just not interested. Give me a pretty good web thing, where I can look up directions to bars, shops and restuarants, look up movie times, and maybe even some basic access to google so I can resolve questions on the run, and you've got something. I can even think of some good applications of location-based-services that I'd be interested in. But seriously, Europe, what's the big deal with email-lite from worst typing interface ever?
I don't think unemployment or accepting the current situation are the only options.
From the main article: You get the feeling that the company is just going to take advantage of you no matter how and what happens. (emphasis added)
Have you, as a group, gotten together with your supervisor and his boss (and possibly his boss's boss) and told them that you're unhappy with the situation? Unions don't walk out first and then tell their demands. A strike really is a last resort. Long before you even mention that to your boss, sit down and tell him what's bugging you, and see what they can do for you.
A lot of times you can get at least some of the more onerous crap reduced. Probably there won't be a raise, and there won't be monetary compensation for on-call time. But there could be added vacation time or something like that. There may be other informal things they could do.
It sucks when a good job gets worse, but this happens in a downturn. But that's gonna happen, because your boss's job also got worse. There's more sh*t raining down on him from above (and those above usually either have creditors, shareholders, or auditors raining it down on them). If you really want another job, then follow the time-honored approach of finding your new job before leaving your old one (because it works a lot better). Unless you've got a stockpile of money and want to take a vacation for a while. But be sure to start back into the job hunt a LONG time (at least 6 months) before that runs out, or be prepared to work at McDonalds/Kinkos/WalMart/temp-agency for a while to make ends meet.
Seriously. Don't let your boss think things are ok and then suddenly walk out. And don't fall into the trap of thinking that you're LUCKY to have a job, but don't just throw a job away because you're angry.
They're doing very high-precision work which doesn't look at the code, but the actual waveform, using static (hours-long) occupations of benchmark monuments. Then custom software is used to work out sub centimeter (often 3-5 mm) locations in post-processing.
This sort of thing has been done in a number of locations. I've been involved with studies like this in Nevada and Italy.
It's hardly suprising that Scotland is rising and England is sinking. The phenomenon is known as 'isostatic rebound' and happens any time a substantial load is removed or added to an area. The massive ice-age glaciers over Scandinavia caused that area to sink and the 'low countries' - especially Holland - to rise. Now that the glaciers are gone, Scandinavia is rising again and the Netherlands are sinking into the sea. The same is probably happening on a smaller scale to Great Britain. In the US, the Appalachian Mountains are eroding away, causing them to rise, and the coastal plains and Mississippi delta, where that sediment is being deposited, are sinking.
This is all a very slow process, millimeters per year, but over time it makes a big difference.
There's something to be said for being the bigger man about these things. Let it go...
The same can be said to Ms Johnson. Yeah, his website is puerile and on the offensive side. Yeah, its embarrassing to her. But to send in the legal goons is ridiculous. She needs to grow up and understand that the world isn't all sweetness and light. This guy's a jerk, but sticks-and-stones...
She'd do more good for her cause to acknowledge that she's done the things she's warning against, and that she regrets that behavior. If she can't be honest to her readers, she shouldn't be upset that someone else is willing to tell a different story.
If she sued him for libel, that'd be one thing. Indeed, there's an interesting argument that allowing libel lawsuits as in the UK actually increases the power of legitimate journalism, since it's harder to dismiss something as 'just a pack of lies' when people can then ask, 'so why aren't you suing them?' But just saying 'I don't deny what he says about me, I just don't like it,' is inappropriate.
This guys mistake was not that he labeled anybody. He didn't say that you or any other /.er was a liberal. He was decrying the perception that many /.ers seem to assume that the GOP will always be opposed to liberty freedom and the forces of light, and that the Democrats are better.
/. who assume that anyone in bed with big business is a conservative, ignoring a great number of counterexamples, the most glaring being Senator Disney (D-SC). Heck, even Al Gore has gotten in bed with the RIAA, when he traded Tipper's pet record labeling scheme for effectively legislating DAT to death in the mid 80s.
To some extent he's right. There are a lot of people posting on
The real problem with this guys post was that he didn't RTFA. If he had, he'd have found that while two of the caucus's founders were Democrats, the third is from the GOP. This caucus is a bi-partisan group of the ill-informed and influenced. Speaking as one who has voted for members of both major parties and for several independents and at least once a strait-ticket for a third party, neither big-league party is going to be instinctively on-board with the OSS. There will be individuals on either side of the aisle who 'get it' and many more who get what their donors tell them. We've got to make sure we back the good guys and spank the baddies, and not let ourselves get distracted by left/right bickering.
Basically, a dog is smarter than collective humanity - a dog won't shit on its food or bed.
Hmm. Not sure what dogs you've been hanging around with. Dogs might not shit directly on their food, but they will eat their own shit, which has the same effect.
the logging companies' habit of only cutting down the largest trees (most profitable) [contributes to increased severity of forest fires]
It sounds like you're refering to selective harvesting, which is not the most profitable harvesting method. The most profitable method under most circumstances is clearcut and re-seed. The biggest problem is definitely the fire-suppression behaviour. The fact is that even in areas without commercially viable timber forests, fires have been supressed. In these areas, there's been a large build-up of fuel.
And while forest fires may not generally pollute, Kyoto is not about pollution but about greenhouse gas emission. Perchlorate in groundwater does not contribute to global warming, but forest fires do.
However, big-ass coal-fired power plants and a herd of Canyoneros stampeding along the freeway every day for a year will both serve up more greenhouse gas than any but the biggest forest fires. And there are a lot more coal plants than sizeable forest fires.
True, but we're talking about greenhouse gas emissions here. Soot is not a greenhouse gas, but rather a smog agent. Being a particulate, its pretty bad for the lungs, too. But in terms of global warming, it has no effect, and therefore is not an issue with respect to Kyoto.
There are several different types of gaseous polutants, and these tend to get confused. The big ones that get talked about are CFCs, particulates, unburned hydrocarbons, and greenhouse gasses. CFCs are the culprits behind the ozone hole (CFCs are not an evil of the internal combustion engine, but rather from ACs, refrigerators, fire supresssion systems, and aerosol sprays). Particulates are bad for your lungs. Unburned hydrocarbons contribute to ozone polution (ozone is good high in the atmosphere, but bad to breath). And greenhouse gasses tend to absorb thermal IR, preventing the Earth from radiating heat back into space at night, thus causing the global warming. CO2 is the main greenhouse gas. This means that a car which has no particulate emissions, and no unburned hydrocarbons, is considered to be clean, but anything which burns hydrocarbons converts them to CO2 and water, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This happens regardless of how 'clean' the burning process is. Fuel cell cars will emmit as much C02 per gallon as a two stroke.
But ratifying Kyoto might at least have shown the USA's intention to do something about its mass consumption. It might have shown they feel responsible for burning over 25% of worldwide resources...
Yes! It would have let us say one thing, and do another!
Why do I have 'A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Rock&Roll' going through my head right now?
Most of them meant to vote for Gore, but ended up voting for Buchannan.
Stupid worms.
It was the tomato seeds that voted for Bush. Tomatos have always been a bunch of reactionaries.
Yeah, but since I do the same thing, that's not really a chick thing.
I've never really figured out if the Special Olympics is really for all handicapped people or only mentally handicapped people. If the former, then that would be the place for people with prosthetics.
As far as GM people, I'd have to say that you could easily have 'sanctioned' genetic therapies. People with such therapies would then be able to compete in the Olympics. Folks with modifications that have not been sanctioned as theraputic rather than enhancing would then have to compete in another competition, wether a new category in the Special Olympics or in a GM Olympics.