The solution is obvious -- stop paying the dole that enables the chavs.
As you note, locking people into a gov't program (and most do, by unreasonably limiting your assets**) is a major step toward totalitarian gov't. And it also locks in votes for that gov't, since no one votes to end the handouts.
** I'm not sure what the asset limits are elsewhere, but here in SoCal certain welfare recipients cannot own more than $500 worth of property (including a car, which ensures that those who can't commute via bus CANNOT get to work) AND you cannot ever have more than $500 in the bank (ensuring that you never have the seed money to get out of poverty). As you say, the welfare system is designed to keep poor people poor -- because that ensures employment for the bureaucracy and votes for its overlords.
"There will soon be laws stating that minors must wear clothes inside the house..."
Fixed that for ya!
Seriously, that could readily be the upshot of such surveillance -- new laws requiring modest dress inside the home, lest your children be exposed to adult bodies, or worse, adults get to see children's bodies. Because after all, only someone who loves CP could possibly object! It's for the children, didn't you know!
When I read TFA, I had the thought that this is just what an RIAA shill would say, if put on the stand to help generate a precedent in the RIAA's favour.
Whether this is a good thought or not, I have no idea, but I had it anyway:)
I find it an interesting metric of slashdot readership that every single complaint involves this "omighod must stay with the herd" behaviour resulting in multiple lanes being 'blocke'd on the freeway.
Not one comment (at least that I saw, and I read most of 'em) mentions the much more hazardous problem of passing on two-lane roads, where you go to pass someone and they speed up to match you WHILE YOU ARE IN THE ONCOMING TRAFFIC'S LANE.
Again, judging from my neighbour's behaviour, this is usually unconscious (hardwired stick-with-the-herd), not just being an asshole.
====
You trust your fellow man. In fact, you trust him with your very life.
Don't think so?? You drive on two-lane roads, don't you??
Er, well, judging from the comment chain as remarked above... maybe not.
Being in an area of housing glut at the high end AND tons of illegals... I'd say the AC was also correct. It may all be one continuum, but neither illegals nor spec building does the market any good.
And what do you sell once you run out of salable assets?
This is like maxing out your credit card to pay for your overdrawn checking account. Now that you've done this, and once the money thus garnered is spent to repay the principle, how do you plan to pay the interest on that credit card??
I'd like to see how that actually breaks down in terms of how much each average resident actually "spends" of that amount, and how much is bureaucratic overhead.
For comparison, the Montana state budget works out at something like $2040 per resident. Yet I'd hazard that on a per capita basis MT citizens enjoy better services from state gov't.
If the housing market depends on illegals, rather than the poor LEGAL residents, that tells me the whole market has a soft foundation and needs to be resettled on sounder ground anyway. Such as with our OWN poor LEGAL residents paying the same as ILLEGALS do now.
Second, the housing market is presently inflated beyond what wages can support -- even middle-class wages (I'm seeing middle-class wage earners SHARING apartments just to make the rent, it's gotten that out of hand in some areas). So there again, it NEEDS to be pulled downward. Thus I'd say that what's really happened is that illegals have artificially propped up the rental market and thereby inflated housing costs to everyone else.
No one will buy the buildings without expecting to make a profit, meaning in the end it'll cost FAR more to taxpayers than the short-term revenue gained. How is this progress? Damn stupidest thing I've ever seen a gov't propose to do. This may even surpass selling various infrastructures (such as highway systems) to foreign investors... those deals have, to my understanding, so far been nothing but a net loss to the states that have tried it. How is this different?
Maybe they should stop spending instead?!
How about cold-turkeying ALL gov't spending that goes to illegal aliens? I'd bet that would make up the deficit right there!!
I'm in CA... didn't realise AZ was even worse off, but mark my words, if this flies in AZ, CA will be next. Gods forbid anyone's pet project should stop hemorrhaging tax dollars!!
Agreed with someone upstream re term limits. I used to think it was a good idea too, til I saw what it did to the CA legislature. All it does is force everyone to form party-line alliances, since you don't have time to develop real working relationships. And the good people get termed out with the bad. Hello, if they're bad you can unelect them NEXT time... Seems to me term limits do nothing but pretty much ensure every career politician gets promoted every couple terms, while the good people who are real legislators rather than career politicians (note the distinction) fall by the wayside, since they don't spend their whole last term campaigning for higher office.
If those tools only make derivative works, they may have a point. Rather like how if you write fiction set in the Star Trek universe, Paramount owns it.
But is WA making a derivative work, or is it just regurgitating facts?? You can copyright your own presentation of facts, but not the facts themselves. (cf. phonebooks)
Better to have safe roads for everyone, methinks... because if the road's poor design causes a bigger vehicle to wreck, the smaller vehicles in the line of fire will pay the highest price.
And yes, I am one of those who NEED a truck. It's a rare day I drive anywhere and don't wind up hauling up to half a ton of stuff. One trip in my truck or 4 trips in my car... hmmm....
I use Spacejock's yBook as an eBook reader. Its "Load file" function stalls on very long filenames, and on longer paths that have a lot of spaces and whatnot in them. However, I can drag and drop the same file into yBook without a problem. (Well, most of the time. I've hit one that I had to move to a shorter path, otherwise drag-and-drop stalled too.)
I'm not sure this isn't a Windows bug that yBook happens to tickle -- I vaguely recall having a file-open-dialog and long-path issue somewhere else, tho don't recall what the apps involved were. (BTW this is not the DOS effectively-62 character path limit.)
Something here must be app-specific rather than OS-specific. Witness:
Tried dragging the Google logo from Netscape3 to Photopaint -- nothing. Nada. Ignored me entirely.
From Seamonkey to M$Paint -- a variety of not-found and access-denied errors, mostly involving "F:\Win98\Desktop\F not found" (which doesn't exist) and "F:\Win98\Desktop\: not found" (yes, with a trailing colon). "Access to F:\ was denied." And so on. Appeared to be trying to stuff the paste buffer with chunks of the various locations involved.
However -- dragging the Google logo from IE5.0 (on google.com) to Photopaint worked perfectly.
And it tried to work with IE to M$Paint, but this is an old version of Paint that doesn't know GIFs, so it whined about an invalid bitmap. But it got the cache location right.
I tried it on this venerable Win98 box... an amusing croggle indeed: Tried to drag the Google logo from Seamonkey's browser window into Photopaint. Found myself with 25+ copies of the text "http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" but no image.
It works from pretty much any other app, but not from a browser window. [scratching head]
Which gave me this odd thought: Since the planet continuously loses some atmosphere into space -- maybe it behooves us to thicken up that top layer and slow down the process...;)
Considering how variable the weather is in September, how can you be sure you're seeing causation, and not mere correlation? Having 3 or 4 days of temps significantly warmer or cooler than the week before is normal that time of year, as it's when winter fronts start moving across the continent.
While I've seen the sky completely haze over between morning and afternoon due to contrail spreading (if you work outside all day and can watch the sky, you can see this happen) I'm still not convinced it's significant. How much of the moisture was already there, and condensed due to the air disruption??
That's great where they actually bank the curves correctly, so your car tends to follow the curve. I-15 thru Wolf Creek Canyon in Montana is so good about this that you can almost take your hands off the wheel, or use only the lightest touch to steer, and your car will still follow the curves.
In southern California, once you get off the Interstate system (which is to say, away from Federally approved engineering) there is a BIG problem with curves being banked the wrong way, so the road tends to throw your car OFF the curve. Which means you need to slow down, frequently below the posted limit, to be safe, and you need to haul on the steering to follow the curve.
You may not notice these problems if you have a little low-to-the-ground coupe, but get in a truck or van, or haul a load, and trust me, you WILL notice.
I think this may be hardwired behaviour, NOT due to just being a competitive asshole. It is essentially herd behaviour -- stick with the herd, don't get left behind for the predators to notice.
I've noticed my neighbour, who has no push-and-shove in her at all and is very much a "herd animal", will drive faster to "keep up with" a car in the next lane, AND DOES NOT REALISE SHE IS DOING IT. She will speed up by as much as 10mph to "keep up" and still doesn't notice she's done so.
Me, I'm a predator by nature, and I find that my natural response is to get AWAY from the car in the next lane, to get ahead of or behind them, but never to travel side by side.
I seem to recall that human-generated EM is some small fraction of the strength of the normal background EM, and the info I've seen refereed to stuff like wireless and cell phones specifically.
Second, I really want to know why, as TFA's comment pointed out, he's only bothered by "wireless" and not by... oh, the cordless phone he doubtless uses.
This comment following TFA says it all: ===== The problem with this claim is that WiFi uses the 2.4 gigahertz frequency spectrum along with Bluetooth phones, cordless home phones, and just about any other consumer wireless device. If he really had an 'allergy' like that, he wouldn't have been able to leave his house for the past 15 years. He should try to promote himself a different way than this.
- Dr. Black, Los Angeles, CA, 24/7/2009 14:30 =====
Not to mention that cosmic radiation doesn't conveniently omit some portion of the EM spectrum. Has he ever been outdoors??
There have always been people who claim that some particular class of witchcraft is making their lives hell. In days of yore it was the evil eye; during the hippie era it was Bad Vibes; today it's some portion of the EM spectrum, because that's the Newly Widespread Thing That We Know Is There But Can't See, So It Must Be Causing Our Ills.
Crank these people's tinfoil hats one notch tighter, and they'll claim it's thoughtwaves from aliens instead. Oh wait, we've already had that one!!
And then there are people like myself, who are NOT regular readers. Very occasionally, I follow someone else's link to the NYT or some similar site, but I *never* go there just to browse. Charge a fee for access and I'll never go there at all -- I'm not a pre-existing content addict.
Now, NN-many pageviews per $, that I could live with for an occasional-use site. I pay Slashdot's $5 sub fee because it's pay per use AND never expires. And it's small enough that I never think about it. But if I had to pay so much per month, use it or lose it -- I wouldn't do it.
==== Writing in Canada's National Post in October 2001, [Greenpeace founder] Patrick Moore offered the following critique: "I had no idea that after I left in 1986 they would evolve into a band of scientific illiterates... Clearly, my former Greenpeace colleagues are either not reading the morning paper or simply don't care about the truth." ====
Slashdot Mirror
It would be interesting to correlate those stats with the street price of common illegal drugs, adjusted for inflation.
I'd bet they go hand in hand.
The solution is obvious -- stop paying the dole that enables the chavs.
As you note, locking people into a gov't program (and most do, by unreasonably limiting your assets**) is a major step toward totalitarian gov't. And it also locks in votes for that gov't, since no one votes to end the handouts.
** I'm not sure what the asset limits are elsewhere, but here in SoCal certain welfare recipients cannot own more than $500 worth of property (including a car, which ensures that those who can't commute via bus CANNOT get to work) AND you cannot ever have more than $500 in the bank (ensuring that you never have the seed money to get out of poverty). As you say, the welfare system is designed to keep poor people poor -- because that ensures employment for the bureaucracy and votes for its overlords.
"There will soon be laws stating that minors must wear clothes inside the house..."
Fixed that for ya!
Seriously, that could readily be the upshot of such surveillance -- new laws requiring modest dress inside the home, lest your children be exposed to adult bodies, or worse, adults get to see children's bodies. Because after all, only someone who loves CP could possibly object! It's for the children, didn't you know!
When I read TFA, I had the thought that this is just what an RIAA shill would say, if put on the stand to help generate a precedent in the RIAA's favour.
Whether this is a good thought or not, I have no idea, but I had it anyway :)
I find it an interesting metric of slashdot readership that every single complaint involves this "omighod must stay with the herd" behaviour resulting in multiple lanes being 'blocke'd on the freeway.
Not one comment (at least that I saw, and I read most of 'em) mentions the much more hazardous problem of passing on two-lane roads, where you go to pass someone and they speed up to match you WHILE YOU ARE IN THE ONCOMING TRAFFIC'S LANE.
Again, judging from my neighbour's behaviour, this is usually unconscious (hardwired stick-with-the-herd), not just being an asshole.
====
You trust your fellow man. In fact, you trust him with your very life.
Don't think so?? You drive on two-lane roads, don't you??
Er, well, judging from the comment chain as remarked above... maybe not.
Being in an area of housing glut at the high end AND tons of illegals... I'd say the AC was also correct. It may all be one continuum, but neither illegals nor spec building does the market any good.
And what do you sell once you run out of salable assets?
This is like maxing out your credit card to pay for your overdrawn checking account. Now that you've done this, and once the money thus garnered is spent to repay the principle, how do you plan to pay the interest on that credit card??
That works out to $8461 per Arizona resident.
I'd like to see how that actually breaks down in terms of how much each average resident actually "spends" of that amount, and how much is bureaucratic overhead.
For comparison, the Montana state budget works out at something like $2040 per resident. Yet I'd hazard that on a per capita basis MT citizens enjoy better services from state gov't.
If the housing market depends on illegals, rather than the poor LEGAL residents, that tells me the whole market has a soft foundation and needs to be resettled on sounder ground anyway. Such as with our OWN poor LEGAL residents paying the same as ILLEGALS do now.
Second, the housing market is presently inflated beyond what wages can support -- even middle-class wages (I'm seeing middle-class wage earners SHARING apartments just to make the rent, it's gotten that out of hand in some areas). So there again, it NEEDS to be pulled downward. Thus I'd say that what's really happened is that illegals have artificially propped up the rental market and thereby inflated housing costs to everyone else.
No one will buy the buildings without expecting to make a profit, meaning in the end it'll cost FAR more to taxpayers than the short-term revenue gained. How is this progress? Damn stupidest thing I've ever seen a gov't propose to do. This may even surpass selling various infrastructures (such as highway systems) to foreign investors... those deals have, to my understanding, so far been nothing but a net loss to the states that have tried it. How is this different?
Maybe they should stop spending instead?!
How about cold-turkeying ALL gov't spending that goes to illegal aliens? I'd bet that would make up the deficit right there!!
I'm in CA... didn't realise AZ was even worse off, but mark my words, if this flies in AZ, CA will be next. Gods forbid anyone's pet project should stop hemorrhaging tax dollars!!
Agreed with someone upstream re term limits. I used to think it was a good idea too, til I saw what it did to the CA legislature. All it does is force everyone to form party-line alliances, since you don't have time to develop real working relationships. And the good people get termed out with the bad. Hello, if they're bad you can unelect them NEXT time... Seems to me term limits do nothing but pretty much ensure every career politician gets promoted every couple terms, while the good people who are real legislators rather than career politicians (note the distinction) fall by the wayside, since they don't spend their whole last term campaigning for higher office.
If those tools only make derivative works, they may have a point. Rather like how if you write fiction set in the Star Trek universe, Paramount owns it.
But is WA making a derivative work, or is it just regurgitating facts?? You can copyright your own presentation of facts, but not the facts themselves. (cf. phonebooks)
How is this different from a paint and brush manufacturer claiming that all works made with their products also belong to them??
Better to have safe roads for everyone, methinks... because if the road's poor design causes a bigger vehicle to wreck, the smaller vehicles in the line of fire will pay the highest price.
And yes, I am one of those who NEED a truck. It's a rare day I drive anywhere and don't wind up hauling up to half a ton of stuff. One trip in my truck or 4 trips in my car... hmmm....
I wonder if this is a related peculiarity:
I use Spacejock's yBook as an eBook reader. Its "Load file" function stalls on very long filenames, and on longer paths that have a lot of spaces and whatnot in them. However, I can drag and drop the same file into yBook without a problem. (Well, most of the time. I've hit one that I had to move to a shorter path, otherwise drag-and-drop stalled too.)
I'm not sure this isn't a Windows bug that yBook happens to tickle -- I vaguely recall having a file-open-dialog and long-path issue somewhere else, tho don't recall what the apps involved were. (BTW this is not the DOS effectively-62 character path limit.)
Something here must be app-specific rather than OS-specific. Witness:
Tried dragging the Google logo from Netscape3 to Photopaint -- nothing. Nada. Ignored me entirely.
From Seamonkey to M$Paint -- a variety of not-found and access-denied errors, mostly involving "F:\Win98\Desktop\F not found" (which doesn't exist) and "F:\Win98\Desktop\: not found" (yes, with a trailing colon). "Access to F:\ was denied." And so on. Appeared to be trying to stuff the paste buffer with chunks of the various locations involved.
However -- dragging the Google logo from IE5.0 (on google.com) to Photopaint worked perfectly.
And it tried to work with IE to M$Paint, but this is an old version of Paint that doesn't know GIFs, so it whined about an invalid bitmap. But it got the cache location right.
I tried it on this venerable Win98 box... an amusing croggle indeed: Tried to drag the Google logo from Seamonkey's browser window into Photopaint. Found myself with 25+ copies of the text "http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" but no image.
It works from pretty much any other app, but not from a browser window. [scratching head]
Yeah, but you're extinct ;)
Which gave me this odd thought: Since the planet continuously loses some atmosphere into space -- maybe it behooves us to thicken up that top layer and slow down the process... ;)
Considering how variable the weather is in September, how can you be sure you're seeing causation, and not mere correlation? Having 3 or 4 days of temps significantly warmer or cooler than the week before is normal that time of year, as it's when winter fronts start moving across the continent.
While I've seen the sky completely haze over between morning and afternoon due to contrail spreading (if you work outside all day and can watch the sky, you can see this happen) I'm still not convinced it's significant. How much of the moisture was already there, and condensed due to the air disruption??
That's great where they actually bank the curves correctly, so your car tends to follow the curve. I-15 thru Wolf Creek Canyon in Montana is so good about this that you can almost take your hands off the wheel, or use only the lightest touch to steer, and your car will still follow the curves.
In southern California, once you get off the Interstate system (which is to say, away from Federally approved engineering) there is a BIG problem with curves being banked the wrong way, so the road tends to throw your car OFF the curve. Which means you need to slow down, frequently below the posted limit, to be safe, and you need to haul on the steering to follow the curve.
You may not notice these problems if you have a little low-to-the-ground coupe, but get in a truck or van, or haul a load, and trust me, you WILL notice.
I think this may be hardwired behaviour, NOT due to just being a competitive asshole. It is essentially herd behaviour -- stick with the herd, don't get left behind for the predators to notice.
I've noticed my neighbour, who has no push-and-shove in her at all and is very much a "herd animal", will drive faster to "keep up with" a car in the next lane, AND DOES NOT REALISE SHE IS DOING IT. She will speed up by as much as 10mph to "keep up" and still doesn't notice she's done so.
Me, I'm a predator by nature, and I find that my natural response is to get AWAY from the car in the next lane, to get ahead of or behind them, but never to travel side by side.
I seem to recall that human-generated EM is some small fraction of the strength of the normal background EM, and the info I've seen refereed to stuff like wireless and cell phones specifically.
Second, I really want to know why, as TFA's comment pointed out, he's only bothered by "wireless" and not by ... oh, the cordless phone he doubtless uses.
This comment following TFA says it all:
=====
The problem with this claim is that WiFi uses the 2.4 gigahertz frequency spectrum along with Bluetooth phones, cordless home phones, and just about any other consumer wireless device. If he really had an 'allergy' like that, he wouldn't have been able to leave his house for the past 15 years. He should try to promote himself a different way than this.
- Dr. Black, Los Angeles, CA, 24/7/2009 14:30
=====
Not to mention that cosmic radiation doesn't conveniently omit some portion of the EM spectrum. Has he ever been outdoors??
There have always been people who claim that some particular class of witchcraft is making their lives hell. In days of yore it was the evil eye; during the hippie era it was Bad Vibes; today it's some portion of the EM spectrum, because that's the Newly Widespread Thing That We Know Is There But Can't See, So It Must Be Causing Our Ills.
Crank these people's tinfoil hats one notch tighter, and they'll claim it's thoughtwaves from aliens instead. Oh wait, we've already had that one!!
And then there are people like myself, who are NOT regular readers. Very occasionally, I follow someone else's link to the NYT or some similar site, but I *never* go there just to browse. Charge a fee for access and I'll never go there at all -- I'm not a pre-existing content addict.
Now, NN-many pageviews per $, that I could live with for an occasional-use site. I pay Slashdot's $5 sub fee because it's pay per use AND never expires. And it's small enough that I never think about it. But if I had to pay so much per month, use it or lose it -- I wouldn't do it.
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm?oid=131 concludes with this quote:
====
Writing in Canada's National Post in October 2001, [Greenpeace founder] Patrick Moore offered the following critique: "I had no idea that after I left in 1986 they would evolve into a band of scientific illiterates... Clearly, my former Greenpeace colleagues are either not reading the morning paper or simply don't care about the truth."
====