It amazes me that people aren't yelling and screaming about this and marching in front of the White House.
How come you, personally, are not in front of the White House, yelling and screaming?
It amazes me how many people who berate others for not "doing something", are too lazy, chicken, busy, or whatever to actually themselves "do something".
So go for it. But just so you know, you won't be able to get very close, and you'll get arrested because it is illegal to yell and scream in front of the White House, but that's ok.
I won't even comment on child porn because the issue is too charged to have a rational discussion about. But I've done some thinking about the war on drugs recently.
Like you, I believe that government intervention should be minimized, and in the case of a purely victimless situation, the government should not get involved at all. If some guy wants to smoke a joint in the privacy of his own home, I have no interest in that, and I believe that the state should have no interest in it, either. However, like you said, as soon as someone's actions infringe on my right (and others' right) to be safe and secure in my (their) person, that's where the state should have an interest. To use your example, if drug lords want to start shooting each other up, that's a problem for the state to handle.
The problem is, drugs tend to make the user lose control of his/her actions. Indeed, many users take drugs specificially in order to lose control of their actions. Take Meth, for instance. Meth is highly a highly-addictive stimulant, and can cause the user to become violently aggressive. It doesn't take a mental stretch to realize that meth users are going to be burglarizing and robbing people in order to raise funds to support their meth habits. And meth cooks (the people who make meth is home "labs") are a huge problem as well. The chemical byproducts of the cooking process are extremely toxic and the cleanup involves specialized contractors in full hazmat suits and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've seen it happen, and it is not pretty.
Since meth users and cooks tend to cause so many problems, how can we, as a society, permit people to use meth in good concience? I think of it like driving while drunk. We have decided, as a society, that it is impossible to operate a motor vehicle in a manner that is safe to yourself and others while you are falling-down drunk. So even if a person by some stroke of luck manages to make it home safely driving while drunk, he/she is still guilty of a crime.
Perhaps if there were some way for people to experiment with recreational drugs in the presence of a medical professional who could supervise the experience and after-care to prevent overdose and manage any withdrawl symptoms? Seems like a waste of a doctor to me, but perhaps society has a need?
So I guess my position is that some drug use really ought to be outlawed, because certain drugs make it impossible or near-impossible for the user to respect the rights of others in society. Meth and driving drunk are just two examples. How does that translate to child porn? Clearly, those who abuse children should be punished. I believe that those who pay others to abuse children also be punished as well. However, I am not clear how "having a few thumbnails of child porn in your browser's cache" could be anything other than a victimless crime. Perhaps it's still worthy of an intervention? Maybe probation+treatment? I don't really know anything about the propensity of child-porn viewers to abuse actual children other than what you hear on the 11:00 news ("Anyone who even dreams of looking at at 17-year-old naked is having sex with infants, killing them, and then eating them!!1 Lock them up and throw away teh key!!!11"), which I do not consider to be scientific evidence. My gut tells me that anyone who really wants to molest or rape children would not waste time looking at child porn. I enjoy having sex, and as I'm sure you'll agree, pornography is no substitute for an actual woman.
I'm sure they were also very concerned that those folks were conspiring to steal a bunch of stuff. It would be really hard for store security to stop the shoplifter by saying, "Nab the guy in the blue shirt and kakhi pants" when there are 80 people plus the Best Buy employees all wearing the same thing.
I can definitely understand why the managers and security got all uppity. But their response was really unprofessional and stupid. "My civil rights are violated by you bringing a video camera into an electronics store." Yeah... right...
I can inform you that when you were an infant, your parents changed 6-10 of your diapers daily, including the ones where your excrement was not necessarily contained by the diaper as well as the times when you pissed in their face while your diaper was off. They also fed you roughly 6 meals per day, held you while you were crying, woke up at 3am to see what was the matter with you this time, cleaned up everything you puked on, dealt with your rashes and sicknesses, and countless other things, all with smiles on their faces.
Now shut the fuck up and run adaware for your parents, you lazy, ungrateful bastard.
It's a popular myth that that Boston Tea Party was done in protest of British taxation of the colonies. I feel it is my duty to inform you that the real motive behind it was because we Americans were sick and tired of trying to explain to you limey motherfuckers that tea is to be mixed with water and water alone.
Tea. Water.
Tea. Water.
Tea. Water.
Polluting perfectly good tea with something like milk is worth starting wars over, as you would later discover.
When adjusted for inflation, I stopped being paid well for doing what I like about 8 years into the industry. Since then, my wages adjusted for inflation have been falling.
Well, if you worked for either of my companies, I would have fired your ass long ago since you are a whiny bitch. You're lucky to have only gotten "raises".
What do you do if you want to have more than one account? A checking and a savings account, perhaps? What do you do if you want to have a joint account?
No offense, but I bet you are misunderstanding what your account number really is. It wouldn't have taken your CU long to realize that a lot of people need to have more than one account (checking account for daily txns, a MMA with restricted withdrawls as a savings account, a mortgage or HELOC or three, you get the idea)
"You can't take your baby if you don't have a proper child seat."
Yeah, they said the same thing to me. So I asked the hospital to check make sure mine was installed properly.
"Oooohhh no! We can't do that! We can't even look at your carseat, because if god forbid you got into an car crash and we said your seat was ok and something happened to your baby, you'd sue us for a million dollars!"
Basically, when the hospital says, "You have to do XYZ to take your baby home," they really mean, "We know you're exhausted and not thinking straight and we've found the only way to get you to do XYZ is to say you can't have your baby, even though that's a complete load of baby poop."
I'd just love to get a message: "Mr. Lorcha, Hi. This is Mr. Shitforbrains calling you from American Express. We have reason to beleive that your card was stolen. Please look at the card that is no longer in your possession and call the 800 number on the back of it for furthere instructions. Have a nice day!"
I'm in the Washington DC Market. If you wife wants to find a better broker, I'd suggest she do one of the following:
Good: Actually read the magazine from her Association. There will be dozens of ads for brokers who do not rape their agents.
Better: Go to one of your local REIA meetings. Tell her not to feel bad for having to google it... most Realtors(R) think the REIA is what comes out of your ass after eating too much Taco Bell. While there, she should ask the investor/agents where they hang their licenses. They'll know who offers the best deals.
Also, she should pay 110% attention to what types of deals investors are doing in your market. She should collect as many business cards as she can, and on the backs of them, she should write down each investor's strategy. Then she should find properties for them. Remember, we investors have funds and have no mental problems. We do deal after deal and we don't care that the paint in the guest bathroom doesn't match the couch we inherited from aunt Mildred. She could do a lot of business if she learned about investors.
First of all, if you would have gone to a real college, this wouldn't be a problem.:-)
All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?
I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.
By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.
Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.
There's a far cry between 5% comission on a $400,000 house and what the agent actually takes home. Half will go to the agency.
There are a ton of changes going on in the real estate brokerage industry. The "standard" 6% commission is ancient history, non-Realtors now have access to search the MLS, and 50% of the agent's commission sure as heck does NOT go to the broker after an agent makes a few sales.
And that's just at the big brokerages. I hapen to have a real estate license (I don't buy/sell for anyone other than myself. I'm an investor.), and at my brokerage, the standard commission split for all agents (even newly-licensed ones) is 80/20 (20% goes to the broker), but if you want, you can just pay the broker $400/mo cash and keep 100% of your commissions. No agent worth his salt is giving 50% of his earnings to some broker anymore.
Good to know. Since I'd like to not break the law, could you please enumerate what the laws are so I know them and don't break them? Surely they'd fit on a page or two and you've committed them to memory by now so you can be sure not to break them.
here. This was the guy's third conviction and second supervised release violation in 6 years. Also, the 2005 conviction (and 20 year sentence) included 14 images of real (not cartoon) child porn. Saying this guy got 20 years for cartoon child porn is wildly inaccurate.
Strike four: At the time of his arrest in this case, Whorley was a registered sex offender who was convicted in March 1999, on a federal charge of receiving child pornography and was sentenced to 46 months' incarceration.
Strike five: In January 2003, after serving that sentence and while on supervised release for his earlier conviction, Whorley was re-arrested for violating the conditions of his probation. Whorley subsequently pled guilty to violating the conditions of his release and was sentenced to an additional 12 months of incarceration to be followed by 12 months of supervision by the United States Probation Office.
Strike six: He was arrested on the present charges on April 5, 2005-just three months after being released from incarceration-when United States Probation Officers learned that Whorley had received child pornography by using a computer at the VEC.
The 20 year (harsh) sentence was based on the fact that this was his third conviction, and his second violation of his supervised release agreements. I think we can understand the VA jury losing patience with the man.
These days, there's nothing an IVR can tell me that the company's website can't tell me. If I'm calling customer service, it's because I can't do what I need to do using any automated system (the website, or the IVR) and I need to speak with a real, live, human being. Preferrably, one who speaks passable English.
You might be happier with a different email service. That way, if you ever want to bolt from Verizon, you don't have to mess around with changing your email address.
I think macing someone rushing the field is warranted.
I think you are out of your fucking mind.
When you've got a mob of people going one way, the last thing you want to do is use mace/pepper spray/whatever to force the people in front back. That's just begging for people in the middle to get crushed or trampled. It's also begging for people in the pepper sprayed areas to get crushed or trampled in the meyhem.
It's much better to just get out of the way.
Let's remember we're talking about kids at a football game and not a mob of revolutionaries here. There's no reason for cops to take a harmless situation and make it dangerous. At my alma mater, kids got trampled when the cops tried to prevent the inevitable. One girl was nearly killed.
Slashdot Mirror
It amazes me how many people who berate others for not "doing something", are too lazy, chicken, busy, or whatever to actually themselves "do something".
So go for it. But just so you know, you won't be able to get very close, and you'll get arrested because it is illegal to yell and scream in front of the White House, but that's ok.
Like you, I believe that government intervention should be minimized, and in the case of a purely victimless situation, the government should not get involved at all. If some guy wants to smoke a joint in the privacy of his own home, I have no interest in that, and I believe that the state should have no interest in it, either. However, like you said, as soon as someone's actions infringe on my right (and others' right) to be safe and secure in my (their) person, that's where the state should have an interest. To use your example, if drug lords want to start shooting each other up, that's a problem for the state to handle.
The problem is, drugs tend to make the user lose control of his/her actions. Indeed, many users take drugs specificially in order to lose control of their actions. Take Meth, for instance. Meth is highly a highly-addictive stimulant, and can cause the user to become violently aggressive. It doesn't take a mental stretch to realize that meth users are going to be burglarizing and robbing people in order to raise funds to support their meth habits. And meth cooks (the people who make meth is home "labs") are a huge problem as well. The chemical byproducts of the cooking process are extremely toxic and the cleanup involves specialized contractors in full hazmat suits and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've seen it happen, and it is not pretty.
Since meth users and cooks tend to cause so many problems, how can we, as a society, permit people to use meth in good concience? I think of it like driving while drunk. We have decided, as a society, that it is impossible to operate a motor vehicle in a manner that is safe to yourself and others while you are falling-down drunk. So even if a person by some stroke of luck manages to make it home safely driving while drunk, he/she is still guilty of a crime.
Perhaps if there were some way for people to experiment with recreational drugs in the presence of a medical professional who could supervise the experience and after-care to prevent overdose and manage any withdrawl symptoms? Seems like a waste of a doctor to me, but perhaps society has a need?
So I guess my position is that some drug use really ought to be outlawed, because certain drugs make it impossible or near-impossible for the user to respect the rights of others in society. Meth and driving drunk are just two examples. How does that translate to child porn? Clearly, those who abuse children should be punished. I believe that those who pay others to abuse children also be punished as well. However, I am not clear how "having a few thumbnails of child porn in your browser's cache" could be anything other than a victimless crime. Perhaps it's still worthy of an intervention? Maybe probation+treatment? I don't really know anything about the propensity of child-porn viewers to abuse actual children other than what you hear on the 11:00 news ("Anyone who even dreams of looking at at 17-year-old naked is having sex with infants, killing them, and then eating them!!1 Lock them up and throw away teh key!!!11"), which I do not consider to be scientific evidence. My gut tells me that anyone who really wants to molest or rape children would not waste time looking at child porn. I enjoy having sex, and as I'm sure you'll agree, pornography is no substitute for an actual woman.
What, exactly, is "cock throttling"? This is a term witch which I am completely unfamiliar.
I can definitely understand why the managers and security got all uppity. But their response was really unprofessional and stupid. "My civil rights are violated by you bringing a video camera into an electronics store." Yeah... right...
Not nearly as sorry as I feel for your parents.
Again, shut the fuck up and run adaware.
Now shut the fuck up and run adaware for your parents, you lazy, ungrateful bastard.
Tea. Water.
Tea. Water.
Tea. Water.
Polluting perfectly good tea with something like milk is worth starting wars over, as you would later discover.
With all that savings, you should go out and buy some health insurance so your savings won't be wiped out by a nasty illness.
No offense, but I bet you are misunderstanding what your account number really is. It wouldn't have taken your CU long to realize that a lot of people need to have more than one account (checking account for daily txns, a MMA with restricted withdrawls as a savings account, a mortgage or HELOC or three, you get the idea)
"Oooohhh no! We can't do that! We can't even look at your carseat, because if god forbid you got into an car crash and we said your seat was ok and something happened to your baby, you'd sue us for a million dollars!"
Basically, when the hospital says, "You have to do XYZ to take your baby home," they really mean, "We know you're exhausted and not thinking straight and we've found the only way to get you to do XYZ is to say you can't have your baby, even though that's a complete load of baby poop."
I'd just love to get a message: "Mr. Lorcha, Hi. This is Mr. Shitforbrains calling you from American Express. We have reason to beleive that your card was stolen. Please look at the card that is no longer in your possession and call the 800 number on the back of it for furthere instructions. Have a nice day!"
Also, she should pay 110% attention to what types of deals investors are doing in your market. She should collect as many business cards as she can, and on the backs of them, she should write down each investor's strategy. Then she should find properties for them. Remember, we investors have funds and have no mental problems. We do deal after deal and we don't care that the paint in the guest bathroom doesn't match the couch we inherited from aunt Mildred. She could do a lot of business if she learned about investors.
That was my path, anyhow.
All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?
I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.
By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.
Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.
And that's just at the big brokerages. I hapen to have a real estate license (I don't buy/sell for anyone other than myself. I'm an investor.), and at my brokerage, the standard commission split for all agents (even newly-licensed ones) is 80/20 (20% goes to the broker), but if you want, you can just pay the broker $400/mo cash and keep 100% of your commissions. No agent worth his salt is giving 50% of his earnings to some broker anymore.
here. This was the guy's third conviction and second supervised release violation in 6 years. Also, the 2005 conviction (and 20 year sentence) included 14 images of real (not cartoon) child porn. Saying this guy got 20 years for cartoon child porn is wildly inaccurate.
Strike five: In January 2003, after serving that sentence and while on supervised release for his earlier conviction, Whorley was re-arrested for violating the conditions of his probation. Whorley subsequently pled guilty to violating the conditions of his release and was sentenced to an additional 12 months of incarceration to be followed by 12 months of supervision by the United States Probation Office.
Strike six: He was arrested on the present charges on April 5, 2005-just three months after being released from incarceration-when United States Probation Officers learned that Whorley had received child pornography by using a computer at the VEC.
The 20 year (harsh) sentence was based on the fact that this was his third conviction, and his second violation of his supervised release agreements. I think we can understand the VA jury losing patience with the man.
These days, there's nothing an IVR can tell me that the company's website can't tell me. If I'm calling customer service, it's because I can't do what I need to do using any automated system (the website, or the IVR) and I need to speak with a real, live, human being. Preferrably, one who speaks passable English.
You might be happier with a different email service. That way, if you ever want to bolt from Verizon, you don't have to mess around with changing your email address.
When you've got a mob of people going one way, the last thing you want to do is use mace/pepper spray/whatever to force the people in front back. That's just begging for people in the middle to get crushed or trampled. It's also begging for people in the pepper sprayed areas to get crushed or trampled in the meyhem.
It's much better to just get out of the way.
Let's remember we're talking about kids at a football game and not a mob of revolutionaries here. There's no reason for cops to take a harmless situation and make it dangerous. At my alma mater, kids got trampled when the cops tried to prevent the inevitable. One girl was nearly killed.
To protect and to serve, indeed.