The tax writeoff aspect needs to be emphasized. While we can all get a warm fuzzy in the midriff about the kids, it's that pleasure jolt in the wallet from getting mugged by the taxman that affects behavior.
This was my big question. How do you write the $300 off as a "donation" when you're getting a laptop out of it? It seems like you wouldn't be able to do it. I'm not sure how the IRS would feel about a quasi-sale like that. I suspect that, just like buying a Newman's Own can of salsa (or other product where "all profits go to charity") you wouldn't be able to take the purchase price as a tax deduction. As far as the IRS is concerned, you're just buying an overpriced laptop, and the company you're buying it from is making a donation.
If you're getting something back, it doesn't seem like it would be a donation. Maybe some good tax lawyers could figure out a way to do it, but the way it was being done didn't leave much room, at least that I could see, for how I'd be able to write it off.
The ability to take it as a tax deduction is basically like getting another 20-40% off, depending on how you do your taxes and what kind of bracket you're in, and could be a big incentive to certain people (those with disposable income).
First I'd just like to compliment you on your well-said, rational post.
I consider myself to be basically a small-government borderline libertarian, and I agree with you. I have seen very little evidence to convince me that a society completely devoid of regulation, either in the criminal or economic sense, would be a nice place to live. Maybe it would be an interesting place to visit -- I mean, who wouldn't want to play at being a ruthless vigilante? -- but I wouldn't want to live there permanently. (And this completely ignores the fact that in an 'unregulated' society, I suspect that people would form together and produce something not dissimilar to a 'government' pretty quickly; in time, you'd probably produce a society similar to what we have today. There's no 'natural regulation' in our society; everything we have is our own creation. Thus, we are the steady-state solution to the problem.)
Here's how the market economy works, or ought to: the people, by way of the democratic process, decide on what they want the outcome to be. They decide that "we want to have running water and sewer and electricity." If that need is not already being met by the market, then there is a place for the government (democratically elected!) to inject itself, and provide the absolute minimum incentive structure necessary, in order to accomplish the outcome desired by the electorate. The interference should always be minimal, and only after there is no alternative that doesn't involve interference.
There is no point in even having a government, if it is powerless to interfere in the "market" when that market isn't producing the outcomes that are desired by the citizenry. If it can't, then it's just redundant: you might as well get rid of it and just let the market be your government, because the layer of powerlessness isn't doing you any good.
If people in a community want high-speed internet, and the market isn't providing it, then there is a place for the local government to put it in place, or create an incentive structure sufficient so that it is created, just like any other type of infrastructure development project. There is ample historical evidence for successful infrastructure projects done using public funds, for public benefit; it's not a completely foreign concept. And it doesn't even need to be done with public funds per se, like some gigantic Stalinist Central Planning committee; a government might just need to provide loan guarantees or otherwise mitigate risk in order to spur commercial development. As I said earlier, the incentives to create the desired ends should always be approached from a minimalist perspective: the least interference is best, because it means the least chance of unintended consequences. But fear of interference shouldn't paralyze local governments from acting when they have a mandate from their people to do so.
So even as a fan of small, decentralized, basically weak government, I can see very valid reasons for public action in infrastructure development. If a government isn't allowed to do something this basic, and this simple, then it's hardly a functioning government at all.
Of course, such compromises are not as fun to make from a rhetorical perspective as lazy black and white distinctions, however false they may be.
If you believe that a nuclear North Korea really would use a weapon against a populated area (either in the U.S., or South Korea, or Japan), and that the odds of them doing this only increase with time until it becomes a near certainty, and you also believe that it is the duty of governments to protect the lives of their own citizens first, and enemy states' citizens second, then there is an argument for a first strike against North Korea.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "war," though. I'm not sure what term you use for wiping out another country's infrastructure and population in a fraction of a second, but 'war' seems to imply more back-and-forth than that action leaves room for.
Of course, I don't think that the U.S., or the West in general, has the stomach for that sort of action. We have tacitly accepted the idea of a nuclear North Korea -- really, a nuclear Kim Jong-Il -- in our refusal to contemplate such drastic measures, which are the only guaranteed method of preventing a budding nuclear power from joining the club for real.
Either we acknowledge them as a power, or we annihilate them before they have a chance to become a threat. If we cannot do the latter, then we have already chosen the former.
I'm not saying whether such actions would be a Good Idea or not (probably not), but it's time to admit to ourselves that the age of nonproliferation is over, if we're not going to forcibly prohibit, using whatever means are necessary, countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. If inaction is what our collective conscience dictates, then we should get used to the effects.
Have they tried offering to let him direct a live action Daffy Duck feature length movie? From everything I have heard, this guy just want's to be an American mover and shaker. One movie deal, and we just might have him distracted for a couple of years.
Sounds like a plan to me. I mean, what's one more megalomaniac Communist in Hollywood? He'll fit right in.
I'd rather use a browser that supported CSS and rendered pages fast enough, than use a browser that didn't support CSS, and rendered them only a little faster.
I hear you. But realize that while this is how you feel, not everyone necessarily agrees with you. To some people, that increase in rendering speed might be worth the errors. They might care more about how "snappy" the browser feels, and don't really care whether it looks perfect.
To you, that might seem ridiculous. But I could definitely think of some people who are that impatient, and would easily trade some (to them) minor rendering errors for an increase in rendering speed and UI responsiveness. Particularly if they don't know that the errors are happening, or have any reason to care.
While I'd never use IE, I switched from Safari to Firefox, even though Safari is the "better" browser in terms of standards-compliance, because Firefox 'feels faster' and renders some pages noticeably faster on my machine. For me, that extra rendering speed was more important than passing Acid2 or some other test for everyday browsing. I could easily see how some person even less patient than I, might go even further and throw away any attempt at compliance, and accept IE's rendering in order to get its speed.
The tradeoffs that you feel are valid, are not universally accepted. Lots of people may do the same math and come up with different answers for what's "most important" to them.
The "fun part" of the war -- the bombing-the-crap-out-of-them part -- was over when the Taliban government collapsed.
The U.S. population doesn't have a whole lot of patience for long search-and-destroy campaigns or counter-guerilla warfare. When they wanted a war, they wanted an actual war. Like, with armies and stuff. And tanks. You know, like in the movies. One with an identifiable enemy and progress that can be marked on maps and analyzed on CNN.
When the Afghanistan campaign ceased being a "war" in the Saving Private Ryan sense, and turned into some sort of long-term occupation against an invisible enemy, the U.S. pretty much packed up and headed for Iraq. As soon as the Taliban government fell, there was talk in the U.S. of pulling out and passing responsibility over to an international force.
The people really wanted a war, but "dismantling... the Taliban resurgence" wasn't going to cut it. Iraq did; they had an actual army that could be defeated in something resembling a conventional pitched battle, infrastructure that could be bombed, and (it was thought) people who would gratefully acknowledge their liberators.
The slow dismantling of the remaining Taliban wasn't -- just as the continuing counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq isn't -- cinematographic enough to capture the interest and support of the U.S. citizenry. If you want to maintain public support in this country for a war, you need to have images of things getting blown up and your troops marching forward on TV every day. The public won't tolerate any lack of perceived forward momentum.
Had Iraq not been invaded, the public would have tired of Afghanistan long ago, just as it now tires of Iraq. The political reasons for keeping the 'war footing' going longer are obvious, but it's silly to place blame on Bush and the Administration as if they were some sort of evil-genius cabal. The public was entirely complicit -- in fact, hugely supportive -- of the war, before they grew bored with it.
Thank you, China. Because every day, when I get up and read the U.S. news, and think "goddamn, our country is going into the toilet," all I have to do is turn to the International section to realize that it could always be worse.
There might be a few countries that would do a better (by which I mean 'freer') job of internet governance. But it's a very, very short list. Many European governments are even more censorious than the United States; say the wrong thing about the Holocaust in Germany, and you can end up in prison. Perhaps some of the Northern European countries (particularly Sweden) would be good stewards, as they seem to have been doing a good job of not knuckling under to corporate interests so far, but I wonder what they'd do if the pressure of the world was put upon them.
There are a lot of countries, on the other hand, that would be far, far worse stewards of the Internet than the U.S. has been. Countries like Iran, China, or even Turkey, all have significantly more barriers to free speech than the U.S. does. Plenty of other countries have non-secular governments that don't hesitate (or even see a problem) introducing religious dogma into political decision-making. Would you really want a Sharia court having a say in domain-name disputes? I wouldn't.
The U.N.'s regulatory bodies have had success managing basically uncontroversial issues where a mutual need for coordination is clear (for instance, the radio spectrum), and there is a lot of delegation to national authorities. With the internet, none of this would be the case. The nature of the network prohibits much meaningful delegation to lower levels of authority; it's not like radio spectrum, where every country can just arbitrarily decide what the standards will be for content that is broadcasted to their own citizenry. Either regulations are universal, or they don't exist at all (or you fragment the network behind national firewalls in order to produce spheres of influence that can be independently regulated -- but at that point, it would barely be the Internet anymore). There would be a variety of controversial issues (do we prohibit child pornography? If so, what's the standard for "child"? How about 'hate speech'?), and that's only if everyone actually agreed that regulation was necessary at all, which is unlikely in itself.
I can understand some people's frustration with the United States. But it's foolish to think that the U.N. would do much better; at least the U.S. has a large stake in making sure the Internet survives as a medium, so that there's a self-interested brake on any politically-motivated changes that might destroy the net completely. To put control in the hands of a governmental body that includes many countries that could care less about Internet governance, and would just use it as a political football in the negotiation of other disputes, would be jumping out of the frying pan and into a very hot fire.
Actually Iraq had a lot to do with 9/11, in that it was what caused the U.S. government, driven by its citizenry, to go on an Arab-hunting expedition. Let's cut the crap and stop deceiving ourselves: that was the main reason for going to Iraq -- after Taliban Afghanistan collapsed like a rotten piece of fruit, without a chance to really get any good video clips of our expensive military hardware blowing stuff up, we needed somewhere else to go. Iraq was a target of convenience and opportunity; the Hussein government was unsympathetic, almost cartoonishly so, and we had pretty good maps and ideas of their capabilities from the last time we visited there. Very few people who knew anything about what was going on actually believed the Iraq/terrorism connection; it was pretty clear from the beginning that it was just a justification for a war that had been decided on for other reasons. And why not -- it had 95% approval early on; people wanted a war, they wanted some sort of violent retribution against somebody, somewhere, for 9/11. The administration delivered.
It's only since the ground war has dragged on, and the images on CNN aren't as impressive and fun to watch anymore, that public support has flagged. When it was 24-hour 'watch us bomb the sand n***ers back into the Stone Age,' the politicians couldn't crawl over themselves fast enough to support it.
The Bush administration deserves blame for creating a partially misleading premise for war, but it's dishonest to say that it wasn't a war that a very large segment of America didn't want in the first place. As a country, we willingly stood by and let the wool be put over our eyes, because we wanted to vent our spleen on someone, and (Bin Laden being indisposed at the moment) Iraq was as good a place as any.
My understanding is that the apostrophe is always used to contract two words, and never to denote possession.
The apostrophe certainly can be used to indicate possession, when it follows a proper noun such as a name: e.g. "I stole Dave's guitar."
In this case it is not being used to contract two words ('I stole Dave is guitar' is not correct); the apostrophe serves purely to indicate possession. This is separate from the use of the apostrophe as part of a contraction (for example "can not" to "can't" and "it is" to "it's").
What trips people up is that the possessive form of "it" is not a contraction, it is simply a possessive pronoun, like "his" or "hers", neither of which use apostrophes. So the usage of "it" in the possessive form ('its' -- no apostrophe) is consistent with other possessive pronouns, and the usage when part of a contraction ('it's' -- with an apostrophe) is consistent with the other contractions.
As I've said elsewhere, Roe vs. Wade is a prime example of why it's a really, really bad idea to accept bad jurisprudence just because it creates a good outcome in the short term.
Roe rests on a rather silly argument. Rather than using any number of very good justifications for enabling abortion -- such as the equal protection clause, or better yet, just tossing it back to the legislature until public pressure forced the creation of a real "Right to Privacy" amendment -- the USSC created a legal fiction. Beginning with Griswold vs Connecticut, they constructed a 'phantom right,' using what's now called the "penumbra argument." Basically they said that the right to privacy is unwritten but assumed, and that it's necessary in order for the functional implementation of other enumerated rights. It's a plausible enough argument, but certainly not airtight. Compared to the logic underlying most other high court decisions, it's got flaming hoops of assumptions to jump through. It's the Evel Knievel of opinions: on one hand there's where you are, and on the other side is the result you want, and then -- holy shit, look at it go -- it stretches between the two.
The justices voting for the majority, being very smart and well-read people, (in my opinion) voted the way they did less because they were actually convinced of the correctness of the penumbra argument on strict jurisprudential grounds, than because they thought that to allow abortion was the Right Thing To Do at the time, and they figured out a way to make it happen. There is some merit to this approach -- public opinion at the time was in favor and if you looked at trends over the past decade or two, it looked as if society was on a straight, predictable path towards social liberalization. If the court had ruled otherwise, many would have felt that the results were unjust. (And they would be partially correct: the Court would have been just, but it would have been wrong; fixing the relationship between justice and rightness being the proper domain of the Legislature.)
However, by acting on a results-focused, rather than principled or jurisprudential approach, the Court gave society a number of real rights -- things that average, everyday people count on, like the ability to get contraception or an abortion without consulting a judge -- but rested them on shaky, unstable foundations.
Now, all that needs to happen for these real-world abilities to disappear, is for the jurisprudential foundation to be undermined. And now, there is little chance of a national "Right to Privacy" being passed, as there might have been if Roe or Griswold had been decided differently and there had been a public outcry of 'injustice.' It might have taken longer to get the results that people wanted, but the ultimate right would have been more secure as a result, if it had come in the form of a law or Constitutional Amendment instead of a Court opinion.
Results-focused or social-utility "jurisprudence" is almost always a cop-out, a trading of short-term gains for long-term instability and unintended consequences. That we have begun to rely on them more and more is either a sign that the Legislative branch of government is not doing its job and forcing the Judicial to step in, or that the Judicial branch is overstepping. (Which one you think it is, is infinitely debatable.)
"Perfectly legal" was how it should have read; it was a typo.
I had originally written that sentence in the negative tense but changed it for clarity, and somehow missed changing that word. (Even made it through two preview cycles.) Oh, well.
The moment I ask "how much?" and they tell me, they have entered into a contract to supply the goods at that price or a lower price if they can't make change.
I'm calling shenanigans on this. (Unless you're located in some dollar-using country besides the U.S., in which case I think you're an idiot for not making that more clear, since you had to know it would be assumed.)
The right of a vendor to refuse sale to any person, excepting a few prescribed categories (e.g. racial discrimination) has been long established. (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. vs Cream of Wheat Co., U.S.C.C.A. 2nd Ct., 1915 being the earliest I could find.) If you are quoted a fare to get on a bus, or for any other good or service, and you attempt to pay for it with some large bill, the vendor is not obligated to provide change. They could at that point inform you that they didn't have change, and wouldn't be required to give you the service or good for free -- that would be ridiculous. It amounts to legitimizing a theft of services, or requiring everyone to carry around change sufficient to break the largest available denomination of legal tender (in the U.S., several thousands of dollars); if it was true, everyone would be walking around with thousand-dollar bills. That you have been able to get away with it on public buses may be indicative of an internal policy of the bus company or their desire not to create a problem, but I do not see how they are legally obligated to let you ride.
If I go into a penny-candy store and ask to buy 5 cents worth of something, and try to pay with a $20, and the seller doesn't have 19.95 in change, I can't just demand the candy for free. In order to create the oral contract, both parties need to agree to the other party's offer. If my offer is "this candy for five cents," and your offer is "I've got a twenty and I want change," we haven't come to an agreement yet. Both parties make an offer, and then there is consideration, and then there might -- or might not -- be agreement. Only after both parties agree to the terms is there an oral contract of sale created. Just saying 'five cents' doesn't carry with it an implied promise of change from some arbitrarily large denomination of currency that you might want to use, and which could require the vendor to do any number of potentially time-consuming activities (close the store, go to the bank, get change, etc.).
It's not even clear that businesses are required in all U.S. states to accept cash as payment. There is at least one business I know of that absolutely refuses cash, and made it into the national press as a result. A lot of people questioned whether this was legal, and they were in the clear. (It was the cafe "Snap" in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. Story here.) And this doesn't even get into the countless thousands of fast-food joints and gas stations which flatly refuse to accept large-denomination bills (usually $100s or larger, although some refuse $50s as well); I haven't heard of any problems with any of them.
If you're claiming that this widespread practice is illegal, then I think the onus is on you to come up with some factual evidence as to why it is.
All of these solutions are mostly aimed at PCs used by users right at the local console, but I could see a lot of good reasons for wanting encryption on a server, or other colocated computer. Or maybe I just want to make sure that my desktop workstation doesn't hang forever after a power outage, waiting for someone to put a password in on its local console.
It would be nice if there was a way to mount one of these drives by giving it a password over a secure networked connection.
I guess the way to do it would be to put the root filesystem (hopefully not containing any sensitive data) on an unencrypted drive/partition, and then letting the machine boot from that, and then prompting for a password when it wants to load the drive or partition that contains user data (/home or whatever you prefer). Maybe you could keep a small solid-state flash drive that would maintain a minimal system, just enough to boot the machine and provide network services, and then from there allow you to mount the hardware-encrypted drive. That wouldn't require you to have two complete drives.
Alternately, maybe one of those drive+flash combo units that they're talking about pushing now, could offer features like that. Keep enough of the system on the flash (unencrypted) to bootstrap the machine to a point where you could safely authenticate remotely, and bring up the encrypted portions of the drive.
On Windows systems that mostly keep the user data on the same drive and partition as the system, I don't see an elegant way to do this. But I guess that's just a reflection that no matter how many ways you try to dress it up, Windows is really designed to be a single-user, locally-operated system, at least in most configurations and common flavors.
There are big advantages to the U.S. system as well. With number portability, you can take your landline number, with its same exchange, and move it to a mobile phone, and use it as your primary number without making everyone who wants to call you pay extra.
The area code of where you transfer the number from (the original geographic exchange) will determine which people pay for it as a "long distance" call, but that's far less expensive for most people than European mobile airtime is, I think.
I wouldn't be willing to keep a mobile phone as my only phone number, if doing so required everyone who wanted to call me pay extra. That just seems rude. I'm quite content to pay for people's incoming calls to me, since I'm the one deciding to attach the number to a mobile, rather than fixed phone.
From the caller's perspective, the U.S. system puts land and mobile numbers on equal footing, which seems more logical to me.
There are lots of these places around. They don't hide; generally they'll sell you stuff without problems. In most places, lockpicks, along with crowbars, hack saws, bolt cutters, slim jims, glass drills, etc. are perfectly illegal unless there is some reason that someone thinks they're going to be used for a crime, in which case they become "burglar's tools."
Aside from the fact that I think this is really terrible law -- it puts far too much interpretative power in the hands of the police, inserting ambiguity where there really doesn't need to be any (the crime itself is already illegal, whether you use tools to do it or not shouldn't really matter; if we want to discourage people, why not just make the punishment for the actual crime more severe?) -- it still requires some indication that the tools are going to be used for a nefarious purpose before they become illegal. I used to have a slim jim because I drove a car that had a bad habit of locking itself up automatically, and it was perfectly legal. Likewise, anyone who's ever installed a fence probably has a pair of large bolt cutters in their garage. Yet if you put those same bolt cutters in the trunk of your car when you were driving around the wrong part of town, you might find yourself in hot water.
Can you tell me what the relative advantages would be of GNUNet versus Freenet?
It seems like Freenet was basically designed for doing something exactly like this, yet it seems like Freenet really never took off for anything (besides some minor anarchism and porn). I don't pretend to know exactly why Freenet failed to take off, but how does GNUnet improve on it, and how does it hope to avoid the same fate?
I think the Civilian Marksmanship Program is still selling some M1s at reduced prices to members of CMP affiliated clubs; the only special requirements (aside from being eligible to own a firearm and ponying up the cash) are a demonstration that you can hit a paper plate at 50 yards or something similarly easy. It's really quite a neat program. Back in the day you could get an M1 or M1 Carbine for a few bucks, shipped in the mail. Now it has to go through a dealer, but it's still a good way to get your hands on one.
Sadly, several Presidents, culimating with President Clinton, effectively gutted the program and ensured that once it runs out of WWII and Korea surplus Garands, it will effectively cease to exist (military surplus M14s and M16s cannot be sold to the public, even if the full-auto capabilities are permanently disabled; even surplus ammunition is destroyed rather than sold surplus, though it would be worth millions of dollars).
Get them while you still can. Up until a few years ago you could even specify a manufacturer preference for your M1, they had some International Harvester ones that were neat, but I think now you have to deal with whatever's left.
According to this site the material most boarding passes are printed out of, is 80 lb "cover stock."
How exactly you'd do the perforation on the tear-off piece, I'm not sure. But getting the material would be pretty simple.
There are also some airlines that are doing print-your-own boarding passes, just like Ticketmaster does for some concert tickets. You go to a website and print out a form on your home printer, on plain paper, that contains a bar code that they scan as you're boarding the plane. I've often wondered exactly how Ticketmaster's system works and how easy it would be to counterfeit a ticket that would come up as valid. I assume the bar code just contains a serial number, and the scanners that they use at the entrance to the venue contain a table that cross references serial numbers to seats. Assuming the numbers are randomly generated and not sequential, it seems like it would be hard to come up with one.
I'm not sure whether the type of boarding pass that TFA is discussing how to make, is of the first type (the 'real' kind), or a print-at-home one.
That's really fascinating, I was not aware that ice tanks were commonly used that way. Using them as "peak storage" to even out the electrical load is a pretty good idea too, in more typical office environments. Probably in areas where the electricity has a "demand charge" component to it (where your rate goes up depending on your maximum power draw at any particular time), it could be economical. Also, I assume that you can replenish them with ice during the night, when the air conditioners are both more efficient and have less load on them. Just a neat idea all around.
There is another issue though, which is how emotionally connected people feel to the victims.
Due to a lot of reasons, which we can blame on media coverage, as well as cultural differences and perhaps even plain-old entrenched racism, there's not a whole lot of demand in America to intervene in Darfur. Yeah, people think it's bad, but it's not "send in the Marines" bad. When push comes to shove, and people are asked whether it would be worth spending a lot of money, resources, and potentially American lives to stop it, they say 'no.'
You can see this pattern repeat over and over. Darfur is just its latest incarnation. We let it happen in Rwanda in the early 1990s, too, and afterwards there was a lot of "never again" chatter, but it was just that -- chatter. Now it's happening again, and the public will to intervene isn't there.
I've just been watching the behavior of the U.S. electorate for a while, and there are forces at work that we just don't like to talk about in polite society. We prefer to think that we're above anything as crass as holding a white Christian child's life above that of a black Muslim's. However, regardless of what we say to each other, looking only at foreign-policy decisions, it's pretty clear that American interventionism follows a sort of "cultural closeness," in addition to the predictable realpolitik and Machievellian geopolitical advantage-building.
The closer a would-be exterminee population is to a theoretical "middle American" ideal, the greater chance it has of getting an intervention or support on its behalf. In some cases, such intervention is given even when it is arguably not in the United States' direct strategic interest -- I would argue that a great part of our continuing support of Israel is based on the fact that Americans in general feel a much greater kinship with Israel as an idea, their form of government, and the Israeli people than they do with any of the Arab countries in the region.
The American public has little tolerance for slaughter when it is a population that looks like themselves, but finds it remarkably easy to ignore when it is of people of a different skin color, language, culture, and religion. The fact that it is perceived as a hopeless, never-ending, tribal conflict also adds to both the sense of foreignness and the disinterest in involving ourselves.
If the killing in Darfur was happening in Sydney or Tel Aviv, regardless of the state of the U.S. military due to Iraq or anything else, we would respond. But when it's in Africa, happening to Africans, we let it go.
Actually you probably did the right thing, Dapper is the "Long Term Support" version -- basically the 'stable' line, while Edgy is the first of a number of smaller builds that will be released, but do not totally supplant the LTS version.
If the PCs were all your personal machines then of course you can do what you want, but if they're ones that have to work reliably and you're expected to support, you probably saved yourself a lot of trouble by going with Dapper.
Well, you know the old rule: "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"...
Stallman wouldn't want to execute Raymond too early; it would just precipitate a civil war. You know, BSDers blowing themselves up in LUG meetings, contamination of the Cheetos supply, and caffeinated-beverage shortages. You know, basically all the worst parts of the Bible.
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The tax writeoff aspect needs to be emphasized. While we can all get a warm fuzzy in the midriff about the kids, it's that pleasure jolt in the wallet from getting mugged by the taxman that affects behavior.
This was my big question. How do you write the $300 off as a "donation" when you're getting a laptop out of it? It seems like you wouldn't be able to do it. I'm not sure how the IRS would feel about a quasi-sale like that. I suspect that, just like buying a Newman's Own can of salsa (or other product where "all profits go to charity") you wouldn't be able to take the purchase price as a tax deduction. As far as the IRS is concerned, you're just buying an overpriced laptop, and the company you're buying it from is making a donation.
If you're getting something back, it doesn't seem like it would be a donation. Maybe some good tax lawyers could figure out a way to do it, but the way it was being done didn't leave much room, at least that I could see, for how I'd be able to write it off.
The ability to take it as a tax deduction is basically like getting another 20-40% off, depending on how you do your taxes and what kind of bracket you're in, and could be a big incentive to certain people (those with disposable income).
First I'd just like to compliment you on your well-said, rational post.
I consider myself to be basically a small-government borderline libertarian, and I agree with you. I have seen very little evidence to convince me that a society completely devoid of regulation, either in the criminal or economic sense, would be a nice place to live. Maybe it would be an interesting place to visit -- I mean, who wouldn't want to play at being a ruthless vigilante? -- but I wouldn't want to live there permanently. (And this completely ignores the fact that in an 'unregulated' society, I suspect that people would form together and produce something not dissimilar to a 'government' pretty quickly; in time, you'd probably produce a society similar to what we have today. There's no 'natural regulation' in our society; everything we have is our own creation. Thus, we are the steady-state solution to the problem.)
Here's how the market economy works, or ought to: the people, by way of the democratic process, decide on what they want the outcome to be. They decide that "we want to have running water and sewer and electricity." If that need is not already being met by the market, then there is a place for the government (democratically elected!) to inject itself, and provide the absolute minimum incentive structure necessary, in order to accomplish the outcome desired by the electorate. The interference should always be minimal, and only after there is no alternative that doesn't involve interference.
There is no point in even having a government, if it is powerless to interfere in the "market" when that market isn't producing the outcomes that are desired by the citizenry. If it can't, then it's just redundant: you might as well get rid of it and just let the market be your government, because the layer of powerlessness isn't doing you any good.
If people in a community want high-speed internet, and the market isn't providing it, then there is a place for the local government to put it in place, or create an incentive structure sufficient so that it is created, just like any other type of infrastructure development project. There is ample historical evidence for successful infrastructure projects done using public funds, for public benefit; it's not a completely foreign concept. And it doesn't even need to be done with public funds per se, like some gigantic Stalinist Central Planning committee; a government might just need to provide loan guarantees or otherwise mitigate risk in order to spur commercial development. As I said earlier, the incentives to create the desired ends should always be approached from a minimalist perspective: the least interference is best, because it means the least chance of unintended consequences. But fear of interference shouldn't paralyze local governments from acting when they have a mandate from their people to do so.
So even as a fan of small, decentralized, basically weak government, I can see very valid reasons for public action in infrastructure development. If a government isn't allowed to do something this basic, and this simple, then it's hardly a functioning government at all.
Of course, such compromises are not as fun to make from a rhetorical perspective as lazy black and white distinctions, however false they may be.
Depends on your definition of "worse."
If you believe that a nuclear North Korea really would use a weapon against a populated area (either in the U.S., or South Korea, or Japan), and that the odds of them doing this only increase with time until it becomes a near certainty, and you also believe that it is the duty of governments to protect the lives of their own citizens first, and enemy states' citizens second, then there is an argument for a first strike against North Korea.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a "war," though. I'm not sure what term you use for wiping out another country's infrastructure and population in a fraction of a second, but 'war' seems to imply more back-and-forth than that action leaves room for.
Of course, I don't think that the U.S., or the West in general, has the stomach for that sort of action. We have tacitly accepted the idea of a nuclear North Korea -- really, a nuclear Kim Jong-Il -- in our refusal to contemplate such drastic measures, which are the only guaranteed method of preventing a budding nuclear power from joining the club for real.
Either we acknowledge them as a power, or we annihilate them before they have a chance to become a threat. If we cannot do the latter, then we have already chosen the former.
I'm not saying whether such actions would be a Good Idea or not (probably not), but it's time to admit to ourselves that the age of nonproliferation is over, if we're not going to forcibly prohibit, using whatever means are necessary, countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. If inaction is what our collective conscience dictates, then we should get used to the effects.
Have they tried offering to let him direct a live action Daffy Duck feature length movie? From everything I have heard, this guy just want's to be an American mover and shaker. One movie deal, and we just might have him distracted for a couple of years.
Sounds like a plan to me. I mean, what's one more megalomaniac Communist in Hollywood? He'll fit right in.
I'd rather use a browser that supported CSS and rendered pages fast enough, than use a browser that didn't support CSS, and rendered them only a little faster.
I hear you. But realize that while this is how you feel, not everyone necessarily agrees with you. To some people, that increase in rendering speed might be worth the errors. They might care more about how "snappy" the browser feels, and don't really care whether it looks perfect.
To you, that might seem ridiculous. But I could definitely think of some people who are that impatient, and would easily trade some (to them) minor rendering errors for an increase in rendering speed and UI responsiveness. Particularly if they don't know that the errors are happening, or have any reason to care.
While I'd never use IE, I switched from Safari to Firefox, even though Safari is the "better" browser in terms of standards-compliance, because Firefox 'feels faster' and renders some pages noticeably faster on my machine. For me, that extra rendering speed was more important than passing Acid2 or some other test for everyday browsing. I could easily see how some person even less patient than I, might go even further and throw away any attempt at compliance, and accept IE's rendering in order to get its speed.
The tradeoffs that you feel are valid, are not universally accepted. Lots of people may do the same math and come up with different answers for what's "most important" to them.
The "fun part" of the war -- the bombing-the-crap-out-of-them part -- was over when the Taliban government collapsed.
... the Taliban resurgence" wasn't going to cut it. Iraq did; they had an actual army that could be defeated in something resembling a conventional pitched battle, infrastructure that could be bombed, and (it was thought) people who would gratefully acknowledge their liberators.
The U.S. population doesn't have a whole lot of patience for long search-and-destroy campaigns or counter-guerilla warfare. When they wanted a war, they wanted an actual war. Like, with armies and stuff. And tanks. You know, like in the movies. One with an identifiable enemy and progress that can be marked on maps and analyzed on CNN.
When the Afghanistan campaign ceased being a "war" in the Saving Private Ryan sense, and turned into some sort of long-term occupation against an invisible enemy, the U.S. pretty much packed up and headed for Iraq. As soon as the Taliban government fell, there was talk in the U.S. of pulling out and passing responsibility over to an international force.
The people really wanted a war, but "dismantling
The slow dismantling of the remaining Taliban wasn't -- just as the continuing counter-insurgency warfare in Iraq isn't -- cinematographic enough to capture the interest and support of the U.S. citizenry. If you want to maintain public support in this country for a war, you need to have images of things getting blown up and your troops marching forward on TV every day. The public won't tolerate any lack of perceived forward momentum.
Had Iraq not been invaded, the public would have tired of Afghanistan long ago, just as it now tires of Iraq. The political reasons for keeping the 'war footing' going longer are obvious, but it's silly to place blame on Bush and the Administration as if they were some sort of evil-genius cabal. The public was entirely complicit -- in fact, hugely supportive -- of the war, before they grew bored with it.
I really think they would be more like this:
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Thank you, China. Because every day, when I get up and read the U.S. news, and think "goddamn, our country is going into the toilet," all I have to do is turn to the International section to realize that it could always be worse.
If you really think that, you're a fool.
There might be a few countries that would do a better (by which I mean 'freer') job of internet governance. But it's a very, very short list. Many European governments are even more censorious than the United States; say the wrong thing about the Holocaust in Germany, and you can end up in prison. Perhaps some of the Northern European countries (particularly Sweden) would be good stewards, as they seem to have been doing a good job of not knuckling under to corporate interests so far, but I wonder what they'd do if the pressure of the world was put upon them.
There are a lot of countries, on the other hand, that would be far, far worse stewards of the Internet than the U.S. has been. Countries like Iran, China, or even Turkey, all have significantly more barriers to free speech than the U.S. does. Plenty of other countries have non-secular governments that don't hesitate (or even see a problem) introducing religious dogma into political decision-making. Would you really want a Sharia court having a say in domain-name disputes? I wouldn't.
The U.N.'s regulatory bodies have had success managing basically uncontroversial issues where a mutual need for coordination is clear (for instance, the radio spectrum), and there is a lot of delegation to national authorities. With the internet, none of this would be the case. The nature of the network prohibits much meaningful delegation to lower levels of authority; it's not like radio spectrum, where every country can just arbitrarily decide what the standards will be for content that is broadcasted to their own citizenry. Either regulations are universal, or they don't exist at all (or you fragment the network behind national firewalls in order to produce spheres of influence that can be independently regulated -- but at that point, it would barely be the Internet anymore). There would be a variety of controversial issues (do we prohibit child pornography? If so, what's the standard for "child"? How about 'hate speech'?), and that's only if everyone actually agreed that regulation was necessary at all, which is unlikely in itself.
I can understand some people's frustration with the United States. But it's foolish to think that the U.N. would do much better; at least the U.S. has a large stake in making sure the Internet survives as a medium, so that there's a self-interested brake on any politically-motivated changes that might destroy the net completely. To put control in the hands of a governmental body that includes many countries that could care less about Internet governance, and would just use it as a political football in the negotiation of other disputes, would be jumping out of the frying pan and into a very hot fire.
that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.
Actually Iraq had a lot to do with 9/11, in that it was what caused the U.S. government, driven by its citizenry, to go on an Arab-hunting expedition. Let's cut the crap and stop deceiving ourselves: that was the main reason for going to Iraq -- after Taliban Afghanistan collapsed like a rotten piece of fruit, without a chance to really get any good video clips of our expensive military hardware blowing stuff up, we needed somewhere else to go. Iraq was a target of convenience and opportunity; the Hussein government was unsympathetic, almost cartoonishly so, and we had pretty good maps and ideas of their capabilities from the last time we visited there. Very few people who knew anything about what was going on actually believed the Iraq/terrorism connection; it was pretty clear from the beginning that it was just a justification for a war that had been decided on for other reasons. And why not -- it had 95% approval early on; people wanted a war, they wanted some sort of violent retribution against somebody, somewhere, for 9/11. The administration delivered.
It's only since the ground war has dragged on, and the images on CNN aren't as impressive and fun to watch anymore, that public support has flagged. When it was 24-hour 'watch us bomb the sand n***ers back into the Stone Age,' the politicians couldn't crawl over themselves fast enough to support it.
The Bush administration deserves blame for creating a partially misleading premise for war, but it's dishonest to say that it wasn't a war that a very large segment of America didn't want in the first place. As a country, we willingly stood by and let the wool be put over our eyes, because we wanted to vent our spleen on someone, and (Bin Laden being indisposed at the moment) Iraq was as good a place as any.
My understanding is that the apostrophe is always used to contract two words, and never to denote possession.
The apostrophe certainly can be used to indicate possession, when it follows a proper noun such as a name:
e.g. "I stole Dave's guitar."
In this case it is not being used to contract two words ('I stole Dave is guitar' is not correct); the apostrophe serves purely to indicate possession. This is separate from the use of the apostrophe as part of a contraction (for example "can not" to "can't" and "it is" to "it's").
What trips people up is that the possessive form of "it" is not a contraction, it is simply a possessive pronoun, like "his" or "hers", neither of which use apostrophes. So the usage of "it" in the possessive form ('its' -- no apostrophe) is consistent with other possessive pronouns, and the usage when part of a contraction ('it's' -- with an apostrophe) is consistent with the other contractions.
Wikipedia's reference section has a good discussion of its/it's and other conflicts, in modern U.S. English usage.
As I've said elsewhere, Roe vs. Wade is a prime example of why it's a really, really bad idea to accept bad jurisprudence just because it creates a good outcome in the short term.
Roe rests on a rather silly argument. Rather than using any number of very good justifications for enabling abortion -- such as the equal protection clause, or better yet, just tossing it back to the legislature until public pressure forced the creation of a real "Right to Privacy" amendment -- the USSC created a legal fiction. Beginning with Griswold vs Connecticut, they constructed a 'phantom right,' using what's now called the "penumbra argument." Basically they said that the right to privacy is unwritten but assumed, and that it's necessary in order for the functional implementation of other enumerated rights. It's a plausible enough argument, but certainly not airtight. Compared to the logic underlying most other high court decisions, it's got flaming hoops of assumptions to jump through. It's the Evel Knievel of opinions: on one hand there's where you are, and on the other side is the result you want, and then -- holy shit, look at it go -- it stretches between the two.
The justices voting for the majority, being very smart and well-read people, (in my opinion) voted the way they did less because they were actually convinced of the correctness of the penumbra argument on strict jurisprudential grounds, than because they thought that to allow abortion was the Right Thing To Do at the time, and they figured out a way to make it happen. There is some merit to this approach -- public opinion at the time was in favor and if you looked at trends over the past decade or two, it looked as if society was on a straight, predictable path towards social liberalization. If the court had ruled otherwise, many would have felt that the results were unjust. (And they would be partially correct: the Court would have been just, but it would have been wrong; fixing the relationship between justice and rightness being the proper domain of the Legislature.)
However, by acting on a results-focused, rather than principled or jurisprudential approach, the Court gave society a number of real rights -- things that average, everyday people count on, like the ability to get contraception or an abortion without consulting a judge -- but rested them on shaky, unstable foundations.
Now, all that needs to happen for these real-world abilities to disappear, is for the jurisprudential foundation to be undermined. And now, there is little chance of a national "Right to Privacy" being passed, as there might have been if Roe or Griswold had been decided differently and there had been a public outcry of 'injustice.' It might have taken longer to get the results that people wanted, but the ultimate right would have been more secure as a result, if it had come in the form of a law or Constitutional Amendment instead of a Court opinion.
Results-focused or social-utility "jurisprudence" is almost always a cop-out, a trading of short-term gains for long-term instability and unintended consequences. That we have begun to rely on them more and more is either a sign that the Legislative branch of government is not doing its job and forcing the Judicial to step in, or that the Judicial branch is overstepping. (Which one you think it is, is infinitely debatable.)
"Perfectly legal" was how it should have read; it was a typo.
I had originally written that sentence in the negative tense but changed it for clarity, and somehow missed changing that word. (Even made it through two preview cycles.) Oh, well.
The right of a vendor to refuse sale to any person, excepting a few prescribed categories (e.g. racial discrimination) has been long established. (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. vs Cream of Wheat Co., U.S.C.C.A. 2nd Ct., 1915 being the earliest I could find.) If you are quoted a fare to get on a bus, or for any other good or service, and you attempt to pay for it with some large bill, the vendor is not obligated to provide change. They could at that point inform you that they didn't have change, and wouldn't be required to give you the service or good for free -- that would be ridiculous. It amounts to legitimizing a theft of services, or requiring everyone to carry around change sufficient to break the largest available denomination of legal tender (in the U.S., several thousands of dollars); if it was true, everyone would be walking around with thousand-dollar bills. That you have been able to get away with it on public buses may be indicative of an internal policy of the bus company or their desire not to create a problem, but I do not see how they are legally obligated to let you ride.
If I go into a penny-candy store and ask to buy 5 cents worth of something, and try to pay with a $20, and the seller doesn't have 19.95 in change, I can't just demand the candy for free. In order to create the oral contract, both parties need to agree to the other party's offer. If my offer is "this candy for five cents," and your offer is "I've got a twenty and I want change," we haven't come to an agreement yet. Both parties make an offer, and then there is consideration, and then there might -- or might not -- be agreement. Only after both parties agree to the terms is there an oral contract of sale created. Just saying 'five cents' doesn't carry with it an implied promise of change from some arbitrarily large denomination of currency that you might want to use, and which could require the vendor to do any number of potentially time-consuming activities (close the store, go to the bank, get change, etc.).
It's not even clear that businesses are required in all U.S. states to accept cash as payment. There is at least one business I know of that absolutely refuses cash, and made it into the national press as a result. A lot of people questioned whether this was legal, and they were in the clear. (It was the cafe "Snap" in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. Story here.) And this doesn't even get into the countless thousands of fast-food joints and gas stations which flatly refuse to accept large-denomination bills (usually $100s or larger, although some refuse $50s as well); I haven't heard of any problems with any of them.
If you're claiming that this widespread practice is illegal, then I think the onus is on you to come up with some factual evidence as to why it is.
This is actually a very good point.
All of these solutions are mostly aimed at PCs used by users right at the local console, but I could see a lot of good reasons for wanting encryption on a server, or other colocated computer. Or maybe I just want to make sure that my desktop workstation doesn't hang forever after a power outage, waiting for someone to put a password in on its local console.
It would be nice if there was a way to mount one of these drives by giving it a password over a secure networked connection.
I guess the way to do it would be to put the root filesystem (hopefully not containing any sensitive data) on an unencrypted drive/partition, and then letting the machine boot from that, and then prompting for a password when it wants to load the drive or partition that contains user data (/home or whatever you prefer). Maybe you could keep a small solid-state flash drive that would maintain a minimal system, just enough to boot the machine and provide network services, and then from there allow you to mount the hardware-encrypted drive. That wouldn't require you to have two complete drives.
Alternately, maybe one of those drive+flash combo units that they're talking about pushing now, could offer features like that. Keep enough of the system on the flash (unencrypted) to bootstrap the machine to a point where you could safely authenticate remotely, and bring up the encrypted portions of the drive.
On Windows systems that mostly keep the user data on the same drive and partition as the system, I don't see an elegant way to do this. But I guess that's just a reflection that no matter how many ways you try to dress it up, Windows is really designed to be a single-user, locally-operated system, at least in most configurations and common flavors.
There are big advantages to the U.S. system as well. With number portability, you can take your landline number, with its same exchange, and move it to a mobile phone, and use it as your primary number without making everyone who wants to call you pay extra.
The area code of where you transfer the number from (the original geographic exchange) will determine which people pay for it as a "long distance" call, but that's far less expensive for most people than European mobile airtime is, I think.
I wouldn't be willing to keep a mobile phone as my only phone number, if doing so required everyone who wanted to call me pay extra. That just seems rude. I'm quite content to pay for people's incoming calls to me, since I'm the one deciding to attach the number to a mobile, rather than fixed phone.
From the caller's perspective, the U.S. system puts land and mobile numbers on equal footing, which seems more logical to me.
http://www.lockpicks.com/
There are lots of these places around. They don't hide; generally they'll sell you stuff without problems. In most places, lockpicks, along with crowbars, hack saws, bolt cutters, slim jims, glass drills, etc. are perfectly illegal unless there is some reason that someone thinks they're going to be used for a crime, in which case they become "burglar's tools."
Aside from the fact that I think this is really terrible law -- it puts far too much interpretative power in the hands of the police, inserting ambiguity where there really doesn't need to be any (the crime itself is already illegal, whether you use tools to do it or not shouldn't really matter; if we want to discourage people, why not just make the punishment for the actual crime more severe?) -- it still requires some indication that the tools are going to be used for a nefarious purpose before they become illegal. I used to have a slim jim because I drove a car that had a bad habit of locking itself up automatically, and it was perfectly legal. Likewise, anyone who's ever installed a fence probably has a pair of large bolt cutters in their garage. Yet if you put those same bolt cutters in the trunk of your car when you were driving around the wrong part of town, you might find yourself in hot water.
Can you tell me what the relative advantages would be of GNUNet versus Freenet?
It seems like Freenet was basically designed for doing something exactly like this, yet it seems like Freenet really never took off for anything (besides some minor anarchism and porn). I don't pretend to know exactly why Freenet failed to take off, but how does GNUnet improve on it, and how does it hope to avoid the same fate?
I think the Civilian Marksmanship Program is still selling some M1s at reduced prices to members of CMP affiliated clubs; the only special requirements (aside from being eligible to own a firearm and ponying up the cash) are a demonstration that you can hit a paper plate at 50 yards or something similarly easy. It's really quite a neat program. Back in the day you could get an M1 or M1 Carbine for a few bucks, shipped in the mail. Now it has to go through a dealer, but it's still a good way to get your hands on one.
Sadly, several Presidents, culimating with President Clinton, effectively gutted the program and ensured that once it runs out of WWII and Korea surplus Garands, it will effectively cease to exist (military surplus M14s and M16s cannot be sold to the public, even if the full-auto capabilities are permanently disabled; even surplus ammunition is destroyed rather than sold surplus, though it would be worth millions of dollars).
Get them while you still can. Up until a few years ago you could even specify a manufacturer preference for your M1, they had some International Harvester ones that were neat, but I think now you have to deal with whatever's left.
You can sign up to be sent a sales catalog on their website: http://www.odcmp.com/
According to this site the material most boarding passes are printed out of, is 80 lb "cover stock."
How exactly you'd do the perforation on the tear-off piece, I'm not sure. But getting the material would be pretty simple.
There are also some airlines that are doing print-your-own boarding passes, just like Ticketmaster does for some concert tickets. You go to a website and print out a form on your home printer, on plain paper, that contains a bar code that they scan as you're boarding the plane. I've often wondered exactly how Ticketmaster's system works and how easy it would be to counterfeit a ticket that would come up as valid. I assume the bar code just contains a serial number, and the scanners that they use at the entrance to the venue contain a table that cross references serial numbers to seats. Assuming the numbers are randomly generated and not sequential, it seems like it would be hard to come up with one.
I'm not sure whether the type of boarding pass that TFA is discussing how to make, is of the first type (the 'real' kind), or a print-at-home one.
That's really fascinating, I was not aware that ice tanks were commonly used that way. Using them as "peak storage" to even out the electrical load is a pretty good idea too, in more typical office environments. Probably in areas where the electricity has a "demand charge" component to it (where your rate goes up depending on your maximum power draw at any particular time), it could be economical. Also, I assume that you can replenish them with ice during the night, when the air conditioners are both more efficient and have less load on them. Just a neat idea all around.
There is another issue though, which is how emotionally connected people feel to the victims.
Due to a lot of reasons, which we can blame on media coverage, as well as cultural differences and perhaps even plain-old entrenched racism, there's not a whole lot of demand in America to intervene in Darfur. Yeah, people think it's bad, but it's not "send in the Marines" bad. When push comes to shove, and people are asked whether it would be worth spending a lot of money, resources, and potentially American lives to stop it, they say 'no.'
You can see this pattern repeat over and over. Darfur is just its latest incarnation. We let it happen in Rwanda in the early 1990s, too, and afterwards there was a lot of "never again" chatter, but it was just that -- chatter. Now it's happening again, and the public will to intervene isn't there.
I've just been watching the behavior of the U.S. electorate for a while, and there are forces at work that we just don't like to talk about in polite society. We prefer to think that we're above anything as crass as holding a white Christian child's life above that of a black Muslim's. However, regardless of what we say to each other, looking only at foreign-policy decisions, it's pretty clear that American interventionism follows a sort of "cultural closeness," in addition to the predictable realpolitik and Machievellian geopolitical advantage-building.
The closer a would-be exterminee population is to a theoretical "middle American" ideal, the greater chance it has of getting an intervention or support on its behalf. In some cases, such intervention is given even when it is arguably not in the United States' direct strategic interest -- I would argue that a great part of our continuing support of Israel is based on the fact that Americans in general feel a much greater kinship with Israel as an idea, their form of government, and the Israeli people than they do with any of the Arab countries in the region.
The American public has little tolerance for slaughter when it is a population that looks like themselves, but finds it remarkably easy to ignore when it is of people of a different skin color, language, culture, and religion. The fact that it is perceived as a hopeless, never-ending, tribal conflict also adds to both the sense of foreignness and the disinterest in involving ourselves.
If the killing in Darfur was happening in Sydney or Tel Aviv, regardless of the state of the U.S. military due to Iraq or anything else, we would respond. But when it's in Africa, happening to Africans, we let it go.
It's called a "loss leader." You give something away in order to get people to spend more money on something else.
If you're unfamiliar, walk down to the corner and talk to your friendly local crack rock dealer, he can fill you in on the basics.
Whoever can get the most consumers 'hooked' on their format stands to make a whole lot of money...
Actually you probably did the right thing, Dapper is the "Long Term Support" version -- basically the 'stable' line, while Edgy is the first of a number of smaller builds that will be released, but do not totally supplant the LTS version.
If the PCs were all your personal machines then of course you can do what you want, but if they're ones that have to work reliably and you're expected to support, you probably saved yourself a lot of trouble by going with Dapper.
Well, you know the old rule: "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"...
Stallman wouldn't want to execute Raymond too early; it would just precipitate a civil war. You know, BSDers blowing themselves up in LUG meetings, contamination of the Cheetos supply, and caffeinated-beverage shortages. You know, basically all the worst parts of the Bible.