Maybe instead of wasting money on cable, caller ID, x-box and cell phones (of which I have none), they could do something produtive with their time and capital and save me some tax dollars.
Like what? Poor urban areas are generally violent, so parents won't let kids out in the streets to play. Libraries and recreation facilities have closed. So parents are looking form something to occupy their kids, lest the kids turn to the less savory "entertainments" found on the streets. Given our culture, of course they'll look to consumer goods for the answer.
Secondhand TVs, video games, and PCs are cheap or even free (hand-me-downs from friends or family), or new ones can be "rented" at prices that seem appealing to the undereducated. Hell, these days they can get new ones at Wal Mart dirt cheap - maybe even made by the guys in China to whom Wal*Mart sent their old job.
And people who didn't used to be poor still have their TV, etcetera, from when they were working. Contrary to popular belief, most people on relief programs are working people who fall on hard times temporarily.
My own parents were on food stamps for a while in the early 90s. They were suburban professionals, but the first Bush recession took my father's programming job, and my mother, an R.N., was injured on the job (due to understaffing at the nursing home where she worked) and stuck in a drawn-out workman's comp suit. They didn't throw out their TV and computer.
And yes, they kept their cable service on during that period; a few extra bucks a month for entertainment to help keep your spirits up when you're going through the most difficult time in your life doesn't seem like a bad idea, or an abuse of the system you've paid into all your life.
As for cell phones, they can be obtained on a pre-paid basis, whereas landline phone service usally requires a credit check or significant security deposit. This makes cellular service a more obtainable option for many poor people.
Your beef about caller ID, I just don't get, it's a cheap add-on - in fact, though I don't use it, it's included in the base service from my CLEC.
My Windows' users want apps that function like all other Windows apps they use - same for the MacOS crowd.
Has anyone ever actually studied or polled user behaviors to check this common assertation?
My books all have different typefaces. My cars have had different dashboard layouts. Every piece of consumer electronics I've ever had has had different controls. Web sites all have different layouts. Somehow, most of us are able to cope with this variety of user interfaces without a second thought.
For most of my computer-using life, my programs have had different intrfaces. (These days, most of what I'm running is GTK stuff.) It's not been a problem.
or the solar power car that crashes into other vehicles due to a little bit of wind?
The only mention of wind is speculation by a local cop. But yes, smaller vehicles are more affected by wind - including motorcycles. Shall we ban them?
My question is this - do we have an explicit, constitutional guarantee of privacy regardless of where we are?
The question is backwards. The proper question is, does the federal government have legitimate power to invade your privacy?
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The fact that the Constitution doesn't explictly enumerate all of our rights, is not a limit on them. However, the Constitution does specifically enumerate the powers of the federal government - if the Constitution doesn't specifically authorize them to do something, they don't have the legal right to do it.
It would seem fair, in this day and age, that the identities of persons entering various public facilities should be verified, if needed.
We're talking about a company whose only product is online advertising
When you talk about television networks, you're talking about companies whose only "product" is broadcast advertising. Television networks did well for several decades.
The stock market on the other hand, has two things going for it: products (or services) are generated as a direct result of investors buying stock, and more importantly, it is not a zero sum game.
Sure it is. There is still X amount of actual money in circulation (disregarding the hocus-pocus by which the federal reserve system lets private banks create money).
Case in point: person X sells 100 shares of a company at P for a profit. Person Y bought the shares from them (simplified) at P+e (e = commission and/or bid/ask spread, etc.). Down the road, person Y sells their shares for Q>(P+e) and in so doing ALSO makes a profit.
So it was person Z (who bought from Y) who lost out. That fact that there are winners doesn't mean that the house doesn't always come out ahead in the long run...
Repeat after me: the stock market is *not* gambling.
In these non-dividend days, when it's all about stock price, it's as much gambling as any other collecting activity. Just like collecting baseball cards, the "investor" is gambling (risking money on an uncertain future outcomes) that some sucker will pay a higher price later. The actual economics of the company are relevant only in that their surface appearance helps drive demand - just like performance on the field helps drive demand for a baseball star's card.
Slashdot seems rabidly opposed to businesses registering gogle.com and yaho.com and so on
Says who? It's no different than when MCI had a "1-800-OPERATER" number to play off misspellings of AT&T's "1-800-OPERATOR". So long as the service at the end of the number/URL correctly indentifies itself and isn't doing anything fraudulant, no harm and no foul. "This isn't the site you're looking for, but how about this instead?" is no worse than a 404.
No seriously on Linux use svgatextmode if you can or a framebuffer driver and try to expand the columns on your screen. Or just use X / windows elsewhere.
Why would I want to strain my eyes with smaller text? I've managed to stay 20/20 in both eyes despite all these years of staring at displays, and I attribute this to using large clear fonts. (I'm a fan of 12 point Lucida Typewriter bold for my Emacs and terminal windows)
80 columns is thought of as old.
80 columns is classic. Like a pair of Levi 501's. Old, yes, but optimal too - there just isn't a better solution. Think of it as carrying on a Grand Tradition from Elder Days, and be glad.
If the author doesn't even have the final say about the TITLE OF HER OWN BOOK, then something else is seriously wrong.
Yes, something is seriously wrong. Yes, publishers do re-title books. Yes, book publishers have been known to screw writers in much the same way that music labels screw musicians.
and maybe half the fluff removed that will have no bearing on real-world employment?
That "fluff" is what makes the difference between a person of learning, and a mere skilled worker. Once upon a time, the goal of colleges was to produce the former.
I'm deeply worried by PHP becoming so increasingly popular.
Can anyone explain this to me, please?
What's to explain? It gets the job done. It's a tool designed specifically for the job of making websites, unlike Perl or Python. It's easy for beginners to pick up, yet featured enough to not drive experienced coders nuts. It's popular enough that you can find people to pick up existing projects, and that there'll still be support for it in 10 years.
What's so bad about Python, Ruby, etc.?
Aside from the horror of syntactically significant whitespace?:-) And that they are general pupurpose languages not designed specifically for the web? To some degree, it's a matter of momentum - if you code a project in Python, you'll have trouble finding someone to take it over when you leave/get promoted/get run over by a bus. You won't have that problem with PHP.
How'd you get the money for a computer? Nevermind that somebody is paying for your internet access. It's called capitalism
Um, no, actually, it's called labor. Exchanging labor long predates capitalism...when Og the Homo Habilis traded six flint arrowheads he made, for two clay bowls that Ook made, there were no investors, no landlords, no capitalists involved.
The idea that economic resources should be controled by a minority of state-backed parasitic "owners" is a later development.
And how many people have had their lives shortened by a lack of protein in the diet?
Outside of famine-stricken areas, very few, since it's hard to eat a diet with a reasonable caloric intake and a variety of foods that is protein deficient.
On average, it seems to me, eating meat is probably better for you than not eating meat.
Given the higher disease transmissions from flesh foods, not to mention the increased risks of heart disease, stroke, cancer, osteoporosis, and higher exposure to pesticides and other pollutants that come from eating flesh foods, meat should be eaten sparingly or not at all.
I'd also add in that if you (in the general) are receiving federal handouts you should not be able to vote.
So everyone owning stock in a corporation benefiting from corporate welfare, or receiving specially targeted tax breaks for the wealthy, doesn't get to vote? That might be interesting.
Can't work a voting machine? Sure, we'll dumb that right down for ya!
The ablility or inability to communicate with machines is not reflective of general intelligence - and certainly not reflective of political wisdom.
"Show me your receipt showing a vote for XXX or else..."
It is not at all impossible. Or are you unfamiliar with absentee ballots? "Fill out and mail your absentee ballot for XXX, or else..."
Anyway, crytographic schemes make possible receipts that the voter can verify that his vote was counted without disclosing the contents of that vote (Google "Chaum ballots two-layer").
Why? Because we need a disaster recovery plan. We need a way to ensure that if a meteor the size of Texas slams into this blue marble tomorrow that we as a species will survive.
But the money spend on such a project would be better spent on developing a tracking and deflection system for potential impactors.
There's little benefit to me in sending you off to Mars to carry on the human race in the event of disaster. (Maybe you'll carry a copy of one of my poems or something, otherwise, feh.) There's a lot more benefit to me in building a planetary defense grid. Given the costs of manned spaceflight, the grid is probably a lot cheaper too.
Many of those problems nearly weren't solvable without having a person there, and most of them could have been solved much more quickly if a person had simply been able to flip the pod over or replace the problematic hardware.
More quickly, yes. But it's cheaper - by orders of magnitude - to build and send another robot. Yeah, we'd like to get the answer now, but the rocks aren't going anywhere.
Anyone who says that people are an unnecessary part of space flight has an agenda.
Of course they do. So do the people in favor of manned space flight. In the case of most of the "people in space are unnecessary", the agenda is simple economics; the costs aren't worth it.
I used to be an unabashed proponent of manned space exploration. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to stick to sending robots out, until such time as we have a need and a good plan to send humans. Not just sending a couple guys out to plant a flag and take some photos, but making a real commitment. Say something like McMurdo station on the moon.
It may be decades, or centuries, before manned space flight makes sense. Not for technical reasons (though better launch technology would help bring the cost down), but for social and economic reasons; we're not ready to make the investment to do anything worthy with manned spaceflight.
Nationalism and jingoism are not the same as patriotism.
Also, Woodie Guthrie was a communist so I hardly feel he could be considered anti-government; he was just anti-capitalist.
"Communist" is a broad brush. Sure, Stalin was a great statist, but Marx's idea was that the state would wither away eventually. (Sadly, he didn't understand that when the workers form the the government, they cease being workers and start being rulers - power corrupts.) And there's Libertarian Communism, "a society organised without the state and without private ownership." I don't claim to know Guthrie's stand on the question of how much and what kinds of power the state ought to have.
Guthrie was one of the greatest craftsmen of words this country ever produced, but he was also kind of an arrogant jerk
He was passionate and commited, which many people often confuse with arrogant jerkness (see also RMS). He also suffered from a degerative neurological condition in his later years, leading to sometimes erractic behavior.
it seems pretty obvious to me that is what is being talked about in the Bill of Rights.
Then, to be blunt, either your reading comprehension needs improvement, or your ideology is clouding your mind. The Amendment does not say "freedom of political speech". It says "freedom of speech".
There is no valid reason to require that you should be able to be freely use vulgar language, or display pornography.
You've got it backwards. There is no valid reason that the state should point guns at me if I say "fuck", or display pictures of people having sex. It's not up to me to defend my speech; under our Constitutional system of goverment, it's up to the state (at least, in theory) to defend it's use of force to silence me, by showing
that the exercise of such a power does not infringe on my enumerated or unenumerated rights;
that the Constitution grants it such a power; and
that such use of force is in the public interest.
Censorship fails on all three counts. Fuck censorship, and those who support it.
Do you think that there should be publicly broadcast pornography? Or publicly broadcast videos showing how to make bombs?
"Publically broadcast" is no different than "published". Should people be able to publish naked pictures, or bomb-making instructions? Sure, that's called freedom of the press. The fact that the publication occurs via radio signal rather than pigement marks on dead trees doesn't change that.
Slashdot Mirror
Like what? Poor urban areas are generally violent, so parents won't let kids out in the streets to play. Libraries and recreation facilities have closed. So parents are looking form something to occupy their kids, lest the kids turn to the less savory "entertainments" found on the streets. Given our culture, of course they'll look to consumer goods for the answer.
Secondhand TVs, video games, and PCs are cheap or even free (hand-me-downs from friends or family), or new ones can be "rented" at prices that seem appealing to the undereducated. Hell, these days they can get new ones at Wal Mart dirt cheap - maybe even made by the guys in China to whom Wal*Mart sent their old job.
And people who didn't used to be poor still have their TV, etcetera, from when they were working. Contrary to popular belief, most people on relief programs are working people who fall on hard times temporarily.
My own parents were on food stamps for a while in the early 90s. They were suburban professionals, but the first Bush recession took my father's programming job, and my mother, an R.N., was injured on the job (due to understaffing at the nursing home where she worked) and stuck in a drawn-out workman's comp suit. They didn't throw out their TV and computer.
And yes, they kept their cable service on during that period; a few extra bucks a month for entertainment to help keep your spirits up when you're going through the most difficult time in your life doesn't seem like a bad idea, or an abuse of the system you've paid into all your life.
As for cell phones, they can be obtained on a pre-paid basis, whereas landline phone service usally requires a credit check or significant security deposit. This makes cellular service a more obtainable option for many poor people.
Your beef about caller ID, I just don't get, it's a cheap add-on - in fact, though I don't use it, it's included in the base service from my CLEC.
Has anyone ever actually studied or polled user behaviors to check this common assertation?
My books all have different typefaces. My cars have had different dashboard layouts. Every piece of consumer electronics I've ever had has had different controls. Web sites all have different layouts. Somehow, most of us are able to cope with this variety of user interfaces without a second thought.
For most of my computer-using life, my programs have had different intrfaces. (These days, most of what I'm running is GTK stuff.) It's not been a problem.
At the time, there was a fellow on USENET who had as a sig something like this:
There can be only one! -- The Highlander
There should have been only one! I want my money back! -- Me
Actually, oversized SUVs are banned by weight limits in many residential areas, but the bans are not enforced.
The only mention of wind is speculation by a local cop. But yes, smaller vehicles are more affected by wind - including motorcycles. Shall we ban them?
The question is backwards. The proper question is, does the federal government have legitimate power to invade your privacy? Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The fact that the Constitution doesn't explictly enumerate all of our rights, is not a limit on them. However, the Constitution does specifically enumerate the powers of the federal government - if the Constitution doesn't specifically authorize them to do something, they don't have the legal right to do it.
Define "needed".
Uh, right. I always carry a pad of paper and a pencil around with me when I go to visit national monuments.
Um, most of us move closer to read smaller print.
When you talk about television networks, you're talking about companies whose only "product" is broadcast advertising. Television networks did well for several decades.
Sure it is. There is still X amount of actual money in circulation (disregarding the hocus-pocus by which the federal reserve system lets private banks create money).
So it was person Z (who bought from Y) who lost out. That fact that there are winners doesn't mean that the house doesn't always come out ahead in the long run...
In these non-dividend days, when it's all about stock price, it's as much gambling as any other collecting activity. Just like collecting baseball cards, the "investor" is gambling (risking money on an uncertain future outcomes) that some sucker will pay a higher price later. The actual economics of the company are relevant only in that their surface appearance helps drive demand - just like performance on the field helps drive demand for a baseball star's card.
There is a very large difference. In one case, you are taking advantage of confusion about the name that already exists (in the form of fat-fingering the URL); in the second, you are creating confusion about the name. The former was found to be ok in a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on a case involving a telephone number ("1-800-H0LIDAY" instead of "1-800-HOLIDAY"). Given that precedent, this ruling is surprising.
Says who? It's no different than when MCI had a "1-800-OPERATER" number to play off misspellings of AT&T's "1-800-OPERATOR". So long as the service at the end of the number/URL correctly indentifies itself and isn't doing anything fraudulant, no harm and no foul. "This isn't the site you're looking for, but how about this instead?" is no worse than a 404.
Why would I want to strain my eyes with smaller text? I've managed to stay 20/20 in both eyes despite all these years of staring at displays, and I attribute this to using large clear fonts. (I'm a fan of 12 point Lucida Typewriter bold for my Emacs and terminal windows)
80 columns is classic. Like a pair of Levi 501's. Old, yes, but optimal too - there just isn't a better solution. Think of it as carrying on a Grand Tradition from Elder Days, and be glad.
If you print and display at a decent size, you won't end up needing reading glasses...
Don't strain your eyes - you only get one pair.
Yes, something is seriously wrong. Yes, publishers do re-title books. Yes, book publishers have been known to screw writers in much the same way that music labels screw musicians.
That "fluff" is what makes the difference between a person of learning, and a mere skilled worker. Once upon a time, the goal of colleges was to produce the former.
What's to explain? It gets the job done. It's a tool designed specifically for the job of making websites, unlike Perl or Python. It's easy for beginners to pick up, yet featured enough to not drive experienced coders nuts. It's popular enough that you can find people to pick up existing projects, and that there'll still be support for it in 10 years.
Aside from the horror of syntactically significant whitespace? :-) And that they are general pupurpose languages not designed specifically for the web? To some degree, it's a matter of momentum - if you code a project in Python, you'll have trouble finding someone to take it over when you leave/get promoted/get run over by a bus. You won't have that problem with PHP.
Um, no, actually, it's called labor. Exchanging labor long predates capitalism...when Og the Homo Habilis traded six flint arrowheads he made, for two clay bowls that Ook made, there were no investors, no landlords, no capitalists involved.
The idea that economic resources should be controled by a minority of state-backed parasitic "owners" is a later development.
Outside of famine-stricken areas, very few, since it's hard to eat a diet with a reasonable caloric intake and a variety of foods that is protein deficient.
Given the higher disease transmissions from flesh foods, not to mention the increased risks of heart disease, stroke, cancer, osteoporosis, and higher exposure to pesticides and other pollutants that come from eating flesh foods, meat should be eaten sparingly or not at all.
So everyone owning stock in a corporation benefiting from corporate welfare, or receiving specially targeted tax breaks for the wealthy, doesn't get to vote? That might be interesting.
The ablility or inability to communicate with machines is not reflective of general intelligence - and certainly not reflective of political wisdom.
It is not at all impossible. Or are you unfamiliar with absentee ballots? "Fill out and mail your absentee ballot for XXX, or else..."
Anyway, crytographic schemes make possible receipts that the voter can verify that his vote was counted without disclosing the contents of that vote (Google "Chaum ballots two-layer").
But the money spend on such a project would be better spent on developing a tracking and deflection system for potential impactors.
There's little benefit to me in sending you off to Mars to carry on the human race in the event of disaster. (Maybe you'll carry a copy of one of my poems or something, otherwise, feh.) There's a lot more benefit to me in building a planetary defense grid. Given the costs of manned spaceflight, the grid is probably a lot cheaper too.
More quickly, yes. But it's cheaper - by orders of magnitude - to build and send another robot. Yeah, we'd like to get the answer now, but the rocks aren't going anywhere.
Of course they do. So do the people in favor of manned space flight. In the case of most of the "people in space are unnecessary", the agenda is simple economics; the costs aren't worth it.
I used to be an unabashed proponent of manned space exploration. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to stick to sending robots out, until such time as we have a need and a good plan to send humans. Not just sending a couple guys out to plant a flag and take some photos, but making a real commitment. Say something like McMurdo station on the moon.
It may be decades, or centuries, before manned space flight makes sense. Not for technical reasons (though better launch technology would help bring the cost down), but for social and economic reasons; we're not ready to make the investment to do anything worthy with manned spaceflight.
Nationalism and jingoism are not the same as patriotism.
"Communist" is a broad brush. Sure, Stalin was a great statist, but Marx's idea was that the state would wither away eventually. (Sadly, he didn't understand that when the workers form the the government, they cease being workers and start being rulers - power corrupts.) And there's Libertarian Communism, "a society organised without the state and without private ownership." I don't claim to know Guthrie's stand on the question of how much and what kinds of power the state ought to have.
He was passionate and commited, which many people often confuse with arrogant jerkness (see also RMS). He also suffered from a degerative neurological condition in his later years, leading to sometimes erractic behavior.
Then, to be blunt, either your reading comprehension needs improvement, or your ideology is clouding your mind. The Amendment does not say "freedom of political speech". It says "freedom of speech".
You've got it backwards. There is no valid reason that the state should point guns at me if I say "fuck", or display pictures of people having sex. It's not up to me to defend my speech; under our Constitutional system of goverment, it's up to the state (at least, in theory) to defend it's use of force to silence me, by showing
Censorship fails on all three counts. Fuck censorship, and those who support it.
"Publically broadcast" is no different than "published". Should people be able to publish naked pictures, or bomb-making instructions? Sure, that's called freedom of the press. The fact that the publication occurs via radio signal rather than pigement marks on dead trees doesn't change that.