(I don't think Gore's license
idea is that bad... you do it for your car, which is probably on the same level of lethal potential...)
Bad analogy. I don't need a licence to own a car! I only need one to drive it on the public roads. Driving on public roads is a priviledge; self defense, and ownership of tools thereof, is a right.
On a practical level, when firearms ownership is understood as a defense against an oppressive government, gun licencing runs into the same problems as literacy tests for voting (another defense against an oppressive government). They provide a convenient means for the state to deprive of basic right those it would oppress.
It would be very, very easy to rig tests so that members of racial, political, or religious minorities would not be permitted to pass, just as blacks were set up to fail literacy exams required for voting under Jim Crow laws.
Ok, maybe prior to the past 40 years or so, semi-automatic guns were not as available.
Fully-automatic firearms were readily available in the early part of this century. It wasn't much of a problem until alcohol prohibtion ignited a violent black market.
Today, most violent crime is still related to prohibition, except it's heroin and cocaine prohibtion.
Their general opinion was "nukes are bad, m-kay"... but they managed to get a piece on 60 minutes as well.
There were also several more articulate explanations of the dangers involved, such as this or this.
The risk was non-zero, and NASA does not have what I would call a good track record on risk estimation. (See Feyman's tale in "What Do You Care What Other People Think?") Yes, there was ignorance among many who opposed the lauch; there was also plenty of ignorance among many who supported it.
Think of any disease that you've had in your lifetime... Did it make you a worse person? Chances are it made you better! Our tribulations define our character more than our triumphs.
Oh, bullshit. Having to have my legs twisted into alignment (I was born "pigeon toed") as an infant didn't make me a better person. Getting teeth yanked and the rest re-arranged by braces didn't improve my personality one whit. A lifetime of respiratory allergies hasn't taugh me any moral lessons.
Sometimes that which doesn't kill us doesn't make us stronger either - it just annoys the fsck out of us instead.
Who decided that we should play God and decide who should or shouldn't be born?
Your question assumes that there is a "someone" to be born at that state. But a few cells is not a "someone". It can be argued that a "someone" doesn't happen until well after an infant is born; it takes experience of the world to make a "someone" - an blank brain does not a person make.
Deciding after a few cell divisions whether development will progress towards a "someone" is no different than deciding pre-conception; by your thinking, am I deciding
"who should or shouldn't be born" by using a condom?
As those cells divide, the baby will have a serious deficity as an entire source or exponential division is
missing!! I mean, that baby is going to divide strangely, and probably develop a cleft pallet or something!
It doesn't work that way. Fetal development isn't based on "x rounds of exponential cell division and we're done."
This is not the first time such a procedure has been done; fetal development is not affected by removing one cell. Heck, remember that early on in development an embryo can split in two, and each half form a perfectly fine infant. (Actually, it might not be an embryo yet at that stage - blastula? Gastrula? Whatyamacallit? Dammit Jim, I'm a hacker, not a biologist.)
And.. there are those of us who believe that for the most part the "greenhouse effect" is a bunch of BS.
The greenhouse effect is 100% established fact - without it, the planet would be much colder.
The only debate is whether human activity is causing a rise in greenhouse gasses, and causing global warming. And it's not much of a debate; there is a strong scientific consensus that human activity is altering the climate.
More CFC's are released from one single volcanic eruption than you can dream of releasing in your lifetime.
Volcanic eruptions are rare, while there are over 6 billion people on the planet. So your point is?
Earth has its own cycles that we strive very hard to but never can comprehend.
Which is a pretty good reason not to mess with them, no?
Earth can take care of itself I think, *shrugs*
Um, yes, the rock will still be here no matter what we do. And it would be really hard to get rid of all the life that's on it; some fungi and bactera would probably survive anything short of the Sun's death. But if we fuck it up enough, we could take out the ecosystem and ourselves with it.
Well, not everybody....our Maryland legislature obviously needs a whack with the clue stick. (And yes, I did write my legislature-critters before the bill was voted on.)
There are some things that I really like about living in Maryland. UCITA (along with gun control and 300+ murders a year in Baltimore) is not on that list.
Well what about something simple like replacing a limb witha prostetic.
This is simple? A pegleg or a hook, maybe, but there's nothing simple about modern prostetics.
The cost of prostetic legs is roughly according to one man I know who has one about ~$10,000 per leg and those are the older models.
Yeah, pretty pricey. That'll change. Think about how expensive and difficult to use contact lens used to be - now they throw them away. Think about how expensive car phone were in the 1970's - now they give away cell phones free with the service.
Computers fail so much that it's impossible to be at one with the computer. Take a program I am writing now.
I try to program the computer to do what I want and I look over the line that the compiler is barfing on and it
just dosn't make sense.
Sorry, but your lack of programming skill is not the computer's fault.
What other reasons can there be for what amounts to turning yourself into some(one|thing) else?
Most of us want to turn into something else. If I was exactly the same now as I was at the age of twenty, ten years would have been wasted!
We want to learn new things; we want to improve our bodies; we want to change elements of our personality and emotional makeup. That's why people go to school, read books (or even/.), go to the gym, try different diets, see therapists, take anti-depressants, whatever. Many of these means are misguided, and one might even argue that the goal itself is a mistake (after all, you are already a Buddha), but there's no dening that part of the human condition is the desire for personal transformation.
It's a scary prospect for the future, one in which people will willingly rush wholesale into abandoning their
humanity for the promise of an artificial dream.
This doesn't have to be some Faustian bargain. Using nanotechnology to augment my physiology doesn't take away any of my "humanity"; nor would providing me with an AI butler/manservant/gal friday.
However, the techoskeptics are right about at least one thing: it isn't a given that such technology will be sued wisely. The example given about people borrowing money they don't need in order to give good inputs to a credit rating algorithm is an excellent one. OTOH, that's not so much an issue of technology as of bureaucracy - the algorithm could just as well be implemented by men with ledgers and quill pens as by big iron.
They seem to think that doubleclick is perfectly fine.
Doubleclick has made the top of my shitlist, not just because I loathe banner ads, not just because of their evil user-tracking practices, but because they're spammers. They're behind something called "DARTmail", which claims to be an opt-in e-mail advertising service.
But I sure as hell never opted in. Any reputable company would use a confirmation scheme to make sure that people had really opted in; they didn't. Any reputable company would have ceased after my first complaint. They didn't. Scumbags, through and through.
It seems all the these certifications refer to the design of the system, and don't address implementation
aspects.
Yes, implementation aspects are part of the process. At least they were when I worked on T rus ted Mach, which we planned to have evaluated to TCSEC level B3; our code was reviewed by "trust engineers".
IIRC, you don't have to deliver the source to the evaluators, but you have to at least have someone in-house designated to do reviews. Somewhere in the huge pile of documents has to be plan for ensuring that implementation meets design - as well as plans for testing and configuration management.
The only two operating system/hardware combos I've ever seen with an A1
rating under this [yes, A1 is both hardware and software security] are Trusted Xenix [where did this one go?]
Trusted Xenix was B2, not A1. TIS (now NAI labs) sold a few copies, but aimed further development efforts at T rus ted Mach, which was targeted at B3 but basically ended up going nowhere. TMach was deemed insuffiently interesting to speculators^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestors (who were interested mostly in the Gauntlet firewall) and so was cancelled shortly after TIS's IPO.
Uhm, when you sue a corporation, win, and they pay you money, that money comes out of the corporation assets that the stockholders own.
But it does not come out of dividend payment or capital gains made on sale of shares.
If I own 1000 shares of Amalgamated Profits which I bought at $1 a share, and Amalgamated Profits pillages and rapes its way to obscene profits and I sell at $100 a share, that $99,000 profit is unassailable if Amalgamated Profits is sued. That's not right. All profits I made from Amalgamated Profits's pillaging should be within the scope of liability.
There are companies that are worth more than most sovereign nations on the planet, with as much, or more,independence from external pressures. I'd love to here how to hold them accountable.
My suggestions:
no corporation can own stock. Period. Every shareholder must be an individual.
File the Supreme Court decision that granted corporations all the rights of citizens in the circular file right next to Dred Scott and Korematsu.
Start invoking the corporate death penalty - revoke the charters of misbehaving corporations.
Does this mean major changes in the economic infrastructure? Damn straight.
Putting a passive collector next to power lines will cause the lines to radiate more?
Not quite; a current in the collector induces a counter EMF in the the power lines. It's the same way that a load on the output coil of a transformer is "felt" in the input coil.
you really think Linus Torvalds would have started Transmeta if
he knew that failure will result in his personal bancrupcy and not just the dissolution of the company?
Linus works for Transmeta, he didn't start them.
Turn it around: would the stockholders of Firestone have allowed the corporation to have shoddy product safety practices if they faced personal liability?
Permitting profit without responsabilty is a recipe for disaster. At a very minimum, stockholders should be able to be sued up to every penny of profit or dividends they ever made off a share in a misbehaving corporation.
Never before in American history has so much money been invested in the stock market by so many people. We own our oppressor.
Sorry, but your fifty shares of MSFT gives you no power over the corporation.
We all have "stock" in the federal government, too; but does that mean that it doesn't oppress some American citizens? Hardly.
Before you tell
me that, tell me how much your vote will mean in the next election. Tell me if your vote is wasted.
The massive difference being that in elections, it's "one man, one vote"; in corporations, it's "one dollar, one vote", and 5% of the people hold 95% of the dollars. Until that changes, we're fucked - economically and politically, because that 5% determine who gets to be treated as serious candidates for office, and because one of the main jobs of the government is to protect that 95% of the wealth from us peons.
So will my vote for Nader be wasted? Pretty much. It's symbolic action, rejecting both mainstream choices; it might have some small indirect effect if enough people do the same, but no matter which way I - or anyone who reads this - votes, we're going to get a rich, big-business-friendly, born-again-Christian, white guy in the White House.
I mostly go to the polls to vote on bond issues, for schools and parks and against new jails (stop locking up drug users and you'll have plenty of room) and "senior citizens" centers (the elderly are the richest demographic and they already get a nice chunck out of my paycheck to subsidize their retirement), and occasionally an interesting local race.
Why do we not have a simple, flat-tax structure that everyone can handle? Because it would give too much control
back to the consumer, and it would not require an IRS of anything near its current size to maintain.
A tax structure doesn't have to be flat to be simple. The tricky part is deductions, credits, and all the rigamorol that goes into figuring how much of your income is taxable; then people just look up the tax in the chart. A simple percentage, a stepped tax like todays, or a polynomial or logarithmic curve, it doesn't matter too much in terms of complexity to the average taxpayer.
Second, the corporation's executives have a legal obligation to produce as much profit for the shareholders as they can. The point of a business is to make money, not random acts of kindness.
Maybe we ought to change that law? Maybe, just maybe, creating legal entities whose only mission is to accumulate profit is not a good idea.
Nobody stuffs Britney Spears down the throats of unwilling people. People buy it, ask for it, scream for it.
The type of people who like Britney Spears are the people who like whatever the mass media consumption-encouragement machine tells them to like this month. The American consumer is so innundated with attempts at psychological influence (most of it government encouraged - the government want you to spend, to keep that ol' GDP rising, to keep yourself distracted with shiny baubles) that it's meaningless to talk about what the people want.
You're just
talking about transferring money from customers to employees.
Employees get very little of the money that comes from customers. The lion's share goes to owners.
Here's an interesting bit of math. Take the Gross Domestic Product, representing the total value of goods and services produced in the US: about $US 9,559,700,000,000 for 1999. Divide by the size of the American workforce: 137,673,000. You discover that the average American worker creates $US 69,438 of value per year.
All that value has to end up somewhere. Eventually it all ends up in the hands of a worker who made something - or, in the pocket of an investor, who didn't do a lick of work on making something but manages to get paid anyway.
The average American worker's gross pay, including benefits, is $US 18.50 / hour, or $US 38,480 / year. Leaving $US 30,958 of value going somewhere else.
In other words, the average U.S. worker gets about 45% of his or her productive worth diverted to the owning class. Welcome to capitalism.
In any case, remember that multinationals typically pay twice the going wage rate. Stop them from doing that, and you mire the Third World in poverty.
"Our new king is so nice! He give us beggars twice as many table scraps than the old king! We should make sure our king stays in power!"
Just because you leave a group of people better off than before does not mean that you are not exploiting them.
Rather than assisting multinationals to come in and pay six cents a day rather than the locally prevailing three cents, how about assisting these nations in building their own domestically-owned industries?
Trying to stop lobbying means trying to stop free speech.
Bribery is not speech.
This whole mess (corporate control of government) got started because we used politics to interfere with them. We need to get back to using markets to control corporations.
Corporations are creations of the political process - they are state-created entities. Regulation is not "interference", it is the responsibility of the states to control their creations.
(They have failed miserably; perhaps we should just remove the ability of the states to issue new corporate charters, and revoke all existing ones. There's a free market for you...)
"Computers don't make mistakes." Obviously you have never dealt with a computer with a bad DRAM chip;)
Or even a blown CPU fan. Everything was OK except when I tried to recompile the kernel (or sometime play QuakeWorld) I'd get all sort of wacky behavior. New CPU fan, no problem.
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On a practical level, when firearms ownership is understood as a defense against an oppressive government, gun licencing runs into the same problems as literacy tests for voting (another defense against an oppressive government). They provide a convenient means for the state to deprive of basic right those it would oppress.
It would be very, very easy to rig tests so that members of racial, political, or religious minorities would not be permitted to pass, just as blacks were set up to fail literacy exams required for voting under Jim Crow laws.
Of course, after that we'd no doubt see a five day waiting period to buy a gallon of gasoline, and federally mandated gas cap locks.
Today, most violent crime is still related to prohibition, except it's heroin and cocaine prohibtion.
There were also several more articulate explanations of the dangers involved, such as this or this.
The risk was non-zero, and NASA does not have what I would call a good track record on risk estimation. (See Feyman's tale in "What Do You Care What Other People Think?") Yes, there was ignorance among many who opposed the lauch; there was also plenty of ignorance among many who supported it.
Sometimes that which doesn't kill us doesn't make us stronger either - it just annoys the fsck out of us instead.
Your question assumes that there is a "someone" to be born at that state. But a few cells is not a "someone". It can be argued that a "someone" doesn't happen until well after an infant is born; it takes experience of the world to make a "someone" - an blank brain does not a person make.Deciding after a few cell divisions whether development will progress towards a "someone" is no different than deciding pre-conception; by your thinking, am I deciding "who should or shouldn't be born" by using a condom?
This is not the first time such a procedure has been done; fetal development is not affected by removing one cell. Heck, remember that early on in development an embryo can split in two, and each half form a perfectly fine infant. (Actually, it might not be an embryo yet at that stage - blastula? Gastrula? Whatyamacallit? Dammit Jim, I'm a hacker, not a biologist.)
The only debate is whether human activity is causing a rise in greenhouse gasses, and causing global warming. And it's not much of a debate; there is a strong scientific consensus that human activity is altering the climate.
Volcanic eruptions are rare, while there are over 6 billion people on the planet. So your point is? Which is a pretty good reason not to mess with them, no? Um, yes, the rock will still be here no matter what we do. And it would be really hard to get rid of all the life that's on it; some fungi and bactera would probably survive anything short of the Sun's death. But if we fuck it up enough, we could take out the ecosystem and ourselves with it.There are some things that I really like about living in Maryland. UCITA (along with gun control and 300+ murders a year in Baltimore) is not on that list.
We want to learn new things; we want to improve our bodies; we want to change elements of our personality and emotional makeup. That's why people go to school, read books (or even /.), go to the gym, try different diets, see therapists, take anti-depressants, whatever. Many of these means are misguided, and one might even argue that the goal itself is a mistake (after all, you are already a Buddha), but there's no dening that part of the human condition is the desire for personal transformation.
This doesn't have to be some Faustian bargain. Using nanotechnology to augment my physiology doesn't take away any of my "humanity"; nor would providing me with an AI butler/manservant/gal friday.However, the techoskeptics are right about at least one thing: it isn't a given that such technology will be sued wisely. The example given about people borrowing money they don't need in order to give good inputs to a credit rating algorithm is an excellent one. OTOH, that's not so much an issue of technology as of bureaucracy - the algorithm could just as well be implemented by men with ledgers and quill pens as by big iron.
Doubleclick has made the top of my shitlist, not just because I loathe banner ads, not just because of their evil user-tracking practices, but because they're spammers. They're behind something called "DARTmail", which claims to be an opt-in e-mail advertising service.
But I sure as hell never opted in. Any reputable company would use a confirmation scheme to make sure that people had really opted in; they didn't. Any reputable company would have ceased after my first complaint. They didn't. Scumbags, through and through.
IIRC, you don't have to deliver the source to the evaluators, but you have to at least have someone in-house designated to do reviews. Somewhere in the huge pile of documents has to be plan for ensuring that implementation meets design - as well as plans for testing and configuration management.
If I own 1000 shares of Amalgamated Profits which I bought at $1 a share, and Amalgamated Profits pillages and rapes its way to obscene profits and I sell at $100 a share, that $99,000 profit is unassailable if Amalgamated Profits is sued. That's not right. All profits I made from Amalgamated Profits's pillaging should be within the scope of liability.
My suggestions:- no corporation can own stock. Period. Every shareholder must be an individual.
- File the Supreme Court decision that granted corporations all the rights of citizens in the circular file right next to Dred Scott and Korematsu.
- Start invoking the corporate death penalty - revoke the charters of misbehaving corporations.
Does this mean major changes in the economic infrastructure? Damn straight.Turn it around: would the stockholders of Firestone have allowed the corporation to have shoddy product safety practices if they faced personal liability?
Permitting profit without responsabilty is a recipe for disaster. At a very minimum, stockholders should be able to be sued up to every penny of profit or dividends they ever made off a share in a misbehaving corporation.
We all have "stock" in the federal government, too; but does that mean that it doesn't oppress some American citizens? Hardly.
The massive difference being that in elections, it's "one man, one vote"; in corporations, it's "one dollar, one vote", and 5% of the people hold 95% of the dollars. Until that changes, we're fucked - economically and politically, because that 5% determine who gets to be treated as serious candidates for office, and because one of the main jobs of the government is to protect that 95% of the wealth from us peons.So will my vote for Nader be wasted? Pretty much. It's symbolic action, rejecting both mainstream choices; it might have some small indirect effect if enough people do the same, but no matter which way I - or anyone who reads this - votes, we're going to get a rich, big-business-friendly, born-again-Christian, white guy in the White House.
I mostly go to the polls to vote on bond issues, for schools and parks and against new jails (stop locking up drug users and you'll have plenty of room) and "senior citizens" centers (the elderly are the richest demographic and they already get a nice chunck out of my paycheck to subsidize their retirement), and occasionally an interesting local race.
Here's an interesting bit of math. Take the Gross Domestic Product, representing the total value of goods and services produced in the US: about $US 9,559,700,000,000 for 1999. Divide by the size of the American workforce: 137,673,000. You discover that the average American worker creates $US 69,438 of value per year.
All that value has to end up somewhere. Eventually it all ends up in the hands of a worker who made something - or, in the pocket of an investor, who didn't do a lick of work on making something but manages to get paid anyway.
The average American worker's gross pay, including benefits, is $US 18.50 / hour, or $US 38,480 / year. Leaving $US 30,958 of value going somewhere else.
In other words, the average U.S. worker gets about 45% of his or her productive worth diverted to the owning class. Welcome to capitalism.
"Our new king is so nice! He give us beggars twice as many table scraps than the old king! We should make sure our king stays in power!"Just because you leave a group of people better off than before does not mean that you are not exploiting them.
Rather than assisting multinationals to come in and pay six cents a day rather than the locally prevailing three cents, how about assisting these nations in building their own domestically-owned industries?
(They have failed miserably; perhaps we should just remove the ability of the states to issue new corporate charters, and revoke all existing ones. There's a free market for you...)