All I meant was that things like forcing you to vote, forcing you to exercise, and forcing you to do community service are *steps* in that direction. The logical end is a government that controls every aspect of your life.
And the logical end of only valuing personal liberty is equally horrific to most Americans. Slippery-slope argument rarely matter in practice because in the real world we end up balancing many values, many solutions. Here, the primary tension is between liberty and civic duty. The Obama administration will move us inches along that spectrum, not miles.
Yeah well you better excuse me from every other duty as well then, like paying taxes and living according to the law. And actually that wouldn't be a bad trade... a lot of people would pay good money to go on vacation to a place like that.
And they would be back in short order. Well-off westerners often take civilization for granted, because they have never seen what it's like without it.
Freedom is swell, and I'm for it. But it isn't free.
Personal stories are very powerful to a lot of people. Not so much to engineers, but to a lot of other folks.
That's why 98% of business books can, as far as engineers are concerned, be summed up in 1-2 pages of bullet points. The rest of the content is telling stories about (usually imaginary) people, so that readers can more easily understand the ideas and their implications. We Slashdotters dismiss that part as fluff, as we get no value from it, but clearly the people who buy business books eat that shit up.
So her telling her personal story will certainly do some good. I salute her for it; it's not easy to stand up in public and admit that you have been a total fucking idiot.
[...] I worked with the general public (retail sales, waiting, bartender) and by doing this it was made painfully clear that most people out there are fucked In the head [...]
You think that's scary? At some point, you will realize that you are one of those people.
Every couple of years reality will whack me across the face with a 2x4 and I'll realize that I've spent my whole life being an idiot about something.
As far as I can tell, that happens eventually to everybody except people who are crazy and/or dumb enough that they never notice their flaws. So now I've come to kinda sorta welcome the 2x4. It hurts like hell, but at least it's a chance to improve.
I'm not a Christian-basher, and have plenty of family and friends that are religious. However, this guy's got a point.
Some churches I've visited strike me as very reasonable places. But others actively work a lot of the same mechanisms that scammers use. The main difference between a scam artist and a cult leader is that the scam artist builds his game around leaving town eventually, whereas cult leaders build to last. Scammers are mainly after money, whereas cult leaders take not just money but time, attention, and love.
And sure, you can say that your church is different than some cult. Maybe yours is. But there's no hard line separating the most reasonable church from the craziest cult; it's a matter of degree, a continuum. All of them try to get people to think and behave differently, and I've never heard of one that doesn't benefit from that through tithes, donations, service, and support.
That doesn't mean I'm against people joining churches; it seems to do some a lot of good. But when somebody rings my doorbell to tell me that their invisible, magical friend will do good things for me if I just give their organization 10% of my income and get others to do the same, then I have a hard time not classifying that as a scam, even if the person ringing my doorbell is perfectly likable.
Although it's possible she's mentally ill, I wouldn't bet on it. I know people who have been taken in scams for substantial money, and they're both smart and sane. It's just that they don't have much experience in dealing with highly manipulative people who have a lot of practice in fooling honest citizens.
If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend the book The Big Con. It's a great cultural portrait of scam artists of the 1930s. They took advantage not of madness but of normal parts of human nature.
Janella, no, you're not a sucker or an easy mark. You're the dumbest fucking person on Earth.
I'm not disagreeing. But smarts -- at least in the sense of high IQ score -- doesn't have much to do with it. There were plenty of smart people on Wall Street, but a lot of them devoted most of that brainpower to fooling themselves and each other. IQ is a tool that you can use for good or ill.
So being smart is one possible way to avoid getting scammed, but there are other ways: she would have been just as well served by more humility, modesty, wisdom, experience, self control, or respect for family and friends. And a bit more mistrust of strangers would have been good, too.
I think it's a good thing to take resources from the stupid, and give it to the smart. And that's what's happening. Even if you do not like it.:)
The underlying problem is that the Nigerian scammers may be smart, but they are not productive. They aren't making the world richer or better; they're just diverting value other people have generated.
From an evolutionary perspective, scammers are parasites on their own species. I don't know how much it happens in the real world, but I've seen simulations where self-parasitization causes species to go extinct. The parasite genes become enormously successful for a period, until the parasites crowd out the non-parasites, causing a drastic population crash.
So if you really want to support evolution here, you should be for sterilizing the scammers for sure, and possibly the people who fall for them.
Touched a nerve, eh? I guess you never realized before that spammers taking a hit puts you at risk of having to be a productive citizen.
The first part of your point is, to my eyes, incoherent. Feel free to try again if you think it matters.
Vigilantism is taking the law into one's own hands. Only certain powers are reserved to the law; the rest are ours to use as we see fit, including making things more just. Choosing to refuse business from people who are actively making the world worse isn't vigilantism; it's good morals and good business sense.
So please, oh wise sage of the internet, show me your blog that documents how the police laughed at your substantial evidence?
You're the one making the claim that calling the police on spammers has regularly proved effective (that's what "tried and true" means). I say it's an idiotic claim. If you can back your claim up, do it. Otherwise, pipe down and let your betters have a real conversation.
I like to know where these guys hang out so I can avoid them, the same way I avoid the riff-raff in the physical city where I live.
That seems reasonable. Except that it only works when you're one of a small number of people who know where they are. If a lot of people knew, they would not go elsewhere. So you're basically saying, "Things are fine because I make a living from being sure it's only you other people have the problem." Feh.
We already have laws against spam and certain porn, and it should be up to the government to enforce those laws. Vigilantism is never the answer.
That's utterly ridiculous. The primary tool of enforcement on the Internet is the acceptable use policy, and has been for the 20 years I've been paying attention. Providers don't have to accept traffic from people behaving in ways likely to harm the network, because if they did, then other providers would stop accepting their traffic.
Choosing to cut off miscreants isn't vigilantism, it's exercising freedom of association and free trade. For comparison, vigilantism would be, say, lynching them.
The tried-and-true way works: if you have evidence, take it to the police.
Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's hilarious. Could you point me to your blog where you have successfully done this with multiple spammers? Because as far as I can tell, you're talking entirely out your ass.
In my professional capacity I've tried on a few different occasions to get the police involved in various network-driven crimes, ones much more serious than spam. Unless you can prove substantial financial damages, and unless you can sort out the jurisdictional issues for them, they just don't care. At all. Calling them up and saying that there's spam in your in-box would get you laughed at.
Yes, by all means someone should start selling a Skami Computer, hopefully via infomercial! I'd recommend filling out the product line with a "Do!Be!Us!" smartphone, a "Krapee" monitor line, the "De-Funk(t)" music player, the "Borkt" series of printers, and the "InnerFierce" wireless networking gear.
But please, if you do this, make sure you set up your "world headquarters" in a semi-abandoned strip mall, and move it every time the landlord kicks you out for non-payment. (And no, you can't ever pay rent when running a scam. A penny stolen is a penny earned.)
The good news is you'll be able to sell Vista on this stuff without increasing your complaint load. Heck, given the target audience, you could probably charge them for two copies and call it Double Vista.
Name it what you want, but the RESULT is what gives products their reputations, not the names of said products.
This is true, but not totally relevant.
Especially for new products, a name is a big part of the first impression they create. A good name can't turn crap into gold, but it can persuade people to try your product and find out whether or not it's any good. And it certainly can help make it easy for people to talk and learn about your product.
Some products succeed based on their technical awesomeness and nothing else. Some products succeed on marketing alone, as anybody who has purchased from late-night TV or an MLM scam knows. But the smart entrepreneur tries to cover all the bases, starting with a good idea well executed, and then properly marketed, sold, and supported.
And I'd add that some places actively test the names, as well. E.g., asking what people think in focus groups of different names. Or, more subtly, showing a new product to different people with different names on it, and getting stats about their reactions.
Depending too much on what executives personally think of names is dangerous, because executives are very rarely representative of the target market. That lesson applies to lots of other things, too, like features and pricing.
Would you be support a law that requires everybody to vote... hey why not it's easy and voting is necessary for a functioning democracy...
I have lived in two other countries where it is mandatory that you show up. You don't actually have to vote, mind you, but you have to go to the trouble of being present. It seemed to work well enough for them.
How about a law that requires everybody to exercise (unless excused by a doctor)... hey a healthy society is critical right? It's for our own good.
The difference there is that the effect is mainly personal. By not helping run the country by voting, you are failing in one of the primary duties of citizen. By not exercising, you'll screw yourself, but I think that should be allowed.
This is America and not a fascist state that controls every aspect of your life for your own good. Fuck community service. Hell, protesting this community service crap is truer to the ideals of America than actually doing it.
Mandatory community service for students, or even for all citizens, is not by any means controlling every aspect of your life. Every person gets something from society, and every person is required to give back. Currently, you can fulfill that obligation mainly through money, and the occasional bit of jury duty (which is also mandatory civic service, I note). But saying that people should pay with time instead of money doesn't seem like an obviously bad idea to me, or at least not obviously worse than taxes or jury duty.
However, I guess I would be happy to excuse you from your civic duty if you didn't receive schooling or police protection, have your house occasionally invaded by the Russians, don't benefit from the education of your fellow citizens by talking to them or trading with them, and refrain from using the roads. Oh, and when you get old or sick, if you'd be kind enough to shoot yourself before you become a burden, that'd be great. Failing that, suck it up and share in your civic duties like the rest of us.
The whole premise of your thought is that others have the right to order you around and to make you work for their causes, and not the ones you personally chose to work for.
You need to work on the reading comprehension a little, as I did not say that at all.
I do definitely believe that adults have both the right and the duty to order children around to achieve certain ends, like education.
As to the matter of who's causes one works for, the US definition of a charity is pretty clear and very broad. There are currently circa 1.5 million registered charities in the US, so for the community service programs I've seen, there are plenty of options.
A gent from Kenya that was all smiles and friendly as can be never had a problem. He always dressed nice and carried him self well. He always wondered what the African-American's were talking about.
Your examples don't prove your point, and they make you look a little clueless here.
If somebody dresses "nice", then that pretty much by definition means he dresses better than average. And what did he get for that? Not having a problem. Which is what the average white person gets without any dressing up at all.
Similarly, that white hoodlums getting treated like hoodlums doesn't prove that black people don't, on average, get treated a little worse than white people.
I'm not saying there is a giant difference in most places; these days you have to go to the ass end of nowhere to actually get dragged behind a truck. All I'm saying is that there is still a difference, and that difference affects people.
It's a truism that people notice problems easily, but rarely appreciate what they have. So that white males don't notice white male privilege is unsurprising. I'm sure I never would have noticed it except for a variety of experiences that made it painfully obvious to me.
Its important to note (and this is as an Obama supporter) that doing "everything we can to help Obama succeed" also includes being critical of his plans and holding him accountable when he steps out of line. No government office is above criticism. Debate and accountability is healthy.
Heh. You must be an Obama supporter, as I haven't heard many people in the Republican party saying that the last few years.
I expect to be hearing more of it soon, though. Limited executive power looks a lot better when it's somebody else who has the power.
How did the Obama transition team get a.gov domain name?
Legally? At one level or another, the Bush administration gave it to him. That's unsurprising. Obama's not the president yet, but they're also giving him full security briefings, inviting him to things, and generally trying to make for a smooth transition.
If you think of Bush as somebody who is sincerely dedicated to good government, then of course he'd accede to any reasonable request that makes the transition smoother. And if you think of him as purely political, then this is good politics. Obama can get whatever he wants in a couple of months anyhow, and Bush's legacy wouldn't be improved by capping his presidency with a period of churlish dickishness.
In the US, we have a pretty clear system for deciding what a charity is. It's unlikely that the new administration would screw around with creating yet another one. You can read about a 501c3 at Wikipedia, where they mention that they should be operated "operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals."
I note that the ACLU and the EFF, which are both 501c3 organizations, do all sorts of good freedom-oriented legal work. So if you were to go back to school and have a community service obligation, those might be good organizations to start with.
What happens if one wishes to exercise the freedom to abstain? Shouldn't such a freedom exist in a "free" society?
Should it? What if I wish to abstain from paying taxes? Or obeying that pesky drive-on-the-right thing?
Societies involve collective effort with other people. A completely free society in the sense you're suggesting, where individual actors can do anything they please, is an impossibility. Any modern democracy, especially in heavily interdependent modern context, always has a tension between absolute individual freedom and accomplishing shared goals.
Societies are expensive things to run, and democracies require informed voters. Moreover, people are inclined to help one another; it's a basic human urge that makes societies possible. Making it easy for adults to serve the public good, and requiring students to at least try it out, seems pretty reasonable to me. If nothing else, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying Halliburton's rates for that kind of work.
Ontario requires 40, I had to see if I could find the original pamphlet "Students are to volunteer for compulsory community service." I always loved that sentence. So yes, bullshit. Don't try to sugar coat, forced labor to me.
I agree that the phrasing is a little oxymoronic, but it was part of a compulsory education. Children have no choice in any of it, because they aren't yet mature enough to reliably decide what's good for them, and what's good for society.
You can argue that children shouldn't learn how to do community service, in the same way people can argue that they shouldn't have to learn math, or computers. But there's no particular paradox in forcing them to volunteer somewhere, any more than there is in having compulsory elective classes, where you are compelled to pick one of a set of available options. Schools give progressively more choice to the student as they mature, but it always happens in the context of a rigorous framework.
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry for the late reply though.)
No problem! Thanks for the reply.
All I meant was that things like forcing you to vote, forcing you to exercise, and forcing you to do community service are *steps* in that direction. The logical end is a government that controls every aspect of your life.
And the logical end of only valuing personal liberty is equally horrific to most Americans. Slippery-slope argument rarely matter in practice because in the real world we end up balancing many values, many solutions. Here, the primary tension is between liberty and civic duty. The Obama administration will move us inches along that spectrum, not miles.
Yeah well you better excuse me from every other duty as well then, like paying taxes and living according to the law. And actually that wouldn't be a bad trade... a lot of people would pay good money to go on vacation to a place like that.
And they would be back in short order. Well-off westerners often take civilization for granted, because they have never seen what it's like without it.
Freedom is swell, and I'm for it. But it isn't free.
Personal stories are very powerful to a lot of people. Not so much to engineers, but to a lot of other folks.
That's why 98% of business books can, as far as engineers are concerned, be summed up in 1-2 pages of bullet points. The rest of the content is telling stories about (usually imaginary) people, so that readers can more easily understand the ideas and their implications. We Slashdotters dismiss that part as fluff, as we get no value from it, but clearly the people who buy business books eat that shit up.
So her telling her personal story will certainly do some good. I salute her for it; it's not easy to stand up in public and admit that you have been a total fucking idiot.
[...] I worked with the general public (retail sales, waiting, bartender) and by doing this it was made painfully clear that most people out there are fucked In the head [...]
You think that's scary? At some point, you will realize that you are one of those people.
Every couple of years reality will whack me across the face with a 2x4 and I'll realize that I've spent my whole life being an idiot about something.
As far as I can tell, that happens eventually to everybody except people who are crazy and/or dumb enough that they never notice their flaws. So now I've come to kinda sorta welcome the 2x4. It hurts like hell, but at least it's a chance to improve.
Until you get paid, it's not a high-yield investment; it's a high-risk investment.
That is the smartest single sentence I've read all week.
I'm not a Christian-basher, and have plenty of family and friends that are religious. However, this guy's got a point.
Some churches I've visited strike me as very reasonable places. But others actively work a lot of the same mechanisms that scammers use. The main difference between a scam artist and a cult leader is that the scam artist builds his game around leaving town eventually, whereas cult leaders build to last. Scammers are mainly after money, whereas cult leaders take not just money but time, attention, and love.
And sure, you can say that your church is different than some cult. Maybe yours is. But there's no hard line separating the most reasonable church from the craziest cult; it's a matter of degree, a continuum. All of them try to get people to think and behave differently, and I've never heard of one that doesn't benefit from that through tithes, donations, service, and support.
That doesn't mean I'm against people joining churches; it seems to do some a lot of good. But when somebody rings my doorbell to tell me that their invisible, magical friend will do good things for me if I just give their organization 10% of my income and get others to do the same, then I have a hard time not classifying that as a scam, even if the person ringing my doorbell is perfectly likable.
Although it's possible she's mentally ill, I wouldn't bet on it. I know people who have been taken in scams for substantial money, and they're both smart and sane. It's just that they don't have much experience in dealing with highly manipulative people who have a lot of practice in fooling honest citizens.
If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend the book The Big Con. It's a great cultural portrait of scam artists of the 1930s. They took advantage not of madness but of normal parts of human nature.
Janella, no, you're not a sucker or an easy mark. You're the dumbest fucking person on Earth.
I'm not disagreeing. But smarts -- at least in the sense of high IQ score -- doesn't have much to do with it. There were plenty of smart people on Wall Street, but a lot of them devoted most of that brainpower to fooling themselves and each other. IQ is a tool that you can use for good or ill.
So being smart is one possible way to avoid getting scammed, but there are other ways: she would have been just as well served by more humility, modesty, wisdom, experience, self control, or respect for family and friends. And a bit more mistrust of strangers would have been good, too.
I think it's a good thing to take resources from the stupid, and give it to the smart. And that's what's happening. Even if you do not like it. :)
The underlying problem is that the Nigerian scammers may be smart, but they are not productive. They aren't making the world richer or better; they're just diverting value other people have generated.
From an evolutionary perspective, scammers are parasites on their own species. I don't know how much it happens in the real world, but I've seen simulations where self-parasitization causes species to go extinct. The parasite genes become enormously successful for a period, until the parasites crowd out the non-parasites, causing a drastic population crash.
So if you really want to support evolution here, you should be for sterilizing the scammers for sure, and possibly the people who fall for them.
Touched a nerve, eh? I guess you never realized before that spammers taking a hit puts you at risk of having to be a productive citizen.
The first part of your point is, to my eyes, incoherent. Feel free to try again if you think it matters.
Vigilantism is taking the law into one's own hands. Only certain powers are reserved to the law; the rest are ours to use as we see fit, including making things more just. Choosing to refuse business from people who are actively making the world worse isn't vigilantism; it's good morals and good business sense.
And yes, lynching is a classic vigilante action. Read up on your history a little. E.g., the San Francisco Vigilance Movement, or, more generally, vigilance committees. Canceling a contract by entirely legal means just doesn't compare with, say, tarring and feathering.
So please, oh wise sage of the internet, show me your blog that documents how the police laughed at your substantial evidence?
You're the one making the claim that calling the police on spammers has regularly proved effective (that's what "tried and true" means). I say it's an idiotic claim. If you can back your claim up, do it. Otherwise, pipe down and let your betters have a real conversation.
I like to know where these guys hang out so I can avoid them, the same way I avoid the riff-raff in the physical city where I live.
That seems reasonable. Except that it only works when you're one of a small number of people who know where they are. If a lot of people knew, they would not go elsewhere. So you're basically saying, "Things are fine because I make a living from being sure it's only you other people have the problem." Feh.
We already have laws against spam and certain porn, and it should be up to the government to enforce those laws. Vigilantism is never the answer.
That's utterly ridiculous. The primary tool of enforcement on the Internet is the acceptable use policy, and has been for the 20 years I've been paying attention. Providers don't have to accept traffic from people behaving in ways likely to harm the network, because if they did, then other providers would stop accepting their traffic.
Choosing to cut off miscreants isn't vigilantism, it's exercising freedom of association and free trade. For comparison, vigilantism would be, say, lynching them.
The tried-and-true way works: if you have evidence, take it to the police.
Ha, ha, ha, ha. That's hilarious. Could you point me to your blog where you have successfully done this with multiple spammers? Because as far as I can tell, you're talking entirely out your ass.
In my professional capacity I've tried on a few different occasions to get the police involved in various network-driven crimes, ones much more serious than spam. Unless you can prove substantial financial damages, and unless you can sort out the jurisdictional issues for them, they just don't care. At all. Calling them up and saying that there's spam in your in-box would get you laughed at.
Yes, by all means someone should start selling a Skami Computer, hopefully via infomercial! I'd recommend filling out the product line with a "Do!Be!Us!" smartphone, a "Krapee" monitor line, the "De-Funk(t)" music player, the "Borkt" series of printers, and the "InnerFierce" wireless networking gear.
But please, if you do this, make sure you set up your "world headquarters" in a semi-abandoned strip mall, and move it every time the landlord kicks you out for non-payment. (And no, you can't ever pay rent when running a scam. A penny stolen is a penny earned.)
The good news is you'll be able to sell Vista on this stuff without increasing your complaint load. Heck, given the target audience, you could probably charge them for two copies and call it Double Vista.
Name it what you want, but the RESULT is what gives products their reputations, not the names of said products.
This is true, but not totally relevant.
Especially for new products, a name is a big part of the first impression they create. A good name can't turn crap into gold, but it can persuade people to try your product and find out whether or not it's any good. And it certainly can help make it easy for people to talk and learn about your product.
Some products succeed based on their technical awesomeness and nothing else. Some products succeed on marketing alone, as anybody who has purchased from late-night TV or an MLM scam knows. But the smart entrepreneur tries to cover all the bases, starting with a good idea well executed, and then properly marketed, sold, and supported.
And I'd add that some places actively test the names, as well. E.g., asking what people think in focus groups of different names. Or, more subtly, showing a new product to different people with different names on it, and getting stats about their reactions.
Depending too much on what executives personally think of names is dangerous, because executives are very rarely representative of the target market. That lesson applies to lots of other things, too, like features and pricing.
What regex library do you use which precludes a match for microsoft.* also being a match for *.beastiality.* ?
Microsoft's, of course.
Would you be support a law that requires everybody to vote... hey why not it's easy and voting is necessary for a functioning democracy...
I have lived in two other countries where it is mandatory that you show up. You don't actually have to vote, mind you, but you have to go to the trouble of being present. It seemed to work well enough for them.
How about a law that requires everybody to exercise (unless excused by a doctor)... hey a healthy society is critical right? It's for our own good.
The difference there is that the effect is mainly personal. By not helping run the country by voting, you are failing in one of the primary duties of citizen. By not exercising, you'll screw yourself, but I think that should be allowed.
This is America and not a fascist state that controls every aspect of your life for your own good. Fuck community service. Hell, protesting this community service crap is truer to the ideals of America than actually doing it.
Mandatory community service for students, or even for all citizens, is not by any means controlling every aspect of your life. Every person gets something from society, and every person is required to give back. Currently, you can fulfill that obligation mainly through money, and the occasional bit of jury duty (which is also mandatory civic service, I note). But saying that people should pay with time instead of money doesn't seem like an obviously bad idea to me, or at least not obviously worse than taxes or jury duty.
However, I guess I would be happy to excuse you from your civic duty if you didn't receive schooling or police protection, have your house occasionally invaded by the Russians, don't benefit from the education of your fellow citizens by talking to them or trading with them, and refrain from using the roads. Oh, and when you get old or sick, if you'd be kind enough to shoot yourself before you become a burden, that'd be great. Failing that, suck it up and share in your civic duties like the rest of us.
The whole premise of your thought is that others have the right to order you around and to make you work for their causes, and not the ones you personally chose to work for.
You need to work on the reading comprehension a little, as I did not say that at all.
I do definitely believe that adults have both the right and the duty to order children around to achieve certain ends, like education.
As to the matter of who's causes one works for, the US definition of a charity is pretty clear and very broad. There are currently circa 1.5 million registered charities in the US, so for the community service programs I've seen, there are plenty of options.
A gent from Kenya that was all smiles and friendly as can be never had a problem. He always dressed nice and carried him self well. He always wondered what the African-American's were talking about.
Your examples don't prove your point, and they make you look a little clueless here.
If somebody dresses "nice", then that pretty much by definition means he dresses better than average. And what did he get for that? Not having a problem. Which is what the average white person gets without any dressing up at all.
Similarly, that white hoodlums getting treated like hoodlums doesn't prove that black people don't, on average, get treated a little worse than white people.
I'm not saying there is a giant difference in most places; these days you have to go to the ass end of nowhere to actually get dragged behind a truck. All I'm saying is that there is still a difference, and that difference affects people.
It's a truism that people notice problems easily, but rarely appreciate what they have. So that white males don't notice white male privilege is unsurprising. I'm sure I never would have noticed it except for a variety of experiences that made it painfully obvious to me.
Just so everybody knows, you can always report problems like this at RFC-ignorant.org.
Its important to note (and this is as an Obama supporter) that doing "everything we can to help Obama succeed" also includes being critical of his plans and holding him accountable when he steps out of line. No government office is above criticism. Debate and accountability is healthy.
Heh. You must be an Obama supporter, as I haven't heard many people in the Republican party saying that the last few years.
I expect to be hearing more of it soon, though. Limited executive power looks a lot better when it's somebody else who has the power.
How did the Obama transition team get a .gov domain name?
Legally? At one level or another, the Bush administration gave it to him. That's unsurprising. Obama's not the president yet, but they're also giving him full security briefings, inviting him to things, and generally trying to make for a smooth transition.
If you think of Bush as somebody who is sincerely dedicated to good government, then of course he'd accede to any reasonable request that makes the transition smoother. And if you think of him as purely political, then this is good politics. Obama can get whatever he wants in a couple of months anyhow, and Bush's legacy wouldn't be improved by capping his presidency with a period of churlish dickishness.
Oh, please. All of middle school and most of high school is compulsory. By your logic, going out and banging the erasers together would be slavery.
Why do I have this funny feeling [...]
Maybe your ignorance is tingling?
In the US, we have a pretty clear system for deciding what a charity is. It's unlikely that the new administration would screw around with creating yet another one. You can read about a 501c3 at Wikipedia, where they mention that they should be operated "operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals."
I note that the ACLU and the EFF, which are both 501c3 organizations, do all sorts of good freedom-oriented legal work. So if you were to go back to school and have a community service obligation, those might be good organizations to start with.
forcing people into civil service just because?
Hint: the people who are for it are not doing so on a whim. Try completing your sentence, and you'll be closer to understanding.
What happens if one wishes to exercise the freedom to abstain? Shouldn't such a freedom exist in a "free" society?
Should it? What if I wish to abstain from paying taxes? Or obeying that pesky drive-on-the-right thing?
Societies involve collective effort with other people. A completely free society in the sense you're suggesting, where individual actors can do anything they please, is an impossibility. Any modern democracy, especially in heavily interdependent modern context, always has a tension between absolute individual freedom and accomplishing shared goals.
Societies are expensive things to run, and democracies require informed voters. Moreover, people are inclined to help one another; it's a basic human urge that makes societies possible. Making it easy for adults to serve the public good, and requiring students to at least try it out, seems pretty reasonable to me. If nothing else, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying Halliburton's rates for that kind of work.
Ontario requires 40, I had to see if I could find the original pamphlet "Students are to volunteer for compulsory community service." I always loved that sentence. So yes, bullshit. Don't try to sugar coat, forced labor to me.
I agree that the phrasing is a little oxymoronic, but it was part of a compulsory education. Children have no choice in any of it, because they aren't yet mature enough to reliably decide what's good for them, and what's good for society.
You can argue that children shouldn't learn how to do community service, in the same way people can argue that they shouldn't have to learn math, or computers. But there's no particular paradox in forcing them to volunteer somewhere, any more than there is in having compulsory elective classes, where you are compelled to pick one of a set of available options. Schools give progressively more choice to the student as they mature, but it always happens in the context of a rigorous framework.