I'm pretty sure there are fine programmers in India
There certainly are fine programmers available in India. The only problem is that they tend to cost nearly as much as comparable Americans what with all the salary inflation going on in the Indian software industry. There are only so many good engineers, even in a country the size of India, and not enough to satisfy the worldwide demand so naturally prices have been going up...to the tune of 10% or more each year with top talent getting headhunted constantly because of the "hot" market for good software talent in India. What is left after the good engineers have been bid up are the people who picked up their first learn to program VB book less than six months ago, but have an attitude that their "superior" Indian education, no doubt the legacy of the British way of thinking about education, completely prepared them for everything that they could ever need to know about software engineering in the real world. I have learned these truths from working with our outsourced teams and so I speak from firsthand experiences. There are surely good engineers in India, but they were too expensive for management's taste so they don't work for us.
The human race is by its very nature violent. We would not have survived to become the dominant species on this planet if this were not so. The natural order of things among the other species on this planet is competitive, heirarchical, and selfish. There will always be people in this world who resort to violence as the final and ultimate court of appeal and thus there will always be a need for protection from that violence. Indeed, the entire order of our civilization, the polite and lawful society, is built upon that intrinsic threat of violence, up to and including deadly force. I understand where the pacifist is coming from and most people would agree that their goals are noble and worthy. However, we disagree on the means to best achieve those goals. If you want peace then prepare for war.
The character Col. Jessep from A Few Good Men said it best...
"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."
The detachable box magazine makes the weapon easier to clean and maintain, semi-automatic fire is a feature of almost all modern firearms with the exception of bolt action rifles and muzzle loaders, the pistol grip improves aim and allows a quick and controlled second shot (useful in many hunting situations), and flash suppressor/muzzle brake reduces recoil and flash again contributing to the utility of the aforementioned second shot. These are all legitimate and useful features and there is absolutely no reason, no reason at all, why a law abiding citizen should be denied his right to own this type of weapon. It is not the job of the government to ban outright activities, items, and lifestyles which are quietly enjoyed by law abiding citizens simply because a minority of people in society cannot handle adult responsibilities. As long as the activities of an individual law abiding citizen do not directly harm or impinge upon the rights of others then they should be allowed to do as they wish...it's a free country after all. You are of course free to disagree, but I for one do not want to live in a nanny society with the government carefully monitoring and regulating every detail of my existence.
The definition of an assault rifle is pretty clear-cut, IMHO. Any rifle capable of fully automatic fire.
you would think so, but depending upon the state in which you live the definition can be much more strict, including such things as detachable magazine (regardless of the number of rounds it holds), portruding pistol grip, semi-automatic (just about every modern gun except for bolt action rifles), larger calibres (.308 and.50), muzzle brake, etc. There is generally some clause that says if the gun has two or more features from the list of "assault rifle" features or if it is specifically named on the banned list then it is by definition an "assault rifle". Naturally the gun control advocates would like to expand the list to include as many features as they possibly can so that the widest possible range of useful civilian firearms are banned. I am not suggesting that everyone needs to own a.50 calibre belt-fed Browning machine gun, but why should an M-14 target rifle (a popular choice among enthusiasts), which has the detachable box magazine, semi-automatic fire, a portruding pistol grip, and a flash suppressor/muzzle brake be banned?
Look at it from the criminals' perspective. What is the most desirable gun with which to commit a crime? Is the AK-47, the M-16, or the M-14 a good choice? All of these rifles are bulky, difficult to conceal, tough to wield in tight circumstances, and expensive when compared to the cheap likeable and disposable.22 calibre automatic pistol. Remarkably few crimes have been commited with.50 calibre bolt action rifles, or AK-47s, and the like and it is not because criminals respect the ban or couldn't get these weapons if they wanted to. The gun control people are mostly rude and disengenous in their arguments or at least the ones that I have encountered have been, while the gun owners are mostly polite, courteous, and intelligent in theirs. Draw your own conlcusions, but like so many other issues, upon which reasonable people should be able to compromise, this one has been turned into a political pissing match between the red states and the blue states by the advocates and their petty agendas.
As for fewer people...well the world could use a few less assholes:D
For example, a lot of people (I'd go so far as to say -most- people) think that assault rifles should be banned
The problem is that gun control advocates are manipulating the definition of "assault rifle" such that just about every modern firearm will run afoul of the definition and be banned. This is just another attempt to implement a backdoor ban. The police cannot be everywhere all of the time and just ask any hardened criminal what they would like more: a gun owning public or a passive, submissive, non-weapon carrying society with under funded and overworked police departments trying to pick up the slack. The right to defense of life and property is just that...a right. There would be fewer violent crimes and asshole loudmouths if all of the honest and law abiding citizens walking around were armed to the teeth.
I thought that signals intelligence gathering was one of the few types that the United States was really good at. I would be surprised if the NSA is not intercepting every single call on those disposable cell phones. The free e-mail accounts might take a bit more work to monitor, but surely the NSA could ask their buddies at AT&T and other backbone providers to intercept all of the emails coming out of Iraq and forward them on to the NSA for scanning into their Echelon system. If the insurgents are managing to elude our intelligence gathering efforts with disposable cell phones and hotmail then what does that say about our vaunted intelligence agencies? My tax dollars at work...or not as the case may be.
The state secrets or breach of national security intervention is surely the ultimate trump card for the government to squash legal proceedings before they reach their natural conclusion. While I believe that this power is necessary in extraordinary cases where the danger of immediate and irreparable harm is obvious, I also believe that it should be used in an extremely narrow and judicious fashion since the fallout (pun intended) from its frequent use would destroy the very democracy that the provision is designed to protect. Does anyone know of a case where a judge has NOT granted the request of the government for immediate suppression and dismissal under this statute?
There is one other possibility that has not been considered and that is that the break-in was organized by a foreign intelligence agency in an apparently successful operation to capture records relating to United States military personnel. If this is true then it ups the ante significantly because foreign intelligence agencies have the resources and expertise to organize these types of raids despite the best private security and especially if the operatives are willing to kill for the information. They could have infiltrated across the Mexican border, where security is sorely lacking, and gone anywhere in the US without attracting much attention. Most corporations do not employ the types of security measures that the military does and so they would probably be caught off guard by a commando style raid in the middle of the night. The night watchmen doesn't get paid enough to be killed over a couple of hard drives and all he saw were men in balaclavas before he was knocked over the head with the butt of an mp5 and tied up...you get the idea. This may have been a professional job.
I seem to recall that current stepping transformers broke the chain and caused any sort of data encoded on the line to be lost in the transition from higher to lower voltages. However, that was several years ago so perhaps someone has found away around this problem?
I would be interested to know how the dog distinguishes between a DVD and any other mailed product which contains plastic wrapping. Perhaps they are operating on the assumption that plastic wrapping materials of the type used to shrink wrap DVDs are not common in other types of mail. One also wonders how much of a dent this will actually make in the amount counterfeit DVDs and movie piracy in general. It was my understanding that bootleggers generally sell on the street, at swap meets, and other spontaneous social gatherings where the counterfeit goods are priced as impulse purchases at 1-2 dollars apiece. The rest are probably file sharing downloads of DVD rips to divx and such so how many bootleg DVDs, not orders from Amazon.com or NetFlix, are actually making their way through the mail system? It is probably insignificant.
I wonder if Nintendo is aware that in certain states here in the United States, namely New York and California although there may be others, the mere possession of nunchaku is illegal. These types of laws are of course utterly ridiculous, who would bother to use a nunchaku in a crime when they could use any number of other potential weapons up to and including a handgun, but they are on the books anyway. Probably due to some wrongheaded political gambit in an election year...they are bringing nunchaku to school so they we must totally ban the possession of two sticks joined with a string...wont somebody think of the children? You know the rest.
If they don't, they are dismissed with an airy 'well, its open source, we don't have to fix it - because anyone can'.
That is one of the tradeoffs with using source products. If you want new functionality then you must hire someone to create it for you, create it yourself, or beg the community to do it for you but you cannot expect people in the community to dance to your tune for nothing. If you want prompt turnaround on new features and you cannot wait for an interested party to get around to implementing it then you may be better off with a closed source software package where needs are more customer driven rather than what developers think is a cool or fun...Beggars can't be choosers as they sometimes say.
The way trademarks work, Walmart MUST try to defend their common-law trademark against a rogue trademark registration.
They obviously need to set the bar a bit higher than fill out some forms and pay a fee for potential registrants. Would it be unreasonable to ask that the person or corporation registering the mark show some proof of its pedigree?
generally, in a writing class, formal writing is taught.
It is interesting to hear you say this because I recall from my freshman writing courses that the subject matter was almost always informal or, to put it another way, not related in either style or substance to the more formalized writing that one uses in the business or technical environment excluding email with programming being the most formal writing of all. I was fortunate in that my writing skills were not as poor as those of my peers coming out of high school, but I must confess that I was often completely disinterested in the materials that were presented as a normal part of the required coursework. The writing topics struck me as being out of touch with the life experience of the average student and motivated by a sickening undercurrent of political correctness that smacked of liberal intellectual philosophy. If the goal is to teach students to improve their writing skills then it would be nice to have a couple of topic choices for each assignment so that the subject matter does not interfere with the primary objective. The basic problem in most college writing courses is that engineers, while highly intelligent and motivated, tend to favor the systematic and logical approach to problem solving at the expense of the creative and human reasoning solution. Some might say that this also explains why there are few attractive women in most engineering schools and why engineers can write software, modify complex machinery, and solve differential equations, but are unable to hold a non-professional conversation with an attractive female or male (although true female nerds are rare indeed). If you want to reach the engineers in your class then you will have to emphasize the grammar, sentence structure, and organization rules at the risk of possibly loosing the non-engineering students. Remember that engineers revel in logically complex rule-based systems and are generally very good abstract thinkers so what would normally fail for a non-engineering student, emphasis on grammar and rules, is precisely the approach that engineers understand and appreciate. The trick will be to strike the correct balance so that the engineers do not simply check out when they are in your writing class. Unfortunately, many college writing courses, and mine were no exception, are stacked against the engineering students because the people that teach them, for the most part, do not understand how best to teach engineers.
In a commercial setting you wouldn't own your batteries, you'd lease them, and simply stop for a tray switch when needed, taking no more time than a gas fill up.
What about the weight of these battery trays? There are enough people out there now who are barely physically able enough to pull the pump nozzle off the island, insert it into their fuel system, and squeeze the handle to pump the gas. You could have attendants to load and unload battery trays I suppose, but then you are talking about increased employee costs for all of the attendants.
The infamous Rocket Car story always specifies a late 1960s Chevy Impala as the pilot's first choice...
"But despite all these oversights, the story did specify that the car was a 1967 Chevy Impala. I think the reason this detail is always supplied is because it's critical to make the listener think the test pilot at least looked cool when he flew into the cliff. You'll never hear someone tell a story about a guy in a rocket-powered K-car or a Volkswagen Beetle. It has to be a car that deserves to have a rocket attached to it."
If the RIAA wants the university to filter their network to protect their copyrights and their bottom line then they should pay the university for all of the network equipment, bandwidth, employee/consultant hours, and any other expenses necessary to conduct the filtering. The mission of any university is to provide higher education and policing the student body so that a private industry organization, which is entirely external to the mission of the university, will not suffer from potential loss of profits is NOT the responsibility of the university. The question is not whether file sharing is legal, but rather to what extent the university can be compelled to shoulder the cost of protecting the intellectual property of someone else, especially in the expensive and escalating arms race between the RIAA and the file sharers. If the university makes a good faith effort to inform students in their acceptable use policy what is and is not acceptable use and complies with reasonable and specific subpoenas (subject to reasonable charges for research, copies, and other legal expenses that any other civil plaintiff would have to pay) the I would say that they (the university) have satisfied their obligation under the law. If the RIAA et al wants more extensive monitoring then they can shell out the $100,000+ for extra servers and network monitoring gear along with the consultants to operate it all and the university employees' time (billed at least $100 per hour for interruption of normal university related duties). They cannot compel us to pay to protect THEIR property, only the government has the power to tax. Anyway, no other private business gets anywhere near the cooperation from law enforcement at the expense of the tax paying public and still they complain. The FBI should be traking down the identity thieves, terrorists, serial killers, and other really nasty criminals...not wasting their time busting copyright infringers on behalf of the entertainment industry. The RIAA should get off our campuses and they should take their craptastic "music" with them.
"They also pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue."
I meant income tax, but I probably should have qualified that specifically to satisfy the legalists amongst us who wish to score a minor point that is not essential to the central thrust of the argument. The parent was implying that the wealthiest 5% of the population do not pay their "fair share" As for the social security caps, remember that the original intent of the social security system was to provide a hedge against your individual risk of living in poverty in old age. It was NOT meant to be a full pension retirement system nor were you supposed to be responsible for other people's amounts just because you lead a more successful life. Higher incomes pay higher rates in part because what one person considers to be poverty is another persons acceptable standard of living. The social security system was an attempt, misguided though it has turned out to be, to force people to help themselves prepare for the expenses of old age at a standard of living that they could be satisified with based upon the standards that they had earned/enjoyed during their working lives.
Sigh...very well let us walk through some of the points made in your linked comment:
Fortunately, health care has no relationship whatsoever to other commercial industries. Customers don't shop for health care. The amount of specialized knowledge you'd need to compare the providers of every kind of care is beyond the reach of any single human being.
This is true, but it does not preclude you from making the best decision that you can with the information that is available to you. There are very few transactions in the real world where both the buyers and the sellers have perfect information about all factors which may affect the deal. However, this does not always cause people to vacillate and do nothing. Depending upon the size of the purchase and its relative importance to your life you spend some time considering what information is available to you, you weigh your options, and then you make a decision. It would be hard for you as an individual to do much worse than having a third party, whose best interests are not your own, make that decision for you and then spend your money foolishly in the face of rising costs.
If you wait until you need a particular care; you usually need it immediately, which precludes comparison shopping. You can always walk away from a bad car salesman, but if you're bleeding to death you don't have much negotiating power if the hospital tells you it is $3,000 for admittance.
This is why insurance exists. You purchase insurance to mitigate unavoidable risks which may cause you to incur massive costs during a painful and stressful time of your life. You do not negotiate with the hospital while your are bleeding to death in the emergency room. You purchase insurance ahead of time so that you have the certainty of NOT having to do such things under duress. More importantly you save for this expense which is why the health savings accounts recently enacted by Congress are a terrific idea. You save up enough ahead of time to meet your high deductible and your insurance pays the rest in the case of catastrophic injury or unanticipated long term care.
Health care needs no advertising -- Insurance companies aren't spending billions of dollars on commercials so that people know there is such a thing available and they should buy some. All they're doing is taking customers from each other and money away from actual care. In the computer business, that would be fine, since a smaller transistor size on the manufacturing side or broader market on the customer side can make up for the marketing expenses, but I can assure you that there's nobody having heart attacks with health care advertising that wouldn't have had one already (or vice-versa). State Farm isn't developing any top-secret surgical procedures that Allstate won't have access to.
The insurance companies are not competing to provide you better health care directly, but rather to provide you with a more competitively priced risk premium. Competition among insurance agencies, as long as they can meet federal requirements for assets vs. ongoing expenses, is a good thing.
Incentive to improve is omnipresent since Death is a far more efficient competitor than Microsoft or State Farm. Death has no overhead, he's penetrated every market segment and is very efficient at finding new opportunities for development. Death works 24/7 -- even on holidays! No matter how good insurance and health care are, there will always be real and constant pressure on them to improve.
At the end of the day, death, like any other insurable loss can be quantified directly into a finite dollar amount on the bottom line. It creates no greater incentive than the prospect of any other similar sized loss. In fact, in the case of healthcare death may even be preferable for the insurance company because they no longer have to pay for expensive long term care once you have died, unless of course you have your life insurance policy with the same company, but even then they h
Well the people who produced all those studies that have shown that real wages have dropped significantly in the last 30 years would love to know what methodology you used in your study that invalidates theirs.
The real wages, or those adjusted for inflation, purchase, relatively speaking, more goods and services today than they did 30 years ago, just ask anyone loading up the SUV in the Walmart parking lot who worked during the 1970s if they could have bought nearly as much back then for the same amount, relatively speaking, of inflation adjusted money. The real wages my have dropped, but that was not my point. The real question is what does your money buy? If I could have five dollars more in my pocket but at the cost of everything being five times more expensive then what difference would it make if I had more money because it wouldn't buy as much.
Seems like it should be at least 60%, don't you think?
I suppose that depends upon what one considers to be a "fair share", but remember that high taxes create disincentives for saving and in the end everyone could be worse off. You may achieve a society where nobody lives in abject poverty, but neither will anyone be living much above that line either so that is a tremendous dead weight loss to society in terms of wasted resources and potential...the proverbial nanny state with 90% taxes and no incentive to do anything because it makes no difference either way. I don't know about you but equal subsistence is not my idea of an ideal society.
That's a matter of opinion. If that was really true then the Republicans wouldn't bitch about "redistributing" wealth anytime anybody wanted to restore a sane tax rate structure.
It may be true that misery loves company, but do you really want to accept a lower standard of living just so that other people, including yourself, who might do better with lower taxes, would share that same lower standard of living? That sounds like cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.
This statement gives you away as someone who grew up with money and has no idea what it's like to barely make it. Just like nearly all Americans have no concept of going to bed hungry, you cannot have any concept of living from paycheck to paycheck (although I guarantee that's not going to stop you from talking about it).
What is with you liberals and the Ad Hominem attack? I will admit that I grew up in a middle class home, but I can tell you that my parents had some tight months when my brother and I were growing up and especially in their earlier years when our family was just starting out. Fortunately, my parents were kind enough to shield those facts from their grade school aged children so that we would not be worried unnecessarily. There was no Nintendo entertainment system in our home and I didn't always wear the most fashionable tennis shoes or the latest style clothing, but there was food on the table and work ethic in our home. If you were truly part of the bottom 5% who live in abject poverty, like they do in parts the Appalachian mountains back east, when you were growing up then you have my sympathy and I believe that the government should help those people, if for no other reason than to return them to productivity in our society, but I was by no means a rich man's son born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I know what it means to work for a living.
Sorry, but I just don't buy that. I personally know an Indian gentleman who arrived in this country (legally) in 1978 with $10 in his pocket and is now the CEO of his own company with a net worth of several million dollars and he is not the exception either. They don't call America the land of opportunity for nothing after all, but let's try and take your points one by one from the top.
It is true that poor people don't have 200k mortgages, but most people don't start out with these types of assets either so how do they acquire them? They save diligently and invest wisely what they can until they are in a position to make their move. It is all about priorities in life and if something is worth having and you want it bad enough then there are ways to make it happen. Remember what Andrew Carnegie used to say, "A quitter never wins and a winner never quits."
The medical care issue is a bit more complicated so I will not go into the full explanation here, but suffice it to say that the primary culprit in the escalating costs of our system is the third party payment system. Insurance normally insures you against the catastrophic loss. You insure your home against the hurricane, fire, flood, and not against the cost of mowing the lawn which you pay out of pocket. The basic point is that a third party will never spend your money as wisely or frugally as you might so is it any wonder that the costs continue to spiral out of control? Out of sight out of mind as they say. The real solution to this problem would be to first eliminate the tax credit on employer provided health care so that people have an incentive to purchase their own coverage and shop around for the best price on the coverage that they need and two for the government to massively cut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid which contribute to the escalating costs by giving the lawyers, drug companies, hospitals, and others direct access to the public purse. If these things were done then competition would reign and market forces would take care of our expensive healthcare. Of course, such a solution is not politically acceptable, but it bears mentioning the ideal scenario so that we can judge how well other plans do in addressing the basic problems. (and this was the short answer!)
Step away from your OWN flat panel TV and DVD rack long enough to go look outside your window for a moment. See that? That's the "real world". And it extends a bit beyond the middle-class suburban skyline that no doubt graces your view.
I do not own a television of any kind let alone a flat panel one (95% of television is a waste of time even from an entertainment perspective, but that is just my opinion) and I live in the real world too. The income which does not go towards meeting my immediate personal needs is either saved in my bank accounts or invested in my portfolio. There is nothing preventing anyone with the determination and willpower from saving and investing their money too. One does not need thousands of dollars to start saving and investing, again it is all about your priorities. It's called making a budget and balancing your checkbook and any normal person with even a high school education can do these things.
The view "Poor people are there because they are lazy/don't want to work/lack motivation/can't plan well" is almost always exclusively found in.. wait for it... people who AREN'T POOR. Try it yourself sometime before you make broad, sweeping, generalizations.
There is no suggestion of laziness or not working hard enough, in fact many poor people undoubtedly work extremely hard, but that is not the point. The point is that not everyone makes the best choices when it comes to spending the income they worked so hard to get. How many times have I seen people who are obviously working people driving souped up cars with spinner rims while talking on their $200 dollar cell phone, wearing name brand tennis shoes and obnoxious jewelry? Priorities, I cannot stress that enough...it all boils down to what it is that you want out of life and what are you willing to do to make it happen, but dont blame society for your own poor choices.
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I'm pretty sure there are fine programmers in India
There certainly are fine programmers available in India. The only problem is that they tend to cost nearly as much as comparable Americans what with all the salary inflation going on in the Indian software industry. There are only so many good engineers, even in a country the size of India, and not enough to satisfy the worldwide demand so naturally prices have been going up...to the tune of 10% or more each year with top talent getting headhunted constantly because of the "hot" market for good software talent in India. What is left after the good engineers have been bid up are the people who picked up their first learn to program VB book less than six months ago, but have an attitude that their "superior" Indian education, no doubt the legacy of the British way of thinking about education, completely prepared them for everything that they could ever need to know about software engineering in the real world. I have learned these truths from working with our outsourced teams and so I speak from firsthand experiences. There are surely good engineers in India, but they were too expensive for management's taste so they don't work for us.
Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two...
The human race is by its very nature violent. We would not have survived to become the dominant species on this planet if this were not so. The natural order of things among the other species on this planet is competitive, heirarchical, and selfish. There will always be people in this world who resort to violence as the final and ultimate court of appeal and thus there will always be a need for protection from that violence. Indeed, the entire order of our civilization, the polite and lawful society, is built upon that intrinsic threat of violence, up to and including deadly force. I understand where the pacifist is coming from and most people would agree that their goals are noble and worthy. However, we disagree on the means to best achieve those goals. If you want peace then prepare for war.
The character Col. Jessep from A Few Good Men said it best...
"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."
The detachable box magazine makes the weapon easier to clean and maintain, semi-automatic fire is a feature of almost all modern firearms with the exception of bolt action rifles and muzzle loaders, the pistol grip improves aim and allows a quick and controlled second shot (useful in many hunting situations), and flash suppressor/muzzle brake reduces recoil and flash again contributing to the utility of the aforementioned second shot. These are all legitimate and useful features and there is absolutely no reason, no reason at all, why a law abiding citizen should be denied his right to own this type of weapon. It is not the job of the government to ban outright activities, items, and lifestyles which are quietly enjoyed by law abiding citizens simply because a minority of people in society cannot handle adult responsibilities. As long as the activities of an individual law abiding citizen do not directly harm or impinge upon the rights of others then they should be allowed to do as they wish...it's a free country after all. You are of course free to disagree, but I for one do not want to live in a nanny society with the government carefully monitoring and regulating every detail of my existence.
The definition of an assault rifle is pretty clear-cut, IMHO. Any rifle capable of fully automatic fire.
.50), muzzle brake, etc. There is generally some clause that says if the gun has two or more features from the list of "assault rifle" features or if it is specifically named on the banned list then it is by definition an "assault rifle". Naturally the gun control advocates would like to expand the list to include as many features as they possibly can so that the widest possible range of useful civilian firearms are banned. I am not suggesting that everyone needs to own a .50 calibre belt-fed Browning machine gun, but why should an M-14 target rifle (a popular choice among enthusiasts), which has the detachable box magazine, semi-automatic fire, a portruding pistol grip, and a flash suppressor/muzzle brake be banned?
.22 calibre automatic pistol. Remarkably few crimes have been commited with .50 calibre bolt action rifles, or AK-47s, and the like and it is not because criminals respect the ban or couldn't get these weapons if they wanted to. The gun control people are mostly rude and disengenous in their arguments or at least the ones that I have encountered have been, while the gun owners are mostly polite, courteous, and intelligent in theirs. Draw your own conlcusions, but like so many other issues, upon which reasonable people should be able to compromise, this one has been turned into a political pissing match between the red states and the blue states by the advocates and their petty agendas.
:D
you would think so, but depending upon the state in which you live the definition can be much more strict, including such things as detachable magazine (regardless of the number of rounds it holds), portruding pistol grip, semi-automatic (just about every modern gun except for bolt action rifles), larger calibres (.308 and
Look at it from the criminals' perspective. What is the most desirable gun with which to commit a crime? Is the AK-47, the M-16, or the M-14 a good choice? All of these rifles are bulky, difficult to conceal, tough to wield in tight circumstances, and expensive when compared to the cheap likeable and disposable
As for fewer people...well the world could use a few less assholes
For example, a lot of people (I'd go so far as to say -most- people) think that assault rifles should be banned
The problem is that gun control advocates are manipulating the definition of "assault rifle" such that just about every modern firearm will run afoul of the definition and be banned. This is just another attempt to implement a backdoor ban. The police cannot be everywhere all of the time and just ask any hardened criminal what they would like more: a gun owning public or a passive, submissive, non-weapon carrying society with under funded and overworked police departments trying to pick up the slack. The right to defense of life and property is just that...a right. There would be fewer violent crimes and asshole loudmouths if all of the honest and law abiding citizens walking around were armed to the teeth.
I thought that signals intelligence gathering was one of the few types that the United States was really good at. I would be surprised if the NSA is not intercepting every single call on those disposable cell phones. The free e-mail accounts might take a bit more work to monitor, but surely the NSA could ask their buddies at AT&T and other backbone providers to intercept all of the emails coming out of Iraq and forward them on to the NSA for scanning into their Echelon system. If the insurgents are managing to elude our intelligence gathering efforts with disposable cell phones and hotmail then what does that say about our vaunted intelligence agencies? My tax dollars at work...or not as the case may be.
The state secrets or breach of national security intervention is surely the ultimate trump card for the government to squash legal proceedings before they reach their natural conclusion. While I believe that this power is necessary in extraordinary cases where the danger of immediate and irreparable harm is obvious, I also believe that it should be used in an extremely narrow and judicious fashion since the fallout (pun intended) from its frequent use would destroy the very democracy that the provision is designed to protect. Does anyone know of a case where a judge has NOT granted the request of the government for immediate suppression and dismissal under this statute?
1.21 Jigawatts! I suppose that in 1985 you can get plutonium at the corner store future boy, but here in 1955 it's a bit hard to come by!
There is one other possibility that has not been considered and that is that the break-in was organized by a foreign intelligence agency in an apparently successful operation to capture records relating to United States military personnel. If this is true then it ups the ante significantly because foreign intelligence agencies have the resources and expertise to organize these types of raids despite the best private security and especially if the operatives are willing to kill for the information. They could have infiltrated across the Mexican border, where security is sorely lacking, and gone anywhere in the US without attracting much attention. Most corporations do not employ the types of security measures that the military does and so they would probably be caught off guard by a commando style raid in the middle of the night. The night watchmen doesn't get paid enough to be killed over a couple of hard drives and all he saw were men in balaclavas before he was knocked over the head with the butt of an mp5 and tied up...you get the idea. This may have been a professional job.
I seem to recall that current stepping transformers broke the chain and caused any sort of data encoded on the line to be lost in the transition from higher to lower voltages. However, that was several years ago so perhaps someone has found away around this problem?
I would be interested to know how the dog distinguishes between a DVD and any other mailed product which contains plastic wrapping. Perhaps they are operating on the assumption that plastic wrapping materials of the type used to shrink wrap DVDs are not common in other types of mail. One also wonders how much of a dent this will actually make in the amount counterfeit DVDs and movie piracy in general. It was my understanding that bootleggers generally sell on the street, at swap meets, and other spontaneous social gatherings where the counterfeit goods are priced as impulse purchases at 1-2 dollars apiece. The rest are probably file sharing downloads of DVD rips to divx and such so how many bootleg DVDs, not orders from Amazon.com or NetFlix, are actually making their way through the mail system? It is probably insignificant.
I wonder if Nintendo is aware that in certain states here in the United States, namely New York and California although there may be others, the mere possession of nunchaku is illegal. These types of laws are of course utterly ridiculous, who would bother to use a nunchaku in a crime when they could use any number of other potential weapons up to and including a handgun, but they are on the books anyway. Probably due to some wrongheaded political gambit in an election year...they are bringing nunchaku to school so they we must totally ban the possession of two sticks joined with a string...wont somebody think of the children? You know the rest.
Fighting Arts - Nunchaku Illegal in New York
If they don't, they are dismissed with an airy 'well, its open source, we don't have to fix it - because anyone can'.
That is one of the tradeoffs with using source products. If you want new functionality then you must hire someone to create it for you, create it yourself, or beg the community to do it for you but you cannot expect people in the community to dance to your tune for nothing. If you want prompt turnaround on new features and you cannot wait for an interested party to get around to implementing it then you may be better off with a closed source software package where needs are more customer driven rather than what developers think is a cool or fun...Beggars can't be choosers as they sometimes say.
The way trademarks work, Walmart MUST try to defend their common-law trademark against a rogue trademark registration.
They obviously need to set the bar a bit higher than fill out some forms and pay a fee for potential registrants. Would it be unreasonable to ask that the person or corporation registering the mark show some proof of its pedigree?
generally, in a writing class, formal writing is taught.
It is interesting to hear you say this because I recall from my freshman writing courses that the subject matter was almost always informal or, to put it another way, not related in either style or substance to the more formalized writing that one uses in the business or technical environment excluding email with programming being the most formal writing of all. I was fortunate in that my writing skills were not as poor as those of my peers coming out of high school, but I must confess that I was often completely disinterested in the materials that were presented as a normal part of the required coursework. The writing topics struck me as being out of touch with the life experience of the average student and motivated by a sickening undercurrent of political correctness that smacked of liberal intellectual philosophy. If the goal is to teach students to improve their writing skills then it would be nice to have a couple of topic choices for each assignment so that the subject matter does not interfere with the primary objective. The basic problem in most college writing courses is that engineers, while highly intelligent and motivated, tend to favor the systematic and logical approach to problem solving at the expense of the creative and human reasoning solution. Some might say that this also explains why there are few attractive women in most engineering schools and why engineers can write software, modify complex machinery, and solve differential equations, but are unable to hold a non-professional conversation with an attractive female or male (although true female nerds are rare indeed). If you want to reach the engineers in your class then you will have to emphasize the grammar, sentence structure, and organization rules at the risk of possibly loosing the non-engineering students. Remember that engineers revel in logically complex rule-based systems and are generally very good abstract thinkers so what would normally fail for a non-engineering student, emphasis on grammar and rules, is precisely the approach that engineers understand and appreciate. The trick will be to strike the correct balance so that the engineers do not simply check out when they are in your writing class. Unfortunately, many college writing courses, and mine were no exception, are stacked against the engineering students because the people that teach them, for the most part, do not understand how best to teach engineers.
In a commercial setting you wouldn't own your batteries, you'd lease them, and simply stop for a tray switch when needed, taking no more time than a gas fill up.
What about the weight of these battery trays? There are enough people out there now who are barely physically able enough to pull the pump nozzle off the island, insert it into their fuel system, and squeeze the handle to pump the gas. You could have attendants to load and unload battery trays I suppose, but then you are talking about increased employee costs for all of the attendants.
The infamous Rocket Car story always specifies a late 1960s Chevy Impala as the pilot's first choice...
"But despite all these oversights, the story did specify that the car was a 1967 Chevy Impala. I think the reason this detail is always supplied is because it's critical to make the listener think the test pilot at least looked cool when he flew into the cliff. You'll never hear someone tell a story about a guy in a rocket-powered K-car or a Volkswagen Beetle. It has to be a car that deserves to have a rocket attached to it."
The Rocket Car Legend
If the RIAA wants the university to filter their network to protect their copyrights and their bottom line then they should pay the university for all of the network equipment, bandwidth, employee/consultant hours, and any other expenses necessary to conduct the filtering. The mission of any university is to provide higher education and policing the student body so that a private industry organization, which is entirely external to the mission of the university, will not suffer from potential loss of profits is NOT the responsibility of the university. The question is not whether file sharing is legal, but rather to what extent the university can be compelled to shoulder the cost of protecting the intellectual property of someone else, especially in the expensive and escalating arms race between the RIAA and the file sharers. If the university makes a good faith effort to inform students in their acceptable use policy what is and is not acceptable use and complies with reasonable and specific subpoenas (subject to reasonable charges for research, copies, and other legal expenses that any other civil plaintiff would have to pay) the I would say that they (the university) have satisfied their obligation under the law. If the RIAA et al wants more extensive monitoring then they can shell out the $100,000+ for extra servers and network monitoring gear along with the consultants to operate it all and the university employees' time (billed at least $100 per hour for interruption of normal university related duties). They cannot compel us to pay to protect THEIR property, only the government has the power to tax. Anyway, no other private business gets anywhere near the cooperation from law enforcement at the expense of the tax paying public and still they complain. The FBI should be traking down the identity thieves, terrorists, serial killers, and other really nasty criminals...not wasting their time busting copyright infringers on behalf of the entertainment industry. The RIAA should get off our campuses and they should take their craptastic "music" with them.
"They also pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue."
I meant income tax, but I probably should have qualified that specifically to satisfy the legalists amongst us who wish to score a minor point that is not essential to the central thrust of the argument. The parent was implying that the wealthiest 5% of the population do not pay their "fair share" As for the social security caps, remember that the original intent of the social security system was to provide a hedge against your individual risk of living in poverty in old age. It was NOT meant to be a full pension retirement system nor were you supposed to be responsible for other people's amounts just because you lead a more successful life. Higher incomes pay higher rates in part because what one person considers to be poverty is another persons acceptable standard of living. The social security system was an attempt, misguided though it has turned out to be, to force people to help themselves prepare for the expenses of old age at a standard of living that they could be satisified with based upon the standards that they had earned/enjoyed during their working lives.
Sigh...very well let us walk through some of the points made in your linked comment:
Fortunately, health care has no relationship whatsoever to other commercial industries. Customers don't shop for health care. The amount of specialized knowledge you'd need to compare the providers of every kind of care is beyond the reach of any single human being.
This is true, but it does not preclude you from making the best decision that you can with the information that is available to you. There are very few transactions in the real world where both the buyers and the sellers have perfect information about all factors which may affect the deal. However, this does not always cause people to vacillate and do nothing. Depending upon the size of the purchase and its relative importance to your life you spend some time considering what information is available to you, you weigh your options, and then you make a decision. It would be hard for you as an individual to do much worse than having a third party, whose best interests are not your own, make that decision for you and then spend your money foolishly in the face of rising costs.
If you wait until you need a particular care; you usually need it immediately, which precludes comparison shopping. You can always walk away from a bad car salesman, but if you're bleeding to death you don't have much negotiating power if the hospital tells you it is $3,000 for admittance.
This is why insurance exists. You purchase insurance to mitigate unavoidable risks which may cause you to incur massive costs during a painful and stressful time of your life. You do not negotiate with the hospital while your are bleeding to death in the emergency room. You purchase insurance ahead of time so that you have the certainty of NOT having to do such things under duress. More importantly you save for this expense which is why the health savings accounts recently enacted by Congress are a terrific idea. You save up enough ahead of time to meet your high deductible and your insurance pays the rest in the case of catastrophic injury or unanticipated long term care.
Health care needs no advertising -- Insurance companies aren't spending billions of dollars on commercials so that people know there is such a thing available and they should buy some. All they're doing is taking customers from each other and money away from actual care. In the computer business, that would be fine, since a smaller transistor size on the manufacturing side or broader market on the customer side can make up for the marketing expenses, but I can assure you that there's nobody having heart attacks with health care advertising that wouldn't have had one already (or vice-versa). State Farm isn't developing any top-secret surgical procedures that Allstate won't have access to.
The insurance companies are not competing to provide you better health care directly, but rather to provide you with a more competitively priced risk premium. Competition among insurance agencies, as long as they can meet federal requirements for assets vs. ongoing expenses, is a good thing.
Incentive to improve is omnipresent since Death is a far more efficient competitor than Microsoft or State Farm. Death has no overhead, he's penetrated every market segment and is very efficient at finding new opportunities for development. Death works 24/7 -- even on holidays! No matter how good insurance and health care are, there will always be real and constant pressure on them to improve.
At the end of the day, death, like any other insurable loss can be quantified directly into a finite dollar amount on the bottom line. It creates no greater incentive than the prospect of any other similar sized loss. In fact, in the case of healthcare death may even be preferable for the insurance company because they no longer have to pay for expensive long term care once you have died, unless of course you have your life insurance policy with the same company, but even then they h
Well the people who produced all those studies that have shown that real wages have dropped significantly in the last 30 years would love to know what methodology you used in your study that invalidates theirs.
The real wages, or those adjusted for inflation, purchase, relatively speaking, more goods and services today than they did 30 years ago, just ask anyone loading up the SUV in the Walmart parking lot who worked during the 1970s if they could have bought nearly as much back then for the same amount, relatively speaking, of inflation adjusted money. The real wages my have dropped, but that was not my point. The real question is what does your money buy? If I could have five dollars more in my pocket but at the cost of everything being five times more expensive then what difference would it make if I had more money because it wouldn't buy as much.
Seems like it should be at least 60%, don't you think?
I suppose that depends upon what one considers to be a "fair share", but remember that high taxes create disincentives for saving and in the end everyone could be worse off. You may achieve a society where nobody lives in abject poverty, but neither will anyone be living much above that line either so that is a tremendous dead weight loss to society in terms of wasted resources and potential...the proverbial nanny state with 90% taxes and no incentive to do anything because it makes no difference either way. I don't know about you but equal subsistence is not my idea of an ideal society.
That's a matter of opinion. If that was really true then the Republicans wouldn't bitch about "redistributing" wealth anytime anybody wanted to restore a sane tax rate structure.
It may be true that misery loves company, but do you really want to accept a lower standard of living just so that other people, including yourself, who might do better with lower taxes, would share that same lower standard of living? That sounds like cutting off ones nose to spite ones face.
This statement gives you away as someone who grew up with money and has no idea what it's like to barely make it. Just like nearly all Americans have no concept of going to bed hungry, you cannot have any concept of living from paycheck to paycheck (although I guarantee that's not going to stop you from talking about it).
What is with you liberals and the Ad Hominem attack? I will admit that I grew up in a middle class home, but I can tell you that my parents had some tight months when my brother and I were growing up and especially in their earlier years when our family was just starting out. Fortunately, my parents were kind enough to shield those facts from their grade school aged children so that we would not be worried unnecessarily. There was no Nintendo entertainment system in our home and I didn't always wear the most fashionable tennis shoes or the latest style clothing, but there was food on the table and work ethic in our home. If you were truly part of the bottom 5% who live in abject poverty, like they do in parts the Appalachian mountains back east, when you were growing up then you have my sympathy and I believe that the government should help those people, if for no other reason than to return them to productivity in our society, but I was by no means a rich man's son born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I know what it means to work for a living.
Sorry, but I just don't buy that. I personally know an Indian gentleman who arrived in this country (legally) in 1978 with $10 in his pocket and is now the CEO of his own company with a net worth of several million dollars and he is not the exception either. They don't call America the land of opportunity for nothing after all, but let's try and take your points one by one from the top.
It is true that poor people don't have 200k mortgages, but most people don't start out with these types of assets either so how do they acquire them? They save diligently and invest wisely what they can until they are in a position to make their move. It is all about priorities in life and if something is worth having and you want it bad enough then there are ways to make it happen. Remember what Andrew Carnegie used to say, "A quitter never wins and a winner never quits."
The medical care issue is a bit more complicated so I will not go into the full explanation here, but suffice it to say that the primary culprit in the escalating costs of our system is the third party payment system. Insurance normally insures you against the catastrophic loss. You insure your home against the hurricane, fire, flood, and not against the cost of mowing the lawn which you pay out of pocket. The basic point is that a third party will never spend your money as wisely or frugally as you might so is it any wonder that the costs continue to spiral out of control? Out of sight out of mind as they say. The real solution to this problem would be to first eliminate the tax credit on employer provided health care so that people have an incentive to purchase their own coverage and shop around for the best price on the coverage that they need and two for the government to massively cut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid which contribute to the escalating costs by giving the lawyers, drug companies, hospitals, and others direct access to the public purse. If these things were done then competition would reign and market forces would take care of our expensive healthcare. Of course, such a solution is not politically acceptable, but it bears mentioning the ideal scenario so that we can judge how well other plans do in addressing the basic problems. (and this was the short answer!)
Step away from your OWN flat panel TV and DVD rack long enough to go look outside your window for a moment. See that? That's the "real world". And it extends a bit beyond the middle-class suburban skyline that no doubt graces your view.
I do not own a television of any kind let alone a flat panel one (95% of television is a waste of time even from an entertainment perspective, but that is just my opinion) and I live in the real world too. The income which does not go towards meeting my immediate personal needs is either saved in my bank accounts or invested in my portfolio. There is nothing preventing anyone with the determination and willpower from saving and investing their money too. One does not need thousands of dollars to start saving and investing, again it is all about your priorities. It's called making a budget and balancing your checkbook and any normal person with even a high school education can do these things.
The view "Poor people are there because they are lazy/don't want to work/lack motivation/can't plan well" is almost always exclusively found in.. wait for it... people who AREN'T POOR. Try it yourself sometime before you make broad, sweeping, generalizations.
There is no suggestion of laziness or not working hard enough, in fact many poor people undoubtedly work extremely hard, but that is not the point. The point is that not everyone makes the best choices when it comes to spending the income they worked so hard to get. How many times have I seen people who are obviously working people driving souped up cars with spinner rims while talking on their $200 dollar cell phone, wearing name brand tennis shoes and obnoxious jewelry? Priorities, I cannot stress that enough...it all boils down to what it is that you want out of life and what are you willing to do to make it happen, but dont blame society for your own poor choices.