> And this may be slightly off topic, but what I see here is a poker chip Hollings can use to get his other bill passed. A few people really interested in seeing this thing become law, but that aren't too crazy about the CBDTPA, may be persuaded to compromise.
Interesting. Maybe I'm wearing tinfoil, but I see it as a missing piece of the CBDTPA puzzle.
I travelled into the future, in which President Hollings passed CBDTPA and this privacy bill by executive order, and brought back the following opt-out notice. Due to a mixup involving a cup of really hot tea and a hyperbogonic matter converter, all the legal obfuscations were accidentally translated, not just into plain English, but into truthful statements:
"Hi, we're your ISP. Unless you opt out, we're going to sell patterns of your usage to people willing to pay us enough money.
The fact that we're AOL/TW (part of the Content Cartel), and Eisner offered us $100 per name for a qualified list of 'people who have an interest in downloading movies' based on our logs of traffic over P2P networks or USENET', and that subpoena you got last week is merely a coincidence.
If you don't like the way we do business, you can take your business elsewhere, such as MSN. This will, of course, keep Valenti off your back, but will do nothing to stop the BSA (funded by Microsoft) from purchasing a targeted list of 'people likely to be interested in receiving information about software licensing' based on MSN's recent broadcast of packets and analysis of TCP/IP sequence numbers, cross-linking subscriber machines that appear to be running Windows, but who don't appear in Microsoft's customer list. This, too, is a meaningless coincidence.
You may also consider taking your business to Earthlink, but some who do will be getting some very strange marketing materials, given the nature of the company that's continually seeking qualified leads for 'internet users with an interest in expensive sci-fi religions involving Galactic Emperors named Xenu, and/or any customers interested in eating clams at beachfront social gatherings.'
> BSA: We need to see licenses for all your software. > Me: This is an open source shop, but if you tell me which open source license you would like to see... > BSA: We at least need you to run this auditing software. > Me: Hmmm, seems kinda pointless, but what the hell. Do you have a Linux version? > BSA: No. You will have to remove your Linux OS and install an MS based OS that we do support. > Me: You want me to do what?!? Get the !&@$#%*@$%^& outta my sight!
You left out a part...
BSA: "Step away from the computer. We're installing our auditing tool. Huh? Linucks? What's this gear doing where the Start menu should be?" (power-cycles machine)
You: "Hey, what are you doing with that DOS boot floppy?"
BSA: FDISK... FORMAT C:/S...
~ two hours later ~
BSA: Finally, I've installed Windows ME. Now I can install and run the audit tool.
You: YOU BASTARD! YOU JUST REFORMATTED MY DEVELOPMENT WORKSTATION WITH TWO WEEKS OF MY WORK ON IT!
BSA: Relax, Mr. Willow, your audit was pretty clean. Everything seems to be in order on your network, except you have one unlicensed copy of Windows ME. Please pay $10,000 in fines or face one criminal charge of copyright infringement.
> This may be a attempt to fund this sort of abuse by instituting a Zero Tolerance confiscation rule like they do with drugs. Got a MP3 Player in your car? Your busted and they sell it at auction.
1) Hilary Rosen gets Zero Tolerance law.
2) Cops seize your iPod with 5G of tunes.
3) Cops sell it at auction or dump contents to the precinct's MP3 server.
4) Either way, Hilary Rosen sues local police for $100B.
5) Not just "Profit!", but world domination, one small town at a time!
(On the other hand, if there's an immunity for cops in posession of MP3s and MP3 playback devices, our cyber-security problem is solved, because every geek in the country will have to work for law enforcement:)
> The 1040 is not as bad as I think it once was, so maybe this just means that the IRS has done a good job, not that EULAs are that bad.
All it means that the 1040 is still two pages long.
Of course, every line on the 1040 requires either a 10-line worksheet that's buried in the 200-page tax guide, or the filling out of another two-page form with its own lines, each of those which require worksheets, etc. etc. etc.
The 1040's easy. A 20-page 1040 would also be easy. The current mess - a 2-page 1040, and pages of extra work to figure out which subset of 2-page forms apply to your particular situation - is what makes the people of this country spend 10% of their tax burden on CPAs.
Just think, Washington could abolish the Internal Revenue Code, create something new and simple, jack up taxes by 5%, and the people would still have 5% more money in their pockets.
(The legions of tax lawyers and accountants would all be out of work however. Since Congress is run by lawyers... gee, what a surprise...)
> I don't trust the Chinese People's Army at all, but I trust the CIA even less. Which has done more real harm in the world? Pretty close call.
Huh? I think the comparable levels of real-world harm are so far away from "pretty close" as to have a red shift due to cosmological expansion.
I mean, unless there are 40-45 million people dead that we've somehow managed not to notice in the past 50 years.
You wanna knock the Cultural Revolution casualties down to just the ~2 million actually executed, ignoring the ~10M who "died of natural causes" in the labor camps, and the ~30M who died from starvation... well, fine, but I'll still take my chances with the CIA;-)
> Let me put it another way: Only eight guys in eight planes had to risk their lives, and they only had to do it once, 20 years ago, in order to prevent millions of casualties.
Addendum:
My original point - that intelligence is probably the greatest force multiplier possible - remains.
It's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I'd have been remiss, however, if I didn't also credit the unknown number of intel guys who also risked their lives to make it possible for eight pilots to save millions.
> Why the need for "intel" -- aside from military adventuring, dissent suppression, and occasional government-overthrowing?
Geez, I like AMD too, but Andy Grove isn't that powerful:)
Seriously - how about finding out about people who Really Don't Like Us, and Kicking their Asses before they can kick ours?
You may not have noticed, but there are some people out there who Really Don't Like Us. Some of them are pretty open about not liking us. They wave flags and rant and rave in peaceful demonstrations. But some of them keep quiet about not liking us, and you don't find out about them until they fly a plane through a building, by which time it's a bit late, especially for the people in the plane (and the people in the building, for that matter).
I happen to be among those who believes that the people in the latter group rather desperately need their Asses Kicked, and that infiltrating and exposing such groups is a good way to Kick those Asses.
Sun Tzu knew that most wars are won before the first battle is fought, and that the best way to win a war is never to need to fight one in the first place. I'd paraphrase that by suggesting that if you can keep your adversary sufficiently off-balance (through the Kicking of Only the Very Few Asses that Really Need to be Kicked), you can defer war indefinitely.
Good intelligence (whether CIA or Mossad, the point is immaterial) allowed the Israelis to find out about Saddam's nuclear weapons programme. In 1981, eight Israeli F-16s to attack an Iraqi nuclear reactor. During the raid, ONE technician at the reactor was reported killed.
As a result of that raid 20 years ago, Saddam's nuke programme was set back by years; he had no nuke to drop on Tel Aviv during the Gulf War. In all probability, he still has no nukes.
Good intelligence meant that one guy got fragged (by accident) in 1981, but millions of casualties were averted in 1991, and if the US goes after Iraq in the near future, millions of casualties may yet be averted.
Let me put it another way: Only eight guys in eight planes had to risk their lives, and they only had to do it once, 20 years ago, in order to prevent millions of casualties.
You might want to think about those kinds of numbers the next time you ask "what has intelligence done for us?"
> Another good point -- what do the NSA do for anyone? Surely all the smart people doing cryptanalysis and whatnot for them could be doing something more constructive.
Ummm... you mean, like strengthening DES against differential analysis by tweaking the S-boxes when nobody (not even IBM, which invented it) outside NSA knew about it?
Remember - NSA isn't just about 0wning the other d00dz - they're also in the business of making it harder for other d00dz to 0wn j00.
Ironic that there's also an NYTimes article on a proposed New York City recycling halt.
That's right - even in a densely-packed metropolis like NYC, where you don't have to haul small amounts of junk halfway across the state to recycle it, the "blue box" types of curbside recycling are big eaters of tax dollars.
Apart from paper (which is marginal), most plastics/glass, while recyclable, aren't recyclable at a profit.
If you want to recycle, you can either pay a tax at the point of purchase (like the one being discussed for computers), or in the form of higher bills for waste disposal and property taxes (like the "recycling programs" at the municipal level.
Of course, nowhere is the notion of "Hey, how about just stuff it into landfills, because we don't want to pay more" ever discussed. Funny, that.
Why not just make recycling voluntary? Those who want to "help save the cute fluffy bunnies" can pay market rates to dispose of their waste in an environmentally-friendly manner, and those of us who don't give a rat's ass can just dump it. (Hey, if you enviro-types really believed that recycling stuff - even at a net energy loss - why aren't you buying landfills, digging them up, and recycling them with your own money?:-)
Interesting note - apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics". Newsprint is about the only commodity for which recycling makes sense (on either an energy-use or a dollar-cost basis)
Let's see, the $25-35 per "computer" (CRT? Case? Motherboard? Individual card?) tax goes to funding a recycling programme.
If that meant I could plunk my old box on the sidewalk and let it be picked up by the recyclers (garbage crew, because it ain't recyclable), sure.
But what do you want to bet that "since there's a recycling programme, we can ban picking it up at the curbside", the way they have in California?
In other words, I pay the tax, and I still can't throw away the boat anchor? The only difference I can see here is that some preferred contractor gets a cushy pork-barrel project.
> Seeing as Scientology fits all the classic signs of a cult, why has it not been properly labled and dealt with? Simply reclassifying it properly would give law enforcement agencies much greater access to investigate and prosecute abuses within the "church" of Scientology and would serve to protect the members from themselves.
I believe the only reason they were awarded "religious" tax-exempt status with the IRS is because of a denial-of-service attack against the IRS, using individually-filed spurious tax claims as weapons.
As I understand the story outlined in the pages I linked to above, "individual $cientologists" (that is, cult members, under directions from superior officers) filed thousands of lawsuits (that is, individual lawsuits, not a class action suit) against the IRS. The cost to the taxpayer of defeating each of these suits, one by one, would have been prohibitive. As a result, the IRS granted the cult tax-exempt status in a deal whose details are, shall we say, ethically-suspect.
The tactic of using a DDoS-by-lawyer is straight out of cult doctrine: "The purpose of a lawsuit is to harass, not to win".
I'll also add - depending on where she lived, between 1m and 3m resolution satellite photos of her home.
Always freaks 'em out when I say "So, is your room on the side of the house facing the row of trees, or do you wake up looking at that ugly apartment block across the street?"
> Simple example: You, known to be a single guy, are regularly seen walking down the street and entering the home of another known single guy.
What inference is readily drawn from that? Who might put it to use in a fashion that might negatively impact both of you, regardless of the facts?
Obviously, we're faggots, busily offending the sensibilities of victorian society behind closed doors.
Of course, if we had a transparent society - in which all our personal data were available to anyone who'd care to look - they'd realize that we're just a couple of heterosexual geeks having a small LAN party. (We both read Slashdot, but he's the only one within 13000 feet of the CO.)
Of course, since such a meeting would also be conducive to things that would offend the sensibilities of RIAA and MPAA executives, and the penalties for that are far worse, maybe it's better that the security apparatus doesn't know what goes on behind modded cases:)
> How long to learn how to h4x0r an unpatched IIS server they came across while surfing?
I owe my career - my life - to this sort of experiment, except that at the time, nobody knew it was an experiment.
My first encounter with a computer was on a "professional activity day" - the teachers take the day off to eat donuts (the professional activity), and the kids get the day off school.
My folks, unable to find a babysitter that day, took me to work. Mom worked in a place with an Apple ][ that was used to do data entry and run rudimentary statistical analyses.
I was left alone in an office at age 10ish with a computer and two complete strangers.
Stranger: "How 'bout playing with the computer?"
Me: "What do you do with it?"
Stranger: [wanting the kid to stop bugging her so she could get some work done] "Well, we use it to enter our test data. You might want to try those books in the bottom shelf."
Me: [Picks up an Applesoft BASIC guide, concludes that "programming them" is what one does with "computers", and doesn't say a word for the rest of the day]. I was hooked by that afternoon. Went through the book that day, then hit the campus bookstore, bought a magazine with some programs you could type in, came back and "played with it" on the rare occasions I could.
A year (only about 6 "professional activity days", and maybe a couple of hours a week during the summer holiday) later, and I'd found the monitor ROM and was experimenting with 6502 assembly.
So in answer to your question - probably about 6 months, tops.
> Rob the common man to give to the Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Where is Robin Hood when you need him?
Robin Hood isn't the cure, he's the disease.
He robs from the rich to give to the poor. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.
And who better to do the robbing than the Sherriff Davis of Nottingham himself, dressed in green tights, pretending that he and he alone - knows who hasn't paid his "fair share"?
> If a non-governmental entity made this mistake do you think the state of California would come to their rescue?
Of course not, nor should they!
> Those of you who are hammering government for wasteful spending should remember how many dot com companies with stupid ideas have died over the last two years, largely because of their inability to understand that money doesn't grow on trees...
But the dot-coms are dead - an excellent object lesson in capitalism - if you spend dollars on stuff to make things that nobody wants to trade dollars for, eventually you run out of dollars, and the problem of stupid spending decisions is self-limiting.
But the dot-govs aren't dead - they continue to take more money - because, for them, the money does grow on trees. You work for it, you earn it, they spend it on crap they don't need, and then, when they realize they screwed up with it, they know they can always take more of it next year to make up for what they wasted this year.
> as far as I am concerned the only thing that can limit the excesses of the megarich is government.
Body count from corporate excess, last 100 years: Tens of thousands. (Bhopal, etc.)
Body count from government excess, last 100 years: Tens of millions. (Independent of political alignment, whether communist or fascist)
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that can limit the excesses of government are the megarich, and I'd much rather deal with the excesses of the megarich ("Bill Gates has a really big house, and Larry Ellison has a really fast yacht!") than the excesses of state power.
Enron was fraud, plain and simple. Fraud isn't commerce. The government had every right to step into the Enron/accounting mess, kick ass, and take names.
The problem isn't that government taxes you for police, roads, fire departments, armies, and the SEC. The problem is the rest of the stuff that they also tax you for, and that the private sector has a brake (called "bankruptcy") on excessive spending, and the government doesn't.
> The last thing the world needs is thousands of delusional psychopathics geeks!!!
C'mon, the only hope any of us ever had of being millionaires was the dot-com boom - and what was that, other than what happens when you put thousands of delusional psychopathic geeks in the same room with thousands of delusional psychopathic venture capitalists and offer shares to millions of delusional psychopathic day traders?
If that was delusional psychopathy, I want it back!
They're right, Silicon Valley will go crazy over this thing. I was reading the article and figured "To hell with work, I could use something like that for all-night Civ3 marathons. I could, like, play for three days straight! That sounds like fun."
Prediction: If it works and the side-effects turn out to be manageable, within a few years, this'll be taken off the prescription schedule and sold over-the-counter just like Vivarin, No-Doz, and sleeping pills.
Skeptic's Take: That said, the article gushes pretty poetic about this. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that this article is part of a PR campaign.
By the time it's available over-the-counter, though, it probably won't matter, as by that time, the risks and side-effects will be pretty well documented. I'm lookin' forward to it.
> This would rule out most nanny cams. The issue would be where the camera is located and if the intent is to get intimate video. Now, if your baby sitter has sex on the sofa, after the baby is sleeping....
Well, since you didn't have the intent to capture the naughty deed with your hidden cam, you're OK under the new law.
Of course, if either the babysitter or her partner is under 18, you're probably fux0r3d no matter what:-)
I can see the court case under the new law already. "Your Honor, Mr. Jones is clearly guilty. My client, Bunny the Babysitter, has testified that and her partner had been leaving damp spots on the couch for months, so Mr. Jones must have known in advance what he was gonna see when he set up the camera."
(Actually, I was originally going for a +1, Funny, but I may have a point here -- if you suspect your babysitter is mistreating your sprog or stealing your silverware, the best place for a nanny cam probably isn't "hidden in the VCR and pointing at the couch", it's "hidden in a light fixture overlooking the crib" or "pointing at the silverware closet".)
He said it by implication - just as you point out yourself.
> If you think about it, a GOOD professional at a higher wage can do the work of 2 lackeys at a lower wage. This may SAVE money.
Exactly, and in the private sector, you'd do just that - hire one smart guy at $50000 to do the work of two $30000 lackeys, fire the lackeys, and save yourself $10 grand.
But in the public sector...
> The problem with government is that every time spending is increased, it is never decreased.
Departments only have to justify NEW spending, not the old. Now you end up with bloated useless government full of people doing useless jobs that nobody cares about just because funding was given 30 years ago for a long since depreciated need.
...the poster's proposal would merely mean the hiring of one guy at $50000, and the retention of the two $30000 drones, for a net cost of $110,000.
You then either run a $50000 deficit (i.e. issue $50000 worth of bonds and get the money back, plus interest, from the taxpayers when the bonds mature), or you raise taxes by $50000. Either way, the practical effect is that the taxpayer foots the bill.
Actually, I agree with you that my post up there probably wasn't worthy of a 4. A 3, tops. I don't generally follow campaign finance - which is why I asked if there was a connection between any Ellison-funded PACs and the Davis campaign. I figured someone would point me in the right direction - thanks for finding the info. As you point out, Oracle/Ellison doesn't show up in the top 25.)
As for bias, sure, I'm biased. I believe that Davis views his time as Governor of California as nothing more than a fundraising venue for an upcoming Presidential bid. I believe that's wrong from the point of view of providing sound management to Californians.
I further believe that when a politician starts to blather about how "the rich" aren't paying "their fair share", that they're looking to jack up taxes on the middle class to spend on their own pet projects.
In 1999 we reached at the point, federally, where the bottom 50% of the income curve pays 4% of the taxes, yet can outvote the top 50% of the income curve footing the other 96% of the bill. I believe that to be a recipe for long-term disaster for prudent fiscal policy - regardless of the party in power.
Finally, I believe that Davis' track record of mismanagement (MTBE will save the environment, bring it in! No, MTBE is bad, take it out! Each time, gouging oil companies for campaign funds with threatened legislation. Big power companies are gouging you! Let's sign long-term contracts that'll bankrupt us! No, that'll bankrupt them! No, let's bail 'em out!) speaks for itself.
I admire and respect Davis' skills as a master fundraiser and shrewd politician. His attacks on Riordan in the Republican primaries have given him a much easier opponent, as he can characterize Simon as "a millionaire", which rings very strongly as "an evil person" with his voting base. I don't for an instant think Simon has a hope in hell of unseating him.
(Of course, I don't think Riordan would have won either. At least the Davis/Simon matchup will be fun to watch this fall. A Davis/Riordan battle would have put me to sleep. So I'm actually looking forward to the this fall, as the campaign promises to be a great old-fashioned slugfest of ideas. I'm stocking up on popcorn and potato chips as I speak:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. Maybe I'm wearing tinfoil, but I see it as a missing piece of the CBDTPA puzzle.
I travelled into the future, in which President Hollings passed CBDTPA and this privacy bill by executive order, and brought back the following opt-out notice. Due to a mixup involving a cup of really hot tea and a hyperbogonic matter converter, all the legal obfuscations were accidentally translated, not just into plain English, but into truthful statements:
> Me: This is an open source shop, but if you tell me which open source license you would like to see...
> BSA: We at least need you to run this auditing software.
> Me: Hmmm, seems kinda pointless, but what the hell. Do you have a Linux version?
> BSA: No. You will have to remove your Linux OS and install an MS based OS that we do support.
> Me: You want me to do what?!? Get the !&@$#%*@$%^& outta my sight!
You left out a part...
BSA: "Step away from the computer. We're installing our auditing tool. Huh? Linucks? What's this gear doing where the Start menu should be?" (power-cycles machine)
You: "Hey, what are you doing with that DOS boot floppy?"
BSA: FDISK... FORMAT C: /S...
~ two hours later ~
BSA: Finally, I've installed Windows ME. Now I can install and run the audit tool.
You: YOU BASTARD! YOU JUST REFORMATTED MY DEVELOPMENT WORKSTATION WITH TWO WEEKS OF MY WORK ON IT!
BSA: Relax, Mr. Willow, your audit was pretty clean. Everything seems to be in order on your network, except you have one unlicensed copy of Windows ME. Please pay $10,000 in fines or face one criminal charge of copyright infringement.
1) Hilary Rosen gets Zero Tolerance law.
2) Cops seize your iPod with 5G of tunes.
3) Cops sell it at auction or dump contents to the precinct's MP3 server.
4) Either way, Hilary Rosen sues local police for $100B.
5) Not just "Profit!", but world domination, one small town at a time!
(On the other hand, if there's an immunity for cops in posession of MP3s and MP3 playback devices, our cyber-security problem is solved, because every geek in the country will have to work for law enforcement :)
All it means that the 1040 is still two pages long.
Of course, every line on the 1040 requires either a 10-line worksheet that's buried in the 200-page tax guide, or the filling out of another two-page form with its own lines, each of those which require worksheets, etc. etc. etc.
The 1040's easy. A 20-page 1040 would also be easy. The current mess - a 2-page 1040, and pages of extra work to figure out which subset of 2-page forms apply to your particular situation - is what makes the people of this country spend 10% of their tax burden on CPAs.
Just think, Washington could abolish the Internal Revenue Code, create something new and simple, jack up taxes by 5%, and the people would still have 5% more money in their pockets.
(The legions of tax lawyers and accountants would all be out of work however. Since Congress is run by lawyers... gee, what a surprise...)
Huh? I think the comparable levels of real-world harm are so far away from "pretty close" as to have a red shift due to cosmological expansion.
I mean, unless there are 40-45 million people dead that we've somehow managed not to notice in the past 50 years.
You wanna knock the Cultural Revolution casualties down to just the ~2 million actually executed, ignoring the ~10M who "died of natural causes" in the labor camps, and the ~30M who died from starvation... well, fine, but I'll still take my chances with the CIA ;-)
Addendum:
My original point - that intelligence is probably the greatest force multiplier possible - remains.
It's bad form to reply to one's own post, but I'd have been remiss, however, if I didn't also credit the unknown number of intel guys who also risked their lives to make it possible for eight pilots to save millions.
Geez, I like AMD too, but Andy Grove isn't that powerful :)
Seriously - how about finding out about people who Really Don't Like Us, and Kicking their Asses before they can kick ours?
You may not have noticed, but there are some people out there who Really Don't Like Us. Some of them are pretty open about not liking us. They wave flags and rant and rave in peaceful demonstrations. But some of them keep quiet about not liking us, and you don't find out about them until they fly a plane through a building, by which time it's a bit late, especially for the people in the plane (and the people in the building, for that matter).
I happen to be among those who believes that the people in the latter group rather desperately need their Asses Kicked, and that infiltrating and exposing such groups is a good way to Kick those Asses.
Sun Tzu knew that most wars are won before the first battle is fought, and that the best way to win a war is never to need to fight one in the first place. I'd paraphrase that by suggesting that if you can keep your adversary sufficiently off-balance (through the Kicking of Only the Very Few Asses that Really Need to be Kicked), you can defer war indefinitely.
Good intelligence (whether CIA or Mossad, the point is immaterial) allowed the Israelis to find out about Saddam's nuclear weapons programme. In 1981, eight Israeli F-16s to attack an Iraqi nuclear reactor. During the raid, ONE technician at the reactor was reported killed.
As a result of that raid 20 years ago, Saddam's nuke programme was set back by years; he had no nuke to drop on Tel Aviv during the Gulf War. In all probability, he still has no nukes.
Good intelligence meant that one guy got fragged (by accident) in 1981, but millions of casualties were averted in 1991, and if the US goes after Iraq in the near future, millions of casualties may yet be averted.
Let me put it another way: Only eight guys in eight planes had to risk their lives, and they only had to do it once, 20 years ago, in order to prevent millions of casualties.
You might want to think about those kinds of numbers the next time you ask "what has intelligence done for us?"
> Another good point -- what do the NSA do for anyone? Surely all the smart people doing cryptanalysis and whatnot for them could be doing something more constructive.
Ummm... you mean, like strengthening DES against differential analysis by tweaking the S-boxes when nobody (not even IBM, which invented it) outside NSA knew about it?
Remember - NSA isn't just about 0wning the other d00dz - they're also in the business of making it harder for other d00dz to 0wn j00.
You mean when Bush said "The Chinese have Chomskybot and are not afraid to use 'em against Slashdotters?" ;-)
That's right - even in a densely-packed metropolis like NYC, where you don't have to haul small amounts of junk halfway across the state to recycle it, the "blue box" types of curbside recycling are big eaters of tax dollars.
Apart from paper (which is marginal), most plastics/glass, while recyclable, aren't recyclable at a profit.
If you want to recycle, you can either pay a tax at the point of purchase (like the one being discussed for computers), or in the form of higher bills for waste disposal and property taxes (like the "recycling programs" at the municipal level.
Of course, nowhere is the notion of "Hey, how about just stuff it into landfills, because we don't want to pay more" ever discussed. Funny, that.
Why not just make recycling voluntary? Those who want to "help save the cute fluffy bunnies" can pay market rates to dispose of their waste in an environmentally-friendly manner, and those of us who don't give a rat's ass can just dump it. (Hey, if you enviro-types really believed that recycling stuff - even at a net energy loss - why aren't you buying landfills, digging them up, and recycling them with your own money? :-)
Interesting note - apparently, you burn less fossil fuel over time if you "dig more oil out of the ground to make new plastics from scratch" than you do in "melting down old plastics to make new plastics". Newsprint is about the only commodity for which recycling makes sense (on either an energy-use or a dollar-cost basis)
If that meant I could plunk my old box on the sidewalk and let it be picked up by the recyclers (garbage crew, because it ain't recyclable), sure.
But what do you want to bet that "since there's a recycling programme, we can ban picking it up at the curbside", the way they have in California?
In other words, I pay the tax, and I still can't throw away the boat anchor? The only difference I can see here is that some preferred contractor gets a cushy pork-barrel project.
I believe the only reason they were awarded "religious" tax-exempt status with the IRS is because of a denial-of-service attack against the IRS, using individually-filed spurious tax claims as weapons.
Overview: $cn vs. IRS
One analysis is particularly revealing.
As I understand the story outlined in the pages I linked to above, "individual $cientologists" (that is, cult members, under directions from superior officers) filed thousands of lawsuits (that is, individual lawsuits, not a class action suit) against the IRS. The cost to the taxpayer of defeating each of these suits, one by one, would have been prohibitive. As a result, the IRS granted the cult tax-exempt status in a deal whose details are, shall we say, ethically-suspect.
The tactic of using a DDoS-by-lawyer is straight out of cult doctrine: "The purpose of a lawsuit is to harass, not to win".
I'll also add - depending on where she lived, between 1m and 3m resolution satellite photos of her home.
Always freaks 'em out when I say "So, is your room on the side of the house facing the row of trees, or do you wake up looking at that ugly apartment block across the street?"
Funny, I never seem to get a second date :)
Obviously, we're faggots, busily offending the sensibilities of victorian society behind closed doors.
Of course, if we had a transparent society - in which all our personal data were available to anyone who'd care to look - they'd realize that we're just a couple of heterosexual geeks having a small LAN party. (We both read Slashdot, but he's the only one within 13000 feet of the CO.)
Of course, since such a meeting would also be conducive to things that would offend the sensibilities of RIAA and MPAA executives, and the penalties for that are far worse, maybe it's better that the security apparatus doesn't know what goes on behind modded cases :)
Your packets start bouncing through 24th floor of the Pirelli building?
I owe my career - my life - to this sort of experiment, except that at the time, nobody knew it was an experiment.
My first encounter with a computer was on a "professional activity day" - the teachers take the day off to eat donuts (the professional activity), and the kids get the day off school.
My folks, unable to find a babysitter that day, took me to work. Mom worked in a place with an Apple ][ that was used to do data entry and run rudimentary statistical analyses.
I was left alone in an office at age 10ish with a computer and two complete strangers.
Stranger: "How 'bout playing with the computer?"
Me: "What do you do with it?"
Stranger: [wanting the kid to stop bugging her so she could get some work done] "Well, we use it to enter our test data. You might want to try those books in the bottom shelf."
Me: [Picks up an Applesoft BASIC guide, concludes that "programming them" is what one does with "computers", and doesn't say a word for the rest of the day]. I was hooked by that afternoon. Went through the book that day, then hit the campus bookstore, bought a magazine with some programs you could type in, came back and "played with it" on the rare occasions I could.
A year (only about 6 "professional activity days", and maybe a couple of hours a week during the summer holiday) later, and I'd found the monitor ROM and was experimenting with 6502 assembly.
So in answer to your question - probably about 6 months, tops.
Robin Hood isn't the cure, he's the disease. He robs from the rich to give to the poor. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.
And who better to do the robbing than the Sherriff Davis of Nottingham himself, dressed in green tights, pretending that he and he alone - knows who hasn't paid his "fair share"?
Of course not, nor should they!
> Those of you who are hammering government for wasteful spending should remember how many dot com companies with stupid ideas have died over the last two years, largely because of their inability to understand that money doesn't grow on trees...
But the dot-coms are dead - an excellent object lesson in capitalism - if you spend dollars on stuff to make things that nobody wants to trade dollars for, eventually you run out of dollars, and the problem of stupid spending decisions is self-limiting.
But the dot-govs aren't dead - they continue to take more money - because, for them, the money does grow on trees. You work for it, you earn it, they spend it on crap they don't need, and then, when they realize they screwed up with it, they know they can always take more of it next year to make up for what they wasted this year.
PHBs in corporations who spend more than their companies earn either get fired, or lose their jobs when their employers go bankrupt.
PHBs in government get promoted or transferred to other departments.
There's an incentive in the private sector not to waste shareholder money. There's no such incentive in government.
Body count from corporate excess, last 100 years: Tens of thousands. (Bhopal, etc.)
Body count from government excess, last 100 years: Tens of millions. (Independent of political alignment, whether communist or fascist)
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that can limit the excesses of government are the megarich, and I'd much rather deal with the excesses of the megarich ("Bill Gates has a really big house, and Larry Ellison has a really fast yacht!") than the excesses of state power.
Enron was fraud, plain and simple. Fraud isn't commerce. The government had every right to step into the Enron/accounting mess, kick ass, and take names.
The problem isn't that government taxes you for police, roads, fire departments, armies, and the SEC. The problem is the rest of the stuff that they also tax you for, and that the private sector has a brake (called "bankruptcy") on excessive spending, and the government doesn't.
C'mon, the only hope any of us ever had of being millionaires was the dot-com boom - and what was that, other than what happens when you put thousands of delusional psychopathic geeks in the same room with thousands of delusional psychopathic venture capitalists and offer shares to millions of delusional psychopathic day traders?
If that was delusional psychopathy, I want it back!
Prediction: If it works and the side-effects turn out to be manageable, within a few years, this'll be taken off the prescription schedule and sold over-the-counter just like Vivarin, No-Doz, and sleeping pills.
Skeptic's Take: That said, the article gushes pretty poetic about this. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that this article is part of a PR campaign.
By the time it's available over-the-counter, though, it probably won't matter, as by that time, the risks and side-effects will be pretty well documented. I'm lookin' forward to it.
OK, how about goatse.cbdtpa :-)
Well, since you didn't have the intent to capture the naughty deed with your hidden cam, you're OK under the new law.
Of course, if either the babysitter or her partner is under 18, you're probably fux0r3d no matter what :-)
I can see the court case under the new law already. "Your Honor, Mr. Jones is clearly guilty. My client, Bunny the Babysitter, has testified that and her partner had been leaving damp spots on the couch for months, so Mr. Jones must have known in advance what he was gonna see when he set up the camera."
(Actually, I was originally going for a +1, Funny, but I may have a point here -- if you suspect your babysitter is mistreating your sprog or stealing your silverware, the best place for a nanny cam probably isn't "hidden in the VCR and pointing at the couch", it's "hidden in a light fixture overlooking the crib" or "pointing at the silverware closet".)
He said it by implication - just as you point out yourself.
> If you think about it, a GOOD professional at a higher wage can do the work of 2 lackeys at a lower wage. This may SAVE money.
Exactly, and in the private sector, you'd do just that - hire one smart guy at $50000 to do the work of two $30000 lackeys, fire the lackeys, and save yourself $10 grand.
But in the public sector...
> The problem with government is that every time spending is increased, it is never decreased. Departments only have to justify NEW spending, not the old. Now you end up with bloated useless government full of people doing useless jobs that nobody cares about just because funding was given 30 years ago for a long since depreciated need.
You then either run a $50000 deficit (i.e. issue $50000 worth of bonds and get the money back, plus interest, from the taxpayers when the bonds mature), or you raise taxes by $50000. Either way, the practical effect is that the taxpayer foots the bill.
Actually, I agree with you that my post up there probably wasn't worthy of a 4. A 3, tops. I don't generally follow campaign finance - which is why I asked if there was a connection between any Ellison-funded PACs and the Davis campaign. I figured someone would point me in the right direction - thanks for finding the info. As you point out, Oracle/Ellison doesn't show up in the top 25.)
As for bias, sure, I'm biased. I believe that Davis views his time as Governor of California as nothing more than a fundraising venue for an upcoming Presidential bid. I believe that's wrong from the point of view of providing sound management to Californians.
I further believe that when a politician starts to blather about how "the rich" aren't paying "their fair share", that they're looking to jack up taxes on the middle class to spend on their own pet projects.
In 1999 we reached at the point, federally, where the bottom 50% of the income curve pays 4% of the taxes, yet can outvote the top 50% of the income curve footing the other 96% of the bill. I believe that to be a recipe for long-term disaster for prudent fiscal policy - regardless of the party in power.
Finally, I believe that Davis' track record of mismanagement (MTBE will save the environment, bring it in! No, MTBE is bad, take it out! Each time, gouging oil companies for campaign funds with threatened legislation. Big power companies are gouging you! Let's sign long-term contracts that'll bankrupt us! No, that'll bankrupt them! No, let's bail 'em out!) speaks for itself.
I admire and respect Davis' skills as a master fundraiser and shrewd politician. His attacks on Riordan in the Republican primaries have given him a much easier opponent, as he can characterize Simon as "a millionaire", which rings very strongly as "an evil person" with his voting base. I don't for an instant think Simon has a hope in hell of unseating him.
(Of course, I don't think Riordan would have won either. At least the Davis/Simon matchup will be fun to watch this fall. A Davis/Riordan battle would have put me to sleep. So I'm actually looking forward to the this fall, as the campaign promises to be a great old-fashioned slugfest of ideas. I'm stocking up on popcorn and potato chips as I speak :-)