I think the authors of the Constitution, the forward and progressive thinkers that they were, would be ashamed and appalled that humanity invented nuclear weapons, and, if they could be convinced that anyone needed to own them at all, would certainly limit them to the government.
I stand corrected. It's not the email address; it's the old user name that A) was supposed to be secret, and B) can't be changed.
I very much would not want it associated with my character's name, as it could tie together different online identities that I have, as a privacy concern, a desire to keep separate.
There were fewer people in any given area, and most people never traveled at all. Thus a given outbreak likely wouldn't spread and could only at most kill the people in a few small farming communities, i.e. a few hundred people at most.
For everywhere else, records don't really exist because people didn't keep many written records of their dead.
For the specific viruses you list, some of them could be new. Viruses replicate hundreds or thousands of times a year, and thus their rate of mutation is hence faster than that of humans. If beneficial (to the viruses) mutations occur and propagate, then, evolution is also faster. Ebola, for example, either existed for a long time but wasn't able to infect humans with a written history due to the remote nature of the sub-Saharan Africa jungle, or it only evolved the ability to cross infect from other primates to humans in the last 50 years. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ebola+history
I actually came here to post the same thing. It will cost about the stated amount, give him access to a solid keyboard to learn on, and give him access to the very basics of the hardware with an easy power cycle to clear away the damage.
This isn't funny; it's serious. Get him a Commodore 64.
I consider the fact that it is a tradition started by Mitt Romney's dad to increase transparency for the voters that makes it a bigger issue - it makes it pretty damn obvious that he's hiding something.
What is illegal and what is unethical are very different, and most people want to at least pretend that the elected officials they vote for are ethical. If Romney used an IRS amnesty program to pay up his previously-undeclared offshore income, then he went from illegal tax-dodger to legal taxpayer from the IRS' perspective. From the American voter perspective, however, the fact he paid up when he had a chance to do so without risking jail time or a threat to his public image doesn't necessarily improve his ethics.
I would love to see them. I'll bet he hasn't paid taxes in years. They offshore their profits and domesticate their losses.
I have no proof for my ideas, but given the very personal nature of the tax return disclosure tradition (it was his dad that started it), the fact that he refuses to release more tax returns tells me there's a not-so-tinfoil-hat-crazy conspiracy to hide something.
Personally, I think that he failed to disclose his offshore wealth, and he used the IRS' amnesty program to declare it all and pay the back taxes that he previously dodged. When he said a few months ago that he paid "at least 13%" of his income in taxes in each of the last ten years, I think that he is stating his "revisionist" tax rate after paying his back taxes, not what he originally filed and paid.
Given how few years of taxes he released, I have to believe that there's an indication of this occurring very recently - or at least an indication of him settling this debt recently. I suspect that either the 2008 or 2009 returns would show amendments or other notes that would explain this in far more detail, and hence his inability to release even a few more years' returns to mollify critics.*
* (Not that releasing two more years of tax returns would mollify most.)
Not quite. As a major party candidate for the Presidency, he has the right to, has requested, and has received, his own Secret Service security detail.
Ignoring anything else, that alone makes him something "more" than a typical American citizen (at least for now).
The definition of "arms" has changed greatly in the last 200+ years. I don't think the government even today has any restrictions (no background check, no license, no registration) on possession of breech-loading muskets for those people who haven't lost their rights through due process (i.e. conviction).
So this comes down to whether you think the Constitution is a static document, written exactly how the authors pictured things in their time, or if it's designed to change and adapt as culture and language change around it.
After all, if you think the Constitution should be interpreted literally, but substituting the modern definitions for its terms, then I propose we start a movement to refer to bong parties as "well regulated militias", and to call marijuana "arms". Keep it up for 100 years and some conservative dudes out there will start to argue that the framers fully intended the second amendment to protect the possession of pot.
The same way a book should enter public domain the second it goes out of print? Sorry, I support drastic copyright reform but that's still a bit too harsh for me.
True, but only because "most people" is a majority comprising what's left of the "greatest" (WWII) generation, the baby boom generation almost in its entirety, and then a significantly smaller portion of gen X, and an even smaller portion still of the millennials (using each generation's preferred name for itself afaik).
I think that ideal is dying away, which will naturally help this issue somewhat. We'll have to wait and see.
The SCOTUS ruled that clauses slipped into contracts prohibiting class action lawsuits are valid. In other words - there are some rights that you can't give away in a contract, but the right to join a class action lawsuit isn't one of those.
Now, some companies have already started changing their one-sided take-it-or-leave-for-our-competitors-oops-they-all-have-the-same-clause contracts to include a waiver of the right to participate in a class action lawsuit. The argument is that all companies will do this soon, as there's little reason not to, and that will thus block most citizens from joining class action lawsuits.
The problem here is that SCOTUS was wrong. The right to redress in court is one right that we shouldn't be able to sign away, and given how our court system is structured to so heavily favor the rich, class action rights should be considered a basic citizen right to redress.
Without a filibuster-proof majority, the "majority" can't do anything. Thus the OP's claim that they had a "solid majority" implying they could have gotten work done (but didn't) was disingenuous.
Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the senate for about 17 weeks, far less than the "2 years" you just made up. (The 17 weeks is from Al Franken's confirmation to Ted Kennedy's illness.)
During that time, there seemed to be a lot of internal discussion and compromise within the Democratic party - you know, the kind of give-and-take compromise that is supposed to make our government work. All of that is still alive and well within the Democratic party. It's just the big blog of "NO NO NO IT'S ALL MINE NO" coming from the extreme right that keeps the government from doing anything differently than the overall failed course it's on of late.
That doesn't invalidate the parent's point. Once you are in court and a judge has the ability to decide in favor of either party, if he thinks the contract is bogus he can decide at any time for the other side, ignoring anything else in the contract regardless of such a clause. Judges are supposed to be fair and impartial, but screw with one in his/her court and he/she is supposed to bring down the hammer.
I'm hereby offering my services to everyone with which I'm not related. I'll buy your home-built PC with an OEM license, paying you in net 30 terms, under the condition that you will buy the machine back at full cost if I'm at all unsatisfied.
If the cost to me (including shipping) is greater than $0, I'm unsatisfied, and I hereby return the machine to you. I accept your payment as an erasure of my debt to you.
You make a false assumption that those individuals are very productive. You also presume that individuals naturally have the right to pay no taxes, which is laughably false.
Slashdot Mirror
"arms"
I think the authors of the Constitution, the forward and progressive thinkers that they were, would be ashamed and appalled that humanity invented nuclear weapons, and, if they could be convinced that anyone needed to own them at all, would certainly limit them to the government.
But we'll never know.
I stand corrected. It's not the email address; it's the old user name that A) was supposed to be secret, and B) can't be changed.
I very much would not want it associated with my character's name, as it could tie together different online identities that I have, as a privacy concern, a desire to keep separate.
I believe Blizzard now requires user IDs to be a valid email address.
There were fewer people in any given area, and most people never traveled at all. Thus a given outbreak likely wouldn't spread and could only at most kill the people in a few small farming communities, i.e. a few hundred people at most.
Obviously there are exceptions for outbreaks of various things in cities like London. There are records of those.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=london+disease+history
For everywhere else, records don't really exist because people didn't keep many written records of their dead.
For the specific viruses you list, some of them could be new. Viruses replicate hundreds or thousands of times a year, and thus their rate of mutation is hence faster than that of humans. If beneficial (to the viruses) mutations occur and propagate, then, evolution is also faster. Ebola, for example, either existed for a long time but wasn't able to infect humans with a written history due to the remote nature of the sub-Saharan Africa jungle, or it only evolved the ability to cross infect from other primates to humans in the last 50 years.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ebola+history
I actually came here to post the same thing. It will cost about the stated amount, give him access to a solid keyboard to learn on, and give him access to the very basics of the hardware with an easy power cycle to clear away the damage.
This isn't funny; it's serious. Get him a Commodore 64.
If the edit gets accepted, be grateful, otherwise stop trying and write it off as an occasionally useful resource but a failed social experiment.
Fixed, which is what happened to me after enough inane reversions.
They had 17 weeks, not two years. Stop trying to revise history.
Couldn't you argue that GM cars are the most American cars of all, given that they are, you know, owned by America?
I consider the fact that it is a tradition started by Mitt Romney's dad to increase transparency for the voters that makes it a bigger issue - it makes it pretty damn obvious that he's hiding something.
What is illegal and what is unethical are very different, and most people want to at least pretend that the elected officials they vote for are ethical. If Romney used an IRS amnesty program to pay up his previously-undeclared offshore income, then he went from illegal tax-dodger to legal taxpayer from the IRS' perspective. From the American voter perspective, however, the fact he paid up when he had a chance to do so without risking jail time or a threat to his public image doesn't necessarily improve his ethics.
I would love to see them. I'll bet he hasn't paid taxes in years. They offshore their profits and domesticate their losses.
I have no proof for my ideas, but given the very personal nature of the tax return disclosure tradition (it was his dad that started it), the fact that he refuses to release more tax returns tells me there's a not-so-tinfoil-hat-crazy conspiracy to hide something.
Personally, I think that he failed to disclose his offshore wealth, and he used the IRS' amnesty program to declare it all and pay the back taxes that he previously dodged. When he said a few months ago that he paid "at least 13%" of his income in taxes in each of the last ten years, I think that he is stating his "revisionist" tax rate after paying his back taxes, not what he originally filed and paid.
Given how few years of taxes he released, I have to believe that there's an indication of this occurring very recently - or at least an indication of him settling this debt recently. I suspect that either the 2008 or 2009 returns would show amendments or other notes that would explain this in far more detail, and hence his inability to release even a few more years' returns to mollify critics.*
* (Not that releasing two more years of tax returns would mollify most.)
Not quite. As a major party candidate for the Presidency, he has the right to, has requested, and has received, his own Secret Service security detail.
Ignoring anything else, that alone makes him something "more" than a typical American citizen (at least for now).
The definition of "arms" has changed greatly in the last 200+ years. I don't think the government even today has any restrictions (no background check, no license, no registration) on possession of breech-loading muskets for those people who haven't lost their rights through due process (i.e. conviction).
So this comes down to whether you think the Constitution is a static document, written exactly how the authors pictured things in their time, or if it's designed to change and adapt as culture and language change around it.
After all, if you think the Constitution should be interpreted literally, but substituting the modern definitions for its terms, then I propose we start a movement to refer to bong parties as "well regulated militias", and to call marijuana "arms". Keep it up for 100 years and some conservative dudes out there will start to argue that the framers fully intended the second amendment to protect the possession of pot.
They are an invasive species with no redeeming qualities. There is no reason to let any of them live.
The same way a book should enter public domain the second it goes out of print? Sorry, I support drastic copyright reform but that's still a bit too harsh for me.
But but... wouldn't your karma persist long after the game was gone?
And DNA doesn't just prove where your cells where, not where you were?
>> The goal of most people
True, but only because "most people" is a majority comprising what's left of the "greatest" (WWII) generation, the baby boom generation almost in its entirety, and then a significantly smaller portion of gen X, and an even smaller portion still of the millennials (using each generation's preferred name for itself afaik).
I think that ideal is dying away, which will naturally help this issue somewhat. We'll have to wait and see.
The SCOTUS ruled that clauses slipped into contracts prohibiting class action lawsuits are valid. In other words - there are some rights that you can't give away in a contract, but the right to join a class action lawsuit isn't one of those.
Now, some companies have already started changing their one-sided take-it-or-leave-for-our-competitors-oops-they-all-have-the-same-clause contracts to include a waiver of the right to participate in a class action lawsuit. The argument is that all companies will do this soon, as there's little reason not to, and that will thus block most citizens from joining class action lawsuits.
The problem here is that SCOTUS was wrong. The right to redress in court is one right that we shouldn't be able to sign away, and given how our court system is structured to so heavily favor the rich, class action rights should be considered a basic citizen right to redress.
"Do you need a filibuster-proof majority to pass a budget?"
Have you been awake for the past two years? The government hasn't been able to pass a budget for quite a while, so the answer is obviously yes.
Without a filibuster-proof majority, the "majority" can't do anything. Thus the OP's claim that they had a "solid majority" implying they could have gotten work done (but didn't) was disingenuous.
Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the senate for about 17 weeks, far less than the "2 years" you just made up. (The 17 weeks is from Al Franken's confirmation to Ted Kennedy's illness.)
During that time, there seemed to be a lot of internal discussion and compromise within the Democratic party - you know, the kind of give-and-take compromise that is supposed to make our government work. All of that is still alive and well within the Democratic party. It's just the big blog of "NO NO NO IT'S ALL MINE NO" coming from the extreme right that keeps the government from doing anything differently than the overall failed course it's on of late.
That doesn't invalidate the parent's point. Once you are in court and a judge has the ability to decide in favor of either party, if he thinks the contract is bogus he can decide at any time for the other side, ignoring anything else in the contract regardless of such a clause. Judges are supposed to be fair and impartial, but screw with one in his/her court and he/she is supposed to bring down the hammer.
I'm hereby offering my services to everyone with which I'm not related. I'll buy your home-built PC with an OEM license, paying you in net 30 terms, under the condition that you will buy the machine back at full cost if I'm at all unsatisfied.
If the cost to me (including shipping) is greater than $0, I'm unsatisfied, and I hereby return the machine to you. I accept your payment as an erasure of my debt to you.
You make a false assumption that those individuals are very productive. You also presume that individuals naturally have the right to pay no taxes, which is laughably false.