Sure, some of those methods involve printing one-time passwords.
Still, the point is that two-factor is annoying. Even picking up my phone is annoying. It would make more sense to wave my super light/thin government-issue identity ring that I wear 24x7 in front of my monitor. Of course, first we need such a thing, instead of everybody just coming up with their own solution.
Simple. In the US I don't think the banks are liable for these losses in the first place. Also, nobody wants to carry around 47 dongles which is what will happen if everybody wants their own personal two-factor solution.
Maybe if we get to a point where one two-factor device can be used for EVERYTHING without the need to manually retype 6-digit numbers or whatever then it will become a good solution.
Imagine if SSL for websites worked by copy/pasting ASCII-armored webpages to/from an encrypt/decrypt application like people used to do with gpg and email (which also never took off). Nobody would be using SSL. That is where we are with two-factor - you have to think about it to use it, and so nobody does.
When you just wave your government ID ring in front of your computer to log into a website or something like that, then we'll have widespread two-factor authentication.
Property ownership starts with self ownership. To earn money one has to spend his own time and effort, one has to use his own health and life, the time not spent enjoying but working. Property is thus extension of our own bodies and time given to us to spend on this planet.
You say that you earn money/property by spending your time and effort, and that gives you the right to own money. What did you spend to earn yourself in the first place? You were born with what you have, and did not do anything to earn having a healthy body and brain, vs being born a mentally retarded cripple.
Your ideas are horrendous if someone takes 1 minute to examine them, they lead to slavery and murder while providing superficial justification for the feeble minded.
If you take collectivism to the ultimate extreme we all end up as slaves to the community. If you take libertarianism to the ultimate extreme we all end up as slaves to the guy who owns all the resources.
I don't argue that you need to allow people to have some ownership of the fruits of their labor so that they have something to work for in the first place. The problem is that if you give people exclusive ownership of the fruits of their labor then anybody who isn't able to earn a living just starves to death, or basically ends up being treated as a pet.
The problem with the system that you advocate is that the march of technology steadily makes a larger and larger number of people unnecessary to the economy, if you view the sole purpose of the economy as providing goods and services to people who have money (remember, the vast majority of the wealth is owned by a small portion of the population). This leads to increasing disparity of wealth. Maybe in 100 years if the Earth has a population of 10 people each tended by an army of robots you could argue that those 10 people were the hardest workers and the most deserving of living in paradise. However, if you accept that people ought to be able to get by with less than a continent each then you could have a society where far more people can get by happily by just accepting that the folks who own all the robots should use some of them to help everybody else out, even if they don't really want to.
Non-progressive taxation is also economically inefficient. If somebody is able to earn a billion dollars, that doesn't mean that they will efficiently use the billion dollars that they earned. In fact, letting them sit on that pile of money actually takes away their motive for ever working another day in their life. There is no reason that they can't get by with less than 100% of the fruits of their labor, while still allowing them to have far more than the average person.
I assume this is because the care is improving and more people are pulling through but outbreaks like this often become less virulent over time as well.
Oh good, instead of losing 90% of the country, we might just lose a few New York Cities. That makes it better.:)
you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine.
Uh, if you're in the one town in the US where there is an Ebola outbreak you're not going to be able to stop the rest of the country from taking your rights. There will be fences, tanks, armies, drones, aircraft, and the general works surrounding your town. Your stash of AR-15s in the basement aren't going to accomplish much except maybe to keep your neighbors from stealing your food assuming you have a stockpile so that you can stay inside and let the disease blow over. Besides, if you do have such a stockpile then just hunker down - you'll outlive the epidemic anyway, which is probably why you have that stockpile to begin with.
Well, that is if the rest of the country has the brains to set up a strong quarantine. There is a good chance that this won't look good in the polls so we'll just ask everybody to be nice and stay at home, and watch the disease overrun the country. Maybe I should work on my own stockpile...:)
But, if the government has any brains they'll put up a perimeter around the town, lock down all air travel into/out of the country, And burn down everything within 10 miles of the town to create a no-man's land. I mean, we are talking about a plague that could kill half the population here. Given a choice of raising taxes half a percent to rebuild the no-man's land after it is all over, or watching the entire country turn into a post-apocalyptic horror story, I'll take a bit of authoritarianism and call you in the morning.
I'm not convinced some level of quarantine wouldn't be wise. Just ban general air/maritime travel to/from any location within 100 miles of a reported Ebola case, and lock down borders/etc as best as you can. I agree that the disease will certainly continue to spread, but then you just expand the quarantine region as it does, staying a step ahead.
The goal isn't so much to prevent any spread at all as to keep the disease off of aircraft, where it could spread globally overnight.
Sooner or later the spread of the disease will end up running against geographical barriers, like the Sahara or the Atlantic/Indian Oceans. Gaza certainly would be a defensible border. There are limits on how far the disease could spread against a coordinated effort to contain it.
Plus, a decent quarantine will at least slow down the spread so that you have a fighting chance to do something about it. What is the alternative, throwing your hands up in the air and saying, "sure, feel free to get on a plane if you're sick?" Better to have a handful of people sneaking through the jungles between checkpoints spreading the disease than hundreds of people taking busses.
If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?
- because it is in your best interest to recognise that if I cannot own property, then neither can you.
I do not debate that libertarianism is in my own best interest. That does not make it morally right. There are many who cannot own property because they do not have the ability to purchase it, because they do not have the ability to earn money. I do not accept that these folks should be left as destitute.
Ultimately libertarianism fails because it puts the right of property above virtually everything else. In the name of liberty it ends up reducing virtually everybody to slavery.
I know what you do NOT do, you do NOT put a gun to OTHER people's had to steal their money from them to 'help' anybody whatsoever under any circumstances. No amount of misery can be justified to destroy individual freedom.
Nobody is stealing your money - you're paying taxes. The rest of us will recognize your right to retain the rest of your property if you recognize your responsibility to help care for the indigent. If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?
But, call it theft if you like. It really doesn't change the fact that you have no choice but to comply.
If a person is irresponsible and has children, too bad for those children, however that's what other family members are for. Beyond that there are private organisations that try to help children. Governments cause massive pain for children by destroying the economy that they and their parents live in.
I imagine that you'd be a little less lofty in your views if you had one of those irresponsible parents. Heck, some kids don't have any parents/family at all.
The fact is that all the property/etc you've worked so hard to obtain is only yours as the result of you having been born to parents who raised you well, and who gave you genes that allow you to support yourself. Absent either of those, and especially absent the latter, you'd be as well-off as an ape that shares 98% of your genetics. As a result, I certainly have no moral issues with requiring anybody with the ability to take care of themselves to spend some of their effort taking care of others, using force if they do not wish to do so.
Hate to self reply, but think of it like shooting a rifle round at a blimp. The bullet is going to just sail right through both sides, with neither object being affected all that much.
You have a few stars worth of neutornium the size of a big asteroid or maybe a small moon moving towards a red giant that is perhaps similar in mass to our own sun.
I can buy that eventually the one ends up inside the other. What I wonder about is how you get from a neutron star falling towards a red giant to a neutron star inside a red giant.
I'd think the neutron star would have so much momentum that it would basically blast right through the star and come out the other side.
Of course, a more likely scenario is a mutual orbit where over many orbits the stars interact via their extended atmospheres/etc slowing their orbits until they merge. Still, I'd think that neutron star would keep making orbital passes deeper and deeper into the red giant's atmosphere, basically plowing a trench into the red giant which of course fills right back in each time.
I just don't see either star changing velocity enough on a single pass for them to merge.
What do you think parents are for? Children are the responsibility of their parents, not the state.
That's great. What do you do with the children of irresponsible parents? Do you just let them starve when they turn out unemployable?
And what do you do with mentally retarded cripples? I guess they can beg, except that they probably won't quite master that and will probably end up trespassing on some self-righteous gun owner's lawn and get shot (since everybody is their own police in this utopia).
Yup, I can't wait to see how they advertise their services with this twist.
Comcast: Would you like to buy a fast-lane? Customer: What happens if I don't buy a fast lane? Comcast: If you don't buy a fast lane then your connections will only operate at the 50Mbps rate that your plan has purchased. Customer: What happens if I do buy a fast lane? Comcast: Then for that one website we will actually deliver the 50Mbps rate that you already paid for, as long as you don't use it too much.
My definition of "cure "is when people stop dying of these diseases. My point was that medical doctors and psychiatrists in particular have but a tenuous grasp on the actual workings of the human body.
To be fair, many of these "diseases" are just labels applied to general classes of symptoms, which probably have many underlying mechanisms. It is a bit like saying we haven't come up with a cure for "ache" yet, even though many conditions that cause aches do in fact have genuine cures.
Many doctors contend if you have a mental illness that it is not a medical problem. You have to go see a psychiatrist for that. As if the brain weren't part of the human body.
Heck, I can't figure out why in the US dentistry is treated differently than any other form of medicine. I can appreciate that insurers don't want to pay for cosmetic treatments like teeth whitening, but if I break any bone in my body other than a tooth, it is treated differently than if I break a tooth.
I don't think people appreciate how biological reasoning actually is, and just how modular the brain is, with every part having to trust the other parts to do their jobs. Your reasoning might be perfectly intact, but perhaps your visual perception has a problem, which means that you're going to make bizarre decisions.
You can have a brain that does 95% of everything spot-on, but some very specific abnormality causes really bizarre cognitive functionality.
Just talk to anybody young who had a serious stroke. They could probably describe just how things changed for them, what did and didn't recover, and so on. In the beginning they might have been completely oblivious to there even being anything wrong - sometimes they perceive everybody around them as suddenly becoming dumb/etc.
Umm... simply come with a set of glasses and put on the ones your enemy wears?
I'm not an expert on laser goggles, but I'm not sure that you can tell just by looking from a distance. Sure, some are obviously different in color, but what I don't know is whether there are 12 different types of goggles that all look orange-ish and how much protection you get if you pick the wrong one.
Plus they aren't very cheap - it might cost you $35-100 to acquire each one, and you might need a dozen for complete coverage.
That said, if the companies selling this gear publish their specs you might find that there are only 2-3 wavelengths in significant use and that the glasses needed for each have a distinctive appearance, which would allow you tell which one is in use.
Of course, you'll also need your gas mask, anti-microwave suit, padding, and body armor (for when the police get frustrated and just start using live rounds). I'd recommend doing your protesting in the winter.
Unfortunately, the last two times I bought a car it was following a collision, so I didn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing the time that I made the purchase.
Yup. Mass was the place that brought us the Salem witch trials, The Scarlet Letter, and plenty of similar themes. They made the Westboro Baptist Church look like a gay pride parade, though perhaps only because all that stuff had the full force of law.
Agreed. If I want to comparison shop just about anything other than a car I can just do an online search by model number, see all the asking prices, and purchase one in 5 minutes. A car turns into a high-pressure negotiation on my day off. With anything else if it turns out to be defective I just return it and get my money back - not so with the car.
I can understand that it has to work this way with houses since they aren't mass-produced. The car sales model is a dinosaur, and half the tactics that are used should be illegal.
Yup. The last time I walked into a car dealership I brought a TVM calculator with me. I didn't care what they told me about the price, interest, whatever. I punched in the terms into my calculator along with what I determined to be a fair price, calculated the effective interest rate, and decided if it was good enough. For my lease they ended up making it work by bumping up the residual value considerably. Whatever - just means I pay less now and we can play lets make a deal in 3 years when I've paid them way less than the loss they've taken from depreciation.
Hopefully true, but have you ever looked through welding goggles? While they will protect your eyes, you'll have no way to see. I suppose the only way to make goggles work, would be with a camera connected to LCDs -- pretty expensive to outfit a few thousand protestors.
Lasers are monochromatic. You can design goggles that will effectively block a particular laser wavelength while not overly diminishing the rest of visible light.
The police know what wavelengths their lasers use in advance, and can come to the party prepared. Protesters would have to use the welding glasses and be blind anyway, or they would have to guess which laser wavelength to protect against.
Well, in theory anybody can choose to violate the laws of war, but if you do so chances are your enemies will do so as well.
So, you could go bombing enemy hospitals. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't really get you much (you're bombing people that are already out of action), and then you suddenly have to put all your own hospitals in bunkers lest they be bombed.
Likewise, if you start firing off gas weapons, then you get to watch cities full of thousands of people being killed with gas in retaliation. Or if you get too liberal with the laser blinders you get to watch your enemy come up with weapons designed to cause blindness and deploy them against battlefields such that huge numbers of your troops end up being blinded. The weapons being talked about here are more about dealing with individuals, but if you set out with the goal of blinding people I'm sure you could come up with more effective area-based weapons. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if there were super-intense flares you could fire into the night sky that would cause permanent eye damage to anybody looking in their direction.
The Geneva Conventions are just that - conventions. Nobody can force anybody to obey them, but countries choose to do so in the hope that their enemies will do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, some of those methods involve printing one-time passwords.
Still, the point is that two-factor is annoying. Even picking up my phone is annoying. It would make more sense to wave my super light/thin government-issue identity ring that I wear 24x7 in front of my monitor. Of course, first we need such a thing, instead of everybody just coming up with their own solution.
Simple. In the US I don't think the banks are liable for these losses in the first place. Also, nobody wants to carry around 47 dongles which is what will happen if everybody wants their own personal two-factor solution.
Maybe if we get to a point where one two-factor device can be used for EVERYTHING without the need to manually retype 6-digit numbers or whatever then it will become a good solution.
Imagine if SSL for websites worked by copy/pasting ASCII-armored webpages to/from an encrypt/decrypt application like people used to do with gpg and email (which also never took off). Nobody would be using SSL. That is where we are with two-factor - you have to think about it to use it, and so nobody does.
When you just wave your government ID ring in front of your computer to log into a website or something like that, then we'll have widespread two-factor authentication.
I never claimed the quarantine would work.
You claimed that "you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine."
My point was simply that you have no ability to prevent the government from taking your rights away in a situation like this.
Property ownership starts with self ownership. To earn money one has to spend his own time and effort, one has to use his own health and life, the time not spent enjoying but working. Property is thus extension of our own bodies and time given to us to spend on this planet.
You say that you earn money/property by spending your time and effort, and that gives you the right to own money. What did you spend to earn yourself in the first place? You were born with what you have, and did not do anything to earn having a healthy body and brain, vs being born a mentally retarded cripple.
Your ideas are horrendous if someone takes 1 minute to examine them, they lead to slavery and murder while providing superficial justification for the feeble minded.
If you take collectivism to the ultimate extreme we all end up as slaves to the community. If you take libertarianism to the ultimate extreme we all end up as slaves to the guy who owns all the resources.
I don't argue that you need to allow people to have some ownership of the fruits of their labor so that they have something to work for in the first place. The problem is that if you give people exclusive ownership of the fruits of their labor then anybody who isn't able to earn a living just starves to death, or basically ends up being treated as a pet.
The problem with the system that you advocate is that the march of technology steadily makes a larger and larger number of people unnecessary to the economy, if you view the sole purpose of the economy as providing goods and services to people who have money (remember, the vast majority of the wealth is owned by a small portion of the population). This leads to increasing disparity of wealth. Maybe in 100 years if the Earth has a population of 10 people each tended by an army of robots you could argue that those 10 people were the hardest workers and the most deserving of living in paradise. However, if you accept that people ought to be able to get by with less than a continent each then you could have a society where far more people can get by happily by just accepting that the folks who own all the robots should use some of them to help everybody else out, even if they don't really want to.
Non-progressive taxation is also economically inefficient. If somebody is able to earn a billion dollars, that doesn't mean that they will efficiently use the billion dollars that they earned. In fact, letting them sit on that pile of money actually takes away their motive for ever working another day in their life. There is no reason that they can't get by with less than 100% of the fruits of their labor, while still allowing them to have far more than the average person.
I assume this is because the care is improving and more people are pulling through but outbreaks like this often become less virulent over time as well.
Oh good, instead of losing 90% of the country, we might just lose a few New York Cities. That makes it better. :)
you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine.
Uh, if you're in the one town in the US where there is an Ebola outbreak you're not going to be able to stop the rest of the country from taking your rights. There will be fences, tanks, armies, drones, aircraft, and the general works surrounding your town. Your stash of AR-15s in the basement aren't going to accomplish much except maybe to keep your neighbors from stealing your food assuming you have a stockpile so that you can stay inside and let the disease blow over. Besides, if you do have such a stockpile then just hunker down - you'll outlive the epidemic anyway, which is probably why you have that stockpile to begin with.
Well, that is if the rest of the country has the brains to set up a strong quarantine. There is a good chance that this won't look good in the polls so we'll just ask everybody to be nice and stay at home, and watch the disease overrun the country. Maybe I should work on my own stockpile... :)
But, if the government has any brains they'll put up a perimeter around the town, lock down all air travel into/out of the country, And burn down everything within 10 miles of the town to create a no-man's land. I mean, we are talking about a plague that could kill half the population here. Given a choice of raising taxes half a percent to rebuild the no-man's land after it is all over, or watching the entire country turn into a post-apocalyptic horror story, I'll take a bit of authoritarianism and call you in the morning.
I'm not convinced some level of quarantine wouldn't be wise. Just ban general air/maritime travel to/from any location within 100 miles of a reported Ebola case, and lock down borders/etc as best as you can. I agree that the disease will certainly continue to spread, but then you just expand the quarantine region as it does, staying a step ahead.
The goal isn't so much to prevent any spread at all as to keep the disease off of aircraft, where it could spread globally overnight.
Sooner or later the spread of the disease will end up running against geographical barriers, like the Sahara or the Atlantic/Indian Oceans. Gaza certainly would be a defensible border. There are limits on how far the disease could spread against a coordinated effort to contain it.
Plus, a decent quarantine will at least slow down the spread so that you have a fighting chance to do something about it. What is the alternative, throwing your hands up in the air and saying, "sure, feel free to get on a plane if you're sick?" Better to have a handful of people sneaking through the jungles between checkpoints spreading the disease than hundreds of people taking busses.
If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?
- because it is in your best interest to recognise that if I cannot own property, then neither can you.
I do not debate that libertarianism is in my own best interest. That does not make it morally right. There are many who cannot own property because they do not have the ability to purchase it, because they do not have the ability to earn money. I do not accept that these folks should be left as destitute.
Ultimately libertarianism fails because it puts the right of property above virtually everything else. In the name of liberty it ends up reducing virtually everybody to slavery.
I know what you do NOT do, you do NOT put a gun to OTHER people's had to steal their money from them to 'help' anybody whatsoever under any circumstances. No amount of misery can be justified to destroy individual freedom.
Nobody is stealing your money - you're paying taxes. The rest of us will recognize your right to retain the rest of your property if you recognize your responsibility to help care for the indigent. If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?
But, call it theft if you like. It really doesn't change the fact that you have no choice but to comply.
If a person is irresponsible and has children, too bad for those children, however that's what other family members are for. Beyond that there are private organisations that try to help children. Governments cause massive pain for children by destroying the economy that they and their parents live in.
I imagine that you'd be a little less lofty in your views if you had one of those irresponsible parents. Heck, some kids don't have any parents/family at all.
The fact is that all the property/etc you've worked so hard to obtain is only yours as the result of you having been born to parents who raised you well, and who gave you genes that allow you to support yourself. Absent either of those, and especially absent the latter, you'd be as well-off as an ape that shares 98% of your genetics. As a result, I certainly have no moral issues with requiring anybody with the ability to take care of themselves to spend some of their effort taking care of others, using force if they do not wish to do so.
Hate to self reply, but think of it like shooting a rifle round at a blimp. The bullet is going to just sail right through both sides, with neither object being affected all that much.
You have a few stars worth of neutornium the size of a big asteroid or maybe a small moon moving towards a red giant that is perhaps similar in mass to our own sun.
I can buy that eventually the one ends up inside the other. What I wonder about is how you get from a neutron star falling towards a red giant to a neutron star inside a red giant.
I'd think the neutron star would have so much momentum that it would basically blast right through the star and come out the other side.
Of course, a more likely scenario is a mutual orbit where over many orbits the stars interact via their extended atmospheres/etc slowing their orbits until they merge. Still, I'd think that neutron star would keep making orbital passes deeper and deeper into the red giant's atmosphere, basically plowing a trench into the red giant which of course fills right back in each time.
I just don't see either star changing velocity enough on a single pass for them to merge.
How do you "crack down on" people following the rules and doing exactly what is best for them, paying the least amount of taxes?
By changing the rules so that people following the rules and doing exactly what is best for them end up paying more taxes.
What do you think parents are for? Children are the responsibility of their parents, not the state.
That's great. What do you do with the children of irresponsible parents? Do you just let them starve when they turn out unemployable?
And what do you do with mentally retarded cripples? I guess they can beg, except that they probably won't quite master that and will probably end up trespassing on some self-righteous gun owner's lawn and get shot (since everybody is their own police in this utopia).
Yup, I can't wait to see how they advertise their services with this twist.
Comcast: Would you like to buy a fast-lane?
Customer: What happens if I don't buy a fast lane?
Comcast: If you don't buy a fast lane then your connections will only operate at the 50Mbps rate that your plan has purchased.
Customer: What happens if I do buy a fast lane?
Comcast: Then for that one website we will actually deliver the 50Mbps rate that you already paid for, as long as you don't use it too much.
Or, you could just say that you pay one fee to get 50Mbps, and then you pay another fee to REALLY get 50Mbps, for one website.
My definition of "cure "is when people stop dying of these diseases. My point was that medical doctors and psychiatrists in particular have but a tenuous grasp on the actual workings of the human body.
To be fair, many of these "diseases" are just labels applied to general classes of symptoms, which probably have many underlying mechanisms. It is a bit like saying we haven't come up with a cure for "ache" yet, even though many conditions that cause aches do in fact have genuine cures.
Many doctors contend if you have a mental illness that it is not a medical problem. You have to go see a psychiatrist for that. As if the brain weren't part of the human body.
Heck, I can't figure out why in the US dentistry is treated differently than any other form of medicine. I can appreciate that insurers don't want to pay for cosmetic treatments like teeth whitening, but if I break any bone in my body other than a tooth, it is treated differently than if I break a tooth.
I don't think people appreciate how biological reasoning actually is, and just how modular the brain is, with every part having to trust the other parts to do their jobs. Your reasoning might be perfectly intact, but perhaps your visual perception has a problem, which means that you're going to make bizarre decisions.
You can have a brain that does 95% of everything spot-on, but some very specific abnormality causes really bizarre cognitive functionality.
Just talk to anybody young who had a serious stroke. They could probably describe just how things changed for them, what did and didn't recover, and so on. In the beginning they might have been completely oblivious to there even being anything wrong - sometimes they perceive everybody around them as suddenly becoming dumb/etc.
My big issue with multiplayer is just the inability to hit pause or save. It feels like the game is in charge of me instead of the other way around.
Umm... simply come with a set of glasses and put on the ones your enemy wears?
I'm not an expert on laser goggles, but I'm not sure that you can tell just by looking from a distance. Sure, some are obviously different in color, but what I don't know is whether there are 12 different types of goggles that all look orange-ish and how much protection you get if you pick the wrong one.
Plus they aren't very cheap - it might cost you $35-100 to acquire each one, and you might need a dozen for complete coverage.
That said, if the companies selling this gear publish their specs you might find that there are only 2-3 wavelengths in significant use and that the glasses needed for each have a distinctive appearance, which would allow you tell which one is in use.
Of course, you'll also need your gas mask, anti-microwave suit, padding, and body armor (for when the police get frustrated and just start using live rounds). I'd recommend doing your protesting in the winter.
Unfortunately, the last two times I bought a car it was following a collision, so I didn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing the time that I made the purchase.
Yup. Mass was the place that brought us the Salem witch trials, The Scarlet Letter, and plenty of similar themes. They made the Westboro Baptist Church look like a gay pride parade, though perhaps only because all that stuff had the full force of law.
Agreed. If I want to comparison shop just about anything other than a car I can just do an online search by model number, see all the asking prices, and purchase one in 5 minutes. A car turns into a high-pressure negotiation on my day off. With anything else if it turns out to be defective I just return it and get my money back - not so with the car.
I can understand that it has to work this way with houses since they aren't mass-produced. The car sales model is a dinosaur, and half the tactics that are used should be illegal.
Yup. The last time I walked into a car dealership I brought a TVM calculator with me. I didn't care what they told me about the price, interest, whatever. I punched in the terms into my calculator along with what I determined to be a fair price, calculated the effective interest rate, and decided if it was good enough. For my lease they ended up making it work by bumping up the residual value considerably. Whatever - just means I pay less now and we can play lets make a deal in 3 years when I've paid them way less than the loss they've taken from depreciation.
Hopefully true, but have you ever looked through welding goggles? While they will protect your eyes, you'll have no way to see. I suppose the only way to make goggles work, would be with a camera connected to LCDs -- pretty expensive to outfit a few thousand protestors.
Lasers are monochromatic. You can design goggles that will effectively block a particular laser wavelength while not overly diminishing the rest of visible light.
The police know what wavelengths their lasers use in advance, and can come to the party prepared. Protesters would have to use the welding glasses and be blind anyway, or they would have to guess which laser wavelength to protect against.
Well, in theory anybody can choose to violate the laws of war, but if you do so chances are your enemies will do so as well.
So, you could go bombing enemy hospitals. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't really get you much (you're bombing people that are already out of action), and then you suddenly have to put all your own hospitals in bunkers lest they be bombed.
Likewise, if you start firing off gas weapons, then you get to watch cities full of thousands of people being killed with gas in retaliation. Or if you get too liberal with the laser blinders you get to watch your enemy come up with weapons designed to cause blindness and deploy them against battlefields such that huge numbers of your troops end up being blinded. The weapons being talked about here are more about dealing with individuals, but if you set out with the goal of blinding people I'm sure you could come up with more effective area-based weapons. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if there were super-intense flares you could fire into the night sky that would cause permanent eye damage to anybody looking in their direction.
The Geneva Conventions are just that - conventions. Nobody can force anybody to obey them, but countries choose to do so in the hope that their enemies will do the same.