Until you realize that the newspaper writers are now (thanks to Internet news) under pressure to get the story out before anyone else, rather than to get the story out better than anyone else, so they're likely to report that, say, a USDA official is a racist when she's not (to pick a random example).
Why the exception for undercover? I grant you the recording would not be like the cop-car cameras, but wires, bugged apartments, and surveillance tape ought to give them some level of recording coverage. About the only exception I can think of is a cop who needs to sleep with somebody at a place that wasn't controlled by the police as part of their investigation, which I can't think would be a common situation.
In addition to not talking to police (which is still brilliant), you should also not as a rule let them into your home or your car. If they have a legitimate reason to search, then they'll have a warrant or explain to you their probable cause for doing so.
Like every rule, there's a potential exception: If you're the victim of a crime, you might want to give the police access to the scene of the crime. However, you'd be wise to search the place pretty thoroughly yourself first to make absolutely sure there are no weapons or contraband there.
Community colleges, most state universities, and nearly all private institutions generally lose money on each student. They make it up in other ways - community colleges and state universities get public funding, while the private schools have significant investment earnings on their endowments as well as alumni donations. It's rather astounding to realize that when they're charging $50K / year they still aren't making ends meet, but it's true nonetheless. This dynamic, incidentally, means that private universities in particular have a strong interest in your future earnings, because that's their future as an institution.
That should tell you something - if a "college" is somehow able to make a profit, it's cheating you. They're charging a lot more than the equivalent publicly funded school, and their faculty are usually cheap instructors without a doctorate in their field. They're also skimping on career placement. And of course anything else that an academic institution would do, like having talks by distinguished speakers, is completely off the list. These private "colleges" aren't academic institutions, they're businesses who's product is the illusion of an academic institution without actually being one.
Frankly, I find their business model to be cruel: They go mostly to decent hardworking working-class folks who are trying to make something of themselves, sell them dream of becoming part of the college-educated middle class, get them to spend years of effort and thousands of dollars trying to achieve that dream, and then give them a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's slightly more moral than home loan sharking, but not much.
But... but... but... that's "socialism" (by the Fox News definition), along with anything else that the government does that might benefit the citizens who aren't part of the wealthiest 5% of Americans. Right now, we have a significant portion of the US Congress seriously arguing that the reason there are so many unemployed people during a recession is because getting $200 a week causes them to be shiftless layabouts. Oh, and also think that the 10% unemployment is wonderful, because it enables many corporations to hire high-quality workers at discount prices, and use the threat of unemployment to force their existing workers to work longer hours for less pay.
They're really very similar. In the US, you can go up to President Obama and say "I hate President Obama" without legal retaliation. In China, you can go up to Hu Jintao and say "I hate President Obama" without legal retaliation.
So the federal appeals court rules against the district, and presumably the district petitions for certiorari to SCOTUS. Since 4 votes are needed to hear a case, and the conservative wing of the court (who have been awfully friendly to this sort of thing in recent years) have 4 votes, it's hardly inconceivable that this will reach SCOTUS.
I'm reasonably certain that Justice Kennedy would vote against the district, because to him stare decisis still means something, but I'd have no such assurance when discussing Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.
That analogy doesn't exactly work, because most courses on chemistry at least make some mention of alchemy. That's because for all their fumbling around and trying to accomplish the impossible, they managed to discover quite a few useful tidbits of information about how chemistry worked. Similarly, a lot of the folks who studied astrology managed to pick up some information that was useful for astronomy, so an overview of astronomy will make mention and use of the work of astrologers.
Alchemy was also far from an anti-scientific viewpoint: Isaac Newton was primarily an alchemist who had some side projects in physics and mathematics (which gives you some idea of how smart the guy was).
Before the Interstate Highway System existed, many states built toll expressways because that was preferable to not having any express routes. When the Interstate Highway System was created, they wanted to make use of those toll expressways, but the states wouldn't stand for the loss of toll revenue. So they came up with a compromise that allows states to keep the tolls if they already existed until the highway was paid off (which of course mysteriously never happens). However, they generally aren't allowed to take interstate highways that weren't toll roads and turn them into toll roads. I'm not sure where in New England you're complaining about, but the Everett and Spalding Turnpikes in New Hampshire, the Mass Pike, and the Maine Turnpike all pre-date the federal highway projects.
If this were really such a cut & dry partisan issue, why have 70+ democrat members of congress also asked the FCC to drop it's plans to impose net neutrality rules?
It's a partisan issue all right, but not in the sense of the Democratic and Republican Parties. It's a partisan issue in the sense of the Bought-and-Paid-For Party versus the Sensible-Policy Party. Members of both the BAPFP and SPP can be found in both the Democratic and Republican caucuses, although the BAPFP has a clear majority in both houses and parties. You'll notice that members of the SPP aren't generally taken seriously by the establishment media (who are not coincidentally part of the group that is doing the buying).
The trouble is that I can't rule out the first case either. I think it's reasonable to think that the guy really does want Christianity established in the US, so if he got to SCOTUS and Justice Kennedy decided to go along with Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito to allow it, he wouldn't be disappointed.
And yes, I'm reasonably certain that those 4 Supreme Court Justices would vote to allow creationism in public schools. Scalia and Thomas have voted that way consistently, and Roberts and Alito recently both voted that crosses on public land aren't a problem.
This guy is clearly trying to set up a Supreme Court case. Of course, he just handed whoever litigates this on Establishment Clause grounds the key piece of evidence: "Teachers should have the freedom to look at creationism and find a way to get it into the classroom."
That means that the express purpose of the measure is to allow teachers to force a particular religious viewpoint on their students. Not a nice little side-effect, or the unexpressed intent. He actually came out and said "this is so we can force kids to learn creationism". So what he's banking on, it sounds like, is that either many of the justices who hear the case will be willing to scrap the Establishment Clause in order to get Christianity in schools, or (more likely) that fighting the losing fight will improve his future political prospects.
And the test is very easy to make too: Would Mr Mitchell be so interested in ensuring that every child in his district knew about Odin and his brothers slicing up a giant to create Midgard, and treated it as fact?
That whole "military-industrial complex" thing was clearly the creation of some Communist-loving peacenik hippies who are planning on imposing Muslim Socialism on the entire world, starting with the US. I mean, it's not like some good Republican 5-star General would ever think that the military had become too powerful.
I didn't know it was the Westborough asshats, or I'd have had words with them, like my pastor did with some similar guys protesting outside the Percy Jackson and the Harry Potter Ripoffs movie.
Please do not feed the real-life trolls.
And that's what they are. The more of a reaction (of any kind) that they elicit, the more they feel like God is on their side, and the more they'll continue doing stupid protests. I've been in a town that responded to a WBC protest with a large gay pride party, which was all good fun, but really the by far best reaction to them has been the Patriot Guard Riders who ensure that what families of fallen soldiers see at military funerals is a lot of people with American flags rather than "God Hates Fags".
More to the point, if you are generally unprepared for whatever you're doing, and call for a rescue, your rescuers will hate you. My sister worked for several years as an EMT in an area that's popular with outdoor adventurers of all stripes, and they never begrudged someone who was well-prepared but ended up with a broken leg due to bad luck, but absolutely loathed people who had no clue what they were doing and ended up causing a risky search-and-rescue because of their own stupidity.
Most of the bitching and moaning about Linus seems to be along the lines of "he didn't accept my patch" or "he tore me a new one for suggesting something", not "Linux sucks, I'm going to use HURD or FreeBSD instead". And that's an important distinction, because Linus' primary goal is to make Linux and its codebase as awesome as it can be, not stroke developer's egos.
So yeah, if you write up something that you think is a great memory management scheme that Linus decides isn't the best approach, you're going to be pissed at him, because you thought very carefully about it and worked very hard to create a patch. But that doesn't mean Linus is necessarily wrong, and also doesn't mean he's arrogant - it means he thinks there's better choices available. He's picking not from the best that you can come up with, but from the best that the much larger set of people who've ever considered this problem can come up with.
Banks do people that find ways to get in their vault legally. They hire people to penetrate (har, har) their security in any way possible...
The first sentence was a rather nice bit of unintentional humor.
But your point is well-taken: the whole concept of penetration testing was originally taken from the military, which also hires teams to see if they can break their security and leave notes like "code books stolen" if they succeed.
I'm reminded of an old Adlai Stevenson quip: Supporter: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!" Adlai: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"
FDIC deposit insurance insures you, not your bank, and it's for the specific purpose of preventing runs on banks, because one of the effects of a run on a bank is that the depositors of the bank lose most of what they deposited. If you talk to people who lived through the Depression, it's not uncommon to uncover stories about Dad coming home with some amount of cash he just withdrew from the bank and announcing that the family's savings had been reduced to a fraction of what they had been a few hours ago.
Contrast that with bank failures that occurred in the 1980's due to the S&L crisis. In those cases, the bank would be shut down and their assets sold off, and the depositors each got a check for the amount in their account up to the limit of the FDIC deposit insurance (I think it's $100K, may be higher). So it does in fact protect you, not your bank.
This issue of who AT&T donates to is really really easy to settle. All we need to do is go to research that looks directly at who's giving what to whom, which is thankfully available right here.
As you can see, the general story is: 1. AT&T has given more to Republicans since 1994, but gives huge amounts of cash to candidates of both major parties. 2. AT&T has handed out more cash than any other organization in the country since 1990.
Can you give me an example of government regulation that did not end up favoring entrenched incumbents in the industry more than potential competitors or consumers?
That's easy - FDIC deposit insurance. And if you want to know why that benefits consumers, think about what would have happened to your savings account in late 2008 (even if your bank was solvent).
Slashdot Mirror
Until you realize that the newspaper writers are now (thanks to Internet news) under pressure to get the story out before anyone else, rather than to get the story out better than anyone else, so they're likely to report that, say, a USDA official is a racist when she's not (to pick a random example).
Trouble is, if you're not careful, all this does is make the police spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that their work falls under the exception.
except in certain undercover situations
Why the exception for undercover? I grant you the recording would not be like the cop-car cameras, but wires, bugged apartments, and surveillance tape ought to give them some level of recording coverage. About the only exception I can think of is a cop who needs to sleep with somebody at a place that wasn't controlled by the police as part of their investigation, which I can't think would be a common situation.
In addition to not talking to police (which is still brilliant), you should also not as a rule let them into your home or your car. If they have a legitimate reason to search, then they'll have a warrant or explain to you their probable cause for doing so.
Like every rule, there's a potential exception: If you're the victim of a crime, you might want to give the police access to the scene of the crime. However, you'd be wise to search the place pretty thoroughly yourself first to make absolutely sure there are no weapons or contraband there.
Community colleges, most state universities, and nearly all private institutions generally lose money on each student. They make it up in other ways - community colleges and state universities get public funding, while the private schools have significant investment earnings on their endowments as well as alumni donations. It's rather astounding to realize that when they're charging $50K / year they still aren't making ends meet, but it's true nonetheless. This dynamic, incidentally, means that private universities in particular have a strong interest in your future earnings, because that's their future as an institution.
That should tell you something - if a "college" is somehow able to make a profit, it's cheating you. They're charging a lot more than the equivalent publicly funded school, and their faculty are usually cheap instructors without a doctorate in their field. They're also skimping on career placement. And of course anything else that an academic institution would do, like having talks by distinguished speakers, is completely off the list. These private "colleges" aren't academic institutions, they're businesses who's product is the illusion of an academic institution without actually being one.
Frankly, I find their business model to be cruel: They go mostly to decent hardworking working-class folks who are trying to make something of themselves, sell them dream of becoming part of the college-educated middle class, get them to spend years of effort and thousands of dollars trying to achieve that dream, and then give them a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's slightly more moral than home loan sharking, but not much.
But ... but ... but ... that's "socialism" (by the Fox News definition), along with anything else that the government does that might benefit the citizens who aren't part of the wealthiest 5% of Americans. Right now, we have a significant portion of the US Congress seriously arguing that the reason there are so many unemployed people during a recession is because getting $200 a week causes them to be shiftless layabouts. Oh, and also think that the 10% unemployment is wonderful, because it enables many corporations to hire high-quality workers at discount prices, and use the threat of unemployment to force their existing workers to work longer hours for less pay.
They're really very similar. In the US, you can go up to President Obama and say "I hate President Obama" without legal retaliation. In China, you can go up to Hu Jintao and say "I hate President Obama" without legal retaliation.
So the federal appeals court rules against the district, and presumably the district petitions for certiorari to SCOTUS. Since 4 votes are needed to hear a case, and the conservative wing of the court (who have been awfully friendly to this sort of thing in recent years) have 4 votes, it's hardly inconceivable that this will reach SCOTUS.
I'm reasonably certain that Justice Kennedy would vote against the district, because to him stare decisis still means something, but I'd have no such assurance when discussing Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.
The one from Back to the Future.
I think you're mixing up Christopher Lloyd and Christopher Lee there.
That analogy doesn't exactly work, because most courses on chemistry at least make some mention of alchemy. That's because for all their fumbling around and trying to accomplish the impossible, they managed to discover quite a few useful tidbits of information about how chemistry worked. Similarly, a lot of the folks who studied astrology managed to pick up some information that was useful for astronomy, so an overview of astronomy will make mention and use of the work of astrologers.
Alchemy was also far from an anti-scientific viewpoint: Isaac Newton was primarily an alchemist who had some side projects in physics and mathematics (which gives you some idea of how smart the guy was).
Before the Interstate Highway System existed, many states built toll expressways because that was preferable to not having any express routes. When the Interstate Highway System was created, they wanted to make use of those toll expressways, but the states wouldn't stand for the loss of toll revenue. So they came up with a compromise that allows states to keep the tolls if they already existed until the highway was paid off (which of course mysteriously never happens). However, they generally aren't allowed to take interstate highways that weren't toll roads and turn them into toll roads. I'm not sure where in New England you're complaining about, but the Everett and Spalding Turnpikes in New Hampshire, the Mass Pike, and the Maine Turnpike all pre-date the federal highway projects.
If this were really such a cut & dry partisan issue, why have 70+ democrat members of congress also asked the FCC to drop it's plans to impose net neutrality rules?
It's a partisan issue all right, but not in the sense of the Democratic and Republican Parties. It's a partisan issue in the sense of the Bought-and-Paid-For Party versus the Sensible-Policy Party. Members of both the BAPFP and SPP can be found in both the Democratic and Republican caucuses, although the BAPFP has a clear majority in both houses and parties. You'll notice that members of the SPP aren't generally taken seriously by the establishment media (who are not coincidentally part of the group that is doing the buying).
Going rate for a BAPF congressman seems to be around $10-15,000 in campaign donations:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000076
"That isn't a business plan, that's an escape plan!" - Turanga Leela
The trouble is that I can't rule out the first case either. I think it's reasonable to think that the guy really does want Christianity established in the US, so if he got to SCOTUS and Justice Kennedy decided to go along with Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito to allow it, he wouldn't be disappointed.
And yes, I'm reasonably certain that those 4 Supreme Court Justices would vote to allow creationism in public schools. Scalia and Thomas have voted that way consistently, and Roberts and Alito recently both voted that crosses on public land aren't a problem.
This guy is clearly trying to set up a Supreme Court case. Of course, he just handed whoever litigates this on Establishment Clause grounds the key piece of evidence:
"Teachers should have the freedom to look at creationism and find a way to get it into the classroom."
That means that the express purpose of the measure is to allow teachers to force a particular religious viewpoint on their students. Not a nice little side-effect, or the unexpressed intent. He actually came out and said "this is so we can force kids to learn creationism". So what he's banking on, it sounds like, is that either many of the justices who hear the case will be willing to scrap the Establishment Clause in order to get Christianity in schools, or (more likely) that fighting the losing fight will improve his future political prospects.
And the test is very easy to make too: Would Mr Mitchell be so interested in ensuring that every child in his district knew about Odin and his brothers slicing up a giant to create Midgard, and treated it as fact?
That whole "military-industrial complex" thing was clearly the creation of some Communist-loving peacenik hippies who are planning on imposing Muslim Socialism on the entire world, starting with the US. I mean, it's not like some good Republican 5-star General would ever think that the military had become too powerful.
Oh, wait ...
Was Seth Lloyd perhaps inspired to design paradox-free time machines by the great Christopher Lloyd?
I didn't know it was the Westborough asshats, or I'd have had words with them, like my pastor did with some similar guys protesting outside the Percy Jackson and the Harry Potter Ripoffs movie.
Please do not feed the real-life trolls.
And that's what they are. The more of a reaction (of any kind) that they elicit, the more they feel like God is on their side, and the more they'll continue doing stupid protests. I've been in a town that responded to a WBC protest with a large gay pride party, which was all good fun, but really the by far best reaction to them has been the Patriot Guard Riders who ensure that what families of fallen soldiers see at military funerals is a lot of people with American flags rather than "God Hates Fags".
More to the point, if you are generally unprepared for whatever you're doing, and call for a rescue, your rescuers will hate you. My sister worked for several years as an EMT in an area that's popular with outdoor adventurers of all stripes, and they never begrudged someone who was well-prepared but ended up with a broken leg due to bad luck, but absolutely loathed people who had no clue what they were doing and ended up causing a risky search-and-rescue because of their own stupidity.
Most of the bitching and moaning about Linus seems to be along the lines of "he didn't accept my patch" or "he tore me a new one for suggesting something", not "Linux sucks, I'm going to use HURD or FreeBSD instead". And that's an important distinction, because Linus' primary goal is to make Linux and its codebase as awesome as it can be, not stroke developer's egos.
So yeah, if you write up something that you think is a great memory management scheme that Linus decides isn't the best approach, you're going to be pissed at him, because you thought very carefully about it and worked very hard to create a patch. But that doesn't mean Linus is necessarily wrong, and also doesn't mean he's arrogant - it means he thinks there's better choices available. He's picking not from the best that you can come up with, but from the best that the much larger set of people who've ever considered this problem can come up with.
Banks do people that find ways to get in their vault legally. They hire people to penetrate (har, har) their security in any way possible ...
The first sentence was a rather nice bit of unintentional humor.
But your point is well-taken: the whole concept of penetration testing was originally taken from the military, which also hires teams to see if they can break their security and leave notes like "code books stolen" if they succeed.
I'm reminded of an old Adlai Stevenson quip:
Supporter: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!"
Adlai: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"
FDIC deposit insurance insures you, not your bank, and it's for the specific purpose of preventing runs on banks, because one of the effects of a run on a bank is that the depositors of the bank lose most of what they deposited. If you talk to people who lived through the Depression, it's not uncommon to uncover stories about Dad coming home with some amount of cash he just withdrew from the bank and announcing that the family's savings had been reduced to a fraction of what they had been a few hours ago.
Contrast that with bank failures that occurred in the 1980's due to the S&L crisis. In those cases, the bank would be shut down and their assets sold off, and the depositors each got a check for the amount in their account up to the limit of the FDIC deposit insurance (I think it's $100K, may be higher). So it does in fact protect you, not your bank.
This issue of who AT&T donates to is really really easy to settle. All we need to do is go to research that looks directly at who's giving what to whom, which is thankfully available right here.
As you can see, the general story is:
1. AT&T has given more to Republicans since 1994, but gives huge amounts of cash to candidates of both major parties.
2. AT&T has handed out more cash than any other organization in the country since 1990.
Can you give me an example of government regulation that did not end up favoring entrenched incumbents in the industry more than potential competitors or consumers?
That's easy - FDIC deposit insurance. And if you want to know why that benefits consumers, think about what would have happened to your savings account in late 2008 (even if your bank was solvent).