Fair enough. I agree the tone of the reply you're commenting on was silly, so allow me to present a counter argument, hopefully slightly more logical.
It's very hard to put a drunken state down because traffic demands it, while it is easy to put a phone down.
I routinely take calls while driving, and as the evidence indicates, I'm typical in my response of driving much more conservatively when that happens. Personally, I'm probably safer when I'm taking a call than I am normally, because I back way off and try to stay well away from other cars when I'm on a call. If I'm going to reply to a text, I'm going to wait until I'm pretty lonely on the road and start paying a lot of attention to the driving when otherwise I'd normally be pretty much on auto-pilot. If there is heavy traffic and I need to use my phone for some reason, I find an exit and pull off. If I'm averaging 5mph and take a call and traffic picks up, I switch to hands free or if it looks like it is resuming normal speeds, say I'll have to call back.
Contrast that with driving intoxicated. If I'm behind the wheel, there is nothing I can stop doing as a result of my analysis of traffic. I can try to drive slower, but cause a whole set of different problems by impeding normal traffic flow. There is no "set it down" or "I'll have to call you back" option.
None of this means that texting or talking on the phone while driving is as safe as not doing those things. I don't think anyone is suggesting that a driver should do things that decrease the safety of the situation. All I am saying is that there are clear differences between driving intoxicated and engaging in texting while driving.
If I *had* to text while driving, my driving would be significantly impaired, just like it is in a study comparing reaction times. The fatality rates of motorists has actually decreased while mobile phone use has increased. (Look it up. I had to before I believed it.) The corollary is obviously NOT an indication that mobile phone use while driving improves safety, there are a lot of other things offsetting the hazard posed by texting while driving, but the idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they used to be is false. The idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they need to be is fair. There is a difference.
I hate it when people confuse improper and immature behavior with the technology they're using. Bittorrent is a very logical and quite useful protocol and it has a bad name because it is associated with the behavior of many people who use it. Outlawing the bittorrent protocol is just as reasonable as outlawing texting while driving. Unsafe driving should be (and is) against the law, just as copyright infringement is against the law. The technology isn't *ever* the problem, the people making bad decisions are the problem.
Seconded. Do NOT just go with defaults. XFS is really good for serving large files like video, but when I last used it regularly, it wasn't very nice after a power loss. That isn't to say it got corrupted like resiserfs or anything, but the self check and correction process was tedious. Ext4 is pretty fast, has the journaling you'd expect and has been tested pretty well now. Btrfs looks cool, and seems to work well, but I don't know that I'm ready to trust it yet. ZFS is nice too, but I don't think it's native yet (is it?) so I wouldn't want to put it on anything I couldn't do without for a few days.
Just FYI for the purposes of considering how useful Waze is:
If you're a dedicated Waze user, don't worry: Google said it will leave the Waze team in Israel, where they will operate independently "for now." (That caveat implies Waze will be brought to America at some point.)
Are you wanting to compare voluntary spending or involuntary spending?
Some miniscule amount of tax money goes to defending sport franchises' rights, where a very significant percentage of the taxes people pay goes toward education.
Now comparing voluntary spending on education to sports related spending would be a very interesting number indeed. People pay for college and private school but only some of them and generally only for a limited period of their life. The spending on sports is much more prevalent and is generally spread over a lifetime.
Spending on health is another issue entirely, but voluntary verses involuntary numbers would indeed be interesting.
I'd very much like to see MSN or CNN or even Fox offer a $2000 bounty and protection from identification as a source to anyone who shows that they've successfully accessed mass information on healthcare.gov. I've never been there, but I'm a little concerned that some of my records might be accessed through the site and I don't think the people working on it are placing a high enough priority on security. I'd rather it was done by someone to provide to a news agency that gets publicly reported than someone who does it for personal profit, even though both are illegal.
Publishing the results of a successful hack of healthcare.gov, or more likely a dozen successful hacks of it, would serve the public good by providing information to the public about the failures of our government, which is pretty much what freedom of the press is for.
I hope Gawker wins for the same reason I am glad that Larry Flint won: Protecting the rights of scum ensures that my rights are safe as well.
Not saying I haven't wanted to bypass the legal system myself from time to time, but given the choice, don't you want to live in a world with laws?
Sure, I'd like to live in a world that doesn't need laws, but since ours does need them, then having people forced to follow them is the best we can hope for.
do we have to go thru a court to get a registrar to do something? that isn't reallllly that good of news.
Registrars can voluntarily do something when asked, so no, you don't have to get a court order to get a registrar to do something. They are absolutely supposed to let people move their domains when people want to also, but some of them weren't following the rules. Having them follow the rules is a good thing.
If, however, you want to force a registrar to do something which isn't part of the rules, then yes, you should have to get a court order.
Did you like the scenario where companies don't have to follow the rules you both agreed to? Most of us don't.
"Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin.
"And what happened?" pressed Ford.
"It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.
The advantage of RHEL is being able to call somebody when you have a problem that you can't resolve by reading or need to resolve faster than you can on your own. RHEL generally has patches and improvements quicker than CentOS does which is important if you're running a heavily used server exposed to the internet.
I've been quite happy with CentOS and use it in the majority of systems that I set up. However, if I need somebody to call when it crashes and the boss is standing in my doorway demanding to know what I'm doing about a problem, I want to be able to make that all important call to the experts. I have made that call once or twice and I was quite happy in feeling like my company's money was being well spent when I did.
There's a little more to it than that. The announcement doesn't cover the history CentOS has had with RHEL, but when CentOS people found bugs or made improvements, they would pass the info back to RHEL. It makes sense for CentOS because when they make improvements, they can hope that in the next release, they can just reuse RHEL work rather than having to apply the patches each time. It made sense for RHEL because they were getting a better product to offer their customers than they would have without the CentOS contributions, and by integrating the work of their biggest potential competitor, they decrease the incentive to move to somebody who has patches and improvements they don't.
It's rare to read about "synergy" between companies that actually makes sense, but RHEL and CentOS have benefitted from each others' work. The more RHEL helped CentOS, the better RHEL software was. The more CentOS helped RHEL, the better CentOS software was. This move to actually formalize their relationship makes sense for both of them.
Good thought. I should know more about the history of Tor. I checked Wikipedia and got "Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which had been instrumental in the early development of onion routing under the aegis of DARPA, Tor was financially supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2004 to 2005."
How would this work exactly? I'm used to having my browser and OS start with trusted roots, but I can imagine taking them out and replacing them with my own, then having to add in cert by cert, individually and specifically trusting each one. It sounds like a real hassle, but one that would grow easier as time goes on. I use NoScript to do very much the same thing, but it's no defense against MITM. Is there some system where there is a web of trust being built to do the same thing? I would *really* like to learn about that.
You know, that was my thought too. I think bittorrent is an excellent way to manage file distribution but 99% of the 1% of people who have heard of it think it is just for getting something illegal. I think Tor is an excellent system that should be directly sponsored by freedom loving countries all around the world as a way to battle oppressive and tyrannical governments, but instead it's seen as a terrorist and druggie tool.
If a tool can be used to give the people power to bypass an oppressive government, then some people will use it to bypass the laws of whatever government they are in. No matter how noble an idea for a tool is, not every tool user will use it nobly.
He does mean John Wilkes Booth. Some people believe that Lincoln acted as a tyrant and counter to the goals that the United States was founded on. Slavery is a tangential issue just like porn is to the censorship debate. People who object to the censorship are conveniently labeled as supporters of porn and people who object to the suppression of states rights are conveniently labeled as supporters of slavery. However, supporting states rights doesn't make you a supporter of slavery just like decrying censorship doesn't make you a supporter of pornography.
Many people who object to the censorship are supporters of porn and many who object to the suppression of states rights are racists. Having people you dislike agree with you is an uncomfortable position but it doesn't make the position you're in wrong.
As for me? I generally don't censor or filter my family's access to the internet, (though I did when my children were younger,) but I do log things and when appropriate discuss with them my opinions of their choices. I'm perfectly comfortable with believing that I should do that but my government and my ISP should not.
I am glad to hear somebody else say that. There are lots of potential ways to provide coverage through our income taxes which weren't a part of the discussion when we got Obamacare.
I've personally advocated a "last choice insurance by government" plan where a national insurance plan would cover everyone, regardless of income or situation but where the full price of whatever cost was incurred was put into a balance with the IRS which would perpetually collect 10% of gross income as an additional income tax until the balance was repaid. Typical health insurance is about getting a reduced cost by paying for what you don't need just in case, where "last choice insurance by government" would be paying full cost for what you need, just deferred over the lifetime of the recipient. In return, we'd all pay some extra in income tax to cover the costs that weren't recovered from the recipients who needed the coverage.
People in this day and age believe that electronics are immoral. They live in the same world we do, though I sometimes wonder if they perceive it the same way.
Freedom is about allowing people to live the way they want to live, believe what they want to believe and live the way they believe is best. So long as their freedom doesn't harm someone else, I believe in freedom.
(But there is an answer to your question. You'll have to do the math yourself, I'm on my third glass of wine.) A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.
We should care an awful lot when our government decides to dictate activity that contradicts longly held religious beliefs. If you're an atheist, it is about preventing the government from dictating that people must adhere to the religion they disagree with. Agnostics should fear that government may dictate they acknowledge the one true religion. Any religious person should fear the government will decide that another differing religion will be supported by their own government.
Whatever your ideal society is, the historical tendency is for governments to support single religions. One of the things that makes the US potentially a better place to live is that it is Constitutionally inhibited from doing the same thing as governments have often done. I like the US Constitution primarily because it is designed to limit the authority of the government. When I read about things which call in to question whether those limits should be upheld, I almost reflexively always say "limit the authority of the government."
Interesting point. Just for the record, I think I agree with you, but I find it helps me think more clearly to consider opposing arguments.
Assuming we as a society believe that widely adopted health insurance is good, then is it better to have it supplied directly by the government or better to allow wider choice provided by a more free but still highly regulated open market?
Compromise is something our society thinks we want. Yet, it does lead to issues just like this where we have to decide whether it is best to offer no choice (single-payer) healthcare, pure capitalism or regulated and incentivized semi-capitalism healthcare.
Religion X says that they are giving health insurance as an additional incentive to work for them, in other words - "pay". Then they are against some of the things the employee might spend that pay on, so they want the right to restrict how that employee spends what they have already been paid. In short, as you put it, the goverment has decided that once you pay somebody something, you have no right to dictate how they spend that money. (That's why saying "In Short..." is usually a mistake, it makes it to easy to reduce one side's more complex, nuanced opinion to a sound-bite that "nobody in their right mind" could possibly disagree with). Christians that have taken the position their church can or should control money they have already given to an employee
That's a fair point. I get the choice whether to pay for health insurance from my employer. If I choose not to, I have the money I would have spent to spend on other insurance (or booze) of my choice. In my case, insurance isn't part of my pay, it is an optional agreement I may or may not enter into with my employer. I think that's usually the case, but I don't know if that is what is going on with this case. I'll admit that with my admittedly limited knowledge of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's history, I assumed that she would support the spirit of Obamacare and that lead me to think she wouldn't issue an injunction unless she had serious concerns about the legality of the issue. If it's a choice, then it's not part of the pay, but if it isn't then perhaps it can rightfully be considered pay. I wish now that I'd taken the time to read up on the case, but it is two glasses of wine too late for me to maintain sufficient interest.
By what right can they take such benefits and then insist on not meeting the minimum standards for types of coverage the entity paying out those benefits imposes to get them?
Insurance providers have lots of things they decide not to cover. The question is whether the government has the authority to mandate this particular coverage which they previously didn't.
What's the moral difference between paying someone in health coverage and then trying to control how they spend it, and paying someone the cash portion of their pay in company money that can only be spent at the company store? Can the church demand to pay somebody their cash wages only by direct deposit, and then demand to see their monthy debit card statements each month to prove they haven't been spending any of that money on booze or lap dances during the time they weren't working?
Well the difference is in whether it is pay or a separate agreement. If my employer offered to give me a monthly stipend of 120% of my pay rate in return for entering a separate agreement to follow their specific spending guidelines, I'd consider the option. I don't know if I'd do it or not, but if I have the option to enter into a separate second agreement, it isn't just my regular pay. Our government does allow the same sort of thing with health insurance with an incentive for my company to offer that second agreement. Is that rational? Is it the best option for the society we want? That's a different question but maybe one that should be discussed more.
Sorry, but you missed the point. Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.
Anytime the government mandates that people do something they believe is immoral, I believe the law should be very carefully examined. Do I agree with their opinion of what is immoral? No. But this is a question of how free our society is, and specifically whether the government has the authority to force an organization to go against their religious beliefs.
Obamacare is something that is particularly problematic for religious organizations. It is the one of the first times our legislature has ever mandated that organizations must provide a service, which is problematic enough in itself, but further it specifies that organizations must provide a service contrary to their religious beliefs.
Whether you agree with Religion A or not, the important question is whether the government should have the authority to tell you what you must do even if you believe it is immoral. Flip the argument around and you're asking whether the government has the right to demand that you tithe to the Roman Catholic church regardless of what you believe. If they have the right to demand you do one thing against your beliefs, then they have the right to do others. The seperation of church and state was supposed to keep the government from dictating what activity you must participate in. Are you sure you want a government that has decided to ignore that separation?
What is IPv6 in your analogy then? EFT/Traditional currencies have the problems of government interference, heavy tracking and are expensive to move. The expense is really the big issue because we're used to the other problems, but they're not insignificant. If you want to call EFT with traditional currencies IPv4, that's fine, particularly since IPv6 is a working standard that fixes most of the problems with IPv4. Bitcoin is analogous to IPv6 quite accurately. Name any other peer-to-peer currency with a tenth the value of Bitcoin, or even any other method of electronically exchanging value that overcomes those issues and you can compare bitcoin to IPv9.
Calling current currencies IPv4 is a potentially agreeable analogy to me as well. There are a variety of limitations and problems people have with it. It's expensive to move, heavily tracked and tied to specific governments. IPv6 is an attempt to overcome those limitations and problems, and there have been some flaws found and resolved with IPv6. Bitcoin mirrors that pretty well too. Calling it IPv9 is a little bit of a jump since people are actually using bitcoin and the protocol is widely established. Name another peer-to-peer currency with more support if you want to make the argument that IPv9 is a better analogy.
Well maybe not. On the other hand I believe it was possible to buy a variety of things that aren't illegal on the Silk Road. I listen to a podcast where the commentators were talking about the twinkies they bought that way. There might be journalists who were using Silk Road to buy legal things and had their bitcoins seized. The argument could be made that it is like buying strawberries at a flea market where some sellers are engaging in illegal activity and the buyers of strawberries have a legitimate right to have their seized assets returned.
I'm really not sure how the legalities would play out, but I would like to see the legal system set some precedents on what constitutes legal property since Congress has suggested that bitcoin is at least sort of property.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. I agree the tone of the reply you're commenting on was silly, so allow me to present a counter argument, hopefully slightly more logical.
It's very hard to put a drunken state down because traffic demands it, while it is easy to put a phone down.
I routinely take calls while driving, and as the evidence indicates, I'm typical in my response of driving much more conservatively when that happens. Personally, I'm probably safer when I'm taking a call than I am normally, because I back way off and try to stay well away from other cars when I'm on a call. If I'm going to reply to a text, I'm going to wait until I'm pretty lonely on the road and start paying a lot of attention to the driving when otherwise I'd normally be pretty much on auto-pilot. If there is heavy traffic and I need to use my phone for some reason, I find an exit and pull off. If I'm averaging 5mph and take a call and traffic picks up, I switch to hands free or if it looks like it is resuming normal speeds, say I'll have to call back.
Contrast that with driving intoxicated. If I'm behind the wheel, there is nothing I can stop doing as a result of my analysis of traffic. I can try to drive slower, but cause a whole set of different problems by impeding normal traffic flow. There is no "set it down" or "I'll have to call you back" option.
None of this means that texting or talking on the phone while driving is as safe as not doing those things. I don't think anyone is suggesting that a driver should do things that decrease the safety of the situation. All I am saying is that there are clear differences between driving intoxicated and engaging in texting while driving.
If I *had* to text while driving, my driving would be significantly impaired, just like it is in a study comparing reaction times. The fatality rates of motorists has actually decreased while mobile phone use has increased. (Look it up. I had to before I believed it.) The corollary is obviously NOT an indication that mobile phone use while driving improves safety, there are a lot of other things offsetting the hazard posed by texting while driving, but the idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they used to be is false. The idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they need to be is fair. There is a difference.
I hate it when people confuse improper and immature behavior with the technology they're using. Bittorrent is a very logical and quite useful protocol and it has a bad name because it is associated with the behavior of many people who use it. Outlawing the bittorrent protocol is just as reasonable as outlawing texting while driving. Unsafe driving should be (and is) against the law, just as copyright infringement is against the law. The technology isn't *ever* the problem, the people making bad decisions are the problem.
Seconded. Do NOT just go with defaults. XFS is really good for serving large files like video, but when I last used it regularly, it wasn't very nice after a power loss. That isn't to say it got corrupted like resiserfs or anything, but the self check and correction process was tedious. Ext4 is pretty fast, has the journaling you'd expect and has been tested pretty well now. Btrfs looks cool, and seems to work well, but I don't know that I'm ready to trust it yet. ZFS is nice too, but I don't think it's native yet (is it?) so I wouldn't want to put it on anything I couldn't do without for a few days.
Just FYI for the purposes of considering how useful Waze is:
Maps App Will Remain Independent -- For Now
Are you wanting to compare voluntary spending or involuntary spending?
Some miniscule amount of tax money goes to defending sport franchises' rights, where a very significant percentage of the taxes people pay goes toward education.
Now comparing voluntary spending on education to sports related spending would be a very interesting number indeed. People pay for college and private school but only some of them and generally only for a limited period of their life. The spending on sports is much more prevalent and is generally spread over a lifetime.
Spending on health is another issue entirely, but voluntary verses involuntary numbers would indeed be interesting.
I'd very much like to see MSN or CNN or even Fox offer a $2000 bounty and protection from identification as a source to anyone who shows that they've successfully accessed mass information on healthcare.gov. I've never been there, but I'm a little concerned that some of my records might be accessed through the site and I don't think the people working on it are placing a high enough priority on security. I'd rather it was done by someone to provide to a news agency that gets publicly reported than someone who does it for personal profit, even though both are illegal.
Publishing the results of a successful hack of healthcare.gov, or more likely a dozen successful hacks of it, would serve the public good by providing information to the public about the failures of our government, which is pretty much what freedom of the press is for.
I hope Gawker wins for the same reason I am glad that Larry Flint won: Protecting the rights of scum ensures that my rights are safe as well.
Mod parent up.
Not saying I haven't wanted to bypass the legal system myself from time to time, but given the choice, don't you want to live in a world with laws?
Sure, I'd like to live in a world that doesn't need laws, but since ours does need them, then having people forced to follow them is the best we can hope for.
Registrars can voluntarily do something when asked, so no, you don't have to get a court order to get a registrar to do something. They are absolutely supposed to let people move their domains when people want to also, but some of them weren't following the rules. Having them follow the rules is a good thing.
If, however, you want to force a registrar to do something which isn't part of the rules, then yes, you should have to get a court order.
Did you like the scenario where companies don't have to follow the rules you both agreed to? Most of us don't.
"Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin. "And what happened?" pressed Ford. "It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.
The advantage of RHEL is being able to call somebody when you have a problem that you can't resolve by reading or need to resolve faster than you can on your own. RHEL generally has patches and improvements quicker than CentOS does which is important if you're running a heavily used server exposed to the internet.
I've been quite happy with CentOS and use it in the majority of systems that I set up. However, if I need somebody to call when it crashes and the boss is standing in my doorway demanding to know what I'm doing about a problem, I want to be able to make that all important call to the experts. I have made that call once or twice and I was quite happy in feeling like my company's money was being well spent when I did.
There's a little more to it than that. The announcement doesn't cover the history CentOS has had with RHEL, but when CentOS people found bugs or made improvements, they would pass the info back to RHEL. It makes sense for CentOS because when they make improvements, they can hope that in the next release, they can just reuse RHEL work rather than having to apply the patches each time. It made sense for RHEL because they were getting a better product to offer their customers than they would have without the CentOS contributions, and by integrating the work of their biggest potential competitor, they decrease the incentive to move to somebody who has patches and improvements they don't.
It's rare to read about "synergy" between companies that actually makes sense, but RHEL and CentOS have benefitted from each others' work. The more RHEL helped CentOS, the better RHEL software was. The more CentOS helped RHEL, the better CentOS software was. This move to actually formalize their relationship makes sense for both of them.
Good thought. I should know more about the history of Tor. I checked Wikipedia and got "Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which had been instrumental in the early development of onion routing under the aegis of DARPA, Tor was financially supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2004 to 2005."
I was thinking of the more recent NSA activity
How would this work exactly? I'm used to having my browser and OS start with trusted roots, but I can imagine taking them out and replacing them with my own, then having to add in cert by cert, individually and specifically trusting each one. It sounds like a real hassle, but one that would grow easier as time goes on. I use NoScript to do very much the same thing, but it's no defense against MITM. Is there some system where there is a web of trust being built to do the same thing? I would *really* like to learn about that.
Oh, I like that. Pick your own warning totem from this list or from this handy Yahoo/Google/AnythingButBing search.
Mod parent up. I'm submitting to seenonslash.
You know, that was my thought too. I think bittorrent is an excellent way to manage file distribution but 99% of the 1% of people who have heard of it think it is just for getting something illegal. I think Tor is an excellent system that should be directly sponsored by freedom loving countries all around the world as a way to battle oppressive and tyrannical governments, but instead it's seen as a terrorist and druggie tool.
If a tool can be used to give the people power to bypass an oppressive government, then some people will use it to bypass the laws of whatever government they are in. No matter how noble an idea for a tool is, not every tool user will use it nobly.
He does mean John Wilkes Booth. Some people believe that Lincoln acted as a tyrant and counter to the goals that the United States was founded on. Slavery is a tangential issue just like porn is to the censorship debate. People who object to the censorship are conveniently labeled as supporters of porn and people who object to the suppression of states rights are conveniently labeled as supporters of slavery. However, supporting states rights doesn't make you a supporter of slavery just like decrying censorship doesn't make you a supporter of pornography.
Many people who object to the censorship are supporters of porn and many who object to the suppression of states rights are racists. Having people you dislike agree with you is an uncomfortable position but it doesn't make the position you're in wrong.
As for me? I generally don't censor or filter my family's access to the internet, (though I did when my children were younger,) but I do log things and when appropriate discuss with them my opinions of their choices. I'm perfectly comfortable with believing that I should do that but my government and my ISP should not.
I am glad to hear somebody else say that. There are lots of potential ways to provide coverage through our income taxes which weren't a part of the discussion when we got Obamacare.
I've personally advocated a "last choice insurance by government" plan where a national insurance plan would cover everyone, regardless of income or situation but where the full price of whatever cost was incurred was put into a balance with the IRS which would perpetually collect 10% of gross income as an additional income tax until the balance was repaid. Typical health insurance is about getting a reduced cost by paying for what you don't need just in case, where "last choice insurance by government" would be paying full cost for what you need, just deferred over the lifetime of the recipient. In return, we'd all pay some extra in income tax to cover the costs that weren't recovered from the recipients who needed the coverage.
People in this day and age believe that electronics are immoral. They live in the same world we do, though I sometimes wonder if they perceive it the same way.
Freedom is about allowing people to live the way they want to live, believe what they want to believe and live the way they believe is best. So long as their freedom doesn't harm someone else, I believe in freedom.
(But there is an answer to your question. You'll have to do the math yourself, I'm on my third glass of wine.) A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.
We should care an awful lot when our government decides to dictate activity that contradicts longly held religious beliefs. If you're an atheist, it is about preventing the government from dictating that people must adhere to the religion they disagree with. Agnostics should fear that government may dictate they acknowledge the one true religion. Any religious person should fear the government will decide that another differing religion will be supported by their own government.
Whatever your ideal society is, the historical tendency is for governments to support single religions. One of the things that makes the US potentially a better place to live is that it is Constitutionally inhibited from doing the same thing as governments have often done. I like the US Constitution primarily because it is designed to limit the authority of the government. When I read about things which call in to question whether those limits should be upheld, I almost reflexively always say "limit the authority of the government."
Interesting point. Just for the record, I think I agree with you, but I find it helps me think more clearly to consider opposing arguments.
Assuming we as a society believe that widely adopted health insurance is good, then is it better to have it supplied directly by the government or better to allow wider choice provided by a more free but still highly regulated open market?
Compromise is something our society thinks we want. Yet, it does lead to issues just like this where we have to decide whether it is best to offer no choice (single-payer) healthcare, pure capitalism or regulated and incentivized semi-capitalism healthcare.
That's a fair point. I get the choice whether to pay for health insurance from my employer. If I choose not to, I have the money I would have spent to spend on other insurance (or booze) of my choice. In my case, insurance isn't part of my pay, it is an optional agreement I may or may not enter into with my employer. I think that's usually the case, but I don't know if that is what is going on with this case. I'll admit that with my admittedly limited knowledge of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's history, I assumed that she would support the spirit of Obamacare and that lead me to think she wouldn't issue an injunction unless she had serious concerns about the legality of the issue. If it's a choice, then it's not part of the pay, but if it isn't then perhaps it can rightfully be considered pay. I wish now that I'd taken the time to read up on the case, but it is two glasses of wine too late for me to maintain sufficient interest.
Insurance providers have lots of things they decide not to cover. The question is whether the government has the authority to mandate this particular coverage which they previously didn't.
Well the difference is in whether it is pay or a separate agreement. If my employer offered to give me a monthly stipend of 120% of my pay rate in return for entering a separate agreement to follow their specific spending guidelines, I'd consider the option. I don't know if I'd do it or not, but if I have the option to enter into a separate second agreement, it isn't just my regular pay. Our government does allow the same sort of thing with health insurance with an incentive for my company to offer that second agreement. Is that rational? Is it the best option for the society we want? That's a different question but maybe one that should be discussed more.
Sorry, but you missed the point. Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.
Anytime the government mandates that people do something they believe is immoral, I believe the law should be very carefully examined. Do I agree with their opinion of what is immoral? No. But this is a question of how free our society is, and specifically whether the government has the authority to force an organization to go against their religious beliefs.
Obamacare is something that is particularly problematic for religious organizations. It is the one of the first times our legislature has ever mandated that organizations must provide a service, which is problematic enough in itself, but further it specifies that organizations must provide a service contrary to their religious beliefs.
Whether you agree with Religion A or not, the important question is whether the government should have the authority to tell you what you must do even if you believe it is immoral. Flip the argument around and you're asking whether the government has the right to demand that you tithe to the Roman Catholic church regardless of what you believe. If they have the right to demand you do one thing against your beliefs, then they have the right to do others. The seperation of church and state was supposed to keep the government from dictating what activity you must participate in. Are you sure you want a government that has decided to ignore that separation?
What is IPv6 in your analogy then? EFT/Traditional currencies have the problems of government interference, heavy tracking and are expensive to move. The expense is really the big issue because we're used to the other problems, but they're not insignificant. If you want to call EFT with traditional currencies IPv4, that's fine, particularly since IPv6 is a working standard that fixes most of the problems with IPv4. Bitcoin is analogous to IPv6 quite accurately. Name any other peer-to-peer currency with a tenth the value of Bitcoin, or even any other method of electronically exchanging value that overcomes those issues and you can compare bitcoin to IPv9.
Calling current currencies IPv4 is a potentially agreeable analogy to me as well. There are a variety of limitations and problems people have with it. It's expensive to move, heavily tracked and tied to specific governments. IPv6 is an attempt to overcome those limitations and problems, and there have been some flaws found and resolved with IPv6. Bitcoin mirrors that pretty well too. Calling it IPv9 is a little bit of a jump since people are actually using bitcoin and the protocol is widely established. Name another peer-to-peer currency with more support if you want to make the argument that IPv9 is a better analogy.
Well maybe not. On the other hand I believe it was possible to buy a variety of things that aren't illegal on the Silk Road. I listen to a podcast where the commentators were talking about the twinkies they bought that way. There might be journalists who were using Silk Road to buy legal things and had their bitcoins seized. The argument could be made that it is like buying strawberries at a flea market where some sellers are engaging in illegal activity and the buyers of strawberries have a legitimate right to have their seized assets returned.
I'm really not sure how the legalities would play out, but I would like to see the legal system set some precedents on what constitutes legal property since Congress has suggested that bitcoin is at least sort of property.