"If the Holy See and the world of catholicism survives anyhow, it can be only due to infinite divine grace, full-blown miracles, that is!"
Or people will believe what they want, regardless of the facts about the scandal. Or maybe people will look for alternate versions of the story that discredit it altogether, like some people tried to deny the existence of any Holocaust... Either way, the required "infinite divine grace" to save the church may be provided by the members themselves.
Here's a question for you (and no, I don't condone red light running, but): Did anyone get hurt when you saw their "brazen law breaking"? Really think about it - how much would've changed in their lives? Nothing... except that they would've slammed on their brakes and not gone through.
If you lived where red light cameras were installed (most of the cities I drive in in the Phoenix metro area), you'd see other unsafe side effects of the RLCs, like people slamming on their brakes on yellow lights to avoid tickets and causing rear end accidents. You'd also see the more unscrupulous cities (like Paradise Valley, AZ, or Chandler, AZ), put the cameras at intersections with shorter yellow times, amplifying the rear-end issue - or even intentionally breaking their own city's yellow light policies/regulations by intentionally shortening yellow light times even more to pay for the onerous contracts naive city councils sign with the camera company sharks/sheisters...
Trust me - Your city would be MUCH better off without the cameras and simply lengthening yellow light times. Safety doesn't have to come from Big Brother solutions to work...
Arizona turned off its Janet Napalitano-implemented state highway photo radar system (we're sorry, rest of the country, for dumping her and her "screw privacy" views on you.) Despite the fearmongering that poured out from various pro-camera sources, the highways have NOT grown more dangerous without the cameras watching. If anything, this real world study is showing that the sheer drop in traffic volume due to the recession played a much larger role in accident reductions than the speed cameras ever did.
In the end, the cameras were proven to just be an ineffective way to collect a new sin tax from Arizona drivers. The rest of the nation should note of our experiences here and avoid falling into the same trap.
Bottom line: Speed cameras are nothing more than a sin tax that made some drivers feel good about themselves and gave them an avenue to get even with other more "aggressive" drivers.
BTW - People may still not like Jan Brewer (the governor of AZ) for various reasons (SB1070, etc.), but she clearly got it right when she cancelled that program.
Are you referring to the historically-honorable leadership in Communist societies as well? Like Stalin? Mao?
Communism is an evil bastardization of what Mormons/LDS people call the "law of consecration" - which is a society where people share everything they do not need WILLINGLY. They work hard WILLINGLY and CHOOSE their own career path. They have the right to private land ownership (vs. the government owning everything). It's what is described in the Book of Acts (and that fell apart when the church was corrupted by various social, philosophical, and political forces.)
People aren't the problem in a Communist system. The Communist system IS the problem. Why? As long as communism refuses to give free agency and choices to its subjects, it will always fail.
I'm also from Arizona (work in Tempe), and I helped camerafraud.com try and collect signatures to put all photo enforcement up for a state-wide vote. (We fell short - we needed 153k+ valid signatures, but only collected 120,000 or so). Here's the thing: Once the camera companies (Redflex, ATS, etc.) get their foothold in your community/city and hooks your city council and/or mayor on the "sin tax" revenue, any fair and balanced debate is over.
The camera companies have a VERY powerful lobbyist community and stronger marketing divisions, and they will fight any votes on camera systems in any way possible. They will use every dirty trick in the book (sponsored "polls" showing widespread support for the cameras, one-sided arguments, outright lies, etc.) in the public eye, and behind closed doors in the government they somehow manage to ALWAYS keep camera systems from coming to a vote.
Look at what's happened in Los Angeles and Houston. Houston actually voted them out, but a judge deemed that the vote was illegal on procedural grounds, and the city has tripped around and turned their cameras back on. Los Angeles had clear evidence that the $500/citation cameras weren't working nor bringing in the revenue that they were promised, but some of the council members STILL loved them - for whatever reasons they had. It's like arguing about religion with those people - they love the cameras, no matter what the data shows. You'll hear glib statements like, ""Just slow down!", or "How hard is it to follow the law, a**hole?", arguments from them, all while the public officials are counting the take (right before they have to give a large chunk of it to the camera companies)..
Here in Arizona, vote after vote was attempted in the state legislature, but there was always one or two well-bought... er... well-placed legislators (yes, you, Kirk Adams - SOTH in the state house) that never let the entire legislature vote on it. Then you have the Democrats who vote as a block for the cameras (perhaps in some twisted, belated reverence to Janet Napalitano), swearing by their perceived efficacy.
Bottom line: Beware of any camera companies selling safety "for a price", whether you agree with them or not. Once they have their hand in the cookie jar, it will almost take an act of God to get their hands back out, regardless of the facts or public will.
(After debating cameras with countless people during signature collection, my personal opinion is that a majority of the pro-camera citizens are suffering from the "cameras get even with that guy that cut me off last week" syndrome, mixed in with, "I don't have to pay anything, so why do I care?", but that's just a study of one.)
I have to close Firebug anytime a heavy webpage (a huge table with sorting, like in a Drupal admin area, etc.). If I don't it locks up for several seconds anytime I try to leave that page. About 25% of those times it just hangs until I have to restart it.
It has made FF 3.6 look like the last version of FF for me... and I've been using it (or Mozilla before FF even existed) since the Netscape 6 debacle. Sorry guys - I hate the idea of Chrome as much as any privacy lover would, and I love certain addons (Adblock/NoScript/Firebug/etc.), but as a web dev FF4+ just isn't cutting it. Unless one of these new version fix those issues, I have to leave FF behind. It's now wasting my time on the job.
BTW - Isn't it ironic that it's the same version number (4.x) where the Netscape code became too buggy/broken and had to be scrapped? Hopefully that's not an omen for Firefox...
That's like saying, "There's no gas-powered car ban. Sure - you can have a gas powered car... What was that?... Yes, it's true that you can't buy or sell a car like that in the United States anymore unless it gets 100MPG, but.... What?... *Sigh* Yeah, yeah, yeah - it's true that after decades of research and effort by the auto industry no 100% gas-powered car has even come that close to that number, but it's not a car ban. Are you listening this time? IT'S... NOT... A... BAN! Man... Stupid teabaggers need to get an education or something..."
That's the weirdest part is that there's clear proof that cameras do not deter crime or help solve it. The only other reasons a governmental unit would put them up is control by fear or if there was a lot of dirty money changing hands - neither of which is a good thing.
Why do people tolerate it? Are they just uninformed? Willfully ignorant? Afraid of the boogeyman? What?
Can we for the first time award a "+6, Insightful" to a post, please?
Not everyone should just skip manual labor and become a "business grad" with a (more watered down) four year college degree. Not everyone has the intellectual capacity to be an engineer or architect. There are tens of millions of Americans with an IQ of less than 100 but will work hard if given an opportunity to make a decent wage, without having to go into $50,000+ in student loans to get a degree that is worthless to them (especially from the more criminal for-profit "universities" that are preying on that, "I HAVE to have a college degree," paranoia that has permeated our society).
BTW - Speaking of clothing... When's the last time you could buy a good pair of all-leather Nike tennis shoes? When's the last time you could buy 100% cotton socks? When's the last time you could get 100% cotton shirts for your kids at Wal-Mart? And so on... I'd LOVE to have those quality choices back, and yes, I would pay a realistic premium, especially if they were HQ and made in the US...
Maybe we should start up lower-level American manufacturing again, perhaps with a ball?
We can give hundreds of billions to the poor around the world, but we can't buy a satellite to watch the weather?
How about we not build a few of those bridges we've built in Baghdad or something? Or maybe have those countries pay us back for some of the infrastructure we rebuilt from scratch? Hell - you can even deduct the value of the old infrastructure after some depreciation...
Or maybe we could launch one or two fewer spy satellites?
Hell - I bet that the interest on the debt we've borrowed over the last five years would cover a LOT of satellites...
What a mess...
Interesting concept, but there are two possible issues: 1) Cost - Who pays for the bureaucracy that kind of system would create? It wouldn't be THAT expensive, but it would cost something. 2) Inflation - Do you adjust for inflation in those annual payments? What if the dollar hyper-inflates itself out of existence?
Then again, somebody will figure out what the right carrot will be for people to accept this. Maybe they'll try to sweeten the deal somehow, by paying for a year of cable in exchange for your privacy. "We'll give you a free year of premium cable, or 3 months of pay-per-view (pornography channels included), if you allow us to collect data that will make YOUR viewing experience better." Maybe they'll somehow tap the vanity/celebrity of everyday viewers and turn people viewing TV into some kind of programming, with people making asses of themselves just to get on the "Real YouTube" channel.
You never know what people will do to get something they consider valuable for free, or to get their 15 seconds of fame.
According to a video on this issue on moveon.org I saw yesterday, this potentially could become a problem.
The gist of the video: If you choose to like certain search results (news/politics), won't that block you from seeing "the other side" in a 2-sided debate? If all you do is like conservative-leaning news sources, and the more liberal-leaning news sources are filtered out, how are you ever going to have an objective view of the world? Shouldn't we be the "gatekeepers" of what we want to read, not search engines or social media platforms?
This sounds like it serves the narcissism in ourselves more than the ideal of what the internet is supposed to be - an objective purveyor of information.
The ones who aren't kissing the ass of said all powerful authority are usually the ones who are kissing their own ass, usually while looking down on everyone else in their own wisdom, blissfully unaware of their intellectual narcissism.
It's a scary thing not having something to worship...
If he didn't encrypt his HDD and it burns terrorists everywhere, the smart terrorists in the future won't make the same mistake. This is probably a one-time "motherlode" of intel...
A few possible reasons the Slashdot crowd isn't more "digital":
Maybe people in the tech field are aware of the security risks involved with financial document storage? The chance of a hacker stealing my electronic financial documents is zero...
It's easier to just throw them in a shoe box, in chronological order, and keep important tax receipts for each year in a manila envelope and then discard them after 7 years. Why go to all the trouble of digitizing a bunch of receipts and bills, time-wise and materials-wise, when there's a 99% chance that you'll never go back to the receipts/documents outside of once for taxes?
I don't have to use any resources to recreate a bill in paper form if necessary. Someone else has already paid for the materials to do that for me. All I pay is a "where do I put this shoebox?" storage fee of sorts...
The only positive for digital docs is that you don't have to shred them at some point, which takes a little time (make sure to not skimp and get a good shredder).
"DVDs don't crash because some jag-off decided to run Java code between frames of my movie. DVDs don't make me worry about version numbers, patching my player, or any of that jazz. And that's just technical."
This was my hangup. My first and only experience with Blu-ray was Avatar. My brother had just bought it, and I quickly took it out of the case, threw it in my brother's relatively new, expensive, stand-alone Blu-Ray player (a few months old, if that). Instead of the movie starting up, I got a screen saying in essence, "Error - We can't play this Blu-Ray disc because your Blu-Ray player needs to be updated. Please update your player." I was really surprised, and then angry. I had a Blu-Ray player and I had a Blu-Ray disc. What I didn't have was Avatar playing on the huge LCD screen. It didn't "just work" for whatever reason.
That experience stuck with me. How could I ever know if MY future Blu-Ray player would play any Blu-Ray disc, like DVDs universally do? For the kind of money you pay for the Blu-Ray experience, it had better just work, and it didn't for me. It'll be a LONG time before I even consider buying a Blu-Ray player of my own.
"People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free."
Selfish absolute freedom from an individual perspective: Yes.
True and absolute freedom, however, does not exist in life because no man is an island. Any "action debt" racked up by the free individual has to be accounted for in our universe.
I mean, who's going to pay (with their time or money) to get rid of the dead body? Everything always comes even...
Many independents in Arizona bemoan how they can't vote for Dems or GOPers in the primaries, but this kind of movement is exactly why we have closed primaries in this state.
To you Dems who support this kind of ballot box stuffing: What if Obama found a way to screw up for another 2 years or some other unforeseen events screwed him politicially after the primaries, and Palin somehow actually WON the election? Like her or not, Sarah Palin is NOT presidential material. Underneath her everyman's "Drill, Baby, Drill!", one-liners, she's a pretty face with a 100IQ and a reality TV show. (She didn't even have the wisdom to stay away from trash like reality TV - and you want HER making executive decisions on world policy or with ICBM launch codes?
Even the possibility of Dems doing this to the presidency shows just how ignorant, spiteful, partisan, and ultimately short-sighted politics have become. Americans should be putting the best candidates on the ballot in the general election, regardless of allegiances.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the Holy See and the world of catholicism survives anyhow, it can be only due to infinite divine grace, full-blown miracles, that is!"
Or people will believe what they want, regardless of the facts about the scandal. Or maybe people will look for alternate versions of the story that discredit it altogether, like some people tried to deny the existence of any Holocaust... Either way, the required "infinite divine grace" to save the church may be provided by the members themselves.
Here's a question for you (and no, I don't condone red light running, but): Did anyone get hurt when you saw their "brazen law breaking"? Really think about it - how much would've changed in their lives? Nothing... except that they would've slammed on their brakes and not gone through.
If you lived where red light cameras were installed (most of the cities I drive in in the Phoenix metro area), you'd see other unsafe side effects of the RLCs, like people slamming on their brakes on yellow lights to avoid tickets and causing rear end accidents. You'd also see the more unscrupulous cities (like Paradise Valley, AZ, or Chandler, AZ), put the cameras at intersections with shorter yellow times, amplifying the rear-end issue - or even intentionally breaking their own city's yellow light policies/regulations by intentionally shortening yellow light times even more to pay for the onerous contracts naive city councils sign with the camera company sharks/sheisters...
Trust me - Your city would be MUCH better off without the cameras and simply lengthening yellow light times. Safety doesn't have to come from Big Brother solutions to work...
Arizona turned off its Janet Napalitano-implemented state highway photo radar system (we're sorry, rest of the country, for dumping her and her "screw privacy" views on you.) Despite the fearmongering that poured out from various pro-camera sources, the highways have NOT grown more dangerous without the cameras watching. If anything, this real world study is showing that the sheer drop in traffic volume due to the recession played a much larger role in accident reductions than the speed cameras ever did.
In the end, the cameras were proven to just be an ineffective way to collect a new sin tax from Arizona drivers. The rest of the nation should note of our experiences here and avoid falling into the same trap.
Bottom line: Speed cameras are nothing more than a sin tax that made some drivers feel good about themselves and gave them an avenue to get even with other more "aggressive" drivers.
BTW - People may still not like Jan Brewer (the governor of AZ) for various reasons (SB1070, etc.), but she clearly got it right when she cancelled that program.
I hope you're joking 'cause in this day and age some people actually believe that tripe.
Good stuff - You beat us all to the punch... It'll be interesting to see the rationale as the artists all eventually pass on.
It depends on people acting honorably."
Are you referring to the historically-honorable leadership in Communist societies as well? Like Stalin? Mao?
Communism is an evil bastardization of what Mormons/LDS people call the "law of consecration" - which is a society where people share everything they do not need WILLINGLY. They work hard WILLINGLY and CHOOSE their own career path. They have the right to private land ownership (vs. the government owning everything). It's what is described in the Book of Acts (and that fell apart when the church was corrupted by various social, philosophical, and political forces.)
People aren't the problem in a Communist system. The Communist system IS the problem. Why? As long as communism refuses to give free agency and choices to its subjects, it will always fail.
I'm also from Arizona (work in Tempe), and I helped camerafraud.com try and collect signatures to put all photo enforcement up for a state-wide vote. (We fell short - we needed 153k+ valid signatures, but only collected 120,000 or so). Here's the thing: Once the camera companies (Redflex, ATS, etc.) get their foothold in your community/city and hooks your city council and/or mayor on the "sin tax" revenue, any fair and balanced debate is over.
The camera companies have a VERY powerful lobbyist community and stronger marketing divisions, and they will fight any votes on camera systems in any way possible. They will use every dirty trick in the book (sponsored "polls" showing widespread support for the cameras, one-sided arguments, outright lies, etc.) in the public eye, and behind closed doors in the government they somehow manage to ALWAYS keep camera systems from coming to a vote.
Look at what's happened in Los Angeles and Houston. Houston actually voted them out, but a judge deemed that the vote was illegal on procedural grounds, and the city has tripped around and turned their cameras back on. Los Angeles had clear evidence that the $500/citation cameras weren't working nor bringing in the revenue that they were promised, but some of the council members STILL loved them - for whatever reasons they had. It's like arguing about religion with those people - they love the cameras, no matter what the data shows. You'll hear glib statements like, ""Just slow down!", or "How hard is it to follow the law, a**hole?", arguments from them, all while the public officials are counting the take (right before they have to give a large chunk of it to the camera companies)..
Here in Arizona, vote after vote was attempted in the state legislature, but there was always one or two well-bought... er... well-placed legislators (yes, you, Kirk Adams - SOTH in the state house) that never let the entire legislature vote on it. Then you have the Democrats who vote as a block for the cameras (perhaps in some twisted, belated reverence to Janet Napalitano), swearing by their perceived efficacy.
Bottom line: Beware of any camera companies selling safety "for a price", whether you agree with them or not. Once they have their hand in the cookie jar, it will almost take an act of God to get their hands back out, regardless of the facts or public will.
(After debating cameras with countless people during signature collection, my personal opinion is that a majority of the pro-camera citizens are suffering from the "cameras get even with that guy that cut me off last week" syndrome, mixed in with, "I don't have to pay anything, so why do I care?", but that's just a study of one.)
I have to close Firebug anytime a heavy webpage (a huge table with sorting, like in a Drupal admin area, etc.). If I don't it locks up for several seconds anytime I try to leave that page. About 25% of those times it just hangs until I have to restart it. It has made FF 3.6 look like the last version of FF for me... and I've been using it (or Mozilla before FF even existed) since the Netscape 6 debacle. Sorry guys - I hate the idea of Chrome as much as any privacy lover would, and I love certain addons (Adblock/NoScript/Firebug/etc.), but as a web dev FF4+ just isn't cutting it. Unless one of these new version fix those issues, I have to leave FF behind. It's now wasting my time on the job. BTW - Isn't it ironic that it's the same version number (4.x) where the Netscape code became too buggy/broken and had to be scrapped? Hopefully that's not an omen for Firefox...
That's like saying, "There's no gas-powered car ban. Sure - you can have a gas powered car... What was that?... Yes, it's true that you can't buy or sell a car like that in the United States anymore unless it gets 100MPG, but.... What?... *Sigh* Yeah, yeah, yeah - it's true that after decades of research and effort by the auto industry no 100% gas-powered car has even come that close to that number, but it's not a car ban. Are you listening this time? IT'S... NOT ... A ... BAN! Man... Stupid teabaggers need to get an education or something..."
That's the weirdest part is that there's clear proof that cameras do not deter crime or help solve it. The only other reasons a governmental unit would put them up is control by fear or if there was a lot of dirty money changing hands - neither of which is a good thing.
Why do people tolerate it? Are they just uninformed? Willfully ignorant? Afraid of the boogeyman? What?
Not everyone should just skip manual labor and become a "business grad" with a (more watered down) four year college degree. Not everyone has the intellectual capacity to be an engineer or architect. There are tens of millions of Americans with an IQ of less than 100 but will work hard if given an opportunity to make a decent wage, without having to go into $50,000+ in student loans to get a degree that is worthless to them (especially from the more criminal for-profit "universities" that are preying on that, "I HAVE to have a college degree," paranoia that has permeated our society).
There is GREAT value in doing good, hard day's labor. It FEELS good to actually do something, other than click a mouse all day (and significantly raise our mortality rates in the process).
BTW - Speaking of clothing... When's the last time you could buy a good pair of all-leather Nike tennis shoes? When's the last time you could buy 100% cotton socks? When's the last time you could get 100% cotton shirts for your kids at Wal-Mart? And so on... I'd LOVE to have those quality choices back, and yes, I would pay a realistic premium, especially if they were HQ and made in the US...
Maybe we should start up lower-level American manufacturing again, perhaps with a ball?
We can give hundreds of billions to the poor around the world, but we can't buy a satellite to watch the weather? How about we not build a few of those bridges we've built in Baghdad or something? Or maybe have those countries pay us back for some of the infrastructure we rebuilt from scratch? Hell - you can even deduct the value of the old infrastructure after some depreciation... Or maybe we could launch one or two fewer spy satellites? Hell - I bet that the interest on the debt we've borrowed over the last five years would cover a LOT of satellites... What a mess...
Interesting concept, but there are two possible issues: 1) Cost - Who pays for the bureaucracy that kind of system would create? It wouldn't be THAT expensive, but it would cost something. 2) Inflation - Do you adjust for inflation in those annual payments? What if the dollar hyper-inflates itself out of existence?
No? This is real? Then hell no...
Then again, somebody will figure out what the right carrot will be for people to accept this. Maybe they'll try to sweeten the deal somehow, by paying for a year of cable in exchange for your privacy. "We'll give you a free year of premium cable, or 3 months of pay-per-view (pornography channels included), if you allow us to collect data that will make YOUR viewing experience better." Maybe they'll somehow tap the vanity/celebrity of everyday viewers and turn people viewing TV into some kind of programming, with people making asses of themselves just to get on the "Real YouTube" channel.
You never know what people will do to get something they consider valuable for free, or to get their 15 seconds of fame.
Instead of stealing oil from other countries, they're stealing from their own carbon resource: super cheap human labor.
According to a video on this issue on moveon.org I saw yesterday, this potentially could become a problem.
The gist of the video: If you choose to like certain search results (news/politics), won't that block you from seeing "the other side" in a 2-sided debate? If all you do is like conservative-leaning news sources, and the more liberal-leaning news sources are filtered out, how are you ever going to have an objective view of the world? Shouldn't we be the "gatekeepers" of what we want to read, not search engines or social media platforms?
This sounds like it serves the narcissism in ourselves more than the ideal of what the internet is supposed to be - an objective purveyor of information.
The ones who aren't kissing the ass of said all powerful authority are usually the ones who are kissing their own ass, usually while looking down on everyone else in their own wisdom, blissfully unaware of their intellectual narcissism.
It's a scary thing not having something to worship...
If he didn't encrypt his HDD and it burns terrorists everywhere, the smart terrorists in the future won't make the same mistake. This is probably a one-time "motherlode" of intel...
A few possible reasons the Slashdot crowd isn't more "digital":
The only positive for digital docs is that you don't have to shred them at some point, which takes a little time (make sure to not skimp and get a good shredder).
"DVDs don't crash because some jag-off decided to run Java code between frames of my movie. DVDs don't make me worry about version numbers, patching my player, or any of that jazz. And that's just technical."
This was my hangup. My first and only experience with Blu-ray was Avatar. My brother had just bought it, and I quickly took it out of the case, threw it in my brother's relatively new, expensive, stand-alone Blu-Ray player (a few months old, if that). Instead of the movie starting up, I got a screen saying in essence, "Error - We can't play this Blu-Ray disc because your Blu-Ray player needs to be updated. Please update your player." I was really surprised, and then angry. I had a Blu-Ray player and I had a Blu-Ray disc. What I didn't have was Avatar playing on the huge LCD screen. It didn't "just work" for whatever reason.
That experience stuck with me. How could I ever know if MY future Blu-Ray player would play any Blu-Ray disc, like DVDs universally do? For the kind of money you pay for the Blu-Ray experience, it had better just work, and it didn't for me. It'll be a LONG time before I even consider buying a Blu-Ray player of my own.
Gilligan's Island.
"People should be able to put anything they want into their bodies, upto and including cyanide. Else they are not truly free."
Selfish absolute freedom from an individual perspective: Yes.
True and absolute freedom, however, does not exist in life because no man is an island. Any "action debt" racked up by the free individual has to be accounted for in our universe.
I mean, who's going to pay (with their time or money) to get rid of the dead body? Everything always comes even...
It's not different as long as the other technologies also come with the equivalent of a snooze bar or an off switch...
Many independents in Arizona bemoan how they can't vote for Dems or GOPers in the primaries, but this kind of movement is exactly why we have closed primaries in this state.
To you Dems who support this kind of ballot box stuffing: What if Obama found a way to screw up for another 2 years or some other unforeseen events screwed him politicially after the primaries, and Palin somehow actually WON the election? Like her or not, Sarah Palin is NOT presidential material. Underneath her everyman's "Drill, Baby, Drill!", one-liners, she's a pretty face with a 100IQ and a reality TV show. (She didn't even have the wisdom to stay away from trash like reality TV - and you want HER making executive decisions on world policy or with ICBM launch codes?
Even the possibility of Dems doing this to the presidency shows just how ignorant, spiteful, partisan, and ultimately short-sighted politics have become. Americans should be putting the best candidates on the ballot in the general election, regardless of allegiances.
Religious bigotry is alive and well, I see...
(Disclaimer: I think that Palin isn't presidential material either..)