So vote third party! If the outcome is "guaranteed" to be either R or D, think of it as giving you the luxury to check the box next to I, or G, or L, without "throwing the race".
Hey, me too, and seriously, if you do this: write to your favorite congresscritter(s) to let them/him/her know. The House and Senate Transportation committees are good places to send a note if you don't want to write to your own congressional reps. (The Senate committee already hauled Pistole in last week for a grilling. Hopefully they will keep on top of him.) Consider cc'ing the TSA, White House, and the Air Transport Association (airline trade group). Other good organizations to write to might be the ACLU, We Won't Fly, and Fly With Dignity.
Opting out altogether is great, but not if no one knows about it. If you let organizations like this know, you'll get included in the numbers.
Both the security guard and their supervisor broke procedure and policy, risking their jobs. ..I'd say it's a good experience to meet a decent human being. ..it's a step in the right direction.
You're absolutely right, these individuals deserve praise for using their heads rather than foolishly following mindless procedure. (Would that such behavior made them eligible for more supervisory duties where they could spread that attitude.) However, liquidsin's point is also quite good: that this shouldn't be the exception. It shouldn't be remarkable that a decent human being is working as a TSA screener; it should be expected. If the system is such that a person needs to risk unemployment to do what's right, the system is, pardonnez mon français, fucked up. If that's a step in the right direction, we need to start taking leaps.
The general idea of banning certain items in the cabin isn't, in itself, ridiculous to me. It's the idea that some person is trusted and approved to carry a gun, but that the same person carrying, say, a wrench greater than 7" length constitutes a threat.
What's really brilliant about this policy is that even a LEO who has approval to carry a service weapon on a flight is subject to the same confiscation rules as everyone else: i.e., no liquids, nail clippers, and so forth.
"Yes, you can bring your pistol, but the can of mace, the Leatherman, and this jar of tomato sauce are going in the circular file."
The fact that you can't conveniently get across the country without getting on the plane isn't the government's problem.
Then why is it the government's concern that I'm willing to risk getting on a plane where someone might possibly have managed to figure out a way to force the plane to crash? Why is it the government's concern that I have a mutually-satisfactory private deal with a service provider to get me across the country? Why do you think the government has the authority to restrict my right of movement?
You could take a private plane.
Airplanes running into buildings are the government's problem.
Then why aren't private planes flying into buildings part of the federal government's "sphere of control"? Why are the other methods of travel that you mentioned not? Why aren't U-Haul trucks checked every hundred miles to make sure they're not full of fertilizer and timers?
saying that he 4th amendment protects you from airport security is just stupid. The government cannot force you to submit to a search of your person without a warrant
The 4th amendment notes that I have right to be secure against an unreasonable search. A warrant is just a written-out reason that's been reviewed and approved by someone; it's not the be-all and end-all of reasonableness. What's the reason here?
Many people want their own information to be free. Ever heard of a blog? Ever heard of self-publishing a book? Ever heard of Linux, for crying out loud? Lots and lots of people are enthusiastic about and made happy by sharing what they know. Often a person just wants acknowledgement for the presentation of the information.
Some people do make their living by producing information in such a way that induces other people to trade money or valuables for access to it, but that is by no means the norm, the natural state of things, or historically, the main way that information is distributed.
Granted that you never made the explicit statement "Xylitol is a protein."
However, your twoposts (leaving aside the hypocrisy of the arrogant manner in which you complained about arrogance in posting) are uselessly conflating three different things: sugarless gum (which may or may not contain xylitol or this protein that the Army has developed), xylitol (one of a few sugar substitutes used in sugarless gum, and not a protein), and the gum that is the subject of this article (which is almost certainly sugarless, but may or may not have xylitol). In the course of waving your dick^Wdegree around for us all to marvel at, you must have forgotten the content of the article that you had just read so thoroughly, which was about an artificial protein fragment that has been developed that seems to have the property of actively destroying harmful oral bacteria.
One usually says "amused by". The use of "with" is not quite incorrect, but in US English, it sounds a little funny.
...available web pages, a court-ordered fine...
That comma should have been a semicolon, connecting two semantically related but syntactically complete sentences. By way of example, I could have just written: "That comma should have been a semicolon; they are used to connect two semantically related but syntactically complete sentences." If the constructions on each side of the comma are able to stand on their own, separated by a period, then the comma is incorrect.
I believe that "North Country Gazette" has been misguided in this case...
Your use of "misguided" in this sentence is, again, not quite incorrect, but a little awkward to a careful US reader. It's a very subtle point, but "misguided" is almost always used with the sense that the entity being guided is also the one doing the guiding. The phrase "has been misguided" reads as "it did, at some point, choose to travel down an improper path, but is no longer traveling that way". So, in fully pedantic mode, I would suggest you use "misled".
If you publish your material freely accessible on a website...
This is an improper use of modifiers. The two words "freely accessible" don't quite work together the way that I think you intend them to. I don't know the proper terms in this case, but I'll try to explain the problem. The word "accessible" is an adjective, and can't modify the verb "publish". However, "freely" attaches to "publish", instead of "accessible" as I think you meant it to. It has in some way to do with the semantics of "publish"; you could use "make" in its place and the sentence would work perfectly. Due to its meaning, "make" is capable of taking an adjectival phrase (like "freely accessible") to describe a changed state of its object; unfortunately, like I said, I don't know the terminology for this. Another option is to stick a subjunctive (I think!) verb in there, and make a conjunctive (I think!) phrase, like so: "publish your material so that it is freely available..."
All that having been said, your English in this post is very good. It is certainly at or above the level of the majority of educated native English-speakers in the US. (It is also without any doubt more than acceptable for an internet forum post.) Would that I spoke a second language as well as you... Anyways, well done! I hope that you find my grammar pedantry helpful.
You should be able to go back to the old style comment system using your user preferences. I just did, anyways. Help & Preferences > Discussions > Viewing > Disable Dynamic Comments.
Someone that would have bought that at $2 never got the chance to see it, or someone that was specifically looking for it but got there later
the actual reader has $2.50 less left over for buying other books
The difference is that a scalper extracted $2.50 out of the economy for doing nothing of value at all.
You're assuming that the Actual Reader is necessarily in proximity to the bookstore, enough to be able to find the book in that place. In fact, there may be an Actual Reader across the country who's really interested in the book, and has scoured her local stores, but can only find it online after ScumBag With PDA posts it for sale. Either of these cases is equally likely, and the SBWPDA in Vancouver making the book available to AR in Little Rock is potentially valuable.
AR's time or inclinations may also be such that she doesn't want to go to the bookstore, and places a lot of value on getting the book she wants shipped to her house, even though the bookstore just down the street has it in stock for cheaper.
The only way SBWPDA is scalping is if he's buying a book that a person already could have purchased for a certain price ("could have purchased" includes desire to spend the required time to make the purchase) and then selling it to that person for a higher price, but that is not at all necessarily the case.
it's like those assholes who have a program that sits on the WoW auction house buying out things and relisting them for higher prices
Those people are assholes, because they are reselling a limited product in the same market, which, yes, is scalping. Scalping means that I have taken a product that was available and made price the only barrier to its availability. SBWPDA is removing at least one barrier, namely location, to the product's availability. SBWPDA is making the product available to more buyers, adding value by moving the product to a larger market, and can earn money by doing that work.
If I go to a popular sandwich shop and buy out their whole stock, then stand just outside and resell the sandwiches for a 50% markup, that's scalping. If I put the sandwiches in a trailer on my bike and cart them around to job sites and office buildings at lunchtime, saving those people from wasting half their lunch break traveling to the sandwich shop, that's useful work. (If you object that people might want to "stretch their legs" by walking to the shop, imagine me taking the sandwiches to a beautiful picnic spot that the people wouldn't otherwise have had time to walk to from the sandwich shop.)
If the goal is the dissemination of the knowledge within books
I'm reasonably certain that the goal of most businesses is to put food on the table of, and a roof over the head of, the operators. There are of course other considerations, like "I really like books and helping people find great ones to read", that might make a person open a bookstore instead of a scrap metal yard where he could make more money, but if there's no money coming in, that secondary goal isn't going to be met, no matter how much the owner cares about it.
Or from the library's point of view, some jackass is preventing them from getting books in the hands of readers at the low price they wanted to do it at.
As other people here have pointed out, a library doesn't sell books to "get them into the hands of readers". It sells them to remove low-circulation books from storage, so that it doesn't have to deal with them anymore. If the library wanted to maximize access to the books, it would have left them in circulation where anyone could read them for free. Or, if you're really convinced that the purpose is charitable, the library can very simply institute a "N books per person, show yr library car
If the goal of the store is truly to have a cool place to hang out and talk about books, then the owner of the stor^H^H^Hocial club needs to start putting prices on his or her books that discourage or make impossible the profitable reselling of the books. Simple. In fact, if the owner starts pricing books a little higher, there might be a little money left over at the end of the month for some brandy to go in that coffee!
And I would argue that it's somewhat scumbaggish to undermine that choice by sucking out any books that are below the global market price for a quick profit.
There's a book, "How to Make Money Selling Books", priced $2 at the used bookstore.
Scenario 1: ScumBag With PDA comes in, decides he can sell this book for $4.50 on Amazon, and pays the store the $2 it's asking. Then SBWP goes home and posts the book for sale on Amazon. The store's income: $2, paid to it buy a local patron.
Scenario 2: SomeBody Who's Penny-wise comes in, decides she wants to read this book, and pays the store the $2 it's asking. Then SBWP goes home and reads the book. The store's income: $2, paid to it by a local patron.
What is the difference between these scenarios? The store got the money that it was asking for. It has a right to sell its books to local buyers, of course, and it has done so in both cases. It has absolutely no right to put terms on what the buyer does with the book. ("Not for resale"?) Are you asserting that the second SBWP has some right to the book before the first?
Leaving aside the issue that PDA-guy may act rudely to other patrons as he roots through the books, why is what he's doing wrong? If you come into the bookstore, looking for "HtMMSB", after either of the SBWPs, the book is already sold.
Actually, the signature is nothing more than an approval to a contract, not for comparison purposes. . ..The signature on the cheque indicates that you're agreeing to pay the amount specified on the note. A cheque can be written on anything as long as it contains . . . a signature indicating approval of the transaction.
Okay. ..but if the signature is that of someone who isn't authorized to approve this contract, i.e., not the owner of the account (or other person listed as having access), then the bank shouldn't pay the check! (Likewise for a credit card slip.) Which means that they ought to compare the signature to the one that they have on file (the one that they got when the account was opened), when they are moving the funds around.
You could write this all on a piece of paper and it would be valid. ..
This used to be the case, but AFAIK (based on asking the banks that I've used), most banks will only honor checks printed in specific formats. I assume this has a lot to do with making sure the account number is machine-readable to make processing easier, but there's some fraud protection that comes with it. However, based on the fact that you write "cheque" and I write "check", I surmise that we are in different parts of the world, so your ability to use a cocktail napkin as a note to pay your bills may differ from mine.
You realise that your mainly demonstrating my point by showing such blatant intolerance of these few example viewpoints.
And they're not even really controversial viewpoints.
As I said, they are so far from being controversial that they don't even represent a departure from the consensus in their respective fields. The only things that I'm intolerant of are your presentation of them as somehow radical, and your unrelated, unsubstantiated, and frankly bigoted claim that members of a specific political group would attack you for making them.
Slashdot Mirror
So vote third party! If the outcome is "guaranteed" to be either R or D, think of it as giving you the luxury to check the box next to I, or G, or L, without "throwing the race".
+1 for reasonable, hopeful attitude! Well written!
Hey, me too, and seriously, if you do this: write to your favorite congresscritter(s) to let them/him/her know. The House and Senate Transportation committees are good places to send a note if you don't want to write to your own congressional reps. (The Senate committee already hauled Pistole in last week for a grilling. Hopefully they will keep on top of him.) Consider cc'ing the TSA, White House, and the Air Transport Association (airline trade group). Other good organizations to write to might be the ACLU, We Won't Fly, and Fly With Dignity.
Opting out altogether is great, but not if no one knows about it. If you let organizations like this know, you'll get included in the numbers.
You're absolutely right, these individuals deserve praise for using their heads rather than foolishly following mindless procedure. (Would that such behavior made them eligible for more supervisory duties where they could spread that attitude.) However, liquidsin's point is also quite good: that this shouldn't be the exception. It shouldn't be remarkable that a decent human being is working as a TSA screener; it should be expected. If the system is such that a person needs to risk unemployment to do what's right, the system is, pardonnez mon français, fucked up. If that's a step in the right direction, we need to start taking leaps.
I seem to remember hearing about an AI that killed a few people. Must be ten years ago now. . . Yes, here's a Wikipedia article about it.
Okay, good to know. That does make sense.
The general idea of banning certain items in the cabin isn't, in itself, ridiculous to me. It's the idea that some person is trusted and approved to carry a gun, but that the same person carrying, say, a wrench greater than 7" length constitutes a threat.
What's really brilliant about this policy is that even a LEO who has approval to carry a service weapon on a flight is subject to the same confiscation rules as everyone else: i.e., no liquids, nail clippers, and so forth.
"Yes, you can bring your pistol, but the can of mace, the Leatherman, and this jar of tomato sauce are going in the circular file."
WTF?
I have never seen a post that made me wish I had mod points more. Well written, well argued! (Plus I agree with it! ;-)
Communism is just a red herring.
A-fucking-men!
The 4th amendment restricts the government's authority to search me to reasonable circumstances.
There are many cases where there is no reasonable alternative to flying on a commercial airline.
Ergo, the government is overstepping its authority.
Then why is it the government's concern that I'm willing to risk getting on a plane where someone might possibly have managed to figure out a way to force the plane to crash? Why is it the government's concern that I have a mutually-satisfactory private deal with a service provider to get me across the country? Why do you think the government has the authority to restrict my right of movement?
Then why aren't private planes flying into buildings part of the federal government's "sphere of control"? Why are the other methods of travel that you mentioned not? Why aren't U-Haul trucks checked every hundred miles to make sure they're not full of fertilizer and timers?
The 4th amendment notes that I have right to be secure against an unreasonable search. A warrant is just a written-out reason that's been reviewed and approved by someone; it's not the be-all and end-all of reasonableness. What's the reason here?
Many people want their own information to be free. Ever heard of a blog? Ever heard of self-publishing a book? Ever heard of Linux, for crying out loud? Lots and lots of people are enthusiastic about and made happy by sharing what they know. Often a person just wants acknowledgement for the presentation of the information.
Some people do make their living by producing information in such a way that induces other people to trade money or valuables for access to it, but that is by no means the norm, the natural state of things, or historically, the main way that information is distributed.
Granted that you never made the explicit statement "Xylitol is a protein."
However, your two posts (leaving aside the hypocrisy of the arrogant manner in which you complained about arrogance in posting) are uselessly conflating three different things: sugarless gum (which may or may not contain xylitol or this protein that the Army has developed), xylitol (one of a few sugar substitutes used in sugarless gum, and not a protein), and the gum that is the subject of this article (which is almost certainly sugarless, but may or may not have xylitol). In the course of waving your dick^Wdegree around for us all to marvel at, you must have forgotten the content of the article that you had just read so thoroughly, which was about an artificial protein fragment that has been developed that seems to have the property of actively destroying harmful oral bacteria.
You might want to take a refresher course, doctor. Xylitol isn't a protein.
I have absolutely no clue what I'm supposed to be looking for, but the availability of these photos is really cool. Thanks for the link!
Also, I hope your .sig was serious or I'm going to feel like a real ass...
One usually says "amused by". The use of "with" is not quite incorrect, but in US English, it sounds a little funny.
That comma should have been a semicolon, connecting two semantically related but syntactically complete sentences. By way of example, I could have just written: "That comma should have been a semicolon; they are used to connect two semantically related but syntactically complete sentences." If the constructions on each side of the comma are able to stand on their own, separated by a period, then the comma is incorrect.
Your use of "misguided" in this sentence is, again, not quite incorrect, but a little awkward to a careful US reader. It's a very subtle point, but "misguided" is almost always used with the sense that the entity being guided is also the one doing the guiding. The phrase "has been misguided" reads as "it did, at some point, choose to travel down an improper path, but is no longer traveling that way". So, in fully pedantic mode, I would suggest you use "misled".
This is an improper use of modifiers. The two words "freely accessible" don't quite work together the way that I think you intend them to. I don't know the proper terms in this case, but I'll try to explain the problem. The word "accessible" is an adjective, and can't modify the verb "publish". However, "freely" attaches to "publish", instead of "accessible" as I think you meant it to. It has in some way to do with the semantics of "publish"; you could use "make" in its place and the sentence would work perfectly. Due to its meaning, "make" is capable of taking an adjectival phrase (like "freely accessible") to describe a changed state of its object; unfortunately, like I said, I don't know the terminology for this. Another option is to stick a subjunctive (I think!) verb in there, and make a conjunctive (I think!) phrase, like so: "publish your material so that it is freely available..."
All that having been said, your English in this post is very good. It is certainly at or above the level of the majority of educated native English-speakers in the US. (It is also without any doubt more than acceptable for an internet forum post.) Would that I spoke a second language as well as you... Anyways, well done! I hope that you find my grammar pedantry helpful.
You should be able to go back to the old style comment system using your user preferences. I just did, anyways. Help & Preferences > Discussions > Viewing > Disable Dynamic Comments.
You're assuming that the Actual Reader is necessarily in proximity to the bookstore, enough to be able to find the book in that place. In fact, there may be an Actual Reader across the country who's really interested in the book, and has scoured her local stores, but can only find it online after ScumBag With PDA posts it for sale. Either of these cases is equally likely, and the SBWPDA in Vancouver making the book available to AR in Little Rock is potentially valuable.
AR's time or inclinations may also be such that she doesn't want to go to the bookstore, and places a lot of value on getting the book she wants shipped to her house, even though the bookstore just down the street has it in stock for cheaper.
The only way SBWPDA is scalping is if he's buying a book that a person already could have purchased for a certain price ("could have purchased" includes desire to spend the required time to make the purchase) and then selling it to that person for a higher price, but that is not at all necessarily the case.
Those people are assholes, because they are reselling a limited product in the same market, which, yes, is scalping. Scalping means that I have taken a product that was available and made price the only barrier to its availability. SBWPDA is removing at least one barrier, namely location, to the product's availability. SBWPDA is making the product available to more buyers, adding value by moving the product to a larger market, and can earn money by doing that work.
If I go to a popular sandwich shop and buy out their whole stock, then stand just outside and resell the sandwiches for a 50% markup, that's scalping. If I put the sandwiches in a trailer on my bike and cart them around to job sites and office buildings at lunchtime, saving those people from wasting half their lunch break traveling to the sandwich shop, that's useful work. (If you object that people might want to "stretch their legs" by walking to the shop, imagine me taking the sandwiches to a beautiful picnic spot that the people wouldn't otherwise have had time to walk to from the sandwich shop.)
I'm reasonably certain that the goal of most businesses is to put food on the table of, and a roof over the head of, the operators. There are of course other considerations, like "I really like books and helping people find great ones to read", that might make a person open a bookstore instead of a scrap metal yard where he could make more money, but if there's no money coming in, that secondary goal isn't going to be met, no matter how much the owner cares about it.
As other people here have pointed out, a library doesn't sell books to "get them into the hands of readers". It sells them to remove low-circulation books from storage, so that it doesn't have to deal with them anymore. If the library wanted to maximize access to the books, it would have left them in circulation where anyone could read them for free. Or, if you're really convinced that the purpose is charitable, the library can very simply institute a "N books per person, show yr library car
If the goal of the store is truly to have a cool place to hang out and talk about books, then the owner of the stor^H^H^Hocial club needs to start putting prices on his or her books that discourage or make impossible the profitable reselling of the books. Simple. In fact, if the owner starts pricing books a little higher, there might be a little money left over at the end of the month for some brandy to go in that coffee!
There's a book, "How to Make Money Selling Books", priced $2 at the used bookstore.
Scenario 1: ScumBag With PDA comes in, decides he can sell this book for $4.50 on Amazon, and pays the store the $2 it's asking. Then SBWP goes home and posts the book for sale on Amazon. The store's income: $2, paid to it buy a local patron.
Scenario 2: SomeBody Who's Penny-wise comes in, decides she wants to read this book, and pays the store the $2 it's asking. Then SBWP goes home and reads the book. The store's income: $2, paid to it by a local patron.
What is the difference between these scenarios? The store got the money that it was asking for. It has a right to sell its books to local buyers, of course, and it has done so in both cases. It has absolutely no right to put terms on what the buyer does with the book. ("Not for resale"?) Are you asserting that the second SBWP has some right to the book before the first?
Leaving aside the issue that PDA-guy may act rudely to other patrons as he roots through the books, why is what he's doing wrong? If you come into the bookstore, looking for "HtMMSB", after either of the SBWPs, the book is already sold.
You know what their response to that is? It's very simple: "Right, you're buying a license."
Okay. . .but if the signature is that of someone who isn't authorized to approve this contract, i.e., not the owner of the account (or other person listed as having access), then the bank shouldn't pay the check! (Likewise for a credit card slip.) Which means that they ought to compare the signature to the one that they have on file (the one that they got when the account was opened), when they are moving the funds around.
This used to be the case, but AFAIK (based on asking the banks that I've used), most banks will only honor checks printed in specific formats. I assume this has a lot to do with making sure the account number is machine-readable to make processing easier, but there's some fraud protection that comes with it. However, based on the fact that you write "cheque" and I write "check", I surmise that we are in different parts of the world, so your ability to use a cocktail napkin as a note to pay your bills may differ from mine.
As I said, they are so far from being controversial that they don't even represent a departure from the consensus in their respective fields. The only things that I'm intolerant of are your presentation of them as somehow radical, and your unrelated, unsubstantiated, and frankly bigoted claim that members of a specific political group would attack you for making them.