It gets worse. In Arkansas, an atheist can't even serve as a witness in court. You're right though, a law barring any other minority group from holding office would be struck down the day it passed, but for some reason it's perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged) to discriminate against atheists like myself.
To be fair, I don't know how much the laws are actually enforced, but they are on the books. Any candidate that openly declares himself as an atheist has absolutely NO chance of being elected anyway. What's really irritating is that Christians claim they are the ones being persecuted. Funny, I don't see too many of them having to hide their (lack of) beliefs for fear of not being hired or passed over for raises or promotions.
My recollection of the events (admittedly biased):
The votes were cast and tabulated. Bush won by so small of a margin that FL law required a recount. The recount resulted in Bush winning again by an even slimmer margin. Gore legally (by FL law) requested a recount in a few heavily democratic counties. The republicans protested that Gore was cherry picking which counties to recount, so Gore suggested that ALL Florida counties be recounted - the republicans quickly backed off that claim. The FL secretary of state (a republican) couldn't legally deny the recount, but insisted that no extra time was going to be given for it. The republicans staged riots and filled suits to stop the recount hoping to delay it long enough for the first recount (the one required by FL law when the margin of victory is below a certain percent) to be certified as the official count. The democrats filed counter suits which eventually ended up with the supreme court refusing to step in, effectively making the 2nd recount moot.
Of course I'm not getting into all the controversy over the butterfly ballots, the purging of so-called felons from the voter lists, intimidation and misinformation in heavily democratic counties, etc.
I'm not saying the democrats are innocent, but in my opinion at least, the republicans dealt a serious blow to democracy during the 2000 election.
Personally, I think it's more fun to put a 50+ page document in random order and include a sticky note saying "Some assembly required." on the top page.
Exactly! My next door neighbor asked for computer help to write a paper her senior year in college. I had to explain to her not only how to use a word processor, but also how to use the mouse. The worst part was she was a freaking IT major! Her parents paid for her education while I was turned down for student loans because I the only jobs I could find were minimum wage ($3.35/hr at the time) and had no credit history. I was turned down for government aid because my they said my father made too much money (around 35k a year) although my parents were divorced and what little he paid in child support ended at midnight on my 18th birthday. I was turned down for a scholarship despite having a 3.9 gpa. The only college I could realistically attend supposedly guaranteed a full scholarship to anybody with an ACT score above 27 - I got a 29 and was still turned down (I'm sure my father's new wife having a position pretty high in the financial aid department at the school was just a coincidence). I managed to scrape together enough money to pay for junior college and got a pretty much worthless Associate's degree in CS, while she graduated (barely) with her friends' help & got a Bachelor's. She's had several well paying programming jobs, I couldn't get anything better than delivering pizzas for a long time after I graduated.
Disclaimer: don't take this the wrong way - this isn't a jealous whine or a rant - just an observation. Hell, in a strange, twisted way it's even a little funny.
Wish I could mod you up. People at work tell me I'm smart because I'm pretty good with technical or logical things and that I'm wasting my time at my rather dead-end job. But I really don't feel I am any smarter than anybody else. I may be mathematically or logically smart, but socially, I'm as dumb as a rock. For example, one of my coworkers had a death in the family a few days ago. I felt bad for her & but I had no idea how to express it without sounding like a hallmark card.
I did something like this in high school, though without the suicidal thoughts (those came later). When I was inducted into the Honor Society, I was made to give a speech to the entire student body. I was always extremely shy and terrible at communicating, so this absolutely mortified me. Needless to say, I completely botched it up and was ridiculed endlessly about it. So much so that I dropped out of all the honors classes I was taking (except calculus & computer science - got to have SOME standards) and deliberately sabotaged my grades so I wouldn't have to go through anything like that again. I pretty much stopped associating with the "nerds" and started hanging out with the so-called "freaks" (we called ourselves stoners & head-bangers). Although I didn't really fit in there either, it was a much better match - I was never "proper" enough to fit in with the nerds or preppies. I still ended up graduating 3rd in my class (although I don't think I would have had much of a chance of being 1st or 2nd even if I had tried).
I've been using Mandrake since 8.0 & have never had any problems with hardware autodetection. I might be considered a little biased since I built my desktop with Linux in mind but, then again, everything but the winmodem in my Compaq laptop is detected fine also. Now if I could just get a good S3 driver that supports 3d acceleration & doesn't crash X when I try to run Xine, I'd be happy.
I've considered bringing a Knoppix cd to work to run Linux without having to convice the sysadmin to let me install it, but the 3 or 4 bsod's a day on the win98 machine gives me a great excuse to take smoke breaks.:)
I'm not sure where you live, but I know several firemen personally here - most of them in stations in poor parts of town. They respond just as quick for a $50k house as they do for a $500k house. True, the quality of education received in a poor school is not as good as in a rich school. But at least there is education. At least the students that are motivated or have parents that are concerned enough to pay attention to the student at least receive SOME education. With truly privatized schools, children with poor, uneducated parents will receive no (or very little depending on the generosity of the community) education.
So, if the police & fire companies are going to help me anyway, what incentive is there for ME to pay for those services? How is the *community* going to pay for those services without taxes?
Since whenver anybody brings up examples of waste, fraud or corruption in private companies/corporations (Enron, Worldcom, Microsoft, etc) the rebuttal is always that's just a single case, I'll bring up the opposite. The power company where I live is owned by the taxpayers. Sure they have problems. Sure, we still complain. But overall, we have one of the cheapest & most reliable electricity providers in the nation, despite paying the employees well.
If you really want to live in an area where everything is privatized, go ahead. I sincerely wish you all the luck in the world. Just don't pick Tennessee, I'd hate to have to vote against you.
Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the definition of a dictator?
I'm sure the people who live(d) under Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Hussein & others would agree with you.
Now I am wondering about general upkeep of infrastructure. How does that happen? Who pays for it?
You do, in the form of tolls & fees for everything currently maintained by tax money. Instead of roads being maintained by taxes, they will be maintained by tolls paid to the owners whenever you leave your house. Want to read a book at the local library? Better have some money in your pocket and hope the book you want is popular enough for the library's private owners to make a profit from it. Like to take quiet walks in parks? Only if you can afford the admission fee - the owners don't maintain it for thier health. Want your children to have an education? Better start saving when they are born. Maybe you can let them skip 1st grade to save a few dollars. Someone breaking into your house? Hope you have an account with a private security firm. Gotten into a dispute with your neighbor? Whoever can afford the best lawyer wins. Your house catches fire? Unless you live on a lakeshore, better have enough money stashed away to pay the firemen.
You'll still be paying taxes, only to private companies instead of the government. The difference, in my opinion, is if you are born into a wealthy family that can afford good private services, it's a good deal as you pay only for the particular services you use. If you are unlucky enough to have poor parents that can only afford to buy you a 3rd grade education, you're screwed.
...but when I opened it the box had Debian printed on it.
Seriously though, if the plan is to provide security consulting services to big companies for mission critical servers, it's not that bad of an idea. But if they are planning to charge home users for WinXP service pack 2, I expect the net to become virtually useless as Code Red 2.0, etc starts running rampant on unpatched machines.
Of course this could just be a ploy to "encourage" people to buy the next version of Windows -
It'll cost $200 to buy the anti-Nimda patch for 98/ME/2k/XP so you might as well buy Windows.DRM for just $300.
Spammers do have a right to exist... in the bottom of the Atlantic wearing a pair of concrete shoes. In other words, the service I choose to block spam is a mafia hitman.
I got spam today from panoramic.net saying it was for my own privacy (yeah, right) & they wanted to give me the opportunity to opt out before they send me any spam & oh, btw check out this great deal. At the bottom they even included a disclaimer saying that by continuing to receive spam from them I would be opting in to thier (non)privacy policy & they will collect & share my any personal info I'm stupid enough to give them.
Hmm, if they are going to try to hold me to thier disclaimer, maybe I should send them a message with a disclaimer saying that by continuing to send any email to my address they are agreeing to pay me $500 per message & $1000 for any bit of personal info they share with thier "marketing partners."
3.5) Must have an option for a yearly non-renewing subscription for folks like me who don't trust automatically renewing subscriptions. Oh, and see #'s 1 and 2 again.
You're absolutely right, a person who doesn't buy the cd is not given the right to listen to the music anyway. But where the RIAA & record labels see thieves & criminals, I see potential customers. File sharing is not something the RIAA will be able to stop without spending more money than they will lose in tolerating it (not to mention putting alot of otherwise innocent people in prison). For all practical purposes, they succeeded in getting Napster shut down & dozens of new p2p networks sprang up in it's place. Maybe I am missing the point, but it would seem like instead of trying to bully people around & give themselves the right to hack people's computers & DoS thier networks, the RIAA would realize they are fighting a losing battle & compromise a little.
If you don't like that, vote with your money and don't buy.
Isn't that what, in effect, file sharers are doing? Seems to me they are saying, "We like the music, but aren't willing to pay $20 for the cd." Yes, there are a few people who wouldn't pay $1 for a cd, just as there are a few people who are willing to pay $20 to get the cover art with the music but I would be willing to bet there are many more who would gladly pay $5 to $10 directly to the artist to be able to download an album & eliminate the RIAA middleman altogether if the option were available. According to the RIAA website, marketing is the biggest cost in producing a cd. Maybe if they cut down on all the hype, they could lower the cost so that the convenience of buying a cd would be more attractive than (legally or illegally) downloading & burning your own.
...if the value of the work exceeds $1,000. Violations are punishable by one year in prison, or if the value tops $2,500, "not more than five years" in prison.
Is it me or does this seem a little vague as a guideline for jail time? Which work is this referring to - the original work or the one on my computer (encoded at a lower bit rate & lossy compression) or the version that I programmed to play (crudely) on the pc speaker?
Also, who determines the value of the work? If I get to determine the value, I could share thousands of gigabytes of Britney Spears & NSync songs as I wouldn't even pay a penny for them (they'd have to pay me to listen to them). But if the RIAA determines the value, they could include all the costs of producing the song including studio time & marketing, so even sharing 1 song would be well over $2500. If they use the retail price of the cd, will they have to determine how many people downloaded that song from me to determine "damages"?
IANAL, but since criminal charges & jail time are involved, wouldn't that mean that file sharers would have the right to a trial by jury? I know songs on the radio aren't actually free - the radio station pays the copyright holder, but to most people, the only "price" to radio is listening to the advertising. I wonder how many ordinary people will be willing to find someone guilty knowing that the defendant could be sent to prison for sharing songs that can be heard everyday on the radio for "free"?
Seems more like RIAA Protection feature...which is akin to 'Mafia Protection'
Tool Tip in Windows.DRM- check this box to cripple your computer & ensure that you aren't acting like the music sharing, terrorist helping, millionaire bankrupting pirate that we know you are.
Slashdot Mirror
It gets worse. In Arkansas, an atheist can't even serve as a witness in court. You're right though, a law barring any other minority group from holding office would be struck down the day it passed, but for some reason it's perfectly acceptable (and even encouraged) to discriminate against atheists like myself.
o ns.htm
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/StateConstituti
To be fair, I don't know how much the laws are actually enforced, but they are on the books. Any candidate that openly declares himself as an atheist has absolutely NO chance of being elected anyway. What's really irritating is that Christians claim they are the ones being persecuted. Funny, I don't see too many of them having to hide their (lack of) beliefs for fear of not being hired or passed over for raises or promotions.
I doubt there is an out of closet atheist anywhere in US politics.
Actually, athiests are barred by law from holding any office in my home state of Tennessee and a few others.
Darn, I was hoping to see the dance again ...Voting machines, voting machines, voting machines, voting machines!
My recollection of the events (admittedly biased):
The votes were cast and tabulated. Bush won by so small of a margin that FL law required a recount. The recount resulted in Bush winning again by an even slimmer margin. Gore legally (by FL law) requested a recount in a few heavily democratic counties. The republicans protested that Gore was cherry picking which counties to recount, so Gore suggested that ALL Florida counties be recounted - the republicans quickly backed off that claim. The FL secretary of state (a republican) couldn't legally deny the recount, but insisted that no extra time was going to be given for it. The republicans staged riots and filled suits to stop the recount hoping to delay it long enough for the first recount (the one required by FL law when the margin of victory is below a certain percent) to be certified as the official count. The democrats filed counter suits which eventually ended up with the supreme court refusing to step in, effectively making the 2nd recount moot.
Of course I'm not getting into all the controversy over the butterfly ballots, the purging of so-called felons from the voter lists, intimidation and misinformation in heavily democratic counties, etc. I'm not saying the democrats are innocent, but in my opinion at least, the republicans dealt a serious blow to democracy during the 2000 election.
Personally, I think it's more fun to put a 50+ page document in random order and include a sticky note saying "Some assembly required." on the top page.
Software has had bugs forever. Now the bugs have software.
Or how about helium? Sure you might get a little, er, light headed during the movie, but think of what the commentary will sound like!
it's not WHAT you know, it's WHO you know
Exactly! My next door neighbor asked for computer help to write a paper her senior year in college. I had to explain to her not only how to use a word processor, but also how to use the mouse. The worst part was she was a freaking IT major! Her parents paid for her education while I was turned down for student loans because I the only jobs I could find were minimum wage ($3.35/hr at the time) and had no credit history. I was turned down for government aid because my they said my father made too much money (around 35k a year) although my parents were divorced and what little he paid in child support ended at midnight on my 18th birthday. I was turned down for a scholarship despite having a 3.9 gpa. The only college I could realistically attend supposedly guaranteed a full scholarship to anybody with an ACT score above 27 - I got a 29 and was still turned down (I'm sure my father's new wife having a position pretty high in the financial aid department at the school was just a coincidence). I managed to scrape together enough money to pay for junior college and got a pretty much worthless Associate's degree in CS, while she graduated (barely) with her friends' help & got a Bachelor's. She's had several well paying programming jobs, I couldn't get anything better than delivering pizzas for a long time after I graduated.
Disclaimer: don't take this the wrong way - this isn't a jealous whine or a rant - just an observation. Hell, in a strange, twisted way it's even a little funny.
Wish I could mod you up. People at work tell me I'm smart because I'm pretty good with technical or logical things and that I'm wasting my time at my rather dead-end job. But I really don't feel I am any smarter than anybody else. I may be mathematically or logically smart, but socially, I'm as dumb as a rock. For example, one of my coworkers had a death in the family a few days ago. I felt bad for her & but I had no idea how to express it without sounding like a hallmark card.
I did something like this in high school, though without the suicidal thoughts (those came later). When I was inducted into the Honor Society, I was made to give a speech to the entire student body. I was always extremely shy and terrible at communicating, so this absolutely mortified me. Needless to say, I completely botched it up and was ridiculed endlessly about it. So much so that I dropped out of all the honors classes I was taking (except calculus & computer science - got to have SOME standards) and deliberately sabotaged my grades so I wouldn't have to go through anything like that again. I pretty much stopped associating with the "nerds" and started hanging out with the so-called "freaks" (we called ourselves stoners & head-bangers). Although I didn't really fit in there either, it was a much better match - I was never "proper" enough to fit in with the nerds or preppies. I still ended up graduating 3rd in my class (although I don't think I would have had much of a chance of being 1st or 2nd even if I had tried).
I've been using Mandrake since 8.0 & have never had any problems with hardware autodetection. I might be considered a little biased since I built my desktop with Linux in mind but, then again, everything but the winmodem in my Compaq laptop is detected fine also. Now if I could just get a good S3 driver that supports 3d acceleration & doesn't crash X when I try to run Xine, I'd be happy.
:)
I've considered bringing a Knoppix cd to work to run Linux without having to convice the sysadmin to let me install it, but the 3 or 4 bsod's a day on the win98 machine gives me a great excuse to take smoke breaks.
I'm not sure where you live, but I know several firemen personally here - most of them in stations in poor parts of town. They respond just as quick for a $50k house as they do for a $500k house. True, the quality of education received in a poor school is not as good as in a rich school. But at least there is education. At least the students that are motivated or have parents that are concerned enough to pay attention to the student at least receive SOME education. With truly privatized schools, children with poor, uneducated parents will receive no (or very little depending on the generosity of the community) education.
So, if the police & fire companies are going to help me anyway, what incentive is there for ME to pay for those services? How is the *community* going to pay for those services without taxes?
Since whenver anybody brings up examples of waste, fraud or corruption in private companies/corporations (Enron, Worldcom, Microsoft, etc) the rebuttal is always that's just a single case, I'll bring up the opposite. The power company where I live is owned by the taxpayers. Sure they have problems. Sure, we still complain. But overall, we have one of the cheapest & most reliable electricity providers in the nation, despite paying the employees well.
If you really want to live in an area where everything is privatized, go ahead. I sincerely wish you all the luck in the world. Just don't pick Tennessee, I'd hate to have to vote against you.
they only get paid if they catch a suspect that is found guilty in a court of law.
I sure wouldn't want to be around when the policeman needs some extra cash. Especially if his brother is the judge.
one bully with a monopoly on force
Umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the definition of a dictator?
I'm sure the people who live(d) under Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Hussein & others would agree with you.
Now I am wondering about general upkeep of infrastructure. How does that happen? Who pays for it?
You do, in the form of tolls & fees for everything currently maintained by tax money. Instead of roads being maintained by taxes, they will be maintained by tolls paid to the owners whenever you leave your house. Want to read a book at the local library? Better have some money in your pocket and hope the book you want is popular enough for the library's private owners to make a profit from it. Like to take quiet walks in parks? Only if you can afford the admission fee - the owners don't maintain it for thier health. Want your children to have an education? Better start saving when they are born. Maybe you can let them skip 1st grade to save a few dollars. Someone breaking into your house? Hope you have an account with a private security firm. Gotten into a dispute with your neighbor? Whoever can afford the best lawyer wins. Your house catches fire? Unless you live on a lakeshore, better have enough money stashed away to pay the firemen.
You'll still be paying taxes, only to private companies instead of the government. The difference, in my opinion, is if you are born into a wealthy family that can afford good private services, it's a good deal as you pay only for the particular services you use. If you are unlucky enough to have poor parents that can only afford to buy you a 3rd grade education, you're screwed.
...but when I opened it the box had Debian printed on it.
Seriously though, if the plan is to provide security consulting services to big companies for mission critical servers, it's not that bad of an idea. But if they are planning to charge home users for WinXP service pack 2, I expect the net to become virtually useless as Code Red 2.0, etc starts running rampant on unpatched machines.
Of course this could just be a ploy to "encourage" people to buy the next version of Windows -
It'll cost $200 to buy the anti-Nimda patch for 98/ME/2k/XP so you might as well buy Windows.DRM for just $300.
Spammers do have a right to exist... in the bottom of the Atlantic wearing a pair of concrete shoes. In other words, the service I choose to block spam is a mafia hitman.
I got spam today from panoramic.net saying it was for my own privacy (yeah, right) & they wanted to give me the opportunity to opt out before they send me any spam & oh, btw check out this great deal. At the bottom they even included a disclaimer saying that by continuing to receive spam from them I would be opting in to thier (non)privacy policy & they will collect & share my any personal info I'm stupid enough to give them.
Hmm, if they are going to try to hold me to thier disclaimer, maybe I should send them a message with a disclaimer saying that by continuing to send any email to my address they are agreeing to pay me $500 per message & $1000 for any bit of personal info they share with thier "marketing partners."
I knew there was a reason Microsoft acts like a 3 year old.
3.5) Must have an option for a yearly non-renewing subscription for folks like me who don't trust automatically renewing subscriptions. Oh, and see #'s 1 and 2 again.
Damnit, this means my phone bill is going to go up again to help provide internet access to needy Martians.
You're absolutely right, a person who doesn't buy the cd is not given the right to listen to the music anyway. But where the RIAA & record labels see thieves & criminals, I see potential customers. File sharing is not something the RIAA will be able to stop without spending more money than they will lose in tolerating it (not to mention putting alot of otherwise innocent people in prison). For all practical purposes, they succeeded in getting Napster shut down & dozens of new p2p networks sprang up in it's place. Maybe I am missing the point, but it would seem like instead of trying to bully people around & give themselves the right to hack people's computers & DoS thier networks, the RIAA would realize they are fighting a losing battle & compromise a little.
If you don't like that, vote with your money and don't buy.
Isn't that what, in effect, file sharers are doing? Seems to me they are saying, "We like the music, but aren't willing to pay $20 for the cd." Yes, there are a few people who wouldn't pay $1 for a cd, just as there are a few people who are willing to pay $20 to get the cover art with the music but I would be willing to bet there are many more who would gladly pay $5 to $10 directly to the artist to be able to download an album & eliminate the RIAA middleman altogether if the option were available. According to the RIAA website, marketing is the biggest cost in producing a cd. Maybe if they cut down on all the hype, they could lower the cost so that the convenience of buying a cd would be more attractive than (legally or illegally) downloading & burning your own.
...if the value of the work exceeds $1,000. Violations are punishable by one year in prison, or if the value tops $2,500, "not more than five years" in prison.
Is it me or does this seem a little vague as a guideline for jail time? Which work is this referring to - the original work or the one on my computer (encoded at a lower bit rate & lossy compression) or the version that I programmed to play (crudely) on the pc speaker? Also, who determines the value of the work? If I get to determine the value, I could share thousands of gigabytes of Britney Spears & NSync songs as I wouldn't even pay a penny for them (they'd have to pay me to listen to them). But if the RIAA determines the value, they could include all the costs of producing the song including studio time & marketing, so even sharing 1 song would be well over $2500. If they use the retail price of the cd, will they have to determine how many people downloaded that song from me to determine "damages"?
IANAL, but since criminal charges & jail time are involved, wouldn't that mean that file sharers would have the right to a trial by jury? I know songs on the radio aren't actually free - the radio station pays the copyright holder, but to most people, the only "price" to radio is listening to the advertising. I wonder how many ordinary people will be willing to find someone guilty knowing that the defendant could be sent to prison for sharing songs that can be heard everyday on the radio for "free"?
Personal Protection feature???
...which is akin to 'Mafia Protection'
Seems more like RIAA Protection feature
Tool Tip in Windows.DRM- check this box to cripple your computer & ensure that you aren't acting like the music sharing, terrorist helping, millionaire bankrupting pirate that we know you are.