There is a key difference between listening to your neighbor's XM and using your neighbors Wi-Fi: Listening ot the XM is passive, and using the Wi-Fi is active.
Listening to your neighbor's XM is akin to listening to all the packets transmitted on your neighbor's wireless network. But your analogy breaks down when YOU transmit onto their network. It's a similar problem with the analogies about people watchingthe big TV or listening to their neighbor's music from the sidewalk outside: In both cases, the activity is limited to observing what the neighbor has broadcast into public property.
But using Wi-Fi is not limited to just observing what your neighbor is braodcasting, you also have to transmit back onto/into your neighbor's private property.
There's another problem here as well: Even if we assume that by leaving the Wi-Fi open your neighbor has given you permission to use their network, the cable company definitely hasn't given you permission to use their network.
For many years, people in apartment buildings adjacent to Wrigley Field in Chicago would watch Cubs games from their roofs. They would also charge other people to come up to their roofs to watch the games. The Cubs tried to stop this via lawsuit, but it was determined that the apartment owners had the right to sell tickets to their roofs, even if the value of the tickets was based on a game produced by the Cubs.
The Cubs then put up a fence blocking the view from the apartments, and then the apartment owners sued the Cubs for reducing the value of their property.
Ultimately, the two parties settled, with the fence being removed in exchange for the Cubs receiving some portion of the proceeds from the sales of tickets to the neighboring roofs.
Applied to Wi-Fi, if you don't want other people viewing it, the onus is on you to put up the fence.
They buy things, lend, start businesses, hire people, invest.
And your point is...?
Taxes are just forced investments in something owned by everybody. Taxes arn't bad because they prevent people from investing in things they own, as the money will create just as many jobs if it's spent by the government.
Taxes are SOMETIMES bad because the government can spend money on stupid stuff. You don't want to take a bunch of money that would have been invested in private business that would have created new technology to, say, build a superhighway to the Yukon.
If the government were as good or better at allocating resources than the free market, then we'd want 100% taxes. But it's not. The government IS, however, better at allocating money for some things (like roads and military). So we need some percentage of taxes.
What the right percentage, and where it comes from, well, that's why we have politics But it's definitely not a valid arugment to say taxes on the rich are bad because then the money isn't spent - it *IS* spent, you just don't get to directly decide where anymore.
The rich get a lot more from our government than the poor. Who is bailing out those corporations? Who builds the roads the rich people owning the corporations ship their products on? Who makes sure the rich don't have their foreign investments seized by foreign governments? Who makes sure the rich stay that way? Who makes all those nie tax loopholes for the rich?
The thing is, rich people spend very little of their money in the way your average poor or middle clas schmuck consumer does. They invest it - most people arn't rich in cash, they're rich in stock or other assets. More taxes on the rich diverts some of that investment from private concerns (new factories, better technology, bigger real estate) to public concerns, like roads and military.
I'll support a FairTax when we also get FairSpending.
Let's say I want to do activity A, like go to the strip club. And she wants to do Activiy B, like anything other than go to the strip club.
I will say 'Hey, we should go to the strip club. Do you want to go?'
Of course, we all know the answer is No. But there's no way she's going to just say 'No, I don't want to go to the strip club', because she's female, and that would violate the laws of physics. Instead, she'll say "It's Sunday. The strippers on Sunday are ugly."
And I'm supposed to pretend that the reason we're not going to the strip club is that the strippers are ugly on Sunday, not that I'm dating a jealous, selfish prude.
Actually, maybe H&R Block isn't like my girlfriend. If you let someone else do your taxes for you this time, you can still pay H&R block to do it next time.
The fact that the government issues social security numbers is not the problem - they're great for what they were designed to do, identify social security recipients. You pay your taxes, uncle sam knows you paid your taxes, so when you go to cash out social security uncle sam knows you qualify. If someone "steals" your SSN to pay more taxes for you, well, great.
The problem with the system is that EVERYBODY ELSE has decided to use social security numbers to identify you, *AND* also to use them to prove that you are who you say you are.
Bank: "I need to know who you are. What is your social security number?" You: "123-45-6789" Bank: "I need you to prove that you're really this person. What is your social security number?" You: "123-45-6789"
THAT'S the problem. It's like protecting your system by requiring a user ID to log in, and then to make sure the user is who they say they are, asking for the user ID again. Prety stupid, isn't it?
Anyway, it's not the government's fault that others use social security numbers for both the login and the password.
Using the money for a purpose other than the one the fund was set up for is borderline criminal.
A part of the Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws or other organizing instrument of any organization should include what will be done with any assets at such time as the organization is disolved. This is actually a requirement if you want the IRS to recognize you as a non-profit, precisely to avoid having to make that decision after-the-fact. I happen to run a non-profit org, and while what we do has nothing to with activities normally carried out by the American Red Cross, in the event our non-profit must be dissolved all of the assets get donated to them.
If Linuxfund was set up properly, deciding what to do with the money should be as simple as consulting the articles of incorporation or bylws for the organization.
If not, well, the people who donated the money should have taken greater care in selecting the organization they gave it to.
Standard AGP has *FOUR* devices on the bus: The PCI master/slave on the chipset, the PCI master/slave on the card, the AGP master on the card, and the AGP slave on the chipset.
Only *ONE* of those devices can transmit data at a time, and there is an arbitration scheme to determine which device can use the bus at any given time.
Compare that to PCI-E, which is NOT a bus. It's a point-to-point link, and the sender can always send data to the receiver because the link is DEDICATED. To add more devices to a PCI-E topology, you need switches.
Well perhaps because as a general principle, it's immoral to charge different amount for different fields of endeavor. A domain should cost the same, regardless of the TLD in which it resides. Anything else is just a money grab.
Anything else is capitalism at it's finest.
Bought an airline ticket lately? New car? Have health insurance through your job? Watched a movie at the theater before 6 PM? Received (or not received) a student or senior citizen's dicount? Bought two and received one free?
Pricing is NOT determined by how much something costs. Pricing is determined by what price will generate the most profit for the person providing the product.
We have two groups of children: One group has a parent who is in a "male" profession, like engineering, and the other has a parent in a "female" profession, like nursing.
What is far more likely to be true of a child with a parent who is in a female profession as opposed to a child with a parent in a male profession?
They're more likely to have a mother who works.
Seems pretty obvious to me: Working moms are more likely to have girls. Might have something to do with Y-chromosome sperm being more fragile than X-chromosome sperm. (That's been demonstrated elsewehre.)
I saw Ep. III yesterday. It wasn't very good. It only appeared kinda good in the sense that after Eps. I and II, it didn't totally suck.
It had great CGI, good fight scenes, but no magic. In fact, maybe it was a little too CGI-happy - too much effort put into funny-looking vehicles.
There was magic in Eps. IV-VI, even if it was accidental; a new universe, a mystical force, and some good characters. Ep. III was just an excercise in setting up Ep. IV, which is OK if all you expect is setting up for Ep. IV, not so great if you're evaluating the movie on it's own.
(SPOILER ALERT)
One thing Ep. III *ALMOST* got right was Anakin's transformation to the dark side. There's a fairly believable progressive slide to the dark side, and then we have a scene with Samuel L. Jackson (sorr, forgotten the characters name) standing over the would-be emperor saying that he must be killed because he is too dangerous while Anakin is saying that he must be brought to trial, and then Anakin kills Jackson to save Palpatine (sp). So far so good.
Then he says "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" and collapses in a chair. What the fuck? You're on a slide to the dark side! You were manipulated into saving the chancellor and the Jedi gave you the final push by insisting on execution! Then 10 minutes later he's slaying younglings emotionlessly even though he apparently felt it was horrible to kill the first Jedi. That one line really jarred the transformation and was so out of place. You spend a whole hour watching this character slide, then for 10 seconds it's like none of that happened at all, and then he's suddenly the most evil character in the universe. It would have been far more convincing if Anakin took his final step to the dark side because he believed he had to protect the republic from the jedi instead of he knew he shouldn't kill the jedi but does so anyway for power.
Unless the cashier has a photographic memory, he/she would have to write the number down while the card is still in their possession - and if I ever see a cashier do that the cops shall be called.
I can memorize 16 digit numbers, at least long enough to write them down a few minutes later, without much trouble. Talent picked up when working in a restaurant and it being convenient to memorize the numbers on the manager cards.
Because I'm confident that any company engaging in credit card theft will promptly get caught, prosecuted, and sued the pants off of. The same may not hold true for an individual, and the fact that there are two dozen people standing within RFID range when most transactions are done greatly disturbs me.
You missed the point. I'm not talking about the company on the OTHER END of the line - I'm talking about the ability of parties to intercept your transmission between you and the company. If you use credit cards, you must accept that the encryption that keeps your data safe from when it leaves you and when it gets to the company is sufficient. If you're willing to accept that the encryption is sufficient, why does swapping hundreds of miles of phone line or fiber for 10 inches of air suddenly make you not trust the encryption?
Either the encryption is good enough, or it isn't. Whether it's a contact or contactless transmission doesn't matter.
And it ain't good enough. I can promise you it will be cracked sooner rather than later.
Are there people running around breaking the encryption used on web transactions? The encryption used to move money from bank to bank? The encryption used when the VERY SAME data you don't want to transmit wirelessly is transmitted over the phone or internet to process EVERY SINGLE OTHER CREDIT CARD TRANSACTION YOU MAKE?
I can accept that you are paranoid and don't trust encryption. But if you don't trust encryption, you shouldn't use a credit card at all. But if you do use a credit card, which it appears that you do, there is no logical reason not to use contactless credit cards. If the information can be stolen in contactless transmission, it can be stolen even more efficiently by tapping the data line on the way out of the store.
You haven't gone to fast food places lately, have you? McDonald's, Wendy's, and Panera (the 3 joints i frequent most) do not require a signature on credit cards if the transaction is small (less than $25 or so). So, there is next to no money saved on that point.
For those merchants, and that was a huge concession on the part of the credit card industry in order to be accepted into those merchants, who didn't want to slow down their lines to make people sign stuff. It won't be that easy for industries where credit cards are already an expected form of payment, so if contactless transmission will get the credit card companies to allow merchants to not require paper, that's a good thing.
Having to waste 10 minutes walking to the store...
vs.
Getting sideswiped by a semi on the way to the door and getting killed.
Your comparison is a bad one. You need to add up all those 5 seconds you save and compare them to the time you'd spend fixing it if your information got stolen times the odds your information gets stolen.
Let's also keep in mind how easy it is to steal your credit card information as it is. The number is written RIGHT ON your card. Every cashier you ever give your credit card to has access to that number.
And when that cashier runs the card, what happens? It dials up to the central server and sends your personal information over the phone line. If you're confident with encrytpion to someplace perhaps thousands of miles away, why are you not comfortable with encryption to something 10 inches away?
The fact of the matter is, getting bent out of shape about contactless transmission is silly. Either the encryption method used is good, or it ain't. You don't need to worry about physical layer compramisesif your transaction layer protection is good.
Also, there are other savings here than just your time: Contactless transactions are chepaer to process than signed paper credit card transactions. Merchants can save a lot of money not having to pay cashiers to sit there and watch you sign the receipt, and credit card companies can save money not having to archive those pieces of paper.
The problem is that some groups are so big that legislators can get away with adding additional "benefits" to the bill because the people who might actually care that the particular legislator's pet project is a total waste of money don't live in that legislator's district, and nobody is dumb enough to vote against a bill backed by a lobby as powerful as the agricultural lobby.
Same reason we got the national ID cards - somebody stuck it on the defense appropriations bill, and after the beating Kerry took because he voted against a defense appropriations bill (nevermind that the bill was crap), ain't nobody going to vote against one of those things if they have ANY thoughts whatsoever of running for office again.
Democracy at it's finest: Prevent people from voting against stupid stuff by forcing them to vote against money for the troops at the same time.
while I can counter-point that the money spent to arrest, adjudicate, and incarcerate someone would be better spent on treatment.
And I can argue that that money would be better spent on one bullet and a tax rebate.
Why is society obliged to provide a safety net for drug use? Don't use drugs. If you do use drugs to the point that you become a burden to society, that's your problem.
We should do what the brits did with Australia. Let's create a Drug Treatment Reservaton by walling off a few thousand acres of Wyoming and suspending minimum wage laws within that area. If you get arrested and need drug treatment, we slap one of those electronic monitors on your leg and send you to the reservation. We'll let you back out after 2 years. Either you'll figure out how to survive without bothering productive members of society or you'll die.
Back when I was in school, we only broke into the database to change our grades
back when I was in school, we earned our grades
Are you saying we didn't earn our grades? Breaking into the database was hard work, and our grades reflected it!
Why fail English, Math, Biology, Government and Economics when you can get 5 A's in Database Manipulation? The grades arn't any less "earned" just because they misprinted the course names on the report card.
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There is a key difference between listening to your neighbor's XM and using your neighbors Wi-Fi: Listening ot the XM is passive, and using the Wi-Fi is active.
Listening to your neighbor's XM is akin to listening to all the packets transmitted on your neighbor's wireless network. But your analogy breaks down when YOU transmit onto their network. It's a similar problem with the analogies about people watchingthe big TV or listening to their neighbor's music from the sidewalk outside: In both cases, the activity is limited to observing what the neighbor has broadcast into public property.
But using Wi-Fi is not limited to just observing what your neighbor is braodcasting, you also have to transmit back onto/into your neighbor's private property.
There's another problem here as well: Even if we assume that by leaving the Wi-Fi open your neighbor has given you permission to use their network, the cable company definitely hasn't given you permission to use their network.
For many years, people in apartment buildings adjacent to Wrigley Field in Chicago would watch Cubs games from their roofs. They would also charge other people to come up to their roofs to watch the games. The Cubs tried to stop this via lawsuit, but it was determined that the apartment owners had the right to sell tickets to their roofs, even if the value of the tickets was based on a game produced by the Cubs.
The Cubs then put up a fence blocking the view from the apartments, and then the apartment owners sued the Cubs for reducing the value of their property.
Ultimately, the two parties settled, with the fence being removed in exchange for the Cubs receiving some portion of the proceeds from the sales of tickets to the neighboring roofs.
Applied to Wi-Fi, if you don't want other people viewing it, the onus is on you to put up the fence.
If you don't consume dairy, you'll go insane.
Every vegan I've ever met has been some degree of crazy. The less dairy they were willing to eat the crazier they were. Drink milk, stay sane.
Hackers are people who love to play with technology, not cause carnage and destruction. This guy is a "criminal".
Hackers are people who love to play with technology, who *MAY* also like to cause carnage and destruction.
White or black, a hack is a hack.
They buy things, lend, start businesses, hire people, invest.
And your point is...?
Taxes are just forced investments in something owned by everybody. Taxes arn't bad because they prevent people from investing in things they own, as the money will create just as many jobs if it's spent by the government.
Taxes are SOMETIMES bad because the government can spend money on stupid stuff. You don't want to take a bunch of money that would have been invested in private business that would have created new technology to, say, build a superhighway to the Yukon.
If the government were as good or better at allocating resources than the free market, then we'd want 100% taxes. But it's not. The government IS, however, better at allocating money for some things (like roads and military). So we need some percentage of taxes.
What the right percentage, and where it comes from, well, that's why we have politics But it's definitely not a valid arugment to say taxes on the rich are bad because then the money isn't spent - it *IS* spent, you just don't get to directly decide where anymore.
The rich get a lot more from our government than the poor. Who is bailing out those corporations? Who builds the roads the rich people owning the corporations ship their products on? Who makes sure the rich don't have their foreign investments seized by foreign governments? Who makes sure the rich stay that way? Who makes all those nie tax loopholes for the rich?
The thing is, rich people spend very little of their money in the way your average poor or middle clas schmuck consumer does. They invest it - most people arn't rich in cash, they're rich in stock or other assets. More taxes on the rich diverts some of that investment from private concerns (new factories, better technology, bigger real estate) to public concerns, like roads and military.
I'll support a FairTax when we also get FairSpending.
Let's say I want to do activity A, like go to the strip club. And she wants to do Activiy B, like anything other than go to the strip club.
I will say 'Hey, we should go to the strip club. Do you want to go?'
Of course, we all know the answer is No. But there's no way she's going to just say 'No, I don't want to go to the strip club', because she's female, and that would violate the laws of physics. Instead, she'll say "It's Sunday. The strippers on Sunday are ugly."
And I'm supposed to pretend that the reason we're not going to the strip club is that the strippers are ugly on Sunday, not that I'm dating a jealous, selfish prude.
Actually, maybe H&R Block isn't like my girlfriend. If you let someone else do your taxes for you this time, you can still pay H&R block to do it next time.
since there are cheaper ways to fight spam.
Like bullets.
Stop signing up for all those free porn sites!
The fact that the government issues social security numbers is not the problem - they're great for what they were designed to do, identify social security recipients. You pay your taxes, uncle sam knows you paid your taxes, so when you go to cash out social security uncle sam knows you qualify. If someone "steals" your SSN to pay more taxes for you, well, great.
The problem with the system is that EVERYBODY ELSE has decided to use social security numbers to identify you, *AND* also to use them to prove that you are who you say you are.
Bank: "I need to know who you are. What is your social security number?"
You: "123-45-6789"
Bank: "I need you to prove that you're really this person. What is your social security number?"
You: "123-45-6789"
THAT'S the problem. It's like protecting your system by requiring a user ID to log in, and then to make sure the user is who they say they are, asking for the user ID again. Prety stupid, isn't it?
Anyway, it's not the government's fault that others use social security numbers for both the login and the password.
Using the money for a purpose other than the one the fund was set up for is borderline criminal.
A part of the Articles of Incorporation or Bylaws or other organizing instrument of any organization should include what will be done with any assets at such time as the organization is disolved. This is actually a requirement if you want the IRS to recognize you as a non-profit, precisely to avoid having to make that decision after-the-fact. I happen to run a non-profit org, and while what we do has nothing to with activities normally carried out by the American Red Cross, in the event our non-profit must be dissolved all of the assets get donated to them.
If Linuxfund was set up properly, deciding what to do with the money should be as simple as consulting the articles of incorporation or bylws for the organization.
If not, well, the people who donated the money should have taken greater care in selecting the organization they gave it to.
Standard AGP has *FOUR* devices on the bus: The PCI master/slave on the chipset, the PCI master/slave on the card, the AGP master on the card, and the AGP slave on the chipset.
Only *ONE* of those devices can transmit data at a time, and there is an arbitration scheme to determine which device can use the bus at any given time.
Compare that to PCI-E, which is NOT a bus. It's a point-to-point link, and the sender can always send data to the receiver because the link is DEDICATED. To add more devices to a PCI-E topology, you need switches.
The .xxx domain will make it easier for kids to find porn. anything.com is hit or miss, but anything.xxx will definitely get you what you're after.
Well perhaps because as a general principle, it's immoral to charge different amount for different fields of endeavor. A domain should cost the same, regardless of the TLD in which it resides. Anything else is just a money grab.
Anything else is capitalism at it's finest.
Bought an airline ticket lately? New car? Have health insurance through your job? Watched a movie at the theater before 6 PM? Received (or not received) a student or senior citizen's dicount? Bought two and received one free?
Pricing is NOT determined by how much something costs. Pricing is determined by what price will generate the most profit for the person providing the product.
I don't own a porn website, so a greater share of the expenses of running the internet being born by porn websites sounds like a great idea to me.
Besides, if porn websites tend to enjoy a greater commercial benefit from the internet, what's wrong with them paying a bigger price?
have you ever willingly had sex with someone so that they would allow you to check your email?
Wait, addicts can GET alcohol by having sex with people? I thought you had to GIVE people alcohol to have sex...
Where do I sign up to be an addict?
What are you doing reading about season two if you havn't seen season one yet?
For example, somebody was saying the other day that he knew all along that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Um, no, he didn't. He hadn't ever even been to Iraq.
I've never been to Mars, but I know there are not any apple trees there.
Most things we "know" we have no direct evidence of.
Or more importantly, who is doing it.
We have two groups of children: One group has a parent who is in a "male" profession, like engineering, and the other has a parent in a "female" profession, like nursing.
What is far more likely to be true of a child with a parent who is in a female profession as opposed to a child with a parent in a male profession?
They're more likely to have a mother who works.
Seems pretty obvious to me: Working moms are more likely to have girls. Might have something to do with Y-chromosome sperm being more fragile than X-chromosome sperm. (That's been demonstrated elsewehre.)
I saw Ep. III yesterday. It wasn't very good. It only appeared kinda good in the sense that after Eps. I and II, it didn't totally suck.
It had great CGI, good fight scenes, but no magic. In fact, maybe it was a little too CGI-happy - too much effort put into funny-looking vehicles.
There was magic in Eps. IV-VI, even if it was accidental; a new universe, a mystical force, and some good characters. Ep. III was just an excercise in setting up Ep. IV, which is OK if all you expect is setting up for Ep. IV, not so great if you're evaluating the movie on it's own.
(SPOILER ALERT)
One thing Ep. III *ALMOST* got right was Anakin's transformation to the dark side. There's a fairly believable progressive slide to the dark side, and then we have a scene with Samuel L. Jackson (sorr, forgotten the characters name) standing over the would-be emperor saying that he must be killed because he is too dangerous while Anakin is saying that he must be brought to trial, and then Anakin kills Jackson to save Palpatine (sp). So far so good.
Then he says "WHAT HAVE I DONE?!" and collapses in a chair. What the fuck? You're on a slide to the dark side! You were manipulated into saving the chancellor and the Jedi gave you the final push by insisting on execution! Then 10 minutes later he's slaying younglings emotionlessly even though he apparently felt it was horrible to kill the first Jedi.
That one line really jarred the transformation and was so out of place. You spend a whole hour watching this character slide, then for 10 seconds it's like none of that happened at all, and then he's suddenly the most evil character in the universe. It would have been far more convincing if Anakin took his final step to the dark side because he believed he had to protect the republic from the jedi instead of he knew he shouldn't kill the jedi but does so anyway for power.
Unless the cashier has a photographic memory, he/she would have to write the number down while the card is still in their possession - and if I ever see a cashier do that the cops shall be called.
I can memorize 16 digit numbers, at least long enough to write them down a few minutes later, without much trouble. Talent picked up when working in a restaurant and it being convenient to memorize the numbers on the manager cards.
Because I'm confident that any company engaging in credit card theft will promptly get caught, prosecuted, and sued the pants off of. The same may not hold true for an individual, and the fact that there are two dozen people standing within RFID range when most transactions are done greatly disturbs me.
You missed the point. I'm not talking about the company on the OTHER END of the line - I'm talking about the ability of parties to intercept your transmission between you and the company. If you use credit cards, you must accept that the encryption that keeps your data safe from when it leaves you and when it gets to the company is sufficient. If you're willing to accept that the encryption is sufficient, why does swapping hundreds of miles of phone line or fiber for 10 inches of air suddenly make you not trust the encryption?
Either the encryption is good enough, or it isn't. Whether it's a contact or contactless transmission doesn't matter.
And it ain't good enough. I can promise you it will be cracked sooner rather than later.
Are there people running around breaking the encryption used on web transactions? The encryption used to move money from bank to bank? The encryption used when the VERY SAME data you don't want to transmit wirelessly is transmitted over the phone or internet to process EVERY SINGLE OTHER CREDIT CARD TRANSACTION YOU MAKE?
I can accept that you are paranoid and don't trust encryption. But if you don't trust encryption, you shouldn't use a credit card at all. But if you do use a credit card, which it appears that you do, there is no logical reason not to use contactless credit cards. If the information can be stolen in contactless transmission, it can be stolen even more efficiently by tapping the data line on the way out of the store.
You haven't gone to fast food places lately, have you? McDonald's, Wendy's, and Panera (the 3 joints i frequent most) do not require a signature on credit cards if the transaction is small (less than $25 or so). So, there is next to no money saved on that point.
For those merchants, and that was a huge concession on the part of the credit card industry in order to be accepted into those merchants, who didn't want to slow down their lines to make people sign stuff. It won't be that easy for industries where credit cards are already an expected form of payment, so if contactless transmission will get the credit card companies to allow merchants to not require paper, that's a good thing.
Having to waste 10 minutes walking to the store...
vs.
Getting sideswiped by a semi on the way to the door and getting killed.
Your comparison is a bad one. You need to add up all those 5 seconds you save and compare them to the time you'd spend fixing it if your information got stolen times the odds your information gets stolen.
Let's also keep in mind how easy it is to steal your credit card information as it is. The number is written RIGHT ON your card. Every cashier you ever give your credit card to has access to that number.
And when that cashier runs the card, what happens? It dials up to the central server and sends your personal information over the phone line. If you're confident with encrytpion to someplace perhaps thousands of miles away, why are you not comfortable with encryption to something 10 inches away?
The fact of the matter is, getting bent out of shape about contactless transmission is silly. Either the encryption method used is good, or it ain't. You don't need to worry about physical layer compramisesif your transaction layer protection is good.
Also, there are other savings here than just your time: Contactless transactions are chepaer to process than signed paper credit card transactions. Merchants can save a lot of money not having to pay cashiers to sit there and watch you sign the receipt, and credit card companies can save money not having to archive those pieces of paper.
Economic efficiency is good for everyone.
The problem is that some groups are so big that legislators can get away with adding additional "benefits" to the bill because the people who might actually care that the particular legislator's pet project is a total waste of money don't live in that legislator's district, and nobody is dumb enough to vote against a bill backed by a lobby as powerful as the agricultural lobby.
Same reason we got the national ID cards - somebody stuck it on the defense appropriations bill, and after the beating Kerry took because he voted against a defense appropriations bill (nevermind that the bill was crap), ain't nobody going to vote against one of those things if they have ANY thoughts whatsoever of running for office again.
Democracy at it's finest: Prevent people from voting against stupid stuff by forcing them to vote against money for the troops at the same time.
while I can counter-point that the money spent to arrest, adjudicate, and incarcerate someone would be better spent on treatment.
And I can argue that that money would be better spent on one bullet and a tax rebate.
Why is society obliged to provide a safety net for drug use? Don't use drugs. If you do use drugs to the point that you become a burden to society, that's your problem.
We should do what the brits did with Australia. Let's create a Drug Treatment Reservaton by walling off a few thousand acres of Wyoming and suspending minimum wage laws within that area. If you get arrested and need drug treatment, we slap one of those electronic monitors on your leg and send you to the reservation. We'll let you back out after 2 years. Either you'll figure out how to survive without bothering productive members of society or you'll die.
Let's put drug addicts to work!
Back when I was in school, we only broke into the database to change our grades
back when I was in school, we earned our grades
Are you saying we didn't earn our grades? Breaking into the database was hard work, and our grades reflected it!
Why fail English, Math, Biology, Government and Economics when you can get 5 A's in Database Manipulation? The grades arn't any less "earned" just because they misprinted the course names on the report card.