Like I said to the others that brought up this point:
We are NOT discussing the right to let you into the store.
We are talking about your right to have a camera.
Yes, the store can kick you out.
They can not confiscate the camera, call the police, sue you, lock you up, etc. etc. etc.
Those are two DIFFERENT things.
Basically I am saying that you have the "right" to take pictures of the store, not that the store can't kick you out. P.S. There are MANY situations where stores do NOT have the legal right to kick any person out without cause. Malls for example, sometimes demand store owners sign contracts that limit there rights.
They can ask you to leave for doing nothing. But they can not take away your right to photograph them. The question we were discussing was not about having the right to ask someone to leave, but about the right to take photos.
Your comment ignores the rights of those being under survelliance.
I will admit that the ownder of the camers does not WANT them to be photographed. So what? So do criminals, and so do people cheating on their wife, and so do people simply trying to protect their privacy.
The question is not "is there a reason", but instead is "Is the reason you want to stop people taking pictures of your cameras BETTER than the reason you came up with to let you set up the cameras in the first place"?
Why? Because ANY reason that lets you prevent others from taking pictures of your camers can be turned around and used to prevent the store from taking your picture
If you have the right to take my picture to prevent criminal actions by me, I have the right to take YOUR picture to prevent criminal actions by you. Yes, if I were a criminal, I could analyze the pictures I took to plan a crime against you. SO WHAT. If the employees of the store are criminal, they can analyze THERE surveliance tapes to plan crimes against shoppers.
The management clearly wants the power to observe their shoppers and does not want shoppers to have a similar right against them. Shoppers want the power to observe the management and does not want the management to have similar rights against them.
But the law is not a slave to EITHER side, so gives BOTH the rights to observe and record.
I do agree that the management has the right to require the shoppers to hide their cameras, as the store has hidden their own cameras.
No. You just need to tell them to order the computer without a Hard Drive and then seperately get a hard drive. If you want a Nude computer you should be competent enough to install a hard drive.
No. You are missing the point. Earth did not start out being a great place to live. OK, so life did not create the water, but the breathable air was created by PLANTS.
We currently have the technology to begin a terraforming project on some of the planets and moons. Yes it would be expensive, but just seeding the right bacteria would have it done within 100 years.
Earth has BEEN TURNED INTO A PARADISE. It did not start out that way. It is relatively cheap and easy for us to make certain of the moons and at least Mars, possibly Venus into an earth-like paradise.
As for "hepa filters, etc." HA,HA,HA,HA,HA. You really should learn a bit more about thoe things. I am not saying it is impossible for humans to survive, but the disasters that wiped out the dinosaurs would be A LOT harder for humans to survive. Assuming enough of those things were available, assuming enough people had the time to get those things (a large number would die within minutes), the problems are so immense. What will they eat? What will they drink? Most animal life would die. A lot of plant life would die. We are talking maybe 1% human survivors, with NO guarantee that they would make it. Humans are smart, and we might survive. But it is no means certain.
Finally you are VERY locked into one or two death for the race scenarios. Here. Let me enlighten you:
Explosive death (Nuclear, anti-matter, whatever)
Nanno-death (gray sludge)
Bio-death -(Any airborne disease that incubates for one week with few/no symptops, then kills quickly)
Ecological-catastrophic cascade (A sudden sharp change in a planet's ecology caused when a previously little watched phenomema breaks out of it's known limits. Primary example in history was the mutation resulting in aerobic bacteria, that turned the carbon-dixoxide atmosphere of our planet into an oxygen one, thereby entirely wipeing out the anaerobic bacteria that had previously ruled it. Another example could be the melting of our ice caps - galciers are dis-appearing at an alarming rate)
Volcanic eruptions (similar to asteroid hits, but more spread out, often happens WITH asteroid hits
And those are just the ones that an in-system colony would defeat. Once we colonize the rest of the planet, we need to leave Sol system. Someday the sun will die - and while the odds of it happening now are low, it is still theoretically possible to happen TODAY.
Eventually, our descendents will HAVE to leave the Galaxy. Galaxies die too. While some may dis-agree about if black hole exists, whatever happens there it WILL exist.
And over the VERY long term, even the universe itself has some kind of death awaiting it. While at this point in time we have NO idea if there is anything we can do about it, there may be a way to escape it. But I know for a fact that if we are stuck on this tiny little speck of matter called Earth, we will not survive it.
My main point is that even as a species, we do NOT have the knowledge or resources to survive, no matter how much duct tape you buy.
That I can show you easily, and simply, over the long run.
Conservation is limited to 100% effecient uses of the resources on earth.
Even assuming we are currently using resources at 1% effeciency (which I think is ridiculous - we are probably using them at about 25%), that means the maximum possible increase in resource useage is x100 via conservation. At my more likely value of 25%, the max increase is x4.
Earth contains less than 1% of the resoureces of the solar system. Once you get out of our gravity well, it even contains even less than 1% of the easily obtainable resources (i.e. ignorin other resources in heavy gravity wells like Jupiter, etc.).
It is simple economics. We live on a tiny, insignficant speck. Once you get off the speck, the economics of gathering resources are phenomally increased.
Finally, the science required to get off the world generally AIDS conservation. The things we need most in space are self-renewing food, clean water, clean air, and electricity. As we learn to create the conservation bubble neccesary to travel in space, we learn how to better use the resources we have on Earth.
I now seed a low rider version with extendable legs. Guys standing around on street corners, "dancing" by going up 5 ft, then back down 5ft, with the entire carrying capacity of the mech being used to carry HUGE speakers, blasting out music.
Yes it is true that in the past, bi-pedal walkers were less energy efficient. But the new ones have enhanced algorithyms that are designed to conserve momentum. The most modern ones no longer do the "step by step" movement, but instead "flow", absorbing energy and storing it as needed.
Will they match wheeled travel on roads? (Cars) No. But they will beat off road Tracked vehicles (tanks).
You make a lot of points, but then ignore what you yourself are saying.
"Our substantial and urgent problems are all caused by too many people trying to take too many resources. Are these problems too obvious to be interesting? An effective way to solve them would be to have fewer people using resources more modestly."
The bold part was intelligent. Everything else was said by someone that had NO idea how intelligent the bold part was.
Let me re-word what you said, as done by someone that has long considered the bold part.
Our substantial and urgent problems are all caused by too many people and not enough resources. Using fewer resources (conservation) is helping, simple math shows that it is not enough. With a growing population and with more and more of the population ceasing to be "developing" and instead becoming "developed", we need another solution. That leaves us with two obvious solutions: 1) reduce population (either through birth control or death - traditionally we have used War to do this) or 2) FIND MORE RESOURCES. We already use the resources on Earth, so getting off Earth and beinging a wise, conservation based use of Space resources should be our HIGHEST priority. That way we can keep Earth a paradise, while using the huge amounts of resources off Earth to solve our issues.
The major reason eath is such a great place is that we have ALREADY been spending 1000's of years making it so. You are comparing a mansion to an empty lot. What you think Las vegas is a livable area? Get real. Las vegas has no water, no shade, no food, no shelter that people did not bring there. It is a hellish place, just as bad if not worse, then most places on Mars. Mars has less air, but more water. As for Alpha Centauri, we have no idea if there is a nice, high oxygen content planet orbiting one of the Centauri stars. Frankly our telescopes are not that good yet.
Outer space IS a great place to live. The reason why we are not already building country homes and golf courses it is expensive, to get there. They are great places to live, just hard to visit.
And most importantly, you are missing the main point. All life over 2ft tall has in the past been eliminated from earth. If the SAME disaster that happened before happened again, all humans would die out. A simple 1,000 person colony on the Moon would save the species, if not the 6 billion lives currently on earth.
All life, including man, has an inborn instinct to survive.
The unexamined uses this instinct and that is why it is assumed to be true.
There are LOTS of great reasons to support this instint. But that is irrelevant. The instint exists.
Therefore to make any sense at all, You must first answer the OPPOSITE question
In order to even question life's instinct to survive you must show some evidence that that we are NOT too important to lose. The questionis not why should we survive, but why should we NOT survive.
Try and answer that question. If you can do it,then I will try and answer your question more fully, explaining why we should survive even ignorint life's main instinct of survival.
The cost is minimal not great, and the added value is HUGE.
The cost is like 5,000/year - which seems like a lot only to the people that have no idea what a city spends. 5,000/year is nothing to a city. Far less than how much it pays people to clean up a park's statues.
This however is a HUGE quality of life issue - it makes the city very attractive to a lot of people, grants internet access to some people that could not afford it. Many people can afford $500 one time payment for a crappy computer +$100 more for a wifi card, but not afford the $1,200 + a year reasonable internet access can cost.
Wouldn't it make FAR more sense to just include a Number on the chip.
Authorized custom agents could then pass a reader over that chip, which would take the number, connect to a US government's computer, input the number which would return photo, fingerprints, etc. etc.
There seems NO need to put all the sensitive information on a chip, when all you need is a number. Keep the sensitive information on more secure computers, accesible only by valid custom agents.
I am not saying that Perl can not be intentionally written poorly. Anyone can do that with any language.
For example I could say "My name is Andrew."
OR I could say:
My name is an anagram of "Wander" with the last two letters swithed and then take the first letter and move it to the back.
Or I could say: The first letter of my name has the same first letter as the fruit traditionally used to represent the fruit of Knowledge in the bible. The second letter....
You made an error that I think a lot of people make.
It is not how long it takes you to understand a perl script of X length that is relevant.
What SHOULD be the important data is:
Whether it would take you MORE time to understand a C or Java program that does the same thing.
I have seen cases where people complain that it takes them a week to understand a Perl Script of 500 lines. So they write a new program in C, that does the same thing in 5,000 lines. Which then takes me 8 days to understand.
One of Perl's image problems is that because it does so much with so little, people underestimate what the tiny program does and therefore get frustrated when it takes them more time to understand than a C program of the same size, even though the C program does 1/10 what the Perl one does.
I did the seach, several times. The aritcle I mentione referenced several professional studies he researched - whether or not his work sucks is irrelevant to the question at hand.
I do know a LOT about statistics, and recognize that many studies are done with less than 100 people. Selecting that point to even comment about is a sign that your argument is weak - it is called a Red Herring - aruging about an inconsequential peice of information.
YES, lots of studies show LOTS of things, but the people against video game violence ALWAYS misinterprate the study results.
They pull bull crap like claim "adverse reaction" instead of something relevant.
Here I will examine what you claim the studies say, and show why it has NO business being in front of Congress.
Aggreesive behavior is NOT violence.
Aggression is a HEALTHY, neccesary part of the human psyche. People NEED aggression. Every single CEO in the world has more aggression than the wage slaves that work for them. Every single member of the military, police, fire department, NEEDS more aggression than the average person.
The studies show Agression, NOT violence - but the anti-game fools immediately claim that the games make you violent
Yes, aggression can be too high. We have a name for that. It is called unnessary violence. Kids by their very nature are learning when and where violence is unnessary. It is part of their education learning how to deal with Aggression.
More important, Aggression is NOT action.
It is a mind set, an attitude, a philosophy/way of life.
The EXACT kind of thing we created the Freedom of Speech Constitional Amendment to protect - the government has NO business telling people that they can not buy a certain item because it will make them or their kids think things that the government does not want them to think.
So basically, the people that want the government to control video games are NOT trying to stop violent, illegal behavior of our children, but instead attempting to get the government to control the minds/parent my kids.
That is NOT their job. It is MY job to parent my kids, MY job to decide what kinds of thoughts to expose them to, MY job, NOT the government.
Look, would I personally want my kids to play Grant Theft Auto? No. But I have the right to make that decision, NOT the government.
Why?
Because playing Grant Theft Auto, or similar games does NOT make my kids more violent, it just makes them more aggressive. Aggression is legal.
Most importantly, the fools trying to make violent video games illegal are ignoring the rest of the world.
There ARE thing out there that DO make kids more violent. Drugs do it instantly. Poverty does it slowly. Drunk parents, criminal parents, single parents, etc. etc. etc.
You want to REALLY redice violent crime? Try solving the things that REALLY make kids violent.
Allow parents to work and still get welfare checks, slowly reducing the cash on a 1/4 ratio (for every 4 dollars you earn, welfare check goes down by 1).
If a parent gets arrested twice for drug/alcohol related crimes, social workers investigate and have the authority to remove the kids if the parents are found to be addicted.
Give significnat tax reductions for any two single parents living together under the same roof.
Just make alcohol illegal again - yeah that' work real well.
Picking on violent video games that:
1) Have NOT a single reputable study out there indicating that they cause actual illegal actions.
2) Are a huge industry, one of the few that America is still on the top of the heap.
I take issue with your belief that the study is hard to pull off. The study is EASY to pull off. But it always shows that video games don't cause violence, so the idiots start complaining and saying the study was bad, it did not detect a real effect that was too small.
If video games REALLY caused violent behavior then we can measure violent behavior by:
# of arrests for any violent crime
# of times the kids come home with a visible wound on their face.
# of calls the parents get complaining about the kid beating someone up.
# of times the kids go to the emergency room.
Of course, those number are the same for kids that play Violent video games as for those that don't. So the Anti-game people claim "it is more subtle than that, it is only a.05% thing", or some other crap. Look. If the effect is so slight that it does not create a significant increase in criminal behavior etc. etc., then the effect is NOT significant enough for us to care about.
It is up to the anti-game people to prove that the effect, if it exists at all, is strong enough to warrant legal actions that will interefere with people's lives and the huge business that profit from it.
Maybe it IS a real, tiny effect. Maybe watching 10,000 hours of violent video games increases your chance to engage in a violent crimes each year by 1 in a 24 million. Assuming EVERYONE on earth plays for 10,000 hours in their life time,that would come out to 500 additional violent criminal actions in the entire world. Alcohol causes how many bar fights? If the effect is so small that reasonable definitions of violent actions can not reveal any increase, then we have no business outlawing it.
They list several studes, some of which showed a DECREASE in violence.
I just picked 100 as a sample number. Do it as large as you want to.
Note, there are LOTS of studies where the Authors "Conclude that violence was caused by video games". But NONE of them I have ever seen succesfully show indicate causation of actual violence.
What the tons of "anti-video game studies
consistently prove is that:
people that play violent video games have some violent thoughts for the period immediately afterwords. Violent thoughts sounds scary, but there is another name for it: Memories. When you look at red things for an hour, you tend to think about red things. It does not make you like the color red more, nor does it make you subconciously want to buy red things.
People that engage in violent actions like playing violent games and liked to play violent games when they were kids. They also like to eat meat and liked to eat meat as a kid. They also like to wear cloathing and wore cloathing as a kid. And they tend to be physically in better shape.
Causation is not correlation. Proving Correlation is worthless. Show me causation and I will agree with you.
THERE ARE TONS AND TONS OF STUDIES SUGGESTING THAT VIOLENT BEHAVIOR IS NOT PROMOTED BY VIOLENT GAMES. So can we talk now? Or did you just lie?
But lets pretend you are correct that no such studies exist.
You can't outlaw something just because a correlation exists - doing that is one of the stupidest, most incompetent ideas ever. They tried it before. Comics.
In the 60's there were several studies demonstrating a correlation between comic reading and criminal behavior. Apparently some idiot did a study and found that 90% of adults that read comic books were either in prison or had been in prison. (This was back in the 60's, so it was even rarer than now for an adult to read comic books)
A moronic movement grew and tried to outlaw comics. It went all the way to Congress. Then the Comic industry got together and demonstrated that:
while 90% of adults that read comic in the 60s were in prison, 99% of adults that read comics were in fact funcionally illiterate - comics was the ONLY thing they could read and being in prison was BORING.
Another study showed that about 90% of people that were functionally illiterate ended up in prison.
One MORE study showed that Children that read comic books were about 5 x LESS likely to be functionally illiterate when they left school.
That not enough for you?
99% of all criminals wear cloathing
99% of all criminals eat meat
99% of all criminals sleep at leat 6 hours aday.
Correlation is WORTHLESS All it does is indicate something that should be studied. When people claim that video games cause violence, they are CLAIMING causation. That is why people want to elmininate it. If causation was realinstead of false, then it would take less than ONE year to prove it with a double blind study. We have had violent videogames for over a decade - why won't you take a single extra year to actually PROVE your ridiculous idea?
I know why.
Those studies I mentioned at the begining? They all prove you wrong. Video games do NOT cause violent actions. At most they encourage a few random violent thoughts that are as much a memory of the game you play'd as anything else.
You have demonstrated that it is POSSIBLE to use VOIP as a service.
But the nature of VOIP itself is NOT a service, so they can not block all VOIP.
If they had a way to systematically ONLY stop people doing what you describe, that would be legal.
The fact that SOME companies already block it does NOT make it legal. Companies commit crimes all the time. And they get away with it. The question is not what people do, but what claims were made and whether or not they fulfilled their claims. They made claims they did not fulfill. They committed Fraud, and violated Common Carrier rules that require them to allow other telephony services to use their services.
The question is, "what is the defintion of full consumer internet service".
The FCC agrees with my interpretation that a running mail server is not a "consumer " internet service, but is instead a "business" internet sercice, while VOIP is a "consumer" internet service.
For your arugment to be valid, you have to convince the courts/FCC that people expect a "retail/consumer" internet service to include a mail server, which I don't think is going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically I am saying that you have the "right" to take pictures of the store, not that the store can't kick you out. P.S. There are MANY situations where stores do NOT have the legal right to kick any person out without cause. Malls for example, sometimes demand store owners sign contracts that limit there rights.
The difference is they can't use force, they can't call the police if you willingly leave, they can't sue you, etc. etc. etc.
These are important facts.
Even "banning you for life" might cause problems.
They can ask you to leave for doing nothing. But they can not take away your right to photograph them. The question we were discussing was not about having the right to ask someone to leave, but about the right to take photos.
I will admit that the ownder of the camers does not WANT them to be photographed. So what? So do criminals, and so do people cheating on their wife, and so do people simply trying to protect their privacy.
The question is not "is there a reason", but instead is "Is the reason you want to stop people taking pictures of your cameras BETTER than the reason you came up with to let you set up the cameras in the first place"?
Why? Because ANY reason that lets you prevent others from taking pictures of your camers can be turned around and used to prevent the store from taking your picture
If you have the right to take my picture to prevent criminal actions by me, I have the right to take YOUR picture to prevent criminal actions by you. Yes, if I were a criminal, I could analyze the pictures I took to plan a crime against you. SO WHAT. If the employees of the store are criminal, they can analyze THERE surveliance tapes to plan crimes against shoppers.
The management clearly wants the power to observe their shoppers and does not want shoppers to have a similar right against them. Shoppers want the power to observe the management and does not want the management to have similar rights against them.
But the law is not a slave to EITHER side, so gives BOTH the rights to observe and record.
I do agree that the management has the right to require the shoppers to hide their cameras, as the store has hidden their own cameras.
If you wrote scripts for a hospital, then a your next IT department might want to see something you have written before.
If you are working on proprietary code that is another story.
No. You just need to tell them to order the computer without a Hard Drive and then seperately get a hard drive. If you want a Nude computer you should be competent enough to install a hard drive.
We currently have the technology to begin a terraforming project on some of the planets and moons. Yes it would be expensive, but just seeding the right bacteria would have it done within 100 years.
Earth has BEEN TURNED INTO A PARADISE. It did not start out that way. It is relatively cheap and easy for us to make certain of the moons and at least Mars, possibly Venus into an earth-like paradise.
As for "hepa filters, etc." HA,HA,HA,HA,HA. You really should learn a bit more about thoe things. I am not saying it is impossible for humans to survive, but the disasters that wiped out the dinosaurs would be A LOT harder for humans to survive. Assuming enough of those things were available, assuming enough people had the time to get those things (a large number would die within minutes), the problems are so immense. What will they eat? What will they drink? Most animal life would die. A lot of plant life would die. We are talking maybe 1% human survivors, with NO guarantee that they would make it. Humans are smart, and we might survive. But it is no means certain.
Finally you are VERY locked into one or two death for the race scenarios. Here. Let me enlighten you:
Explosive death (Nuclear, anti-matter, whatever)
Nanno-death (gray sludge)
Bio-death -(Any airborne disease that incubates for one week with few/no symptops, then kills quickly)
Ecological-catastrophic cascade (A sudden sharp change in a planet's ecology caused when a previously little watched phenomema breaks out of it's known limits. Primary example in history was the mutation resulting in aerobic bacteria, that turned the carbon-dixoxide atmosphere of our planet into an oxygen one, thereby entirely wipeing out the anaerobic bacteria that had previously ruled it. Another example could be the melting of our ice caps - galciers are dis-appearing at an alarming rate)
Volcanic eruptions (similar to asteroid hits, but more spread out, often happens WITH asteroid hits
And those are just the ones that an in-system colony would defeat. Once we colonize the rest of the planet, we need to leave Sol system. Someday the sun will die - and while the odds of it happening now are low, it is still theoretically possible to happen TODAY.
Eventually, our descendents will HAVE to leave the Galaxy. Galaxies die too. While some may dis-agree about if black hole exists, whatever happens there it WILL exist.
And over the VERY long term, even the universe itself has some kind of death awaiting it. While at this point in time we have NO idea if there is anything we can do about it, there may be a way to escape it. But I know for a fact that if we are stuck on this tiny little speck of matter called Earth, we will not survive it.
My main point is that even as a species, we do NOT have the knowledge or resources to survive, no matter how much duct tape you buy.
Conservation is limited to 100% effecient uses of the resources on earth.
Even assuming we are currently using resources at 1% effeciency (which I think is ridiculous - we are probably using them at about 25%), that means the maximum possible increase in resource useage is x100 via conservation. At my more likely value of 25%, the max increase is x4.
Earth contains less than 1% of the resoureces of the solar system. Once you get out of our gravity well, it even contains even less than 1% of the easily obtainable resources (i.e. ignorin other resources in heavy gravity wells like Jupiter, etc.).
It is simple economics. We live on a tiny, insignficant speck. Once you get off the speck, the economics of gathering resources are phenomally increased.
Finally, the science required to get off the world generally AIDS conservation. The things we need most in space are self-renewing food, clean water, clean air, and electricity. As we learn to create the conservation bubble neccesary to travel in space, we learn how to better use the resources we have on Earth.
I now seed a low rider version with extendable legs. Guys standing around on street corners, "dancing" by going up 5 ft, then back down 5ft, with the entire carrying capacity of the mech being used to carry HUGE speakers, blasting out music.
Yes it is true that in the past, bi-pedal walkers were less energy efficient. But the new ones have enhanced algorithyms that are designed to conserve momentum. The most modern ones no longer do the "step by step" movement, but instead "flow", absorbing energy and storing it as needed.
Will they match wheeled travel on roads? (Cars) No. But they will beat off road Tracked vehicles (tanks).
"Our substantial and urgent problems are all caused by too many people trying to take too many resources. Are these problems too obvious to be interesting? An effective way to solve them would be to have fewer people using resources more modestly."
The bold part was intelligent. Everything else was said by someone that had NO idea how intelligent the bold part was.
Let me re-word what you said, as done by someone that has long considered the bold part.
Our substantial and urgent problems are all caused by too many people and not enough resources. Using fewer resources (conservation) is helping, simple math shows that it is not enough. With a growing population and with more and more of the population ceasing to be "developing" and instead becoming "developed", we need another solution. That leaves us with two obvious solutions: 1) reduce population (either through birth control or death - traditionally we have used War to do this) or 2) FIND MORE RESOURCES. We already use the resources on Earth, so getting off Earth and beinging a wise, conservation based use of Space resources should be our HIGHEST priority. That way we can keep Earth a paradise, while using the huge amounts of resources off Earth to solve our issues.
The major reason eath is such a great place is that we have ALREADY been spending 1000's of years making it so. You are comparing a mansion to an empty lot. What you think Las vegas is a livable area? Get real. Las vegas has no water, no shade, no food, no shelter that people did not bring there. It is a hellish place, just as bad if not worse, then most places on Mars. Mars has less air, but more water. As for Alpha Centauri, we have no idea if there is a nice, high oxygen content planet orbiting one of the Centauri stars. Frankly our telescopes are not that good yet.
Outer space IS a great place to live. The reason why we are not already building country homes and golf courses it is expensive, to get there. They are great places to live, just hard to visit.
And most importantly, you are missing the main point. All life over 2ft tall has in the past been eliminated from earth. If the SAME disaster that happened before happened again, all humans would die out. A simple 1,000 person colony on the Moon would save the species, if not the 6 billion lives currently on earth.
The unexamined uses this instinct and that is why it is assumed to be true.
There are LOTS of great reasons to support this instint. But that is irrelevant. The instint exists.
Therefore to make any sense at all, You must first answer the OPPOSITE question
In order to even question life's instinct to survive you must show some evidence that that we are NOT too important to lose. The questionis not why should we survive, but why should we NOT survive.
Try and answer that question. If you can do it,then I will try and answer your question more fully, explaining why we should survive even ignorint life's main instinct of survival.
The cost is minimal not great, and the added value is HUGE.
The cost is like 5,000/year - which seems like a lot only to the people that have no idea what a city spends. 5,000/year is nothing to a city. Far less than how much it pays people to clean up a park's statues.
This however is a HUGE quality of life issue - it makes the city very attractive to a lot of people, grants internet access to some people that could not afford it. Many people can afford $500 one time payment for a crappy computer +$100 more for a wifi card, but not afford the $1,200 + a year reasonable internet access can cost.
They can set it up on a virtual network connected to the US computers. They send the information for only the specific passport requested.
Thus no foreign place would have more information than the current procedure.
Authorized custom agents could then pass a reader over that chip, which would take the number, connect to a US government's computer, input the number which would return photo, fingerprints, etc. etc.
There seems NO need to put all the sensitive information on a chip, when all you need is a number. Keep the sensitive information on more secure computers, accesible only by valid custom agents.
Unless you get high quality stuff, you are going to be in for a nasty surprise after 20.
For example I could say "My name is Andrew."
OR I could say: My name is an anagram of "Wander" with the last two letters swithed and then take the first letter and move it to the back.
Or I could say: The first letter of my name has the same first letter as the fruit traditionally used to represent the fruit of Knowledge in the bible. The second letter....
It is not how long it takes you to understand a perl script of X length that is relevant.
What SHOULD be the important data is: Whether it would take you MORE time to understand a C or Java program that does the same thing.
I have seen cases where people complain that it takes them a week to understand a Perl Script of 500 lines. So they write a new program in C, that does the same thing in 5,000 lines. Which then takes me 8 days to understand.
One of Perl's image problems is that because it does so much with so little, people underestimate what the tiny program does and therefore get frustrated when it takes them more time to understand than a C program of the same size, even though the C program does 1/10 what the Perl one does.
I do know a LOT about statistics, and recognize that many studies are done with less than 100 people. Selecting that point to even comment about is a sign that your argument is weak - it is called a Red Herring - aruging about an inconsequential peice of information.
YES, lots of studies show LOTS of things, but the people against video game violence ALWAYS misinterprate the study results.
They pull bull crap like claim "adverse reaction" instead of something relevant.
Here I will examine what you claim the studies say, and show why it has NO business being in front of Congress.
Aggreesive behavior is NOT violence.
Aggression is a HEALTHY, neccesary part of the human psyche. People NEED aggression. Every single CEO in the world has more aggression than the wage slaves that work for them. Every single member of the military, police, fire department, NEEDS more aggression than the average person.
The studies show Agression, NOT violence - but the anti-game fools immediately claim that the games make you violent
Yes, aggression can be too high. We have a name for that. It is called unnessary violence. Kids by their very nature are learning when and where violence is unnessary. It is part of their education learning how to deal with Aggression.
More important, Aggression is NOT action.
It is a mind set, an attitude, a philosophy/way of life.
The EXACT kind of thing we created the Freedom of Speech Constitional Amendment to protect - the government has NO business telling people that they can not buy a certain item because it will make them or their kids think things that the government does not want them to think.
So basically, the people that want the government to control video games are NOT trying to stop violent, illegal behavior of our children, but instead attempting to get the government to control the minds/parent my kids.
That is NOT their job. It is MY job to parent my kids, MY job to decide what kinds of thoughts to expose them to, MY job, NOT the government.
Look, would I personally want my kids to play Grant Theft Auto? No. But I have the right to make that decision, NOT the government.
Why?
Because playing Grant Theft Auto, or similar games does NOT make my kids more violent, it just makes them more aggressive. Aggression is legal.
Most importantly, the fools trying to make violent video games illegal are ignoring the rest of the world.
There ARE thing out there that DO make kids more violent. Drugs do it instantly. Poverty does it slowly. Drunk parents, criminal parents, single parents, etc. etc. etc.
You want to REALLY redice violent crime? Try solving the things that REALLY make kids violent.
Allow parents to work and still get welfare checks, slowly reducing the cash on a 1/4 ratio (for every 4 dollars you earn, welfare check goes down by 1).
If a parent gets arrested twice for drug/alcohol related crimes, social workers investigate and have the authority to remove the kids if the parents are found to be addicted.
Give significnat tax reductions for any two single parents living together under the same roof.
Just make alcohol illegal again - yeah that' work real well.
Picking on violent video games that: 1) Have NOT a single reputable study out there indicating that they cause actual illegal actions. 2) Are a huge industry, one of the few that America is still on the top of the heap.
If video games REALLY caused violent behavior then we can measure violent behavior by:
# of arrests for any violent crime
# of times the kids come home with a visible wound on their face.
# of calls the parents get complaining about the kid beating someone up.
# of times the kids go to the emergency room.
Of course, those number are the same for kids that play Violent video games as for those that don't. So the Anti-game people claim "it is more subtle than that, it is only a .05% thing", or some other crap. Look. If the effect is so slight that it does not create a significant increase in criminal behavior etc. etc., then the effect is NOT significant enough for us to care about.
It is up to the anti-game people to prove that the effect, if it exists at all, is strong enough to warrant legal actions that will interefere with people's lives and the huge business that profit from it.
Maybe it IS a real, tiny effect. Maybe watching 10,000 hours of violent video games increases your chance to engage in a violent crimes each year by 1 in a 24 million. Assuming EVERYONE on earth plays for 10,000 hours in their life time,that would come out to 500 additional violent criminal actions in the entire world. Alcohol causes how many bar fights? If the effect is so small that reasonable definitions of violent actions can not reveal any increase, then we have no business outlawing it.
http://www.pafko.com/wayne/docs/media_effects_vide o_games.pdf
They list several studes, some of which showed a DECREASE in violence.
I just picked 100 as a sample number. Do it as large as you want to.
Note, there are LOTS of studies where the Authors "Conclude that violence was caused by video games". But NONE of them I have ever seen succesfully show indicate causation of actual violence.
What the tons of "anti-video game studies consistently prove is that:
people that play violent video games have some violent thoughts for the period immediately afterwords. Violent thoughts sounds scary, but there is another name for it: Memories. When you look at red things for an hour, you tend to think about red things. It does not make you like the color red more, nor does it make you subconciously want to buy red things.
People that engage in violent actions like playing violent games and liked to play violent games when they were kids. They also like to eat meat and liked to eat meat as a kid. They also like to wear cloathing and wore cloathing as a kid. And they tend to be physically in better shape.
Causation is not correlation. Proving Correlation is worthless. Show me causation and I will agree with you.
But lets pretend you are correct that no such studies exist.
You can't outlaw something just because a correlation exists - doing that is one of the stupidest, most incompetent ideas ever. They tried it before. Comics.
In the 60's there were several studies demonstrating a correlation between comic reading and criminal behavior. Apparently some idiot did a study and found that 90% of adults that read comic books were either in prison or had been in prison. (This was back in the 60's, so it was even rarer than now for an adult to read comic books)
A moronic movement grew and tried to outlaw comics. It went all the way to Congress. Then the Comic industry got together and demonstrated that:
while 90% of adults that read comic in the 60s were in prison, 99% of adults that read comics were in fact funcionally illiterate - comics was the ONLY thing they could read and being in prison was BORING.
Another study showed that about 90% of people that were functionally illiterate ended up in prison.
One MORE study showed that Children that read comic books were about 5 x LESS likely to be functionally illiterate when they left school.
That not enough for you?
99% of all criminals wear cloathing
99% of all criminals eat meat
99% of all criminals sleep at leat 6 hours aday.
Correlation is WORTHLESS All it does is indicate something that should be studied. When people claim that video games cause violence, they are CLAIMING causation. That is why people want to elmininate it. If causation was realinstead of false, then it would take less than ONE year to prove it with a double blind study. We have had violent videogames for over a decade - why won't you take a single extra year to actually PROVE your ridiculous idea?
I know why.
Those studies I mentioned at the begining? They all prove you wrong. Video games do NOT cause violent actions. At most they encourage a few random violent thoughts that are as much a memory of the game you play'd as anything else.
P.S. I don't play video games at all.
But the nature of VOIP itself is NOT a service, so they can not block all VOIP.
If they had a way to systematically ONLY stop people doing what you describe, that would be legal.
The fact that SOME companies already block it does NOT make it legal. Companies commit crimes all the time. And they get away with it. The question is not what people do, but what claims were made and whether or not they fulfilled their claims. They made claims they did not fulfill. They committed Fraud, and violated Common Carrier rules that require them to allow other telephony services to use their services.
The question is, "what is the defintion of full consumer internet service".
The FCC agrees with my interpretation that a running mail server is not a "consumer " internet service, but is instead a "business" internet sercice, while VOIP is a "consumer" internet service.
For your arugment to be valid, you have to convince the courts/FCC that people expect a "retail/consumer" internet service to include a mail server, which I don't think is going to happen.