My concern is that the Dems will bail people out with my tax money, once again rewarding the spendthrifts and fools while punishing the honest, hardworking, and diligent people who try to save and invest their money instead of rushing headlong into a bad deal and then screaming for the government to throw them a life preserver when they get in over their heads. Reward the spenders and punish the savers. It never fails in the United States and especially not during an election year...sigh.
Don't be so disingenuous. The Dems certainly bail out individuals who don't deserve it, but the Republicans do the very same thing for failing businesses. Democrats = individual welfare. Republicans = corporate welfare. No matter who's in office, we end up propping-up some freeloaders with our tax money.
Yeah, look how much better off people were in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia.
If you look at all of human history, you can find plenty of examples of theocracies which commit similarly egregious violations of human rights and decency. One need only look toward the Middle East if you need a recent example.
The problem is, they don't merely increase your rates. With the right (or wrong, as the case may be) set of pre-dispositions, an insurance agency will refuse to accept your business, as you are too much of a risk. This is less of an issue with employer group plans, of course, but it can still happen. Life insurance companies are even worse than health insurance companies.
Or are we/.'ers different from most citizens, and if so, why?
Several reasons, actually:
Many of us realize that the choice isn't between liberty and effective counter-terrorism. The choice is between liberty and a security illusion meant to make people feel safer.
Knowing that we aren't actually becoming safer, it is much easier for us to realize how scary it is to be placing these kinds of powers in the hands of people who are already blatantly corrupt and whose interests clearly lie contrary to the public's.
There is a fair amount of skepticism that anything beyond simply locking cockpit doors on airplanes is a necessary response to 9/11. Even if you could convince us that we are actually more secure, it could still be a hard sell that the additional security is worth the cost in liberty.
There are many other causes of death in our country besides terrorism that vastly outweigh the losses suffered on 9/11... on a yearly basis. Why haven't we taken any steps to solve those? Why is a single event where 3,000 people died cause to go batshit insane protective give-up-our-liberties mode, when Heart Disease causes over 200 times that many deaths on a yearly basis, and we can't convince ourselves to hit up a gym?
My understanding is that the difference between a business line and a consumer line is that the business line comes with an uptime agreement, whereas the consumer line doesn't.
My workplace's 2 T1 (1.5MBps) lines aren't supposed to get any more bandwidth than my 3.0MBps cable line at home. The difference is: when the T1s go down, we get an immediate response from the provider to get things fixed, and we get money back if they go down for too long. If my cable goes down, I can tell the cable company about it, but if it's down I'm simply out of luck.
Business lines get higher priority for maintenance/uptime, not bandwidth.
Where do you get that doctors and lawyers have legal restrictions against competition????
I can't speak for lawyers, but there are multiple factors affecting the number of doctors in the field, outside of market forces. The largest factor is the limit the AMA places on the number of physician licenses that are granted each year.
For a glimpse into some problems that can arise from this:
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
A better example might be as follows:
Case 1: I create a mix CD for someone, and install a rootkit on the CD.
Case 2: An executive at Sony oks the installation of rootkits in their CDs.
In the first case, I could be put in jail under one or more computer crime laws, and would likely be held liable for all expenses to remove the rootkit and any losses incurred.
In the second case, the worst that might happen is that the executive loses his job (and collects a nice golden parachute award). In the best case, the executive doesn't even take a pay cut. Sony as a company might get sued, but there's no guarantee that the responsibility for the criminal act ever makes its way to the individual who gave the ok to do it.
If we are to believe the NSA, at least part of Congress, and our current President, it also doesn't apply to US citizens who choose to have phone conversations with non-citizens outside the country.
If we are to believe our schools, it also doesn't apply to US citizens who are minors.
Let's keep the list going - who else can think up common exceptions to the rule (acceptable or not)? I'm sure I've missed a few.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
The problems are that:
Those in power have successfully convinced a large portion of the public that we only have those rights specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And, many have been sold on the idea that even those rights have limits.
The 4th Amendment is, unfortunately, a little ambiguous.
The big, gaping hole in the amendment is the inclusion of the word "unreasonable." It's quite easy to convince the more timid that all monitoring is reasonable if it can protect us from terrorists or protect our children from pedophiles.
That, and we've chipped-away at the 4th Amendment for a long time, with concepts like "reasonable expectation of privacy" that can be waved around whenever someone objects to the newest form of surveillance. For example, you can bet the framers of the Constitution would have been horrified at the prospect of putting up cameras everywhere to monitor anyone out in public, but it's defended heavily by the assertion that anyone could see you in public, so it's ok.
Sure, I may be able to download them just as easily, but what if I want to read them on the subway/bus? During lunch? Hell, even in bed?
You could put them on a PDA. Or, if you prefer the paper-like display, toss them on a Kindle or equivalent device.
That being said, there are some people who simply prefer the tactile feel of holding a physical book and flipping pages. Not to mention, you don't have to pay the rather large up-front cost of a reader like a PDA or Kindle that I mentioned above. I suppose that could be compared to a person who preferred riding in horse-drawn buggies to automobiles, though.
If you look at the bigger picture, one could easily argue that both are credible.
The first is merely a logical reaction to someone who has been caught in a bold-faced lie. How many other lies have they told?
The second takes a bit of a larger picture to gain credibility, but sounds believable enough when you factor in lobbying efforts, extension to copyright, vast increases in the punishment for infringement, and a vast increase in the enforcement of infringement.
How much more difficult would it have been to push through some of the relatively recent changes to copyright law if the **AA couldn't point to a bunch of statistics "proving" the evil terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hpirates were robbing them blind? It is a lot easier to ask Congress for new laws and the Executive branch for aid if you can show that half your business is being taken away by "thieves" than it is with a "well, we estimate we're losing 15%, but that number is really too high."
If no one is buying their product, they will claim that it is due to the illegal copying of their product - proving that they need more stringent laws.
That may be true, but in the absence of federal subsidies, they will still go away.
Businesses cannot survive without money. It may certainly take quite some time before they finally keel over, but if people stop buying their products, RIAA/MPAA member companies will eventually die off.
That's correct - photosynthesis gets is energy input from nutrients the plant gathers. Shame on biologists for using words like photosynthesis (where photo- means light, or under most contexts of photosynthesis, sunlight) to confuse others as to where the real power comes from.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) -- A large mob of terrorists were gunned-down in front of the White House today, after an attempt to assassinate the President. White House officials called the move "an attack on freedom," while onlookers were not so sure.
"They didn't look like terrorists to me," said John Smith, a local resident. He explains, "these people seemed to be angrily protesting some new government policy. One of them was even waving around a sign saying 'Welcome to China'."
I find it weird how this "license to listen" meme keeps cropping up from so many different people.
It is not so wierd. You touched upon the reason in the last half of your post.
The RIAA/MPAA would have you believe that when you buy a CD/DVD, you don't really own the copy. Rather, they assert, as in licensed use, that they can provide you with a list of restrictions on how you can use your copy once you've bought it. When you start getting into DRMed media, this becomes even more explicit, as the song/video itself starts to place restrictions upon how you can use it (e.g. you can only use CoolMusic.mp3 you bought from iTunes in 3 devices you own, vs. being able to play a CD in any CD player you own).
Naturally, such assertions are absurd. However, if you preach something long enough, you will find some people start to believe you anyways. The fact that such restrictions become possible with DRMed media only fosters this belief.
Copyright has become the prohibition of our age. It is the law, but few accept or really care to follow it, and outside of the media cartels, no one really takes any aggressive steps to enforce it.
The reality is unquestionably that politicians are inherently corrupt and will spin things as much in their favor as possible. However, this does not mean that our jobs are to champion or even accept it.
Wikipedia is not responsible for the misinformation in the least - responsibility lies squarely in the lap of those who choose to taint articles with propaganda. The message one should come away from this regarding Wikipedia (which should be common practice, anyways) is to always take articles with a grain of salt. Examine any attached sources, search for additional sources, and draw your own conclusions from what you gather. Taking anything you hear or read at face value is generally a poor idea.
The fact that allowing anyone to modify an article can occasionally lead to misinformation is simply something you should accept when reading anything on Wikipedia.
No, the copyright system isn't broken. Copyright has worked well for over 200 years in this country. (The patent system is another story). Now laws like the DMCA that criminalize what would otherwise be legitimate acts...that's broken.
Some would argue that the current copyright system is broken.
The original system where a copyright:
Had to be registered
Lasted 14 years
Provided for an additional 14 year extension if applied for
Programmers are getting lazy or worse yet, sabotaging programs so they're ensured work to do later fixing it. I say put in some damn effort and release software that's actually good!
More than likely, you should be blaming the marketing and sales droids that pushed out a product prematurely, realizing they could get the money now and slave-drive the programmers to fix the issues as fast as possible afterwards.
You could also try blaming it on the people who'll buy broken software and just bitch and moan, rather than take the software back and demand refunds due to defects. After all, if defective software didn't sell, the marketing and sales droids would be forced to release when the software is ready, and not before then.
Slashdot Mirror
My concern is that the Dems will bail people out with my tax money, once again rewarding the spendthrifts and fools while punishing the honest, hardworking, and diligent people who try to save and invest their money instead of rushing headlong into a bad deal and then screaming for the government to throw them a life preserver when they get in over their heads. Reward the spenders and punish the savers. It never fails in the United States and especially not during an election year...sigh.
Don't be so disingenuous. The Dems certainly bail out individuals who don't deserve it, but the Republicans do the very same thing for failing businesses. Democrats = individual welfare. Republicans = corporate welfare. No matter who's in office, we end up propping-up some freeloaders with our tax money.
That depends on what city you live in.
After instituting a smoking ban in all public buildings, every county in my area showed an immediate, noticeable drop in health issues.
The truth seems rather self-evident from my perspective.
Yeah, look how much better off people were in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia.
If you look at all of human history, you can find plenty of examples of theocracies which commit similarly egregious violations of human rights and decency. One need only look toward the Middle East if you need a recent example.
religion != morality
The problem is, they don't merely increase your rates. With the right (or wrong, as the case may be) set of pre-dispositions, an insurance agency will refuse to accept your business, as you are too much of a risk. This is less of an issue with employer group plans, of course, but it can still happen. Life insurance companies are even worse than health insurance companies.
Or are we /.'ers different from most citizens, and if so, why?
Several reasons, actually:
My understanding is that the difference between a business line and a consumer line is that the business line comes with an uptime agreement, whereas the consumer line doesn't.
My workplace's 2 T1 (1.5MBps) lines aren't supposed to get any more bandwidth than my 3.0MBps cable line at home. The difference is: when the T1s go down, we get an immediate response from the provider to get things fixed, and we get money back if they go down for too long. If my cable goes down, I can tell the cable company about it, but if it's down I'm simply out of luck.
Business lines get higher priority for maintenance/uptime, not bandwidth.
Where do you get that doctors and lawyers have legal restrictions against competition????
I can't speak for lawyers, but there are multiple factors affecting the number of doctors in the field, outside of market forces. The largest factor is the limit the AMA places on the number of physician licenses that are granted each year.
For a glimpse into some problems that can arise from this:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-02-doctor-shortage_x.htmA better example might be as follows:
In the first case, I could be put in jail under one or more computer crime laws, and would likely be held liable for all expenses to remove the rootkit and any losses incurred.
In the second case, the worst that might happen is that the executive loses his job (and collects a nice golden parachute award). In the best case, the executive doesn't even take a pay cut. Sony as a company might get sued, but there's no guarantee that the responsibility for the criminal act ever makes its way to the individual who gave the ok to do it.
If we are to believe the NSA, at least part of Congress, and our current President, it also doesn't apply to US citizens who choose to have phone conversations with non-citizens outside the country.
If we are to believe our schools, it also doesn't apply to US citizens who are minors.
Let's keep the list going - who else can think up common exceptions to the rule (acceptable or not)? I'm sure I've missed a few.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"
The problems are that:
- Those in power have successfully convinced a large portion of the public that we only have those rights specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And, many have been sold on the idea that even those rights have limits.
- The 4th Amendment is, unfortunately, a little ambiguous.
The big, gaping hole in the amendment is the inclusion of the word "unreasonable." It's quite easy to convince the more timid that all monitoring is reasonable if it can protect us from terrorists or protect our children from pedophiles.That, and we've chipped-away at the 4th Amendment for a long time, with concepts like "reasonable expectation of privacy" that can be waved around whenever someone objects to the newest form of surveillance. For example, you can bet the framers of the Constitution would have been horrified at the prospect of putting up cameras everywhere to monitor anyone out in public, but it's defended heavily by the assertion that anyone could see you in public, so it's ok.
Magic.
Sure, I may be able to download them just as easily, but what if I want to read them on the subway/bus? During lunch? Hell, even in bed?
You could put them on a PDA. Or, if you prefer the paper-like display, toss them on a Kindle or equivalent device.
That being said, there are some people who simply prefer the tactile feel of holding a physical book and flipping pages. Not to mention, you don't have to pay the rather large up-front cost of a reader like a PDA or Kindle that I mentioned above. I suppose that could be compared to a person who preferred riding in horse-drawn buggies to automobiles, though.
If you look at the bigger picture, one could easily argue that both are credible.
The first is merely a logical reaction to someone who has been caught in a bold-faced lie. How many other lies have they told?
The second takes a bit of a larger picture to gain credibility, but sounds believable enough when you factor in lobbying efforts, extension to copyright, vast increases in the punishment for infringement, and a vast increase in the enforcement of infringement.
How much more difficult would it have been to push through some of the relatively recent changes to copyright law if the **AA couldn't point to a bunch of statistics "proving" the evil terror^H^H^H^H^H^Hpirates were robbing them blind? It is a lot easier to ask Congress for new laws and the Executive branch for aid if you can show that half your business is being taken away by "thieves" than it is with a "well, we estimate we're losing 15%, but that number is really too high."
If no one is buying their product, they will claim that it is due to the illegal copying of their product - proving that they need more stringent laws.
That may be true, but in the absence of federal subsidies, they will still go away.
Businesses cannot survive without money. It may certainly take quite some time before they finally keel over, but if people stop buying their products, RIAA/MPAA member companies will eventually die off.
That's correct - photosynthesis gets is energy input from nutrients the plant gathers. Shame on biologists for using words like photosynthesis (where photo- means light, or under most contexts of photosynthesis, sunlight) to confuse others as to where the real power comes from.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) -- A large mob of terrorists were gunned-down in front of the White House today, after an attempt to assassinate the President. White House officials called the move "an attack on freedom," while onlookers were not so sure.
"They didn't look like terrorists to me," said John Smith, a local resident. He explains, "these people seemed to be angrily protesting some new government policy. One of them was even waving around a sign saying 'Welcome to China'."
President Bush was unavailable for comment.
I find it weird how this "license to listen" meme keeps cropping up from so many different people.
It is not so wierd. You touched upon the reason in the last half of your post.
The RIAA/MPAA would have you believe that when you buy a CD/DVD, you don't really own the copy. Rather, they assert, as in licensed use, that they can provide you with a list of restrictions on how you can use your copy once you've bought it. When you start getting into DRMed media, this becomes even more explicit, as the song/video itself starts to place restrictions upon how you can use it (e.g. you can only use CoolMusic.mp3 you bought from iTunes in 3 devices you own, vs. being able to play a CD in any CD player you own).
Naturally, such assertions are absurd. However, if you preach something long enough, you will find some people start to believe you anyways. The fact that such restrictions become possible with DRMed media only fosters this belief.
Copyright has become the prohibition of our age. It is the law, but few accept or really care to follow it, and outside of the media cartels, no one really takes any aggressive steps to enforce it.
The reality is unquestionably that politicians are inherently corrupt and will spin things as much in their favor as possible. However, this does not mean that our jobs are to champion or even accept it.
Wikipedia is not responsible for the misinformation in the least - responsibility lies squarely in the lap of those who choose to taint articles with propaganda. The message one should come away from this regarding Wikipedia (which should be common practice, anyways) is to always take articles with a grain of salt. Examine any attached sources, search for additional sources, and draw your own conclusions from what you gather. Taking anything you hear or read at face value is generally a poor idea.
The fact that allowing anyone to modify an article can occasionally lead to misinformation is simply something you should accept when reading anything on Wikipedia.
No, the copyright system isn't broken. Copyright has worked well for over 200 years in this country. (The patent system is another story). Now laws like the DMCA that criminalize what would otherwise be legitimate acts...that's broken.
Some would argue that the current copyright system is broken.
The original system where a copyright:- Had to be registered
- Lasted 14 years
- Provided for an additional 14 year extension if applied for
was far more sane than what we have now.Programmers are getting lazy or worse yet, sabotaging programs so they're ensured work to do later fixing it. I say put in some damn effort and release software that's actually good!
More than likely, you should be blaming the marketing and sales droids that pushed out a product prematurely, realizing they could get the money now and slave-drive the programmers to fix the issues as fast as possible afterwards.
You could also try blaming it on the people who'll buy broken software and just bitch and moan, rather than take the software back and demand refunds due to defects. After all, if defective software didn't sell, the marketing and sales droids would be forced to release when the software is ready, and not before then.
But isn't it perfect training to become future politicians and CEOs? They lied, cheated, and stole to get ahead.
If Canada was refusing entry to everyone that ever got ticketed while driving, would you blame the US' traffic laws?
If I was put on a list of dangerous criminals because I got caught one evening with a tail light out... yes.
"The best way to fight irrationality is..." to jingle your keys in front of the person's face and say "Shiny! Shiny!"