This was my thinking too, but I suppose people would adjust rather quickly to using other search engines; they're not as good but for the most part will get the job done. The newsgroup data would be the biggest loss there. Even if all of them failed, there'd be winners and losers. The losers would be companies doing research or otherwise actually using the Internet; the winners would be just about everyone else, for whom employee web use is a drain on productivity.
We'd probably also get a hefty productivity boost from an eBay and/or Amazon outage, and it probably wouldn't be too bad if YouTube, MySpace, and LiveJournal crapped out too. My guess is that you'd see a day or two of significantly higher productivity, then a tailing off as people found other ways to waste time instead of doing what they're paid for.
Besides that, word will spread quickly if people find that the banks are ripping them off, and no one will make deposits anymore, and then Citibank will just be left with an unused banking apparatus and a bad reputation.
Which is exactly what has happened in the United States. Angry about ever-escalating fees (bank fees have risen more or less continuously for the past decade, and are growing far faster than inflation) - fees which for most banks and credit-card issuers now constitute most of their profitability - millions of Americans have withdrawn their money from the banking system, cut up and paid off their credit cards, and left thousands of abandoned branches and ATMs in their wake.
Reality check. Choice in banking is limited in most states by the requirement that all banks be corporations; private corporations are legally obligated to obtain for their shareholders the highest possible returns on their capital. In practice this means that if one bank has found a way to extract more money from its customers, all others will and in many cases MUST utilise the same or similar strategies. The end result is that banking is fairly expensive for all but the wealthiest customers - those whose astronomical asset and loan balances provide the banks with sufficient incentive to waive the fees that would otherwise be charged - even those who are responsible and prudent in their use of the bank's services. Credit unions offer some relief, but not much: both their fee structures and their interest rates look remarkably similar to those of banks. I'd love to know why this is; their status as cooperatives ought to free them from the need to keep up with the banks' predatory practices, but that doesn't appear to be the case. At an initial guess, I might suspect a selection bias - credit union customers might be inherently less prudent or creditworthy than banks' customers, leading the CUs to charge higher fees to recoup losses and discourage bad behaviour. But that's nothing but a guess; I'd be in no way surprised to learn that the actual cause is something else altogether.
Anyway, in an even less well-regulated environment, in which competition from even other foreign banks is likely to be limited or nonexistent, I'd be very surprised if Citi doesn't turn the screws to their customers just as they have in the US. Again, they are effectively obligated to do so by law, especially since most investors - the people in a position to force the issue - are overwhelmingly focused on the short- and immediate-term success of the operation rather than its prospects for long-term expansion and customer goodwill. About the only limits on their activity will be attention from Indian regulators and outrage at home; neither seems especially likely given what we see already. Customer revolts against the entire (overwhelmingly uniform) banking industry simply don't happen. They could, but they don't.
Gladly. See, here's the thing: you can easily form an entirely self-consistent legal system in which committing sex acts on camera for commercial purposes is legal, and yet slavery is not. Forcing, deceiving, or coercing someone into doing any job, even an otherwise legal one (such as, say, committing sex acts on camera for commercial purposes), is slavery. You don't need a prohibition on pornography to go after the sex slavers. I'll happily tell a girl's parents that I'm not going to prosecute the pornographer who get her to lick a dozen men's semen crust off a rest-stop wall on camera for $10 because he didn't commit a crime. I'll also tell them she ought to have known better, and that she's old enough to make her own choices in life. Sorry your daughter didn't turn out the way you wanted her to; life's tough all over. But I'll also happily send that same pornographer to the chair if he enslaved her in the process, and I'll be just as happy to tell her parents that I'm doing so.
We already have laws criminalising slavery, indentured servitude, and deceptive and coerced contracts. We don't need laws against pornography to prosecute successfully those individuals who enslave women in the sex and pornography trades, or in any other. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pornography if the participants are aware that they will be filmed, consent to it of their own free will, and are of sound mental state to enter into such a contract. The law already bends over backwards to protect employees and contractors of all types in these kinds of situations. Put another way, it's neither better nor worse to enslave someone as a porn star than to enslave someone as a coal miner or field hand or computer programmer. It's slavery that's wrong, not porn.
Care to try again?
Perhaps because threatening someone to make you pay them is a crime? It's called extortion. In the absence of any solid evidence that Novell bought a license to use some specific code owned by Microsoft, or to implement specific Microsoft-patented technologies, that's all this "agreement" is. A goon walked up to your brother and threatened to break his legs unless he gave the goon $100. Your brother "agreed" to give the goon $100 in exchange for not doing something the goon couldn't legally do in the first place, and the goon said "well, all right then - I'll be back here next week and we'll do this again." And you're asking why the deal should be avoided? If Novell wants its customers to feel confident of their rights to their software (and, conversely, if they want their competitors' customers to feel uneasy about theirs), they should make public exactly what they licensed from Microsoft and how the license applies to their open source products. There's no sensible business reason not to do this, so the only conclusions are (a) they licensed something they need to make some new product they're not currently shipping, (b) they fell prey to extortion, or (c) they're trying to create FUD around their competitors' offerings. Because if there's nothing owned by Microsoft in the products they're shipping today, how does this "licensing" deal actually help any of Novell's customers any more than a "licensing" deal with Milkman Dan or the bum who panhandles you on your way to work? And if there is, why hasn't Microsoft filed suit? They would get a whole lot more money - not just from Novell - with a judge having looked at the evidence and strongly advising the parties to reach a settlement. Microsoft's never been concerned with optics, so if their rights really were being infringed, they'd have done this by now. There's just too much here that doesn't make sense from either side for this to be a legitimate money-for-rights deal. One way or another, one or both companies are trying to deceive customers into giving them more money than they deserve.
The OP and many of the responses focus on the things that are wrong with other countries, many of which are the same things that are wrong with the United States. This is of course no coincidence since the US is a behemoth whose influence spans the globe and whose bullying of other nations, even allies, has become just another unpleasant fact of life in the last 20 years. The answer, then, is not to find some other nation and hope it will somehow be less corrupt, less greedy, or less repressive. All the world's nations are in a race to the bottom in these areas and there's no reason to think that will change.
Instead, my plan is to purchase sovereignty over part of another nation from its government, in a manner similar to that in which the US itself purchased most of its current territory from France and Russia. For military reasons, it will be best if the part I purchase is small and defensible, likely an island or mountainous territory. For financial reasons, it will have to be small. For economic reasons it must be capable of producing food and must have a reliable supply of fresh water. There are many other considerations that must be made, but the gist of it is that I'm looking for a small piece of land over which I will rule absolutely. Since there will be no other inhabitants, whether this form of government is democracy, autocracy, or theocracy is a meaningless distinction. My freedom will be absolute, and my responsibility for my own well-being absolute as well.
What's stopping me? Lack of funds. Although I save over 50% of my net pay, buying sovereignty over even a small, unwanted island is not going to be cheap, nor will the military hardware I'd need for defense or the basic infrastructure I'd need to survive (one or two wells or a reservoir, a septic system, livestock and equipment for farm work, machine tools, a storm-survivable shelter, one or more boats, etc.). I expect it will be a number of years before I'm in a position to achieve my goal; there's a real chance that by that time the US will be so repressive that it will be nearly impossible to leave alive. But I see little hope in any other nation extant today, so really my game's the only one in town.
There's an important flaw in your reasoning, however. There were no humans 10 million years ago, nor anything really close. If you want to take issue with my assertion about the state of life on earth at that time, let's be even safer and say there were *definitely* no humans or anything vaguely resembling us 80 million years ago. If every human suddenly died but the rest of the life forms on the planet were unaffected, it's entirely possible that one or more other species with characteristics similar to humans would evolve sometime in the next 80 million years. It's even possible that humans would re-evolve; there is no particular reason to think that the conditions which were favourable to our traits have changed significantly since the branch leading to humans split from our nearest extant relatives. Of course, there's no way to know exactly what would follow humans or when or whether another species we would characterise as "intelligent" would evolve. But given the billion-plus years left in which the sun will have substantially the same luminosity it does today, it seems not too unlikely that at least one more go-round of intelligent life would occur; after all, a billion years ago multicellular life was a novelty. Now, as for scenarios that kill off every last (breeding pair of) human without harming other life, those are hard to come by: any natural disaster large enough to kill all humans would surely damage other life forms as well, and man-made disasters would either fail on small scales (war, collapse of agriculture) or be devastating to other organisms (nuclear winter, runaway greehouse warming). The best bet is probably on something like AIDS - a human-specific disease with high contagion and fatality rates. Whether this extinction scenario is plausible is difficult to know; it strikes at the very heart of selection.
I'm in no way convinced that Earthbound life needs humans to survive. It certainly seems likely that it requires intelligence to do so in the long run, but it's unclear whether humans (or our direct descendents) are the intelligent life form that can or will act as the agency of that survival. We're the best thing going right now, certainly, but it's unclear that we are actually capable of providing for the long-term survival of any Earthbound species on any celestial body other than Earth, and it's highly doubtful that we have the capacity to successfully transport life forms capable of breeding to any other star system. We may well develop - through some combination of learning and evolution - some or all of those capabilities, but it's also possible that we will fail to do so even if we do survive. Note that there is no compelling evidence that any other species anywhere has mastered these techniques. There is no obvious selective bias toward life forms capable of interstellar travel, nor is there any reason to believe there will ever be. This is especially true given that an individual born with the necessary mental capabilities must also have some more direct and immediate advantage in survival and reproduction in order to supplant those without them and eventually construct interstellar vessels (unless, of course, it turns out that such a vessel could be constructed by - or even *be* - a single such individual). The environmental conditions which would cause life to become successively more difficult on a particular planet would not necessarily bias selection in favour of greater intelligence but rather toward greater resistance to heat, cold, or whatever other conditions we expect will accompany the sun's eventual demise. It's also unclear that this demise will occur slowly enough that, even if intelligence were a preferred trait under those conditions, it would have time to evolve to the necessary level. In short, while your theory is certainly reasonable if one supposes that no significant changes will occur in Earthbound life forms prior to the onset of conditions incompatible with every extant species' survival, that supposition is unlikely to verify. Even if it
I'm 27, and I take notes exclusively on paper, using computers for two purposes only: as communication terminals, and to develop software on. Everything else, including my software development notes, is on paper. What happened between 1979 and 1980?
The whole purpose of the study is to ingrain in the minds of readers the idea that Coverity makes software that can count the number of bugs in a piece of software, leading to the obvious conclusion that it can also identify them and therefore is an extremely valuable product for developers. Of course, this is not true. Coverity's products cannot tell you that your program includes an infinite loop (because it cannot solve the Halting Problem), they cannot tell you that your program will perform at a snail's pace (because the performance characteristics of a piece of software depend on the algorithms it uses, which cannot be reliably determined by examining code, as well as the performance characteristics of the machine on which they are run, which simply cannot be determined in any way by examining source), and they cannot tell you that your program is logically wrong (because they do not know what your program is supposed to do). These are, in the real world, the kinds of problems that occupy virtually all bug-fixing effort. Worse still, many of the problems that Coverity's products, like all other automated source checkers such as lint and gcc -Wextra, do report are in fact false alarms.
Coverity, of course, knows that reports like this will be written up in exactly the way this summary was, clearly associating their company with the idea of enumerating the bugs in a piece of source code. While not illegal, this type of marketing is of course deceptive; while published papers describe the type of defects (or non-defects) actually detected, the overwhelming volume of commentary will reflect the broader, and incorrect, view that Coverity == bug-finder. It would be just as meaningful (which is to say, not very) to publish the number of lint warnings or missed opportunities to qualify pointer arguments with the const keyword, and neither would require an expensive piece of overhyped software.
Your hypothesis is orthogonal to the parent's suggested solution. If it is correct, the logical consequence of the proposed solution is that everyone be removed from power. There's no paradox here. Perhaps you're suggesting that this consequence is untenable; I disagree entirely. An organised society in no way relies on anyone having power over anyone else; if anything, the opposite is true. The problems with this approach stem from those people who fail or refuse to defend themselves against those who would wrong them; these in turn band together and impose the will of "leaders" on the rest of us, who were and are perfectly capable of defending ourselves and do not wish to be subject to anyone's whims. Therefore, the solution can be made tenable by simply allowing the "wolves," if you will, to tear out the throats of the sheep, then rounding them up and killing them. Those of us who are neither have no need of government and will be substantially happier in its absence.
Yeah- the idea is that you don't have to interact with a person. Any more it seems that many people are more comfortable interacting with machines anyhow.
Here's the thing: interacting with machines is usually more pleasant than interacting with the kinds of people they've replaced. Why? Because the people they're replacing tend to be salespeople, underpaid and commissioned. No one wants to deal with a desperate salesperson who will lie, hassle, and annoy you into buying whatever they're selling. There's no reason that salespeople have to be that way, of course, but their compensation structure pretty much dictates their tactics. When dealing with a machine, there's no help, but there are also no scummy sales tactics - ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. Wouldn't it be better if used cars were sold by vending machines instead of, well, used-car salesmen? Maybe if the people we'd interact with instead of machines were more pleasant, we wouldn't want to replace them. But that will happen only when they're our neighbours and friends, which is antithetical to the entire way our society is structured. Only in densely-populated cities (where small businesses can be successful and most people do business with a small number of personally-preferred shops) and small BigBox-free towns (where small business is all business and choices are few) does that type of interaction survive. But in most places, the economics of employing salespeople, especially for things people don't understand well like cars and cell plans, makes it impossible to have a pleasant experience as a customer. I'd happily pay more for the product to have a better experience, but the market - consisting mainly of people living way beyond their means - has determined that price trumps all. As long as that remains the case, expect to have a choice between sleazy salespeople and vending machines. I'll take the machines, please.
So, should a bank be forced to pay back a customer who has lost money to phishers? Or is it ultimately the customer's responsibility to make educated use of technology?
Yes, and yes. What I'd like to see from my bank is a published set of expectations in plain language. These can be appended to the usual account agreements as required by the laws of each country. These expectations should make clear to me what I must do to avoid being phished - specific, concrete actions I must or must not take. For example, I must always manually type in the bank's URL and examine the owner and issuer of its SSL certificate. I must never click on any link claiming to be to the bank's site, and must never enter my username and password on any site until I have performed the first two steps. If I receive mail (from any source) containing a link that is or claims to be to the bank's site, I must forward the message to the bank's fraud unit and then destroy it. I must create and secure for myself (using tools provided by the bank, if I lack my own) a cryptographic private key, and to use that key to sign messages to provide instructions to my bank or make requests of it. I alone am responsible for the security of this key, and I agree to revoke it in person if I believe it to be compromised.
Hand in hand with this is a set of specific concrete steps the bank agrees to take on my behalf. For example, they must destroy all paper records containing any information about me or my account on site using an industry-standard cross-shredder. All electronic media which contains that information, if transported or stored outside the bank's control, must be suitably encrypted using keys solely in the bank's control. The bank must control access to my personal information by employees to a degree even stronger than required by current regulations - for example, my name and address must never be shared with anyone who is not an employee of the bank specifically servicing my account on my behalf. No more joint marketing agreements or upselling arrangements with subsidiaries. The bank must also agree not to share my information with "law enforcement" without a valid subpoena, and if it receives such a subpoena it must give me 48 hours' notice before complying, to give me time to quash it. Finally, the bank agrees to provide information about my account only when presented with a message signed by my private key. The bank also agrees to establish a protocol for key retirement and revocation, and provide appropriate tools for performing these actions in person.
There are technical and logistical challenges associated with key management, a well-known problem in applied cryptography. Nevertheless, the use of a single security device (which in turn may be secured by multiple physical devices and/or passwords) which uniquely and absolutely identifies a valid customer, helps to draw a line between the customer's responsibility and the bank's. If the bank leaks my information, the agreement should specify that it is liable for repayment of all losses. If my private key is compromised, I am solely responsible for all losses until I revoke it. Revoking a key requires either the key itself or an in-person visit to a branch, and is irreversible. Because the private key is not a piece of personal identification, and is not stored anywhere in the bank, the only way for a criminal to obtain it is to attack me directly; I am responsible for securing it, and can decide for myself how to manage risk: if I'm especially paranoid, I might write the key on a piece of paper and put it in the vault at a different bank, storing it nowhere else. If I value convenience and am willing to accept more risk, I might store it on a single computer, symmetrically encrypted by a passphrase I commit to memory. If I'm a moron, I might store it in the clear on an Internet-facing Windows computer. Point-of-sale transactions could be restricted using a chip-and-pin system as is being implemented in the UK; however, it needs to be adjusted so th
No massive economic upheaval needed. Instead, mandatory death penalty for spammers. Now, you say, that might help if the spammer happens to be in your jurisdiction, but what about all the Russian, Hungarian, Chinese, and Nigerian spammers? No problem; this is an opportunity for the United States to put its heavy-handed brand of "diplomacy" to work! Instead of bullying every other not-so-sovereign-anymore nation into putting the DMCA into its books, we should force them to either kill spammers themselves or extradite them to us. Our military could be freed from its pointless and hazardous tasks in Iraq to assist in capturing these criminals when a foreign power fails or neglects to do so. If we were serious about solving this problem, it would already be solved. That we haven't even cleared our own house of spammers shows that too few people care enough. Until that changes, there is no solution.
Spamming is a fairly typical nonviolent crime; it's primarily economic in that it forces others to pay for things that benefit the spammer but do not benefit them (much like driving an SUV). That captchas have now forced them to begin paying even a tiny portion of the costs is wonderfully positive news. Unfortunately, the implementation of captchas themselves is an additional cost to the site operator, and of course the cost of the $0.60/hour spam is still imposed on them as well. An economic solution would have to accomplish two separate goals: first, increase the cost of spamming to a level equal to the cost to site operators (and individuals reading mail or text messages, according to the type of spam) to store and process it; second, ensure that those costs are in fact being paid to those people rather than to third parties. This would seem to argue for a combination of technology which is prohibitively expensive to bypass and the sale, if desired, of advertising space to spammers at prices favourable to those doing the storage and processing of spam. If the cost of bypassing captchas is $0.60 per hour, would people be willing to allow an hour's worth of comment spam in their blogs for $0.60? Probably not - at least, I wouldn't. But if it were $6.00? Or $60.00? The curves have to meet somewhere. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that technology will be developed which will be 100 times as expensive to bypass. Therefore, the death penalty is our best bet for the near future.
The problem is, how do you decide which acquittals are meaningful and which aren't? Legally, one acquittal is every bit as binding as any other. If there's a problem with the criminal courts, encouraging abuse of the civil courts to compensate for it doesn't seem like the right solution. And in any case, I'd rather see a million guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished; allowing criminal allegations in a civil court, even though the mode of punishment meted out there is different, only increases the likelihood that innocent individuals will be punished. When you mix in a registry of "civil offenders" as well, it starts to look like criminal penalties with a civil standard of evidence. It would be better for the legislature to direct its efforts toward ensuring that future OJ incidents don't occur.
If you want to bring a wrongful death suit against someone acquitted of murder or manslaughter, you're free to do so. What you should not be permitted to do is assert that the defendant committed murder or manslaughter. That's already been disproven in a criminal court, so from a legal perspective it's factually incorrect. You should be forced to come up with some alternate legal theory if you want to make a case for wrongful death; a case that would have merit only if the defendant had committed a crime should be dismissed. In other words, a wrongful death suit that asserts "He wrongfully caused her death by ________" is permissible if the blank is filled in by "badgering her into ill health" but not if it's filled by "stabbing her with an ice pick."
Why? They voted for these people. They should recall the responsible individuals, vote them out in the next election, or leave the state. And everyone who voted for anyone who voted in favour of this bill is 100% guilty. Feel the guilt, feel the self-loathing you so richly deserve! And remember it well the next time you're about to vote for a major-party candidate. If you're not among the guilty masses, your only real hope is to get out. Your vote probably isn't being counted, and even if it is, the entire system is set up to perpetuate the sort of officeholders who believe in and sponsor this insanity. Save your money, pick a destination, and start learning the language; this country's beyond hope.
Here's the kicker: "A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years if there have been no new problems and the judge believes the person is unlikely to abuse again."
Again? There is no again; these are people who haven't been convicted of anything and therefore have never abused anyone. No new problems? Like getting sued? Geez, that's a pretty low bar to set; anyone can, and usually does, sue for anything or nothing.
Here's an alternative idea: if a finding of civil liability relies upon proving (to civil standards of evidence) an act or acts that would constitute a crime, that finding shall be null and void absent a criminal conviction with respect to that act or acts. The civil courts were never intended to be an alternative to criminal court for weaker cases; their main purpose is to settle business disputes. If you want to accuse someone of a crime, you do it in a criminal court. If you get a conviction there, it's perfectly reasonable to sue in civil court for reparations if the criminal judge didn't impose any. Without that conviction, however, your suit should be dismissed out of hand. And that would put paid to this "civil offender" registry as well.
Really? It's not illegal to put razor blades in your own lunch. It's stupid, but it's not illegal unless you serve it to someone else or otherwise sell it as food. After all, it could be artwork never intended to be consumed by anyone. If someone steals from you, he or she is committing a crime and is entirely responsible for the consequences of that action. Consuming something stolen seems like a pretty bad idea regardless, since you never know what someone else might have put in a refrigerator; it might be spoiled, it might be something you're allergic to.
The GP is probably right that you'd find yourself in trouble, but that's only because, as you sarcastically pointed out, our "justice" system is anything but and is completely out of control. Justice would be "Use your head; if you steal something and then eat it, that's your problem. Don't steal then, and while you're at it, don't eat anything that hasn't been given to you expressly for that purpose. Dumbass."
Do you think if we told the public that any given piece of meat has x billion bacteria on it that it would be useful information to them? Plants too, so none of that herbivore crap.
It depends. If those bacteria, like most of those in the human body, are normal and naturally occurring, it's not useful information. They are, for all practical purposes, part of the meat (or plant product). You'd eat them if you went out into untouched forest, killed a healthy animal, and butchered it correctly and safely on the spot or in a cleanroom. However, if they've been intentionally added for some reason or other - to enhance flavour, to extend shelf life, to compensate for unsafe food handling practices, then yes, it is useful information. That's really what I'm looking for from the government - not regulation as to what can or cannot be done but truth in labeling, telling me in clear, simple, and precise terms what has been done to my food beyond the barest minimum necessary to prepare it for consumption (picking it out of the ground/off a tree, or basic butchering). It's then up to me to make informed choices about which practices and additives are acceptable to me, and buy accordingly.
For those who are trotting out the hybridisation/GM argument, this applies to your case, too: hybridisation can and does occur without human intervention. Direct manipulation of genes in a machine does not. Therefore the former is merely a case of human-directed food production (much like agriculture itself), while the latter is a clearly artificial practice. Does that mean it's unhealthy? It's certainly unhealthy for the market, but that says nothing about safety for human consumption. On the latter grounds, I'm not claiming that GM foods - or bacteriophages, either, for that matter - should be banned. But I do insist that I be allowed to make informed choices, and that means labeling. That the FDA has refused to require labeling for these practices is just another case of paternalism from this government; they either believe they are responsible for our safety or they simply don't care about it. In fact, I am solely responsible for my own safety, and my first step to protect it is to explicitly refuse to trust anything this government says or does.
Instead of trusting a government obviously in the back pocket of Big Agriculture, consider forming relationships with local farmers and butchers. They'll know, and probably tell you, where your food is coming from, how it was grown, and what's been done to it since then. It would be nice if the government would serve its sole regulatory purpose by improving the quality and availability of information in the marketplace, but since it doesn't, you'll have to fall back on simple old-fashioned trust formed in face to face interactions with the people you buy things from.
...just resign myself to buying toiletries at every destination and prepare for the mandatory anal probes in '07
How about DON'T resign yourself to anything? Have you forgotten that this is supposed to be government of, by, and for the people? They work for us, not the other way around; does a boss resign himself to the fact that his employees will show up 5 hours late every day? Hell, no; he tells them to show up on time or he fires them and finds others who will. It's time to take a stand against bad government, the kind that has allowed our rail infrastructure to degrade to pre-1900 performance levels and the kind that scares and/or bullies people into waiting in line 2 hours to get searched for incredibly dangerous items like nail clippers and shaving cream while as everyone knows there are dozens of ways to destroy an airplane if you're determined enough. Instead of kowtowing to the government's plans for you, how about sending the government a message by proxy?
Stop traveling. Just stay home.
I understand this may be a slight annoyance for you, but it's vastly more effective than writing your Congressman. Why? It puts the economic multiplier effect into play. When you don't travel, and make it clear to potential hosts, such as family and friends, as well as the hotel you would have stayed at, the theme park you would have visited, the owner of the boat you would have rented, and the guide you would have employed, you give other people reason to fight for your cause. And when these people turn around and tell their local chamber of commerce about these calls, an entire city's worth of business leaders will be on your side, even those who don't care about tourism or hospitality: they know that the hoteliers, theme park operators, boat shops, and guides are their customers, who now have less money to spend. Just a few thousand people making a point not to travel, and to let others know why they're not traveling, are enough of an economic force to enlist millions of powerful allies. Start an organised travel boycott in a few cities and it's all but over. Direct pressure on the government doesn't work; a few thousand people can't influence an elected official, especially if they're not wealthy. But the interconnectedness of the economy, and business owners' fresh memories of a nation that doesn't travel, allow us to harness the multiplier effect and force change.
What kind of change? Nationwide high-speed rail, for one. An end to ineffective, inconvenient, undignified, and unconstitutional searches and demands for identification for all domestic travel modes. Better training for all transportation and emergency personnel to ensure that everyone knows that transit vehicles, whether on land or water or in the air, have priority at all times. Changes in the law to prohibit police (whether federal, state, or local) from interfering with safe and timely transportation operations - be it traffic on a freeway or a train crossing a bridge - for any reason. In short, the only reason any transit vehicle should ever arrive late is unavoidable mechanical failure. And no one should ever be searched without a warrant. Simple as that.
Of course, there's absolutely no evidence that this is true; any evidence that exists is either classified or simply not yet available. It's entirely possible that the threat is overblown or even manufactured. Convicting someone in an entirely public trial with all evidence on the table will go a long way toward establishing the credibility of the governments' allegations, but even then I'll have my doubts. After all, as London's Deputy Police Commissioner is quoted as saying, "This is about people who are desperate... who want to do things that no right-minded citizen of this country or any other country would want to tolerate." He's right: it's about government officials desperate to remain in power and desperate to place yet more abominable and, in the US, unconstitutional, restrictions on everyone in these formerly free countries.
Actually, the system as a whole has failed. Bush is no longer a President but effectively a Dictator; he has wilfully and arbitrarily disregarded the law and claimed that he has the authority to do so at any time he desires. There is no reason to believe he would abide by the result of the impeachment process or even the next election. Anyone have an idea that would actually work?
Not quite. Those who would not otherwise have attained any education at all certainly do benefit; this is amply demonstrated by the relative advantage later in life accruing to those with more education. And, as you point out, the barons of industry benefit. In fact, they benefit in two ways: increased availability of skilled labour, and lower labour costs. Who doesn't benefit? Why, the 50% (or 80% or any other large proportion you like) of us in the middle. We find the value of our education reduced by its widespread availability, and since so many years of education are legally mandated, voluntarily extending our education is in general not worth the cost of doing so. Worse still, the providers of mandatory education make no serious effort to distinguish those who merely completed the required courses from those who excelled, so that added effort likewise brings only small returns.
It's easy to argue that the very wealthy benefit from public education, and even easier to argue that the very poor do so as well. You could, with some effort, make a case that society as a whole derives a net benefit from this institution. But under no circumstances can you seriously argue that everyone, or even anywhere near everyone, benefits.
Notice that I address only benefits...if one wished a fuller appreciation of the situation, one would also have to inspect the cost part of the equation. Who pays for public education? Certainly not the poor, who generally pay little or nothing (both in absolute terms and as a percentage of wealth or income) in taxes. The very wealthiest individuals, those who control the most employees and thus benefit most from both increased availability and reduced cost of labor, pay very little as well, at least in relative terms. They generally have available devices for reducing their tax liability well below levels one would expect by simply looking at a schedule of tax rates, and armies of lawyers and accountants to assist them in utilising these devices. Naturally, such perquisites are not available to the rest of us, so once again the middle class (defined however broadly you like) pays the lion's share of the costs. Worse still, the wealthy are the very people lending money to states and school districts in the form of bonds, collecting twice on the same investment while the tax slaves force themselves into a lifetime of service to the public debt.
That politicians beholden to the very wealthy (hardly a novel or unique condition) have managed to snow virtually everyone into believing that universal education benefits all, or even that most people derive benefits greater than their costs, is both surprising and unfortunate. As part of a larger picture, however, it highlights a systemic defect in American culture (and perhaps others as well): it's politically impractical to be seen as unsympathetic to the poor; an important part of the cultural identity is that even those born at the very bottom must have every opportunity to join the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. While this is exceedingly rare nonetheless, no politician could seriously argue against it - apparent equality of opportunity is too important to disregard. While the poor can and often do take advantage of these publicly-funded opportunities to improve their lot in life, the middle class collectively deceives itself into believing that the same basic principle may work for them, too, allowing them entry to the halls of weath and power. This act of self-deception has, more than anything else, fed the gaping maw of government spending. Forever afraid of sinking into the sewers but unwilling to deny itself luxuries it cannot afford in order to establish a firm guard against it, forever believing in the myth of the big score, the middle class suckers itself into paying for everything but getting nothing. The poor - mostly consisting of newer immigrants - laugh all the way to the bank, and you know this is so by the unending flood of legal and illegal foreign workers; they wouldn't come if things weren't
The landline companies' biggest threat isn't not the cable company, it's the wireless cell phone company.
This might be true except that they're usually the same, or have a common parent. The two largest mobile providers are Verizon and Cingular, which is owned by AT&T and BellSouth. A few of the smaller players could make providing Internet service a way to gain share, but I don't seriously see that happening. The pattern will be, large company does nothing, small company spends itself into bankruptcy innovating, large company buys small company and its innovative infrastructure at fire sale price, large company charges 2x as much for previously innovative service and places numerous restrictions on its use to ensure that the new service generates more revenue for its other business units as well, customers start to look for new innovative services to get away from large company. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Thereby invalidating much of the advice for avoiding phishing.
No, only the bad advice. Here's the good advice:
Email that contains HTML should be deleted upon receipt, regardless of its purported origin.
Text email that did not result proximately from an explicit and intentional request you sent, which contains URLs or offers to sell you anything, should be deleted upon receipt.
Never enter any personal information, especially financial information, into any page that (a) looks suspicious in any way, or (b) was reached via any kind of advertisement, automatically opened window or tab, or window or tab opened from an email (why didn't you follow rule #1, anyway?), or (c) is not secured by a current and valid SSL certificate of which you have verified the chain of trust, or (d) was not reached in a single click from a reputable entity's site whose address you typed by hand.
Use a text-only mailer. Since you're following rule #1 (oh yes you are) you won't need an HTML-capable mailer; therefore, there's no reason not to use a text-only mailer, which will make it much easier to spot spam, fraud, and all types of junk mail.
Do not use Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Outlook Express on any machine with access (direct or proxied) to the Internet. If you must use one or more of these products, do so only if required by your employer, and then only from your employer's machines and only to access the specific locations you are required to access in the course of your employment. Unless applications your employer requires you to use require it, disable ActiveX and JavaScript. Never use Internet Explorer for any other purpose, especially conducting personal business, and do not use Microsoft Windows at all on machines which you own and control.
If you conduct business via the Internet, use per-vendor or per-transaction dead-drop mailboxes. Disable each one once you have completed your transaction and received the items or information you requested. Never provide your personal address to any web site, commercial or otherwise. Never use your real address when filling out any paper form, even if it is "required"; if information you need or want will be sent to the address you provide, use a dead-drop. Otherwise, provide no address or an invalid one.
Never sign up for "free" consumer-oriented crap on the Internet. Most are simply address-harvesting operations that make their profits by selling your address and any other information you provide them. You don't need smileys, screensavers, shareware, virus scanners, "p2p" software, daily or weekly newsletters, or a free online subscription to the New York Times. If for some incomprehensible reason you think you just can't live without these annoyances, for the love of Pete use a dead-drop and disable it immediately. Be especially wary of software that is intended to be executed locally (anything that opens a download window), especially if you are using Windows or the software is provided in binary form. Such software, regardless of whether you provided a real address to obtain it, almost certainly contains worms, trojans (such as so-called "spyware"), or other malware that may damage your data, transmit confidential and personal data - including your email address(es) and financial information - to others without your knowledge or involvement, expose you to risk of legal action against you, and/or cause your computer to violate your service provider's terms of service and/or applicable law.
Use filters to discard unwanted messages automatically. Filters customised for and trained with your message traffic are best, but even basic filtering provided by bulk carriers such as Google and AOL is better than nothing.
Finally, email is an inherently unreliable medium. If you have any doubt whatever about a message, don't read it, and certainly don't act on its contents without verifying them using a known-safe out-of-band medium, such as a telephone number on official letterhead which
Slashdot Mirror
This was my thinking too, but I suppose people would adjust rather quickly to using other search engines; they're not as good but for the most part will get the job done. The newsgroup data would be the biggest loss there. Even if all of them failed, there'd be winners and losers. The losers would be companies doing research or otherwise actually using the Internet; the winners would be just about everyone else, for whom employee web use is a drain on productivity.
We'd probably also get a hefty productivity boost from an eBay and/or Amazon outage, and it probably wouldn't be too bad if YouTube, MySpace, and LiveJournal crapped out too. My guess is that you'd see a day or two of significantly higher productivity, then a tailing off as people found other ways to waste time instead of doing what they're paid for.
Which is exactly what has happened in the United States. Angry about ever-escalating fees (bank fees have risen more or less continuously for the past decade, and are growing far faster than inflation) - fees which for most banks and credit-card issuers now constitute most of their profitability - millions of Americans have withdrawn their money from the banking system, cut up and paid off their credit cards, and left thousands of abandoned branches and ATMs in their wake.
Reality check. Choice in banking is limited in most states by the requirement that all banks be corporations; private corporations are legally obligated to obtain for their shareholders the highest possible returns on their capital. In practice this means that if one bank has found a way to extract more money from its customers, all others will and in many cases MUST utilise the same or similar strategies. The end result is that banking is fairly expensive for all but the wealthiest customers - those whose astronomical asset and loan balances provide the banks with sufficient incentive to waive the fees that would otherwise be charged - even those who are responsible and prudent in their use of the bank's services. Credit unions offer some relief, but not much: both their fee structures and their interest rates look remarkably similar to those of banks. I'd love to know why this is; their status as cooperatives ought to free them from the need to keep up with the banks' predatory practices, but that doesn't appear to be the case. At an initial guess, I might suspect a selection bias - credit union customers might be inherently less prudent or creditworthy than banks' customers, leading the CUs to charge higher fees to recoup losses and discourage bad behaviour. But that's nothing but a guess; I'd be in no way surprised to learn that the actual cause is something else altogether.
Anyway, in an even less well-regulated environment, in which competition from even other foreign banks is likely to be limited or nonexistent, I'd be very surprised if Citi doesn't turn the screws to their customers just as they have in the US. Again, they are effectively obligated to do so by law, especially since most investors - the people in a position to force the issue - are overwhelmingly focused on the short- and immediate-term success of the operation rather than its prospects for long-term expansion and customer goodwill. About the only limits on their activity will be attention from Indian regulators and outrage at home; neither seems especially likely given what we see already. Customer revolts against the entire (overwhelmingly uniform) banking industry simply don't happen. They could, but they don't.
Gladly. See, here's the thing: you can easily form an entirely self-consistent legal system in which committing sex acts on camera for commercial purposes is legal, and yet slavery is not. Forcing, deceiving, or coercing someone into doing any job, even an otherwise legal one (such as, say, committing sex acts on camera for commercial purposes), is slavery. You don't need a prohibition on pornography to go after the sex slavers. I'll happily tell a girl's parents that I'm not going to prosecute the pornographer who get her to lick a dozen men's semen crust off a rest-stop wall on camera for $10 because he didn't commit a crime. I'll also tell them she ought to have known better, and that she's old enough to make her own choices in life. Sorry your daughter didn't turn out the way you wanted her to; life's tough all over. But I'll also happily send that same pornographer to the chair if he enslaved her in the process, and I'll be just as happy to tell her parents that I'm doing so. We already have laws criminalising slavery, indentured servitude, and deceptive and coerced contracts. We don't need laws against pornography to prosecute successfully those individuals who enslave women in the sex and pornography trades, or in any other. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pornography if the participants are aware that they will be filmed, consent to it of their own free will, and are of sound mental state to enter into such a contract. The law already bends over backwards to protect employees and contractors of all types in these kinds of situations. Put another way, it's neither better nor worse to enslave someone as a porn star than to enslave someone as a coal miner or field hand or computer programmer. It's slavery that's wrong, not porn. Care to try again?
Perhaps because threatening someone to make you pay them is a crime? It's called extortion. In the absence of any solid evidence that Novell bought a license to use some specific code owned by Microsoft, or to implement specific Microsoft-patented technologies, that's all this "agreement" is. A goon walked up to your brother and threatened to break his legs unless he gave the goon $100. Your brother "agreed" to give the goon $100 in exchange for not doing something the goon couldn't legally do in the first place, and the goon said "well, all right then - I'll be back here next week and we'll do this again." And you're asking why the deal should be avoided? If Novell wants its customers to feel confident of their rights to their software (and, conversely, if they want their competitors' customers to feel uneasy about theirs), they should make public exactly what they licensed from Microsoft and how the license applies to their open source products. There's no sensible business reason not to do this, so the only conclusions are (a) they licensed something they need to make some new product they're not currently shipping, (b) they fell prey to extortion, or (c) they're trying to create FUD around their competitors' offerings. Because if there's nothing owned by Microsoft in the products they're shipping today, how does this "licensing" deal actually help any of Novell's customers any more than a "licensing" deal with Milkman Dan or the bum who panhandles you on your way to work? And if there is, why hasn't Microsoft filed suit? They would get a whole lot more money - not just from Novell - with a judge having looked at the evidence and strongly advising the parties to reach a settlement. Microsoft's never been concerned with optics, so if their rights really were being infringed, they'd have done this by now. There's just too much here that doesn't make sense from either side for this to be a legitimate money-for-rights deal. One way or another, one or both companies are trying to deceive customers into giving them more money than they deserve.
Instead, my plan is to purchase sovereignty over part of another nation from its government, in a manner similar to that in which the US itself purchased most of its current territory from France and Russia. For military reasons, it will be best if the part I purchase is small and defensible, likely an island or mountainous territory. For financial reasons, it will have to be small. For economic reasons it must be capable of producing food and must have a reliable supply of fresh water. There are many other considerations that must be made, but the gist of it is that I'm looking for a small piece of land over which I will rule absolutely. Since there will be no other inhabitants, whether this form of government is democracy, autocracy, or theocracy is a meaningless distinction. My freedom will be absolute, and my responsibility for my own well-being absolute as well.
What's stopping me? Lack of funds. Although I save over 50% of my net pay, buying sovereignty over even a small, unwanted island is not going to be cheap, nor will the military hardware I'd need for defense or the basic infrastructure I'd need to survive (one or two wells or a reservoir, a septic system, livestock and equipment for farm work, machine tools, a storm-survivable shelter, one or more boats, etc.). I expect it will be a number of years before I'm in a position to achieve my goal; there's a real chance that by that time the US will be so repressive that it will be nearly impossible to leave alive. But I see little hope in any other nation extant today, so really my game's the only one in town.
I'm in no way convinced that Earthbound life needs humans to survive. It certainly seems likely that it requires intelligence to do so in the long run, but it's unclear whether humans (or our direct descendents) are the intelligent life form that can or will act as the agency of that survival. We're the best thing going right now, certainly, but it's unclear that we are actually capable of providing for the long-term survival of any Earthbound species on any celestial body other than Earth, and it's highly doubtful that we have the capacity to successfully transport life forms capable of breeding to any other star system. We may well develop - through some combination of learning and evolution - some or all of those capabilities, but it's also possible that we will fail to do so even if we do survive. Note that there is no compelling evidence that any other species anywhere has mastered these techniques. There is no obvious selective bias toward life forms capable of interstellar travel, nor is there any reason to believe there will ever be. This is especially true given that an individual born with the necessary mental capabilities must also have some more direct and immediate advantage in survival and reproduction in order to supplant those without them and eventually construct interstellar vessels (unless, of course, it turns out that such a vessel could be constructed by - or even *be* - a single such individual). The environmental conditions which would cause life to become successively more difficult on a particular planet would not necessarily bias selection in favour of greater intelligence but rather toward greater resistance to heat, cold, or whatever other conditions we expect will accompany the sun's eventual demise. It's also unclear that this demise will occur slowly enough that, even if intelligence were a preferred trait under those conditions, it would have time to evolve to the necessary level. In short, while your theory is certainly reasonable if one supposes that no significant changes will occur in Earthbound life forms prior to the onset of conditions incompatible with every extant species' survival, that supposition is unlikely to verify. Even if it
I'm 27, and I take notes exclusively on paper, using computers for two purposes only: as communication terminals, and to develop software on. Everything else, including my software development notes, is on paper. What happened between 1979 and 1980?
Coverity, of course, knows that reports like this will be written up in exactly the way this summary was, clearly associating their company with the idea of enumerating the bugs in a piece of source code. While not illegal, this type of marketing is of course deceptive; while published papers describe the type of defects (or non-defects) actually detected, the overwhelming volume of commentary will reflect the broader, and incorrect, view that Coverity == bug-finder. It would be just as meaningful (which is to say, not very) to publish the number of lint warnings or missed opportunities to qualify pointer arguments with the const keyword, and neither would require an expensive piece of overhyped software.
Just Say No to Coverity's marketing gimmicks.
Your hypothesis is orthogonal to the parent's suggested solution. If it is correct, the logical consequence of the proposed solution is that everyone be removed from power. There's no paradox here. Perhaps you're suggesting that this consequence is untenable; I disagree entirely. An organised society in no way relies on anyone having power over anyone else; if anything, the opposite is true. The problems with this approach stem from those people who fail or refuse to defend themselves against those who would wrong them; these in turn band together and impose the will of "leaders" on the rest of us, who were and are perfectly capable of defending ourselves and do not wish to be subject to anyone's whims. Therefore, the solution can be made tenable by simply allowing the "wolves," if you will, to tear out the throats of the sheep, then rounding them up and killing them. Those of us who are neither have no need of government and will be substantially happier in its absence.
Here's the thing: interacting with machines is usually more pleasant than interacting with the kinds of people they've replaced. Why? Because the people they're replacing tend to be salespeople, underpaid and commissioned. No one wants to deal with a desperate salesperson who will lie, hassle, and annoy you into buying whatever they're selling. There's no reason that salespeople have to be that way, of course, but their compensation structure pretty much dictates their tactics. When dealing with a machine, there's no help, but there are also no scummy sales tactics - ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. Wouldn't it be better if used cars were sold by vending machines instead of, well, used-car salesmen? Maybe if the people we'd interact with instead of machines were more pleasant, we wouldn't want to replace them. But that will happen only when they're our neighbours and friends, which is antithetical to the entire way our society is structured. Only in densely-populated cities (where small businesses can be successful and most people do business with a small number of personally-preferred shops) and small BigBox-free towns (where small business is all business and choices are few) does that type of interaction survive. But in most places, the economics of employing salespeople, especially for things people don't understand well like cars and cell plans, makes it impossible to have a pleasant experience as a customer. I'd happily pay more for the product to have a better experience, but the market - consisting mainly of people living way beyond their means - has determined that price trumps all. As long as that remains the case, expect to have a choice between sleazy salespeople and vending machines. I'll take the machines, please.
Yes, and yes. What I'd like to see from my bank is a published set of expectations in plain language. These can be appended to the usual account agreements as required by the laws of each country. These expectations should make clear to me what I must do to avoid being phished - specific, concrete actions I must or must not take. For example, I must always manually type in the bank's URL and examine the owner and issuer of its SSL certificate. I must never click on any link claiming to be to the bank's site, and must never enter my username and password on any site until I have performed the first two steps. If I receive mail (from any source) containing a link that is or claims to be to the bank's site, I must forward the message to the bank's fraud unit and then destroy it. I must create and secure for myself (using tools provided by the bank, if I lack my own) a cryptographic private key, and to use that key to sign messages to provide instructions to my bank or make requests of it. I alone am responsible for the security of this key, and I agree to revoke it in person if I believe it to be compromised.
Hand in hand with this is a set of specific concrete steps the bank agrees to take on my behalf. For example, they must destroy all paper records containing any information about me or my account on site using an industry-standard cross-shredder. All electronic media which contains that information, if transported or stored outside the bank's control, must be suitably encrypted using keys solely in the bank's control. The bank must control access to my personal information by employees to a degree even stronger than required by current regulations - for example, my name and address must never be shared with anyone who is not an employee of the bank specifically servicing my account on my behalf. No more joint marketing agreements or upselling arrangements with subsidiaries. The bank must also agree not to share my information with "law enforcement" without a valid subpoena, and if it receives such a subpoena it must give me 48 hours' notice before complying, to give me time to quash it. Finally, the bank agrees to provide information about my account only when presented with a message signed by my private key. The bank also agrees to establish a protocol for key retirement and revocation, and provide appropriate tools for performing these actions in person.
There are technical and logistical challenges associated with key management, a well-known problem in applied cryptography. Nevertheless, the use of a single security device (which in turn may be secured by multiple physical devices and/or passwords) which uniquely and absolutely identifies a valid customer, helps to draw a line between the customer's responsibility and the bank's. If the bank leaks my information, the agreement should specify that it is liable for repayment of all losses. If my private key is compromised, I am solely responsible for all losses until I revoke it. Revoking a key requires either the key itself or an in-person visit to a branch, and is irreversible. Because the private key is not a piece of personal identification, and is not stored anywhere in the bank, the only way for a criminal to obtain it is to attack me directly; I am responsible for securing it, and can decide for myself how to manage risk: if I'm especially paranoid, I might write the key on a piece of paper and put it in the vault at a different bank, storing it nowhere else. If I value convenience and am willing to accept more risk, I might store it on a single computer, symmetrically encrypted by a passphrase I commit to memory. If I'm a moron, I might store it in the clear on an Internet-facing Windows computer. Point-of-sale transactions could be restricted using a chip-and-pin system as is being implemented in the UK; however, it needs to be adjusted so th
Spamming is a fairly typical nonviolent crime; it's primarily economic in that it forces others to pay for things that benefit the spammer but do not benefit them (much like driving an SUV). That captchas have now forced them to begin paying even a tiny portion of the costs is wonderfully positive news. Unfortunately, the implementation of captchas themselves is an additional cost to the site operator, and of course the cost of the $0.60/hour spam is still imposed on them as well. An economic solution would have to accomplish two separate goals: first, increase the cost of spamming to a level equal to the cost to site operators (and individuals reading mail or text messages, according to the type of spam) to store and process it; second, ensure that those costs are in fact being paid to those people rather than to third parties. This would seem to argue for a combination of technology which is prohibitively expensive to bypass and the sale, if desired, of advertising space to spammers at prices favourable to those doing the storage and processing of spam. If the cost of bypassing captchas is $0.60 per hour, would people be willing to allow an hour's worth of comment spam in their blogs for $0.60? Probably not - at least, I wouldn't. But if it were $6.00? Or $60.00? The curves have to meet somewhere. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that technology will be developed which will be 100 times as expensive to bypass. Therefore, the death penalty is our best bet for the near future.
The problem is, how do you decide which acquittals are meaningful and which aren't? Legally, one acquittal is every bit as binding as any other. If there's a problem with the criminal courts, encouraging abuse of the civil courts to compensate for it doesn't seem like the right solution. And in any case, I'd rather see a million guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished; allowing criminal allegations in a civil court, even though the mode of punishment meted out there is different, only increases the likelihood that innocent individuals will be punished. When you mix in a registry of "civil offenders" as well, it starts to look like criminal penalties with a civil standard of evidence. It would be better for the legislature to direct its efforts toward ensuring that future OJ incidents don't occur.
If you want to bring a wrongful death suit against someone acquitted of murder or manslaughter, you're free to do so. What you should not be permitted to do is assert that the defendant committed murder or manslaughter. That's already been disproven in a criminal court, so from a legal perspective it's factually incorrect. You should be forced to come up with some alternate legal theory if you want to make a case for wrongful death; a case that would have merit only if the defendant had committed a crime should be dismissed. In other words, a wrongful death suit that asserts "He wrongfully caused her death by ________" is permissible if the blank is filled in by "badgering her into ill health" but not if it's filled by "stabbing her with an ice pick."
Why? They voted for these people. They should recall the responsible individuals, vote them out in the next election, or leave the state. And everyone who voted for anyone who voted in favour of this bill is 100% guilty. Feel the guilt, feel the self-loathing you so richly deserve! And remember it well the next time you're about to vote for a major-party candidate. If you're not among the guilty masses, your only real hope is to get out. Your vote probably isn't being counted, and even if it is, the entire system is set up to perpetuate the sort of officeholders who believe in and sponsor this insanity. Save your money, pick a destination, and start learning the language; this country's beyond hope.
Again? There is no again; these are people who haven't been convicted of anything and therefore have never abused anyone. No new problems? Like getting sued? Geez, that's a pretty low bar to set; anyone can, and usually does, sue for anything or nothing.
Here's an alternative idea: if a finding of civil liability relies upon proving (to civil standards of evidence) an act or acts that would constitute a crime, that finding shall be null and void absent a criminal conviction with respect to that act or acts. The civil courts were never intended to be an alternative to criminal court for weaker cases; their main purpose is to settle business disputes. If you want to accuse someone of a crime, you do it in a criminal court. If you get a conviction there, it's perfectly reasonable to sue in civil court for reparations if the criminal judge didn't impose any. Without that conviction, however, your suit should be dismissed out of hand. And that would put paid to this "civil offender" registry as well.
You didn't read my post. I contend that this is a grievous BUG in the law. Simple as that.
Really? It's not illegal to put razor blades in your own lunch. It's stupid, but it's not illegal unless you serve it to someone else or otherwise sell it as food. After all, it could be artwork never intended to be consumed by anyone. If someone steals from you, he or she is committing a crime and is entirely responsible for the consequences of that action. Consuming something stolen seems like a pretty bad idea regardless, since you never know what someone else might have put in a refrigerator; it might be spoiled, it might be something you're allergic to. The GP is probably right that you'd find yourself in trouble, but that's only because, as you sarcastically pointed out, our "justice" system is anything but and is completely out of control. Justice would be "Use your head; if you steal something and then eat it, that's your problem. Don't steal then, and while you're at it, don't eat anything that hasn't been given to you expressly for that purpose. Dumbass."
It depends. If those bacteria, like most of those in the human body, are normal and naturally occurring, it's not useful information. They are, for all practical purposes, part of the meat (or plant product). You'd eat them if you went out into untouched forest, killed a healthy animal, and butchered it correctly and safely on the spot or in a cleanroom. However, if they've been intentionally added for some reason or other - to enhance flavour, to extend shelf life, to compensate for unsafe food handling practices, then yes, it is useful information. That's really what I'm looking for from the government - not regulation as to what can or cannot be done but truth in labeling, telling me in clear, simple, and precise terms what has been done to my food beyond the barest minimum necessary to prepare it for consumption (picking it out of the ground/off a tree, or basic butchering). It's then up to me to make informed choices about which practices and additives are acceptable to me, and buy accordingly.
For those who are trotting out the hybridisation/GM argument, this applies to your case, too: hybridisation can and does occur without human intervention. Direct manipulation of genes in a machine does not. Therefore the former is merely a case of human-directed food production (much like agriculture itself), while the latter is a clearly artificial practice. Does that mean it's unhealthy? It's certainly unhealthy for the market, but that says nothing about safety for human consumption. On the latter grounds, I'm not claiming that GM foods - or bacteriophages, either, for that matter - should be banned. But I do insist that I be allowed to make informed choices, and that means labeling. That the FDA has refused to require labeling for these practices is just another case of paternalism from this government; they either believe they are responsible for our safety or they simply don't care about it. In fact, I am solely responsible for my own safety, and my first step to protect it is to explicitly refuse to trust anything this government says or does.
Instead of trusting a government obviously in the back pocket of Big Agriculture, consider forming relationships with local farmers and butchers. They'll know, and probably tell you, where your food is coming from, how it was grown, and what's been done to it since then. It would be nice if the government would serve its sole regulatory purpose by improving the quality and availability of information in the marketplace, but since it doesn't, you'll have to fall back on simple old-fashioned trust formed in face to face interactions with the people you buy things from.
How about DON'T resign yourself to anything? Have you forgotten that this is supposed to be government of, by, and for the people? They work for us, not the other way around; does a boss resign himself to the fact that his employees will show up 5 hours late every day? Hell, no; he tells them to show up on time or he fires them and finds others who will. It's time to take a stand against bad government, the kind that has allowed our rail infrastructure to degrade to pre-1900 performance levels and the kind that scares and/or bullies people into waiting in line 2 hours to get searched for incredibly dangerous items like nail clippers and shaving cream while as everyone knows there are dozens of ways to destroy an airplane if you're determined enough. Instead of kowtowing to the government's plans for you, how about sending the government a message by proxy?
Stop traveling. Just stay home.
I understand this may be a slight annoyance for you, but it's vastly more effective than writing your Congressman. Why? It puts the economic multiplier effect into play. When you don't travel, and make it clear to potential hosts, such as family and friends, as well as the hotel you would have stayed at, the theme park you would have visited, the owner of the boat you would have rented, and the guide you would have employed, you give other people reason to fight for your cause. And when these people turn around and tell their local chamber of commerce about these calls, an entire city's worth of business leaders will be on your side, even those who don't care about tourism or hospitality: they know that the hoteliers, theme park operators, boat shops, and guides are their customers, who now have less money to spend. Just a few thousand people making a point not to travel, and to let others know why they're not traveling, are enough of an economic force to enlist millions of powerful allies. Start an organised travel boycott in a few cities and it's all but over. Direct pressure on the government doesn't work; a few thousand people can't influence an elected official, especially if they're not wealthy. But the interconnectedness of the economy, and business owners' fresh memories of a nation that doesn't travel, allow us to harness the multiplier effect and force change.
What kind of change? Nationwide high-speed rail, for one. An end to ineffective, inconvenient, undignified, and unconstitutional searches and demands for identification for all domestic travel modes. Better training for all transportation and emergency personnel to ensure that everyone knows that transit vehicles, whether on land or water or in the air, have priority at all times. Changes in the law to prohibit police (whether federal, state, or local) from interfering with safe and timely transportation operations - be it traffic on a freeway or a train crossing a bridge - for any reason. In short, the only reason any transit vehicle should ever arrive late is unavoidable mechanical failure. And no one should ever be searched without a warrant. Simple as that.
Join the travel boycott. Enforce change.
Of course, there's absolutely no evidence that this is true; any evidence that exists is either classified or simply not yet available. It's entirely possible that the threat is overblown or even manufactured. Convicting someone in an entirely public trial with all evidence on the table will go a long way toward establishing the credibility of the governments' allegations, but even then I'll have my doubts. After all, as London's Deputy Police Commissioner is quoted as saying, "This is about people who are desperate ... who want to do things that no right-minded citizen of this country or any other country would want to tolerate." He's right: it's about government officials desperate to remain in power and desperate to place yet more abominable and, in the US, unconstitutional, restrictions on everyone in these formerly free countries.
Actually, the system as a whole has failed. Bush is no longer a President but effectively a Dictator; he has wilfully and arbitrarily disregarded the law and claimed that he has the authority to do so at any time he desires. There is no reason to believe he would abide by the result of the impeachment process or even the next election. Anyone have an idea that would actually work?
It's easy to argue that the very wealthy benefit from public education, and even easier to argue that the very poor do so as well. You could, with some effort, make a case that society as a whole derives a net benefit from this institution. But under no circumstances can you seriously argue that everyone, or even anywhere near everyone, benefits.
Notice that I address only benefits...if one wished a fuller appreciation of the situation, one would also have to inspect the cost part of the equation. Who pays for public education? Certainly not the poor, who generally pay little or nothing (both in absolute terms and as a percentage of wealth or income) in taxes. The very wealthiest individuals, those who control the most employees and thus benefit most from both increased availability and reduced cost of labor, pay very little as well, at least in relative terms. They generally have available devices for reducing their tax liability well below levels one would expect by simply looking at a schedule of tax rates, and armies of lawyers and accountants to assist them in utilising these devices. Naturally, such perquisites are not available to the rest of us, so once again the middle class (defined however broadly you like) pays the lion's share of the costs. Worse still, the wealthy are the very people lending money to states and school districts in the form of bonds, collecting twice on the same investment while the tax slaves force themselves into a lifetime of service to the public debt.
That politicians beholden to the very wealthy (hardly a novel or unique condition) have managed to snow virtually everyone into believing that universal education benefits all, or even that most people derive benefits greater than their costs, is both surprising and unfortunate. As part of a larger picture, however, it highlights a systemic defect in American culture (and perhaps others as well): it's politically impractical to be seen as unsympathetic to the poor; an important part of the cultural identity is that even those born at the very bottom must have every opportunity to join the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. While this is exceedingly rare nonetheless, no politician could seriously argue against it - apparent equality of opportunity is too important to disregard. While the poor can and often do take advantage of these publicly-funded opportunities to improve their lot in life, the middle class collectively deceives itself into believing that the same basic principle may work for them, too, allowing them entry to the halls of weath and power. This act of self-deception has, more than anything else, fed the gaping maw of government spending. Forever afraid of sinking into the sewers but unwilling to deny itself luxuries it cannot afford in order to establish a firm guard against it, forever believing in the myth of the big score, the middle class suckers itself into paying for everything but getting nothing. The poor - mostly consisting of newer immigrants - laugh all the way to the bank, and you know this is so by the unending flood of legal and illegal foreign workers; they wouldn't come if things weren't
This might be true except that they're usually the same, or have a common parent. The two largest mobile providers are Verizon and Cingular, which is owned by AT&T and BellSouth. A few of the smaller players could make providing Internet service a way to gain share, but I don't seriously see that happening. The pattern will be, large company does nothing, small company spends itself into bankruptcy innovating, large company buys small company and its innovative infrastructure at fire sale price, large company charges 2x as much for previously innovative service and places numerous restrictions on its use to ensure that the new service generates more revenue for its other business units as well, customers start to look for new innovative services to get away from large company. Lather, rinse, repeat.
No, only the bad advice. Here's the good advice: