...there's probably a reason WJC didn't invade Iraq based on those assertions - he wasn't certain they were true. Clinton, while doing things that were not good, didn't assert that the WMDs he believed Saddam had were reason enough to invade, nor did his advisors claim that Saddam actually had them and was prepared to use them (claims GWB's cabinet members made).
If the only refutation of the WMD "meme of the hive mind" is a rumor that the President of Portugal said WJC thought that Saddam had WMDs (as opposed to the clear, unambiguous (and either misinformed, misleading or wrong) claims of GWB and his administration in the absence of evidence), then that's almost as good as a confirmation. The perspective doesn't improve if O'Neill's claims that GWB was pondering war in Iraq as early as 1/01 (when he was unlikely to have had comprehensive briefings or information on the Iraq and its potential threat to the Middle East) are true.
You need better evidence than this to refute the public statements of GWB's cabinet et al. (or rather, to refute that they spoke with either anecdotal or nonexistent evidence of WMDs).
...you lose. Advertising becomes obnoxious when advertisers forget that people are theoretically the purchasers of their goods, and that their money comes from those who willingly choose to exchange money for goods and services. Instead, some seem to think that they have an inherent right to the money and attention of others. Previously (or maybe only in my fantasy world), a business had to have goods that someone wanted and might actually consider purchasing. Now some businesses take for granted that obnoxious and obtrusive ads (let alone spam for dru9s) will earn them my attention and not my anger and annoyance. Other businesses intimidate their customers (or people who should be their customers) for money they believe they should get (SCO) only to find out that they don't have any customers anymore.
My bar has ads in the toilet which are run by a company which says as its tagline (I think) "ads for a captive audience". Pop-up, -under, etc. ads, spammers, etc., are the same way - instead of having products that people might want and choose willingly to look at or even buy, companies predicate their income on an absolute right to my attention. They seem to forget that there are few people with an absolute right to my attention (parents, GF, boss, etc.), and that they aren't on the list. If they attempt to force the issue, then they will lose any attention I might ever have willingly given them, and any money that might come from it.
The market comes from the willing exchange of goods and services and money. Any business that is predicated on forcing you to watch their ads is probably doing so because they don't have anything worth selling, and thus deserves to lose. Don't enrage your customers, and they might give you money (and only a few will take from you). Screw them, and pay the piper as a long line of angry people take you out of the corporate gene pool.
DRM disables me from doing a variety of things to which the gov't has decided that I possess the right to do. The "rights" DRM manages are rights that do not belong to those "managing" them in the first place. In some cases, you will have to pay to do what is within your rights (and to pay to whom they do not belong and have never belonged), while others will never be yours (though they are legally so). The rights to goods that I own (my computers and peripherals) are taken away by DRM.
If DRM is about the protection of the rights of copyright holders, then theft should be considered the protection of someone else's right to manage your physical property. Oh wait, they don't have that right? Oops, my bad...
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...but you'd have to use a digital or develop them yourself, and the ability to email said picture to many people/websites rapidly is not possible with (most) digital cameras while it is the main feature of camera phones. Camera phones enable said pictures to be propagated much faster, and are much easier to explain away than an actual camera if you are caught. Thus while you could use a camera for taking these sorts of pictures, a camera phone is more likely to be used for them and taking pictures with one is likely to be harder to stop.
and it's a legitimate point to ask how liberal people would have taken the Patriot Act and its hellspawn if Gore had proposed/aided its passage. I don't know how I would feel - I'd like to say I would think it's a bad idea, but I don't know.
The only problem I would have is that the past three Republican administrations have spent lots of money and potentially expanded rather than diminshed the role of the federal govt. Reagan particularly claimed to want smaller federal govt. but didn't achieve it (not wrt gov't spending). While I would disagree with smaller gov't in some sense, it is a consistent position both with stated intent and with the underlying values that the Republican Party claims as its own. Lately, it seems that the Republican and Democratic Parties differ less in the scope of (federal) govt. and more in the ends they wish to use it for (or the means they choose to those ends). I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for the RP. It seems inconsistent, and bothers me some (although, again, there isn't a reason for the RP to care about that).
I thought Japan had problems with this...
on
Paranoia
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· Score: 1
I thought I had heard (on/. or somewhere similar) that Japanese police had had problems with people (men mainly, I assume) using camera-enabled celllphones to peer up women's dresses and take unauthorized pornographic pictures. Depending on how good locker room security is, I figure someone could sneak in and take pictures of women in locker rooms and showers (most locker rooms that I've been in forswear responsibility for stolen goods, implying that they cannot control access to them). These are people looking for naked women, after all - you could probably shoot pictures through a diffraction grating and people would still be interested in seeing them.
SCO hires PR people to scream from the top of the highest mountain (or from the top of SCO's stack of lawyer-related documents, which is probably the same thing) whenever someone actually responds to its vacuous public statements, whenever it needs a boost in stock price, or whenever it has some more "facts" to reveal to its audience of bad stock analysts and PR people.
Now, they've supplied whatever they know about the nature of IBM's contract violations and the resultant "IP" violations, and SCO requests that the information be kept secret? If they had some significant claims, wouldn't they be screaming from the highest mountain; while some companies (IBM, MS) can best act rather than talk, SCO has predicated its ability to make money in the future on forcing Linux users to pay licensing fees or on suing people it has purchased "IP" from/ sold "IP" to, rather than actually selling a product that someone wants to buy. Being silent doesn't intimidate potential customers into giving SCO money or scare potential Linux adopters into going elsewhere on behalf of its pimp^H^H^Hartner MS. There doesn't seem to be a benefit to them in keeping silent unless their claims aren't strong or are easily refutable. Neither option seems to hold much hope for SCO's continued survival or the ability of its executives to avoid unwanted "friendships" with large men in orange jumpsuits. Or is there something I'm missing here?
1) The military was together for ten months before Afghanistan. GWB didn't have a whole lot of time to firm it up if Clinton screwed it so badly, but he had to go so I can understand why he went no matter what. There hasn't been a lot of evidence to indicate why GWB chose the timing of the invasion of Iraq for now. The ex-Tres. Sec. has claimed that GWB already intended to prosecute such a war when he entered office - if true, he either was planning with forethought (possible) or he thought the military was good enough to do it. If the military wasn't good enough to go to Iraq, then GWB had to improve it - what has the President done to improve it (other than cutting benefits while increasing time in service)? If, however, GWB did build up and improve the military, did the improvements have enough of an effect that in two years the military went from useless and underpowered to being able to prosecute two wars (one medium- or small-scale, the other a regional war). This doesn't seem likely - thus either the military was prepared to act as now (and thus wasn't as bad as you asserted) or GWB decided to go with a force than was less than he wanted, knowing it would be worse to wait for it to be ready.
If the military was bad but the war in Iraq had to be prosecuted, then there has to be some reason why GWB went when he did and not when he could be ready (or more so). It wasn't WMDs (the evidence was questionable - for firmer evidence of intent to develop them, he could have looked at Saddam's actions 12 years ago and the discovery of programs then), and the terrorism angle doesn't hold a lot of water (Saddam promised money to Palestinian suicide bombers but never paid; he did have a "retired" terrorist living in Baghdad, although I don't think that that level of support for terrorism is likely sufficient to go to war). In the lack of a good reason to go when he did, I would assume that GWB went to war because he thought the military was ready - this doesn't support the incompetence implied about the Clinton military. Maybe this is a flawed assumption on my part or there is a significant reason for GWB to have authorized war on Iraq when he did that I have missed (always possible). War in Iraq might have been the correct way to achieve a better Middle East, but it doesn't support the position of a Clinton-nuked military without a really good reason to go post-haste.
2) If (the federal) gov't should not be involved in social or other welfare programs, I can understand (but would disagree) with that opinion. If Republicans spend as much money but on things you prefer, that is a good reason to vote for them. For much of the time I have been interested in politics, the overt agenda of the Republican Party is to decrease the size of the federal gov't. The last three presidents have not only failed to do this, but have significantly expanded the federal government. Part of that may come from necessity; neither party wants to lose the money they need for their goals, so they give everybody what they want - this is not sustainable however, and inconsistent with the Republican Party's goals. As a bonus, cutting spending with a large debt will be ever harder to do. The RP's goals seem at odds with their means and have been so for some time - I can only conclude (with some bias) that they either cannot achieve what they want (in which case they need to change tactics or give up) or they do not want to decrease the size of the federal gov't (in which case they are either lying or very, very clueless). Smaller gov't might be a good goal, but if the politicians advocating it don't even seem to try to achieve it, I have reason to question what their actual goals are.
As for Franken, while he is sometimes a crank (he sometimes sounds like he forgot to take his schizophrenia medicine) and always biased, when he makes arguments with the (externally verifiable) evidence to back them up, he can be taken seriously. GWB said that his tax cut is going mainly to the poor and middle classes (don't have the exact quo
1) If the military was so bad after Clinton, why did Bush II engage in TWO large wars? I mean, if the military was so bad, dragging it into one medium-scale conflict and one large-scale conflict seems pretty stupid. So either 1) Clinton didn't leave the military as in as bad shape as you claim or 2) Bush engaged in at least one war (Iraq) knowing he was unprepared to fight and went anyway. (He didn't have much choice but to go to Afghanistan). So your logic is flawed - the mistakes are Bush's, not Clinton's. That also ignores Bush's contributions to the war on terror - you know, the one Bush ignored (and Clinton DIDN'T) until 9/11/01. Oops.
2) That would be fair, if Bush had said that the tax cuts are going to those whose pay taxes in the proportion to which they pay them. Except he didn't; he claimed specifically that the tax cuts went mainly to the poor and middle class, which was a lie. Franken refuted this one, with actual facts (I know lots of Republican pundits don't seem to like those but there they are).
I'm paying 30% of my income in taxes now, in a state that provides few social services and claims fiscal responsibility. Three Republican adminstrations have placed claims on smaller government and in the end only succeeded at spending more than they had and expanding it, while the "liberal" Clinton actually decreased the size of the federal government AND ran a smaller debt than any of them. After Bush Jr. leaves, someone's going to have to pay for the things he spent, and I'm pretty sure that it'll be all of us - you know, those of us who actually do pay taxes.
It doesn't seem like I'm the one here with a misunderstanding of the value of money or of the real world.
The last three Republican presidents have run about $4 trillion plus onto a $7 trillion debt (Reagan $2.9T / Bush Sr. $1.1T / Bush Jr. ? (probably >$1T)). No social programs there, just lots of money they didn't have and never created spent as if it did. It seems like the Republicans rather than the Democrats are responsible for your shrinking paycheck - after where exactly does that money come from? If it isn't paid back, it raises the cost of your home, car, and other loan payments - so you essentially pay an unseen tax on those items to the gov't. If it is paid back, the gov't has to get the money from somewhere, either less services (which means you pay for them from your paycheck) or higher taxes. Since Republicans spent the money while saying they were "fiscally responsible" (but unwilling to actually act to back it up) and then wouldn't (until Bush Sr.) raise taxes to cover their debt, I think your arrow of responsibility is a little mixed up.
It doesn't help to get tax cuts (that primarily go to the rich, as the last round did, despite claims to the contrary) when the gov't spends more (or even if it just doesn't spend less), in which case the tax cuts are essentially high interest loans to the gov't, and you lose more than you got in the first place (because the money is paid for later, with interest). If tax cuts by Republicans resulted in smaller total gov't (not just moving gov't from the Feds to the local and state levels), your position might hold merit. Since that have been nowhere near the case, I'd say it holds less water than GWB's coke^H^H^H^Hsilver spoon.
I'd rather give money to the Democrats - at least they actually intend to cover what they spend, unlike Reagan/Bush Jr. who seem to have the policy of spend, go to sleep, and hope the debt they run will simply go away.
...we're so much more fiscally responsible here in America - we're not paying for social services for the poor or anything like that - none of that equality higgeryjiggerypoop (or whatever that word is)...
WHAT? we're running a $500 billion deficit? and no health care or Social Security (not when I retire, anyway)? and a selected president?
Where's my passport?
why play if you can't win? hope it's fun...
on
RFID Casino Chips
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· Score: 2, Interesting
You can't count cards, or attempt to use legitimate mean to gain information about cards to improve your bets. The odds for the games are set by the casinos and changed at their will. If you win too much you probably won't be allowed to play. Collecting RFID chip data on bettors in the casino is no worse than anything else the casinos do - it's another step to improve their bottom line at the expense of the people who (legally) are most likely to cost them money. There should be no expectation of fairness at the games in the casion - because there is none. The only sense of fairness is (to modify a Clancy quote) "Fair means I get all my money back, and f*** everything else." If you're going to a casino, you had better have fun, because the likelyhood of getting ahead of the casinos on a consistent basis is probably low.
RFIDs in this case are reasonable because:
1) information of the movements of their chips on their property is reasonable -as long as they don't track my movements elsewhere I'm OK with them.
2) this is similar to data they already acquire and use (it is no worse than other things casinos already do).
3) the chips have legitimate uses in thwarting people who cheat (by most people's definitions, not just the casinos) - they can stop people from increasing bets late, etc.
The game is not much more rigged against you than it was before, and your freedoms outside the casinos haven't be eroded by this use of RFIDs in this context.
I probably should have made this a reply to the topic rather than you in particular, but I agree with your sentiment for the most part. If I had fun at casinos or betting, I might go, but I don't, so there's no point. Playing a rigged game and expecting to get paid is transparently stupid - it's little like going to your local mob boss to be a better criminal. If you're no good, he'll take your money. If you are good, you won't get paid, other than maybe in concrete blocks and small lead weights.
What sources have you read? As previously noted (in the NYT, et al. - there have been multiple references/links to it on/.) Bush lost 6 of the 9 recounts - Gore won most by 1000 votes. The Gore-conditioned recounts gave Bush the victory, while Bush's desired methods gave the vote to Gore. I think Gore also won in a few other vote counting variants. That doesn't seem like "all the other independent investigations prove that Bush did win in Florida". Of course, it could also be that having the person running Bush's campaign in FL also in charge of the vote counting in FL, two SC justices having immediate family working for the Bush campaign, or Bush's brother running the state with contested recounts might give an impression of impropriety...
Regardless, what's so hard for people to figure out? Having two paper copies (one so the person knows what they voted, another as a backup to the electronic vote, treated as the paper votes are now, both containing numeric impersonal codes for each vote) and a computer copy is neither difficult to implement nor expensive. It provides the ability to verify election results (although considering FL, I can see why you wouldn't want THAT). It would allow for the rapid count advantages of computer polls and have a secure backup in case of (or when) problems happen. Instead, the emphasis is on all-electronic voting with security holes one could drive a truck through. Irrelevant of the (supposed) stupidity of some FL voters, this doesn't seem like a hard concept to grasp.
I passed Messin' with the Man easily once I ripped the tank from the air base and drove it to the motorcycle bar. It's amazing what the tank does to lots of things...of course, getting home alive and clearing warrants with six of them is less trivial.
the winner of a deathmatch between Carrot Top and Roseanne Barr would be...HUMANITY. Think about it - at least one of them would no longer have they opportunity to contribute their genes to the gene pool or their ideas (and I'm using the term loosely) to the human culture. Ideally, they take each other out, and thus the human race is improved by their subtraction.
Of course, I might be wrong, particularly if there ends up being a memorial retrospective of Carrot Top's commercial work...
1) CEO's get paid enough so that even if they are not competent, they still get paid money significant enough that the company's success or failure is irrelevant. There is no such thing as "rich enough not to want to succeed", but their willingness to accept failure is highest when the consequences belong to others.
2) In some cases (and most of the egregious ones, I think), CEO's get large amounts of bargain-priced stock options even if their company doesn't do well. As a result, the investments that are supposed to reward them for good performance reward them whether they are good or not, unless it's their own company, in which case it's all theirs. No risk and lots of money for CEOs leads to lots of bad ones.
The problem with executive compensation is that there is no risk - if they get paid whether or not they succeed, there is no real incentive to excel. While their workers are laid off for failures of those in positions of power, the ones who made the mistakes are paid as if they had succeeded. This short-circuits the control and incentives for CEO pay, and the justness of the system.
it is likely that the trade association's spokesman's comment was sarcastic (he understands that people who spend their time in learning a technical field want to be paid) - I missed it. The point above however (CEO are hypocritical to expect workers to make unreasonably low salaries for work with high educational requirements) is still valid, IMO.
To be flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions is nontrivial. Most people spend $10,000-$100,000 on educations - while these allow a fair amount of flexibility, companies are hiring based on skills sets which require significant investments in specific areas. If pay is low, the costs of specialization (or of education in general) are never returned - thus there isn't an incentive for people here to work in fields requiring education if they aren't paid enough to cover its cost. Add to this the simultaneous cost of expanding competence in other fields requires taking resources from what you do now (the expectation of employees giving everything to their work is incompatible with the concept of job security by gaining competence and training in other fields) and you have problems that seem difficult to get around.
Unless the costs of education comes down a lot (and since it has gone up at or above inflation for what - 15 years running? - this is a set of problems that is likely to hurt a lot of people in the US. Since people can't move to take advantage of lower costs in most things (can't go to India to work, for example, even if you wanted to) and have reasons that make it hard to do so (family), the market isn't exactly free in the first place. I don't think protectionism is good (we are all in this together after all) but the immobility of people in the presence of job mobility is a problem for us that isn't easy to solve.
Low wages aren't compatible with high costs of working/living. People can't move to take advantage of lower costs, particularly in education. We can do better things that others can't do, but not everyone is an innovator - once the innovation is done, someone else can do it cheaper and the jobs go where they're cheaper. If innovation arises spontaneously in individual, this works, but usually innovation requires the knowledge to be able to see and do what needs to be done. When the costs to cultivate these abilities are too high, then you have no source for innovation - when you eat the seed corn, there won't be any food for next year. The ability to move jobs around (in the practical absence of mobility in people) means that we will eventually eat our seed corn. I don't know if protectionism is the best way to guard against this, but the market isn't exactly free, and it is likely to work against us.
My loans would cost me my entire take-home pay at minimum wage in the US. Why the hell would anyone want to learn a field, spend thousands of dollars to do so, and then no be able to make enough to pay the costs of the education? Meanwhile, Carly, et al get paid millions of dollars to risk other people's money while they have the opportunity/skill to drive their companies into the ground. (Good CEO's are worth the money, but lots aren't and they get paid anyway.) Do they think that we should be willing to work for nothing but that they should not? The rules of economics work for everyone, yet the people who run these businesses think that people should be willing to make sacrifices for their extravagant incomes (extravagant because of the amount of money/unit of competence). Why do I want DRM when it costs more and gives control of my computer to others while giving me no benefits in terms of costs or features? Why do I want to work in a field when I can make more money by not learning anything and being a garbageman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsanitation engineer? The same motives apply to everyone, yet some of the people who run companies seem to think that only they have the right (and desire) to behave in their self-interest.
The initial comments are correct - we don't have inherent rights to jobs - if someone can do it better and cheaper than us, they will get the job and we'll have to do something else. I simply have a problem with the PHB logic that the stated CEOs seem to labor under - that others should sacrifice their well-being for their benefit while they have no duty to do the same. I'm certain that if their logic were applied to their jobs (I'm pretty sure someone as competent as these CEO's could be hired from overseas at 10% of their pay), they would not be so quick to advocate sacrifice for the benefit of others.
There are always people who want something for nothing. There are also those who want to copy things for the thrill, or as a way to get friends, or for other reasons. These people won't go away - as long as the technical means exist (and in a free society, the means will always exist) people will copy works. I think that these people make up a small segment of the market - that doesn't mean copyright holders shouldn't protect their works, but this set of people is unlikely to destroy the business of selling recorded works.
DVD copying will run rampant if the MPAA decides to screw their customers. The music industry (the larger labels, anyway) raised the prices of CDs, homogenized much of the product, made CDs hard to use, and tried to extract money from customers for fair use rights that weren't theirs to sell. Record companies (RIAA labels) have a product that people want, but they decided that they could get more money from their customers than their customers wanted to pay. Once P2P apps came around, the large set of people the record companies angered had an alternative - copy the music and pay nothing. There would have always been copying at a low level, but the frustration of people with the record labels meant that as soon as a means to get records some other way came around, people would take it. Had there not been significant frustration with record companies in the first place, most of the people who get their music from file trading would not have gone through the trouble to do so.
The means to copy digital media is not going to go away. What will determine whether copying becomes rampant or not is the level of frustration of the customer base (and the cost of the product - e.g. high-end software). If it becomes very easy to obtain copied movies, more people will do it as well - but they probably won't try as hard if they aren't frustrated in the first place. At least, IMHO.
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...there's probably a reason WJC didn't invade Iraq based on those assertions - he wasn't certain they were true. Clinton, while doing things that were not good, didn't assert that the WMDs he believed Saddam had were reason enough to invade, nor did his advisors claim that Saddam actually had them and was prepared to use them (claims GWB's cabinet members made).
If the only refutation of the WMD "meme of the hive mind" is a rumor that the President of Portugal said WJC thought that Saddam had WMDs (as opposed to the clear, unambiguous (and either misinformed, misleading or wrong) claims of GWB and his administration in the absence of evidence), then that's almost as good as a confirmation. The perspective doesn't improve if O'Neill's claims that GWB was pondering war in Iraq as early as 1/01 (when he was unlikely to have had comprehensive briefings or information on the Iraq and its potential threat to the Middle East) are true.
You need better evidence than this to refute the public statements of GWB's cabinet et al. (or rather, to refute that they spoke with either anecdotal or nonexistent evidence of WMDs).
...you lose. Advertising becomes obnoxious when advertisers forget that people are theoretically the purchasers of their goods, and that their money comes from those who willingly choose to exchange money for goods and services. Instead, some seem to think that they have an inherent right to the money and attention of others. Previously (or maybe only in my fantasy world), a business had to have goods that someone wanted and might actually consider purchasing. Now some businesses take for granted that obnoxious and obtrusive ads (let alone spam for dru9s) will earn them my attention and not my anger and annoyance. Other businesses intimidate their customers (or people who should be their customers) for money they believe they should get (SCO) only to find out that they don't have any customers anymore.
My bar has ads in the toilet which are run by a company which says as its tagline (I think) "ads for a captive audience". Pop-up, -under, etc. ads, spammers, etc., are the same way - instead of having products that people might want and choose willingly to look at or even buy, companies predicate their income on an absolute right to my attention. They seem to forget that there are few people with an absolute right to my attention (parents, GF, boss, etc.), and that they aren't on the list. If they attempt to force the issue, then they will lose any attention I might ever have willingly given them, and any money that might come from it.
The market comes from the willing exchange of goods and services and money. Any business that is predicated on forcing you to watch their ads is probably doing so because they don't have anything worth selling, and thus deserves to lose. Don't enrage your customers, and they might give you money (and only a few will take from you). Screw them, and pay the piper as a long line of angry people take you out of the corporate gene pool.
"physical rights managers" (PRMs).
DRM disables me from doing a variety of things to which the gov't has decided that I possess the right to do. The "rights" DRM manages are rights that do not belong to those "managing" them in the first place. In some cases, you will have to pay to do what is within your rights (and to pay to whom they do not belong and have never belonged), while others will never be yours (though they are legally so). The rights to goods that I own (my computers and peripherals) are taken away by DRM.
If DRM is about the protection of the rights of copyright holders, then theft should be considered the protection of someone else's right to manage your physical property. Oh wait, they don't have that right? Oops, my bad...
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At least I can hope.
...but you'd have to use a digital or develop them yourself, and the ability to email said picture to many people/websites rapidly is not possible with (most) digital cameras while it is the main feature of camera phones. Camera phones enable said pictures to be propagated much faster, and are much easier to explain away than an actual camera if you are caught. Thus while you could use a camera for taking these sorts of pictures, a camera phone is more likely to be used for them and taking pictures with one is likely to be harder to stop.
and it's a legitimate point to ask how liberal people would have taken the Patriot Act and its hellspawn if Gore had proposed/aided its passage. I don't know how I would feel - I'd like to say I would think it's a bad idea, but I don't know.
The only problem I would have is that the past three Republican administrations have spent lots of money and potentially expanded rather than diminshed the role of the federal govt. Reagan particularly claimed to want smaller federal govt. but didn't achieve it (not wrt gov't spending). While I would disagree with smaller gov't in some sense, it is a consistent position both with stated intent and with the underlying values that the Republican Party claims as its own. Lately, it seems that the Republican and Democratic Parties differ less in the scope of (federal) govt. and more in the ends they wish to use it for (or the means they choose to those ends). I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for the RP. It seems inconsistent, and bothers me some (although, again, there isn't a reason for the RP to care about that).
I thought I had heard (on /. or somewhere similar) that Japanese police had had problems with people (men mainly, I assume) using camera-enabled celllphones to peer up women's dresses and take unauthorized pornographic pictures. Depending on how good locker room security is, I figure someone could sneak in and take pictures of women in locker rooms and showers (most locker rooms that I've been in forswear responsibility for stolen goods, implying that they cannot control access to them). These are people looking for naked women, after all - you could probably shoot pictures through a diffraction grating and people would still be interested in seeing them.
why can't it be both (death and OH)?
..so it's possible that anything based on that in my argument doesn't work (although I don't need it for the whole argument, it doesn't help)
SCO hires PR people to scream from the top of the highest mountain (or from the top of SCO's stack of lawyer-related documents, which is probably the same thing) whenever someone actually responds to its vacuous public statements, whenever it needs a boost in stock price, or whenever it has some more "facts" to reveal to its audience of bad stock analysts and PR people.
Now, they've supplied whatever they know about the nature of IBM's contract violations and the resultant "IP" violations, and SCO requests that the information be kept secret? If they had some significant claims, wouldn't they be screaming from the highest mountain; while some companies (IBM, MS) can best act rather than talk, SCO has predicated its ability to make money in the future on forcing Linux users to pay licensing fees or on suing people it has purchased "IP" from/ sold "IP" to, rather than actually selling a product that someone wants to buy. Being silent doesn't intimidate potential customers into giving SCO money or scare potential Linux adopters into going elsewhere on behalf of its pimp^H^H^Hartner MS. There doesn't seem to be a benefit to them in keeping silent unless their claims aren't strong or are easily refutable. Neither option seems to hold much hope for SCO's continued survival or the ability of its executives to avoid unwanted "friendships" with large men in orange jumpsuits. Or is there something I'm missing here?
1) The military was together for ten months before Afghanistan. GWB didn't have a whole lot of time to firm it up if Clinton screwed it so badly, but he had to go so I can understand why he went no matter what. There hasn't been a lot of evidence to indicate why GWB chose the timing of the invasion of Iraq for now. The ex-Tres. Sec. has claimed that GWB already intended to prosecute such a war when he entered office - if true, he either was planning with forethought (possible) or he thought the military was good enough to do it. If the military wasn't good enough to go to Iraq, then GWB had to improve it - what has the President done to improve it (other than cutting benefits while increasing time in service)? If, however, GWB did build up and improve the military, did the improvements have enough of an effect that in two years the military went from useless and underpowered to being able to prosecute two wars (one medium- or small-scale, the other a regional war). This doesn't seem likely - thus either the military was prepared to act as now (and thus wasn't as bad as you asserted) or GWB decided to go with a force than was less than he wanted, knowing it would be worse to wait for it to be ready.
If the military was bad but the war in Iraq had to be prosecuted, then there has to be some reason why GWB went when he did and not when he could be ready (or more so). It wasn't WMDs (the evidence was questionable - for firmer evidence of intent to develop them, he could have looked at Saddam's actions 12 years ago and the discovery of programs then), and the terrorism angle doesn't hold a lot of water (Saddam promised money to Palestinian suicide bombers but never paid; he did have a "retired" terrorist living in Baghdad, although I don't think that that level of support for terrorism is likely sufficient to go to war). In the lack of a good reason to go when he did, I would assume that GWB went to war because he thought the military was ready - this doesn't support the incompetence implied about the Clinton military. Maybe this is a flawed assumption on my part or there is a significant reason for GWB to have authorized war on Iraq when he did that I have missed (always possible). War in Iraq might have been the correct way to achieve a better Middle East, but it doesn't support the position of a Clinton-nuked military without a really good reason to go post-haste.
2) If (the federal) gov't should not be involved in social or other welfare programs, I can understand (but would disagree) with that opinion. If Republicans spend as much money but on things you prefer, that is a good reason to vote for them. For much of the time I have been interested in politics, the overt agenda of the Republican Party is to decrease the size of the federal gov't. The last three presidents have not only failed to do this, but have significantly expanded the federal government. Part of that may come from necessity; neither party wants to lose the money they need for their goals, so they give everybody what they want - this is not sustainable however, and inconsistent with the Republican Party's goals. As a bonus, cutting spending with a large debt will be ever harder to do. The RP's goals seem at odds with their means and have been so for some time - I can only conclude (with some bias) that they either cannot achieve what they want (in which case they need to change tactics or give up) or they do not want to decrease the size of the federal gov't (in which case they are either lying or very, very clueless). Smaller gov't might be a good goal, but if the politicians advocating it don't even seem to try to achieve it, I have reason to question what their actual goals are.
As for Franken, while he is sometimes a crank (he sometimes sounds like he forgot to take his schizophrenia medicine) and always biased, when he makes arguments with the (externally verifiable) evidence to back them up, he can be taken seriously. GWB said that his tax cut is going mainly to the poor and middle classes (don't have the exact quo
1) If the military was so bad after Clinton, why did Bush II engage in TWO large wars? I mean, if the military was so bad, dragging it into one medium-scale conflict and one large-scale conflict seems pretty stupid. So either 1) Clinton didn't leave the military as in as bad shape as you claim or 2) Bush engaged in at least one war (Iraq) knowing he was unprepared to fight and went anyway. (He didn't have much choice but to go to Afghanistan). So your logic is flawed - the mistakes are Bush's, not Clinton's. That also ignores Bush's contributions to the war on terror - you know, the one Bush ignored (and Clinton DIDN'T) until 9/11/01. Oops.
2) That would be fair, if Bush had said that the tax cuts are going to those whose pay taxes in the proportion to which they pay them. Except he didn't; he claimed specifically that the tax cuts went mainly to the poor and middle class, which was a lie. Franken refuted this one, with actual facts (I know lots of Republican pundits don't seem to like those but there they are).
I'm paying 30% of my income in taxes now, in a state that provides few social services and claims fiscal responsibility. Three Republican adminstrations have placed claims on smaller government and in the end only succeeded at spending more than they had and expanding it, while the "liberal" Clinton actually decreased the size of the federal government AND ran a smaller debt than any of them. After Bush Jr. leaves, someone's going to have to pay for the things he spent, and I'm pretty sure that it'll be all of us - you know, those of us who actually do pay taxes.
It doesn't seem like I'm the one here with a misunderstanding of the value of money or of the real world.
The last three Republican presidents have run about $4 trillion plus onto a $7 trillion debt (Reagan $2.9T / Bush Sr. $1.1T / Bush Jr. ? (probably >$1T)). No social programs there, just lots of money they didn't have and never created spent as if it did. It seems like the Republicans rather than the Democrats are responsible for your shrinking paycheck - after where exactly does that money come from? If it isn't paid back, it raises the cost of your home, car, and other loan payments - so you essentially pay an unseen tax on those items to the gov't. If it is paid back, the gov't has to get the money from somewhere, either less services (which means you pay for them from your paycheck) or higher taxes. Since Republicans spent the money while saying they were "fiscally responsible" (but unwilling to actually act to back it up) and then wouldn't (until Bush Sr.) raise taxes to cover their debt, I think your arrow of responsibility is a little mixed up.
It doesn't help to get tax cuts (that primarily go to the rich, as the last round did, despite claims to the contrary) when the gov't spends more (or even if it just doesn't spend less), in which case the tax cuts are essentially high interest loans to the gov't, and you lose more than you got in the first place (because the money is paid for later, with interest). If tax cuts by Republicans resulted in smaller total gov't (not just moving gov't from the Feds to the local and state levels), your position might hold merit. Since that have been nowhere near the case, I'd say it holds less water than GWB's coke^H^H^H^Hsilver spoon.
I'd rather give money to the Democrats - at least they actually intend to cover what they spend, unlike Reagan/Bush Jr. who seem to have the policy of spend, go to sleep, and hope the debt they run will simply go away.
...we're so much more fiscally responsible here in America - we're not paying for social services for the poor or anything like that - none of that equality higgeryjiggerypoop (or whatever that word is)...
WHAT? we're running a $500 billion deficit? and no health care or Social Security (not when I retire, anyway)? and a selected president?
Where's my passport?
You can't count cards, or attempt to use legitimate mean to gain information about cards to improve your bets. The odds for the games are set by the casinos and changed at their will. If you win too much you probably won't be allowed to play. Collecting RFID chip data on bettors in the casino is no worse than anything else the casinos do - it's another step to improve their bottom line at the expense of the people who (legally) are most likely to cost them money. There should be no expectation of fairness at the games in the casion - because there is none. The only sense of fairness is (to modify a Clancy quote) "Fair means I get all my money back, and f*** everything else." If you're going to a casino, you had better have fun, because the likelyhood of getting ahead of the casinos on a consistent basis is probably low.
RFIDs in this case are reasonable because:
1) information of the movements of their chips on their property is reasonable -as long as they don't track my movements elsewhere I'm OK with them.
2) this is similar to data they already acquire and use (it is no worse than other things casinos already do).
3) the chips have legitimate uses in thwarting people who cheat (by most people's definitions, not just the casinos) - they can stop people from increasing bets late, etc.
The game is not much more rigged against you than it was before, and your freedoms outside the casinos haven't be eroded by this use of RFIDs in this context.
I probably should have made this a reply to the topic rather than you in particular, but I agree with your sentiment for the most part. If I had fun at casinos or betting, I might go, but I don't, so there's no point. Playing a rigged game and expecting to get paid is transparently stupid - it's little like going to your local mob boss to be a better criminal. If you're no good, he'll take your money. If you are good, you won't get paid, other than maybe in concrete blocks and small lead weights.
What sources have you read? As previously noted (in the NYT, et al. - there have been multiple references/links to it on /.) Bush lost 6 of the 9 recounts - Gore won most by 1000 votes. The Gore-conditioned recounts gave Bush the victory, while Bush's desired methods gave the vote to Gore. I think Gore also won in a few other vote counting variants. That doesn't seem like "all the other independent investigations prove that Bush did win in Florida". Of course, it could also be that having the person running Bush's campaign in FL also in charge of the vote counting in FL, two SC justices having immediate family working for the Bush campaign, or Bush's brother running the state with contested recounts might give an impression of impropriety...
Regardless, what's so hard for people to figure out? Having two paper copies (one so the person knows what they voted, another as a backup to the electronic vote, treated as the paper votes are now, both containing numeric impersonal codes for each vote) and a computer copy is neither difficult to implement nor expensive. It provides the ability to verify election results (although considering FL, I can see why you wouldn't want THAT). It would allow for the rapid count advantages of computer polls and have a secure backup in case of (or when) problems happen. Instead, the emphasis is on all-electronic voting with security holes one could drive a truck through. Irrelevant of the (supposed) stupidity of some FL voters, this doesn't seem like a hard concept to grasp.
I passed Messin' with the Man easily once I ripped the tank from the air base and drove it to the motorcycle bar. It's amazing what the tank does to lots of things...of course, getting home alive and clearing warrants with six of them is less trivial.
the winner of a deathmatch between Carrot Top and Roseanne Barr would be...HUMANITY. Think about it - at least one of them would no longer have they opportunity to contribute their genes to the gene pool or their ideas (and I'm using the term loosely) to the human culture. Ideally, they take each other out, and thus the human race is improved by their subtraction.
Of course, I might be wrong, particularly if there ends up being a memorial retrospective of Carrot Top's commercial work...
1) CEO's get paid enough so that even if they are not competent, they still get paid money significant enough that the company's success or failure is irrelevant. There is no such thing as "rich enough not to want to succeed", but their willingness to accept failure is highest when the consequences belong to others.
2) In some cases (and most of the egregious ones, I think), CEO's get large amounts of bargain-priced stock options even if their company doesn't do well. As a result, the investments that are supposed to reward them for good performance reward them whether they are good or not, unless it's their own company, in which case it's all theirs. No risk and lots of money for CEOs leads to lots of bad ones.
The problem with executive compensation is that there is no risk - if they get paid whether or not they succeed, there is no real incentive to excel. While their workers are laid off for failures of those in positions of power, the ones who made the mistakes are paid as if they had succeeded. This short-circuits the control and incentives for CEO pay, and the justness of the system.
it is likely that the trade association's spokesman's comment was sarcastic (he understands that people who spend their time in learning a technical field want to be paid) - I missed it. The point above however (CEO are hypocritical to expect workers to make unreasonably low salaries for work with high educational requirements) is still valid, IMO.
To be flexible enough to adapt to changing conditions is nontrivial. Most people spend $10,000-$100,000 on educations - while these allow a fair amount of flexibility, companies are hiring based on skills sets which require significant investments in specific areas. If pay is low, the costs of specialization (or of education in general) are never returned - thus there isn't an incentive for people here to work in fields requiring education if they aren't paid enough to cover its cost. Add to this the simultaneous cost of expanding competence in other fields requires taking resources from what you do now (the expectation of employees giving everything to their work is incompatible with the concept of job security by gaining competence and training in other fields) and you have problems that seem difficult to get around.
Unless the costs of education comes down a lot (and since it has gone up at or above inflation for what - 15 years running? - this is a set of problems that is likely to hurt a lot of people in the US. Since people can't move to take advantage of lower costs in most things (can't go to India to work, for example, even if you wanted to) and have reasons that make it hard to do so (family), the market isn't exactly free in the first place. I don't think protectionism is good (we are all in this together after all) but the immobility of people in the presence of job mobility is a problem for us that isn't easy to solve.
Low wages aren't compatible with high costs of working/living. People can't move to take advantage of lower costs, particularly in education. We can do better things that others can't do, but not everyone is an innovator - once the innovation is done, someone else can do it cheaper and the jobs go where they're cheaper. If innovation arises spontaneously in individual, this works, but usually innovation requires the knowledge to be able to see and do what needs to be done. When the costs to cultivate these abilities are too high, then you have no source for innovation - when you eat the seed corn, there won't be any food for next year. The ability to move jobs around (in the practical absence of mobility in people) means that we will eventually eat our seed corn. I don't know if protectionism is the best way to guard against this, but the market isn't exactly free, and it is likely to work against us.
My loans would cost me my entire take-home pay at minimum wage in the US. Why the hell would anyone want to learn a field, spend thousands of dollars to do so, and then no be able to make enough to pay the costs of the education? Meanwhile, Carly, et al get paid millions of dollars to risk other people's money while they have the opportunity/skill to drive their companies into the ground. (Good CEO's are worth the money, but lots aren't and they get paid anyway.) Do they think that we should be willing to work for nothing but that they should not? The rules of economics work for everyone, yet the people who run these businesses think that people should be willing to make sacrifices for their extravagant incomes (extravagant because of the amount of money/unit of competence). Why do I want DRM when it costs more and gives control of my computer to others while giving me no benefits in terms of costs or features? Why do I want to work in a field when I can make more money by not learning anything and being a garbageman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsanitation engineer? The same motives apply to everyone, yet some of the people who run companies seem to think that only they have the right (and desire) to behave in their self-interest.
The initial comments are correct - we don't have inherent rights to jobs - if someone can do it better and cheaper than us, they will get the job and we'll have to do something else. I simply have a problem with the PHB logic that the stated CEOs seem to labor under - that others should sacrifice their well-being for their benefit while they have no duty to do the same. I'm certain that if their logic were applied to their jobs (I'm pretty sure someone as competent as these CEO's could be hired from overseas at 10% of their pay), they would not be so quick to advocate sacrifice for the benefit of others.
I wasn't certain if I had it right, and I didn't. Thank you
There are always people who want something for nothing. There are also those who want to copy things for the thrill, or as a way to get friends, or for other reasons. These people won't go away - as long as the technical means exist (and in a free society, the means will always exist) people will copy works. I think that these people make up a small segment of the market - that doesn't mean copyright holders shouldn't protect their works, but this set of people is unlikely to destroy the business of selling recorded works.
DVD copying will run rampant if the MPAA decides to screw their customers. The music industry (the larger labels, anyway) raised the prices of CDs, homogenized much of the product, made CDs hard to use, and tried to extract money from customers for fair use rights that weren't theirs to sell. Record companies (RIAA labels) have a product that people want, but they decided that they could get more money from their customers than their customers wanted to pay. Once P2P apps came around, the large set of people the record companies angered had an alternative - copy the music and pay nothing. There would have always been copying at a low level, but the frustration of people with the record labels meant that as soon as a means to get records some other way came around, people would take it. Had there not been significant frustration with record companies in the first place, most of the people who get their music from file trading would not have gone through the trouble to do so.
The means to copy digital media is not going to go away. What will determine whether copying becomes rampant or not is the level of frustration of the customer base (and the cost of the product - e.g. high-end software). If it becomes very easy to obtain copied movies, more people will do it as well - but they probably won't try as hard if they aren't frustrated in the first place. At least, IMHO.
...buying a cracked DVD in China and getting the MPAA anti-piracy notice on the screen. Yep, that worked REALLY well.