I am so grateful that the FCC required me to pay more in order to subsidize the lifestyle choices of other people.
I love how people expect us to subsidize their internet access but nobody (sane) argues in favor of subsidies for wells and septic tanks, both of which are more costly than municipal water service. Access to clean water is actually essential to life, unlike internet access, or even electricity for that matter, but nobody expects suburban/urban people to subsidize water for rural folks, why should we have to subsidize their internet connectivity?
Do you have any doubt that it will be counted as both?
Stop with the FUD. Verizon doesn't double dip for MMS (picture messages use data, but they do not add to your data usage), even though such double dipping would likely go unnoticed, why would they do it for minutes?
There's plenty of legitimate things to bash the cellular carriers for without making shit up.
Innocent until proven guilty is a concept of the civilian criminal justice system. It does not apply on foreign battlefields to those who are trying to kill us. The relevant legal precedents go back centuries and don't say what you think they say. Our actions in Pakistan/Afghanistan are perfectly defensible from a legal standpoint.
If the Pakistani secret police flew a drone into NYC and blew up buildings full of civilians, I'm pretty sure you'd call it terrorism.
There's a difference between Pakistan and the United States that you've overlooked: We keep our dogs off their lawn. Nobody in the United States is planning the mass murder of Pakistanis. If they were we would take care of them ourselves. We wouldn't let somebody who killed 3,000 Pakistanis live 5 miles from West Point.
Perhaps if the Pakistanis cleaned up their own backyard we wouldn't have to do it for them?
And even if you enjoy the heck out of gunning down an intruder
If you enjoy gunning someone down there's something seriously wrong with you. Talk to someone who has ended a human life. It's not a pretty thing to have to live with.
The American shoot-down was during a time of crisis
You did see where I said that, right? "the incident did happen in a tense combat zone"
when the people responsible believed themselves to be under attack
Which they shouldn't have, if they had actually listened to what their instruments where telling them. As I said, it's a good case study for scenario fulfillment. Sensors report the aircraft is ascending, crew reports that it's descending on an attack vector. IIRC they had just run a drill days before using the exact same attack scenario they believed they were under, which explains why they ignored what was clearly displayed on the screens in front of them.
I'm not trying to play the moral equivalency game, I'm just pointing out the facts of a sad truth. We fucked up and several hundred people died that shouldn't have. The other poster strikes me as the blame America first sort, and is not really worth engaging, but he is right about one part: Captain Rogers was a hothead. Did he purposefully order the shoot down? Of course not. But he was using a $3,000,000,000 air defense cruiser to engage gunboats, stretching his rules of engagement to the absolute limit, even breaking them at times. His actions left the Commanding Officer of another ship in his task force baffled, which was noted in the public literature available on the subject.
However, after the Russians shot down a civilian airliner (aren't Russians AWESOME!)
Umm, we did that once upon a time too, and in our case the airliner was in a known civil air traffic corridor, rather than miles off course like KAL 007. Of course, the incident did happen in a tense combat zone, so the mistakes made need to be viewed in that context..... It's actually a good case study for scenario fulfillment.
Technically this voids your credit card. Read the line above the signature panel, "Authorized signature - not valid unless signed."
The standard merchant agreement says that merchants are supposed to check the signature panel on the back of your card and compare it against the receipt. They are not allowed to ask for ID (or to impose minimum purchase amounts or fees for that matter) unless the signature does not match. If the card is not signed they're supposed to decline to use it.
Of course, very few merchants actually read the agreement they've signed, much less follow its rules. They do this at their own peril, for they're the ones on the hook for fraudulent transactions.
What about information that is simply embarrassing, like the engagement announcement with my psycho ex-wife that is now in the Top 5 hits for my name on Google?
Planning is great, and need to be done but we have to prevent the end game from happening.
There is no "end game". That's what I think the climate change crowd doesn't realize. They've based their whole notion of "normal" off an incredibly insignificant slice of Earth's history. It's not even a significant slice of homo saipans history, never mind the history of life on Earth. When has the climate on planet Earth been static? Great Britain used to be in the wine belt. Washington crossed an ice filled Delaware river. The climate changed long before humans started digging carbon out of the ground and it will continue to change long after we're gone.
Climate change is not going to doom human civilization. It will have an impact, a very harsh impact for some (and a benefit for others, which is one of the dirty little secrets nobody will acknowledge...) but we will survive and adapt. Pull up pre industrial age life expectancy charts and tell me we're really not better off. Then tell the third world that they're not allowed to develop any further, and the first world that we have to voluntarily lower our standard of living.
I'd really rather we weren't responsible for another disaster resulting in the extinction of those lifeforms that had survived until now.
Too late.
If it makes you feel any better we're just fulfilling our biological imperative. The most adaptable species have thrown their lot in with us and are tagging along for the ride. Species that aren't as adaptable? Well, nature is a bitch like that.
On a macro scale civilization is always going to displace other species that get in the way. On an individual level people are always going to choose survival. My favorite example of the latter? The Wake Island Rail, hunted to extinction by a starving Japanese garrison during WW2.
Would you voluntarily starve yourself to death to save another species? If the answer is "Yes" you've either never experienced true hunger in your life, or you're the most altruistic person I've ever met.
Well, we could start with education, and help nuclear not be a bad word.
That would be an awesome start, but most of the resistance to nuclear power comes from the same people who believe humanity driven climate change is a pressing problem. Nobody else cares, in fact fossil fuels are cheaper, so it's an apparent win as far as most people are concerned.
i.e. by allowing electricity suppliers to change the price of power on a timescale of minutes
This is a stupid idea. Never mind the disruption to people's household finances by asking them to absorb that much pricing uncertainty.... electricity is a commodity and there will always be futures contracts that allow people to lock in a price. Which is as it should be. More to the point, you think people in the United States are going to accept a situation where regular black/brownouts become the norm, after generations of largely having electricity around the clock? I know such occurrences are "normal" in a lot of countries, but not here.
or the equivalent of 23% of the surface of Arizona, to provide for 100% of the US energy usage.
You live in a country that can't even build a wind farm or a pipeline without decades of environmental studies and political bickering from all sides.... You think you're going to cover 23% of Arizona in solar panels, completely re-engineer the power distribution grid, and do this quickly enough to make a damned bit of difference if humanity's CO2 emissions really are the tipping point?
I'm sorry, but I'm a realist, and the best course of action for us at this point is to start planning for the changes rather than try to prevent them from happening.
We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit.
Which won't change a damned thing, because the third world is not going to meekly sit back and accept their current level of development. The United States could literally cease to exist tomorrow and the freed energy wouldn't be enough to bring the billions in the third world out of poverty. You can't even convince Westerners to waste less, but you think you're going to convince those in the third world to meekly accept their current lot in life?
First we need less babies.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of freedom. That's literally the most personal decision you can make, it's not something that can be imposed from the top down in our societies. A civilization without our reverence for individual liberty tried it and arguably failed, or at the very least created all manner of unintended consequences with deleterious outcomes that still haven't been fully quantified.
Ocean levels haven't been constant for the miniscule amount of time humanity has been around, never mind on a geologic scale. For that matter, the climate hasn't been static either, not even for our short amount of time on this rock.
If predictions are true, it's going to suck, it's going to be painful, but we'll survive it. Asking people to forgo the benefits of civilization just isn't going to happen, and even if the killer app of energy is discovered tomorrow (fusion?) we're still going to have to adapt to the changes already under way.
Do some reading about base load power, then contemplate the fact that the United States consumed 3,866,000,000,000 kilowatt hours (that's 13,917,600,000,000,000,000 joules, if you were wondering) of electricity in 2012. Since nuclear fission is politically explosive, explain how you propose to generate a sizable fraction of that energy (never mind all of it) without relying on carbon based sources. Limit yourself to technologies that are actually here, not distant fantasies like nuclear fusion.
After you do that, you can further depress yourself with the realization that I'm only talking about electricity. The actual energy budget of the United States is far higher when you account for the transportation sector and other non-electrical needs. And we're only talking about the United States here, one country out of ~190, with 4.5% of the global population. The rest of the World aspires to our standard of living, and they're not going to abandon that goal because of a distant and hard to quantify threat.
So what do you want to do about it? We live in the real world, most of us in elective democracies where any politician that purposes a reduction in the standard of living will quickly find himself out of a job. Green energy doesn't scale and nuclear is a bad word, so where do you propose we get the gigajoules needed to both run Western civilization and bring the third world out of poverty?
The climate change crowd never has a good answer for this question. Thankfully we're an adaptable species, arguably the most adaptable ever to live on the blue marble. I think we'll manage just fine.
Anything that requires you to put an object into the trigger guard is inherently flawed. I've never seen a trigger guard that would actually preclude the gun from being loaded. What do you suppose happens if you fumble the trigger guard while the firearm is loaded?
Action locks are acceptable, but a solid safe/lockbox is a better choice for a home-defense firearm, because it's the only way to store a firearm in a ready-to-use state.
Really smart gun technology would detect those cases and ask, "Are you really sure you want to do that?"
So you're asking for a firearms version of Clippy?
"It looks like you're trying to commit suicide. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"It looks like you're about to shoot a would be rapist. Would you like me to call an attorney for you?"
"It looks like you've got a flinch, would you like me to schedule some training courses?"
Suicide, while tragic, is the last thing we should be legislating against. At the end of the day I believe in the "my body, my choice" mantra typically applied to another issue but relevant with regards to this one.
Most countries have already agreed to ban landmines, by signing the Ottawa Treaty [wikipedia.org].
Historically such agreements have been discarded when an actual shooting war starts. See unrestricted submarine warfare and the bombing of cities during WW2. The Ottawa Treaty is a feel good piece of paper that will just as quickly be discarded in the event of a major conflict. It won't even really delay the production of landmines in such a conflict, because it takes very little know-how and industrial capacity to build them.
Arms control treaties are useful for complicated weapons that require a major industrial complex and years of investment (the Washington Naval Treaty is the classical example, the Chemical Weapons Convention is a more recent one) to produce. Landmines? Not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I am so grateful that the FCC required me to pay more in order to subsidize the lifestyle choices of other people.
I love how people expect us to subsidize their internet access but nobody (sane) argues in favor of subsidies for wells and septic tanks, both of which are more costly than municipal water service. Access to clean water is actually essential to life, unlike internet access, or even electricity for that matter, but nobody expects suburban/urban people to subsidize water for rural folks, why should we have to subsidize their internet connectivity?
Do you have any doubt that it will be counted as both?
Stop with the FUD. Verizon doesn't double dip for MMS (picture messages use data, but they do not add to your data usage), even though such double dipping would likely go unnoticed, why would they do it for minutes?
There's plenty of legitimate things to bash the cellular carriers for without making shit up.
Innocent until proven guilty is a concept of the civilian criminal justice system. It does not apply on foreign battlefields to those who are trying to kill us. The relevant legal precedents go back centuries and don't say what you think they say. Our actions in Pakistan/Afghanistan are perfectly defensible from a legal standpoint.
If the Pakistani secret police flew a drone into NYC and blew up buildings full of civilians, I'm pretty sure you'd call it terrorism.
There's a difference between Pakistan and the United States that you've overlooked: We keep our dogs off their lawn. Nobody in the United States is planning the mass murder of Pakistanis. If they were we would take care of them ourselves. We wouldn't let somebody who killed 3,000 Pakistanis live 5 miles from West Point.
Perhaps if the Pakistanis cleaned up their own backyard we wouldn't have to do it for them?
And even if you enjoy the heck out of gunning down an intruder
If you enjoy gunning someone down there's something seriously wrong with you. Talk to someone who has ended a human life. It's not a pretty thing to have to live with.
The American shoot-down was during a time of crisis
You did see where I said that, right? "the incident did happen in a tense combat zone"
when the people responsible believed themselves to be under attack
Which they shouldn't have, if they had actually listened to what their instruments where telling them. As I said, it's a good case study for scenario fulfillment. Sensors report the aircraft is ascending, crew reports that it's descending on an attack vector. IIRC they had just run a drill days before using the exact same attack scenario they believed they were under, which explains why they ignored what was clearly displayed on the screens in front of them.
I'm not trying to play the moral equivalency game, I'm just pointing out the facts of a sad truth. We fucked up and several hundred people died that shouldn't have. The other poster strikes me as the blame America first sort, and is not really worth engaging, but he is right about one part: Captain Rogers was a hothead. Did he purposefully order the shoot down? Of course not. But he was using a $3,000,000,000 air defense cruiser to engage gunboats, stretching his rules of engagement to the absolute limit, even breaking them at times. His actions left the Commanding Officer of another ship in his task force baffled, which was noted in the public literature available on the subject.
Half of slashdot disappears the minute Anonymous Coward contacts Google from a EU country.
And nothing of value was lost.
However, after the Russians shot down a civilian airliner (aren't Russians AWESOME!)
Umm, we did that once upon a time too, and in our case the airliner was in a known civil air traffic corridor, rather than miles off course like KAL 007. Of course, the incident did happen in a tense combat zone, so the mistakes made need to be viewed in that context..... It's actually a good case study for scenario fulfillment.
The Romans were not unstoppable murdering machines?
The Germans and Persians seemed to hold them off fairly effectively over the generations....
Of course the Gauls were whipped, but that's about what you'd expect from the forerunners of the French. ;)
Technically this voids your credit card. Read the line above the signature panel, "Authorized signature - not valid unless signed."
The standard merchant agreement says that merchants are supposed to check the signature panel on the back of your card and compare it against the receipt. They are not allowed to ask for ID (or to impose minimum purchase amounts or fees for that matter) unless the signature does not match. If the card is not signed they're supposed to decline to use it.
Of course, very few merchants actually read the agreement they've signed, much less follow its rules. They do this at their own peril, for they're the ones on the hook for fraudulent transactions.
Helium is easier to source. I can buy it at any party store. Where can I buy nitrogen?
What about information that is simply embarrassing, like the engagement announcement with my psycho ex-wife that is now in the Top 5 hits for my name on Google?
Planning is great, and need to be done but we have to prevent the end game from happening.
There is no "end game". That's what I think the climate change crowd doesn't realize. They've based their whole notion of "normal" off an incredibly insignificant slice of Earth's history. It's not even a significant slice of homo saipans history, never mind the history of life on Earth. When has the climate on planet Earth been static? Great Britain used to be in the wine belt. Washington crossed an ice filled Delaware river. The climate changed long before humans started digging carbon out of the ground and it will continue to change long after we're gone.
Climate change is not going to doom human civilization. It will have an impact, a very harsh impact for some (and a benefit for others, which is one of the dirty little secrets nobody will acknowledge...) but we will survive and adapt. Pull up pre industrial age life expectancy charts and tell me we're really not better off. Then tell the third world that they're not allowed to develop any further, and the first world that we have to voluntarily lower our standard of living.
I'd really rather we weren't responsible for another disaster resulting in the extinction of those lifeforms that had survived until now.
Too late.
If it makes you feel any better we're just fulfilling our biological imperative. The most adaptable species have thrown their lot in with us and are tagging along for the ride. Species that aren't as adaptable? Well, nature is a bitch like that.
On a macro scale civilization is always going to displace other species that get in the way. On an individual level people are always going to choose survival. My favorite example of the latter? The Wake Island Rail, hunted to extinction by a starving Japanese garrison during WW2.
Would you voluntarily starve yourself to death to save another species? If the answer is "Yes" you've either never experienced true hunger in your life, or you're the most altruistic person I've ever met.
Well, we could start with education, and help nuclear not be a bad word.
That would be an awesome start, but most of the resistance to nuclear power comes from the same people who believe humanity driven climate change is a pressing problem. Nobody else cares, in fact fossil fuels are cheaper, so it's an apparent win as far as most people are concerned.
i.e. by allowing electricity suppliers to change the price of power on a timescale of minutes
This is a stupid idea. Never mind the disruption to people's household finances by asking them to absorb that much pricing uncertainty.... electricity is a commodity and there will always be futures contracts that allow people to lock in a price. Which is as it should be. More to the point, you think people in the United States are going to accept a situation where regular black/brownouts become the norm, after generations of largely having electricity around the clock? I know such occurrences are "normal" in a lot of countries, but not here.
Far more upsetting to me is the accompanying loss of diversity in the planet's flora and fauna.
We're not the first species on Planet Earth to outcompete other species and we won't be the last....
or the equivalent of 23% of the surface of Arizona, to provide for 100% of the US energy usage.
You live in a country that can't even build a wind farm or a pipeline without decades of environmental studies and political bickering from all sides.... You think you're going to cover 23% of Arizona in solar panels, completely re-engineer the power distribution grid, and do this quickly enough to make a damned bit of difference if humanity's CO2 emissions really are the tipping point?
I'm sorry, but I'm a realist, and the best course of action for us at this point is to start planning for the changes rather than try to prevent them from happening.
We do expect and demand that the public change their lifestyles quite a bit.
Which won't change a damned thing, because the third world is not going to meekly sit back and accept their current level of development. The United States could literally cease to exist tomorrow and the freed energy wouldn't be enough to bring the billions in the third world out of poverty. You can't even convince Westerners to waste less, but you think you're going to convince those in the third world to meekly accept their current lot in life?
First we need less babies.
Capping family sizes is antithetical to western notions of freedom. That's literally the most personal decision you can make, it's not something that can be imposed from the top down in our societies. A civilization without our reverence for individual liberty tried it and arguably failed, or at the very least created all manner of unintended consequences with deleterious outcomes that still haven't been fully quantified.
Ocean levels haven't been constant for the miniscule amount of time humanity has been around, never mind on a geologic scale. For that matter, the climate hasn't been static either, not even for our short amount of time on this rock.
If predictions are true, it's going to suck, it's going to be painful, but we'll survive it. Asking people to forgo the benefits of civilization just isn't going to happen, and even if the killer app of energy is discovered tomorrow (fusion?) we're still going to have to adapt to the changes already under way.
Do some reading about base load power, then contemplate the fact that the United States consumed 3,866,000,000,000 kilowatt hours (that's 13,917,600,000,000,000,000 joules, if you were wondering) of electricity in 2012. Since nuclear fission is politically explosive, explain how you propose to generate a sizable fraction of that energy (never mind all of it) without relying on carbon based sources. Limit yourself to technologies that are actually here, not distant fantasies like nuclear fusion.
After you do that, you can further depress yourself with the realization that I'm only talking about electricity. The actual energy budget of the United States is far higher when you account for the transportation sector and other non-electrical needs. And we're only talking about the United States here, one country out of ~190, with 4.5% of the global population. The rest of the World aspires to our standard of living, and they're not going to abandon that goal because of a distant and hard to quantify threat.
So what do you want to do about it? We live in the real world, most of us in elective democracies where any politician that purposes a reduction in the standard of living will quickly find himself out of a job. Green energy doesn't scale and nuclear is a bad word, so where do you propose we get the gigajoules needed to both run Western civilization and bring the third world out of poverty?
The climate change crowd never has a good answer for this question. Thankfully we're an adaptable species, arguably the most adaptable ever to live on the blue marble. I think we'll manage just fine.
Trigger locks are probably a better option.
Anything that requires you to put an object into the trigger guard is inherently flawed. I've never seen a trigger guard that would actually preclude the gun from being loaded. What do you suppose happens if you fumble the trigger guard while the firearm is loaded?
Action locks are acceptable, but a solid safe/lockbox is a better choice for a home-defense firearm, because it's the only way to store a firearm in a ready-to-use state.
Really smart gun technology would detect those cases and ask, "Are you really sure you want to do that?"
So you're asking for a firearms version of Clippy?
"It looks like you're trying to commit suicide. Are you sure you want to do this?"
"It looks like you're about to shoot a would be rapist. Would you like me to call an attorney for you?"
"It looks like you've got a flinch, would you like me to schedule some training courses?"
I can commit an impulsive suicide with my gas pedal and an oncoming 18 wheeler....
I could commit a slightly less impulsive (and messy) suicide with a tank of helium and a plastic bag.
Suicide, while tragic, is the last thing we should be legislating against. At the end of the day I believe in the "my body, my choice" mantra typically applied to another issue but relevant with regards to this one.
Most countries have already agreed to ban landmines, by signing the Ottawa Treaty [wikipedia.org].
Historically such agreements have been discarded when an actual shooting war starts. See unrestricted submarine warfare and the bombing of cities during WW2. The Ottawa Treaty is a feel good piece of paper that will just as quickly be discarded in the event of a major conflict. It won't even really delay the production of landmines in such a conflict, because it takes very little know-how and industrial capacity to build them.
Arms control treaties are useful for complicated weapons that require a major industrial complex and years of investment (the Washington Naval Treaty is the classical example, the Chemical Weapons Convention is a more recent one) to produce. Landmines? Not so much.