charged with 49 felonies including one count of obstructing justice, three counts of criminal sexual abuse, seven counts of criminal sexual assault, seven counts of armed violence, 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, and 21 counts of official misconduct. He plead guilty to TWO MISDEMEANORS and got off. Anybody else would have been behind bars for the rest of their lives.
No, anyone convicted of all those crimes would have spent a lot of time in jail, but merely being charged with a crime cannot--must not--be interpreted as evidence of guilt.
You do not have the right to torment an individual like this anymore than you have a right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater or "I have a bomb" in an airport. AT some point, the safety of others does override your right to "free" speech.
What point is that? Does this way of conceptualizing the issue allow people to know when they are breaking the law? Why characterize the issue in terms of "safety to others", rather than in terms of fraud?
Personally I think it's the business of the government to protect the interests of the majority... maybe... I'll have to think about that a bit more.
It's in the interest of the majority to not have the will of the majority imposed on them. Particularly not with the big stick.
my personal opinion is that using a phone in a situation where you have to raise your voice significantly to be heard above the ambient noise - and subsequently by everyone else - is pretty rude
Most people, when they realize that they are coming across as rude to others, change their behavior. The occasional jerk is not a problem you can solve through the legal system.
Perhaps it's a bit like the smoking ban in this country - most people don't want to breathe the smoke of others, the majority are happy about the ban, but there's a loud collection of unhappy smokers (obviously).
I'm a smoker, and New York has a public indoor smoking ban--unless the merchant has purchased a license, like Karma and a few others have. Public indoor smoking is now opt-in rather than opt-out, which I approve of. It also means that organizations I transact business with are now paying licensing fees which will be used to create more jobs within the government bureaucracy. Have you had many dealings with government employees? What defines their culture is indifference to how satisfied their customers are.
Quite simply, if they were there for safety, cities would put warning signs up at intersections that have cameras, people would slow down, less people would run lights, and less accidents would occur. I have never seen a warning sign at such an intersection, so their financial motives are pretty clear.
Not so. If all monitored intersections are marked, people will change their behavior at those intersections only while driving as usual at all others. When people know that any particular intersection may or may not be monitored, they drive more carefully at all of them. Your argument is like saying that since people are less likely to commit a crime in the presence of a cop, the motive behind having undercover cops is to arrest people rather than discourage crime.
We're talking about a 7-year old. There should be parental supervision, education, and monitoring.
Unless the supervision, education, and monitoring that the parents are providing is misguided and insistent, in which case protecting oneself from some of it would be in one's best interest.
Blowing up a decaying satellite with a missile is, IMHO, the stupidest thing to do, and I have been an engineer working with satellite control systems for nearly 24 years by now.
Objective: test your prototype anti-satellite weapon system. China did a successful test last year, and we're playing catch up. This makes us look weak... so instead of admitting that it's a weapon test, we say that it's a virtually routine cleanup... It's not the case that the government is increasing its power without telling its citizens, it's merely the government using its already awesome power to do some good.
The media reports this official story and people mostly take it for fact (why not?). But some of us scratch our heads and realize that it makes no sense to shoot down a satellite by blowing it up because you're afraid of it falling down. I'd be far more impressed if they contracted the lowest bidder to bring down the satellite onto a prepared location with payment upon success.
I sometimes tell myself that I am lucky, because I am present to witness the decline of a great civilization. I can still make a good life for myself, and I get to see society crumble around me, and perhaps even fall with me... which would be kind of poetic.
Seriously, does no one advise upper management that trying to block something on the internet just draws *more* attention to it? Happens over and over.
And what do you know about all the times when the censorship was successful?
The Internet is not a benevolent spirit who will liberate you from the necessity of vigilantly protecting your rights.
Just an observation, but do the admins at Wikipedia allow casual profanity in articles? I haven't seen any. I doubt that they take that lightly. It's probably scrubbed out pretty carefully.
Fuck. What's another example of an encyclopedia article in which profanity would be appropriate?
People differ in how well they can compartmentalize their thinking. Those who do it badly are dangerous when given a religion. For the rest, who cares? It amounts to still believing in Santa Claus.
Oh, it's easy to understand. Lying is when you say something you know is untrue. Microsoft's op-ed writers know what they're saying is untrue. "Motive" is a convention, a manner of speaking, that isn't as important as what facts and evidence can demonstrate. Microsoft's op-ed writers were lying. Failing to call it lying isn't "diplomacy", it's permissive cowardice.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you to point out that they were lying.
Why will no one reporting on lies just come out and call them lies?
When you're saying someone is lying, you're accusing them of having a bad motive. Maybe this wasn't an attempt to deceive. If there's no earthly way for you to believe that, then others will draw the same conclusion.
It's politeness and diplomacy. Understand it before you fight it.
First, the "Microsoft" article requires a subscription to read, meaning that very few people will read it and will know about it only through what an opponent said about it.
Second, what is Microsoft's involvement with the original article, which was published by a Canadian political paper called "The Hill Times"?
When "dumb," statistically based data mining software is capable of grasping the clear differences between Republican and Democrat, it becomes impossible to argue with a straight face that the two parties are the same. A fucking computer can tell the difference, why can't a human?
Because humans can weigh the importances of the issues. If you disagree with both parties on what you perceive to be key issues, it makes no difference that their disagreements on the remaining issues follow a pattern. Neither Republicans nor Democrats consistently make an effort to decrease the burden of the government on American citizens. Both parties take every chance they get to grow the bureaucracy still further. It is not okay that I work 4 months out of the year just to cover my tax debt. It is not okay that a 2006 dollar is worth less than 5% of the 1910 dollar. Sure, they're pandering to different demographics, but so what?
AMD and WMD are two points on the evilness spectrum. AMD is non-evil while WMD is very evil, with KMD sitting somewhere between those two points. There are three more levels of evil beyond WMD, but we haven't discovered them yet.
The government owns the airwaves.
Whether or not you like it, it's true.
You SHOULD like it, though, because it ensures things WORK.
This post commits the fallacy of the false dilemma. The alternatives are not "open airways" versus "the government owns the airwaves". The alternative that should be obvious to anyone living in the US but that your post disturbingly fails even to consider is private ownership.
Private ownership means that the owner of the resource has legal control of the resource, and no one else does. If I own a broadcasting frequency, it means that I control what is broadcast on it. If you broadcast on my frequency without my permission, you are breaking the law.
If I own a broadcasting frequency, it will stay in my possession as long as the money that I am able to make through its ownership exceeds the money that I would make if I were to sell it to the highest bidder (who is then free to try to make enough money with it to justify the cost of not selling it). With this excellent system, the frequencies will be owned by a mix of two types of people: those who are best able to monetize them, and those for whom money is not the primary reason for owning the frequency.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. has always been a values-based, ethically led company. The values guiding our decisions and leadership are the 3 basic beliefs established by our founder, Sam Walton, in 1962:
Respect for the Individual
Service to the Customer
Strive for Excellence
Vision Statement
The vision of the Global Ethics Office is to promote ownership of Wal-Mart's ethical culture to all stakeholders globally. The Global Ethics Office was established on June 1, 2004. On June 4, 2004 Wal-Mart released a revised Global Statement of Ethics to communicate our ethical standards to all Wal-Mart facilities and stakeholders. The Global Ethics Office provides guidance in making ethical decisions based on the Global Statement of Ethics and a process for anonymous reporting of suspected ethics violation by calling the Global Ethics Helpline.
Global Ethical Principles
Wal-Mart's Guiding Ethical Principles were added to the revised Global Statement of Ethics on June 4, 2004. These principles are designed to assist our Associates and Suppliers with making the right decision and doing the right thing.
Follow the law at all times
Be honest and fair
Never manipulate, misrepresent, abuse or conceal information
Avoid conflicts of interest between work and personal affairs
Never discriminate against anyone
Never act unethically – even if someone else instructs you to do so
Never ask someone to act unethically
Seek assistance if you have questions about the Statement of Ethics or if you face an ethical dilemma
Cooperate with any investigation of a possible ethics violation
Report ethics violations or suspected violations
The source that you give for the rest of your alleged facts, LeoHat, is an Op-Ed piece written by "Leo Hindery Jr." titled "Wal-Mart's Giant Sucking Sound" which states "WAKE-UP CALL. Costco is a living example that a company can be extremely profitable and competitive and at the same time not destroy everything and everyone in its corporate path." Since you've just demonstrated an indifference to easily Googled facts, surely you don't expect me to accept your statements at face value just because you stated them more than two years ago in a different publication. You seem to be a prevaricating Costco shill.
What is needed in situations like this is some kind of authority with enough clout to stop or even prevent material wastage on products that just can't be used.
This involves creating a government agency and staffing it with employees who will review every single product released to market. I want to know:
How will these new government employees be paid? If tax moneys will be used, how much will your proposal increase the tax burden or/and the government debt? If companies will be required to pay to have their products go through the approval process, how much will your proposal add to the cost of getting a new product to market, and how many new products by small-margin startups will become unprofitable because of it?
What will the average turnaround time be? That is, how much will the approval process add to the time of getting a new product to market? While products are awaiting approval, will competing corporations be able to gain access to their specifications, thus reducing the innovators' opportunity to profit from its innovation?
What systems will be put in place to control corruption? That is, if I am a government employee responsible for approving new products, how will you prevent me from accepting bribes to rubber-stamp bad products, or from refusing to rubber-stamp good products in hopes of receiving bribes? How much corruption will be prevented at what cost?
What systems will be put in place to control errors? For example, in order to know that the device discussed in this story should be outlawed, I would need to be familiar with the Wii. What systems will be in place to keep me as an employee informed of what I need to know to do my job? How much error will be prevented at what cost?
What systems will be put in place to enforce compliance (preventing people from trading products that haven't been approved by the agency)? To what extent will black market dealings be reduced and at what cost?
To put it more briefly, can you give me an estimate of the total cost of the system in terms of:
Money to staff the agency, keep its employees trained, fight its corruption, and enforce public compliance with its decisions
Valuable products that never make it to market due to the agency's mistakes, the agency's corruption, and the increased costs of creating new products
Compare the Slashdot headline to the fark headline:
Microsoft licenses approved as "official" open source by OSI. Overheard from Irony tag: "I see what you did there"
Most slashdot readers have no idea what Ms-PL and Ms-RL are, and a not-insignificant number don't know what OSI is. Wasting readers' time with opaque headlines that cause them to ignore interesting stories is something that should be thought of in terms of not doing it.
If the manufacturer of the end product is not liable for patent violations in third-party components, violating a patent with impunity becomes as simple as forming a puppet company to produce the patent-violating component.
Beat the US "back" to the moon? What kind of metric is this? The US beat everyone to the moon, and nothing that China does now short of building a time machine will change that. Revisiting the moon serves no purpose and should certainly not be sponsored by taxpayer money. This is an attempt by the NASA administrator to get funding for a pointless project. Whether this attempt succeeds or not, it demonstrates a flaw in the structure of our government. We need an amendment to the constitution that prohibits the government from sponsoring pointless projects like these. These kinds of decisions should not be left at the discretion of bureaucrats.
As for his claim that "nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid, and they want to do deals with those nations. It's one of the things that made us the world's greatest economic power." Where is the evidence? It makes far more sense that nations want to do deals with those who give them the best deals.
Slashdot Mirror
No, anyone convicted of all those crimes would have spent a lot of time in jail, but merely being charged with a crime cannot--must not--be interpreted as evidence of guilt.
What point is that? Does this way of conceptualizing the issue allow people to know when they are breaking the law? Why characterize the issue in terms of "safety to others", rather than in terms of fraud?
It's in the interest of the majority to not have the will of the majority imposed on them. Particularly not with the big stick.
Most people, when they realize that they are coming across as rude to others, change their behavior. The occasional jerk is not a problem you can solve through the legal system.
I'm a smoker, and New York has a public indoor smoking ban--unless the merchant has purchased a license, like Karma and a few others have. Public indoor smoking is now opt-in rather than opt-out, which I approve of. It also means that organizations I transact business with are now paying licensing fees which will be used to create more jobs within the government bureaucracy. Have you had many dealings with government employees? What defines their culture is indifference to how satisfied their customers are.
Not so. If all monitored intersections are marked, people will change their behavior at those intersections only while driving as usual at all others. When people know that any particular intersection may or may not be monitored, they drive more carefully at all of them. Your argument is like saying that since people are less likely to commit a crime in the presence of a cop, the motive behind having undercover cops is to arrest people rather than discourage crime.
Unless the supervision, education, and monitoring that the parents are providing is misguided and insistent, in which case protecting oneself from some of it would be in one's best interest.
Objective: test your prototype anti-satellite weapon system. China did a successful test last year, and we're playing catch up. This makes us look weak... so instead of admitting that it's a weapon test, we say that it's a virtually routine cleanup... It's not the case that the government is increasing its power without telling its citizens, it's merely the government using its already awesome power to do some good.
The media reports this official story and people mostly take it for fact (why not?). But some of us scratch our heads and realize that it makes no sense to shoot down a satellite by blowing it up because you're afraid of it falling down. I'd be far more impressed if they contracted the lowest bidder to bring down the satellite onto a prepared location with payment upon success.
I sometimes tell myself that I am lucky, because I am present to witness the decline of a great civilization. I can still make a good life for myself, and I get to see society crumble around me, and perhaps even fall with me... which would be kind of poetic.
Good news for Lamarckism.
And what do you know about all the times when the censorship was successful?
The Internet is not a benevolent spirit who will liberate you from the necessity of vigilantly protecting your rights.
Fuck. What's another example of an encyclopedia article in which profanity would be appropriate?
People differ in how well they can compartmentalize their thinking. Those who do it badly are dangerous when given a religion. For the rest, who cares? It amounts to still believing in Santa Claus.
Topping my wish list is the extermination of all harmful human parasites, from microbes to mosquitoes.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you to point out that they were lying.
When you're saying someone is lying, you're accusing them of having a bad motive. Maybe this wasn't an attempt to deceive. If there's no earthly way for you to believe that, then others will draw the same conclusion.
It's politeness and diplomacy. Understand it before you fight it.
First, the "Microsoft" article requires a subscription to read, meaning that very few people will read it and will know about it only through what an opponent said about it.
Second, what is Microsoft's involvement with the original article, which was published by a Canadian political paper called "The Hill Times"?
Because humans can weigh the importances of the issues. If you disagree with both parties on what you perceive to be key issues, it makes no difference that their disagreements on the remaining issues follow a pattern. Neither Republicans nor Democrats consistently make an effort to decrease the burden of the government on American citizens. Both parties take every chance they get to grow the bureaucracy still further. It is not okay that I work 4 months out of the year just to cover my tax debt. It is not okay that a 2006 dollar is worth less than 5% of the 1910 dollar. Sure, they're pandering to different demographics, but so what?
AMD and WMD are two points on the evilness spectrum. AMD is non-evil while WMD is very evil, with KMD sitting somewhere between those two points. There are three more levels of evil beyond WMD, but we haven't discovered them yet.
H.R. 3791: SAFE Act of 2007
This page contains the full text of the bill, it's status (currently passed house and not voted on in senate), and each representative's vote.
This post commits the fallacy of the false dilemma. The alternatives are not "open airways" versus "the government owns the airwaves". The alternative that should be obvious to anyone living in the US but that your post disturbingly fails even to consider is private ownership.
Private ownership means that the owner of the resource has legal control of the resource, and no one else does. If I own a broadcasting frequency, it means that I control what is broadcast on it. If you broadcast on my frequency without my permission, you are breaking the law.
If I own a broadcasting frequency, it will stay in my possession as long as the money that I am able to make through its ownership exceeds the money that I would make if I were to sell it to the highest bidder (who is then free to try to make enough money with it to justify the cost of not selling it). With this excellent system, the frequencies will be owned by a mix of two types of people: those who are best able to monetize them, and those for whom money is not the primary reason for owning the frequency.
Then you haven't considered contracts.
Twenty seconds of Googling shows this claim to be false. From Wal-Mart's Global Ethics Office
The source that you give for the rest of your alleged facts, LeoHat, is an Op-Ed piece written by "Leo Hindery Jr." titled "Wal-Mart's Giant Sucking Sound" which states "WAKE-UP CALL. Costco is a living example that a company can be extremely profitable and competitive and at the same time not destroy everything and everyone in its corporate path." Since you've just demonstrated an indifference to easily Googled facts, surely you don't expect me to accept your statements at face value just because you stated them more than two years ago in a different publication. You seem to be a prevaricating Costco shill.
This involves creating a government agency and staffing it with employees who will review every single product released to market. I want to know:
To put it more briefly, can you give me an estimate of the total cost of the system in terms of:
Thanks.
Compare the Slashdot headline to the fark headline:
Microsoft licenses approved as "official" open source by OSI. Overheard from Irony tag: "I see what you did there"
Most slashdot readers have no idea what Ms-PL and Ms-RL are, and a not-insignificant number don't know what OSI is. Wasting readers' time with opaque headlines that cause them to ignore interesting stories is something that should be thought of in terms of not doing it.
If the manufacturer of the end product is not liable for patent violations in third-party components, violating a patent with impunity becomes as simple as forming a puppet company to produce the patent-violating component.
"...players will now have to prove they have dwarfism before being allowed to play a dwarf..."
Fixed it for you.
Beat the US "back" to the moon? What kind of metric is this? The US beat everyone to the moon, and nothing that China does now short of building a time machine will change that. Revisiting the moon serves no purpose and should certainly not be sponsored by taxpayer money. This is an attempt by the NASA administrator to get funding for a pointless project. Whether this attempt succeeds or not, it demonstrates a flaw in the structure of our government. We need an amendment to the constitution that prohibits the government from sponsoring pointless projects like these. These kinds of decisions should not be left at the discretion of bureaucrats.
As for his claim that "nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid, and they want to do deals with those nations. It's one of the things that made us the world's greatest economic power." Where is the evidence? It makes far more sense that nations want to do deals with those who give them the best deals.