You realize that without copyright, you as an author write your book (make a time investment), and any publisher at all can sell your invention FOR you, without reimbursing you at all. This is the most basic protection of intellectual work. While lifetime+75 years is excessive, and continual Congressional extensions pushes the edge of any reasonable person's definition of corruption, the basic idea, that you get to sell your intellectual work, is sound. Comparing to a woodworker or cook, it would be as if you cooked a meal, and your neighbor swooped in and served it, and collected the cash. That doesn't pass my fairness test.
How about just limiting copyrights to the same duration as other intellectual works - 20y and done. King's speech would have quite properly become a part of history in 1983, and his kids would have had to do what I've had to do - work and make a living of their own.*
*-seperate from the not-insubstantial money made from this and other works through their 20y copyright period, and the money to be made just from being the child of someone famous, etc.
Certainly true, but at least in the case of WW1 you could argue that those other pre-war powers made catastrophic failures. In the case of WW2 you could argue that for Germany, but the other countries didn't seek that war out.
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1932, China in 1937. The government publicly announced plans to create the "Greater Asian Co-properity Sphere". US responded with progressively firmer warnings, culminating in an embargo of war making materials (oil, steel, etc). Japan planned for taking over the Dutch East Indies (to replace the oil) but assumed the US would intervene (questionable assumption) and bombed Pearl Harbor as a pre-emptive move. The assumption was that this would cow the US into negotiating a deal (ala Somolia in the 1990s, the US had the reputation of not being willing to sustain a fight in the 1930s).
To say that Japan wasn't seeking a war when it invaded 2 countries, bombed a third, then invaded the Phillipines and British, Dutch, French and Australian possesions, as well as bombing Australia itself doesn't fit the facts of the case.
California famously threw out some anti-death penalty judges in an election a few years back. California is also famous for having initiatives and counter-initiatives on the same ballot by two groups opposed to each other, and once in a while both will pass. Makes a mess for the courts to sort out.
You need to see an American ballot to understand the problem, apparently. You are operating in an environment where you vote for one, maybe two people. In the US: 1 for US president 1 for US Senator (in 2/3 of even presidential cycles - 6y terms) 1 for US Representative 1 for state govenor 1 for state senate (usually) 1 for state reprepresenative (in my state, you also vote for secretary of state, attorney general, lt. general, etc - 6 positions other than govenor, iirc) possibly some judges (depends on state, and voting process can differ) certainly some local officials (mayor, county boards, special districts) some state ballot initiatives (not all states) some local initiatives (not all locales)
It would not be unusual to be voting on 20 or more items in a presidential election. I think 2008 ran to 29 items in my area.
Additionally, in the fire station where I vote, there are people that have different sets of local officials, so you get a different ballot depending on exactly where you live so you can vote for your set of officials (and local propositions).
In this context, i don't think different colored slips of paper is going to work, and counting by hand is going to be a serious pain in the ass. We aren't JUST voting for president.
For non-Americans and pre-voting Americans, look up a sample ballot for somewhere in the US and peruse it before suggesting simplistic fixes. Machine + paper trail seems to be the way to go.
Having a 17yo (physically maybe, mentally certainly) tell anyone they are dumb, sheep, idiot, insult o' the day because they like or don't like _____ really gets old on/., almost as bad as hearing made up facts and uninformed opinions. I don't care for reality tv, and therefore don't watch it. One of my best friends, a PhD in medievel lit who works in a technical field, happens to like COPS (particularly when they are using dogs!) but it doesn't make him an idiot in my judgement. Perhaps a few more of the "they're idiots" crowd should try to broaden their horizons. Work on understanding and appreciating rather than just being a counter-idiot.
Curiously, they don't have any "U.S.", "U.K.", "England", "America", or such in their Culture->International listings. Do they not differentiate (all anglo-phone culture is one)? or have they just not gotten around to it?
Overall, I found it very disappointing. The CAPS choices for links renders the thing unreadable, the content is so far from complete as to be useless. The opinionated nature of it is ok, by me, but the general organization is too quirky to be something I'd recommend. Stick to the topical wikis, Wikipedia, or TV Tropes (which recently underwent a mild bout of deletionism, needed IMHO).
p>I remember at least the "cannon = hill = sky high flying cannonball" part and I learned this in high school (at the latest). It kinda surprises me that no one on the entire crew (the performers or the technical folks) made this logical leap and thought "Hey, that hill there... you don't think it could...?"
New myth to test! and the finale - how high can you bounce a cannonball?
Yes, you care about the name, 'cause when it goes wrong, you need to be able to call back and refer to "I talked to Suzy" - it once in a while does help.
FYI, my experience with India has been mixed - just like my experience with Americans. The company is more important to any pattern of behavior than nationality, in my experience. CVS/Caremark has been far and away the worst phone-related experience of my life (many, many calls). They have been consistently wretched, and always American as far as I could detect (and I work regularly with Indian software engineers).
I recently upgraded the TV to an LG flat panel, and LG offered to knock $100 off the price for taking a blu-ray player too. The disk player is *meh*, but the internet connection (NetFlix, YouTube, variety of other stuff i don't use) is pretty cool. The interface could be better, and I'm always wanting a keyboard for YouTube searches, but it's a step in the right direction. NetFlix is addictive, but LG needs enhancements:
1) Contents of firmware revisions public 2) User editable interface 3) Drastic improvement to YouTube skin/app. 4) Access to broadcast TV - if only a passthrough of antenea
The LG box also generates periodic 1s blackouts with particular DVD/resolution combinations. If you select a lower res it goes away, but it's annoying to be changing the res if you want to watch a disk.
No matter who's doing it, mixing units is bad practice. Putting X furlongs/fortnight next to Y furlongs/week is just asking for an incorrect interpretation.
How do I think the police should do their job? Well, I think they should base their inquiries on, you know, EVIDENCE. For one thing.
As they say, freedom isn't free. Sometimes something bad happens. That's the trade.
Um, how do they get this "EVIDENCE" you speak of, when they can't look at you, talk to you, smell you, hear you, or be in your vicinity without violating what you imagine to be your rights?
The step that comes after the handcuffs and back of the car is the trip to the station, where you will be fingerprinted with INK, photographed from three directions, and provide one phone call before sharing a cell with the other local idiots. Getting only a fingerprint scan is clearly less intrusive.
I think you meant to make the point that police shouldn't be able to fingerprint people they suspect of crimes. There a whole problem with that too - when DO police act on a suspicion? Only when they personally saw something go down? or can they believe "witnesses"? can they use some common sense? at some point, you have to trust your police, or not have police. The "let's not have police" thing works if you have a very small community that isn't externally accessible and everyone knows everyone. Otherwise, you're going to have various evildoers that need to be redirected/stopped/incarcerated/shot.
In this, transparency is ultimately your friend. Biometrics (knowing who the actors are) is part of the transparency equation. It's not the only piece, you need transparent policing as well. But positively identifying victims, witnesses, and perpetrators is pretty vital. When an incident occurs, everyone should know all the actors (police, lawyers, and judges included).
Further, are you proposing banning the creation of such devices? if not, they are going to show up in private hand, comparing to private databases. The battle to squash these devices and databases will look remarkably like anti-piracy battles today. My betting money is on the anti-privacy folks.
*** I propose Coyote's coralary to Godwin's law: the first person to beg the question by imposing their assumptions about privacy requirements on the argument via Ben Franklin's pro-gun ownership quote automatically loses the argument, ***
What you need is an app that mods your voice to fit the high priority profile automatically. Then you have competion between callers for who's app can best convice the call center computer that it's a real emergency.
The corporation (the homeowners association) filed a complaint with the goverment (the yay-happytime-good-guy regulators we need more of). The government decided to use it's regulatory power to investigate the corporation for doing a better job at analysis than the government had already done.
This is the Big Government Run States of America. Because government is always right. And more government is more right.
Thank you for a rational, thought-out, flame-free response to your detractor. You persuaded me - I think any pictures of a living human being are going to be limited in resolution by the fact that the target can't stop all motion. Pictures of dead humans are of limited diagnostic value...:-)
As a patient who's had to try to dig up old records, I'm 100% in favor of digitizing. It makes it reasonable for me to be sent (via e-mail) and carry around with my all my records. A current problem is not with the lifespan of the storage medium, but the patient not remembering where the procedure was done. Hard to find that 3yo X-ray, CAT scan, whatever if you can't remember even which facility it was done in. Electronic storage could fix that easily.
Also, some routine things are a real pain to find in paper records. Try looking for your vaccination records. If you're 14, no problem, its a single sheet of routine vaccinations with checkboxes. When you're 40, not so easy - you've been stuck periodically over the last 20 years with this or that depending on your exposures, nothing routine about it. Or at least that's my case (I'm ESRD, get stuck for whatever miscellenous thing the transplant clinic thinks I need, and I/we/they are always losing track of when the last Hep B vaccine, or tetnus, or whatever was). No reason, computers should be able to answer that kind of question instantly.
This is a question most/. readers are not in a position to evaluate very well. Expect lots of paranoia about the gubermint, with very little experience of trying to locate the right information, or dealing with massive quantities of records from 20y of being progressively sicker and sicker. Damn kids! but... it will happen to you someday, unless you die young from a massive sedentary-lifestyle-earned coronary.
~3000 dead in WTC. ~40,000 dead per year in motor vehicles, approximately 50% are "alcohol-involved" (so, maybe 40% alcohol-caused - doncha love government spin!). 40K/365 = ~110 per day. *.4 gives us perhaps 44 people per day killed by drunk drivers. Or, throw out the DUIs and we still have 3000 > 110, by an order of magnitude. You need a couple months for DUI to match WTC.
Your point is still valid though, we are way to worked up over 3K dead than should be warranted. Little kids losing their daddys don't care about WTC or DUI, they are out a father either way. The excess attention lavished on WTC victims (in some cases at the expense of other victims) is a little disturbing.
There was an NPR article on this a year or two ago, and they claimed about 50% of the overall war expenditure was fuel. You get additional expense from KIA/WIA as well, but this is not as bad as you might initially think. Approximately 25% of KIA/WIA are non-combat - setting up 18-22yo with high power heavy equipment, much of it designed to be lethal, and you get periodic fatal accidents, in a war zone or not. There are an alarming number of stupid incidences in the armed forces, war or no.
Further, combat costs more than base/garrison in that there are a lot of vehicle casualties that would not otherwise occur. We use some expensive vehicles, and soldiers are trained to be somewhat cavalier about expending/consuming material to preserve life and limb. In other words, they treat the equipment more roughly than when in garrison.
Beyond that, some garrisons are heavily subsidized by the host country. Specifically, Japan compensates the US for base costs, more than the differential between US and Japanese cost, IIRC. I think Korean forces are also operated on a slight "profit". You might not want to count that, since I don't think we've reduced our Japanese or Korean garrisons - I think the troops all came from European or American garrisons.
Lastly, you maybe need to add in costs of security for non-DOD operations. This is a bit questionable, since our previous position was to have NO embassy/diplomats in country, and now we do - we've expanded ops, you gotta expect addtional expense.
Politicians don't deserve the same freedoms as citizens
Great. So the Obama campaign will be publishing all of Joe and Barrak's e-mail in the next few days then. 'Cause, how can we know if they're conducting public business with those private accounts, unless we see it all??
The Big Rule of a democratic society is Equality Before the Law. Same rules for everyone. So if Palin's e-mail must all be public record, then the same goes for Biden and Obama, and Kennedy, and everyone else. And you.
This is hyperbole. We're perhaps seeing one reason why his wife left - wild exageration can get old in an intimate partnership.
1) ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) can and usually do have annual increases in interest rate, resulting in an increase in the monthly payment. Usually, ARMs are limited to 1% per annum, and have a cap interest rate around 5% higher than the starting rate. I was in an ARM when I first bought my house, so I have a little experience to draw from.
(aside - ARMs typically offer a lower interest/payment for the first 2y, making them attractive for entry-level buyers)
2) Adding 1% to your interest rate on a 30y mortgage will not cause your payment to triple. That's just really bad math.
3) Buying a house 3 years after declaring bankrupcy puts you, by definition, into the high-risk pool.
4) Anyone posting on Slashdot ought to have the savvy to read a mortgage, look through the payment schedule, calculate the worst case scenario, and not be suprised by anything that happens. Some people can claim stupidity, but that won't fly here.
5) Further, the OP is on his second mortgage - he's been through this before. So he really has no grounds for complaint. He made a financial bet - that housing prices would continue to rise, even though they were at all-time highs. The bet failed, in that housing prices are now declining. Smart money would have stayed in the apartment for 1 more year, he'd be $100K ahead or something like that (based on my area's housing prices). If only we could see into the future....
6) It is his fault his mortgage is increasing - he decided to buy, he picked the mortgage, he signed on the dotted line. I certainly didn't - so I don't want it blamed on me. "The Government", George Bush, Henry Paulson, et. al. did not sign on the dotted line. Part of life is trying to pick and choose what to do and when. In a free country, you can make your own choices, but you have to live with the consequences. Buying was his choice. He certainly could have chosen NOT to buy - home-ownership is not legally required of anyone. Renting is sometimes the better financial choice. Given housing prices at historic highs (relative to wages), not buying would have been a sound decision, and time has proven it would have been the prudent course.
I think you missed a line or two of the original description, and let go with the flamethrower at an undeserving target, maybe.
It's not action of the US Congress that we are talking about here. It is the State of Nevada that is enacting a law to take effect in Nevada. Which, I would think is exactly how a State's Rights advocate would want things to be done. There is nothing Federal about it, unless you are hoping that requiring encryption would be a violation of 4th Amendment or something. Not sure how that would work, perhaps you could clarify.
Its not as bad as all that - the law is an improvement in that it should motivate people to do something (encrypt or better, not send personal info) that they should have been doing already. True, it has loopholes. But that's not a bad thing in this case, as it ensures no bogus prosecution is likely to occur.
Think about it in terms of what will change:
Before:
No law, no restiction, send anything you like to anyone, no consequence
Business doesn't think about it
After:
Mild, easily avoidable weak-to-the-point-of-meaningless law
Business thinks a little about it, cause, hey, you gotta manage your risks
So, no, it isn't a perfect fix. Those are rare. But it should hopefully improve the situation. Get enough incremental improvements and you may have an approximation of perfect...:-)
Completely off-topic now, but TRPA mean Tahoe Regional Planning Authority around here, and they tell people where, what, when and how they can build on private land, cut down trees, etc, etc, in the Lake Tahoe basin.
Lot of people swing back and forth depending on whether the TRPA is telling them what to do or someone else. If they're talking to you, it's Big Brother. If they're talking to someone else, they're Protecting the Environment.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that without copyright, you as an author write your book (make a time investment), and any publisher at all can sell your invention FOR you, without reimbursing you at all. This is the most basic protection of intellectual work. While lifetime+75 years is excessive, and continual Congressional extensions pushes the edge of any reasonable person's definition of corruption, the basic idea, that you get to sell your intellectual work, is sound. Comparing to a woodworker or cook, it would be as if you cooked a meal, and your neighbor swooped in and served it, and collected the cash. That doesn't pass my fairness test.
How about just limiting copyrights to the same duration as other intellectual works - 20y and done. King's speech would have quite properly become a part of history in 1983, and his kids would have had to do what I've had to do - work and make a living of their own.*
*-seperate from the not-insubstantial money made from this and other works through their 20y copyright period, and the money to be made just from being the child of someone famous, etc.
Certainly true, but at least in the case of WW1 you could argue that those other pre-war powers made catastrophic failures. In the case of WW2 you could argue that for Germany, but the other countries didn't seek that war out.
Japan invaded Manchuria in 1932, China in 1937. The government publicly announced plans to create the "Greater Asian Co-properity Sphere". US responded with progressively firmer warnings, culminating in an embargo of war making materials (oil, steel, etc). Japan planned for taking over the Dutch East Indies (to replace the oil) but assumed the US would intervene (questionable assumption) and bombed Pearl Harbor as a pre-emptive move. The assumption was that this would cow the US into negotiating a deal (ala Somolia in the 1990s, the US had the reputation of not being willing to sustain a fight in the 1930s).
To say that Japan wasn't seeking a war when it invaded 2 countries, bombed a third, then invaded the Phillipines and British, Dutch, French and Australian possesions, as well as bombing Australia itself doesn't fit the facts of the case.
California famously threw out some anti-death penalty judges in an election a few years back. California is also famous for having initiatives and counter-initiatives on the same ballot by two groups opposed to each other, and once in a while both will pass. Makes a mess for the courts to sort out.
You need to see an American ballot to understand the problem, apparently. You are operating in an environment where you vote for one, maybe two people. In the US:
1 for US president
1 for US Senator (in 2/3 of even presidential cycles - 6y terms)
1 for US Representative
1 for state govenor
1 for state senate (usually)
1 for state reprepresenative
(in my state, you also vote for secretary of state, attorney general, lt. general, etc - 6 positions other than govenor, iirc)
possibly some judges (depends on state, and voting process can differ)
certainly some local officials (mayor, county boards, special districts)
some state ballot initiatives (not all states)
some local initiatives (not all locales)
It would not be unusual to be voting on 20 or more items in a presidential election. I think 2008 ran to 29 items in my area.
Additionally, in the fire station where I vote, there are people that have different sets of local officials, so you get a different ballot depending on exactly where you live so you can vote for your set of officials (and local propositions).
In this context, i don't think different colored slips of paper is going to work, and counting by hand is going to be a serious pain in the ass. We aren't JUST voting for president.
For non-Americans and pre-voting Americans, look up a sample ballot for somewhere in the US and peruse it before suggesting simplistic fixes. Machine + paper trail seems to be the way to go.
Having a 17yo (physically maybe, mentally certainly) tell anyone they are dumb, sheep, idiot, insult o' the day because they like or don't like _____ really gets old on /., almost as bad as hearing made up facts and uninformed opinions. I don't care for reality tv, and therefore don't watch it. One of my best friends, a PhD in medievel lit who works in a technical field, happens to like COPS (particularly when they are using dogs!) but it doesn't make him an idiot in my judgement. Perhaps a few more of the "they're idiots" crowd should try to broaden their horizons. Work on understanding and appreciating rather than just being a counter-idiot.
Curiously, they don't have any "U.S.", "U.K.", "England", "America", or such in their Culture->International listings. Do they not differentiate (all anglo-phone culture is one)? or have they just not gotten around to it?
Overall, I found it very disappointing. The CAPS choices for links renders the thing unreadable, the content is so far from complete as to be useless. The opinionated nature of it is ok, by me, but the general organization is too quirky to be something I'd recommend. Stick to the topical wikis, Wikipedia, or TV Tropes (which recently underwent a mild bout of deletionism, needed IMHO).
I won't be bookmarking the site. :-(
p>I remember at least the "cannon = hill = sky high flying cannonball" part and I learned this in high school (at the latest). It kinda surprises me that no one on the entire crew (the performers or the technical folks) made this logical leap and thought "Hey, that hill there... you don't think it could...?"
New myth to test! and the finale - how high can you bounce a cannonball?
Yes, you care about the name, 'cause when it goes wrong, you need to be able to call back and refer to "I talked to Suzy" - it once in a while does help.
FYI, my experience with India has been mixed - just like my experience with Americans. The company is more important to any pattern of behavior than nationality, in my experience. CVS/Caremark has been far and away the worst phone-related experience of my life (many, many calls). They have been consistently wretched, and always American as far as I could detect (and I work regularly with Indian software engineers).
I recently upgraded the TV to an LG flat panel, and LG offered to knock $100 off the price for taking a blu-ray player too. The disk player is *meh*, but the internet connection (NetFlix, YouTube, variety of other stuff i don't use) is pretty cool. The interface could be better, and I'm always wanting a keyboard for YouTube searches, but it's a step in the right direction. NetFlix is addictive, but LG needs enhancements:
1) Contents of firmware revisions public
2) User editable interface
3) Drastic improvement to YouTube skin/app.
4) Access to broadcast TV - if only a passthrough of antenea
The LG box also generates periodic 1s blackouts with particular DVD/resolution combinations. If you select a lower res it goes away, but it's annoying to be changing the res if you want to watch a disk.
If he has the experience of 1000 hackers, it would still not involve a single woman.
No matter who's doing it, mixing units is bad practice. Putting X furlongs/fortnight next to Y furlongs/week is just asking for an incorrect interpretation.
How do I think the police should do their job? Well, I think they should base their inquiries on, you know, EVIDENCE. For one thing.
As they say, freedom isn't free. Sometimes something bad happens. That's the trade.
Um, how do they get this "EVIDENCE" you speak of, when they can't look at you, talk to you, smell you, hear you, or be in your vicinity without violating what you imagine to be your rights?
The step that comes after the handcuffs and back of the car is the trip to the station, where you will be fingerprinted with INK, photographed from three directions, and provide one phone call before sharing a cell with the other local idiots. Getting only a fingerprint scan is clearly less intrusive.
I think you meant to make the point that police shouldn't be able to fingerprint people they suspect of crimes. There a whole problem with that too - when DO police act on a suspicion? Only when they personally saw something go down? or can they believe "witnesses"? can they use some common sense? at some point, you have to trust your police, or not have police. The "let's not have police" thing works if you have a very small community that isn't externally accessible and everyone knows everyone. Otherwise, you're going to have various evildoers that need to be redirected/stopped/incarcerated/shot.
In this, transparency is ultimately your friend. Biometrics (knowing who the actors are) is part of the transparency equation. It's not the only piece, you need transparent policing as well. But positively identifying victims, witnesses, and perpetrators is pretty vital. When an incident occurs, everyone should know all the actors (police, lawyers, and judges included).
Further, are you proposing banning the creation of such devices? if not, they are going to show up in private hand, comparing to private databases. The battle to squash these devices and databases will look remarkably like anti-piracy battles today. My betting money is on the anti-privacy folks.
*** I propose Coyote's coralary to Godwin's law: the first person to beg the question by imposing their assumptions about privacy requirements on the argument via Ben Franklin's pro-gun ownership quote automatically loses the argument, ***
What you need is an app that mods your voice to fit the high priority profile automatically. Then you have competion between callers for who's app can best convice the call center computer that it's a real emergency.
The corporation (the homeowners association) filed a complaint with the goverment (the yay-happytime-good-guy regulators we need more of). The government decided to use it's regulatory power to investigate the corporation for doing a better job at analysis than the government had already done.
This is the Big Government Run States of America. Because government is always right. And more government is more right.
Thank you for a rational, thought-out, flame-free response to your detractor. You persuaded me - I think any pictures of a living human being are going to be limited in resolution by the fact that the target can't stop all motion. Pictures of dead humans are of limited diagnostic value... :-)
As a patient who's had to try to dig up old records, I'm 100% in favor of digitizing. It makes it reasonable for me to be sent (via e-mail) and carry around with my all my records. A current problem is not with the lifespan of the storage medium, but the patient not remembering where the procedure was done. Hard to find that 3yo X-ray, CAT scan, whatever if you can't remember even which facility it was done in. Electronic storage could fix that easily.
Also, some routine things are a real pain to find in paper records. Try looking for your vaccination records. If you're 14, no problem, its a single sheet of routine vaccinations with checkboxes. When you're 40, not so easy - you've been stuck periodically over the last 20 years with this or that depending on your exposures, nothing routine about it. Or at least that's my case (I'm ESRD, get stuck for whatever miscellenous thing the transplant clinic thinks I need, and I/we/they are always losing track of when the last Hep B vaccine, or tetnus, or whatever was). No reason, computers should be able to answer that kind of question instantly.
This is a question most /. readers are not in a position to evaluate very well. Expect lots of paranoia about the gubermint, with very little experience of trying to locate the right information, or dealing with massive quantities of records from 20y of being progressively sicker and sicker. Damn kids! but... it will happen to you someday, unless you die young from a massive sedentary-lifestyle-earned coronary.
Sorry, bad numbers.
~3000 dead in WTC. ~40,000 dead per year in motor vehicles, approximately 50% are "alcohol-involved" (so, maybe 40% alcohol-caused - doncha love government spin!). 40K/365 = ~110 per day. *.4 gives us perhaps 44 people per day killed by drunk drivers. Or, throw out the DUIs and we still have 3000 > 110, by an order of magnitude. You need a couple months for DUI to match WTC.
http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/PrevGuid/m0023655/m0023655.asp
Your point is still valid though, we are way to worked up over 3K dead than should be warranted. Little kids losing their daddys don't care about WTC or DUI, they are out a father either way. The excess attention lavished on WTC victims (in some cases at the expense of other victims) is a little disturbing.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2005/050113-iraq-deaths.htm
Further, combat costs more than base/garrison in that there are a lot of vehicle casualties that would not otherwise occur. We use some expensive vehicles, and soldiers are trained to be somewhat cavalier about expending/consuming material to preserve life and limb. In other words, they treat the equipment more roughly than when in garrison.
Beyond that, some garrisons are heavily subsidized by the host country. Specifically, Japan compensates the US for base costs, more than the differential between US and Japanese cost, IIRC. I think Korean forces are also operated on a slight "profit". You might not want to count that, since I don't think we've reduced our Japanese or Korean garrisons - I think the troops all came from European or American garrisons.
Lastly, you maybe need to add in costs of security for non-DOD operations. This is a bit questionable, since our previous position was to have NO embassy/diplomats in country, and now we do - we've expanded ops, you gotta expect addtional expense.
Great. So the Obama campaign will be publishing all of Joe and Barrak's e-mail in the next few days then. 'Cause, how can we know if they're conducting public business with those private accounts, unless we see it all??
The Big Rule of a democratic society is Equality Before the Law. Same rules for everyone. So if Palin's e-mail must all be public record, then the same goes for Biden and Obama, and Kennedy, and everyone else. And you.
1) ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) can and usually do have annual increases in interest rate, resulting in an increase in the monthly payment. Usually, ARMs are limited to 1% per annum, and have a cap interest rate around 5% higher than the starting rate. I was in an ARM when I first bought my house, so I have a little experience to draw from.
(aside - ARMs typically offer a lower interest/payment for the first 2y, making them attractive for entry-level buyers)
2) Adding 1% to your interest rate on a 30y mortgage will not cause your payment to triple. That's just really bad math.
3) Buying a house 3 years after declaring bankrupcy puts you, by definition, into the high-risk pool.
4) Anyone posting on Slashdot ought to have the savvy to read a mortgage, look through the payment schedule, calculate the worst case scenario, and not be suprised by anything that happens. Some people can claim stupidity, but that won't fly here.
5) Further, the OP is on his second mortgage - he's been through this before. So he really has no grounds for complaint. He made a financial bet - that housing prices would continue to rise, even though they were at all-time highs. The bet failed, in that housing prices are now declining. Smart money would have stayed in the apartment for 1 more year, he'd be $100K ahead or something like that (based on my area's housing prices). If only we could see into the future....
6) It is his fault his mortgage is increasing - he decided to buy, he picked the mortgage, he signed on the dotted line. I certainly didn't - so I don't want it blamed on me. "The Government", George Bush, Henry Paulson, et. al. did not sign on the dotted line. Part of life is trying to pick and choose what to do and when. In a free country, you can make your own choices, but you have to live with the consequences. Buying was his choice. He certainly could have chosen NOT to buy - home-ownership is not legally required of anyone. Renting is sometimes the better financial choice. Given housing prices at historic highs (relative to wages), not buying would have been a sound decision, and time has proven it would have been the prudent course.
It's not action of the US Congress that we are talking about here. It is the State of Nevada that is enacting a law to take effect in Nevada. Which, I would think is exactly how a State's Rights advocate would want things to be done. There is nothing Federal about it, unless you are hoping that requiring encryption would be a violation of 4th Amendment or something. Not sure how that would work, perhaps you could clarify.
Think about it in terms of what will change:
Before:
No law, no restiction, send anything you like to anyone, no consequence
Business doesn't think about it
After:
Mild, easily avoidable weak-to-the-point-of-meaningless law
Business thinks a little about it, cause, hey, you gotta manage your risks
So, no, it isn't a perfect fix. Those are rare. But it should hopefully improve the situation. Get enough incremental improvements and you may have an approximation of perfect... :-)
Lot of people swing back and forth depending on whether the TRPA is telling them what to do or someone else. If they're talking to you, it's Big Brother. If they're talking to someone else, they're Protecting the Environment.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxxii.html