However, big eyesoard drop property values and we consider our house an asset. They plan on moving out in a few years when they retire and obviously don't want their property value plummetting when the have to sell. It's really their one big asset.
A skilled lawyer should be able to make mincemeat out of the city for depriving you of property without due compensation: allowing the installation of something that can be reasonably forseen to adversely affect your assets is a big no no.
Furthermore, I hope your family demanded a reassessment of the assessed value of the property to get a reduction in property taxes: if the city puts up a tower that wipes out $100,000 of value from your property not only should you get the money but they should reduce your tax burden accordingly.
15 billion dollars is not even a percent of what illegal immigrants have contributed to the American economy by taking jobs that would have either not been taken, or would have required unreasonable wages to convince an american to take (10-12 dollars/hr is not reasonable for zero skill labor).
Spoken in the true spirit of failing to understand basic economics.
There is one, and ONLY one fair compensation for goods and services: what somebody is willing to pay and what somebody is willing to accept. There is no entitlement to any more, there is no requirement to charge any less. There is nothing else that is fair, nothing else that is economically efficient, nothing else that is just.
Is $12/hour excessive for picking apples? The only answer to this question is "depends - are people in Maine willing to pay more than $1.25 cents a pound for apples picked in Washington?"
A market free of restraints, corruption and monopolies has never failed to set a fair price and provide the most efficient and equitable distribution of any good or service.
By the way, why are those who argue that "illegals fill jobs at wages nobody else will take" invariably the same people who complain that the minimum wage isn't high enough?
if we keep the wage-earners inside the US, the residual income from the job will stay (for the most part) inside the US
Entirely untrue. Over $15 billion is sent home to Mexico from US migrants every year - Mexico's 2nd largest source of foreign revenue (behind oil). H1B visa employees virtually invariably have family remaining in the old country and large sums of cash will be wired back home.
There are more than enough skilled, talented tech people in the US to fill all the jobs. There are even enough to replace the slovenly incompetents who blow enough smoke to convince the non-techie managers that they need to stick around. It has been this way for years. Shortly after my position was shipped to Mexico City and I was politely encouraged to leave the building 's CEO gave a speech about how was in dire need of good, qualified tech people. I promptly sent a letter pointing out that I was willing to relocate anywhere in the world, work any shift and reminded them that I had a perfect employment record as a sub-contractor on an project, aced every aptitude/performance test they threw my way and quickly mastered every new system/process they created. My request was ignored, so I could only conclude that 's plea for capable, productive workers was just a smokescreen so they could argue for more H1B workers. Meanwhile dozens of contractors were shown the door while the ex-Xerox salesman who got a friend to make him project manager then promptly declared backups for the mission-critical database to be an unnecessary waste of resources got to pick which 80% were laid off, then collected his bonus for reducing labor expenses.
Does the mail carrier have the right to withold junk mail from your mailbox? Why, and why is spam different, if it is in fact different?
There are federal laws against non-delivery. There are, to my knowledge, no laws against delivery of spam.
The junkmailers enter into a contract with the USPS, whereby in exchange for money, the USPS promises to deliver mail to your address. Spammers have not entered into a contract with your ISP and have received no such promise or guarantee.
From dropoff box to your mailbox the USPS is one complete system. Your ISP is a privately owned entity which is under no specific obligation to receive or relay signals from everybody on the planet. Their servers, their bandwidth, their rules. You are free to set up a box to spew forth as much spam as you like, but ISP has -zero- obligation to let you do it through their network.
And while I hate spam, why don't I have the right to recieve it if I wanted it?
You have the right to find any ISP you wish that will do everything in their power to receive all the spam your heart desires. You have the right to tell your ISP that you don't like them filtering out your spam. You have the right to attempt to purchase said ISP and implement any policy you see fit.
A large part of my county is without DSL service of any kind, even though the county is always trying to present itself as some major hotbed of technology. Verizon is the -only- game in town for landlines and uses great skill in exercising their monopoly. You are lucky if you have one choice of cable for internet, and no wireless available.
There is obviously great demand for the service, yet Verizon simply refuses to provide the service - yet they have unlimited funds to fight local wifi access.
Personally, I would love to see the state utility commission establish a rule preventing telephone service rate hikes to any customer who does not have the option of DSL. The customer wouldn't need to subscribe to DSL, but if it isn't available in the area then the telephone charges (currently averaging over $50/month) should be capped forever. Well, until DSL is available.
Last weekend while at a local establishment I was approached by an individual conducting surveys for some tobacco company. The questions were answered via a touch-sensitive screen on his tablet PC-type device; the bit that struck me was that in order to take the survey (and collect the premium - a gen-u-ine zippo brand lighter) the participants were required to hand over their driver's license which was fed through a scanner on the tablet. I do not know if the scanner read the magnetic strip, but I could clearly see that they were capturing at the very least an image of the front of the license: name, address, photo, height, weight and similar data. For all I know it was capturing a scanned image of the back of the card as well, and very well could have been reading the magnetic stripe.
Every person approached willingly handed over their license (and I note that nobody was told ahead of time or even after the fact) what data was to be collected and/or how it was to be used. Perhaps the alkeyhall had something to do with it, or maybe just those cool lighters they were handing out. But nobody seemed to have any privacy concerns at all.
Here's a link to the reference : http://makeashorterlink.com/?F5CC216CA
"In Washington state, where we have a presence, we get police protection, we get fire protection. We send our kids to local schools. All that stuff happens for us. I don't see why... since we get no services from North Carolina, that they should be able to force us to collect taxes for them."
- Jeff Bezos, BookExpo America, 2000.
While the call for allowing this victim of government greed to vote in New York seems fair and reasonable on the surface, I have to disagree. I don't think that anybody should be allowed to vote for more than one US Senator or US Representative and the government that can't prevent undocumented aliens from voting certainly would be utterly incapable of preventing people from casting more than one federal ballot. Once it got out that to get more than one federal vote all you had to do was to pay a dime in income tax in another state you would suddenly see the voting rolls expand at a rate not seen since the dead learned how to pull levers in Chicago.
I can live just fine without Hasbro. The kids will get along, perfectly adjusted without Tonka, Playskool or Monopoly. I do not do business with heavy-handed companies such as this and have let them know. They will unquestionably lose more revenue by my spending elsewhere than by allowing this website to exist.
If only these companies had to prove economic loss before they could bring a case to trial.
We need to come up with some way, to make the politicians 'feel' each tax increase.
My (unsolicited) proposals:
No elected or appointed official may receive a salary/benefit increase within 3 years of any increase/addition of any tax, fee, service charge or similar.
The salaries and other compensation of all elected and appointed officials should be tied to the average take home pay of the citizenry. If they want more money for themselves then make sure that everybody else has more to spend.
reports had come back to me at my workplace that someone, somewhere was downloading gigabytes of data onto their PCs
My take was that he works in an office with a quantity of computers Q where Q is large and that the bandwidth reports showed a huge spike in traffic. 65Mb * Q = gigabytes of data, easily possible if you have 30-50 machines inhouse and they all picked up the malware.
These spammers were probably within their rights according to CAN SPAM. And by extention, their right to send spam has been infringed on.
But you are missing the point.
CAN SPAM is a legal construct. An ISP's AUP is a civil/contractural construct. There is no law that prohibits you from wearing blue jeans but if you sign a contract promising that you will not wear blue jeans you are held to that standard. If an ISP says you may not send bulk email and you agree to that restriction then you may not send bulk email. If an ISP says that you may not resell services to a company that sends bulk email and you agree to that restriction then you may not resell services to a company that sends bulk email. If an ISP says you may not visit/. and you agree to that restriction then you may not visit/. In all instances you are free to find an ISP with AUP terms that you find acceptable.
Boy people love [Ben Franklin's quote on liberty/security] don't they. You know just because someone said something witty doesn't make it the truth. He was a person, people make mistakes, isn't it possible that he was wrong
It is a philosophical quote: a political mindset. Marx had many quotes that are wrong in the frame of capitalism and Adam Smith generated many quotes that are contrary to a planned economy. Were they right or wrong? That depends on your own sociopolitical/economic concepts and goals.
For a truly free state the Ben Franklin was right on, but many (most?) people these days don't _want_ a truly free state: consider the millions of people who consider a prohibition of random searches and seizures to be a quaint idea that is little more than an idealistic suggestion. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln considered the Constitution to be a rough guideline that could be suspended at will by a single individual (refer to his elimination of habeas corpus). Was that justified and necessary? Those who were thrown in jail without reason would probably say no, but everybody else had to decide for themselves.
So are those willing to sacrifice liberty for security undeserving of either? Personally I say that Ben was right smack spot on. But then again I don't believe in entitlements.
Neat, but on older systems...
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 1
I know many systems that are still in use that won't be able to handle this. I also hate any drop down box that has more than 5-6 options so for my tastes it is a little long.
There is another reason for the time skew: a prime example is Desperate Housewives on ABC Sunday nights. Businesses can't buy enough ads on this smash hit show: ABC is adding a few extra minutes of commercials to the show (with five or six breaks in the hour instead of a more reasonable and typical four) and reduce the advertising minutes of whatever is trying to hitch a ride in the next hour. This way a two hour block of programming still lasts for two hours, but more of the more expensive minutes can be sold.
People will continue to change the channel away from a dumb show in favor of something they like even if the first program ends a minute or five beyond the:00 or:30 break, but they still were there during all xx+ minutes of ads (anybody time the ads in Housewives? I'm guessing 18-22 minutes.)
"The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible....
Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation -- and their ideas from suppression -- at the hand of an intolerant society."
While one can reasonably question anonymity as a "universal" right applicable in all times under all conditions, these times should be the exception rather than the rule with the burden falling on those who say that the restriction should apply rather than on those who say not.
India could never meet the USA's output due to its size
What does land area have to do with anything? Which is larger - Antarctica or Los Angeles? Which produces more pollution?
India has about 3 1/2 times the population of the United States and an economy that is experiencing sustained levels of high growth. If the Indian market has even half of the automobile market penetration rate as the United States they'll still be producing far more automotive smog than we are. When you have over a billion people as opposed to a paltry 300,000,000 you will have that many more factories, power plants, cars, trucks, busses and whatnot.
Great, and after a while you'll be able to wardrive around with a laptop and an antenna and see who has the really good narcotics in their cabinets. There will be more break-ins, since people will know where the 'good stuff' is located.
If you're that worried then unhook the battery and antenna attached to your bottle of v14g4r4 that will be required to broadcast the RFID through not only the medicine cabinet, but through the walls of your house.
RFID comes in both passive and active flavors and the passive kind that will unquestionably be used in pill bottles has a range that will - at best - be measured in inches. Not only that, but wardriving involves listening for signals that are already out there. To get a passive RFID read you need to transmit a signal - and cruising around the neighborhood broadcasting like that in the hopes that you can pick up the RFID tag on a bottle of p3ni5 pills that are still in the mailbox at the curb (which is as close as you'd have to be) is likely to attract a good deal of attention.
The problem is that not everything that involves the space program is done for (or will result in) financial gain. For example, consider the recent Mars rover missions. By all accounts, these missions have increased our knowledge of the Red Planet by several times more than all of the previous missions combined. Are these missions profitable? Is anybody making money off of them (aside from the private sector contractors that won the bids to do a lot of the work that went into them?) Probably not.
Ok, so we know more about Martian geology? So what? Does the information have any practical use? Will it further spaceflight? If no, why shouldn't this be part of R&D for commercial spaceflight operations?
But does that mean that such a mission is not profitable in other, less tangible ways? Aside from the more zealous libertarian types who only want to see their tax dollars spent on tanks or the extreme fundamentalist types who view exploration of the heavens as blasphemy, most people would probably agree that expanding our knowledge of the universe that we live in is a Good Thing (TM). It's profitable from an intellectual and scientific (if not economic) standpoint. And it's hardwired into our very being; curiosity (and the desire to satisfy that curiosity) is one of the things that makes us human.
We can spend billions of dollars on spacecraft that are built with a hodgepodge of metric/standard instructions and go careening off into oblivion, have parts installed upside down and create 300 million dollar thuds in the desert, or spacecraft that have bugs in the radio that scramble the useful data that would otherwise be spent. As a public organization, NASA - nor the federal government in general - simply does not have the mindset required to generate an honest return on the investment that is collected from the public under threat of jail. Or, if you resist, death. Does knowing that water really does flow downhill on Mars make you feel any better about such a massive grab - which is never enough? I know of a certain school in a certain urban area that attracts some of the brightest kids in the city. A science teacher spent over 10 years teaching 5th and 6th graders the wonders of the scientific world. While NASA execs spend public money on mahogany panels and private jets for their senior accountants and public relations wonks, this school has textbooks that refer to manned space stations in the future tense. Every single year the teacher discovers that at least 1/3 of the students don't know that eggs come from chickens. Most of them have never seen any kind of bird in person other than a pigeon, or any mammal other than human, squirrel, cat, dog, rat, mouse. But I suppose that listening to thunder on the moon of some distant planet (which, if not for a gifted engineer who probably had modern textbooks growing up, would never have been possible because testing the radio was deemed too expensive before launch) provides a much better return on the public investment.
If public funding of space missions is so important and the public is so accepting, then all funding of NASA and similar programs should be through voluntary contributions. When you file your 1040 there should be a checkbox to contribute above and beyond the absolutely minimum collected by the government. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on thing that generates no return is deplorable. -DEFECIT- spending of hundreds of billions that generate little return is such a horribly unacceptable concept that words fail me.
In other words, since robbery is a social problem we shouldn't have legislation against it?
Spam will never end as long as there will be fools who buy
By the same measure burglary will never end as long as there are fools who buy stolen merchandise.
Hogwash.
Spam is a criminal activity that involves theft, harassment, intrusion, invasion of privacy and, usually, fraud. What is needed is a combination of legislation (written by somebody who understands spam and is not paid by the DMA) and technology. The CANSPAM act was written after people knew that unsubscribe links could be coded in such a way to introduce hacks onto one's system, yet the idiots in Washington made these dangerous links mandatory. Legislation promising effective fines against companies that knowingly host images used in spamvertising or otherwise collect responses to repeated spam is only a start.
As for the technology, I've been waiting for a spam-alert icon to be submitted for MSIE/Opera/Firefox - when visiting a website hosted by a spam-friendly network that appears on RBLs a little icon should glow red, thus quickly allowing me to determine if I want to patronize that website - if there was an easy way for my browser to alert me to spam-friendly networks then I would definitely do my web shopping elsewhere.
Let's see... the Democrats have repeatedly invaded GOP campaign offices, breaking the arm of a campaign worker (October 7), terrorized a worker in Canton, Ohio by burglarizing an occupied building forcing the worker to barricade herself in an office for safety (October 10), burned swastikas into the lawn of a Bush supporter in Wisconsin (September 30), and fired a weapon into Bush campaign offices in Huntington, West Virginia (while campaign staff were watching Bush's acceptance speech), Knoxville, Tennessee (October 4).
In Milwaukee, Kerry supporters forcibly occupied a GOP campaign HQ and disrupted all operations using a bullhorn.
In Cleveland the NAACP's National Voter Fund and "ACT Ohio" are under investigation for voter registration fraud prompting the local prosecutor to state "We've seen voter fraud before, but never on this level. I grew up in Chicago and this looks like the politics of Mayor Daley in the '50s and '60s."
Slashdot Mirror
Go back and re-read Genesis. They were given -two- mandates, not one.
A skilled lawyer should be able to make mincemeat out of the city for depriving you of property without due compensation: allowing the installation of something that can be reasonably forseen to adversely affect your assets is a big no no.
Furthermore, I hope your family demanded a reassessment of the assessed value of the property to get a reduction in property taxes: if the city puts up a tower that wipes out $100,000 of value from your property not only should you get the money but they should reduce your tax burden accordingly.
Alternate ending: Luke's brother is Chewbacca...
Spoken in the true spirit of failing to understand basic economics.
There is one, and ONLY one fair compensation for goods and services: what somebody is willing to pay and what somebody is willing to accept. There is no entitlement to any more, there is no requirement to charge any less. There is nothing else that is fair, nothing else that is economically efficient, nothing else that is just.
Is $12/hour excessive for picking apples? The only answer to this question is "depends - are people in Maine willing to pay more than $1.25 cents a pound for apples picked in Washington?"
A market free of restraints, corruption and monopolies has never failed to set a fair price and provide the most efficient and equitable distribution of any good or service.
By the way, why are those who argue that "illegals fill jobs at wages nobody else will take" invariably the same people who complain that the minimum wage isn't high enough?
Entirely untrue. Over $15 billion is sent home to Mexico from US migrants every year - Mexico's 2nd largest source of foreign revenue (behind oil). H1B visa employees virtually invariably have family remaining in the old country and large sums of cash will be wired back home.
There are more than enough skilled, talented tech people in the US to fill all the jobs. There are even enough to replace the slovenly incompetents who blow enough smoke to convince the non-techie managers that they need to stick around. It has been this way for years. Shortly after my position was shipped to Mexico City and I was politely encouraged to leave the building 's CEO gave a speech about how was in dire need of good, qualified tech people. I promptly sent a letter pointing out that I was willing to relocate anywhere in the world, work any shift and reminded them that I had a perfect employment record as a sub-contractor on an project, aced every aptitude/performance test they threw my way and quickly mastered every new system/process they created. My request was ignored, so I could only conclude that 's plea for capable, productive workers was just a smokescreen so they could argue for more H1B workers. Meanwhile dozens of contractors were shown the door while the ex-Xerox salesman who got a friend to make him project manager then promptly declared backups for the mission-critical database to be an unnecessary waste of resources got to pick which 80% were laid off, then collected his bonus for reducing labor expenses.
There are federal laws against non-delivery. There are, to my knowledge, no laws against delivery of spam.
The junkmailers enter into a contract with the USPS, whereby in exchange for money, the USPS promises to deliver mail to your address. Spammers have not entered into a contract with your ISP and have received no such promise or guarantee.
From dropoff box to your mailbox the USPS is one complete system. Your ISP is a privately owned entity which is under no specific obligation to receive or relay signals from everybody on the planet. Their servers, their bandwidth, their rules. You are free to set up a box to spew forth as much spam as you like, but ISP has -zero- obligation to let you do it through their network.
You have the right to find any ISP you wish that will do everything in their power to receive all the spam your heart desires. You have the right to tell your ISP that you don't like them filtering out your spam. You have the right to attempt to purchase said ISP and implement any policy you see fit.
There is obviously great demand for the service, yet Verizon simply refuses to provide the service - yet they have unlimited funds to fight local wifi access.
Personally, I would love to see the state utility commission establish a rule preventing telephone service rate hikes to any customer who does not have the option of DSL. The customer wouldn't need to subscribe to DSL, but if it isn't available in the area then the telephone charges (currently averaging over $50/month) should be capped forever. Well, until DSL is available.
Last weekend while at a local establishment I was approached by an individual conducting surveys for some tobacco company. The questions were answered via a touch-sensitive screen on his tablet PC-type device; the bit that struck me was that in order to take the survey (and collect the premium - a gen-u-ine zippo brand lighter) the participants were required to hand over their driver's license which was fed through a scanner on the tablet. I do not know if the scanner read the magnetic strip, but I could clearly see that they were capturing at the very least an image of the front of the license: name, address, photo, height, weight and similar data. For all I know it was capturing a scanned image of the back of the card as well, and very well could have been reading the magnetic stripe.
Every person approached willingly handed over their license (and I note that nobody was told ahead of time or even after the fact) what data was to be collected and/or how it was to be used. Perhaps the alkeyhall had something to do with it, or maybe just those cool lighters they were handing out. But nobody seemed to have any privacy concerns at all.
- Jeff Bezos, BookExpo America, 2000.
While the call for allowing this victim of government greed to vote in New York seems fair and reasonable on the surface, I have to disagree. I don't think that anybody should be allowed to vote for more than one US Senator or US Representative and the government that can't prevent undocumented aliens from voting certainly would be utterly incapable of preventing people from casting more than one federal ballot. Once it got out that to get more than one federal vote all you had to do was to pay a dime in income tax in another state you would suddenly see the voting rolls expand at a rate not seen since the dead learned how to pull levers in Chicago.
If only these companies had to prove economic loss before they could bring a case to trial.
My (unsolicited) proposals:
No elected or appointed official may receive a salary/benefit increase within 3 years of any increase/addition of any tax, fee, service charge or similar.
The salaries and other compensation of all elected and appointed officials should be tied to the average take home pay of the citizenry. If they want more money for themselves then make sure that everybody else has more to spend.
My take was that he works in an office with a quantity of computers Q where Q is large and that the bandwidth reports showed a huge spike in traffic. 65Mb * Q = gigabytes of data, easily possible if you have 30-50 machines inhouse and they all picked up the malware.
The shopkeep refused to come up with the free ice cream because "the coupons weren't printed in color".
But you are missing the point.
CAN SPAM is a legal construct. An ISP's AUP is a civil/contractural construct. There is no law that prohibits you from wearing blue jeans but if you sign a contract promising that you will not wear blue jeans you are held to that standard. If an ISP says you may not send bulk email and you agree to that restriction then you may not send bulk email. If an ISP says that you may not resell services to a company that sends bulk email and you agree to that restriction then you may not resell services to a company that sends bulk email. If an ISP says you may not visit /. and you agree to that restriction then you may not visit /. In all instances you are free to find an ISP with AUP terms that you find acceptable.
Please point out where CAN SPAM becomes relevant.
It is a philosophical quote: a political mindset. Marx had many quotes that are wrong in the frame of capitalism and Adam Smith generated many quotes that are contrary to a planned economy. Were they right or wrong? That depends on your own sociopolitical/economic concepts and goals.
For a truly free state the Ben Franklin was right on, but many (most?) people these days don't _want_ a truly free state: consider the millions of people who consider a prohibition of random searches and seizures to be a quaint idea that is little more than an idealistic suggestion. No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln considered the Constitution to be a rough guideline that could be suspended at will by a single individual (refer to his elimination of habeas corpus). Was that justified and necessary? Those who were thrown in jail without reason would probably say no, but everybody else had to decide for themselves.
So are those willing to sacrifice liberty for security undeserving of either? Personally I say that Ben was right smack spot on. But then again I don't believe in entitlements.
I know many systems that are still in use that won't be able to handle this. I also hate any drop down box that has more than 5-6 options so for my tastes it is a little long.
IANAL, but don't legitimate contracts require a "meeting of the minds"?
People will continue to change the channel away from a dumb show in favor of something they like even if the first program ends a minute or five beyond the :00 or :30 break, but they still were there during all xx+ minutes of ads (anybody time the ads in Housewives? I'm guessing 18-22 minutes.)
Please refer to:
TALLEY v. CALIFORNIA, 362 U.S. 60 (1960)
McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n (93-986), 514 U.S. 334 (1995)
Very relevant is the quote from McIntyre:
While one can reasonably question anonymity as a "universal" right applicable in all times under all conditions, these times should be the exception rather than the rule with the burden falling on those who say that the restriction should apply rather than on those who say not.
What does land area have to do with anything? Which is larger - Antarctica or Los Angeles? Which produces more pollution?
India has about 3 1/2 times the population of the United States and an economy that is experiencing sustained levels of high growth. If the Indian market has even half of the automobile market penetration rate as the United States they'll still be producing far more automotive smog than we are. When you have over a billion people as opposed to a paltry 300,000,000 you will have that many more factories, power plants, cars, trucks, busses and whatnot.
If you're that worried then unhook the battery and antenna attached to your bottle of v14g4r4 that will be required to broadcast the RFID through not only the medicine cabinet, but through the walls of your house.
RFID comes in both passive and active flavors and the passive kind that will unquestionably be used in pill bottles has a range that will - at best - be measured in inches. Not only that, but wardriving involves listening for signals that are already out there. To get a passive RFID read you need to transmit a signal - and cruising around the neighborhood broadcasting like that in the hopes that you can pick up the RFID tag on a bottle of p3ni5 pills that are still in the mailbox at the curb (which is as close as you'd have to be) is likely to attract a good deal of attention.
Ok, so we know more about Martian geology? So what? Does the information have any practical use? Will it further spaceflight? If no, why shouldn't this be part of R&D for commercial spaceflight operations?
Yes, I'm a little grumpy about NASA - the organization that spent and failed to at the very least fire those directly responsible for ignoring the warnings of engineers and causing the destruction of two shuttles and the deaths of several astronauts. But the question goes beyond my petty grumpiness.
We can spend billions of dollars on spacecraft that are built with a hodgepodge of metric/standard instructions and go careening off into oblivion, have parts installed upside down and create 300 million dollar thuds in the desert, or spacecraft that have bugs in the radio that scramble the useful data that would otherwise be spent. As a public organization, NASA - nor the federal government in general - simply does not have the mindset required to generate an honest return on the investment that is collected from the public under threat of jail. Or, if you resist, death. Does knowing that water really does flow downhill on Mars make you feel any better about such a massive grab - which is never enough? I know of a certain school in a certain urban area that attracts some of the brightest kids in the city. A science teacher spent over 10 years teaching 5th and 6th graders the wonders of the scientific world. While NASA execs spend public money on mahogany panels and private jets for their senior accountants and public relations wonks, this school has textbooks that refer to manned space stations in the future tense. Every single year the teacher discovers that at least 1/3 of the students don't know that eggs come from chickens. Most of them have never seen any kind of bird in person other than a pigeon, or any mammal other than human, squirrel, cat, dog, rat, mouse. But I suppose that listening to thunder on the moon of some distant planet (which, if not for a gifted engineer who probably had modern textbooks growing up, would never have been possible because testing the radio was deemed too expensive before launch) provides a much better return on the public investment.
If public funding of space missions is so important and the public is so accepting, then all funding of NASA and similar programs should be through voluntary contributions. When you file your 1040 there should be a checkbox to contribute above and beyond the absolutely minimum collected by the government. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on thing that generates no return is deplorable. -DEFECIT- spending of hundreds of billions that generate little return is such a horribly unacceptable concept that words fail me.
Yes, there are commercial products that r
In other words, since robbery is a social problem we shouldn't have legislation against it?
By the same measure burglary will never end as long as there are fools who buy stolen merchandise.
Hogwash.
Spam is a criminal activity that involves theft, harassment, intrusion, invasion of privacy and, usually, fraud. What is needed is a combination of legislation (written by somebody who understands spam and is not paid by the DMA) and technology. The CANSPAM act was written after people knew that unsubscribe links could be coded in such a way to introduce hacks onto one's system, yet the idiots in Washington made these dangerous links mandatory. Legislation promising effective fines against companies that knowingly host images used in spamvertising or otherwise collect responses to repeated spam is only a start.
As for the technology, I've been waiting for a spam-alert icon to be submitted for MSIE/Opera/Firefox - when visiting a website hosted by a spam-friendly network that appears on RBLs a little icon should glow red, thus quickly allowing me to determine if I want to patronize that website - if there was an easy way for my browser to alert me to spam-friendly networks then I would definitely do my web shopping elsewhere.
In Milwaukee, Kerry supporters forcibly occupied a GOP campaign HQ and disrupted all operations using a bullhorn.
In Cleveland the NAACP's National Voter Fund and "ACT Ohio" are under investigation for voter registration fraud prompting the local prosecutor to state "We've seen voter fraud before, but never on this level. I grew up in Chicago and this looks like the politics of Mayor Daley in the '50s and '60s."
Pro-democrat voter registration fraud in Racine, WI
Michigan
Florida
Denver and Minnesota are also locations of suspected fraud.
Want more?