God, I'll bet you think he actually had something to do with writing any of the songs he recorded.
Why you got modded up, I don't know. I explicitly said:
I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed
So, what I think is that I don't know what, if anything, he had to do with writing the songs he performed. Mind you, if he had nothing to do with the writing, I'm not sure why we'd be throwing mud at him for the lack of meaning in it... Meaning comes from the songwriter, performance comes from the singer/band. Give it up. There's plenty to complain about without making stuff up.
How 'bout some empathy for the children he conned into sex acts?
Proof or retract.
How 'bout some disgust for the jaded rich who don't see anyone else as valid and care only for their own pleasure?
I see MJ completely differently. Thrown into the spotlight at 5 years old, he pretty much stopped maturing at that point. His fame (and, later, infamy) and riches meant that he always had "handlers" around to take care of things for him. Without having to do things for himself, he could never mature. He wasn't jaded rich. He was immature rich, and probably not by his own doing.
How 'bout some joy that children are safer by one pedophile now?
Assuming he was one. I kind of doubt it.
How 'bout the realization that singing meaningless crap in a falsetto while dancing self indulgently isn't talent no matter what the industry tells you?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Based on the sales of said meaningless crap, I'd have to conclude that you're wrong. I just happen to (mostly) agree with you. (Not all of it was meaningless, but I digress - I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed.)
Power consumption? The amount of energy of having dozens of "smaller" machines, each with their separate power supplies, hard disks, RAM, etc., take, vs a similarly powerful mainframe is going to be significant.
Load balancing. I know, you said "properly load [...] balanced." But how much effort is it to properly load-balance your server farm? What if one system suddenly needs two more cores than it has? If it's "properly written" it may be able to send its work to another machine. But that means you need to maintain the software on all machines (maybe you only wanted to have it on one machine in the farm to ease sysadmin maintenance). And the cost of that software probably goes way up as they figure out how to properly partition across machines (which is a whole other beast vs merely partitioning across threads in one machines). In the mainframe world, everything is virtual, including CPUs. Need more CPU power on one machine? It'll rebalance to take that away from machines that may not be using all of their allotted CPUs. Same goes for RAM. (IIRC, you can also turn this off to give hard limits on CPU/RAM usage.)
Hot swapping, upgrading, etc. No need to take down a virtual machine just because you're replacing its CPU or RAM. Rebalancing from adding a new CPU (or set of CPUs - I don't think they come singly) is also easier. You can create a new virtual machine to use the CPU(s) or simply put it in the pool for all VMs to use. A CPU goes bad? The mainframe can take it offline without actually taking down the VM. If a server in your server farm goes down, it's just down.
I think IBM's big pushes for their mainframes come from: a) power consumption ("go green" - to hell with that, look at the money I'm saving on my electricity bills!), b) TCO (admins may cost more, but you need far fewer of them to administer a mainframe than a cluster of servers (whether AIX, Linux, HP, Solaris, or whatever), c) ease of upgrade (usually, mainframes come with a bunch of CPUs turned off and IBM doesn't charge you for them - but when you need to grow, whip out the credit card and IBM will tell you how to enable them - same-day upgrade, and you're already using the extra power - no getting a rack unit out of a box, finding space for it, putting it in, fighting with wiring, installing your software, etc., to take a week from requirement to deployment), and d) space savings ("the most expensive server you buy is the one that causes you to build a new data center" - mainframes pack more power into less space, meaning fewer physical datacenters, better climate control, etc.).
Just to be fair, I have a similar problem with my two-year-old JVC Everio 30GB HDD camera. Except that it won't accept the original battery, either. And JVC thinks it's not their problem.
Well, duh, the reporters aren't reporting to Iran. They're showing their stories to Americans, and viewers like to know how world events affect them. Oh, great, this affects Iraqis. Yawn. Not of interest to 95%+ of American viewers. Should the American journalists talk about how this affects Koreans? Do you think Al-Jazeera(sp) talks about how this affects Canadians?
Jon Stewart makes some interesting comedy. But that doesn't make him politically astute.
Passive would have been not posting anything about the second amendment on their site. By using the word "actively", I'm drawing attention to the fact that they had to go out of their way to post it, rather than the default of not talking about it at all.
If you'd rather, I could point to their about page where they say, "The ACLU is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country." (emphasis mine) If they're not actually defending individual rights and liberties that the Constitution guarantees, then they are tricking the public at large into believing that. The about page continues to say that this "includes" certain rights, if they were only intending to defend those ones, you'd think they'd say that: "We currently focus on the following rights" instead of "These rights include". Under normal circumstances, say if this were the Shriners or something, I'd probably cut them some slack on the loose English. But given that the same page says, "Nearly 200 ACLU staff attorneys and thousands of volunteer attorneys handle countless civil liberties cases every year," I'd have thought at least one of those lawyers could have proof read the about page on their site. In fact, assuming that at least one of those lawyers took the time to read it and is competent seems like a reasonable assumption, which would imply that this was not intended to be an exhaustive list.
Actually, if they said, "We don't do second amendment stuff" I'd probably be okay with it. I can't speak for the OP, of course. As others have said, you need to pick your battles, and even with "[n]early 200 ACLU staff attorneys and thousands of volunteer attorneys" one can't expect them to take on every case where civil liberty is threatened. That's crazy. Unfortunate, but crazy. Of course, the pro-gun groups would claim that it's the second amendment that guarantees the rest... start with keeping rebellion as an option, and suddenly lots of others start falling into line.
As for their name, you apparently can read, but you can't comprehend. Their name was a convenient way to point out their double-standard. Just two minutes reading their website (the "About" page sounds reasonable!) and you'd see that they make the claim all on their own, nevermind the name.
(The NRA, aptly named at the beginning, has grown from its beginnings, or so its about page seems to imply, from just rifles through to education and training, and firearms in general.)
You're right, of course. You probably don't want to see the first draft of my email, "police state" was among the tamer aspects.
I had to delete a number of four-letter words to make it at least palatable and avoid having the RCMP dispatched to my house. Words like "accounatability" and "transparency." I know that to those with a strict, literalist sense of mathematics, those don't seem like four-letter words, but, trust me, on Government Hill, they are considered four-letter words.
If the ACLU's position was strictly, "We feel there already is a capable organisation defending this right, please see the NRA" then I'm sure the OP wouldn't have an objection. It's when they actively post a non-liberty response to the amendment that the OP is complaining about. They've chose a very restrictive view of this liberty ("restrictive" == "opposite of liberty"), and that's what the OP is complaining about.
Further, they even post that, "in [their] view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue." The OP contends that this actually is a civil liberties issue, so takes offense that the ACLU would narrowly define civil liberties to just the ones they like - which seems to be exactly the opposite of what they purport to defend. It's the American Civil Liberties Union, damnit, not the American Civil Liberties That We Like Union.
First I've heard of "11 million" - no offense, but taking the word of someone on the internet, especially one who posts anonymously, isn't something I'm going to do uncorroborated. Anyway, that's all beside the point, as I still feel that Schindler's List was enhanced by the portrayal of the conditions of those who were interned. (The Pianist, though, had a completely different focus, and worked very well without nudity or gore, because, well, it didn't focus on the abject horrors, but merely survival.)
I found Watchmen to be a poor movie. I get Dr Manhattan's alleged rising "above" societal norms. But I don't buy it. If he was so far beyond humanity, why work toward free, limitless power? Why leave the planet and suffer humanity to survive rather than ignore us (since we can't do anything to him anyway) and stay wherever the hell he damned well wants? ("What do you say to a tiger who wants to live in your house? Here's the keys!") Apparently, he has some compassion toward humanity, which very well could have allowed him to respect conventions and those who saw him by wearing clothing. After all, he wore clothes to a funeral, so he sees a point to it. All that's left is "shock value" which increases (they hope) draw to the theatre. Crass commercialism. Not art. And definitely not a story.
What I think we need is censorship on crass commercialism, not necessarily nudity or violence. Don't sell tits and gore, sell your story. Too often, tits, gore, or both are added gratuitously simply to get that R rating to entice (adult, presumably) viewers. Or just gore to get a 14A/M rating to entice teens. Or whatever. Usually, it's not needed, and the story could be told just as effectively without it.
There are exceptions, of course, and here comes the fine line. To me, it's gratuitous unless the story would be impacted to the viewer (yeah, the producers/directors think it impacts the story, but let's face it, most of us miss those subtleties). As an example of both gore and tits that was not gratuitous would be Schindler's List - a story about a real occurrence where the abject horror and humiliation suffered by those interned (nearly all Jewish) was an integral part of the salvation story. There was no salvation without something to be saved from, and so it was needed, IMO. OTOH, I'm of the opinion, having not really liked the movie, that Eyes Wide Shut was largely an excuse to put a bunch of tits on the screen. With a bit more imagination, I think the story of tempation and rejection/falling could have been told in other ways without resorting to the base sexual lusts that they did. It's an interesting story, I just think they took the easy way out.
I've sent an email to my MP. I hope all other Canadian/.ers do likewise. Here is what I wrote. Be sure to add your name and full address to yours, and cc the Honorable Peter Van Loan (vanlop@parl.gc.ca) as well. Feel free to modify to suit your own political beliefs. (Not that you need my permission for that, just being honest and transparent.) If you don't have their email address, you might want to look that up.
The point of laws regarding privacy, and court-sanctioned warrants overriding
privacy, is not to make it easier for the police to solve crimes, but to weigh
carefully the right to privacy on one hand and the reasonable evidence
pointing to a particular suspect requiring further information on the other.
The police, being human beings, can easily get emotionally attached to the
pursuit of an individual, and invade what could easily turn out to be an
innocent person's privacy. The whole point of a warrant being issued by a
judge is for oversight to ensure that the police aren't cutting corners
prior to actually invading someone's privacy.
By removing this level of oversight, I feel we are going in the wrong
direction on personal liberties and freedoms, and are sliding towards a police
state.
It's not that I have an issue with ISPs keeping logs, the same way
corporations are supposed to keep account of their transactions in case of an
audit. But it requires some oversight to keep the police from accessing just
anyone's account without reasonable evidence otherwise. As long as the logs
are protected by similar privacy laws that any other aspect of citizens'
private lives, and only released under proper court warrants, the police
continue to have the tools they need to pursue internet crimes while
continuing to protect citizens' privacy, thereby protecting liberties and
freedoms we all enjoy.
I hope you will incorporate proper privacy protections in this bill, requiring
the police to act the same as they do with any other aspect of our private
lives.
If you're only going to pay rates that only idiots would think are good pay, I don't think a bad application form is going to change things much.
Translation: you gotta pay your public employees competitively to have any hope at attracting the intelligent and hardworking into public service. Stop complaining when they get deserved pay raises. Of course this is coming out of your pocketbook via taxes. Complain about how the taxes are spent, sure, but as long as you're getting the service, you want good people providing it, so the service is actually worth something. You don't want to hire the town idiot to do urban planning, or you end up with haphazard, arbitrary, and over-sized municipalities. That's because the smart ones got better-paying jobs elsewhere - usually in the private sector.
Great. Now, if only there were enough cops to "randomly" pass by every potential crime to avert every assault, mugging, rape, murder, theft, or SEC violation.
Personally, I prefer better deterrents, such as Ole Bessie. I don't go anywhere without her. (She has a black belt in Kung Fu.)
Seriously, though, cops are there not to avoid crime, but to deter it after-the-fact by catching and punishing the criminals. There just aren't enough cops available to stop crime before or during its progress in any way approaching reliably. And then they take some random schmo off the street, placing him (usually a him) in a small room for 18 hours of straight questioning (how the hell is that not torture, judges?), lying to him about what they know or what others have told them, and then throw him in jail.
Sorry, I have a thing about cops. And it's not trust.
It's a dangerous thing to contemplate "fixing" politics. You have to be careful that the fix results in a full net benefit over the current system. And I fully realise that the current system is as corrupt as hades.
For starters, you need to try to imagine what type of people you're going to attract to public service with your change. Is it the people you want to have running the country, or will it further exclude them, leaving public service only for the power hungry?
I ask this of people who oppose politicians (whether municipal, state/provincial, or federal) getting raises. Or tax-free allowances (which, let's face it, merely means they're getting paid more than it looks). If you pay your councillor such a small pittance than only the independently wealthy or the power-hungry will pursue it, how do you expect to attract those who are well-educated and would do a good job? Those people would rather work for the private sector (whether big corps, startups, or entrepreneurially) where they could make double or triple the money, and not have to reapply for their jobs (often at great personal expense, at least for municipal politicians) every few years (every year or so, it seems, for federal politicians in Canada *sigh*). If, and I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, we paid our politicians at a rate that the caliber of leader we wanted would get if they were in the private sector, do we not think we'd get more good candidates "applying" for the job? Sure, we'd get more power-hungry people, too, but we'd at least have SOME decent candidates, possibly. Whining about their pay rate right now, when we also complain about how stupid our representatives are, seems counterproductive to me.
Similarly, what type of people would we get with term limits on house/senate members? We'd get a lot more people who don't know what they're doing, that much is obvious. That would definitely impede activity in government - though if you're of the opinion that this is a good thing, I'm not going to argue with you (not really my topic here anyway). But, beyond that, who would you get? You'd only get people who think that the pay and the benefits (POWER!) are worth giving up your career for that term limit (everyone assumes they'll not only win, but be re-elected as many times as the law allows). Let's say it's 12 years. Would you give up your career for 12 years to "serve" in government? Would the type of smart, wise person who you'd want to represent you in government be willing to give up his/her career for 12 years? Would they want to take the risk of getting back into their old career? What types of careers would be easy to give up for 12 years and re-enter? Is that the type of person you want in government? (I'd think lawyers would be one such career, as might MBA's... other careers, like IT or research or Engineers or Medical Doctors or the such might not be so easy to get back to, especially when recertification is required.) Think about it. Who would you get? Is that an improvement? If it's merely a wash, it's not worth the turmoil to make the change. I suspect it'd be worse than what we have now. Don't get me wrong - on the face, I like the idea of limiting politicians' careers. But I'm not sure that such a limit would improve government, or make the corruption worse.
What I don't get is why anyone would go for Windows 7 when they already have Windows 98. I mean, seriously. We all know that 98 > 7, so Windows 98 must be way better than Windows 7, right?
Just because it's fantasy (and it is) doesn't mean that's not the best/cheapest way to quality. The cost of fixing something in QA vs the original development is significant. Depending on who you believe (which study), it can be 2-10 times the cost. We'll be pessimistic(ish) and say 3x. That's basically enough to pay for pair programming, actually, which probably would be as cost-effective at producing quality as having the QA team. A bit of usability testing is about all that's left that developers are no good at (you've spent months focused on the problem, of COURSE it looks intuitive to you!).
Not that we do this at $work, of course. That's crazy talk.
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God, I'll bet you think he actually had something to do with writing any of the songs he recorded.
Why you got modded up, I don't know. I explicitly said:
I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed
So, what I think is that I don't know what, if anything, he had to do with writing the songs he performed. Mind you, if he had nothing to do with the writing, I'm not sure why we'd be throwing mud at him for the lack of meaning in it... Meaning comes from the songwriter, performance comes from the singer/band. Give it up. There's plenty to complain about without making stuff up.
How 'bout some empathy for the children he conned into sex acts?
Proof or retract.
How 'bout some disgust for the jaded rich who don't see anyone else as valid and care only for their own pleasure?
I see MJ completely differently. Thrown into the spotlight at 5 years old, he pretty much stopped maturing at that point. His fame (and, later, infamy) and riches meant that he always had "handlers" around to take care of things for him. Without having to do things for himself, he could never mature. He wasn't jaded rich. He was immature rich, and probably not by his own doing.
How 'bout some joy that children are safer by one pedophile now?
Assuming he was one. I kind of doubt it.
How 'bout the realization that singing meaningless crap in a falsetto while dancing self indulgently isn't talent no matter what the industry tells you?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Based on the sales of said meaningless crap, I'd have to conclude that you're wrong. I just happen to (mostly) agree with you. (Not all of it was meaningless, but I digress - I'm not sure what he wrote vs merely sang/performed.)
Power consumption? The amount of energy of having dozens of "smaller" machines, each with their separate power supplies, hard disks, RAM, etc., take, vs a similarly powerful mainframe is going to be significant.
Load balancing. I know, you said "properly load [...] balanced." But how much effort is it to properly load-balance your server farm? What if one system suddenly needs two more cores than it has? If it's "properly written" it may be able to send its work to another machine. But that means you need to maintain the software on all machines (maybe you only wanted to have it on one machine in the farm to ease sysadmin maintenance). And the cost of that software probably goes way up as they figure out how to properly partition across machines (which is a whole other beast vs merely partitioning across threads in one machines). In the mainframe world, everything is virtual, including CPUs. Need more CPU power on one machine? It'll rebalance to take that away from machines that may not be using all of their allotted CPUs. Same goes for RAM. (IIRC, you can also turn this off to give hard limits on CPU/RAM usage.)
Hot swapping, upgrading, etc. No need to take down a virtual machine just because you're replacing its CPU or RAM. Rebalancing from adding a new CPU (or set of CPUs - I don't think they come singly) is also easier. You can create a new virtual machine to use the CPU(s) or simply put it in the pool for all VMs to use. A CPU goes bad? The mainframe can take it offline without actually taking down the VM. If a server in your server farm goes down, it's just down.
I think IBM's big pushes for their mainframes come from: a) power consumption ("go green" - to hell with that, look at the money I'm saving on my electricity bills!), b) TCO (admins may cost more, but you need far fewer of them to administer a mainframe than a cluster of servers (whether AIX, Linux, HP, Solaris, or whatever), c) ease of upgrade (usually, mainframes come with a bunch of CPUs turned off and IBM doesn't charge you for them - but when you need to grow, whip out the credit card and IBM will tell you how to enable them - same-day upgrade, and you're already using the extra power - no getting a rack unit out of a box, finding space for it, putting it in, fighting with wiring, installing your software, etc., to take a week from requirement to deployment), and d) space savings ("the most expensive server you buy is the one that causes you to build a new data center" - mainframes pack more power into less space, meaning fewer physical datacenters, better climate control, etc.).
Don't worry. In two or three years, you'll be saying the same about now.
Just to be fair, I have a similar problem with my two-year-old JVC Everio 30GB HDD camera. Except that it won't accept the original battery, either. And JVC thinks it's not their problem.
Well, duh, the reporters aren't reporting to Iran. They're showing their stories to Americans, and viewers like to know how world events affect them. Oh, great, this affects Iraqis. Yawn. Not of interest to 95%+ of American viewers. Should the American journalists talk about how this affects Koreans? Do you think Al-Jazeera(sp) talks about how this affects Canadians?
Jon Stewart makes some interesting comedy. But that doesn't make him politically astute.
*sigh* Where is my +1, Deluded mod anyway?
why write good dialogue when it it so much easier to blow something up?
You've been watching MythBusters, haven't you. :-)
Passive would have been not posting anything about the second amendment on their site. By using the word "actively", I'm drawing attention to the fact that they had to go out of their way to post it, rather than the default of not talking about it at all.
If you'd rather, I could point to their about page where they say, "The ACLU is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country." (emphasis mine) If they're not actually defending individual rights and liberties that the Constitution guarantees, then they are tricking the public at large into believing that. The about page continues to say that this "includes" certain rights, if they were only intending to defend those ones, you'd think they'd say that: "We currently focus on the following rights" instead of "These rights include". Under normal circumstances, say if this were the Shriners or something, I'd probably cut them some slack on the loose English. But given that the same page says, "Nearly 200 ACLU staff attorneys and thousands of volunteer attorneys handle countless civil liberties cases every year," I'd have thought at least one of those lawyers could have proof read the about page on their site. In fact, assuming that at least one of those lawyers took the time to read it and is competent seems like a reasonable assumption, which would imply that this was not intended to be an exhaustive list.
Actually, if they said, "We don't do second amendment stuff" I'd probably be okay with it. I can't speak for the OP, of course. As others have said, you need to pick your battles, and even with "[n]early 200 ACLU staff attorneys and thousands of volunteer attorneys" one can't expect them to take on every case where civil liberty is threatened. That's crazy. Unfortunate, but crazy. Of course, the pro-gun groups would claim that it's the second amendment that guarantees the rest... start with keeping rebellion as an option, and suddenly lots of others start falling into line.
As for their name, you apparently can read, but you can't comprehend. Their name was a convenient way to point out their double-standard. Just two minutes reading their website (the "About" page sounds reasonable!) and you'd see that they make the claim all on their own, nevermind the name.
(The NRA, aptly named at the beginning, has grown from its beginnings, or so its about page seems to imply, from just rifles through to education and training, and firearms in general.)
You're right, of course. You probably don't want to see the first draft of my email, "police state" was among the tamer aspects.
I had to delete a number of four-letter words to make it at least palatable and avoid having the RCMP dispatched to my house. Words like "accounatability" and "transparency." I know that to those with a strict, literalist sense of mathematics, those don't seem like four-letter words, but, trust me, on Government Hill, they are considered four-letter words.
Um, why not just ask the former-intern's IBM manager for permission? Or is it that IBM doesn't open-source anything?
If the ACLU's position was strictly, "We feel there already is a capable organisation defending this right, please see the NRA" then I'm sure the OP wouldn't have an objection. It's when they actively post a non-liberty response to the amendment that the OP is complaining about. They've chose a very restrictive view of this liberty ("restrictive" == "opposite of liberty"), and that's what the OP is complaining about.
Further, they even post that, "in [their] view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue." The OP contends that this actually is a civil liberties issue, so takes offense that the ACLU would narrowly define civil liberties to just the ones they like - which seems to be exactly the opposite of what they purport to defend. It's the American Civil Liberties Union, damnit, not the American Civil Liberties That We Like Union.
At least, that's what I think the OP meant.
Precious metal is just a bitch to get change for at my local convenience store...
First I've heard of "11 million" - no offense, but taking the word of someone on the internet, especially one who posts anonymously, isn't something I'm going to do uncorroborated. Anyway, that's all beside the point, as I still feel that Schindler's List was enhanced by the portrayal of the conditions of those who were interned. (The Pianist, though, had a completely different focus, and worked very well without nudity or gore, because, well, it didn't focus on the abject horrors, but merely survival.)
I found Watchmen to be a poor movie. I get Dr Manhattan's alleged rising "above" societal norms. But I don't buy it. If he was so far beyond humanity, why work toward free, limitless power? Why leave the planet and suffer humanity to survive rather than ignore us (since we can't do anything to him anyway) and stay wherever the hell he damned well wants? ("What do you say to a tiger who wants to live in your house? Here's the keys!") Apparently, he has some compassion toward humanity, which very well could have allowed him to respect conventions and those who saw him by wearing clothing. After all, he wore clothes to a funeral, so he sees a point to it. All that's left is "shock value" which increases (they hope) draw to the theatre. Crass commercialism. Not art. And definitely not a story.
What I think we need is censorship on crass commercialism, not necessarily nudity or violence. Don't sell tits and gore, sell your story. Too often, tits, gore, or both are added gratuitously simply to get that R rating to entice (adult, presumably) viewers. Or just gore to get a 14A/M rating to entice teens. Or whatever. Usually, it's not needed, and the story could be told just as effectively without it.
There are exceptions, of course, and here comes the fine line. To me, it's gratuitous unless the story would be impacted to the viewer (yeah, the producers/directors think it impacts the story, but let's face it, most of us miss those subtleties). As an example of both gore and tits that was not gratuitous would be Schindler's List - a story about a real occurrence where the abject horror and humiliation suffered by those interned (nearly all Jewish) was an integral part of the salvation story. There was no salvation without something to be saved from, and so it was needed, IMO. OTOH, I'm of the opinion, having not really liked the movie, that Eyes Wide Shut was largely an excuse to put a bunch of tits on the screen. With a bit more imagination, I think the story of tempation and rejection/falling could have been told in other ways without resorting to the base sexual lusts that they did. It's an interesting story, I just think they took the easy way out.
I've sent an email to my MP. I hope all other Canadian /.ers do likewise. Here is what I wrote. Be sure to add your name and full address to yours, and cc the Honorable Peter Van Loan (vanlop@parl.gc.ca) as well. Feel free to modify to suit your own political beliefs. (Not that you need my permission for that, just being honest and transparent.) If you don't have their email address, you might want to look that up.
In regards to a proposed new bill:
http://www.news1130.com/more.jsp?content=20090617_213536_8084
The point of laws regarding privacy, and court-sanctioned warrants overriding privacy, is not to make it easier for the police to solve crimes, but to weigh carefully the right to privacy on one hand and the reasonable evidence pointing to a particular suspect requiring further information on the other. The police, being human beings, can easily get emotionally attached to the pursuit of an individual, and invade what could easily turn out to be an innocent person's privacy. The whole point of a warrant being issued by a judge is for oversight to ensure that the police aren't cutting corners prior to actually invading someone's privacy.
By removing this level of oversight, I feel we are going in the wrong direction on personal liberties and freedoms, and are sliding towards a police state.
It's not that I have an issue with ISPs keeping logs, the same way corporations are supposed to keep account of their transactions in case of an audit. But it requires some oversight to keep the police from accessing just anyone's account without reasonable evidence otherwise. As long as the logs are protected by similar privacy laws that any other aspect of citizens' private lives, and only released under proper court warrants, the police continue to have the tools they need to pursue internet crimes while continuing to protect citizens' privacy, thereby protecting liberties and freedoms we all enjoy.
I hope you will incorporate proper privacy protections in this bill, requiring the police to act the same as they do with any other aspect of our private lives.
If you're only going to pay rates that only idiots would think are good pay, I don't think a bad application form is going to change things much.
Translation: you gotta pay your public employees competitively to have any hope at attracting the intelligent and hardworking into public service. Stop complaining when they get deserved pay raises. Of course this is coming out of your pocketbook via taxes. Complain about how the taxes are spent, sure, but as long as you're getting the service, you want good people providing it, so the service is actually worth something. You don't want to hire the town idiot to do urban planning, or you end up with haphazard, arbitrary, and over-sized municipalities. That's because the smart ones got better-paying jobs elsewhere - usually in the private sector.
Only on a good day.
Um, I'm looking back through my calendar, and I'm getting confused. Can you point me to the most recent of these alleged "good days"?
Great. Now, if only there were enough cops to "randomly" pass by every potential crime to avert every assault, mugging, rape, murder, theft, or SEC violation.
Personally, I prefer better deterrents, such as Ole Bessie. I don't go anywhere without her. (She has a black belt in Kung Fu.)
Seriously, though, cops are there not to avoid crime, but to deter it after-the-fact by catching and punishing the criminals. There just aren't enough cops available to stop crime before or during its progress in any way approaching reliably. And then they take some random schmo off the street, placing him (usually a him) in a small room for 18 hours of straight questioning (how the hell is that not torture, judges?), lying to him about what they know or what others have told them, and then throw him in jail.
Sorry, I have a thing about cops. And it's not trust.
It's a dangerous thing to contemplate "fixing" politics. You have to be careful that the fix results in a full net benefit over the current system. And I fully realise that the current system is as corrupt as hades.
For starters, you need to try to imagine what type of people you're going to attract to public service with your change. Is it the people you want to have running the country, or will it further exclude them, leaving public service only for the power hungry?
I ask this of people who oppose politicians (whether municipal, state/provincial, or federal) getting raises. Or tax-free allowances (which, let's face it, merely means they're getting paid more than it looks). If you pay your councillor such a small pittance than only the independently wealthy or the power-hungry will pursue it, how do you expect to attract those who are well-educated and would do a good job? Those people would rather work for the private sector (whether big corps, startups, or entrepreneurially) where they could make double or triple the money, and not have to reapply for their jobs (often at great personal expense, at least for municipal politicians) every few years (every year or so, it seems, for federal politicians in Canada *sigh*). If, and I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, we paid our politicians at a rate that the caliber of leader we wanted would get if they were in the private sector, do we not think we'd get more good candidates "applying" for the job? Sure, we'd get more power-hungry people, too, but we'd at least have SOME decent candidates, possibly. Whining about their pay rate right now, when we also complain about how stupid our representatives are, seems counterproductive to me.
Similarly, what type of people would we get with term limits on house/senate members? We'd get a lot more people who don't know what they're doing, that much is obvious. That would definitely impede activity in government - though if you're of the opinion that this is a good thing, I'm not going to argue with you (not really my topic here anyway). But, beyond that, who would you get? You'd only get people who think that the pay and the benefits (POWER!) are worth giving up your career for that term limit (everyone assumes they'll not only win, but be re-elected as many times as the law allows). Let's say it's 12 years. Would you give up your career for 12 years to "serve" in government? Would the type of smart, wise person who you'd want to represent you in government be willing to give up his/her career for 12 years? Would they want to take the risk of getting back into their old career? What types of careers would be easy to give up for 12 years and re-enter? Is that the type of person you want in government? (I'd think lawyers would be one such career, as might MBA's... other careers, like IT or research or Engineers or Medical Doctors or the such might not be so easy to get back to, especially when recertification is required.) Think about it. Who would you get? Is that an improvement? If it's merely a wash, it's not worth the turmoil to make the change. I suspect it'd be worse than what we have now. Don't get me wrong - on the face, I like the idea of limiting politicians' careers. But I'm not sure that such a limit would improve government, or make the corruption worse.
(Even if the law is a bad one and the cops are thugs controlled by a petty dictator.) (Iran, et al.)
Right up to that "Iran" bit, I thought you were talking about North America, and referring to union bosses.
*sigh*
I guess you missed the WHOOSH.
What I don't get is why anyone would go for Windows 7 when they already have Windows 98. I mean, seriously. We all know that 98 > 7, so Windows 98 must be way better than Windows 7, right?
fry their brains.
Really? I'm not entirely sure there'd be much pleasure in it. Certainly, not enough pleasure anyway...
Just because it's fantasy (and it is) doesn't mean that's not the best/cheapest way to quality. The cost of fixing something in QA vs the original development is significant. Depending on who you believe (which study), it can be 2-10 times the cost. We'll be pessimistic(ish) and say 3x. That's basically enough to pay for pair programming, actually, which probably would be as cost-effective at producing quality as having the QA team. A bit of usability testing is about all that's left that developers are no good at (you've spent months focused on the problem, of COURSE it looks intuitive to you!).
Not that we do this at $work, of course. That's crazy talk.
/me sighs