Can we translate this type of activity to the 30+ crowd instead of just the teens?
At the rate that teens and 20-somethings are being dumbed down by visiting MySpace pages, the 30+ crowd that they will become will have lost any ability to grow out of using it.
1) Get a 16-year-old using MySpace
2) Wait 14 years - thus, 30-year-old still using MySpace
3) Profit!
Well, military applications aside, the truth of the matter is that satellites of all kinds have had a tremendous positive impact on economies and populations the world over.
Why put military applications aside? Orbital guidance and communications systems have allowed western militaries to put one bomb on one "safe house" where we used to have send in a battalion of soldiers for a protracted firefight. Or used to have to pave over the whole town with bombs.
Being able to precisely target things has turned into a bigger deterrent than the old strategic nukes. Doesn't help with some guy carrying a backpack bomb into a market square, but that's a different problem (unless we got his boss in the safe house earlier).
And, of course, when the Navy rolls into a giant tsunami diasaster area, it's space-based imaging and comms that make them able to move as quick as they do.
Anyway - military apps aren't bad, just because the word "military" is in the phrase.
But if I make a reasonable attempt to prevent this information from being viewed by the public--and a password is such a reasonable attempt--that means it is none of your business.
Many background checks - especially those that involve government jobs (even the not-very-sensitive variety) - absolutely get more personal than that. Government jobs that specifically involve the employee's dealings with private citizen data (SSNs, bank/tax info, law enforcement investigations, court docs, etc) require background checks that go beyond your standard credit and criminal history check. They need to know what sort of person you are. That means interviews with old girlfriends, looking at pictures taken on overseas vacations, deliberately uncomfortable discussions about everything from social history to race relations, and so on. Depends on the gig.
When you apply for some such jobs, you expressly sign applications that indicate you're waiving all rights to privacy... your personal life and history are expressly on the table. The more sensitive the job, the more in depth it goes.
Also, the use of the Patriot Act is exceptionally questionable.
I agree it's questionable... but in the sense that I question whether it was used. This entire story smells rotten from beginning to end. Total lack of any detail, the mysterious intrusion of the intern's "mom" in the hiring process, etc. I think the entire thing is an attempt at some apocryphal nonsense designed to spread FUD about The Man. An intern applying for a state job just plain doesn't warrant federal investigator time, and nothing about the story rings true anyway. If there's an element of truth to it, it's probably that a recruiter found some not-very-hard way to look at the applicant's psuedo-private page (another alumni as an intern in the office?), and uttered some red herring about the PATRIOT Act to rattle him in the interview. If, if, any of it even happened. Which I doubt.
grilling new college grads about their party photos
I think you meant to say:
"Reasonably looking at a prospective hire, someone who wants a less-than-top-dollar-job with the state government, and sizing up that person's judgement."
As a person who will act as part of the government, that person's judgement is a central indicator of what they think is appropriate for public display. Pictures of, say, stupidly-drunk boorishness are one thing... but putting them up for a wider community, and saying, essentially, "this is me - these are images that you should associate with my personality and my judgement..." I'd say that's right on the money, in terms of the sort of thing you want to know about someone that's never had a real job before... and is looking for a public role, especially if it's one where the public will trust one with sensitive information.
That law was sold as an anti-terrorism thing. This ain't that.
Actually, it is that. Most state agencies are now much, much more worried than they used to be about whether or not their employees are able to keep sensitive information they way it's supposed to be. This covers things like school transportation emergency plans, communications between agencies, awareness of other departmental hiring practices, and other stuff that's less about whether or not you've hired a terrorist than whether or not you've hired someone who can't seem to stop yapping his mouth.
Lesson 3. Stronger resistance against right-wing intrusiveness is warranted.
Oh, please. Do you really think that in a city, state, or other municipality that is run by officials elected by a majority liberal electorate, with agencies run by political appointees from that camp, that they (the folks hiring new people for even relatively sensitive jobs) would decide not to do background checks? Do you think that liberal-minded schools don't care about the backgrounds of people that will work with kids? Or with cash? Or with law-enforcement details? It's not "right-wing" to do basic fact finding about someone you're about to put in a position of power.
Gabe Newell used this excuse when Half-Life 2 slipped behind schedule
Put down the tinfoil-covered keyboard/mouse, and step away.
Gabe got his desktop hacked. Simple (and dumb) as that. But when you're not planning on giving away your expensively paid-for code to your competition, you don't really think of it as an OSS project - so comparing the two is completely pointless, and you pretending there were no vulnerabilities to sweat under the circumstances just shows how ignorant you are.
Speaking of which, why do you care? You obviously have great contempt for Valve, and wouldn't pay for their products, so why do you care whether they're later than they'd like (or why they are) in delivering their own product? Delivering it is how they repay their investors and write paychecks to their staff - and if you dislike the company so much, you should be pleased that they had a harder time generating the game's revenue than they would have preferred.
Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Sometimes the engine is the most important part of the content. It can be the result of untold thousands of hours of work, and recouping that investment is essential - because if you can't, then you can't risk employing all of those people to build it in the first place.
If made-by-volunteers/hobbyists engines were even close to as viable as those that get millions of dollars of focused investment, we'd see them out there being better than the professionally built ones. But we don't, because they're not. There is no free lunch, and there especially is no free high-end rendering engine, physics engine, driver integration, etc. Once a company is comfortable that their risk and investment has paid off, they might very well consider getting more people into their camp by making their now-established system more open or freely licensable... but they've got to pay the bills, and enabling other (competing) content developers to use a newly built (and paid for) engine for free just doesn't path the math test.
How could you possibly respond that eBay doesn't/can't have a monopoly?
Because they have healthy competition, are in a non-essential area of business, and have no ability to prevent other people from also running auctions or conducting e-commerce. See Amazon's thousands of small-time vendor partners, or Yahoo's commerce areas as examples.
there's no such thing as a market in nature
Market's are natural. Artificially shaping them through regulation is not, however helpful than can sometimes be.
eBay certainly has by far the largest marketshare in the US, doesn't it? As such, it has been obvious that they are no longer driven by competition to improve their product...which seems like adequate evidence of monopolistic behavior.
Wow. Let's see... largest marketshare of what? Auctions, maybe. E-commerce? Not even close. Obvious that thye are no longer driven by competition to improve? Maybe, maybe not... you're confusing "driven to" with "results of efforts." Their service continues to change and integrate with other systems. Are they simply not changing fast enough for you? Are they not as useful to you as your local newspaper's data-driven classifieds web site? Do their listings not show the unfailing integrity and clarity of Craig's List (heh!)?
So, you're saying that not changing as fast as some of their users would like them to, or not as fast as others do... makes them a monopoly? Would you say that General Motors is a monopoly? They're not keeping up, either. But that doesn't make them a monopoly any more than it makes eBay a monopoly. Saying that lack of change indicates a monopoly would mean that every pizza shop that hasn't changed in 10 years is that neighborhood's "pizza monopoly." AOL has barely changed in several years... are they a monopoly? Simply running a stable business and having more customers than some of your competitors does not mean that you therefore should have a bunch of taxpayer dollars tied up in regulating your business.
People who rush to embrace that notion (success = monopoly = now we can tell them how to run their business) are usually taking examples like this to make people numb to the use of the word "monopoly." That makes it easier for them to use it as ammo when they've got some idealogical axe to grind, or, typically, feel some urge to bash Microsoft because they're a Linux fanboy with a chip on their shoulder. It's no different than any other form of simpering political correctness, and seeks to equate success with evil, the better to comfort the less successful.
There are no slave owners, nor former slaves alive at the moment.
Not really true. There are places like Mauritania where Berbers "own" black African slaves outright. In the tens of thousands. That offshoot of the centuries-old Arab slave trade (of African slaves) still hasn't been stamped out. You could also very reasonably consider the young women (girls, really) held by force in the sex trade in eastern Europe and parts of Asia to be slaves.
They're a de facto monopoly, like a public utility, so they have some de facto responsibilities. Personally I think it's bad tactics to take on google like this, but it may be their only chance of not being eaten by the search juggernaut.
You're contradicting yourself! They're not a defacto (or any kind of) monopoly if some other business can, by introducing some new service, etc., "eat" them. Which is it? Are they impervious to competition, or aren't they? The answer's obvious, since there are all sorts of other online marketplaces. A public utility (to use your example) is a monopoly because the municipality in which they operate generally only grants one such company license to operate in their jurisdiction. eBay operates without any similar entity saying they can, one way or the other. There simply isn't any parallel there at all.
Not if it can be said that eBay is a monopoly in the online auction marketplace
But how could that possibly be said? There is virtually no barrier to entry in that market. I could start an auction site right now. So could you. Many other companies have, and operate them with varying degrees of success. No one has to use eBay, and this continual proposition that simple success = monopoly, and thus some obligation to help out competitors is just poisonous.
Looking back on the way the nation's founders started a nation with slavery
You wouldn't be confusing the nation's founders with the European colonists that actually showed up with and imported more slaves for a good 100+ years before the country was formed? Or the bitter civil war that was fought, among reasons, to put a stop to those practices in the remaining states that were still clinging to the colonial economic model? Oh, I guess you would be confusing those.
Its more like having a flee market and requiring that everyone use the orginizers brand of credit cards.
When was the last time your average flea market had extensive TOS agreements to help combat fraud, because that flea market has millions of people walking through it? In a flea market, you're standing, face-to-face, with the person you're thinking about doing business with. In most cases, it's cash and carry. The service that eBay provides (and which you do not have to use!) includes a lot more layers than a flea market. They charge for those extra layers, and people keep coming back with money in hand to pay for their listing/transaction services because they like having that enormous audience for their auctions. Will this erode some of that? Maybe. A bit. Too bad for eBay if they lose a few customers or transactions.
Will you complain if Google starts up their own auction site? Will that be Google being too "monopolistic," since they're just so big and powerful in other ways? If this was a mistake by eBay, the market will sort it out.
Does this mean that someone like me who REFUSES to use Paypal can never buy anything on eBay, because I must go through their payment system?
It's not like eBay is some natural resource that we all share. It's not a government service, it's a for-profit company that always tells you what the terms of using their service will be, and you agree to them if you want to use the service. Is it smart, from a marketing and PR point of view? Open for debate. Is it reasonable for them to want you to use their own service (PayPal is part of eBay) when making use of their other service? Sure. Is it legal to say that participating in an eBay auction means doing so according their rules? Of course - because there are all sorts of other auction sites, if you'd rather go elsewhere.
If they leave the big red button there with no security around it or guards, eventually someone is going to push it simply because they can.
So if you leave your eldery mum on a park bench for an hour, feeding the pigeons, are you "fascist" when you applaud the police for arresting someone that pushes her aside and goes through her purse? I mean, she's just sitting there, with no guards or anything. It's just going to happen - it's probably even a big, red purse.
You're exactly the sort of idiot that makes everyone who, despite some misgivings, votes for the people that you dislike convinced that they did the right thing.
when someone who just looks at unsecured goverment computers serves more time than someone who broke into some ones house and shot and killed some one for shit to pawn for money for drugs..
Never mind that in most places, the guy who kills someone during an armed robbery will probably go away for life (or lose his life), it sounds like what you're arguing for is even harsher penalties for armed robbers/burglars. OK, that's fine.
Somehow, I doubt a large enough percentage of them are liekly to be terrorists for the name to be worth checking.
However, you can narrow the odds a bit by having a matching first name AND last name, and then shipping money - funded by cash - overseas to a destination that itself further greatly reduces the odds.
Hey, man. Every tool is a hammer. Unless it's a chisel, in which case it's a screwdriver.
On this whole subject, though: I'm always highly amused when my Ivy League friends call me a redneck and my country cousins call me a yuppie.
I drive a large SUV... to the datacenter, where I keep my server farm. My dogs have been known to ride along.
I kill critters with any of my many guns... and then serve them up to friends with a shrewdly chosen wine based on decades of caring about wine and refining my tastes.
I've got friends from all over the world, and the nicest ones I've ever met are the local versions of "rednecks" - from across Europe, from Africa, from Peru. I now use that word to mean "down to earth," "not scared to get your hands dirty," "can shovel/plow your own driveway," "can start a fire without it involving an iPod battery," and, most importantly, "polite." In my experience, small town folk can be far kinder, more thoughtful in their discourse, and generally just less shrill than their metrosexual counterparts.
...simply because it would rid of us snobbery that people with higher education have over the uneducated as spelling would not have to be an exquisite skill anymore. Why should we have one more barrier between the rich/poor or educated/uneducated?
Snobbery is as snobbery does. I've been to poor, rural parts of West Virginia where the exact same form of grating human behavior is deployed over issues such as Quality Of Pit Bull. Or, I've seen the same thing - stark, abrasive class stratification - among equally literate people in high-end Ivy Leaque schools, where only Closeness To Current Model Year Of BMW differentiates one person from the next.
That poor, poor Abraham Lincoln - raised in a cabin and couldn't write a lick. Or that wretchedly illiterate Bill Shakespeare... raised in stinking, toothless, no-running-water 1600s England.
Even the poorest in the US enjoy a better standard of living and more opportunity than pretty much all of humanity ever has, especially those who gave rise to the very languages that combined to form modern English. The only thing that keeps a kid from the trivial task of tackling that small percentage of a solid vocabulary that actually requires a little counter-intuitive memorization is the dumb-is-cool culture. And that's currently propped up by the usual villain: popular entertainment.
I mean reely. Its rich white conservatives with there natsi spelling - their to worried about preserving power for they're corporations.
But seriously folks: this smacks of the silly ebonics episode. If someone were to really have a go at removing the leftover Germanic, Scandinavian, Gaelic, Italian, Olde English and other bits of slightly complex spelling from the language, that would just be the opportunity for everyone with a political axe to grind to... well, grind.
Spelling variations in phonetically similar words provde instant visual context. Consolidating things like "weigh" and "way" is nothing more than lowering the intellectual bar and our collective expectations for what a young mind can (and should) do.
If they think it's unfair to expect people to understand that "cough" sounds like "koff" instead of "koo," then imagine how unfair it is that millions of people in the country that only speak Spanish are having to learn to conjugate verbs in English. Or, not, actually, in my neighborhood. I'm starting to feel more like a conjugal visitor every day.
As far as I know, the poster is correct, because I'm not aware of Zarqawi hurting or killing any Americans
Nice troll.
You must be one of the few people who didn't watch Zarqawi personally behead US citizen Nick Berg? Or the US reporter Daniel Pearl?
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi didn't join Al Qaeda until after the Iraq War began
Zarqawi was in the town Kirma, a town in northern Iraq, long before the US invasion. The Al-Qaida funded lab that he was involved in there was working on uses of weaponized ricin and cyanide. A January, 2003 arrest of six terror suspects in London included the discovery of ricin tied to that same lab. Again, prior to the start of the war. Feel free to Google the issue, and you'll find pages like this that provide links to the growing collection of raw documents found in Iraq that further demonstrate this.
As far as I know
Which isn't very far.
Why not try doing your own thinking and research, rather than buying the lies of Republican, conservative traitors?
Um... before you make absurd statements like that, try getting some basic, well-established facts straight. We can even debate how to interpret the intel showing his activities in Iraq before the war, and in Afghanistan before that - but, if you can stomach it, watch the footage of Zarqawi sawing off the head of a live aid volunteer (Berg) before calling someone a non-thinking "traitor" for pointing out the facts.
Ted Stevens is but a rank amateur compared to Robert Byrd. And of course, unlike Stevens, Byrd has such a colorful background, being unanimously elected as the "Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, you can't beat stuff like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we translate this type of activity to the 30+ crowd instead of just the teens?
At the rate that teens and 20-somethings are being dumbed down by visiting MySpace pages, the 30+ crowd that they will become will have lost any ability to grow out of using it.
1) Get a 16-year-old using MySpace
2) Wait 14 years - thus, 30-year-old still using MySpace
3) Profit!
Well, military applications aside, the truth of the matter is that satellites of all kinds have had a tremendous positive impact on economies and populations the world over.
Why put military applications aside? Orbital guidance and communications systems have allowed western militaries to put one bomb on one "safe house" where we used to have send in a battalion of soldiers for a protracted firefight. Or used to have to pave over the whole town with bombs.
Being able to precisely target things has turned into a bigger deterrent than the old strategic nukes. Doesn't help with some guy carrying a backpack bomb into a market square, but that's a different problem (unless we got his boss in the safe house earlier).
And, of course, when the Navy rolls into a giant tsunami diasaster area, it's space-based imaging and comms that make them able to move as quick as they do.
Anyway - military apps aren't bad, just because the word "military" is in the phrase.
But if I make a reasonable attempt to prevent this information from being viewed by the public--and a password is such a reasonable attempt--that means it is none of your business.
Many background checks - especially those that involve government jobs (even the not-very-sensitive variety) - absolutely get more personal than that. Government jobs that specifically involve the employee's dealings with private citizen data (SSNs, bank/tax info, law enforcement investigations, court docs, etc) require background checks that go beyond your standard credit and criminal history check. They need to know what sort of person you are. That means interviews with old girlfriends, looking at pictures taken on overseas vacations, deliberately uncomfortable discussions about everything from social history to race relations, and so on. Depends on the gig.
When you apply for some such jobs, you expressly sign applications that indicate you're waiving all rights to privacy... your personal life and history are expressly on the table. The more sensitive the job, the more in depth it goes.
Also, the use of the Patriot Act is exceptionally questionable.
I agree it's questionable... but in the sense that I question whether it was used. This entire story smells rotten from beginning to end. Total lack of any detail, the mysterious intrusion of the intern's "mom" in the hiring process, etc. I think the entire thing is an attempt at some apocryphal nonsense designed to spread FUD about The Man. An intern applying for a state job just plain doesn't warrant federal investigator time, and nothing about the story rings true anyway. If there's an element of truth to it, it's probably that a recruiter found some not-very-hard way to look at the applicant's psuedo-private page (another alumni as an intern in the office?), and uttered some red herring about the PATRIOT Act to rattle him in the interview. If, if, any of it even happened. Which I doubt.
grilling new college grads about their party photos
I think you meant to say:
"Reasonably looking at a prospective hire, someone who wants a less-than-top-dollar-job with the state government, and sizing up that person's judgement."
As a person who will act as part of the government, that person's judgement is a central indicator of what they think is appropriate for public display. Pictures of, say, stupidly-drunk boorishness are one thing... but putting them up for a wider community, and saying, essentially, "this is me - these are images that you should associate with my personality and my judgement..." I'd say that's right on the money, in terms of the sort of thing you want to know about someone that's never had a real job before... and is looking for a public role, especially if it's one where the public will trust one with sensitive information.
That law was sold as an anti-terrorism thing. This ain't that.
Actually, it is that. Most state agencies are now much, much more worried than they used to be about whether or not their employees are able to keep sensitive information they way it's supposed to be. This covers things like school transportation emergency plans, communications between agencies, awareness of other departmental hiring practices, and other stuff that's less about whether or not you've hired a terrorist than whether or not you've hired someone who can't seem to stop yapping his mouth.
Lesson 3. Stronger resistance against right-wing intrusiveness is warranted.
Oh, please. Do you really think that in a city, state, or other municipality that is run by officials elected by a majority liberal electorate, with agencies run by political appointees from that camp, that they (the folks hiring new people for even relatively sensitive jobs) would decide not to do background checks? Do you think that liberal-minded schools don't care about the backgrounds of people that will work with kids? Or with cash? Or with law-enforcement details? It's not "right-wing" to do basic fact finding about someone you're about to put in a position of power.
Gabe Newell used this excuse when Half-Life 2 slipped behind schedule
Put down the tinfoil-covered keyboard/mouse, and step away.
Gabe got his desktop hacked. Simple (and dumb) as that. But when you're not planning on giving away your expensively paid-for code to your competition, you don't really think of it as an OSS project - so comparing the two is completely pointless, and you pretending there were no vulnerabilities to sweat under the circumstances just shows how ignorant you are.
Speaking of which, why do you care? You obviously have great contempt for Valve, and wouldn't pay for their products, so why do you care whether they're later than they'd like (or why they are) in delivering their own product? Delivering it is how they repay their investors and write paychecks to their staff - and if you dislike the company so much, you should be pleased that they had a harder time generating the game's revenue than they would have preferred.
Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Give away the engine, sell content.
Sometimes the engine is the most important part of the content. It can be the result of untold thousands of hours of work, and recouping that investment is essential - because if you can't, then you can't risk employing all of those people to build it in the first place.
If made-by-volunteers/hobbyists engines were even close to as viable as those that get millions of dollars of focused investment, we'd see them out there being better than the professionally built ones. But we don't, because they're not. There is no free lunch, and there especially is no free high-end rendering engine, physics engine, driver integration, etc. Once a company is comfortable that their risk and investment has paid off, they might very well consider getting more people into their camp by making their now-established system more open or freely licensable... but they've got to pay the bills, and enabling other (competing) content developers to use a newly built (and paid for) engine for free just doesn't path the math test.
How could you possibly respond that eBay doesn't/can't have a monopoly?
... makes them a monopoly? Would you say that General Motors is a monopoly? They're not keeping up, either. But that doesn't make them a monopoly any more than it makes eBay a monopoly. Saying that lack of change indicates a monopoly would mean that every pizza shop that hasn't changed in 10 years is that neighborhood's "pizza monopoly." AOL has barely changed in several years... are they a monopoly? Simply running a stable business and having more customers than some of your competitors does not mean that you therefore should have a bunch of taxpayer dollars tied up in regulating your business.
Because they have healthy competition, are in a non-essential area of business, and have no ability to prevent other people from also running auctions or conducting e-commerce. See Amazon's thousands of small-time vendor partners, or Yahoo's commerce areas as examples.
there's no such thing as a market in nature
Market's are natural. Artificially shaping them through regulation is not, however helpful than can sometimes be.
eBay certainly has by far the largest marketshare in the US, doesn't it? As such, it has been obvious that they are no longer driven by competition to improve their product...which seems like adequate evidence of monopolistic behavior.
Wow. Let's see... largest marketshare of what? Auctions, maybe. E-commerce? Not even close. Obvious that thye are no longer driven by competition to improve? Maybe, maybe not... you're confusing "driven to" with "results of efforts." Their service continues to change and integrate with other systems. Are they simply not changing fast enough for you? Are they not as useful to you as your local newspaper's data-driven classifieds web site? Do their listings not show the unfailing integrity and clarity of Craig's List (heh!)?
So, you're saying that not changing as fast as some of their users would like them to, or not as fast as others do
People who rush to embrace that notion (success = monopoly = now we can tell them how to run their business) are usually taking examples like this to make people numb to the use of the word "monopoly." That makes it easier for them to use it as ammo when they've got some idealogical axe to grind, or, typically, feel some urge to bash Microsoft because they're a Linux fanboy with a chip on their shoulder. It's no different than any other form of simpering political correctness, and seeks to equate success with evil, the better to comfort the less successful.
There are no slave owners, nor former slaves alive at the moment.
Not really true. There are places like Mauritania where Berbers "own" black African slaves outright. In the tens of thousands. That offshoot of the centuries-old Arab slave trade (of African slaves) still hasn't been stamped out. You could also very reasonably consider the young women (girls, really) held by force in the sex trade in eastern Europe and parts of Asia to be slaves.
They're a de facto monopoly, like a public utility, so they have some de facto responsibilities. Personally I think it's bad tactics to take on google like this, but it may be their only chance of not being eaten by the search juggernaut.
You're contradicting yourself! They're not a defacto (or any kind of) monopoly if some other business can, by introducing some new service, etc., "eat" them. Which is it? Are they impervious to competition, or aren't they? The answer's obvious, since there are all sorts of other online marketplaces. A public utility (to use your example) is a monopoly because the municipality in which they operate generally only grants one such company license to operate in their jurisdiction. eBay operates without any similar entity saying they can, one way or the other. There simply isn't any parallel there at all.
Great to see the UK judiciary bending-over for a foreign power.
Would you say that the Spanish government was "bending over" for the UK in this case?
How about the Nigerians? Are you ashamed to make them bend over?
Perhaps the Italians are feeling bent over by the UK?
Or, perhaps the Germans, when they extradited a former US Marine to the UK?
One is tempted to think that you are, perhaps, exhibiting selective distaste for extradition when it suits your purely political posturing?
I mean, they've got a total monopoly on these items! We shouldn't have to use PayChristies, it's just not fair!
Not if it can be said that eBay is a monopoly in the online auction marketplace
But how could that possibly be said? There is virtually no barrier to entry in that market. I could start an auction site right now. So could you. Many other companies have, and operate them with varying degrees of success. No one has to use eBay, and this continual proposition that simple success = monopoly, and thus some obligation to help out competitors is just poisonous.
Looking back on the way the nation's founders started a nation with slavery
You wouldn't be confusing the nation's founders with the European colonists that actually showed up with and imported more slaves for a good 100+ years before the country was formed? Or the bitter civil war that was fought, among reasons, to put a stop to those practices in the remaining states that were still clinging to the colonial economic model? Oh, I guess you would be confusing those.
Its more like having a flee market and requiring that everyone use the orginizers brand of credit cards.
When was the last time your average flea market had extensive TOS agreements to help combat fraud, because that flea market has millions of people walking through it? In a flea market, you're standing, face-to-face, with the person you're thinking about doing business with. In most cases, it's cash and carry. The service that eBay provides (and which you do not have to use!) includes a lot more layers than a flea market. They charge for those extra layers, and people keep coming back with money in hand to pay for their listing/transaction services because they like having that enormous audience for their auctions. Will this erode some of that? Maybe. A bit. Too bad for eBay if they lose a few customers or transactions.
Will you complain if Google starts up their own auction site? Will that be Google being too "monopolistic," since they're just so big and powerful in other ways? If this was a mistake by eBay, the market will sort it out.
Does this mean that someone like me who REFUSES to use Paypal can never buy anything on eBay, because I must go through their payment system?
It's not like eBay is some natural resource that we all share. It's not a government service, it's a for-profit company that always tells you what the terms of using their service will be, and you agree to them if you want to use the service. Is it smart, from a marketing and PR point of view? Open for debate. Is it reasonable for them to want you to use their own service (PayPal is part of eBay) when making use of their other service? Sure. Is it legal to say that participating in an eBay auction means doing so according their rules? Of course - because there are all sorts of other auction sites, if you'd rather go elsewhere.
If they leave the big red button there with no security around it or guards, eventually someone is going to push it simply because they can.
So if you leave your eldery mum on a park bench for an hour, feeding the pigeons, are you "fascist" when you applaud the police for arresting someone that pushes her aside and goes through her purse? I mean, she's just sitting there, with no guards or anything. It's just going to happen - it's probably even a big, red purse.
You're exactly the sort of idiot that makes everyone who, despite some misgivings, votes for the people that you dislike convinced that they did the right thing.
when someone who just looks at unsecured goverment computers serves more time than someone who broke into some ones house and shot and killed some one for shit to pawn for money for drugs..
Never mind that in most places, the guy who kills someone during an armed robbery will probably go away for life (or lose his life), it sounds like what you're arguing for is even harsher penalties for armed robbers/burglars. OK, that's fine.
Somehow, I doubt a large enough percentage of them are liekly to be terrorists for the name to be worth checking.
However, you can narrow the odds a bit by having a matching first name AND last name, and then shipping money - funded by cash - overseas to a destination that itself further greatly reduces the odds.
"Don't matter I'm gonna use it for a hammer."
Hey, man. Every tool is a hammer. Unless it's a chisel, in which case it's a screwdriver.
On this whole subject, though: I'm always highly amused when my Ivy League friends call me a redneck and my country cousins call me a yuppie.
I drive a large SUV... to the datacenter, where I keep my server farm. My dogs have been known to ride along.
I kill critters with any of my many guns... and then serve them up to friends with a shrewdly chosen wine based on decades of caring about wine and refining my tastes.
I've got friends from all over the world, and the nicest ones I've ever met are the local versions of "rednecks" - from across Europe, from Africa, from Peru. I now use that word to mean "down to earth," "not scared to get your hands dirty," "can shovel/plow your own driveway," "can start a fire without it involving an iPod battery," and, most importantly, "polite." In my experience, small town folk can be far kinder, more thoughtful in their discourse, and generally just less shrill than their metrosexual counterparts.
...simply because it would rid of us snobbery that people with higher education have over the uneducated as spelling would not have to be an exquisite skill anymore. Why should we have one more barrier between the rich/poor or educated/uneducated?
Snobbery is as snobbery does. I've been to poor, rural parts of West Virginia where the exact same form of grating human behavior is deployed over issues such as Quality Of Pit Bull. Or, I've seen the same thing - stark, abrasive class stratification - among equally literate people in high-end Ivy Leaque schools, where only Closeness To Current Model Year Of BMW differentiates one person from the next.
That poor, poor Abraham Lincoln - raised in a cabin and couldn't write a lick. Or that wretchedly illiterate Bill Shakespeare... raised in stinking, toothless, no-running-water 1600s England.
Even the poorest in the US enjoy a better standard of living and more opportunity than pretty much all of humanity ever has, especially those who gave rise to the very languages that combined to form modern English. The only thing that keeps a kid from the trivial task of tackling that small percentage of a solid vocabulary that actually requires a little counter-intuitive memorization is the dumb-is-cool culture. And that's currently propped up by the usual villain: popular entertainment.
I mean reely. Its rich white conservatives with there natsi spelling - their to worried about preserving power for they're corporations.
But seriously folks: this smacks of the silly ebonics episode. If someone were to really have a go at removing the leftover Germanic, Scandinavian, Gaelic, Italian, Olde English and other bits of slightly complex spelling from the language, that would just be the opportunity for everyone with a political axe to grind to... well, grind.
Spelling variations in phonetically similar words provde instant visual context. Consolidating things like "weigh" and "way" is nothing more than lowering the intellectual bar and our collective expectations for what a young mind can (and should) do.
If they think it's unfair to expect people to understand that "cough" sounds like "koff" instead of "koo," then imagine how unfair it is that millions of people in the country that only speak Spanish are having to learn to conjugate verbs in English. Or, not, actually, in my neighborhood. I'm starting to feel more like a conjugal visitor every day.
As far as I know, the poster is correct, because I'm not aware of Zarqawi hurting or killing any Americans
Nice troll.
You must be one of the few people who didn't watch Zarqawi personally behead US citizen Nick Berg? Or the US reporter Daniel Pearl?
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi didn't join Al Qaeda until after the Iraq War began
Zarqawi was in the town Kirma, a town in northern Iraq, long before the US invasion. The Al-Qaida funded lab that he was involved in there was working on uses of weaponized ricin and cyanide. A January, 2003 arrest of six terror suspects in London included the discovery of ricin tied to that same lab. Again, prior to the start of the war. Feel free to Google the issue, and you'll find pages like this that provide links to the growing collection of raw documents found in Iraq that further demonstrate this.
As far as I know
Which isn't very far.
Why not try doing your own thinking and research, rather than buying the lies of Republican, conservative traitors?
Um... before you make absurd statements like that, try getting some basic, well-established facts straight. We can even debate how to interpret the intel showing his activities in Iraq before the war, and in Afghanistan before that - but, if you can stomach it, watch the footage of Zarqawi sawing off the head of a live aid volunteer (Berg) before calling someone a non-thinking "traitor" for pointing out the facts.
Ted Stevens is from Alaska
Ted Stevens is but a rank amateur compared to Robert Byrd. And of course, unlike Stevens, Byrd has such a colorful background, being unanimously elected as the "Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. I mean, you can't beat stuff like that.