Just means bigger bonuses for the guys at the top because it makes them look good at cutting costs, while the folks at the bottom continue to slog along getting 2 - 3% raises.
It's the way the free market works. Except if you're a big Wall Street brokerage firm or hedge fund in which case when the free market means you're about to go under the Fed will step in and save your asses with a bailout. But I digress.
The payoff is good for both cable companies and users, as it can result in more programming choices and faster Internet access.
The above statement is true only if there is real competition for cable providers or phone providers. In the example given, Comcast had some form of competition in part of Chicago. I'm sure the price people paid for their high-speed connections reflected that competition.
However, in my area, I have two choices: Comcast or Verizon. In both cases it is impossible to get naked broadband. Not dsl, which can be purchased separately, but true, high speed broadband. Both Comcast and Verizon offer a package deal for over $100/month (not including taxes, surchages, etc) for phone, tv access and broadband.
I don't want all of that. I want just broadband connectivity. "Sorry faceless number. You cannot get what you want. It's either our way or no way."
Thus, unless there is real competition in an area, there is no payoff for the customer, only the provider as they can set just about any rate they want and you have to accept that rate or do without.
Obviously, when one is in public, the right to privacy is essentially nil.
What I was referring to was the catch-all amendment, the Ninth in case you were wondering. In the current case, and as I have discussed with OP, your right to privacy is about the recording of your movements by this system being made available to law enforcement without a warrant to troll through looking for anything.
If law enforcement believes you were involved in a crime then yes, your records should be made available but ONLY if a warrant is presented asking for your specific records.
I agree with your overall comments. My comments were merely to point out that trying to find out who is speeding in Manhattan would be moot since no one can speed anyway. The clean air part would be a good thing though.
The real key is the privacy issue (not to mention the overall cost of implementing this system). If I pay with cash at a toll booth on my way to Hoboken (just across the river from Manhattan), there is no reason to record my license plate. None.
However, if I choose to use EZ Pass (an electronic device), probably similar to if not the same as what you use, I have voluntarily chosen to give up some of my privacy. After all, I have to submit my personal information to our motor vehicle department to get this device as well as add money to it to pay for tolls.
Unfortunately, as much as you or I would like to keep such information private, someone, somewhere in our respective governments will find an excuse to allow police to rummage through the records in the hopes of turning up something rather than being required to submit a warrant about a specific person's activities.
Yes, such information can be useful in attempting to solve crimes but with the fascists currently in power here in the U.S., any hope of having them follow the Constitution and getting a warrant is pretty much dead.
That is the tradeoff. Voluntarily giving up a bit of ones privacy to a private company for an easier commute. However, and as you have said, that information should be kept in private unless there is a specific reason law enforcement needs access to those records in which case they should submit a warrant.
People don't die due to speeding as they used to, Stockholm traffic isn't jammed every god damned day and the environment is happy happy which also means lives saved in the long run. Doesn't that hold any value when compared to privacy?
I'm going on the presumption you have never been to Manhattan so I'll try not to make too much fun of you.
First, the only way anyone can speed in Manhattan, during normal business hours, is if they are on a bike. Traffic is for all intents and purposes, a crawl during the day. There are a few minor exceptions such as Fifth Ave or so where, if you time the lights correctly and are going the correct speed, you can hit all the green lights. But then, so does everyone else in the pack you're traveling with so it's a zero gain.
Second, reducing the number of vehicles below 86th Street in Manhattan will have a very negligible effect on pollution. Considering Manhattan is across the river from New Jersey, and NJ is known for its concentration of industrial and chemical businesses, guess what happens when the wind blows from the west? Not to mention the sheer amount of grime that has built up over the decades which goes airborne in the hot weather (as we recently experienced).
Finally, one of many reasons the Founding Fathers of my country decided to part ways from merry old England was because of privacy. In those times, the Crown could send troops or other officials into your home on a whim, without a warrant, just to see if you were doing anything wrong. It was the Crown, it could do what it wanted. That is why there is that part in our Constitution which specifically says the government must get a warrant to do a search.
So no, giving up our right to privacy (despite Scalia saying it doesn't exist) is not a good trade off. Granted, the vast majority of the unwashed masses don't know squat about their rights except three; right to free speech, right to religion and right to bear arms, but even then they're too brainwashed and kept in a perpetual state of fear to realize that all the other rights our Founding Fathers wanted us to have are essentially null and void at this time.
Maybe you don't mind being tracked everywhere you go but I know I do. If someone wants to know where I was at a particular date and time, they can ask me. If I think it's a legitimate question, I'll answer them. If not, it's none of their business.
I know I've said this before but James Madison nailed it when he said: If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
You, furball, completely missed the point. The point isn't about spending time with ones family, the OP was questioning why that phrase is always used.
For the OP, "spending time with their families" is a generic, catch-all phrased used in political circles when one wants out but doesn't want to reveal the real reason behind ones departure.
In Rove's case, Congressional inquiries are (finally) getting around to having Rove deposed and under oath. The White House doesn't want that and so Rove, last year, decided before things got too hot, to jump ship with Bushs' blessing.
Rove will still be working with GOP so this phrase does not apply him in the literal sense. Guaranteed if you look at who he goes to work for next, his days will be just as long as they are now.
Which will pretty much confirm the lie behind "spending time with my family".
If the cloud around the nucleus didn't exist, then electrons wouldn't exist. The fact that one can see the electron cloud means that electrons do exist.
Second, the detector image shows the passage of electrons. Again, if electrons didn't exist, these images wouldn't exist.
So yes, I have seen electrons. I have seen them by their clouds and presence.
The most genetic diversity is achieved when women have children by as many different men as possible throughout their lifetimes.
In other words, you're suggesting that women become more like the women one sees walking about in the inner cities or appear on Maury Povich doing the paternity tests.
In the episode where they were experimenting with a captured ship, T'lk and O'Neill were flung out to Jupiter and left without a way to get home.
Carter's dad, herself and Daniel are able to rescue them but the two have to eject from their ship and float in space for a few seconds before the ring transport can be used.
I do believe that the two had a spacesuit of some type on but not one that was designed for space. More of a general cover suit.
It is assumed that the universe is not infinite in size.
Which always brings up my question: if the universe is not infinite in size, what is it expanding into or sitting in? I.e. if you place a drop of ink into a glass container full of water, the drop will expand (eventually) until it meets the glass.
That is not what is happening according to current theories of the universe. The most common answer I get is that is loops back upon itself. Fine. That still doesn't explain what the universe sits in.
Just my thoughts on a very esoteric and, IMO, unanswerable question.
It figures. I ran out of mod points yesterday so instead, I'll respond to the troll.
It's not about the government telling someone what business they can or cannot run, it's about this person selling pills which are claimed to be the real thing. In other words, he was selling placebos and not telling people these weren't the real thing.
Further, Congress has delegated authority to regulate medicinces to the FDA since medicines are not state specific. You can find the same bottle of Advil in Georgia as you can in Kansas. The FDA has stated that if it's a medicine, it must undergo rigorous testing to prove its relative safety.
This guy was claiming he had real drugs which he could deliver on the cheap. Not only was he violating FDA guidelines, he was perpetrating fraud.
So tell me, what country do you live in that allows someone to perpetrate fraud and not get penalized?
Why do people consistently think that the Web somehow changes the rules of life?
Because it's the intertubes! Everything is different. We don't need no stinkin rules!
Seriously, the first time Joe Average realized what they could do on the web, pretty much everything they had learned about how to interact with people went out the window. Think of all the stories that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has about one or more idiots who came into an IRC channel/AOL chatroom/whatever and acted liked they had lived in a jungle all their lives. Think about the people who still act that way.
I realize your comments were directed more at the business end but the same ideas still apply. People seem to think that their web site, regardless of how good/bad it is coded or what they are selling, will generate bazillions of dollars and make them multi-millioinaires overnight.
Why? Because it's the intertubes! The rules don't apply on that web thingy.
Neither does it mean that the loss in sales is nearly as much, as many of those who buy/download pirated software would never have bought the software in the first place.
Then it is still a lost sale because the person obviously wanted the product but was too cheap or poor to buy it legally.
One can argue that the overall value of lost sales is not correct as more than likely the figures used are based on U.S. dollars, but the fact that people do have these illegal copies does mean lost sales. Either the person did want to use the product, in which case they should pay for it, or they didn't want to use it. You can't have it both ways.
Easy as hell! I have my grandmother using WindowMaker and I set up four buttons for her - Word processor, Email, Web Browsesr, and Instant Messenger.
Stop. Reread what you just posted. First you say it's easy to use. Then you say that you configured your grandmothers machine with four buttons she can use to access the things she uses most.
If it's so easy, why did you have to configure those buttons? Why couldn't your grandmother do it herself?
I'm not saying whatever version of Linux your grandmother is using isn't easy to use. What I am saying is that well-meaning folks like you who support Linux on the desktop always use an example such as the one you gave to show how easy Linux is to use yet, by your own admission, you had to do the setup. You had to do the configuration.
This isn't to say that configuring Windows is necessarily easy or even intuitive. However, either through force of repetition or blind luck, the average person is able to configure a Windows environment more easily than a Linux environment.
I don't personally use Linux though I have fiddled with Slack 10 and Debian so maybe my perceptions are off, but the overall point is that those who support Linux and who say how easy it is to use ALWAYS say they got a family member/SO/whomever to use it AFTER they configured it for them so therefore, it must be easy to use. That's looking at it from the wrong angle.
I wrote in a post a while back about documentation and how the biggest problem with it is that it isn't detailed enough for the average person. People, despite the innate intelligence we are supposedly born with, like to be handheld the first few times when doing something. Particularly if they have never done it before.
You and I may be able to program our vcrs and dvd players (well, not me yet. See my journal for why) without reading the manual but that is only because we have been exposed to the general process for so long that we can draw upon our past experiences to get us through the configuration. Joe Average can't (or won't depending upon how militant they are).
I don't know what the answer is because installing an OS, even as streamlined as Microsoft, Apple and the various Linus distributions have done, is still not easy. There are still questions that need to be answered to configure it that I'm certain your grandmother couldn't answer without your guidance.
Yes, once the OS is installed and configured things will just work but as has been said a billionteen times before, people don't want to have go through a long configuration process. They want to be able to put in a floppy/CD/glass block/whatever and other than double-clicking on an icon, have the software installed and ready to go.
I realize this is somewhat of a rant but those of you who work with Linux on a daily basis think that using your distro is simple and easy. Which it is but ONLY because you've been working with it for X months/years/decades/eons and know it pretty much inside and out. Take someone off the street and have them do an install of the OS or a piece of software on Linux and I can guarantee you they will tell you to do things to yourself which are not possible (except if you're a master contortionist).
Easy is a relative term. What is easy for you or I is not easy to our parents or grandparents. Those who produce Linux distros need to understand this and have it plastered all over their work spaces so every time they do something they should always ask themselves, "Is this something that Joe Average can do?" not, "Well shoot, this is simple. All one has to do is rm -f *%!@, then grep for dlist -t to be sure it was disjoined at which point they can do an apt get something and finally a make something. I can do that in my sleep!" (and yes, I know what I wrote makes no sense. That it is exactly what the outside world hears when you folks talk about doing something)
Some looners actually have sex with the balloons by sticking their equipment in the nozzle (obviously, you have to be male to pull this off).
Ok, oddball question time. Using the above quote, yes, only a man can stick his equipment inside the balloon. However, what about the reverse? Sticking the balloon inside a woman and GENTLY inflating and deflating it again and again.
I know, I know, I'm a sick puppy. Aren't we all in some manner?
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Just means bigger bonuses for the guys at the top because it makes them look good at cutting costs, while the folks at the bottom continue to slog along getting 2 - 3% raises.
It's the way the free market works. Except if you're a big Wall Street brokerage firm or hedge fund in which case when the free market means you're about to go under the Fed will step in and save your asses with a bailout. But I digress.
The above statement is true only if there is real competition for cable providers or phone providers. In the example given, Comcast had some form of competition in part of Chicago. I'm sure the price people paid for their high-speed connections reflected that competition.
However, in my area, I have two choices: Comcast or Verizon. In both cases it is impossible to get naked broadband. Not dsl, which can be purchased separately, but true, high speed broadband. Both Comcast and Verizon offer a package deal for over $100/month (not including taxes, surchages, etc) for phone, tv access and broadband.
I don't want all of that. I want just broadband connectivity. "Sorry faceless number. You cannot get what you want. It's either our way or no way."
Thus, unless there is real competition in an area, there is no payoff for the customer, only the provider as they can set just about any rate they want and you have to accept that rate or do without.
Obviously, when one is in public, the right to privacy is essentially nil.
What I was referring to was the catch-all amendment, the Ninth in case you were wondering. In the current case, and as I have discussed with OP, your right to privacy is about the recording of your movements by this system being made available to law enforcement without a warrant to troll through looking for anything.
If law enforcement believes you were involved in a crime then yes, your records should be made available but ONLY if a warrant is presented asking for your specific records.
Sure. Just open the cargo bay doors, mount the tank to braces on the inside and you'll solve the problem.
Granted, you won't be able to carry any cargo but at least you won't have to worry about falling bits of foam striking surfaces critical for reentry.
I agree with your overall comments. My comments were merely to point out that trying to find out who is speeding in Manhattan would be moot since no one can speed anyway. The clean air part would be a good thing though.
The real key is the privacy issue (not to mention the overall cost of implementing this system). If I pay with cash at a toll booth on my way to Hoboken (just across the river from Manhattan), there is no reason to record my license plate. None.
However, if I choose to use EZ Pass (an electronic device), probably similar to if not the same as what you use, I have voluntarily chosen to give up some of my privacy. After all, I have to submit my personal information to our motor vehicle department to get this device as well as add money to it to pay for tolls.
Unfortunately, as much as you or I would like to keep such information private, someone, somewhere in our respective governments will find an excuse to allow police to rummage through the records in the hopes of turning up something rather than being required to submit a warrant about a specific person's activities.
Yes, such information can be useful in attempting to solve crimes but with the fascists currently in power here in the U.S., any hope of having them follow the Constitution and getting a warrant is pretty much dead.
That is the tradeoff. Voluntarily giving up a bit of ones privacy to a private company for an easier commute. However, and as you have said, that information should be kept in private unless there is a specific reason law enforcement needs access to those records in which case they should submit a warrant.
I'm going on the presumption you have never been to Manhattan so I'll try not to make too much fun of you.
First, the only way anyone can speed in Manhattan, during normal business hours, is if they are on a bike. Traffic is for all intents and purposes, a crawl during the day. There are a few minor exceptions such as Fifth Ave or so where, if you time the lights correctly and are going the correct speed, you can hit all the green lights. But then, so does everyone else in the pack you're traveling with so it's a zero gain.
Second, reducing the number of vehicles below 86th Street in Manhattan will have a very negligible effect on pollution. Considering Manhattan is across the river from New Jersey, and NJ is known for its concentration of industrial and chemical businesses, guess what happens when the wind blows from the west? Not to mention the sheer amount of grime that has built up over the decades which goes airborne in the hot weather (as we recently experienced).
Finally, one of many reasons the Founding Fathers of my country decided to part ways from merry old England was because of privacy. In those times, the Crown could send troops or other officials into your home on a whim, without a warrant, just to see if you were doing anything wrong. It was the Crown, it could do what it wanted. That is why there is that part in our Constitution which specifically says the government must get a warrant to do a search.
So no, giving up our right to privacy (despite Scalia saying it doesn't exist) is not a good trade off. Granted, the vast majority of the unwashed masses don't know squat about their rights except three; right to free speech, right to religion and right to bear arms, but even then they're too brainwashed and kept in a perpetual state of fear to realize that all the other rights our Founding Fathers wanted us to have are essentially null and void at this time.
Maybe you don't mind being tracked everywhere you go but I know I do. If someone wants to know where I was at a particular date and time, they can ask me. If I think it's a legitimate question, I'll answer them. If not, it's none of their business.
I know I've said this before but James Madison nailed it when he said: If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
You, furball, completely missed the point. The point isn't about spending time with ones family, the OP was questioning why that phrase is always used.
For the OP, "spending time with their families" is a generic, catch-all phrased used in political circles when one wants out but doesn't want to reveal the real reason behind ones departure.
In Rove's case, Congressional inquiries are (finally) getting around to having Rove deposed and under oath. The White House doesn't want that and so Rove, last year, decided before things got too hot, to jump ship with Bushs' blessing.
Rove will still be working with GOP so this phrase does not apply him in the literal sense. Guaranteed if you look at who he goes to work for next, his days will be just as long as they are now.
Which will pretty much confirm the lie behind "spending time with my family".
not to have a cell phone. Whenever anyone asks why I don't have a phone, my standard answer is:
"Don't need one, don't want one. Besides, why would I want people to be able to track where I am?"
Don't worry. Very soon to get on a plane everyone will have to board like this.
If the cloud around the nucleus didn't exist, then electrons wouldn't exist. The fact that one can see the electron cloud means that electrons do exist.
Second, the detector image shows the passage of electrons. Again, if electrons didn't exist, these images wouldn't exist.
So yes, I have seen electrons. I have seen them by their clouds and presence.
Why yes, yes I have.
In other words, you're suggesting that women become more like the women one sees walking about in the inner cities or appear on Maury Povich doing the paternity tests.
Does Can-Spam ring a bell? How about a national Do Not Call list?
There are many federal laws on the books which override stronger state laws.
In the episode where they were experimenting with a captured ship, T'lk and O'Neill were flung out to Jupiter and left without a way to get home.
Carter's dad, herself and Daniel are able to rescue them but the two have to eject from their ship and float in space for a few seconds before the ring transport can be used.
I do believe that the two had a spacesuit of some type on but not one that was designed for space. More of a general cover suit.
Which always brings up my question: if the universe is not infinite in size, what is it expanding into or sitting in? I.e. if you place a drop of ink into a glass container full of water, the drop will expand (eventually) until it meets the glass.
That is not what is happening according to current theories of the universe. The most common answer I get is that is loops back upon itself. Fine. That still doesn't explain what the universe sits in.
Just my thoughts on a very esoteric and, IMO, unanswerable question.
Correction. Not placebos. My fault. Misinterpreted the article.
Admitting he used relatives to hide money from his transactions didn't help matters either.
It figures. I ran out of mod points yesterday so instead, I'll respond to the troll.
It's not about the government telling someone what business they can or cannot run, it's about this person selling pills which are claimed to be the real thing. In other words, he was selling placebos and not telling people these weren't the real thing.
Further, Congress has delegated authority to regulate medicinces to the FDA since medicines are not state specific. You can find the same bottle of Advil in Georgia as you can in Kansas. The FDA has stated that if it's a medicine, it must undergo rigorous testing to prove its relative safety.
This guy was claiming he had real drugs which he could deliver on the cheap. Not only was he violating FDA guidelines, he was perpetrating fraud.
So tell me, what country do you live in that allows someone to perpetrate fraud and not get penalized?
Because it's the intertubes! Everything is different. We don't need no stinkin rules!
Seriously, the first time Joe Average realized what they could do on the web, pretty much everything they had learned about how to interact with people went out the window. Think of all the stories that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, has about one or more idiots who came into an IRC channel/AOL chatroom/whatever and acted liked they had lived in a jungle all their lives. Think about the people who still act that way.
I realize your comments were directed more at the business end but the same ideas still apply. People seem to think that their web site, regardless of how good/bad it is coded or what they are selling, will generate bazillions of dollars and make them multi-millioinaires overnight.
Why? Because it's the intertubes! The rules don't apply on that web thingy.
I sense an episode of Seinfeld in that quote.
Ask and you shall receive.
I'll take Below 15 for 100 Alex.
Then it is still a lost sale because the person obviously wanted the product but was too cheap or poor to buy it legally.
One can argue that the overall value of lost sales is not correct as more than likely the figures used are based on U.S. dollars, but the fact that people do have these illegal copies does mean lost sales. Either the person did want to use the product, in which case they should pay for it, or they didn't want to use it. You can't have it both ways.
Stop. Reread what you just posted. First you say it's easy to use. Then you say that you configured your grandmothers machine with four buttons she can use to access the things she uses most.
If it's so easy, why did you have to configure those buttons? Why couldn't your grandmother do it herself?
I'm not saying whatever version of Linux your grandmother is using isn't easy to use. What I am saying is that well-meaning folks like you who support Linux on the desktop always use an example such as the one you gave to show how easy Linux is to use yet, by your own admission, you had to do the setup. You had to do the configuration.
This isn't to say that configuring Windows is necessarily easy or even intuitive. However, either through force of repetition or blind luck, the average person is able to configure a Windows environment more easily than a Linux environment.
I don't personally use Linux though I have fiddled with Slack 10 and Debian so maybe my perceptions are off, but the overall point is that those who support Linux and who say how easy it is to use ALWAYS say they got a family member/SO/whomever to use it AFTER they configured it for them so therefore, it must be easy to use. That's looking at it from the wrong angle.
I wrote in a post a while back about documentation and how the biggest problem with it is that it isn't detailed enough for the average person. People, despite the innate intelligence we are supposedly born with, like to be handheld the first few times when doing something. Particularly if they have never done it before.
You and I may be able to program our vcrs and dvd players (well, not me yet. See my journal for why) without reading the manual but that is only because we have been exposed to the general process for so long that we can draw upon our past experiences to get us through the configuration. Joe Average can't (or won't depending upon how militant they are).
I don't know what the answer is because installing an OS, even as streamlined as Microsoft, Apple and the various Linus distributions have done, is still not easy. There are still questions that need to be answered to configure it that I'm certain your grandmother couldn't answer without your guidance.
Yes, once the OS is installed and configured things will just work but as has been said a billionteen times before, people don't want to have go through a long configuration process. They want to be able to put in a floppy/CD/glass block/whatever and other than double-clicking on an icon, have the software installed and ready to go.
I realize this is somewhat of a rant but those of you who work with Linux on a daily basis think that using your distro is simple and easy. Which it is but ONLY because you've been working with it for X months/years/decades/eons and know it pretty much inside and out. Take someone off the street and have them do an install of the OS or a piece of software on Linux and I can guarantee you they will tell you to do things to yourself which are not possible (except if you're a master contortionist).
Easy is a relative term. What is easy for you or I is not easy to our parents or grandparents. Those who produce Linux distros need to understand this and have it plastered all over their work spaces so every time they do something they should always ask themselves, "Is this something that Joe Average can do?" not, "Well shoot, this is simple. All one has to do is rm -f *%!@, then grep for dlist -t to be sure it was disjoined at which point they can do an apt get something and finally a make something. I can do that in my sleep!" (and yes, I know what I wrote makes no sense. That it is exactly what the outside world hears when you folks talk about doing something)
Ok, oddball question time. Using the above quote, yes, only a man can stick his equipment inside the balloon. However, what about the reverse? Sticking the balloon inside a woman and GENTLY inflating and deflating it again and again.
I know, I know, I'm a sick puppy. Aren't we all in some manner?
Define temporarily. A week? A month? A year? Five years? Ten years? Fifty years?
As this administration is well known to apply new and twisted logic to the common usage of words, temporarily could very well mean indefinitely.