actually they are doing more. By explicitly warning that they "monitor content" they are saying that literally a human being will be looking at your personal emails, the same web pages you do, your MSN chats etc and read what you read, invetigate what company web sites you visit. You have no more expectation of privacy in that context, and they are thereby entitled to more or less do anything they want with that information. including and not limited to using it to publically humiliate you by telling your boss you have a AIDS. God help you if you are a politician that Sympatico doesn't like. Or perhaps you are the CEO of a large corporation and sympatico wants to glean some stock tips by reading your email.
peons are not the ONLY people who use ISPS.
Until an ISP goes so far as to tell you they are looking at the CONTENT of your communication, they are subject to criminal prosecution under the criminal code for illegal interception of wire communications. The phone company is not allowed to listen to your phone conversations... nor is an ISP allowed to intentionally monitor the content of your data. if they overhear accidentally that is one thing. intentionally snooping on the content is a CRIME. (unless they tell you in advance... and for all intents and purposes... Sympatico has just done that).
Everyone by law is OBLIGATED to hand over whatever information/object etc they have when faced with a search warrant authorising that seizure. They aren't merely saying "yea, we'll hand your stats over [when presented with a warrant]." they are saying "yea well record everything you do even though we have no legitimate reason to. We'll look at it. and yea, we'll hand it over if any government (even china) asks with or without a warrant'.
out of curiousity... if you have a conductor which could switch to a non conductor state in an instant.... would that be able to create an EMP without the explosive?
I'm a computer scientist but I took chemistry and physics in 1st year of university, and it seems to me plausible that some substance would be a conductor and be able to undergo a state change at a certain pressure or temperature, collapsing the magnetic field simultaneously without any need to destroy the coil.. thus a reusable EMP generator.
The whole purpose of this is to sell EXPENSIVE ammunition anyway.. nothing more. weapons manufacturers could give a rats ass about "security". They thrive on instability. We already have encrypted ink cartridges... did it improve print quality? What kind of security is this supposed to improve? It would AT THE VERY LEAST decrease the reliability of your firearm. For not only do you need to worry about all the other things which may cause the weapon to fail to fire, but now the encryption itself may be rejected.
Are the millions of AK47's in the word going to start using some new fangled ammo? What a joke. proprietary ammunition sounds like a corporate dream. It will do nothing to improve security because the guns we have today are going to work perfectly fine for the next two hundred years!
A gun which corrodes to the point of non recognition in 20 years once exposed to oxygen would do a lot more to improve security.
I agree with you. Most run of the mill fraud is detectable with after the fact auditing. And certainly many kinds of telephone network fraud imaginable could be detected that way. In my experience such fraud detection is not given a very high priority even AFTER the fact. And much of the fraud looked for is only the kind of fraud that the people involved have dreamed up themselves. Often the best developers are needed to implement new features without causing the entire system to fall apart, so it is the developers who are more prone to write buggy code which are involved in writing auditing code. These guys were less involved in the system design however, and are less qualified to even know what is and what is not fraud. The internal politics and psychology of a telco make fraud detection fairly expensive compared to the actual amount of fraud. (this however minimizes the cost of making carrying live phone traffic). Lately there has been so much emphasis on downsizing and/or merger as well that the problem is compounded; the departments that are usually first on the chooping block are the non-revenue centers. i.e. auditing.
We are really only concerned with large scale and cost-effective to prevent fraud. Something akin to the easily defeatable copyprotection schemes on some CDs (which really only stop casual copying). And I suspect most companies are like that. Consequently.. if you complain that a phone call you made never happened or was of a much shorter duration.. we are most likely to simply take your word for it, make a note and delete the call. Hell.. we know there are bugs in some of the 3rd party technology we use, and we don't want to piss off our customer and make them feel stupid.
At the end of the day, the act of physically carrying a particular call is NOT the major expense for a telco. Most of the cost is tied up in developing/maintaining/owning the CAPABILITY to carry the call. The paying customers are supporting that capability. After that a few lost calls doesn't really make much difference. as long as the fraud is only a small percentage of total phone calls (hopefully happens during non-peak hours) and doesn't trigger customer service calls or loss of service, then I can say that there just isn't much business rational to do anything about it. It is illogical to spend $100,000 to detect $1,000 worth of loss. And this seems to be the inevitable terminal condition for any fraud detection operation in the company. It gets to a point where too little fraud is being found and then you stop trying.
finding cloned sims is probably something to make a routine however. it is too obviously a serious area of potential fraud.
I also work at a telecom company (I will not identify which), and am involved with the development of logic for real time processing of phone calls. You put far too much faith in telecom systems checking for what may or may not be a nonsensical situations. It is far easier to simply process and complete a phone call, than to speculate on an infinite number of potentially contradictory situations which may arrise which might suggest foul-play.
There is nothing implicitly wrong with completing 2 phone calls at the same time. And while there may be cases where it makes no sense, there are so many cases where it makes sense that generaly speaking it is easier to allow it than to presume there is a problem. A call appearing on a bill for a persons cell phone may not even involve a CELL call or a cloned SIM card at all. It could be a land line which the telco wrongly associated with the cell customers phone bill. There may be nothing wrong with the CELL network at all, but a mere data entry error in the billing system.
We are first and foremost concerned with insuring that our customers (or any party which even appears to be a customer) are able to completing their phone calls. Failing to complete a good call is considered a much more serious error than erroneously ALLOWING the completion of a fraudulent call. The rule of thumb is.. when in doubt : complete the call. In fact, I would say that while our systems are 99.999% reliable, their ability to stop fraudulent phone calls is NOT 99.999%. Or at least I can say our testing and so forth in that regard has not been enough to make such a claim.
So... does my code care if you complete 65 phone calls at the same time? no. For all I know you have a service which allows you to complete 65 phone calls at the same time. And if such a service doesn't exist right today, for all I know someone will dream it up next week. It is not for me to speculate.
As a hypothetical: If the same phone line initiated a call from 2 seperate switches simultaneously, there would be no information passed between the 2 switches to detect such an impossible situation. The difficulty of trying to insure such a check was functioning in real time exceeds the benefit.
In fact... even if we could detect such situations in real time, I would be loath to presume that it was in fact wrong. What if those 2 switches are load sharing? What if Switch A, initiated Call #1, and then experienced a problem causing calls to be routed to Switch B? I would need to think of every possible situation to insure I didn't accidentally break functionality that ought to work.
We design telephone systems to work when there are serious failures all over the network. We don't want to be the one responsible to not completing that phone call that results in someone dying or whatever.
You can pretty much assume telephone networks (to the extent that they would BLOCK a phone call which looks funny) are not bullet proof.
If some technician tells you they are, that technician doesn't know what he's talking about.
I would be amazed that a customer support person actually hung up on a customer who wanted to know about the possibility of cloning a SIM card.
The issue of abusive phone calls is completely different from someone hacking a cell provider's network.
If someone is making abusive phone calls to you, then YOU are the victim. And it would be up to you to take it to the police. If someone is hacking the cell network, then the victim is the phone company. They can and should take it up with the police if they choose to. For all you know it is a computer error in their billing system. As a customer your only concern is that the phone company is erroneously billing you for calls you didn't make. You have no information as to WHY this is. You didn't witness anything. They are perfectly within their rights to involve the police if they choose to. If the police feel like you know something or may be able to assist so be it. But don't let the telecom company convince you that someone hacking into their network is your responsibility to resolve. It isn't.
"I have a nice house in a nice neighborhood on a hill. When my daughter is sunbathing out by the pool, it sometimes attracts unpleasant looking people on the public road behind (and above) our home. They like to stop and gawk. I have asked the police to inform them that they do not have permission to look into my back yard.
They may argue that the open air is genrally reasonable permission to use the view, but they know they do not have permission."
They dont NEED permission. They have a right to be present on a public road and look in any direction they want. It is included in the right to lawful assembly. If anything it is your daughter who is violating them by indecently exposing herself to public view.
Your daughter doesn't gain possession of the public space simply by deciding to take off her clothes (or whatever it is she does).
You have a right against unlawful search and seizure in respect of the government spying on you (although that doesn't seem to exist in America anymore). You certainly don't have the right against private individuals spying on you. Unless those people did something which would amount to harrassing you or something, they are within their rights to admire your daughter from a distance. It may be rude. But it isn't a crime.
very clever. However pointlessly trite. "democracy" is an abstract form of government which doesn't actually exist, never has and can not be implemented.
The word democracy however includes many particular forms of government, none of which are technically true democracies. And that is what the grandparent post was referring to.
It's a good thing we don't live in a democracy, for then we'd be truly fucked. Democracy is called "a tyranny of the majority" for good reason. Our founding fathers knew that, and opted for a constitutional republic instead.
well... they opted for a CONSTITUTION. It is the Constitution which prevents the "tyranny of the majority". Representatives are no less apt to become tyrants than anyone else. However Representatives are as close to a true participatory democracy as could be implemented. They imagined there would be 1 representative for every 10000 people or so. A Far cry from what America has today. Todays America is NOT what the founding fathers envisioned. The founding fathers did not give corporations the right to be people nor give them "limited liability". They didn't allow 70 year copyrights.
Don't let your hatred for people of modest or no wealth (the majority) blind you to the fact it is the Constitution and not the benevolence of the minority (the moneyed elite) which keeps you free (if you would call what little freedoms you have left in "freedom").
It is NOT a good thing you dont live in a democracy. It is a good thing you live in a country with a constitution. You would be better off with a "Constitional Democracy" except that the technology and knowledge of how to implement such a system on a practical scale doesn't exist.
In the mean time you will have to rely on bribing or begging your representative rather than exercising any political influence on a personal level (because unless you are part of the monied elite.. you have none).
It is known to the Military Industrial Complex, that people should not have any cathartic outlet for their aggresive tendencies. If realistically violent videogames are available then very few people would ever dream about using real weapons. More and more of us, having been scared shitless playing games such as Medal of Honour (and getting killed over and over again) would never dream that being in real war is glorious in some way.
The "Tyranny of the Minority" already exists. And it is because of the lack of democracy.
Yahoo could refuse to provide the censored service. Or to be more accurate,it could if it were a human being. Since Yahoo is a corporation with no ulterior motive beyond the bottom line, ofcourse it will cooperate. Whereever the money is, Yahoo will follow. Plain and simple. Yahoo doesn't need to be in China, it went there seeking RICHES. It went to satisfy GREED.
You'll never see a corporation sacrifice its life for the greater good. Put up its very existence in front of a military battle tank simply to make a point that death is better than life as a slave. Corporations feel no remorse and no shame. CEO's are bound by law to seek maximum profits and put their personal feelings aside.
That so many people are dumbed into thinking corporations have HUMAN RIGHTS is utterly appalling.
By aiding and abetting the continuance of the Chinese Communist Party, Yahoo as an organization is just as condemnable as the communist party of China is. Its shareholders are as members of the Chinese Communist Party, all jointly responsible for the human rights violations taking place there. Doesn't Yahoo seek the exact same thing the Chinese Communist Party seeks? (POWER)
If Yahoo wants to help the people of China break free of bondage, then why does it try to blind them to the truth which the communist party so desperately wants to hide?
Which one is worse? The executives at YAHOO know what freedom feels like. At least some of the Chinese Communist Party members have been oppressed for so long they may genuinely believe that absolute supression of individual human rights to the state is justifiable.
This post is not merely directed at YAHOO but at the very institution of the corporation itself.
Unless a corporation has embedded human rights in its shareholder agreement (have any as of this date?) then it is legally bound to treat human rights as nothing more than a Public relations matter. Whatever a corporation says about CARING about anything. Don't buy it for a second. It isn't legally permitted to CARE about anything except self-interest (and anything else the shareholders agree to in the shareholder agreement).
Society certainly has the right to redistribute wealth. And if you take the position that the state has any rights derived from "Society", then certainly it could have the right of wealth redistribution as well. I would agree to that.
However "The State" is not the same as "Society". A truly participatory democracy might be able to make the claim that it is as good an approximation of "society" that could possibly exist, but in many instances "The State" is simply an organization with no more moral claim to the title of "Society" than anyone else. The State may even destroy society, as the Nazis did.
The State only represents the will of the people in POWER. That is not necessarily in the best interest of society itself.
The problem in this "age" isn't a lack of time. It is that too many people accept it as entirely normal that you should have "precious little time enough to have a true family dinner let alone quality time where a family can be together and share ideas and exchange thoughts."
We should not be finding ways to make slavery more convenient. We should demand the right to have the opportunity to raise our children PROPERLY OURSELVES. I wont even get into the moral issue of whether or not a parent even has any right to force their child to carry a homing device.
Do you think that a deliberate attempt to obstruct the NSA's ability to "Protect America from Terrorism" (tm) isn't illegal?
In fact, you probably already broke the law just for posting an article counseling how to obstruct the NSA datamining program.
Someone is here on a visa or is an illegal alien? They should certainly be tracked. Legal citizens? Recognize that they have inalienable essential liberties which are guaranteed by the Constitution, and using the War Powers Act to try to justify your actions is NOT legal, and is certainly not ethical. In fact, encroaching our Constitutionally-protected rights when you have taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution actually amounts to treason.
" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - Declaration of Independence
hrmm.. where in that do you read that only LEGAL CITIZENS are created equal? Or that only legal citizens are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights.
The legal premise of the nation is that rigts were endowed upon ALL by the Creator. Unless immigrants have a different creator, then they too have those fundamental rights. The Constitution does not guarantee your rights. the Constitution merely acknowledges in writing that certain of them exist and acts as a contract between the Federal Government and the States and the People that the rights will not be infringed. Contracts can be violated, and they often are. The only thing which guarantees the right may be enjoyed is the positive ACTIONS of people in defence of those rights.
Most people are far too scared to act against government action even when it breeches the contract. This would seem to be according to plan.
"Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with." - THE PRINCE, Nicolo Machiavelli - 1505
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. " - Darth Vader, "Star Wars: Episode V"
Those in power can trample whatever rights they please, and if it can frighten people out of resisting then it has successfully achieved its aim.
If the people are scared of their own government, then they are already oppressed.
Your proposal for the means to support the elderly is that CHARITY should provide for them?
How is this sustainable? Your original argument is that a working adult would be unhappy to give up 2/3 of his income to support others, and now you are arguing that he would do it voluntarily?
You seem to agree that adults MUST sacrifice 2/3 of their income (or approximately that amount) for the benefits of the younger and older generation. That is to say, you have not refuted my claim that this is true.
When I originally said that there is no universal law which says that 1 person can't produce enough to support 3, you said there was a universal law which said 1 person would not be happy about it.
I am confused about what your position is. You've lost me completely.
So given that a government cannot do the job, I would propose that corporations stand in.
All the flaws with government you have complained about are directly attributable to undue influence by corporations. The solution to the problem of corporations is to put corporations in charge?
Why would a corporation give a shit about you? It would LITERALLY sell its own mother if it could.
You seem to be upset that the people who need the aid aren't getting it. And that is a completely legitimate issue. It must be addressed and something must be done to accomplish it. But the solution must not appear to be self aggrandizing. That kind of solution is typically advocated by those with an ulterior motive. I.e... the solution to the wealth getting to the wrong people is NOT that the wealth should be left with you. That is simply substituting 1 group of wrong people for another group. perhaps the 2nd group is more worthy of misappropriation of funds, but the funds are still not getting to the right people (the elderly and the needy and the disabled), and you have NOT solved the problem you are purporting to be concerned about.
You want to insure that wealth is distributed according to need and utility rather than according to political connection.
I totally support such a goal. And I propose democratic reform as the solution. Government should be structured in a way to insure the government has no incentive or ability to assist others merely on the basis of political connection (or to make political connection a prerequisite for such aid).
There should be many more politicians over all, especially in the executive branch, which is practically a monarchy.
why can't you have a VP of Education, who has a specific budget has all the powers of the current president in regards to education, no power over anything else. Why must the same person who decides how to wage war in Iraq also decide how to administer the education of the nation?
Isn't that absurd?
Why not a VP of Health, a VP of Education, a VP of Environment, a VP of Economy, a VP of Defence, VP of Justice.. etc etc... and no president whatsoever?
The VP's can cooperate if they want to, but in the end that is up to them (they are executives afterall). Why invest all executive powers in a single person?
Likewise.. why not have a hierarchical congress? With 30,000 members across the country? say 500 congresses of 600 members each? Each sub-congress decides yeah or nea to any particular bill. And once the majority have voted yeh then the law is passed. Laws can be proposed by a sub-congress to congress as a whole, once it has passed locally. Imagine how expensive it would be to bribe enough congressmen in such a scenario. Imagine how powerless individual congressmen would actually be?
thats just an idea I came up with off the top of my head. They are many other possible solutions.
Your beef however is not primarily that welfare costs too much. Your beef is that the ones who get most of it are already very wealthy. That's a seperate problem.
The government is unrepresentative, and effective only at furthering the needs of the politically connected. The government must be made truly REPRESENTATIVE of the people and must be made effective at meeting their wishes.
The government is not a living being with a soul. Whatever it did wrong in the past, you can't punish it. (like a hammer (which is a murder weapon) can't be punished). You can only adjust it so it does good from here on in. As much as people like to refer to tax as some kind of cash grab by the government. the government does NOT accumulate wealth. (in fact it does the opposite).. the problem is (as you have identified) that the government is no longer controlled by the People.
There are people who are in a lot worse straits than you were in. They need help, and large entities called corporations who now control over 50% (and growing) of all wealth are forbidden by law from performing any altruistic act without an ulterior profit motive. Some acts of altruism have no possibility of a payoff. The free market mandates only that you APPEAR to be good. It doesn't require bonafide goodness, and corporations are excellent at lying (in part because they can hire naive spokepeople who are clueless and have no idea they are telling lies when they say corporation X actually gives a damn about anything ot
1) They are alway resentfull, unless they have received something from that person in the past (such as life, education, etc.)
Who do you think raised you, brought you into the world, and educated you? Your elders.
When the government comes in and informs you that you will provide 2/3 of your work for the sole benefit of people you have never met, it just doesn't go over well!
It will be for the sole benefit of the people who invested in you as a child. You met them. They are your teachers, your parents, your friends parents, the mailman who brought you mail, the fireman who rescued your cat from a tree. It is the entire community which supported and protected you in your early non-productive years. How many millions upon BILLIONS of dollars do we spend in PREPARING our children? Preparing them for what? So they can make profits for their own aggrandizement? No.. so they can carry on the task of living, raising the next generation (and fulfill their obligation to us when we are too old or sick to work anymore).
2) Put to death? You mean they would have to work like the rest of us? That would put them to death? Weird!
A typical 75 year old grandma is lucky if she can walk without assistance. You want her to WORK? I wont ask if you'd hire her, because I know your answer would be : Why would I hire someone and invest all that money in training in an employee who is going to kick the bucket any time, when I can hire a hot college grad in her 20's for less pay, less medical leave and cheaper insurance costs. For that matter.. why hire a 30 year old woman.. she'll probably go on maternity leave any time.
3) This is called a pyramid scheme. Please research what happens to pyramid schemes when they run out of suckers, er, workers. The last guy that buys in is left holding the bag - and they are never happy about that.
We are not talking about a pyramid, we are talking about a sustainable terminating condition which is more akin to a QUEUE. 1 working adult supports 3 human lives.
your only argument so far is that the working adult will not agree.
On average to sustain the population, you will have 2 children per couple. thus on average 1 working adult supports 1 parent + 1 child.
4) The only reasonable explanation I've seen is the statement "we are not running out of suckers, because the suckers are able to work so much harder than previous suckers". I am unconvinced that this is a winning argument.
The "suckers" (I call them people) need not work harder than previous generation. They only need work more productively than the babyboomers. And THEY DO. We are more productive today, thanks to technology. End of story. There is nothing to convince you of. It is an observable fact.
Instead of investing this money where it needs to be invested, this money is gobbled up in the form of record corporate profits, but the fact remains.. it is due to increased productivity brought about by technology.
Taking care of the elder generation is a moral duty. Do onto others as you would have be done on to you. Most of us want to be taken care of in our twilight years, and most of us *WILL* not have any qualms about collectively supporting the ones who brought us into the world. Even if it means that, after accounting for all we spend on our kids, and all we spend on our parents, we only have 1/3 left to spend on ourselves. It is a fact of live.
Short of killing off the elderly or putting children to work. it is an unavoidable conclusion, that working adults MUST support (one way or another) on average 2 other non working human beings.
I said: There is no universal law of nature which says 1 person can't produce enough for 3.
you said: There is, however, a universal law of nature that says that the one person will not be happy about this arrangement.
1: No there isn't. 2: Even if there was, the happiness of the other 2 at not being put to death, outweighs the inconvenience of the 1 who must support them. 3: in time the 1 will also grow old and retire, and will in turn be supported by another younger worker (his children and grandchildren). His happiness at recieving this help, will outweigh the many years of inconvenience he previously suffered at supporting his elders. 4: see #1.
Not only horny - but economically disenfranchised. "1 Family 1 Child" means that for every 2 retired people there will only be 1 working person. The US has concerns about their social security pyramid scheme collapsing because american families have something like 1.8 kids. China's got it much worse with around 1.05 kids. I would be leaving the country if I were forced into that kind of scheme too - which only makes it worse for the ones who don't leave.
With advances in technology this is not necessarily a problem. We are presumably more productive, so 1 person now can produce more wealth than 3 people could produce 100 years ago. More over with mass production, the goods we need all should cost less.
There is no universal law of nature which says 1 person can't produce enough for 3.
If the Government wants to find out who I talk to and when... it's pretty easy to get that information now as it is.
without a warrent? how do they do that?
If they want to actually listen... it's a waste of time but hey, what do I care? Knock yourself out.
May I listen as well? Its a waste of time but I'll be keeping a record just in case I ever need it for your protection.
My point: I hardly think the Government is interested in what I am asking my wife to make for dinner tonight, or whether I need to pick up anything at the store on the way home to help in making said dinner.
You are making the argument that the government has the right to listen to something because it has no interest. What if you are ARGUING with your wife? Perhaps that is of interest. What if your wife mentions that she is pregnant. What if 9 months later... no baby is born. What if men in black show up and arrest you and your wife for having an illegal abortion. (there was no visit to the clinic.. so that creates probable grounds to believe there was an illegal abortion). What if you are charged and your name is put up in the local newspaper.
What if after an investigation the prosecution is dropped on the basis that there is no reasonable prospect for a conviction, but its too late.. the election in which you were a candidate has already happened and you were defeated because of the air of suspicion surrounding your lifestyle. (afterall you campaigned on a pro-life ticket).
Use your fucking imagination!
They want to know when, where and how the next attack on our country is going to take place.
And listening to your conversation is not relevant... so by your logic... the government OUGHT to listen to it?
What if come FUTURE president just wants to be "president for life", and decides to use the information to blackmail all of his (or enough of his) political enemies, and impose a dictatorship. Perhaps you did something you were ashamed of when you were a teenager.. perhaps you dont want that phone conversation becoming public.... perhaps that can be used to influence your future behavior.. Do you want to condemn todays children to a future of serving the executive branch as blackmailable pawns?
By then it will be too late.
I don't break any laws as I conduct my telephone conversations, nor do (I would speculate) 99.99% of Americans.
So now you are implicitly arguing that it is legitimate to spy on citizens to insure they are in full compliance with law?
You are also living in a fantasy world that the only thing people are embarassed or ashamed about is CRIME. People are embarassed about simple nudity!! You can't think of anything which could be used to deprive people of free will?
We are already speeding down that slippery slope, that the totalitarians insist on denying even exists.
Quite frankly, if some politician wants to call a gay sex hotline, that has nothing to do with his ability to be a politician, and yet it is the type of information he would do almost anything to keep out of the public light. Thereby making him a potential stooge for the Executive Branch, foreign powers, fundamentalists, criminals. This is a threat to the seperation of powers.
What if some less than honest NSA agent (suprise THEY ARE ALSO MOTIVATED BY GREED) decides to make some extra cash and mines the database for blackmailable behavior. The phone companies by themselves would not have the power, but the NSA can connect these records to tax records and god knows what else they've got.
I wont even contemplate what would happen if Al Quaeda or a foreign government ever figured out how to tap into all of these massive centralized data warehouses that you dataphiles seem to think are so wonderful.
But if we catch terrorists and avert attacks, what's the harm in the government monitoring these phone calls? It doesn't affect my daily life one bit - but an attack not thwa
From the article: "in the end, all this surveillance gear and attendant hype becomes meaningless with simple precautions like encrypted VOIP, a good implementation of virtual private networks, and proxies and SSH for web surfing, IM, internet relay chat, webmail and the like"
Which all goes to show that none of this is actually about stopping crime. It is about consolidating power.
So you are in agreement? The United States is a fascist country?
Actually you commit a logical fallacy in your opening statement, but I wont bother pointing it out since you posted as an AC and you wont notice my reply anyway.
DRM is a flawed, ultimately unworkable attempt to control copying of "content" files.
There is nothing unworkable about DRM (from a capitalist perspective), any more than laws about tresspassing and barbwire fences are unworkable. You can bypass them but most of the time people wont.
If you can make the consequence for attempting to bypass DRM severe enough than you have effective DRM. If you encourage only a small number of people to purchase again what they already own, you have garnered profit which would have otherwise not been made.
DRM will deter users from enjoying their RIGHT to access their own copy on their own terms, and it will deter the availability of data into the public domain. Even though it is not perfect, it will create an artificial market for the holder of the DRM key well beyond the copyright actually expiring, and create revenues where no revenues are warranted under the copyright law.
In the future when wireless internet acess is ubiquitous, I imagine call-home style DRM schemes will become predominant and the copyright holder will exploit technology to seize the power to decide who may or may not read a copy on a case by case basis. The right to control access is by law in the hands of the person in possession of the copy (NOT the copyright holder).
Once vendors of data can control access via technology (indefinitely) we must ask the question.... does copyright encourage the transmission of new ideas into the public domain or not?
If the answer is no, then all copyright law should be scrapped. It no longer serves any purpose.
Better yet, if they want to work a political angle, why not work on/against legislation such as the DMCA?
Part of working on the political angle is to persuade the public that the object under legislation itself is wrong.
You can't convince people that laws promoting and protecting DRM are wrong while admitting that DRM is not wrong.
Your proposition that a discussion of trade and subsidy (and their effect) can meaningfully take place while pretending that the we are talking about something other than corporations is astounding.
When you talk about "benefits" of trade, you are talking about the recipient of those benefits.
Who are the ones holding those "benefits"? Who are the ones performing the trade?
Corporations now own more wealth in the world than all individuals combined, and the ratio continues to skew in favor of corporations. So what are we talking about here?
If that major stakeholder is the corporation, then how can you sincerely say "I didn't mention corporations ".
When wages and spending power have been decreasing in America for the past 30 years.... The environment is getting unhealthier, and we are more and more constantly bombarded by a stream of continuous corporate advertising in place of natural environments... how can you say that American's have been the beneficiaries of increased trade?
The corporations are the benefactors.. and it was the corporations who you were talking about even if you refuse to admit it.
If subsidy truly hurt the subsidizing nation in the long run.. there would be absolutely no reason to prohibit them in various free trade agreements. No one nation would ever do something willingly simply to hurt itself. Even the argument that what hurts 1 partner hurts the other, falls flat on its face. If I am trading with you, and you do something stupid to weaken yourself, all that you do to me, is provide me with an opportunity to buy you out completely and then conduct trade with myself on whatever basis I choose.
In fact this is what american multi-nationals do. They buy out the "foreign" businesses, and now are largely conducting trade with themselves. between their own subsidiaries.
Voters may for the most part be stupid (although scientific evidence is that large groups of people are uncanily accurate in the aggregate to compute correct answer.. such as guessing the number of beans in a jar), but local business interests and owners who are in fact the power behind local governments are NOT. If subsidy was really bad for the local people there is no reason to put that in a contract with a foreign nation.
Subsidies tend to benefit the local people in ways that foreign controlled (american) corporations can not exploit. Thus they are evil.
Another fact is that by removing subsidy then the only means of artificially manipulating markets is by military intervention (or its threat).
Being the worlds military superpower, the US naturally has a self interest in convincing the world that something is wrong with subsidy. On the other hand, the official stand of the US foreign policy is to intervene militarily to protect even a purely economic interest.
Why do you think Canada doesn't have a large military? Canadians do not even perceive a remote need to have a large military. We have so completely internalized the notion that America would never allow a foreign power to sieze canada.
Because it is absolutely true.
The US government is discretely subsidizing the cost of the oil you consume by providing military protection ( as well as unstated threats of military occupation) to Canada in exchange for access to Canadian oil. This is exactly the same thing going on in Saudi Arabia.
If the US government didn't subsidize oil prices at the barrel of a gun, then you would get to see laissez-faire capitalism at work. America would become the client state, owned and operated by foreign oil interests.
If the price of oil went too high, your largest employers (the big 3 automakers) would suffer serious difficulties and need to lay off huge numbers of workers.. leading to all sorts of local suffering.
Lets also not forget who the American government is buying obscene numbers of weapons from (answer: from american business).
The Interstate highway system itself was simply a vast makework
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actually they are doing more. By explicitly warning that they "monitor content" they are saying that literally a human being will be looking at your personal emails, the same web pages you do, your MSN chats etc and read what you read, invetigate what company web sites you visit. You have no more expectation of privacy in that context, and they are thereby entitled to more or less do anything they want with that information. including and not limited to using it to publically humiliate you by telling your boss you have a AIDS. God help you if you are a politician that Sympatico doesn't like. Or perhaps you are the CEO of a large corporation and sympatico wants to glean some stock tips by reading your email.
peons are not the ONLY people who use ISPS.
Until an ISP goes so far as to tell you they are looking at the CONTENT of your communication, they are subject to criminal prosecution under the criminal code for illegal interception of wire communications. The phone company is not allowed to listen to your phone conversations... nor is an ISP allowed to intentionally monitor the content of your data. if they overhear accidentally that is one thing. intentionally snooping on the content is a CRIME. (unless they tell you in advance... and for all intents and purposes... Sympatico has just done that).
Everyone by law is OBLIGATED to hand over whatever information/object etc they have when faced with a search warrant authorising that seizure. They aren't merely saying "yea, we'll hand your stats over [when presented with a warrant]." they are saying "yea well record everything you do even though we have no legitimate reason to. We'll look at it. and yea, we'll hand it over if any government (even china) asks with or without a warrant'.
out of curiousity... if you have a conductor which could switch to a non conductor state in an instant.... would that be able to create an EMP without the explosive?
I'm a computer scientist but I took chemistry and physics in 1st year of university, and it seems to me plausible that some substance would be a conductor and be able to undergo a state change at a certain pressure or temperature, collapsing the magnetic field simultaneously without any need to destroy the coil.. thus a reusable EMP generator.
The whole purpose of this is to sell EXPENSIVE ammunition anyway.. nothing more. weapons manufacturers could give a rats ass about "security". They thrive on instability. We already have encrypted ink cartridges... did it improve print quality? What kind of security is this supposed to improve? It would AT THE VERY LEAST decrease the reliability of your firearm. For not only do you need to worry about all the other things which may cause the weapon to fail to fire, but now the encryption itself may be rejected.
Are the millions of AK47's in the word going to start using some new fangled ammo? What a joke. proprietary ammunition sounds like a corporate dream.
It will do nothing to improve security because the guns we have today are going to work perfectly fine for the next two hundred years!
A gun which corrodes to the point of non recognition in 20 years once exposed to oxygen would do a lot more to improve security.
I agree with you. Most run of the mill fraud is detectable with after the fact auditing. And certainly many kinds of telephone network fraud imaginable could be detected that way. In my experience such fraud detection is not given a very high priority even AFTER the fact. And much of the fraud looked for is only the kind of fraud that the people involved have dreamed up themselves. Often the best developers are needed to implement new features without causing the entire system to fall apart, so it is the developers who are more prone to write buggy code which are involved in writing auditing code. These guys were less involved in the system design however, and are less qualified to even know what is and what is not fraud. The internal politics and psychology of a telco make fraud detection fairly expensive compared to the actual amount of fraud. (this however minimizes the cost of making carrying live phone traffic). Lately there has been so much emphasis on downsizing and/or merger as well that the problem is compounded; the departments that are usually first on the chooping block are the non-revenue centers. i.e. auditing.
We are really only concerned with large scale and cost-effective to prevent fraud. Something akin to the easily defeatable copyprotection schemes on some CDs (which really only stop casual copying). And I suspect most companies are like that. Consequently.. if you complain that a phone call you made never happened or was of a much shorter duration.. we are most likely to simply take your word for it, make a note and delete the call. Hell.. we know there are bugs in some of the 3rd party technology we use, and we don't want to piss off our customer and make them feel stupid.
At the end of the day, the act of physically carrying a particular call is NOT the major expense for a telco. Most of the cost is tied up in developing/maintaining/owning the CAPABILITY to carry the call. The paying customers are supporting that capability. After that a few lost calls doesn't really make much difference. as long as the fraud is only a small percentage of total phone calls (hopefully happens during non-peak hours) and doesn't trigger customer service calls or loss of service, then I can say that there just isn't much business rational to do anything about it. It is illogical to spend $100,000 to detect $1,000 worth of loss. And this seems to be the inevitable terminal condition for any fraud detection operation in the company. It gets to a point where too little fraud is being found and then you stop trying.
finding cloned sims is probably something to make a routine however. it is too obviously a serious area of potential fraud.
I also work at a telecom company (I will not identify which), and am involved with the development of logic for real time processing of phone calls. You put far too much faith in telecom systems checking for what may or may not be a nonsensical situations. It is far easier to simply process and complete a phone call, than to speculate on an infinite number of potentially contradictory situations which may arrise which might suggest foul-play.
There is nothing implicitly wrong with completing 2 phone calls at the same time. And while there may be cases where it makes no sense, there are so many cases where it makes sense that generaly speaking it is easier to allow it than to presume there is a problem. A call appearing on a bill for a persons cell phone may not even involve a CELL call or a cloned SIM card at all. It could be a land line which the telco wrongly associated with the cell customers phone bill. There may be nothing wrong with the CELL network at all, but a mere data entry error in the billing system.
We are first and foremost concerned with insuring that our customers (or any party which even appears to be a customer) are able to completing their phone calls. Failing to complete a good call is considered a much more serious error than erroneously ALLOWING the completion of a fraudulent call. The rule of thumb is.. when in doubt : complete the call. In fact, I would say that while our systems are 99.999% reliable, their ability to stop fraudulent phone calls is NOT 99.999%. Or at least I can say our testing and so forth in that regard has not been enough to make such a claim.
So... does my code care if you complete 65 phone calls at the same time? no. For all I know you have a service which allows you to complete 65 phone calls at the same time. And if such a service doesn't exist right today, for all I know someone will dream it up next week. It is not for me to speculate.
As a hypothetical:
If the same phone line initiated a call from 2 seperate switches simultaneously, there would be no information passed between the 2 switches to detect such an impossible situation. The difficulty of trying to insure such a check was functioning in real time exceeds the benefit.
In fact... even if we could detect such situations in real time, I would be loath to presume that it was in fact wrong. What if those 2 switches are load sharing? What if Switch A, initiated Call #1, and then experienced a problem causing calls to be routed to Switch B? I would need to think of every possible situation to insure I didn't accidentally break functionality that ought to work.
We design telephone systems to work when there are serious failures all over the network. We don't want to be the one responsible to not completing that phone call that results in someone dying or whatever.
You can pretty much assume telephone networks (to the extent that they would BLOCK a phone call which looks funny) are not bullet proof.
If some technician tells you they are, that technician doesn't know what he's talking about.
I would be amazed that a customer support person actually hung up on a customer who wanted to know about the possibility of cloning a SIM card.
The issue of abusive phone calls is completely different from someone hacking a cell provider's network.
If someone is making abusive phone calls to you, then YOU are the victim. And it would be up to you to take it to the police. If someone is hacking the cell network, then the victim is the phone company. They can and should take it up with the police if they choose to. For all you know it is a computer error in their billing system. As a customer your only concern is that the phone company is erroneously billing you for calls you didn't make. You have no information as to WHY this is. You didn't witness anything. They are perfectly within their rights to involve the police if they choose to. If the police feel like you know something or may be able to assist so be it. But don't let the telecom company convince you that someone hacking into their network is your responsibility to resolve. It isn't.
"I have a nice house in a nice neighborhood on a hill. When my daughter is sunbathing out by the pool, it sometimes attracts unpleasant looking people on the public road behind (and above) our home. They like to stop and gawk. I have asked the police to inform them that they do not have permission to look into my back yard.
They may argue that the open air is genrally reasonable permission to use the view, but they know they do not have permission."
They dont NEED permission. They have a right to be present on a public road and look in any direction they want. It is included in the right to lawful assembly. If anything it is your daughter who is violating them by indecently exposing herself to public view.
Your daughter doesn't gain possession of the public space simply by deciding to take off her clothes (or whatever it is she does).
You have a right against unlawful search and seizure in respect of the government spying on you (although that doesn't seem to exist in America anymore). You certainly don't have the right against private individuals spying on you. Unless those people did something which would amount to harrassing you or something, they are within their rights to admire your daughter from a distance. It may be rude. But it isn't a crime.
very clever. However pointlessly trite. "democracy" is an abstract form of government which doesn't actually exist, never has and can not be implemented.
The word democracy however includes many particular forms of government, none of which are technically true democracies. And that is what the grandparent post was referring to.
It's a good thing we don't live in a democracy, for then we'd be truly fucked. Democracy is called "a tyranny of the majority" for good reason. Our founding fathers knew that, and opted for a constitutional republic instead.
well... they opted for a CONSTITUTION. It is the Constitution which prevents the "tyranny of the majority". Representatives are no less apt to become tyrants than anyone else. However Representatives are as close to a true participatory democracy as could be implemented. They imagined there would be 1 representative for every 10000 people or so. A Far cry from what America has today. Todays America is NOT what the founding fathers envisioned. The founding fathers did not give corporations the right to be people nor give them "limited liability". They didn't allow 70 year copyrights.
Don't let your hatred for people of modest or no wealth (the majority) blind you to the fact it is the Constitution and not the benevolence of the minority (the moneyed elite) which keeps you free (if you would call what little freedoms you have left in "freedom").
It is NOT a good thing you dont live in a democracy. It is a good thing you live in a country with a constitution. You would be better off with a "Constitional Democracy" except that the technology and knowledge of how to implement such a system on a practical scale doesn't exist.
In the mean time you will have to rely on bribing or begging your representative rather than exercising any political influence on a personal level (because unless you are part of the monied elite.. you have none).
It is known to the Military Industrial Complex, that people should not have any cathartic outlet for their aggresive tendencies. If realistically violent videogames are available then very few people would ever dream about using real weapons. More and more of us, having been scared shitless playing games such as Medal of Honour (and getting killed over and over again) would never dream that being in real war is glorious in some way.
The "Tyranny of the Minority" already exists. And it is because of the lack of democracy.
If you don't like it, tough titties. Move to a developing nation that doesn't have technology yet.
because you can shit-sure bet that "In America" your government representative doesn't care what you think.
The solution to that would be to forbid corporations from owning shares of other corporations.
Yahoo could refuse to provide the censored service. Or to be more accurate,it could if it were a human being. Since Yahoo is a corporation with no ulterior motive beyond the bottom line, ofcourse it will cooperate. Whereever the money is, Yahoo will follow. Plain and simple. Yahoo doesn't need to be in China, it went there seeking RICHES. It went to satisfy GREED.
You'll never see a corporation sacrifice its life for the greater good. Put up its very existence in front of a military battle tank simply to make a point that death is better than life as a slave. Corporations feel no remorse and no shame. CEO's are bound by law to seek maximum profits and put their personal feelings aside.
That so many people are dumbed into thinking corporations have HUMAN RIGHTS is utterly appalling.
By aiding and abetting the continuance of the Chinese Communist Party, Yahoo as an organization is just as condemnable as the communist party of China is. Its shareholders are as members of the Chinese Communist Party, all jointly responsible for the human rights violations taking place there. Doesn't Yahoo seek the exact same thing the Chinese Communist Party seeks? (POWER)
If Yahoo wants to help the people of China break free of bondage, then why does it try to blind them to the truth which the communist party so desperately wants to hide?
Which one is worse? The executives at YAHOO know what freedom feels like. At least some of the Chinese Communist Party members have been oppressed for so long they may genuinely believe that absolute supression of individual human rights to the state is justifiable.
This post is not merely directed at YAHOO but at the very institution of the corporation itself.
Unless a corporation has embedded human rights in its shareholder agreement (have any as of this date?) then it is legally bound to treat human rights as nothing more than a Public relations matter. Whatever a corporation says about CARING about anything. Don't buy it for a second. It isn't legally permitted to CARE about anything except self-interest (and anything else the shareholders agree to in the shareholder agreement).
Society certainly has the right to redistribute wealth. And if you take the position that the state has any rights derived from "Society", then certainly it could have the right of wealth redistribution as well. I would agree to that.
However "The State" is not the same as "Society". A truly participatory democracy might be able to make the claim that it is as good an approximation of "society" that could possibly exist, but in many instances "The State" is simply an organization with no more moral claim to the title of "Society" than anyone else. The State may even destroy society, as the Nazis did.
The State only represents the will of the people in POWER. That is not necessarily in the best interest of society itself.
The problem in this "age" isn't a lack of time. It is that too many people accept it as entirely normal that you should have "precious little time enough to have a true family dinner let alone quality time where a family can be together and share ideas and exchange thoughts."
We should not be finding ways to make slavery more convenient. We should demand the right to have the opportunity to raise our children PROPERLY OURSELVES.
I wont even get into the moral issue of whether or not a parent even has any right to force their child to carry a homing device.
You've identified 3 traits associated with a psychopathic personality. What else should you be telling us?
Do you think that a deliberate attempt to obstruct the NSA's ability to "Protect America from Terrorism" (tm) isn't illegal?
In fact, you probably already broke the law just for posting an article counseling how to obstruct the NSA datamining program.
Someone is here on a visa or is an illegal alien? They should certainly be tracked. Legal citizens? Recognize that they have inalienable essential liberties which are guaranteed by the Constitution, and using the War Powers Act to try to justify your actions is NOT legal, and is certainly not ethical. In fact, encroaching our Constitutionally-protected rights when you have taken an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution actually amounts to treason.
" We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - Declaration of Independence
hrmm.. where in that do you read that only LEGAL CITIZENS are created equal? Or that only legal citizens are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights.
The legal premise of the nation is that rigts were endowed upon ALL by the Creator. Unless immigrants have a different creator, then they too have those fundamental rights. The Constitution does not guarantee your rights. the Constitution merely acknowledges in writing that certain of them exist and acts as a contract between the Federal Government and the States and the People that the rights will not be infringed. Contracts can be violated, and they often are. The only thing which guarantees the right may be enjoyed is the positive ACTIONS of people in defence of those rights.
Most people are far too scared to act against government action even when it breeches the contract. This would seem to be according to plan.
"Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than
feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to
be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is
much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be
dispensed with." - THE PRINCE, Nicolo Machiavelli - 1505
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. " - Darth Vader, "Star Wars: Episode V"
Those in power can trample whatever rights they please, and if it can frighten people out of resisting then it has successfully achieved its aim.
If the people are scared of their own government, then they are already oppressed.
Your proposal for the means to support the elderly is that CHARITY should provide for them?
How is this sustainable? Your original argument is that a working adult would be unhappy to give up 2/3 of his income to support others, and now you are arguing that he would do it voluntarily?
You seem to agree that adults MUST sacrifice 2/3 of their income (or approximately that amount) for the benefits of the younger and older generation. That is to say, you have not refuted my claim that this is true.
When I originally said that there is no universal law which says that 1 person can't produce enough to support 3, you said there was a universal law which said 1 person would not be happy about it.
I am confused about what your position is. You've lost me completely.
So given that a government cannot do the job, I would propose that corporations stand in.
All the flaws with government you have complained about are directly attributable to undue influence by corporations. The solution to the problem of corporations is to put corporations in charge?
Why would a corporation give a shit about you? It would LITERALLY sell its own mother if it could.
You seem to be upset that the people who need the aid aren't getting it. And that is a completely legitimate issue. It must be addressed and something must be done to accomplish it. But the solution must not appear to be self aggrandizing. That kind of solution is typically advocated by those with an ulterior motive. I.e... the solution to the wealth getting to the wrong people is NOT that the wealth should be left with you. That is simply substituting 1 group of wrong people for another group. perhaps the 2nd group is more worthy of misappropriation of funds, but the funds are still not getting to the right people (the elderly and the needy and the disabled), and you have NOT solved the problem you are purporting to be concerned about.
You want to insure that wealth is distributed according to need and utility rather than according to political connection.
I totally support such a goal. And I propose democratic reform as the solution. Government should be structured in a way to insure the government has no incentive or ability to assist others merely on the basis of political connection (or to make political connection a prerequisite for such aid).
There should be many more politicians over all, especially in the executive branch, which is practically a monarchy.
why can't you have a VP of Education, who has a specific budget has all the powers of the current president in regards to education, no power over anything else. Why must the same person who decides how to wage war in Iraq also decide how to administer the education of the nation?
Isn't that absurd?
Why not a VP of Health, a VP of Education, a VP of Environment, a VP of Economy, a VP of Defence, VP of Justice.. etc etc... and no president whatsoever?
The VP's can cooperate if they want to, but in the end that is up to them (they are executives afterall). Why invest all executive powers in a single person?
Likewise.. why not have a hierarchical congress? With 30,000 members across the country? say 500 congresses of 600 members each? Each sub-congress decides yeah or nea to any particular bill. And once the majority have voted yeh then the law is passed. Laws can be proposed by a sub-congress to congress as a whole, once it has passed locally. Imagine how expensive it would be to bribe enough congressmen in such a scenario. Imagine how powerless individual congressmen would actually be?
thats just an idea I came up with off the top of my head. They are many other possible solutions.
Your beef however is not primarily that welfare costs too much. Your beef is that the ones who get most of it are already very wealthy. That's a seperate problem.
The government is unrepresentative, and effective only at furthering the needs of the politically connected.
The government must be made truly REPRESENTATIVE of the people and must be made effective at meeting their wishes.
The government is not a living being with a soul. Whatever it did wrong in the past, you can't punish it. (like a hammer (which is a murder weapon) can't be punished). You can only adjust it so it does good from here on in. As much as people like to refer to tax as some kind of cash grab by the government. the government does NOT accumulate wealth. (in fact it does the opposite).. the problem is (as you have identified) that the government is no longer controlled by the People.
There are people who are in a lot worse straits than you were in. They need help, and large entities called corporations who now control over 50% (and growing) of all wealth are forbidden by law from performing any altruistic act without an ulterior profit motive. Some acts of altruism have no possibility of a payoff. The free market mandates only that you APPEAR to be good. It doesn't require bonafide goodness, and corporations are excellent at lying (in part because they can hire naive spokepeople who are clueless and have no idea they are telling lies when they say corporation X actually gives a damn about anything ot
1) They are alway resentfull, unless they have received something from that person in the past (such as life, education, etc.)
Who do you think raised you, brought you into the world, and educated you? Your elders.
When the government comes in and informs you that you will provide 2/3 of your work for the sole benefit of people you have never met, it just doesn't go over well!
It will be for the sole benefit of the people who invested in you as a child. You met them. They are your teachers, your parents, your friends parents, the mailman who brought you mail, the fireman who rescued your cat from a tree. It is the entire community which supported and protected you in your early non-productive years. How many millions upon BILLIONS of dollars do we spend in PREPARING our children? Preparing them for what? So they can make profits for their own aggrandizement? No.. so they can carry on the task of living, raising the next generation (and fulfill their obligation to us when we are too old or sick to work anymore).
2) Put to death? You mean they would have to work like the rest of us? That would put them to death? Weird!
A typical 75 year old grandma is lucky if she can walk without assistance. You want her to WORK? I wont ask if you'd hire her, because I know your answer would be : Why would I hire someone and invest all that money in training in an employee who is going to kick the bucket any time, when I can hire a hot college grad in her 20's for less pay, less medical leave and cheaper insurance costs. For that matter.. why hire a 30 year old woman.. she'll probably go on maternity leave any time.
3) This is called a pyramid scheme. Please research what happens to pyramid schemes when they run out of suckers, er, workers. The last guy that buys in is left holding the bag - and they are never happy about that.
We are not talking about a pyramid, we are talking about a sustainable terminating condition which is more akin to a QUEUE. 1 working adult supports 3 human lives.
your only argument so far is that the working adult will not agree.
On average to sustain the population, you will have 2 children per couple. thus on average 1 working adult supports 1 parent + 1 child.
4) The only reasonable explanation I've seen is the statement "we are not running out of suckers, because the suckers are able to work so much harder than previous suckers". I am unconvinced that this is a winning argument.
The "suckers" (I call them people) need not work harder than previous generation. They only need work more productively than the babyboomers. And THEY DO. We are more productive today, thanks to technology. End of story. There is nothing to convince you of. It is an observable fact.
Instead of investing this money where it needs to be invested, this money is gobbled up in the form of record corporate profits, but the fact remains.. it is due to increased productivity brought about by technology.
Taking care of the elder generation is a moral duty. Do onto others as you would have be done on to you. Most of us want to be taken care of in our twilight years, and most of us *WILL* not have any qualms about collectively supporting the ones who brought us into the world. Even if it means that, after accounting for all we spend on our kids, and all we spend on our parents, we only have 1/3 left to spend on ourselves. It is a fact of live.
Short of killing off the elderly or putting children to work. it is an unavoidable conclusion, that working adults MUST support (one way or another) on average 2 other non working human beings.
I said: There is no universal law of nature which says 1 person can't produce enough for 3.
you said: There is, however, a universal law of nature that says that the one person will not be happy about this arrangement.
1: No there isn't.
2: Even if there was, the happiness of the other 2 at not being put to death, outweighs the inconvenience of the 1 who must support them.
3: in time the 1 will also grow old and retire, and will in turn be supported by another younger worker (his children and grandchildren). His happiness at recieving this help, will outweigh the many years of inconvenience he previously suffered at supporting his elders.
4: see #1.
Not only horny - but economically disenfranchised. "1 Family 1 Child" means that for every 2 retired people there will only be 1 working person. The US has concerns about their social security pyramid scheme collapsing because american families have something like 1.8 kids. China's got it much worse with around 1.05 kids. I would be leaving the country if I were forced into that kind of scheme too - which only makes it worse for the ones who don't leave.
With advances in technology this is not necessarily a problem. We are presumably more productive, so 1 person now can produce more wealth than 3 people could produce 100 years ago. More over with mass production, the goods we need all should cost less.
There is no universal law of nature which says 1 person can't produce enough for 3.
If the Government wants to find out who I talk to and when... it's pretty easy to get that information now as it is.
.... perhaps that can be used to influence your future behavior.. Do you want to condemn todays children to a future of serving the executive branch as blackmailable pawns?
without a warrent? how do they do that?
If they want to actually listen... it's a waste of time but hey, what do I care? Knock yourself out.
May I listen as well? Its a waste of time but I'll be keeping a record just in case I ever need it for your protection.
My point: I hardly think the Government is interested in what I am asking my wife to make for dinner tonight, or whether I need to pick up anything at the store on the way home to help in making said dinner.
You are making the argument that the government has the right to listen to something because it has no interest. What if you are ARGUING with your wife? Perhaps that is of interest. What if your wife mentions that she is pregnant. What if 9 months later... no baby is born. What if men in black show up and arrest you and your wife for having an illegal abortion. (there was no visit to the clinic.. so that creates probable grounds to believe there was an illegal abortion). What if you are charged and your name is put up in the local newspaper.
What if after an investigation the prosecution is dropped on the basis that there is no reasonable prospect for a conviction, but its too late.. the election in which you were a candidate has already happened and you were defeated because of the air of suspicion surrounding your lifestyle. (afterall you campaigned on a pro-life ticket).
Use your fucking imagination!
They want to know when, where and how the next attack on our country is going to take place.
And listening to your conversation is not relevant... so by your logic... the government OUGHT to listen to it?
What if come FUTURE president just wants to be "president for life", and decides to use the information to blackmail all of his (or enough of his) political enemies, and impose a dictatorship. Perhaps you did something you were ashamed of when you were a teenager.. perhaps you dont want that phone conversation becoming public
By then it will be too late.
I don't break any laws as I conduct my telephone conversations, nor do (I would speculate) 99.99% of Americans.
So now you are implicitly arguing that it is legitimate to spy on citizens to insure they are in full compliance with law?
You are also living in a fantasy world that the only thing people are embarassed or ashamed about is CRIME. People are embarassed about simple nudity!! You can't think of anything which could be used to deprive people of free will?
We are already speeding down that slippery slope, that the totalitarians insist on denying even exists.
Quite frankly, if some politician wants to call a gay sex hotline, that has nothing to do with his ability to be a politician, and yet it is the type of information he would do almost anything to keep out of the public light. Thereby making him a potential stooge for the Executive Branch, foreign powers, fundamentalists, criminals. This is a threat to the seperation of powers.
What if some less than honest NSA agent (suprise THEY ARE ALSO MOTIVATED BY GREED) decides to make some extra cash and mines the database for blackmailable behavior. The phone companies by themselves would not have the power, but the NSA can connect these records to tax records and god knows what else they've got.
I wont even contemplate what would happen if Al Quaeda or a foreign government ever figured out how to tap into all of these massive centralized data warehouses that you dataphiles seem to think are so wonderful.
But if we catch terrorists and avert attacks, what's the harm in the government monitoring these phone calls? It doesn't affect my daily life one bit - but an attack not thwa
From the article:
"in the end, all this surveillance gear and attendant hype becomes meaningless with simple precautions like encrypted VOIP, a good implementation of virtual private networks, and proxies and SSH for web surfing, IM, internet relay chat, webmail and the like"
Which all goes to show that none of this is actually about stopping crime. It is about consolidating power.
This is called neofeudalism.
ohh.. its better than that. In feudalism, a Lord has a nominal reponsibility to protect his serfs. What a waste!
So you are in agreement? The United States is a fascist country?
Actually you commit a logical fallacy in your opening statement, but I wont bother pointing it out since you posted as an AC and you wont notice my reply anyway.
DRM is a flawed, ultimately unworkable attempt to control copying of "content" files.
There is nothing unworkable about DRM (from a capitalist perspective), any more than laws about tresspassing and barbwire fences are unworkable. You can bypass them but most of the time people wont.
If you can make the consequence for attempting to bypass DRM severe enough than you have effective DRM. If you encourage only a small number of people to purchase again what they already own, you have garnered profit which would have otherwise not been made.
DRM will deter users from enjoying their RIGHT to access their own copy on their own terms, and it will deter the availability of data into the public domain. Even though it is not perfect, it will create an artificial market for the holder of the DRM key well beyond the copyright actually expiring, and create revenues where no revenues are warranted under the copyright law.
In the future when wireless internet acess is ubiquitous, I imagine call-home style DRM schemes will become predominant and the copyright holder will exploit technology to seize the power to decide who may or may not read a copy on a case by case basis. The right to control access is by law in the hands of the person in possession of the copy (NOT the copyright holder).
Once vendors of data can control access via technology (indefinitely) we must ask the question.... does copyright encourage the transmission of new ideas into the public domain or not?
If the answer is no, then all copyright law should be scrapped. It no longer serves any purpose.
Better yet, if they want to work a political angle, why not work on/against legislation such as the DMCA?
Part of working on the political angle is to persuade the public that the object under legislation itself is wrong.
You can't convince people that laws promoting and protecting DRM are wrong while admitting that DRM is not wrong.
Your proposition that a discussion of trade and subsidy (and their effect) can meaningfully take place while pretending that the we are talking about something other than corporations is astounding.
When you talk about "benefits" of trade, you are talking about the recipient of those benefits.
Who are the ones holding those "benefits"? Who are the ones performing the trade?
Corporations now own more wealth in the world than all individuals combined, and the ratio continues to skew in favor of corporations. So what are we talking about here?
If that major stakeholder is the corporation, then how can you sincerely say "I didn't mention corporations ".
When wages and spending power have been decreasing in America for the past 30 years.... The environment is getting unhealthier, and we are more and more constantly bombarded by a stream of continuous corporate advertising in place of natural environments... how can you say that American's have been the beneficiaries of increased trade?
The corporations are the benefactors.. and it was the corporations who you were talking about even if you refuse to admit it.
If subsidy truly hurt the subsidizing nation in the long run.. there would be absolutely no reason to prohibit them in various free trade agreements. No one nation would ever do something willingly simply to hurt itself. Even the argument that what hurts 1 partner hurts the other, falls flat on its face. If I am trading with you, and you do something stupid to weaken yourself, all that you do to me, is provide me with an opportunity to buy you out completely and then conduct trade with myself on whatever basis I choose.
In fact this is what american multi-nationals do. They buy out the "foreign" businesses, and now are largely conducting trade with themselves. between their own subsidiaries.
Voters may for the most part be stupid (although scientific evidence is that large groups of people are uncanily accurate in the aggregate to compute correct answer.. such as guessing the number of beans in a jar), but local business interests and owners who are in fact the power behind local governments are NOT. If subsidy was really bad for the local people there is no reason to put that in a contract with a foreign nation.
Subsidies tend to benefit the local people in ways that foreign controlled (american) corporations can not exploit. Thus they are evil.
Another fact is that by removing subsidy then the only means of artificially manipulating markets is by military intervention (or its threat).
Being the worlds military superpower, the US naturally has a self interest in convincing the world that something is wrong with subsidy. On the other hand, the official stand of the US foreign policy is to intervene militarily to protect even a purely economic interest.
Why do you think Canada doesn't have a large military? Canadians do not even perceive a remote need to have a large military. We have so completely internalized the notion that America would never allow a foreign power to sieze canada.
Because it is absolutely true.
The US government is discretely subsidizing the cost of the oil you consume by providing military protection ( as well as unstated threats of military occupation) to Canada in exchange for access to Canadian oil. This is exactly the same thing going on in Saudi Arabia.
If the US government didn't subsidize oil prices at the barrel of a gun, then you would get to see laissez-faire capitalism at work. America would become the client state, owned and operated by foreign oil interests.
If the price of oil went too high, your largest employers (the big 3 automakers) would suffer serious difficulties and need to lay off huge numbers of workers.. leading to all sorts of local suffering.
Lets also not forget who the American government is buying obscene numbers of weapons from (answer: from american business).
The Interstate highway system itself was simply a vast makework