By pulling this stunt, the teachers were able to scare the kids and permanantly brand the image of terrorists into the Children's minds. It doesn't matter that the thing turned up to be a hoax, the less educated/experienced of the kids will live with fear for quite a while, perhaps their whole lives.
Kids rise to whatever is expected of them. They don't know how long-term consequences work; they need us to tell them. And so they will be permanently traumatized only if they sense that we expect as much.
Ditto for victims of sexual abuse. If our society was infused with the unshakeable idea that such "emotional traumas" can be shaken off as long as the traumas did not occur chronically (e.g. four long years spent in the Vietnam war), it would be true.
As a parent of two, and as a former sexual abuse victim, I swear to you it's true.
...then you have almost certainly been given only half the story.
Either that, or you're reading about US politics.
That's what I said!
Indeed, we are in danger of a stack overflow here. When you read about US politics, you are begin given half the story about the giving of half the story.
As someone who doesn't have an email address anymore, I really don't care about spam in the slightest, or the battle they go over to spam people.
You do realize that the costs of spam mitigation are all passed on to you, in the form of higher prices for gadgets, for professional and financial services, and eventually for everything else? Or do you not care about that either?
By the way, now that we are out of the Grunge era, it is no longer automatically cool to not care about such things.
With the proper ironclad legal protections, Life Recorders will be a massive boon. Accused of a crime? No problem, just open up the datafile, fastforward to the time of the event, and see that we were actually sitting in the basement surfing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.midgets.
And for those times when we want to actually bring a midget home, we might want to stop recording. After all, the purpose of privacy is to protect ourselves from the erratic rationality of our fellow humans' moral judgment (as well as the wholesale absence of rationality behind some of our laws). We've still got evolutionary wiring left over that causes us to feel physical pain when others disapprove, and so privacy is a rational demand.
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
"Your employer doesn't pay unemployment benefits" and "as a cost of hiring you" contradict each other, since the cost of hiring you is borne by the employer.
Yes, and the employer is willing to pay a certain total amount for an employee. If you add $1000/year to the cost of each employee, in the form of unemployment insurance, then that $1000 must eventually come out of the employee's other benefits.
Or there could be a 1% headcount reduction, which will put more jobseekers out there, which will put a downward pressure on total benefits paid, which in the long run will have the exact same effect.
Either way, in the long run, all such things that artifically make employees cost more will reduce the amount of money that those employees can carry home. In effect, unemployment benefits is an insurance policy that all employees must purchase.
Same thing with unemployment. There is no reason that an employer should ever have to continue to pay someone they fired because the person is too lazy to get off their butt and find a job. Come on, enough with employee rights, where are our employer rights...
Your employer doesn't pay unemployment benefits; you do. As you work.
While it is indeed the employer that sends in the check every month to the unemployment fund, the money being sent was taken (one way or another) from your benefits, as a cost of hiring you. Same with Social Security [sic], Medicare, and prepaid^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhealth insurance.
The big difference here is that finally someone realizes we can do that independent of crankshaft, pistons, and cams.
This is not news. BMW has been playing with this for years. So has Mercedes -- they call it EVT, for Electronic Valve Train. And next year it will ship in the 2008 C-Class sedan.
It's that simple. Theft and fraud do not bring the price of goods up. When shopping carts are stolen from the supermarket it does not raise the cost of food. If they could have possibly raised the price before they would have already done it. Theft cuts into profits but it absolutely does not raise the price for the consumer.
Well then it raises all prices for the consumer -- but not specifically for the item being most often stolen.
Also, if theft rates of DVDs decline, then more brick-and-mortar outlets may begin selling them (e.g. grocery stores), and that will pressure everyone's DVD prices downward.
But still, in the medium term I'll bet that the big retailers will actually raise prices due to this mechanism, for two reasons:
This mechanism unavoidably adds to the cost of production... and
Part of the equation holding the price where it is now, is the rate of theft per dollar of price: as price rises, theft goes up, somewhat cancelling the higher profits... unless a mechanism like this keeps the theft down.
Wealthier individuals with the larger home... does the environment itself produce children who are less restricted in their thinking?
Now think even broader than that. What will the effect be of the grand and unprecedented social experiment, conducted over the past two decades, of raising children almost continuously confined indoors?
The farther back in history you go, the more time everyone spent outdoors, in which there was no ceiling. Perhaps this explains some small part of the modern retreat from independence.
Well said. 'tis a shame that Economics 101 and 201 are not required courses in school, and specifically tested in order to graduate. If they were, our laws (particularly our monetary and fiscal policies) would probably be vastly more rational.
Ditto for the laws of physics: as they are doing with economics, most people are faking their understanding of it.
It is possible to die, and it is possible to act on this possibility. Therefore, morality is ultimately based on reality. If you have defined 'objective' such that morality can a priori never satisfy its requirements, then perhaps you need a new definition...
Why are hybrids a gimmick? With the tax credit most hybrids pay for themselves within a year, although some people who drive less it takes up to one and a half years. Only new, not used. And fossil fuel infrastructure has a huge enviromental cost to produce and solar panels are easily winning that war. Nothings perfect, and as we go forward you won't be energy neutral because energy is what we need, but setting in stone the things now is good.
I can't tell from your post whether or not you have realized this, so I'll say it and then beg your indulgence if you already knew it...
A tax credit is simply a transfer payment (but less honest). If tax credits are required in order to make hybrids break-even, then hybrids are actually lossy in the total social sense. Owners of hybrids are in-the-black thanks only to a fraudulent subsidy from their neighbors.
That said, there are some who argue that the tax credit for hybrids is functioning as a carbon tax on owners of non-hybrid cars. And there's some merit to that, qua the (questionable) basis of carbon controls. But this is probably more discussion than you wanted.
Yes, and for that we have to suffer with the indignity of using the pronoun "she" to refer to ships (and countries). It's not that I'd prefer "he"; it's that it's dumb to add exceptions to an otherwise exceptionless English grammar rule, just to be cute.
Remember the Ogre books and turn-based-strategy game? There was a reference in there somewhere that went something like: "The men, who had always referred to their vehicles as 'she', preferred 'he' for friendly Ogre tanks, and 'it' for unfriendly Ogres."
I guess they should say "might see if it went supernova soon."
You should have consulted Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's "Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations". If you had, you would know that the correct way to phrase the idea would be: "might seeon if it golo supernova insooner".
If monogamy was the natural condition of humans, we would not need marriage, nor would we hear the constant protestations of fidelity. If monogamy was the natural condition of humans, we would each wake up one day, look at our partner, and boom, we're bonded for life. Like eagles do.
The desire to play, and to stray, arises naturally in (as far as I can tell) virtually all of us. That is why such unnatural effort, such willpower and laws and rituals and social pressure, is needed in order to resist it.
Now I'm the first to denigrate "natural" modes of living as irrelevant, because who the hell cares what Mother Nature intended? After all, she intended for us to die at age twenty of some horrible disease, or in the jaws of wolves. Screw her and her intentions. But that doesn't make monogamy superior: it seems to come with some serious costs, and its benefits are not clear to me... especially now that we have birth control.
Here is a thought problem that can reveal your true motivations on this issue. Imagine that in the future, all communicable diseases are wiped out, and fertility can be perfectly controlled by each individual. There are no longer any negative physical consequences to being promiscuous. Now. Do you still feel the urge to condemn it? Do you still find yourself searching for some harm that it could be imagined to cause? Or do you celebrate our newfound freedom to have pleasure?
Nope, I'm actually a promiscuous lesbian. And that is what gives me such a cynical view of my straight, married, monogamous sisters. They've accepted their fetters because they cannot understand, or will not see, or are pressured on all sides to unsee, the alternatives.
The first amendment protects us from government censorship. It's awfully brazen of Verizon to try to stretch that into protection of collusion with government. Especially when the speech in question is not political or even personal.
Verizon might have a tenuous point if they were simply selling the data to another company. Instead, since the only possible government use of Verizon's data is to enable crackdowns, the matter seems to fit better under the fourth or fifth amendments, both of which would arguably prohibit the whole transaction.
I just don't get the human race. It just seems clear that no matter what century it is, there is some kind of witch hunt or persecution of somebody for something. Is there anybody that has read something about this human phenonemon? Is there going to be a time when humans just don't do this kind of thing?
You already understand that humans are utterly self-centered. Yet many of them have that irresistible desire to control others. It's a paradox, but still frighteningly logical...
Humans seek to control in others what they wish they could control in themselves.
They hate it when other people are having more fun than they are.
And they will cling to their moral rules even after those rules have lost their basis. (Certainly the mutual enforcement of morality is justifiably important in any family, tribe, or society, and certaintly this is an unending chore. But still: moral rules exist to maximize something; they are not divine ends-in-themselves.)
The current war against birth control illustrates all three phenomena of control:
"I hate my profligate urges, but at least I can feel better about them by cracking down on yours."
"Hey, no fair getting laid twice a week! My husband barely wants me once a month!"
Them: "Promiscuous behavior is immoral because it creates unintentional babies." You: "But birth control ends that risk; therefore, there is no longer any basis for condemning promiscuous behavior. Your moral rule is obsolete." Them: "Then to protect morality, we must ban birth control."
> echo "Of course, banks are too cheap and conservative to do this on their own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing this on them, otherwise it'll never happen." | economics101 | more
"Of course, consumers are too cheap and conservative to pay extra for a bank that offers such security features on its own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing these extra costs onto the consumers, otherwise it'll never happen."
I agree with him strongly on about 50% of his issues, and disagree strongly with the rest, but I can respect his position, and think it's a valuable voice to have in our Congress, which is more than I can say for... well, most of Congress, sadly.
No one wants to give up their favorite federal program in exchange for a 0.002% reduction in their taxes... but would you give up your favorite program if everyone else gave up theirs, in exchange for an 80% reduction in your taxes?
That's what it amounts to, and that's why no partial spending-reduction bill can pass. But really: is your favorite federal program really worth ~$20,000 per year to you? Because that's what it costs you, since everyone else gets to have their favorite programs implemented too.
Government is laws and enforcement: i.e. government is restrictions and destruction. Those are useful for fighting crime and invasion (i.e. destroying destruction), but for everything else they are an inherently inefficient way to accomplish it. Sure it can be made to work, but it will always cost more.
The entire idea behind encryption is to make it difficult/impossible to the casual hacker. If someone were dedicated to get into the information contained within however it would only be a matter of two variables... Time and Processing power.
Brute-forcing is for chumps. (Well, assuming your average chump has a grid computer and a few years to spare). Real Men use social engineering to get secret keys.
The TSA has a notoriously shallow understanding of security, because they need to put on a demonstration of security that ordinary people -- who don't understand it either -- will find calming. So you just know that the TSA is plenty vulnerable to the "Hi I'm from IT" call to the receptionist.
Don't forget the obligatory reference to simply powering the laser with frozen nitrogen, to simultaneously power it and keep it cool and pop a ton of popcorn from the stratosphere.
So are credit card numbers etc covered by the DMCA? Or some other law? Like something to do with fraud, perhaps?
If the case of publishing 09 F9 11 etc is just the same as publishing a credit card number, then why isn't it covered by just the same law?
It very well could be.
If your argument were correct then there would be no need for the DMCA at all, because secret keys that were given to every customer who bought a product would be protected by just the same laws as those that protect secret credit card numbers that are given to every seller by the credit card user.
Indeed, there isn't any need for the DMCA -- not in principle. But I think the DMCA was requested in order to clarify what is otherwise a debatable point. I mean, just look at the debates here on slashdot over whether artists have any right at all to hire a studio to sell and protect their work.
I don't particularly see this as a free speech issue, but rather as a fair use issue. Anti-copying technology is an attempt to impose on the user by technological means limits that are far more restrictive than fair use restrictions. The DMCA is an attempt to undermine centuries of common and statute law protecting fair use of legal copies. It is a radical departure from existing law
...because the digital age is a radical departure from existing economies?
and has not proven itself to be effective in its fundamental aim of making bits harder to copy
To my eye it is indeed beginning to be effective in its goals (not that I am pleased about this). But just wait: broader and deeper enforcement is coming, as the enforcers grow wiser and as anonymity grows rarer. It pisses me off, because my privacy is now the victim of our pursuit of dishonorable digital behavior.
In contrast, the completely different laws that protect credit card numbers (or rather, the use of credit card numbers by those not authorized to do so) are based on financial fraud laws that date back centuries, and have proven to be relatively effective.
They could be applied to the AACS key as well, since it -- like a credit card -- is a secret key that unlocks a value which others seek to obtain without authorization. Alas, it seems that most folks' honor is not up to the challenge of abiding the abstract implications of property rights. For these people we need specific and ugly laws, like the DMCA.
Slashdot Mirror
Kids rise to whatever is expected of them. They don't know how long-term consequences work; they need us to tell them. And so they will be permanently traumatized only if they sense that we expect as much.
Ditto for victims of sexual abuse. If our society was infused with the unshakeable idea that such "emotional traumas" can be shaken off as long as the traumas did not occur chronically (e.g. four long years spent in the Vietnam war), it would be true.
As a parent of two, and as a former sexual abuse victim, I swear to you it's true.
That's what I said!
Indeed, we are in danger of a stack overflow here. When you read about US politics, you are begin given half the story about the giving of half the story.
Take care to remember that when you hear a news item that makes you think any of these words:
...then you have almost certainly been given only half the story.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
You do realize that the costs of spam mitigation are all passed on to you, in the form of higher prices for gadgets, for professional and financial services, and eventually for everything else? Or do you not care about that either?
By the way, now that we are out of the Grunge era, it is no longer automatically cool to not care about such things.
With the proper ironclad legal protections, Life Recorders will be a massive boon. Accused of a crime? No problem, just open up the datafile, fastforward to the time of the event, and see that we were actually sitting in the basement surfing alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.midgets.
And for those times when we want to actually bring a midget home, we might want to stop recording. After all, the purpose of privacy is to protect ourselves from the erratic rationality of our fellow humans' moral judgment (as well as the wholesale absence of rationality behind some of our laws). We've still got evolutionary wiring left over that causes us to feel physical pain when others disapprove, and so privacy is a rational demand.
But of course turning off our Life Recorder will be considered a forfeiture of our right to be Presumed Innocent.
Yes, and the employer is willing to pay a certain total amount for an employee. If you add $1000/year to the cost of each employee, in the form of unemployment insurance, then that $1000 must eventually come out of the employee's other benefits.
Or there could be a 1% headcount reduction, which will put more jobseekers out there, which will put a downward pressure on total benefits paid, which in the long run will have the exact same effect.
Either way, in the long run, all such things that artifically make employees cost more will reduce the amount of money that those employees can carry home. In effect, unemployment benefits is an insurance policy that all employees must purchase.
Your employer doesn't pay unemployment benefits; you do. As you work.
While it is indeed the employer that sends in the check every month to the unemployment fund, the money being sent was taken (one way or another) from your benefits, as a cost of hiring you. Same with Social Security [sic], Medicare, and prepaid^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhealth insurance.
This is not news. BMW has been playing with this for years. So has Mercedes -- they call it EVT, for Electronic Valve Train. And next year it will ship in the 2008 C-Class sedan.
Well then it raises all prices for the consumer -- but not specifically for the item being most often stolen.
Also, if theft rates of DVDs decline, then more brick-and-mortar outlets may begin selling them (e.g. grocery stores), and that will pressure everyone's DVD prices downward.
But still, in the medium term I'll bet that the big retailers will actually raise prices due to this mechanism, for two reasons:
Now think even broader than that. What will the effect be of the grand and unprecedented social experiment, conducted over the past two decades, of raising children almost continuously confined indoors?
The farther back in history you go, the more time everyone spent outdoors, in which there was no ceiling. Perhaps this explains some small part of the modern retreat from independence.
Well said. 'tis a shame that Economics 101 and 201 are not required courses in school, and specifically tested in order to graduate. If they were, our laws (particularly our monetary and fiscal policies) would probably be vastly more rational.
Ditto for the laws of physics: as they are doing with economics, most people are faking their understanding of it.
It is possible to die, and it is possible to act on this possibility. Therefore, morality is ultimately based on reality. If you have defined 'objective' such that morality can a priori never satisfy its requirements, then perhaps you need a new definition...
I can't tell from your post whether or not you have realized this, so I'll say it and then beg your indulgence if you already knew it...
A tax credit is simply a transfer payment (but less honest). If tax credits are required in order to make hybrids break-even, then hybrids are actually lossy in the total social sense. Owners of hybrids are in-the-black thanks only to a fraudulent subsidy from their neighbors.
That said, there are some who argue that the tax credit for hybrids is functioning as a carbon tax on owners of non-hybrid cars. And there's some merit to that, qua the (questionable) basis of carbon controls. But this is probably more discussion than you wanted.
Remember the Ogre books and turn-based-strategy game? There was a reference in there somewhere that went something like: "The men, who had always referred to their vehicles as 'she', preferred 'he' for friendly Ogre tanks, and 'it' for unfriendly Ogres."
You should have consulted Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's "Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations". If you had, you would know that the correct way to phrase the idea would be: "might seeon if it golo supernova insooner".
If monogamy was the natural condition of humans, we would not need marriage, nor would we hear the constant protestations of fidelity. If monogamy was the natural condition of humans, we would each wake up one day, look at our partner, and boom, we're bonded for life. Like eagles do.
The desire to play, and to stray, arises naturally in (as far as I can tell) virtually all of us. That is why such unnatural effort, such willpower and laws and rituals and social pressure, is needed in order to resist it.
Now I'm the first to denigrate "natural" modes of living as irrelevant, because who the hell cares what Mother Nature intended? After all, she intended for us to die at age twenty of some horrible disease, or in the jaws of wolves. Screw her and her intentions. But that doesn't make monogamy superior: it seems to come with some serious costs, and its benefits are not clear to me... especially now that we have birth control.
Here is a thought problem that can reveal your true motivations on this issue. Imagine that in the future, all communicable diseases are wiped out, and fertility can be perfectly controlled by each individual. There are no longer any negative physical consequences to being promiscuous. Now. Do you still feel the urge to condemn it? Do you still find yourself searching for some harm that it could be imagined to cause? Or do you celebrate our newfound freedom to have pleasure?
Nope, I'm actually a promiscuous lesbian. And that is what gives me such a cynical view of my straight, married, monogamous sisters. They've accepted their fetters because they cannot understand, or will not see, or are pressured on all sides to unsee, the alternatives.
The first amendment protects us from government censorship. It's awfully brazen of Verizon to try to stretch that into protection of collusion with government. Especially when the speech in question is not political or even personal.
Verizon might have a tenuous point if they were simply selling the data to another company. Instead, since the only possible government use of Verizon's data is to enable crackdowns, the matter seems to fit better under the fourth or fifth amendments, both of which would arguably prohibit the whole transaction.
Thomas Paine's speech is protected; Benedict Arnold's is not.
You already understand that humans are utterly self-centered. Yet many of them have that irresistible desire to control others. It's a paradox, but still frighteningly logical...
Humans seek to control in others what they wish they could control in themselves.
They hate it when other people are having more fun than they are.
And they will cling to their moral rules even after those rules have lost their basis. (Certainly the mutual enforcement of morality is justifiably important in any family, tribe, or society, and certaintly this is an unending chore. But still: moral rules exist to maximize something; they are not divine ends-in-themselves.)
The current war against birth control illustrates all three phenomena of control:
You: "But birth control ends that risk; therefore, there is no longer any basis for condemning promiscuous behavior. Your moral rule is obsolete."
Them: "Then to protect morality, we must ban birth control."
> echo "Of course, banks are too cheap and conservative to do this on their own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing this on them, otherwise it'll never happen." | economics101 | more
"Of course, consumers are too cheap and conservative to pay extra for a bank that offers such security features on its own. We need a regulatory body to start pushing these extra costs onto the consumers, otherwise it'll never happen."
> _
...and if it *was* that small, it isn't juicy enough to make a phishing campaign worthwhile.
No one wants to give up their favorite federal program in exchange for a 0.002% reduction in their taxes... but would you give up your favorite program if everyone else gave up theirs, in exchange for an 80% reduction in your taxes?
That's what it amounts to, and that's why no partial spending-reduction bill can pass. But really: is your favorite federal program really worth ~$20,000 per year to you? Because that's what it costs you, since everyone else gets to have their favorite programs implemented too.
Government is laws and enforcement: i.e. government is restrictions and destruction. Those are useful for fighting crime and invasion (i.e. destroying destruction), but for everything else they are an inherently inefficient way to accomplish it. Sure it can be made to work, but it will always cost more.
Brute-forcing is for chumps. (Well, assuming your average chump has a grid computer and a few years to spare). Real Men use social engineering to get secret keys.
The TSA has a notoriously shallow understanding of security, because they need to put on a demonstration of security that ordinary people -- who don't understand it either -- will find calming. So you just know that the TSA is plenty vulnerable to the "Hi I'm from IT" call to the receptionist.
:golf clap:
Don't forget the obligatory reference to simply powering the laser with frozen nitrogen, to simultaneously power it and keep it cool and pop a ton of popcorn from the stratosphere.
It very well could be.
Indeed, there isn't any need for the DMCA -- not in principle. But I think the DMCA was requested in order to clarify what is otherwise a debatable point. I mean, just look at the debates here on slashdot over whether artists have any right at all to hire a studio to sell and protect their work.
...because the digital age is a radical departure from existing economies?
To my eye it is indeed beginning to be effective in its goals (not that I am pleased about this). But just wait: broader and deeper enforcement is coming, as the enforcers grow wiser and as anonymity grows rarer. It pisses me off, because my privacy is now the victim of our pursuit of dishonorable digital behavior.
They could be applied to the AACS key as well, since it -- like a credit card -- is a secret key that unlocks a value which others seek to obtain without authorization. Alas, it seems that most folks' honor is not up to the challenge of abiding the abstract implications of property rights. For these people we need specific and ugly laws, like the DMCA.