For example, apparently the only difference for California will be that the drivers' picture will be taken at the beginning of the license application process instead of at the end.
For NYS residents like myself, it will apparently change minimally if at all. That's just PR spin. Sure the license may not visibly change. But the infrastructure behind the license is getting a wholesale upgrade to share all of your personal information with all other layers of government, and anyone with access through those layers.
It won't look all that different, but it will be a much more dangerous weapon to be used against you because access to your info is going to be so widespread.
Although I do not like the idea of someone who had their license revoked (or almost did) or got caught drunk driving in another state getting a clean ID in a different state. Linking traffic violations/points between all 50 states would be a real advancement IMO. And how often does that sort of thing really happen? -- I doubt there are more than a few thousand people in those circumstances across the entire country. And what will happen if that sort of linkage is created? -- People will just drive without a license anyway. A piece of plastic can't stop a drunk driver.
They don't deny a driver's license to immigrants. They will deny them to illegal immigrants. While I am very liberal on immigration in that I think we need to make it easier for people to come legally to the US and even work on a path to citizenship for those that are already here the fact remains that they are currently here illegally. Do you also think that a driver's licenses should be denied to someone with a single speeding ticket? Because overstaying a visa - one of the most common forms of illegal immigration - is a crime roughly equivalent to speeding or jaywalking.
Even with unlimited, clean energy, growth still leaves an environmental footprint. Increases in population demand more food, and more living space, both of which would involve expansion into unsettled habitats (e.g., cutting down the rain forests, developing grasslands). I don't think you quite grasp the full implications of the unlimited in "unlimited, clean energy." With unlimited energy it would be possible to move the vast majority of food production and the vast majority of housing into places where there is no environment to speak of - e.g. space. In fact, such a development would mean the reduction of human civilization's footprint on Earth which is exactly in line with the goals of the Dark Greens as expressed on wikipedia.
The description at wikipedia suggests otherwise. To my eye it says that Dark Greens are opposed to the continued growth of the human civilization not because growth is inherently evil but because growth has an impact on the environment. IMO, a truly unlimited and pollution-free source of power would enable zero-impact expansion of civilization which ought to pass muster with the Dark Greens too.
Since you asked... did you know that Greenpeace opposes fusion research? From what you quoted it sure does not sound like that. What it does sound like is that Greenpeace opposes radioactive waste and nuclear weapons. Is that really so surprising?
Hell, by your reasoning someone should be able to just steal the linux source code and do whatever they want with it for profit, without adhering to any of the attached licenses (attribution, redistribution of source code, etc). After all, anyone who restricts you from doing whatever you want with THEIR content is just a greedy twat. Why is it that you head-in-the-sand pro-copyright people always try to justify your position by pointing at GPL licenses? When you do that, all you do is reveal your poor understanding of the GPL. You certainly don't support your point.
In a world without copyright there would be little market for linux products that don't include the source. Just as today there is no market for cars with their hoods welded shut. That is actually RMS's end goal - to get society to the point where the GPL is no longer necessary because its terms are the natural order.
a perfectly clean source of infinite energy was readily, cheaply available - would this be a good thing for the world, or a bad one? Some contend that this is the worst thing that could ever possibly happen Just who contends that? Seriously. Sounds like a strawman argument to me.
The real question, is how would a move to GPLv3 benefit Linux? No, the real question is, "how would a move to GPLv3 benefit Linux users?" The GPL, regardless of version, has always been about the end user, not the developer or any of the intermediaries.
In many ways GPLv3 is a reaction to DRM, but getting all religious about things is not going to be the solution either, IMHO The GPL has always been 'religious' about the end user's freedoms. You could just as easily say that DRM is a reaction to people's natural expectations of freedom.
The GPL's philosophy can be summarized in one sentence: Guarantee that the end user has full ability to tinker with the product. The GPLv3 simply plugs a few loopholes that have come to light since the GPLv2 was written. It does not extend the original philosophy one iota.
OLPC is just as much about making a profit to keep the operation going as it is for Intel. False. Intel is about return on investment for shareholders. That is above and beyond what is necessary to "keep the operation going."
Um... that sounds a bit spun doesn't it? Intel still sells the Classmate PC, and in the Peruvian case, the Intel machines it's trying to sell will still go to the same target audience as the OLPC units, it's not like they suddenly hate kids! I don't think it is spun at all.
Intel wants to sell PC's. They don't care who gets them. For Intel all the feelgood stuff is just a means to an end.
OLPC doesn't care about selling PC's. ALL they care about is who gets them. For OLPC all the business stuff is just a means to an end.
I haven't looked closely at any of the claims by any of the parties involved. But, it is certainly possible that she brought the system in for repair and the repair shop sat on it for a few weeks/months and only returned it to her after she had received notice.
If anyone, with no prior knowledge, was allowed on public roads and highways... don't you think things would be much worse than they are now with licenses? No I don't. If someone is foolish enough to try driving without any training to begin with, I don't think that a license or lack thereof would hold them back in the slightest.
I think the one and only reason things aren't much worse than they are now is that the majority of people are sensible. A piece of paper and after-the-fact enforcement don't make much difference.
Let's take it a step further. If that's the case... what would be the rationale behind it (that's not saying it's rational, whatever it is)? To get us accustomed to the idea that the Feds can jerk us around at will? Yes, but not quite as insidiously as you put it. It makes the life of the feds, or LE in general, easier if they can ignore the constitution.
Pirating is simply an excuse to have laws made that invade your privacy to discovery your piracy. It is not a morally appropiate option to disagreeing with a method of sale. You'll have to do more than assert "moral appropriateness" if you want that opinion to be taken seriously. For example, Trent Reznor - who is responsible for many multi-platinum albums from Nine-Inch Nails, seems to have the exact opposite opinion.
The article says that 70,000 people were referred for further screening, of which 700 were booked for some offense like drug possession, weapons charges, or outstanding warrants. So by those numbers, 99% of the people hassled by the program were innocent. And even more importantly 0% of them were terrorists.
Which means the program is either a 100% failure, or catching terrorists is not the intended goal - unconstitutional searches are.
Actually the reason there are bottlenecks is to allow immigration to look for people acting suspiciously. It's not a bug, it's feature! Yeah, rrrrright.
FWIW, I had the exact same experience. I think the last time I watched any sort of televised news was when Colin Powell was up before the United Nations claiming that Iraq had WMDs. I remember watching him and thinking that he was destroying every ounce of credibility he had built up over his entire career. I just could not wrap my brain around why he would do that when it was so damn obvious to me that it was all bullshit.
It makes a lot more sense if you think of it in terms of total number of trips and not total number of countries.... It takes 2-3 hours to get everyone off one of those big cruise ships because of the need to get 2000 people through customs at once. This sounds like it could speed that process up. About as helpful as a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
The root cause of the problem isn't the number of people, i'ts the lame-ass system in the first place. It's a lot like DRM. People who want to enter the country for nefarious purposes will always have a variety of methods of entry that completely bypass these systems. But thosewho wish to enter legally have to jump through all the hoops. Essentially it punishes the law-abiding citizens and ignores the law breakers. Sure, the system will occasionally catch someone with a felony conviction in their home country who didn't know that would disqualify them from entry. But chances are, those people weren't up to no good, they were just on a trip like any other regular joe and denying them entry doesn't improve the situation at all.
RTFA. This is a device that you get in addition to your passport. You probably leave the device in your car, and it comes with a metallic sleeve so you can shield it when you're not crossing borders. You do not take it with you when you go traveling on a plane. Your point is moot. All US passports issued in the last year or so already have RFID's embedded in them. So it amounts to the same thing.
Furthermore, these new passports have a half-assed faraday cage built into the cover, but like so much of government it really is half-assed. All it takes is for the cover to be open by less than a centimeter, as might easily happen in lady's purse, and the RFID is no longer protected against unwanted access/detection.
Wages paid in Indian Rupees must be spent (eventually) in India. Don't be silly. I am not talking about wages. I am talking about the profits of the businesses. The businesses are paid in US dollars, for the most part those dollars have been re-invested in the US financial markets. Wages are only a small part of the picture.
I would argue it is not destroying the middle class, so much as moving the middle class.... Regardless, the world is becoming an increasingly level playing field - finally. Except, it isn't. The assumption behind your belief is that the money flowing to the third world by way of outsourcing will stay there - be invested in the development of local businesses and infrastructure and ultimately generate more wealth in those local economies. In other words - as the labor supply increases so will the supply of capital.
But, it has not worked out that way. Labor has increased, capital has not. A lot of the problem is because local 3rd world capitalists don't invest in local businesses, they take their earnings and invest it back into the 1st world (mostly the USA). So, in effect labor has been devalued and capital has increased in value.
So, while small numbers of people have improved their economic status - e.g. indian software developers, filipino call-enter workers, etc. Those are just a small drop in the bucket of the populations of their countries.
It does stand to reason that if things keep going the way they are, eventually the status quo will change. The Invisible Hand can not be denied forever. But that day may be a long way off and the longer it takes, the more dramatic and painful the transition will be due to the pent up imbalances.
Huh? I thought REAL-ID was dead in the water. Just because a handful of states have passed legislation say they won't implement real-id because it is an unfunded mandate does not mean it is anywhere near dead. Especially when there are another set of states that have passed legislation embracing it.
More people cross the southern borders of the USA every year undetected than *live* in some of these countries. However, everyone who does cross the borders LEGALLY is subjected to all kinds of privacy invasions like fingerprinting. Even just those who transit through the country - without ever leaving the international terminals at the airports - are recorded. The result is, if you want to keep your privacy you have to break the law in order to do it.
I have every expectation that electronic health records will be abused. And I don't mean simple cases of identity-theft. I mean systemic abuse by organizations which have 'legitimate' access. Call me paranoid. Go ahead and make jokes about my tin-foil hat. But with history as a guide, I believe that such abuses are inevitable.
So, from my point of view, the harder it is to integrate electronic health records from disparate systems, the better. The more proprietary and undocumented these systems are, the less opportunity for abuse. I have no illusion that a lack of common and open standards for these records will prevent ALL abuse. But I do believe they are at least as much of an impediment to abuse as they are to valid uses. And frankly, I don't think there is as much value in interoperability as its proponents make it out to be.
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For NYS residents like myself, it will apparently change minimally if at all. That's just PR spin. Sure the license may not visibly change.
But the infrastructure behind the license is getting a wholesale upgrade to share all of your personal information with all other layers of government, and anyone with access through those layers.
It won't look all that different, but it will be a much more dangerous weapon to be used against you because access to your info is going to be so widespread.
-- I doubt there are more than a few thousand people in those circumstances across the entire country.
And what will happen if that sort of linkage is created?
-- People will just drive without a license anyway. A piece of plastic can't stop a drunk driver.
The description at wikipedia suggests otherwise. To my eye it says that Dark Greens are opposed to the continued growth of the human civilization not because growth is inherently evil but because growth has an impact on the environment. IMO, a truly unlimited and pollution-free source of power would enable zero-impact expansion of civilization which ought to pass muster with the Dark Greens too.
What it does sound like is that Greenpeace opposes radioactive waste and nuclear weapons.
Is that really so surprising?
In a world without copyright there would be little market for linux products that don't include the source. Just as today there is no market for cars with their hoods welded shut. That is actually RMS's end goal - to get society to the point where the GPL is no longer necessary because its terms are the natural order.
Sounds like a strawman argument to me.
The GPL, regardless of version, has always been about the end user, not the developer or any of the intermediaries. In many ways GPLv3 is a reaction to DRM, but getting all religious about things is not going to be the solution either, IMHO The GPL has always been 'religious' about the end user's freedoms. You could just as easily say that DRM is a reaction to people's natural expectations of freedom.
The GPL's philosophy can be summarized in one sentence: Guarantee that the end user has full ability to tinker with the product. The GPLv3 simply plugs a few loopholes that have come to light since the GPLv2 was written. It does not extend the original philosophy one iota.
That is above and beyond what is necessary to "keep the operation going."
Intel wants to sell PC's. They don't care who gets them. For Intel all the feelgood stuff is just a means to an end.
OLPC doesn't care about selling PC's. ALL they care about is who gets them. For OLPC all the business stuff is just a means to an end.
I haven't looked closely at any of the claims by any of the parties involved.
But, it is certainly possible that she brought the system in for repair and the repair shop sat on it for a few weeks/months and only returned it to her after she had received notice.
I think the one and only reason things aren't much worse than they are now is that the majority of people are sensible. A piece of paper and after-the-fact enforcement don't make much difference.
It is not a morally appropiate option to disagreeing with a method of sale. You'll have to do more than assert "moral appropriateness" if you want that opinion to be taken seriously.
For example, Trent Reznor - who is responsible for many multi-platinum albums from Nine-Inch Nails, seems to have the exact opposite opinion.
Which means the program is either a 100% failure, or catching terrorists is not the intended goal - unconstitutional searches are.
FWIW, I had the exact same experience. I think the last time I watched any sort of televised news was when Colin Powell was up before the United Nations claiming that Iraq had WMDs. I remember watching him and thinking that he was destroying every ounce of credibility he had built up over his entire career. I just could not wrap my brain around why he would do that when it was so damn obvious to me that it was all bullshit.
It takes 2-3 hours to get everyone off one of those big cruise ships because of the need to get 2000 people through customs at once. This sounds like it could speed that process up. About as helpful as a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
The root cause of the problem isn't the number of people, i'ts the lame-ass system in the first place. It's a lot like DRM. People who want to enter the country for nefarious purposes will always have a variety of methods of entry that completely bypass these systems. But thosewho wish to enter legally have to jump through all the hoops. Essentially it punishes the law-abiding citizens and ignores the law breakers. Sure, the system will occasionally catch someone with a felony conviction in their home country who didn't know that would disqualify them from entry. But chances are, those people weren't up to no good, they were just on a trip like any other regular joe and denying them entry doesn't improve the situation at all.
Furthermore, these new passports have a half-assed faraday cage built into the cover, but like so much of government it really is half-assed. All it takes is for the cover to be open by less than a centimeter, as might easily happen in lady's purse, and the RFID is no longer protected against unwanted access/detection.
Regardless, the world is becoming an increasingly level playing field - finally. Except, it isn't. The assumption behind your belief is that the money flowing to the third world by way of outsourcing will stay there - be invested in the development of local businesses and infrastructure and ultimately generate more wealth in those local economies. In other words - as the labor supply increases so will the supply of capital.
But, it has not worked out that way. Labor has increased, capital has not. A lot of the problem is because local 3rd world capitalists don't invest in local businesses, they take their earnings and invest it back into the 1st world (mostly the USA). So, in effect labor has been devalued and capital has increased in value.
So, while small numbers of people have improved their economic status - e.g. indian software developers, filipino call-enter workers, etc. Those are just a small drop in the bucket of the populations of their countries.
It does stand to reason that if things keep going the way they are, eventually the status quo will change. The Invisible Hand can not be denied forever. But that day may be a long way off and the longer it takes, the more dramatic and painful the transition will be due to the pent up imbalances.
I have every expectation that electronic health records will be abused. And I don't mean simple cases of identity-theft. I mean systemic abuse by organizations which have 'legitimate' access. Call me paranoid. Go ahead and make jokes about my tin-foil hat. But with history as a guide, I believe that such abuses are inevitable.
So, from my point of view, the harder it is to integrate electronic health records from disparate systems, the better. The more proprietary and undocumented these systems are, the less opportunity for abuse. I have no illusion that a lack of common and open standards for these records will prevent ALL abuse. But I do believe they are at least as much of an impediment to abuse as they are to valid uses. And frankly, I don't think there is as much value in interoperability as its proponents make it out to be.