Car manufactures are right now meeting Californias emissions standards. How can California now turn around and sue after their own set standards have been met?
I like electric cars too, but at least with current battery technology, battery disposal is a very big problem. They may be cleaner while running, but when it comes time to take them to the dump, electric cars are a major hassle, since we're talking about groundwater contamination.
Nuclear power plants produce waste too, obviously, but nowhere near as much as disposing of electric cars would. Ironically (for your typical uneducated environmentalist) the batteries are a bigger problem than the waste in your equation!
Actually, I think you're mistaken -- I think you have it exactly backwards in this particular instance. First of all, regarding revenue from taxes, there's a concept in Economics called the Laffer Curve. Basically, here's how it works. If the government took no taxes from you, its income would be exactly zero. That's easy and obvious. What if the government took 100% of your income? How much money would it make? The answer, if you think about it, is, well, exactly zero, because no one would work. If you had to give all your money to the government, would you work? Hell no! You'd go fishing or something.
These two points are extremes, of course, but the point of the Laffer curve is that increasing taxes raises the proportion of your income the government takes, but also decreases your gross income (ie, before taxes). The more money you have to pay the government, the less you're inclined to work, once your basic needs are met.
In actuality, if you plot government income versus tax rate, you end up with a curve that looks like an upside down U, with y = 0 when x = 0% and 100%, respectively. So it's impossible to just keep increasing taxes -- at some point, increasing taxes will actually decrease government income.
Having said that, let's look at a gas tax (which I personally am in favor of.) I think in the US, what with our cultural addiction to motor vehicles, this tax would be extremely unpopular. At the moment, people complain about the high price of gas and sometimes even go so far as to connect it to the war in Iraq -- but overall they're confident that the price will go down eventually, that this is a temporary situation. If there were a permanent gas tax, well, you'd essentially be telling everyone in the US that they need to pay a lot more for gas for no real economic reason. You'd be telling all the oil companies that in the long term, they're going to lose money, because people will substitute away from gas guzzlers to avoid paying substantially more per year on gas, thus decreasing the amount of gas sold and taking company profits with it. Everyone would oppose it.
In China or Singapore or some other dictatorial state, this might just work -- the government might just be ballsy enough to tell everyone in the country to get over it. But not in the US. We're a democracy, you see.
The first thing any congressional or presidential candidate for office would promise the electorate would be abolishment of the hated gas tax. They'd be tremendously popular for seeing it through. Whatsmore, they'd probably get lots of money from the oil lobby to finance a campaign running on that platform. How can you lose? You get big oil on your side and consumers? It's a politician's wet dream!
So you see, the gas tax would last about as long as prohibition in the US, if even that long. It would be overturned quickly.
So why does it work in Europe? Culture, alternatives, and lack of understanding. Culturally, Europeans aren't as attached to cars and driving as Americans are. They have alternative transportation: public transportation is ubiquitous, fast, and convenient. Lack of understanding: they don't realise how cheap gas could be, if it weren't for high taxes on its sale. They think "that's just how expensive gas is" and get on with their lives. They're surprised when you tell them gas is $3 dollars a gallon in the US -- to them, that's cheap!
It's a bit of a catch-22 actually, because good public transportation and other transport alternatives, along with better city planning and such are prevalent in Europe exactly because gas is too expensive. But we can't get better public transportation and better city planning here in the US, at least not with a purely market-driven solution, because no one would stand for the higher gas prices if they could do something about it (which they could, democracy and all that.)
You are incorrect. The correct answer is that, when you tax a corporation, part of the tax is paid by the corporation, and part of it is paid by consumers. To see why this is, consider the following thought experiment. You are selling a widget for $1. You have decided on this price because it is the optimal one, as per the laws of supply and demand. Because if you decrease the price, you can sell more, but you can't supply as much; and contrariwise, if you increase the price, demand for your widget drops, but you're certainly able to supply more.
It is a fact of economics that any good in a market has just such an optimum price.
When the government levies a tax on your widget, your operating costs effectively go up. Let's say the tax is 9 percent. Then by your logic, you could just sell the widget at $1.09 and have the consumer pay the tax. But this increase in price will have the effect of decreasing demand for your widget (the law of demand), and so you will sell fewer widgets, and your profitability will decrease. The other extreme is, you absorb all the tax, and pass none on to consumers. Then you are still selling for $1, but now the cost of supplying the widgets to sell has gone up, and so you are disinclined to produce that many widgets, even if you can sell them all; you'd make more money producing less and charging more per unit (the law of supply).
In actuality, the new optimum price lies between $1 and $1.09 (where exactly depends on how much demand fluctuates with price, a concept economists call the elasticity of demand.) But the government is getting its 9 cents regardless.
Therefore, the corporation pays some of the tax, and the consumer pays some of the tax.
In some industries, taxes can be passed on to the consumer very efficiently (gas, for example), because in these industries, consumer demand doesn't fluctuate too much with price, at least in the short term. In other industries, for example, luxury goods that people like to have but can easily do with out or substitute with something else, the corporation will end up bearing most of the tax burden, because increasing the price even a little bit will drastically reduce demand for the product.
I know economics isn't such a fashionable thing for Slashdotters to study, but it's useful.
I understand what you're trying to say, but your WoW simile is stupid. Let's assume for a moment that the GP does play WoW all the time (a hobby I, incidentally, also find incredibly stupid.) His doing so in no way affects you, however.
Perhaps a better simile would be to suggest that you liking to drive trucks and other gas guzzlers is like him liking to piss in other people's fish ponds and swimming pools. If you don't live near him, you probably don't care much, but what if you were his neighbour? And even that's not a very good simile, because if you were his neighbour and didn't have a fish pond or swimming pool you might not care.
The thing about your gas guzzlers is that driving them affects everyone around you -- and when their emissions are added to the smog produced by others with hobbies similar to yours, they affect everyone in the entire world.
Now, having said that, I'm not sure that prohibition of gas guzzlers is the best way to deal with these sorts of things. I'm against all the stupid laws that people pass against smoking in public places, for example (although I don't smoke myself, and never have.) I don't like nanny states.
I think it's clear that driving a Toyota Prius is nowhere near as much fun as revving up a Harley. But lots of things that are ultimately damaging to the commons -- in this case the air we breathe and the climate that sustains us -- are fun. The question that needs to be addressed by society is, where do we draw the line?
If you think about it, pleading with others not to complain about your hobbies when your hobbies are damaging to resources that everyone around you needs to survive, is, well, just a little bit selfish.
I don't think fining car companies is going to do much, but I think that a progressive tax on vehicles based on mileage and quality of emmissions could disincent the average American from buying tremendously polluting vehicles. The higher price of gas is doing this already, but not quickly enough, and if the 1970s are any indication, as soon as gas prices drop people like you will be right back out in their trucks having a grand old time, and all those "unfun" Piruses will find themselves docked in the garage permanently.
You may think that's a great thing. I bet teenagers who want to blast loud music at 3am think repealing the noise pollution ordinances active in most communities would be a great thing, too.
Ultimately, your hobbies take a back seat to the well-being of humanity and your community. Those are the sacrifices you make as an individual when you agree to accept the protection and benefits that come from living in a society.
In the case of Vinyl, "ARM" technology is not necessary. By the nature of the format, you only get a few hundred plays anyway, and unless you have very expensive equipment, creating MP3s or OGGs from an LP will produce sound far inferior to the same tracks ripped from a CD.
Vinyl LPs degrade considerably with each play, and are not easily transferable to other formats. Why bother with ARM?
Without any opinion on the matter whatsoever, I'd like to point out that "non-carcinogenic" and "good for you" are not in fact equivalent statements. "not bad for you" and "good for you" are similarly not equivalent.
I have no idea what the details on this thing are, but unless the GP is tremendously misinformed, it appears that the link between second hand smoke and cancer is not particularly well defined. Just because you cough when someone is smoking around you doesn't mean your chances of getting lung cancer have increased with any statistical significance, difficult as that may be for you to accept. We have controlled experiments precisely because feelings (especially when they are biased, as yours clearly are) are a poor predictor of data.
In case you hadn't noticed, the RIAA/MPAA and their international affiliates have very successfully redefined the word "pirate" and its cognates to mean copyright infringement. They did this originally to associate rape and pillaging (violent, deplorable crimes) with one much less likely to evoke any sort of compassion for victims (copyright infringement). This was initially moderately successful, but the (unfortunate in my opinion) long term result has simply been that most people no longer associate the word "piracy" with actual on-the-seven-seas piracy. This isn't really surprising, as real piracy has become much less prevalent in the parts of the world where copyright infringement is considered a big issue.
What this means, of course, is that when the average Swede, Briton, Frenchman or American hears "the Pirate party", they are extremely unlikely to think of it in terms of the "plundering murderous raping bastards on the sea party".
It's also worth noting that most European democracies are parliamentary in nature, which means that a special interest party like the pirate party doesn't need (or even want) to get a majority of seats in parliament -- just one would probably be sufficient to make waves during debates. It is unlikely they'd ever get more, but that's not because of the name: it's because being that successful would communicate very effectively to larger parties that the special interest issue the Pirate party stands for is important to the electorate. It's just one issue; they'd adopt it (this is already happening, in fact.) This would marginalise the Pirate Party as a political entity, but would satisfy its raison-d'etre, namely to push for copyright reform on a national scale.
In the US, unfortunately, our system of government doesn't work this way; we don't have proportional representation and so there's no incentive for either the Republican or Democratic party to ever take the US Pirate Party seriously. In the US, the name is important, because in order to make waves, the Pirate Party would have to become one of the big two, which means they would have to have politically viable opinions on all issues, not just copyright reform.
The Pirate Party is very much a parliamentary political tool. Here in the US, we'd have to lobby (and it's doubtful that we the people could ever out-lobby the RIAA.)
I used to use SCIM. I say used to not because I found something better, but rather because sometime ago (a long time ago) there was some bug in SCIM that made GAIM crash, and so I changed to fcitx, which does better wubi but has an inferior pinyin input method. If you're learning Chinese, you'll probably want pinyin.
Both of these are simplified, although SCIM has traditional too, along with Japanese, Korean, and everything else you can think of (it's a plugin architecture.)
I'd say go with SCIM. fcitx's documentation is in Chinese, so if your Chinese is fairly basic SCIM is a better bet. There's a KDE version called SKIM if you have a preference (SCIM uses GTK). I don't use either GNOME or KDE so I was fairly agnostic on this point.
Emacs also has a bunch of acceptable input methods.
What you say is undeniably true -- there is a fair amount of data out there that supports your thesis -- but there are side-effects to having a society where virtually everyone is armed. It's true that under normal circumstances, people are far more polite and well behaved -- no one wants to start shit if there's a good chance the person you're thinking of upsetting is armed.
The problem is that especially in today's society, it is relatively common for people to get stressed out and freak out. Think "road rage" and other stress-related phenomena. Think drunk people coming out of the pub late at night.
It's worth noting that it's not like the society you're proposing has never existed. In the Old West of the US, everyone basically carried. Mugging might not have been a tremendous problem, but gunfights were frequent, and people dying under such circumstances was routine.
It's also worth noting that while guns do a lot to level the playing field, there is skill involved in operating a gun effectively, and those that have the time and talent to practice their gunmanship will always have the upper hand in societies that revolve around gun ownership. This was certainly true in the old west and would be just as true today.
Furthermore, it's worth noting that a bullet that doesn't meet its intended target does not stop. If everyone had guns, friendly fire deaths would also be more common.
There are pros and cons to widespread adoption of any tool, obviously. Consider the automobile: in most of Europe and the certainly in the USA, almost everyone has one. These were not designed with killing as their primary function, and yet consider how many people are killed in accidents every year. We as a society take that risk because of the convenience that having a car offers: we've come to terms with the issues. There's no doubt that eliminating cars would reduce (eliminate) car related deaths, but the benefits outweigh the problems.
With guns, the equation is similar: if everyone were armed, there would be obvious and tangible benefits, and a drastic reduction in violent crime would certainly be one of them. But there would also be tangible drawbacks. In the USA at least, we apparently decided as a society that dealing with the drawbacks mitigated the benefits of an armed society. Consider that in the west, everyone used to strap, but now very few people do. This is not because of anti-gun laws or anything else, it's because having everyone be armed resulted in a "wild wild west" society that people of the time decided finally that they didn't want to live in anymore.
It's far cheaper than what (the Chinese anyway) currently have to shell out for a computer system. It may not reach impoverished farmers in Guizhou province, but it will certainly increase the number of people who can afford a computer.
However, I anticipate that no one will buy it. Computers are too expensive for many Chinese to own personally, but "internet cafes" ("gaming cafe" would be a more accurate name) are plentiful and extremely cheap -- 2 or 3 yuan per hour is typical (that's about 25 - 30 cents US). PC gaming is huge in the PRC (consoles never really caught on), and that's what the vast majority of Chinese use their machines for -- that and chatting, mostly on QQ, which GAIM and friends do not support*.
The result is that most Chinese are routinely exposed to Windows, and worse, they're addicted to a wide variety of Windows-only software. While owning your own machine is certainly a nice perk, the question they will be asking themselves is, do I want to shell out 125 dollars for a machine that won't run any software I want, or do I want to suffer through not having my own machine, and buy a USB memory stick instead, and do all my computing at the local internet cafe?
My guess is that for the vast majority of Chinese, the latter will seem like a much sounder choice. A 125 dollar x86-compatible machine would be one thing, but if all it can run is Linux, the Chinese won't go for it. Linux penetration in China is virtually nil, except maybe in the government, but they're not the types that would buy 125 dollar, 500MHz desktops.
Thankfully, Chinese support is much better in Linux now than it used to be, but there are still no decent free Chinese fonts -- something that, as a Chinese speaker who uses Linux exclusively, I am very aware of. This company probably would think nothing of bundling MS's SimSun and SimHei fonts with their distribution, as they've thought nothing of using a rip off MIPS chip, but that would be copyright infringement and in my mind wrong. I personally use SimSun and SimHei, but I paid the MS tax when I bought my thinkpad with XP pre-installed (in China, no less). The $125 laptop doesn't come with a Windows license.
All in all, it looks like a bust. It's cool, though.
(*There have been a few attempts to port QQ to Linux, but Tencent adds features to the QQ protocol much too quickly to keep up. Lack of support for wanted features would make Linux seem broken, even though the real culprit is a complex, proprietary, binary protocol with built in obsolescence... but hey, they don't know that.)
Richard Stallmin? Jesus, way to take an otherwise interesting and informative post and make yourself look like a retard. Think "Stalin"? Are you at all aware of what sort of a man Stalin was?
This is just like the wankers who spell "MS" "M$" and "Windows" "Windoze". Only it's worse, because with those stupid spelling conventions at least we can figure out what's meant without it being explained to us. Misspelling intentional, think Stalin? Please. Not to mention that "Windoze" at least doesn't compare something harmless to a murderer responsible for the cold blooded assassination of millions of his own people.
This has got to be the most ridiculously stupid thing I've read all day. Let's compare Bush to Hitler, and ESR to Pol Pot, while we're at it! I know, I know, let's call Bruce Perens Bruce Pinochet!
As you apparently have? I lived there for four years, and proxying to connect to Wikipedia for the last year was a major pain in the ass. The Chinese government will not change its censorship policies because of Wikipedia, no matter how much traffic it might get in the west. The end result of this manoeuvre is that Wikipedia is simply unavailable in China.
I don't necessarily think that censoring Wikipedia -- the way that Google and others currently do -- is a workable solution, however, but I say this from a purely practical standpoint. As long as Wikipedia retains its current policy of non-central control -- a policy I fully support -- it is fundamentally incompatible with centralised censorship of any type. Given that complying with Chinese requirements would, in this case, render Wikipedia non-functional, I have to say that Jimbo Wales is not really making much of a stand (unless you count propagandizing as making a stand.) Simply put, Wikipedia is not able to conform to Chinese self-censorship requirements in any case, even if its creator were so inclined. As such, it's not like he's giving up anything. For him, self-censorship would not be "the easy way out", as it was for Google and Yahoo -- quite the opposite, in fact.
It saddens me that the Chinese government is so short-sighted when it comes to the internet, but it doesn't surprise me much either: China has, up until recently, been a much less technically sophisticated society than that of its neighbours, and most of the higher ups in the CCP are old men who grew up in a very different time. Do you think Ted Stevens and his ilk wouldn't censor the internet if they thought they could do it and/or get away with it? The sad thing is, in China, these short-sighted men have the power to see their plans through.
The result is a net loss for everyone. The Chinese, obviously, can no longer easily read the Chinese Wikipedia, which had previously been growing in popularity on the mainland. This means that the "Chinese" Wikipedia has become extremely NPOV with regards to cross-straight relations, thoughts about mainland government and policy, etc, as the Mainland Chinese are no longer afforded a voice in the process. I'm sure the Taiwanese are thrilled about this, but both sides of the argument are extremely biased and prone to propaganda, so it's a bit of a shame that the other side isn't there to participate in the debate. The mainland government is, in this case, actually hurting their public image with Chinese speakers abroad!
But the Chinese government isn't going to change their views anytime soon. In the meantime, the quality of the Chinese Wikipedia will suffer from the lack of mainland contribution.
In short, this is a lose-lose proposition for everyone. If there were some workable way to make Wikipedia accessible to the Chinese without raising the ire of the Chinese government, and without compromising the decentralised, contributory nature of Wikipedia, I would be all for it. Some service is better than no service.
Shutting out and isolating facists is never the way to go. The Sunshine Policy is the model to follow when you have a totaletarian government that cares what other people think (the Chinese do -- the North Koreans, for example, don't. Iran used to, and probably still does, at some level.)
Always-on DSL is available in most large Chinese cities, although the price is such that most people wouldn't opt for it (prefering, instead, cheaper, metered plans that better fit their usage habits.)
Of course the price isn't really excessive -- it's between 130 and 200 rmb per month -- but if your monthly salary is only 2000 rmb it might be expensive.
Still, I think there are enough Chinese computer geeks for this sort of thing to work, assuming the technology works.
Presumably the same is true of India. Remember, just because there are lots of people who are living in poverty in these two countries doesn't mean there isn't a relatively large (and growing) middle class. Add to this the fact that both cultures are pretty computer-obsessed, and I think that you'd have pretty good coverage. It's not like every person has to have a computer running this thing. Even if only 10% of the population can afford it, that's still a huge number of people. Remember the populations we're talking about here.
I can't comment on Indonesia, as I haven't been there. I lived in China for four years though.
I don't think he was trolling. Statistically speaking -- which is what he said, which means, looking at the numbers and not the people involved -- rape is most often commited by men, and furthermore, it is most often commited by close family friends and family members. Incest is not particularly uncommon, you know. While it's true that it's usually an uncle or a cousin that does the raping, fathers raping their daughters is hardly unheard of.
I don't believe the GP meant to suggest that you were actually in anyway shape or form likely to rape your own daughter. I believe what he wanted you to consider was that, statistically speaking, you could prevent the vast majority of rapes by not allowing young girls to interact with any of the male members of their family or any of the male friends of their family. This group does more raping than anyone else. Statistically speaking.
Of course, as a father yourself, would you agree to such a law? Would you think it fair? Would you never see your daughter again, knowing in your heart that you would never harm her, just because, statistically speaking, you're part of a group that is more likely to do her harm?
The whole rationale behind Megan's law is that sex offenders are statistically speaking more likely to rape again than other people. Of course, many sex offenders are on that list not for sadistically raping four year olds but for being stupid and drunk and doing something that, while unforgivable, they are not going to ever do again.
The GP's point, I think, was that it is fucked up to pass laws like this just penalising a group because of the greater statistical likelyhood of offence. He demonstrated this quite well, I think, by suggesting that while a law seperating a girl from all the male members of her family (including your daughter from you) would prevent most rapes, it's clearly not fair or just.
This law, for similar reasons, is not fair or just. That's the point. I think.
As an aside, threats of violence are silly in any debate, but especially on the internet, because of the infeasibility of making good on them. It just makes you look impotent. Hopefully you can reconsider what's been said with cooler head.
First off, let me say that I disagree with the policy of discrimination against old people. However, I think the company finds themselves in a rather difficult situation in terms of contract enforcement. Most people, regardless of their age, don't read the fine print when the sign a contract. This is probably not a good thing, but despite what paranoid slashdotters seem to think, most contracts aren't like Sony's EULAs: they're simply very detailed descriptions of exactly what services are being provided and what a company's limitations and liabilities are.
Most companies cover their asses in contracts, and contracts are often one-sided: for example, an ISP might state that they reserve the right to discontinue service at any time for any reason, but enforce punitive fees on a customer that prematurely ends the relationship with the ISP. These contracts aren't fair, but we all know that that's how they're written.
The problem, in a nutshell, is positive-descrimination in favor of old people in the courts when it comes to contract enforcement. If an old person decides he's fed up with his ISP because they aren't taking his support calls anymore (because he's exceeded his contractually agreed upon support call quota) or because they're not coming to his house to fix his internet connection (a service not stipulated in the contract) he can just cancel his contract prematurely, and refuse to pay the contractually-agreed upon penalty for doing so.
Why can he do this? Because if the ISP takes him to court for breaking his contract, 9 times out of 10 the ISP will lose. The old person in question (who may in fact have all of his faculties well about him) can claim ignorance of the contract's terms and the court will generally side with him, because (get this) he's old, and the assumption is that old people are senile and stupid and unable to understand contracts.
A young person on the other hand -- by which of course I mean anyone under 60 -- could not get away with this. The court would ask him, simply, whether the signature on the dotted line under "I understand and agree to the terms outlined herein" is his or not, and upon receiving affirmation that it is indeed his, the case would be thrown out of court. It's as simple as that.
There are a lot of posts from older members of the Slashdot community, as well as from people who have extremely lucid 80+ year old grandmas and grandpas, crying foul for this obviously ageist policy. While I agree that the policy is ageist, and that it shouldn't have been adopted, I think that the company is in a serious bind because with old people they cannot be sure that their contract will be upheld in court. Everyone has a grandma or a friend in their 80s that have been taken by scammers who convince them to sign contracts they don't understand -- it's such a common phenomenon that the courts take it into account everytime an old person has a contractual dispute with someone.
I do not believe that this really has anything to do with old people generating more support calls or being less internet savvy than young people, as many Slashdotters have suggested. As anyone who has ever worked tech support knows, 99% of people, regardless of age, are prone to confusing the monitor and the computer and couldn't be counted on to install Windows by themselves. This has nothing really to do with old people per se -- it has to do with stereotypes that we as a society believe about the elderly, and that the elderly have in the past used to their own advantage.
"Your honor, I don't know much about this internet thing, I didn't realize there was a fee for cancellation... please your honor, I'm on a fixed income," says 85-year old Mrs. Monroe, who had previously had disagreements with her ISP over the data throttling they had been doing on her connection to mitigate the substantial bandwidth sink caused by her DecNet over TCP/IP routing experiment, where she used the Alpha cluster in her basement to do dynamic load balancing for her OpenVMS port of Bittorrent.
I dunno, when I used it last year it still seemed to have the notorious padding bug, and it said it was in standards compliance mode. What doctype should I feed it to fix the padding bug?
The "Islamic Community"? What the hell? Islam is one of the world's largest religions -- it may even be the largest. These people comprise the "islamic community", and the vast majority of them are not anymore interested in terrorism than the average christian is interested in blowing up abortion clinics. I've lived in many countries with large muslim populations, and in one case one with a muslim majority, and I have never met any muslim that I believe would be capable of something like 9/11. Since 9/11 most of the muslims I've met abroad have expressed their sympathy, not their joy. Not a single one has suggested that 9/11 was a good idea.
I'm sure there are muslims that agree -- you see pro-Osama protests in Pakistan on CNN after all -- but then you see radical pro-life protestors dangling fetuses around and calling for the reclassification of abortion as a capital crime on TV too. Most of those people are Christians, but I'd be a damn fool if I took that tiny minority as representative and started making wild claims about the "Christian Community", as you've done.
The terrorists that hit the twin towers were indeed muslims, but that in no way implies that all muslims are terrorists. That such a simple logical fallacy should be so prevalent on Slashdot of all places is sort of sad. Aren't we supposed to be smarter than average here?
You really want a chaching proxy like squid for this sort of thing. It can be configured as a transparent proxy (meaning you don't need to fiddle with proxy settings on the machines on your LAN) and it is really, really blazing fast. If you've only got one computer on your LAN squid won't speed up your normal surfing much, unless you consantly view the same static pages, but if you have a lot of computers used by different people (or even the same people) squid can also make the internet seem incredibly responsive by essentially "sharing" everyone's cache.
Who said all people in prison were black? It was a cheeky comment refering to the fact that a disproportionately large number of people in prisons in the US are black. I was implying that they weren't really in prison for any other reason than their skin color, not that everyone in prison was black.
Being unable to parse simple logic proves that you are a fucking idiot.
Wow dude, you really need to read an economics textbook. I'm not saying that to be cheeky or insulting, but what you're suggesting would destroy the US. First off, "full employment" is an economic term that does not mean "100% of all people employed." This may seem weasily to you at first, but the reason is simple: due to frictional unemployment, it is not possible to have sustainable 100% employment (or even 100% employment at all, probably) in an economy which depends on the market to assign jobs. 100% employment is possible in a planned economy, but the US isn't a planned economy.
In case you're not aware, frictional unemployment refers to unemployment that is the result of "shopping around." When you look for a job, you typically have several leads but unless you're absolutely desperate for income, you're unlikely to take the first job offered to you -- you'll look around, see what else is available, see if there's anything better. On the other side of the fence, employers do the same thing: they don't take the first job applicant that responds, but instead shop around for a while to see who the best applicant is. How long this process lasts depends on how badly the worker needs a job and how badly the employer needs an employee. Frictional unemployment is not the only kind of unemployment. Obviously, you can have unemployment as a result of structural changes in the economy (buggy whip manufacturers, for example, had a needless skillset after the rise of the automobile, and were thus structurally unemployed) and unemployment due to overall poor economic conditions, but it is important to recognize that even if everything is completely hunky-dory in the economy and there is a job for everyone, there will still be a certain amount of frictional unemployment.
The result is that 100% employment is not an achievable goal, so instead economists talk about full employment as meaning the full natural rate of employment, not including people who are frictionally unemployed. I believe full employment in the US is estimated to be around 95% of the labour force.
Of course, 95% of the population is not employed, but it's important again to realise that a large percentage of the population is not considered part of the labour force by economists. People in the labour force include people working and people looking for work -- something like only 60% of the US is employed at any given time, but that's because there are lots of children, old people, students, bums, and other folks that for whatever reason are not actively seeking employment. They are not considered "unemployed" by economists because they are not participating in the labour market.
Further, consider that the Fed is helpless to do anything at all about structural unemployment, which results when the structure of the economy changes and results in people being unemployed because their skillset is no longer required by the labour market (the aforementioned buggy whip manufacturers lost their jobs for this reason.) Structural unemployment is a reality in a dynamic economy -- those VAX/VMS experts are out of a job these days, unless they learned some other, more marketable skill in the meantime. The Fed is helpless to stop this, so when they talk about bringing about full employment, you have to be fair and recognize that there are some kinds of employment they can't do anything about, nor should they be expected to.
What they can help with is cyclical unemployment, at least theoretically. Cyclical unemployment is a result of the natural recession-boom-peak-bust cycle: during a recession, people lose their jobs. The fed can temper how eratic the business cycle is with countercyclic monetary policy. When we enter a recession, the fed generally buys US treasury securities on the open market, and when we enter a boom, they sell them. This stimulates the economy during a recession and tempers it during a boom (because when the fed "buys" something, it creates money out of thin a
Because mandatory labeling will make it easy for companies and others to block porn sites, which porn sites do not want. We care about what porn sites want because internet companies are not beholden to any particular physical location to do business -- a porn site based in Russia reaches American consumers just as effectively as a porn site based in the US. The long term effect of porn site registration is that the big, profitable porn sites simply move their base of operations to another country -- there's already strong incentive to do this, as Americans are fairly trigger happy when it comes to pornography (is that 30 year old in pig tails really over 18? Maybe we should take you to court and find out) and smaller pornsites (with narrower profit margins) will be forced to label themselves, see their business die due to the ensuing blocks, and ultimately go out of business.
The reason we should care about this is because the porn industry is an extremely profitable industry. It employs many Americans and pays an awfully large amount of corporate tax thanks to its profitability. If labeling had the desired effect -- ease of censorship -- it would quickly become financially viable to simply move operations elsewhere to avoid the situation. This would be bad for the American economy. Let's face it, porn on the internet isn't going anywhere -- all this sort of thing does is hurts Americans, it doesn't help stop porn (because, after all, all those Russian porn sites with real lolitas aren't going to be affected by this labeling scheme.)
End result: foreign porn prospers, American porn dies, Americans lose jobs, government loses taxes, and ends up raising income taxes to compensate (or sells more debt to the Chinese, which is probably not good either.)
And our ability to find porn is not improved -- because a) finding porn is already easy now and b) what's to stop a morally minded ISP owner from blocking labeled porn sites router-level?
All in all, a stupid idea. Just like the.xxx domain was (is this the same idea?)
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're not. Why don't you RTFA?
I like electric cars too, but at least with current battery technology, battery disposal is a very big problem. They may be cleaner while running, but when it comes time to take them to the dump, electric cars are a major hassle, since we're talking about groundwater contamination.
Nuclear power plants produce waste too, obviously, but nowhere near as much as disposing of electric cars would. Ironically (for your typical uneducated environmentalist) the batteries are a bigger problem than the waste in your equation!
Still, it's good thinking.
Actually, I think you're mistaken -- I think you have it exactly backwards in this particular instance. First of all, regarding revenue from taxes, there's a concept in Economics called the Laffer Curve. Basically, here's how it works. If the government took no taxes from you, its income would be exactly zero. That's easy and obvious. What if the government took 100% of your income? How much money would it make? The answer, if you think about it, is, well, exactly zero, because no one would work. If you had to give all your money to the government, would you work? Hell no! You'd go fishing or something.
These two points are extremes, of course, but the point of the Laffer curve is that increasing taxes raises the proportion of your income the government takes, but also decreases your gross income (ie, before taxes). The more money you have to pay the government, the less you're inclined to work, once your basic needs are met.
In actuality, if you plot government income versus tax rate, you end up with a curve that looks like an upside down U, with y = 0 when x = 0% and 100%, respectively. So it's impossible to just keep increasing taxes -- at some point, increasing taxes will actually decrease government income.
Having said that, let's look at a gas tax (which I personally am in favor of.) I think in the US, what with our cultural addiction to motor vehicles, this tax would be extremely unpopular. At the moment, people complain about the high price of gas and sometimes even go so far as to connect it to the war in Iraq -- but overall they're confident that the price will go down eventually, that this is a temporary situation. If there were a permanent gas tax, well, you'd essentially be telling everyone in the US that they need to pay a lot more for gas for no real economic reason. You'd be telling all the oil companies that in the long term, they're going to lose money, because people will substitute away from gas guzzlers to avoid paying substantially more per year on gas, thus decreasing the amount of gas sold and taking company profits with it. Everyone would oppose it.
In China or Singapore or some other dictatorial state, this might just work -- the government might just be ballsy enough to tell everyone in the country to get over it. But not in the US. We're a democracy, you see.
The first thing any congressional or presidential candidate for office would promise the electorate would be abolishment of the hated gas tax. They'd be tremendously popular for seeing it through. Whatsmore, they'd probably get lots of money from the oil lobby to finance a campaign running on that platform. How can you lose? You get big oil on your side and consumers? It's a politician's wet dream!
So you see, the gas tax would last about as long as prohibition in the US, if even that long. It would be overturned quickly.
So why does it work in Europe? Culture, alternatives, and lack of understanding. Culturally, Europeans aren't as attached to cars and driving as Americans are. They have alternative transportation: public transportation is ubiquitous, fast, and convenient. Lack of understanding: they don't realise how cheap gas could be, if it weren't for high taxes on its sale. They think "that's just how expensive gas is" and get on with their lives. They're surprised when you tell them gas is $3 dollars a gallon in the US -- to them, that's cheap!
It's a bit of a catch-22 actually, because good public transportation and other transport alternatives, along with better city planning and such are prevalent in Europe exactly because gas is too expensive. But we can't get better public transportation and better city planning here in the US, at least not with a purely market-driven solution, because no one would stand for the higher gas prices if they could do something about it (which they could, democracy and all that.)
You are incorrect. The correct answer is that, when you tax a corporation, part of the tax is paid by the corporation, and part of it is paid by consumers. To see why this is, consider the following thought experiment. You are selling a widget for $1. You have decided on this price because it is the optimal one, as per the laws of supply and demand. Because if you decrease the price, you can sell more, but you can't supply as much; and contrariwise, if you increase the price, demand for your widget drops, but you're certainly able to supply more.
It is a fact of economics that any good in a market has just such an optimum price.
When the government levies a tax on your widget, your operating costs effectively go up. Let's say the tax is 9 percent. Then by your logic, you could just sell the widget at $1.09 and have the consumer pay the tax. But this increase in price will have the effect of decreasing demand for your widget (the law of demand), and so you will sell fewer widgets, and your profitability will decrease. The other extreme is, you absorb all the tax, and pass none on to consumers. Then you are still selling for $1, but now the cost of supplying the widgets to sell has gone up, and so you are disinclined to produce that many widgets, even if you can sell them all; you'd make more money producing less and charging more per unit (the law of supply).
In actuality, the new optimum price lies between $1 and $1.09 (where exactly depends on how much demand fluctuates with price, a concept economists call the elasticity of demand.) But the government is getting its 9 cents regardless.
Therefore, the corporation pays some of the tax, and the consumer pays some of the tax.
In some industries, taxes can be passed on to the consumer very efficiently (gas, for example), because in these industries, consumer demand doesn't fluctuate too much with price, at least in the short term. In other industries, for example, luxury goods that people like to have but can easily do with out or substitute with something else, the corporation will end up bearing most of the tax burden, because increasing the price even a little bit will drastically reduce demand for the product.
I know economics isn't such a fashionable thing for Slashdotters to study, but it's useful.
I understand what you're trying to say, but your WoW simile is stupid. Let's assume for a moment that the GP does play WoW all the time (a hobby I, incidentally, also find incredibly stupid.) His doing so in no way affects you, however.
Perhaps a better simile would be to suggest that you liking to drive trucks and other gas guzzlers is like him liking to piss in other people's fish ponds and swimming pools. If you don't live near him, you probably don't care much, but what if you were his neighbour? And even that's not a very good simile, because if you were his neighbour and didn't have a fish pond or swimming pool you might not care.
The thing about your gas guzzlers is that driving them affects everyone around you -- and when their emissions are added to the smog produced by others with hobbies similar to yours, they affect everyone in the entire world.
Now, having said that, I'm not sure that prohibition of gas guzzlers is the best way to deal with these sorts of things. I'm against all the stupid laws that people pass against smoking in public places, for example (although I don't smoke myself, and never have.) I don't like nanny states.
I think it's clear that driving a Toyota Prius is nowhere near as much fun as revving up a Harley. But lots of things that are ultimately damaging to the commons -- in this case the air we breathe and the climate that sustains us -- are fun. The question that needs to be addressed by society is, where do we draw the line?
If you think about it, pleading with others not to complain about your hobbies when your hobbies are damaging to resources that everyone around you needs to survive, is, well, just a little bit selfish.
I don't think fining car companies is going to do much, but I think that a progressive tax on vehicles based on mileage and quality of emmissions could disincent the average American from buying tremendously polluting vehicles. The higher price of gas is doing this already, but not quickly enough, and if the 1970s are any indication, as soon as gas prices drop people like you will be right back out in their trucks having a grand old time, and all those "unfun" Piruses will find themselves docked in the garage permanently.
You may think that's a great thing. I bet teenagers who want to blast loud music at 3am think repealing the noise pollution ordinances active in most communities would be a great thing, too.
Ultimately, your hobbies take a back seat to the well-being of humanity and your community. Those are the sacrifices you make as an individual when you agree to accept the protection and benefits that come from living in a society.
I must be a commie, huh?
In the case of Vinyl, "ARM" technology is not necessary. By the nature of the format, you only get a few hundred plays anyway, and unless you have very expensive equipment, creating MP3s or OGGs from an LP will produce sound far inferior to the same tracks ripped from a CD.
Vinyl LPs degrade considerably with each play, and are not easily transferable to other formats. Why bother with ARM?
But, I'm sure Iran has WMDs! This time we'll find 'em! Did you know that most of the people who bombed the WTC on 9/11 were Iranians?
Without any opinion on the matter whatsoever, I'd like to point out that "non-carcinogenic" and "good for you" are not in fact equivalent statements. "not bad for you" and "good for you" are similarly not equivalent.
I have no idea what the details on this thing are, but unless the GP is tremendously misinformed, it appears that the link between second hand smoke and cancer is not particularly well defined. Just because you cough when someone is smoking around you doesn't mean your chances of getting lung cancer have increased with any statistical significance, difficult as that may be for you to accept. We have controlled experiments precisely because feelings (especially when they are biased, as yours clearly are) are a poor predictor of data.
For the record, I do not smoke, and never have.
In case you hadn't noticed, the RIAA/MPAA and their international affiliates have very successfully redefined the word "pirate" and its cognates to mean copyright infringement. They did this originally to associate rape and pillaging (violent, deplorable crimes) with one much less likely to evoke any sort of compassion for victims (copyright infringement). This was initially moderately successful, but the (unfortunate in my opinion) long term result has simply been that most people no longer associate the word "piracy" with actual on-the-seven-seas piracy. This isn't really surprising, as real piracy has become much less prevalent in the parts of the world where copyright infringement is considered a big issue.
What this means, of course, is that when the average Swede, Briton, Frenchman or American hears "the Pirate party", they are extremely unlikely to think of it in terms of the "plundering murderous raping bastards on the sea party".
It's also worth noting that most European democracies are parliamentary in nature, which means that a special interest party like the pirate party doesn't need (or even want) to get a majority of seats in parliament -- just one would probably be sufficient to make waves during debates. It is unlikely they'd ever get more, but that's not because of the name: it's because being that successful would communicate very effectively to larger parties that the special interest issue the Pirate party stands for is important to the electorate. It's just one issue; they'd adopt it (this is already happening, in fact.) This would marginalise the Pirate Party as a political entity, but would satisfy its raison-d'etre, namely to push for copyright reform on a national scale.
In the US, unfortunately, our system of government doesn't work this way; we don't have proportional representation and so there's no incentive for either the Republican or Democratic party to ever take the US Pirate Party seriously. In the US, the name is important, because in order to make waves, the Pirate Party would have to become one of the big two, which means they would have to have politically viable opinions on all issues, not just copyright reform.
The Pirate Party is very much a parliamentary political tool. Here in the US, we'd have to lobby (and it's doubtful that we the people could ever out-lobby the RIAA.)
Democracy, indeed.
I used to use SCIM. I say used to not because I found something better, but rather because sometime ago (a long time ago) there was some bug in SCIM that made GAIM crash, and so I changed to fcitx, which does better wubi but has an inferior pinyin input method. If you're learning Chinese, you'll probably want pinyin.
Both of these are simplified, although SCIM has traditional too, along with Japanese, Korean, and everything else you can think of (it's a plugin architecture.)
I'd say go with SCIM. fcitx's documentation is in Chinese, so if your Chinese is fairly basic SCIM is a better bet. There's a KDE version called SKIM if you have a preference (SCIM uses GTK). I don't use either GNOME or KDE so I was fairly agnostic on this point.
Emacs also has a bunch of acceptable input methods.
What you say is undeniably true -- there is a fair amount of data out there that supports your thesis -- but there are side-effects to having a society where virtually everyone is armed. It's true that under normal circumstances, people are far more polite and well behaved -- no one wants to start shit if there's a good chance the person you're thinking of upsetting is armed.
The problem is that especially in today's society, it is relatively common for people to get stressed out and freak out. Think "road rage" and other stress-related phenomena. Think drunk people coming out of the pub late at night.
It's worth noting that it's not like the society you're proposing has never existed. In the Old West of the US, everyone basically carried. Mugging might not have been a tremendous problem, but gunfights were frequent, and people dying under such circumstances was routine.
It's also worth noting that while guns do a lot to level the playing field, there is skill involved in operating a gun effectively, and those that have the time and talent to practice their gunmanship will always have the upper hand in societies that revolve around gun ownership. This was certainly true in the old west and would be just as true today.
Furthermore, it's worth noting that a bullet that doesn't meet its intended target does not stop. If everyone had guns, friendly fire deaths would also be more common.
There are pros and cons to widespread adoption of any tool, obviously. Consider the automobile: in most of Europe and the certainly in the USA, almost everyone has one. These were not designed with killing as their primary function, and yet consider how many people are killed in accidents every year. We as a society take that risk because of the convenience that having a car offers: we've come to terms with the issues. There's no doubt that eliminating cars would reduce (eliminate) car related deaths, but the benefits outweigh the problems.
With guns, the equation is similar: if everyone were armed, there would be obvious and tangible benefits, and a drastic reduction in violent crime would certainly be one of them. But there would also be tangible drawbacks. In the USA at least, we apparently decided as a society that dealing with the drawbacks mitigated the benefits of an armed society. Consider that in the west, everyone used to strap, but now very few people do. This is not because of anti-gun laws or anything else, it's because having everyone be armed resulted in a "wild wild west" society that people of the time decided finally that they didn't want to live in anymore.
It's far cheaper than what (the Chinese anyway) currently have to shell out for a computer system. It may not reach impoverished farmers in Guizhou province, but it will certainly increase the number of people who can afford a computer.
However, I anticipate that no one will buy it. Computers are too expensive for many Chinese to own personally, but "internet cafes" ("gaming cafe" would be a more accurate name) are plentiful and extremely cheap -- 2 or 3 yuan per hour is typical (that's about 25 - 30 cents US). PC gaming is huge in the PRC (consoles never really caught on), and that's what the vast majority of Chinese use their machines for -- that and chatting, mostly on QQ, which GAIM and friends do not support*.
The result is that most Chinese are routinely exposed to Windows, and worse, they're addicted to a wide variety of Windows-only software. While owning your own machine is certainly a nice perk, the question they will be asking themselves is, do I want to shell out 125 dollars for a machine that won't run any software I want, or do I want to suffer through not having my own machine, and buy a USB memory stick instead, and do all my computing at the local internet cafe?
My guess is that for the vast majority of Chinese, the latter will seem like a much sounder choice. A 125 dollar x86-compatible machine would be one thing, but if all it can run is Linux, the Chinese won't go for it. Linux penetration in China is virtually nil, except maybe in the government, but they're not the types that would buy 125 dollar, 500MHz desktops.
Thankfully, Chinese support is much better in Linux now than it used to be, but there are still no decent free Chinese fonts -- something that, as a Chinese speaker who uses Linux exclusively, I am very aware of. This company probably would think nothing of bundling MS's SimSun and SimHei fonts with their distribution, as they've thought nothing of using a rip off MIPS chip, but that would be copyright infringement and in my mind wrong. I personally use SimSun and SimHei, but I paid the MS tax when I bought my thinkpad with XP pre-installed (in China, no less). The $125 laptop doesn't come with a Windows license.
All in all, it looks like a bust. It's cool, though.
(*There have been a few attempts to port QQ to Linux, but Tencent adds features to the QQ protocol much too quickly to keep up. Lack of support for wanted features would make Linux seem broken, even though the real culprit is a complex, proprietary, binary protocol with built in obsolescence... but hey, they don't know that.)
Richard Stallmin? Jesus, way to take an otherwise interesting and informative post and make yourself look like a retard. Think "Stalin"? Are you at all aware of what sort of a man Stalin was?
This is just like the wankers who spell "MS" "M$" and "Windows" "Windoze". Only it's worse, because with those stupid spelling conventions at least we can figure out what's meant without it being explained to us. Misspelling intentional, think Stalin? Please. Not to mention that "Windoze" at least doesn't compare something harmless to a murderer responsible for the cold blooded assassination of millions of his own people.
This has got to be the most ridiculously stupid thing I've read all day. Let's compare Bush to Hitler, and ESR to Pol Pot, while we're at it! I know, I know, let's call Bruce Perens Bruce Pinochet!
Fuckwit.
As you apparently have? I lived there for four years, and proxying to connect to Wikipedia for the last year was a major pain in the ass. The Chinese government will not change its censorship policies because of Wikipedia, no matter how much traffic it might get in the west. The end result of this manoeuvre is that Wikipedia is simply unavailable in China.
I don't necessarily think that censoring Wikipedia -- the way that Google and others currently do -- is a workable solution, however, but I say this from a purely practical standpoint. As long as Wikipedia retains its current policy of non-central control -- a policy I fully support -- it is fundamentally incompatible with centralised censorship of any type. Given that complying with Chinese requirements would, in this case, render Wikipedia non-functional, I have to say that Jimbo Wales is not really making much of a stand (unless you count propagandizing as making a stand.) Simply put, Wikipedia is not able to conform to Chinese self-censorship requirements in any case, even if its creator were so inclined. As such, it's not like he's giving up anything. For him, self-censorship would not be "the easy way out", as it was for Google and Yahoo -- quite the opposite, in fact.
It saddens me that the Chinese government is so short-sighted when it comes to the internet, but it doesn't surprise me much either: China has, up until recently, been a much less technically sophisticated society than that of its neighbours, and most of the higher ups in the CCP are old men who grew up in a very different time. Do you think Ted Stevens and his ilk wouldn't censor the internet if they thought they could do it and/or get away with it? The sad thing is, in China, these short-sighted men have the power to see their plans through.
The result is a net loss for everyone. The Chinese, obviously, can no longer easily read the Chinese Wikipedia, which had previously been growing in popularity on the mainland. This means that the "Chinese" Wikipedia has become extremely NPOV with regards to cross-straight relations, thoughts about mainland government and policy, etc, as the Mainland Chinese are no longer afforded a voice in the process. I'm sure the Taiwanese are thrilled about this, but both sides of the argument are extremely biased and prone to propaganda, so it's a bit of a shame that the other side isn't there to participate in the debate. The mainland government is, in this case, actually hurting their public image with Chinese speakers abroad!
But the Chinese government isn't going to change their views anytime soon. In the meantime, the quality of the Chinese Wikipedia will suffer from the lack of mainland contribution.
In short, this is a lose-lose proposition for everyone. If there were some workable way to make Wikipedia accessible to the Chinese without raising the ire of the Chinese government, and without compromising the decentralised, contributory nature of Wikipedia, I would be all for it. Some service is better than no service.
Shutting out and isolating facists is never the way to go. The Sunshine Policy is the model to follow when you have a totaletarian government that cares what other people think (the Chinese do -- the North Koreans, for example, don't. Iran used to, and probably still does, at some level.)
Just my two cents.
Always-on DSL is available in most large Chinese cities, although the price is such that most people wouldn't opt for it (prefering, instead, cheaper, metered plans that better fit their usage habits.)
Of course the price isn't really excessive -- it's between 130 and 200 rmb per month -- but if your monthly salary is only 2000 rmb it might be expensive.
Still, I think there are enough Chinese computer geeks for this sort of thing to work, assuming the technology works.
Presumably the same is true of India. Remember, just because there are lots of people who are living in poverty in these two countries doesn't mean there isn't a relatively large (and growing) middle class. Add to this the fact that both cultures are pretty computer-obsessed, and I think that you'd have pretty good coverage. It's not like every person has to have a computer running this thing. Even if only 10% of the population can afford it, that's still a huge number of people. Remember the populations we're talking about here.
I can't comment on Indonesia, as I haven't been there. I lived in China for four years though.
Well, on my linux installation, I have all my partitions mounted in folders called 'C:', 'D:', 'E:' ...
I don't think he was trolling. Statistically speaking -- which is what he said, which means, looking at the numbers and not the people involved -- rape is most often commited by men, and furthermore, it is most often commited by close family friends and family members. Incest is not particularly uncommon, you know. While it's true that it's usually an uncle or a cousin that does the raping, fathers raping their daughters is hardly unheard of.
I don't believe the GP meant to suggest that you were actually in anyway shape or form likely to rape your own daughter. I believe what he wanted you to consider was that, statistically speaking, you could prevent the vast majority of rapes by not allowing young girls to interact with any of the male members of their family or any of the male friends of their family. This group does more raping than anyone else. Statistically speaking.
Of course, as a father yourself, would you agree to such a law? Would you think it fair? Would you never see your daughter again, knowing in your heart that you would never harm her, just because, statistically speaking, you're part of a group that is more likely to do her harm?
The whole rationale behind Megan's law is that sex offenders are statistically speaking more likely to rape again than other people. Of course, many sex offenders are on that list not for sadistically raping four year olds but for being stupid and drunk and doing something that, while unforgivable, they are not going to ever do again.
The GP's point, I think, was that it is fucked up to pass laws like this just penalising a group because of the greater statistical likelyhood of offence. He demonstrated this quite well, I think, by suggesting that while a law seperating a girl from all the male members of her family (including your daughter from you) would prevent most rapes, it's clearly not fair or just.
This law, for similar reasons, is not fair or just. That's the point. I think.
As an aside, threats of violence are silly in any debate, but especially on the internet, because of the infeasibility of making good on them. It just makes you look impotent. Hopefully you can reconsider what's been said with cooler head.
First off, let me say that I disagree with the policy of discrimination against old people. However, I think the company finds themselves in a rather difficult situation in terms of contract enforcement. Most people, regardless of their age, don't read the fine print when the sign a contract. This is probably not a good thing, but despite what paranoid slashdotters seem to think, most contracts aren't like Sony's EULAs: they're simply very detailed descriptions of exactly what services are being provided and what a company's limitations and liabilities are.
Most companies cover their asses in contracts, and contracts are often one-sided: for example, an ISP might state that they reserve the right to discontinue service at any time for any reason, but enforce punitive fees on a customer that prematurely ends the relationship with the ISP. These contracts aren't fair, but we all know that that's how they're written.
The problem, in a nutshell, is positive-descrimination in favor of old people in the courts when it comes to contract enforcement. If an old person decides he's fed up with his ISP because they aren't taking his support calls anymore (because he's exceeded his contractually agreed upon support call quota) or because they're not coming to his house to fix his internet connection (a service not stipulated in the contract) he can just cancel his contract prematurely, and refuse to pay the contractually-agreed upon penalty for doing so.
Why can he do this? Because if the ISP takes him to court for breaking his contract, 9 times out of 10 the ISP will lose. The old person in question (who may in fact have all of his faculties well about him) can claim ignorance of the contract's terms and the court will generally side with him, because (get this) he's old, and the assumption is that old people are senile and stupid and unable to understand contracts.
A young person on the other hand -- by which of course I mean anyone under 60 -- could not get away with this. The court would ask him, simply, whether the signature on the dotted line under "I understand and agree to the terms outlined herein" is his or not, and upon receiving affirmation that it is indeed his, the case would be thrown out of court. It's as simple as that.
There are a lot of posts from older members of the Slashdot community, as well as from people who have extremely lucid 80+ year old grandmas and grandpas, crying foul for this obviously ageist policy. While I agree that the policy is ageist, and that it shouldn't have been adopted, I think that the company is in a serious bind because with old people they cannot be sure that their contract will be upheld in court. Everyone has a grandma or a friend in their 80s that have been taken by scammers who convince them to sign contracts they don't understand -- it's such a common phenomenon that the courts take it into account everytime an old person has a contractual dispute with someone.
I do not believe that this really has anything to do with old people generating more support calls or being less internet savvy than young people, as many Slashdotters have suggested. As anyone who has ever worked tech support knows, 99% of people, regardless of age, are prone to confusing the monitor and the computer and couldn't be counted on to install Windows by themselves. This has nothing really to do with old people per se -- it has to do with stereotypes that we as a society believe about the elderly, and that the elderly have in the past used to their own advantage.
"Your honor, I don't know much about this internet thing, I didn't realize there was a fee for cancellation... please your honor, I'm on a fixed income," says 85-year old Mrs. Monroe, who had previously had disagreements with her ISP over the data throttling they had been doing on her connection to mitigate the substantial bandwidth sink caused by her DecNet over TCP/IP routing experiment, where she used the Alpha cluster in her basement to do dynamic load balancing for her OpenVMS port of Bittorrent.
"Don't worry Mrs. Monroe, we'll waive the fine."
You know that's how it would go down.
I dunno, when I used it last year it still seemed to have the notorious padding bug, and it said it was in standards compliance mode. What doctype should I feed it to fix the padding bug?
Good point.
The "Islamic Community"? What the hell? Islam is one of the world's largest religions -- it may even be the largest. These people comprise the "islamic community", and the vast majority of them are not anymore interested in terrorism than the average christian is interested in blowing up abortion clinics. I've lived in many countries with large muslim populations, and in one case one with a muslim majority, and I have never met any muslim that I believe would be capable of something like 9/11. Since 9/11 most of the muslims I've met abroad have expressed their sympathy, not their joy. Not a single one has suggested that 9/11 was a good idea.
I'm sure there are muslims that agree -- you see pro-Osama protests in Pakistan on CNN after all -- but then you see radical pro-life protestors dangling fetuses around and calling for the reclassification of abortion as a capital crime on TV too. Most of those people are Christians, but I'd be a damn fool if I took that tiny minority as representative and started making wild claims about the "Christian Community", as you've done.
The terrorists that hit the twin towers were indeed muslims, but that in no way implies that all muslims are terrorists. That such a simple logical fallacy should be so prevalent on Slashdot of all places is sort of sad. Aren't we supposed to be smarter than average here?
You really want a chaching proxy like squid for this sort of thing. It can be configured as a transparent proxy (meaning you don't need to fiddle with proxy settings on the machines on your LAN) and it is really, really blazing fast. If you've only got one computer on your LAN squid won't speed up your normal surfing much, unless you consantly view the same static pages, but if you have a lot of computers used by different people (or even the same people) squid can also make the internet seem incredibly responsive by essentially "sharing" everyone's cache.
It's a great program, I really recommend it.
Who said all people in prison were black? It was a cheeky comment refering to the fact that a disproportionately large number of people in prisons in the US are black. I was implying that they weren't really in prison for any other reason than their skin color, not that everyone in prison was black.
Being unable to parse simple logic proves that you are a fucking idiot.
Wow dude, you really need to read an economics textbook. I'm not saying that to be cheeky or insulting, but what you're suggesting would destroy the US. First off, "full employment" is an economic term that does not mean "100% of all people employed." This may seem weasily to you at first, but the reason is simple: due to frictional unemployment, it is not possible to have sustainable 100% employment (or even 100% employment at all, probably) in an economy which depends on the market to assign jobs. 100% employment is possible in a planned economy, but the US isn't a planned economy.
In case you're not aware, frictional unemployment refers to unemployment that is the result of "shopping around." When you look for a job, you typically have several leads but unless you're absolutely desperate for income, you're unlikely to take the first job offered to you -- you'll look around, see what else is available, see if there's anything better. On the other side of the fence, employers do the same thing: they don't take the first job applicant that responds, but instead shop around for a while to see who the best applicant is. How long this process lasts depends on how badly the worker needs a job and how badly the employer needs an employee. Frictional unemployment is not the only kind of unemployment. Obviously, you can have unemployment as a result of structural changes in the economy (buggy whip manufacturers, for example, had a needless skillset after the rise of the automobile, and were thus structurally unemployed) and unemployment due to overall poor economic conditions, but it is important to recognize that even if everything is completely hunky-dory in the economy and there is a job for everyone, there will still be a certain amount of frictional unemployment.
The result is that 100% employment is not an achievable goal, so instead economists talk about full employment as meaning the full natural rate of employment, not including people who are frictionally unemployed. I believe full employment in the US is estimated to be around 95% of the labour force.
Of course, 95% of the population is not employed, but it's important again to realise that a large percentage of the population is not considered part of the labour force by economists. People in the labour force include people working and people looking for work -- something like only 60% of the US is employed at any given time, but that's because there are lots of children, old people, students, bums, and other folks that for whatever reason are not actively seeking employment. They are not considered "unemployed" by economists because they are not participating in the labour market.
Further, consider that the Fed is helpless to do anything at all about structural unemployment, which results when the structure of the economy changes and results in people being unemployed because their skillset is no longer required by the labour market (the aforementioned buggy whip manufacturers lost their jobs for this reason.) Structural unemployment is a reality in a dynamic economy -- those VAX/VMS experts are out of a job these days, unless they learned some other, more marketable skill in the meantime. The Fed is helpless to stop this, so when they talk about bringing about full employment, you have to be fair and recognize that there are some kinds of employment they can't do anything about, nor should they be expected to.
What they can help with is cyclical unemployment, at least theoretically. Cyclical unemployment is a result of the natural recession-boom-peak-bust cycle: during a recession, people lose their jobs. The fed can temper how eratic the business cycle is with countercyclic monetary policy. When we enter a recession, the fed generally buys US treasury securities on the open market, and when we enter a boom, they sell them. This stimulates the economy during a recession and tempers it during a boom (because when the fed "buys" something, it creates money out of thin a
Because mandatory labeling will make it easy for companies and others to block porn sites, which porn sites do not want. We care about what porn sites want because internet companies are not beholden to any particular physical location to do business -- a porn site based in Russia reaches American consumers just as effectively as a porn site based in the US. The long term effect of porn site registration is that the big, profitable porn sites simply move their base of operations to another country -- there's already strong incentive to do this, as Americans are fairly trigger happy when it comes to pornography (is that 30 year old in pig tails really over 18? Maybe we should take you to court and find out) and smaller pornsites (with narrower profit margins) will be forced to label themselves, see their business die due to the ensuing blocks, and ultimately go out of business.
.xxx domain was (is this the same idea?)
The reason we should care about this is because the porn industry is an extremely profitable industry. It employs many Americans and pays an awfully large amount of corporate tax thanks to its profitability. If labeling had the desired effect -- ease of censorship -- it would quickly become financially viable to simply move operations elsewhere to avoid the situation. This would be bad for the American economy. Let's face it, porn on the internet isn't going anywhere -- all this sort of thing does is hurts Americans, it doesn't help stop porn (because, after all, all those Russian porn sites with real lolitas aren't going to be affected by this labeling scheme.)
End result: foreign porn prospers, American porn dies, Americans lose jobs, government loses taxes, and ends up raising income taxes to compensate (or sells more debt to the Chinese, which is probably not good either.)
And our ability to find porn is not improved -- because a) finding porn is already easy now and b) what's to stop a morally minded ISP owner from blocking labeled porn sites router-level?
All in all, a stupid idea. Just like the