Lomborg is the last person to quote for an example of healthy skepticism. If anything, he's an example of who to be skeptical of.
Huh? Is there some approved list of people who we should not be skeptical of, and a corresponding list of people who we should be? Sounds like the exact opposite of skepticism to me.
I have Bank of America, which actually works kind of like this. In their setup, a normal password login allows you to do a limited number of things - check balances and send money to people/companies that you have already entered into their list, and this is all that you will want to do 99% of the time that you login. The things that a thief would want to to - add a new payee, change the address or account number for an existing payee, or direct transfer funds - require you to enter a key that gets sent to your phone by text message. Since the things that require the second-factor authentication are rare and known, it would be much harder to trick you into entering it (you know you didn't do anything that requires it) or hack your phone somehow (you don't do it very much, so it will be hard for them to have an opportunity to witness the transaction).
Of course, nothing can make it impossible, and I generally don't feel the need to use public terminals for it anyways. But this is probably about the best you can do without requiring the customer to carry around extra gadgets or install custom software or something.
Please let me know where I can find a class where I can "exercise my intellectual curiosity and absorb ideas from others which in turn spark new ideas within myself etc etc". I'm surfing the web, chatting, etc during class because I find most classes to be painfully slow and boring most of the time, and it's either that or fall asleep. I'd rather surf the web because it's easier to switch back to paying attention when something important comes up.
What makes you think we don't have that technical training now? We still have mechanics, plumbers, electricians, hairdressers, barbers, cashiers, tellers, etc, and they aren't going to four-year (or more) colleges to get those jobs. There are indeed people who are happier in those jobs - they know who they are, and they don't need the help of people who think that they are smarter than them to figure out that they want those jobs and how to get them.
I don't. Think about what the potential consequences are. It's generally somewhere between difficult and impossible to guarantee that a jamming signal is going to affect ONLY your property. Also consider the widely varying reception characteristics of phones and the variety of carriers and where they have their base stations. For practical purposes, if you have a jamming signal strong enough to make sure that no phone can connect to any base station within your property, you will almost certainly interfere with at least some phones on some carriers a considerable distance away from your property.
Now, if we take that situation and combine it with an environment where this is legal, then how many establishments in a given area will do this? What will the results be of multiple jamming businesses/homes in a small area? Given the uncertain characteristics of jamming described above, it's likely that if several businesses in an urban area start trying to jam, the entire cellular network could be rendered useless over a pretty large area. I'm not generally in favor of Government intervention, but I think that having cellular networks (and other wireless communication systems) that work reliably over a wide area is more important then someone's supposed right to broadcast anything at any frequency and power level they want.
Mod parent up, exactly what I was going to say. I'll be happy to pay more towards the war against Islamofacism if I can also spend as much less on welfare, social security, a bazillion useless pork projects, dozens of unconstitutional Government agencies, etc. Check out a basic Federal budget sometime, and compare defense spending to everything else.
You have to remember that the top speed is the absolute maximum speed in ideal conditions - flat road in good condition, lots of time to accelerate, negligible wind, minimal load (empty except for the driver). If you build a car with a top speed of 80, then the actual top speed in everyday conditions will often be significantly less. What if you're going up a hill? What if you're taking the family on a vacation and have 5 people plus luggage in the car? What if you'd like to be able to reach 80 in under 3 minutes? What if there's a headwind? Any one of those exceptions could knock your top speed down significantly. Add in a passenger or two and some stuff plus onramp hills on freeways, and you may have trouble doing 60 in a car with a top speed of 80.
There's also the factor that the rest of the vehicle is probably designed around the top speed. Brakes, suspension, tires, steering, frame stiffness, etc, may be designed to be just barely good enough at the top speed. It's probably not much fun to have to swerve to avoid an accident at the vehicle's top speed.
I would expect that it's also pretty hard to get decent fuel economy at top speed. To reach that speed, the engine will have to run at a fairly high RPM level, near it's power peak. But for good fuel economy and a reasonable noise level, you'll want to be running at lower RPMs, meaning less power available.
Note that vehicles with a limited top speed do it electronically, rather then by limiting engine power or available gearing. Yeah, I think that a 100MPH top speed is just barely enough for a safe everyday vehicle.
You guys are totally missing the point here. Launching a ordinary grocery-store soda bottle into space is quite simple. All you have to do is take the bottle into orbit on the Space Shuttle, then have an astronaut launch it out of the cargo bay. You can then legitimately say that you have launched your bottle rocket into space. If you get your angles just right, it'll probably even stay in orbit for a good, long time.
So what? Creating jobs somewhere is a side effect of almost anything the Government does. Should we dump welfare programs because they create lots of high-paying administrative jobs in some other congressperson's district? At least the hypersonic engineers are doing work that could be useful at some point.
Yeah, the most serious threat today is terrorist groups smuggling WMDs. We should be paying lots of attention to that on every level, and as far as I know, we are. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore the possibility of any other type of military conflict. One of the reasons why the conventional threat is practically nonexistent is that we already put a lot of money and work into building a powerful conventional military. If we stop pursuing advances in that because the conventional threat doesn't look very dangerous right now, we're setting the stage to be passed up at a later time. Is anybody eager to see what happens if, say, the Communist Chinese find themselves at the top of the hill as far as conventional military power in 20 years?
Most likely so you can't copy and paste their debunkings into e-mails and forum posts and such, thus showing people the content without the ads. This way, if you want to show someone else their debunking page, you have to link it and let them load it themselves, so that they see Snopes' ads.
Helicopters have pretty short range compared to freighters. Once they get more then a few hundred miles offshore, you'll need an aircraft carrier in the vicinity in order to run a helicopter out to it.
I'd also bet that half the time something goes wrong is due to storms. Good luck landing a helicopter on an unmanned freighter that has probably lost communication in a storm.
I don't know off the top of my head what the practical efficiency of a good automotive IC engine is, though I'd guess it's probably a bit lower then your 20-30%, but the most efficient fossil fuel power plant I have heard of was running at about 50% efficiency. You can bet that most operating power plants are somewhat lower. All heat engines have pretty lousy efficiency.
Also, you cannot reduce carbon emissions except by reducing the amount of fuel burnt. It's basic chemistry - there was carbon in the fuel, it has to go somewhere, and CO2 is the best choice. There's no way to convert that carbon to something else. Pollution reduction mostly consists of things like reducing particulate emissions (mostly particles of unburnt fuel), converting CO to CO2, and breaking down oxides of nitrogen.
While electric motors and plants are pretty efficient, you also have to contend with the inefficiencies of transmitting the power and storing it until you're ready to use it. None of these are too terribly bad, but they do add up. Put it all together and while it probably isn't quite a wash as far as overall efficiency, it's not nearly as big of a gain as some people think.
If you subtract the areas in the US where there's no GSM coverage, i.e. most of the country, you get a GSM population density that's higher.
Maybe you should tell my phone that "most of the country" has no GSM coverage. I use ATT/Cingular and I travel to rural locations frequently. I've had trouble getting a signal maybe one time in the last three years. This is with the stock antenna and no booster or other assistance.
That's true, as far as it goes. The trouble is that we aren't the only ones thinking in this way - the various Islamic Terrorist groups that carry out these acts do it too.
If they carry out a large, dramatic attack and, from their perspective, nothing significant happens to them and their supporters, then they are encouraged to carry out yet more attacks until they achieve their political goals. Meanwhile, the other countries in the rest of the world are watching as well. If they see us suffer a vicious attack and not respond forcefully, then they will believe that they can take advantage of us as well and we won't do anything about it.
On the other hand, if they carry out a large, dramatic attack and see the Government that supported them overthrown seemingly in the blink of an eye, their comrades killed or captured, their adopted homeland reject their form of government, seemingly the whole world hunting them down, that tends to discourage further attacks. And other countries are more likely to see us as strong and respected, unlikely to take abuse lying down and likely to keep our obligations to them if the going gets tough.
Whether these results have been achieved by our actions is of course for the individual to decide.
Not too surprisingly, everyone's complaining that PDFs can be edited, and you need more stuff (passwords, digital signatures, etc) to make it really secure. I think they're all missing the point. The point is: Why is the salesman using the file that the client sent back to him if he doesn't think that there were any changes? Why should the client even be sending back a file at all if they haven't made changes? The salesman should only be using locally-stored copies as the legal documents. If the client wants to change something, the salesman can make the actual changes in his saved copy, and then use that.
If they add passwords and encryption, they'll still need new procedures to make sure that gets done right. Why not just make a procedure that files sent back from the client aren't used for anything anyways, and avoid the problem without adding new technology that could go wrong?
Yes, let's keep kids away from military recruiters. That way, we will have no military, and will eventually be conquered by a hostile power with no opposition. That power will then conscript soldiers by threats of torture, summary execution, and the same to the individual's extended family.
Oh wait, I forgot, that couldn't possibly happen, because the United States is the sole source of all Evil in the world. There was no violence or oppression of any kind anywhere before the United States came into existence, and all violence and oppression will disappear when the United States is gone. The US couldn't possibly be invaded by an evil power, because there is no Evil outside of the US, and all evil that seems to be present in the world is actually caused by the influence of the US.
The scary part is that someone reading Slashdot right now seriously believes every word of that.
Big plus one on that. I'd say Mod Parent Up, but you're already at +5.
Both porn and romance movies show unlikely situations in which people do things that are probably a bad idea in real life. The difference is, most guys figure out pretty early that most girls aren't really into being gangbanged by 3 guys they just met and that sort of thing. It takes much, much longer (and has screwed up more peoples' romantic lives for much longer) to figure out that chasing after and obsessing over some hot girl you ran into somewhere is dumb, because you have no reason to think that she's at all interested in you, or that you will still be interested in her after a 5-minute conversation.
A particularly bad example that I remember is the movie Hitch. Hey, that girl down the street is cute! So, I'll obsess over her for weeks, and then hire some guy who will pull some crazy stunt that results in a conversation with her, and we'll naturally fall in love and get married! In real life, this sort of thing isn't worth the time spent obsessing or playing tricks, because at least 90% of the time, there just isn't anything there. Don't obsess over it; just go talk to her and ask her out. If you two click, then that's more then good enough, and if you don't, then you haven't wasted too much time and can move on to other prospects. If that guy wanted to really do a service to his clients, he'd smack them, tell them to forget about whoever they're obsessing over, then take them to a bar and make them talk to every single woman there.
Based on what I have heard about it, I do support it. The threat of terrorism is ridiculed a lot around here, but the fact is that there are terrorists out there who do want to kill us. You can't not know this if you pay any attention at all to the news. If you want the Government to have a shot at stopping them, they need to have some surveillance/intelligence abilities.
Most of the outrage here strikes me as political posturing. I.E. whenever a Republican is in power, Democrats argue against everything he does with any halfway plausible argument they can think up, but you never hear them saying what exactly you want him to do, and then approving when he does that, complete with all of the unintended consequences that result. And of course, Republicans do the same thing when a Democrat is in power. Just more of the same. A terrorist attack happens, and it's "Why didn't you stop it, you moron!". Then they increase surveillance and such to try to stop the next one, and it's "Don't you dare invade my privacy, you bastard!"
If you want to convince me that you really do oppose any kind of similar surveillance on ideological grounds (not just knee-jerk Bush bashing), what I want to hear you say is that when another terrorist attack happens, or even in regard to 9/11, that the Government can't be expected to stop it. That you prefer that they be limited in their ability to stop it if it means that you get more privacy. That you look at the blood of dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of your countrymen dead and say that it's too bad, but you'd rather have more privacy. These are the consequences of taking such positions in the real world. It's easy to argue for such things on an internet board, but it's much harder to implement them in the real world and deal with the consequences that you didn't think about or take seriously.
Don't mistake the above for a strawman attack - personally, I'd like to see more of that attitude. I'd rather see more people take responsibility for keeping themselves safe then cry to the Government for more protection every time some people get killed. I'd rather see us hitting terrorists and their support structure overseas then trying to crack down on everything and everyone here at home. But I'm sure some of you posting here - you know who you are - have argued for stop the terrorist attacks + don't send the military to attack anyone + don't spy on me. I'd love to live in the perfect fantasy world where that was possible, but it just doesn't exist. There really are people out there who want to hurt you, and if you don't stop them one way or another, they will succeed eventually.
I have to agree - I'm far from being an artist or anything, but I've found GIMP to be reasonably easy to use for the tasks I've used it for. It has its quirks, but so does every other program I've ever used, and you don't really notice it once you get used to them. I don't need all that many features, and I'm not real interested in shelling out $500 or whatever for Photoshop.
I can't figure out why people are complaining about cropping. Click the crop tool, drag a rectangle, the part to be cropped is helpfully shaded and you can drag the crop area around or adjust the numbers in a dialog, and then you click once to crop. How could this be done easier?
Leaving aside the psychological harm of knowing your private information is being illegally monitored and even stored by the government, I can think of dozens of ways in which the NSA could abuse that database that would constitute harm.
Well if they are someday harmed in some provable way, then they can sue for compensation of that harm. Psychological harm? Gimme a break. I'd prefer that the courts deal in things that are provable and quantitative. I think we'd be in a much bigger mess if you could sue for mental distress over something that you can't prove ever happened and has no measurable effect on you.
"If you have to ask your doctor if you have cancer, that in itself serves as proof that you were not harmed any way by cancer (if it does exist)."
Just because you don't (yet) know about the cause of harm done to you, doesn't mean that harm has not been done.
Uhh yeah, that has nothing to do with the situation. Doctors diagnose the underlying cause of problems and fix them, if possible. Civil courts compensate people for direct and measurable harms done unto them unjustly by another party.
If you're saying (2) I don't think that being a taxpayer is the grounds for standing. It's that they are likely to be illegally wiretapped under what's publicly known about the eavesdropping program. A preponderance of evidence suggests they are being affected by the program, just as a preponderance of evidence might give standing to town members who are getting cancer at statistically high rates against the sludge-dumping chemical plant nearby.
Really? Sounds like there's no evidence that they are affected by the program in any way. If they had such evidence, they wouldn't have to ask the Government whether they were being wiretapped.
courts aren't supposed to judge the effects of laws?
Nope, they judge whether laws violate the Constitution or not. Judging the effects of laws is the Legislature's job. Have you read the Constitution lately?
Okay, I can see how you could sue for something like that if you suffered some sort of harm, such as property rightfully yours was damaged or seized, your reputation was harmed, or it was used as evidence against you in a court of law. But where's the harm for them to sue over in this case? How can they sue if they can't show that anything happened to them as a result of the alleged act?
Well, I guess I am about to be modded into oblivion by the anti-Bush crowd, but I don't see anything wrong with this ruling.
IANAL, but to my knowledge, in order to sue over an act (tort), you have to prove that you were not just negatively affected by that act, but affected in a specific dollar amount which the court can award you as compensation for the act. What measurable harm have these guys suffered? I don't think that the possibility that one of your conversations might be in a secret NSA database causes you any measurable harm that a court could compensate you for. If they have to ask the NSA whether they have any such records, that in and of itself serves as proof that they were not harmed in any way by the records (if they do exist), since if they were harmed in any way, they would be able to prove that in court.
I don't think it's a good idea either to seek to challenge laws in court on the grounds that you paid the taxes that support the program or somesuch. That is trying to place the courts in a role they were never meant to take - of judging the effect of laws. Passing and repealing laws is the job of our elected representatives in Congress and the President. Provided that the laws do not directly contradict the Constitution, the Courts have no say in what those laws are. (yes, I know that we seem to be steadily accumulating laws that do directly contradict the Constitution, but that's another post) If you don't like the laws, you're going to have to take it up with your elected Representatives, and you're going to have to accept that the American people do not necessarily agree with you on all issues, and they have as much right to their views as you do. If you want to change things, you have to convince your fellow Americans that you are right and they should vote your way.
I agree with just about all of that (and I'd give a mod point if I had one today) except for OBL's expected response to 9/11. I think he really expected us to do next to nothing, or maybe pull troops out of the Middle East.
See, to most Americans, America is the country that won WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, the first country to develop nuclear weapons and the first and so far the only one to use them in anger. We believe that the USA has the most powerful military in the world, and is capable of doing just about anything if the will is there.
But OBL had no reason to see things that way. To him, we were the country that hasn't done anything significant in response to dozens of terrorist attacks against our people and our interests, the country that pulls out of a conflict whenever it gets tough, paper tigers happy to drop bombs from 30k ft, but with no stomach for a hard fight. Given what he's seen the last 10-20 years in the Middle East, he has every reason to think that way.
I believe that, when he managed to pull off the 9/11 attacks, OBL expected us to give up and decrease our influence in the Middle East. I think he was genuinely stunned to see us respond by overthrowing the Taliban effortlessly (compared to the Soviets), and then later overthrowing Saddam with similar ease.
That's not censorship. Censorship is the Government throwing people in prison for saying things that don't harm anyone directly. A corporation not publishing something that it doesn't think its customers are interested in has nothing to do with censorship. People not listening to you is not censorship.
You have the right to express your opinion without being arrested and thrown in prison for it. You do not have the right to shove your opinion down my throat, or anyone else's.
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Huh? Is there some approved list of people who we should not be skeptical of, and a corresponding list of people who we should be? Sounds like the exact opposite of skepticism to me.
I have Bank of America, which actually works kind of like this. In their setup, a normal password login allows you to do a limited number of things - check balances and send money to people/companies that you have already entered into their list, and this is all that you will want to do 99% of the time that you login. The things that a thief would want to to - add a new payee, change the address or account number for an existing payee, or direct transfer funds - require you to enter a key that gets sent to your phone by text message. Since the things that require the second-factor authentication are rare and known, it would be much harder to trick you into entering it (you know you didn't do anything that requires it) or hack your phone somehow (you don't do it very much, so it will be hard for them to have an opportunity to witness the transaction).
Of course, nothing can make it impossible, and I generally don't feel the need to use public terminals for it anyways. But this is probably about the best you can do without requiring the customer to carry around extra gadgets or install custom software or something.
Please let me know where I can find a class where I can "exercise my intellectual curiosity and absorb ideas from others which in turn spark new ideas within myself etc etc". I'm surfing the web, chatting, etc during class because I find most classes to be painfully slow and boring most of the time, and it's either that or fall asleep. I'd rather surf the web because it's easier to switch back to paying attention when something important comes up.
What makes you think we don't have that technical training now? We still have mechanics, plumbers, electricians, hairdressers, barbers, cashiers, tellers, etc, and they aren't going to four-year (or more) colleges to get those jobs. There are indeed people who are happier in those jobs - they know who they are, and they don't need the help of people who think that they are smarter than them to figure out that they want those jobs and how to get them.
I don't. Think about what the potential consequences are. It's generally somewhere between difficult and impossible to guarantee that a jamming signal is going to affect ONLY your property. Also consider the widely varying reception characteristics of phones and the variety of carriers and where they have their base stations. For practical purposes, if you have a jamming signal strong enough to make sure that no phone can connect to any base station within your property, you will almost certainly interfere with at least some phones on some carriers a considerable distance away from your property.
Now, if we take that situation and combine it with an environment where this is legal, then how many establishments in a given area will do this? What will the results be of multiple jamming businesses/homes in a small area? Given the uncertain characteristics of jamming described above, it's likely that if several businesses in an urban area start trying to jam, the entire cellular network could be rendered useless over a pretty large area. I'm not generally in favor of Government intervention, but I think that having cellular networks (and other wireless communication systems) that work reliably over a wide area is more important then someone's supposed right to broadcast anything at any frequency and power level they want.
Mod parent up, exactly what I was going to say. I'll be happy to pay more towards the war against Islamofacism if I can also spend as much less on welfare, social security, a bazillion useless pork projects, dozens of unconstitutional Government agencies, etc. Check out a basic Federal budget sometime, and compare defense spending to everything else.
You have to remember that the top speed is the absolute maximum speed in ideal conditions - flat road in good condition, lots of time to accelerate, negligible wind, minimal load (empty except for the driver). If you build a car with a top speed of 80, then the actual top speed in everyday conditions will often be significantly less. What if you're going up a hill? What if you're taking the family on a vacation and have 5 people plus luggage in the car? What if you'd like to be able to reach 80 in under 3 minutes? What if there's a headwind? Any one of those exceptions could knock your top speed down significantly. Add in a passenger or two and some stuff plus onramp hills on freeways, and you may have trouble doing 60 in a car with a top speed of 80.
There's also the factor that the rest of the vehicle is probably designed around the top speed. Brakes, suspension, tires, steering, frame stiffness, etc, may be designed to be just barely good enough at the top speed. It's probably not much fun to have to swerve to avoid an accident at the vehicle's top speed.
I would expect that it's also pretty hard to get decent fuel economy at top speed. To reach that speed, the engine will have to run at a fairly high RPM level, near it's power peak. But for good fuel economy and a reasonable noise level, you'll want to be running at lower RPMs, meaning less power available.
Note that vehicles with a limited top speed do it electronically, rather then by limiting engine power or available gearing. Yeah, I think that a 100MPH top speed is just barely enough for a safe everyday vehicle.
You guys are totally missing the point here. Launching a ordinary grocery-store soda bottle into space is quite simple. All you have to do is take the bottle into orbit on the Space Shuttle, then have an astronaut launch it out of the cargo bay. You can then legitimately say that you have launched your bottle rocket into space. If you get your angles just right, it'll probably even stay in orbit for a good, long time.
So what? Creating jobs somewhere is a side effect of almost anything the Government does. Should we dump welfare programs because they create lots of high-paying administrative jobs in some other congressperson's district? At least the hypersonic engineers are doing work that could be useful at some point.
Yeah, the most serious threat today is terrorist groups smuggling WMDs. We should be paying lots of attention to that on every level, and as far as I know, we are. But that doesn't mean that we should ignore the possibility of any other type of military conflict. One of the reasons why the conventional threat is practically nonexistent is that we already put a lot of money and work into building a powerful conventional military. If we stop pursuing advances in that because the conventional threat doesn't look very dangerous right now, we're setting the stage to be passed up at a later time. Is anybody eager to see what happens if, say, the Communist Chinese find themselves at the top of the hill as far as conventional military power in 20 years?
Most likely so you can't copy and paste their debunkings into e-mails and forum posts and such, thus showing people the content without the ads. This way, if you want to show someone else their debunking page, you have to link it and let them load it themselves, so that they see Snopes' ads.
Unless, of course, you have noscript...
Helicopters have pretty short range compared to freighters. Once they get more then a few hundred miles offshore, you'll need an aircraft carrier in the vicinity in order to run a helicopter out to it.
I'd also bet that half the time something goes wrong is due to storms. Good luck landing a helicopter on an unmanned freighter that has probably lost communication in a storm.
I don't know off the top of my head what the practical efficiency of a good automotive IC engine is, though I'd guess it's probably a bit lower then your 20-30%, but the most efficient fossil fuel power plant I have heard of was running at about 50% efficiency. You can bet that most operating power plants are somewhat lower. All heat engines have pretty lousy efficiency.
Also, you cannot reduce carbon emissions except by reducing the amount of fuel burnt. It's basic chemistry - there was carbon in the fuel, it has to go somewhere, and CO2 is the best choice. There's no way to convert that carbon to something else. Pollution reduction mostly consists of things like reducing particulate emissions (mostly particles of unburnt fuel), converting CO to CO2, and breaking down oxides of nitrogen.
While electric motors and plants are pretty efficient, you also have to contend with the inefficiencies of transmitting the power and storing it until you're ready to use it. None of these are too terribly bad, but they do add up. Put it all together and while it probably isn't quite a wash as far as overall efficiency, it's not nearly as big of a gain as some people think.
You must be new here.
Maybe you should tell my phone that "most of the country" has no GSM coverage. I use ATT/Cingular and I travel to rural locations frequently. I've had trouble getting a signal maybe one time in the last three years. This is with the stock antenna and no booster or other assistance.
That's true, as far as it goes. The trouble is that we aren't the only ones thinking in this way - the various Islamic Terrorist groups that carry out these acts do it too.
If they carry out a large, dramatic attack and, from their perspective, nothing significant happens to them and their supporters, then they are encouraged to carry out yet more attacks until they achieve their political goals. Meanwhile, the other countries in the rest of the world are watching as well. If they see us suffer a vicious attack and not respond forcefully, then they will believe that they can take advantage of us as well and we won't do anything about it.
On the other hand, if they carry out a large, dramatic attack and see the Government that supported them overthrown seemingly in the blink of an eye, their comrades killed or captured, their adopted homeland reject their form of government, seemingly the whole world hunting them down, that tends to discourage further attacks. And other countries are more likely to see us as strong and respected, unlikely to take abuse lying down and likely to keep our obligations to them if the going gets tough.
Whether these results have been achieved by our actions is of course for the individual to decide.
Not too surprisingly, everyone's complaining that PDFs can be edited, and you need more stuff (passwords, digital signatures, etc) to make it really secure. I think they're all missing the point. The point is: Why is the salesman using the file that the client sent back to him if he doesn't think that there were any changes? Why should the client even be sending back a file at all if they haven't made changes? The salesman should only be using locally-stored copies as the legal documents. If the client wants to change something, the salesman can make the actual changes in his saved copy, and then use that.
If they add passwords and encryption, they'll still need new procedures to make sure that gets done right. Why not just make a procedure that files sent back from the client aren't used for anything anyways, and avoid the problem without adding new technology that could go wrong?
Yes, let's keep kids away from military recruiters. That way, we will have no military, and will eventually be conquered by a hostile power with no opposition. That power will then conscript soldiers by threats of torture, summary execution, and the same to the individual's extended family.
Oh wait, I forgot, that couldn't possibly happen, because the United States is the sole source of all Evil in the world. There was no violence or oppression of any kind anywhere before the United States came into existence, and all violence and oppression will disappear when the United States is gone. The US couldn't possibly be invaded by an evil power, because there is no Evil outside of the US, and all evil that seems to be present in the world is actually caused by the influence of the US.
The scary part is that someone reading Slashdot right now seriously believes every word of that.
Big plus one on that. I'd say Mod Parent Up, but you're already at +5.
Both porn and romance movies show unlikely situations in which people do things that are probably a bad idea in real life. The difference is, most guys figure out pretty early that most girls aren't really into being gangbanged by 3 guys they just met and that sort of thing. It takes much, much longer (and has screwed up more peoples' romantic lives for much longer) to figure out that chasing after and obsessing over some hot girl you ran into somewhere is dumb, because you have no reason to think that she's at all interested in you, or that you will still be interested in her after a 5-minute conversation.
A particularly bad example that I remember is the movie Hitch. Hey, that girl down the street is cute! So, I'll obsess over her for weeks, and then hire some guy who will pull some crazy stunt that results in a conversation with her, and we'll naturally fall in love and get married! In real life, this sort of thing isn't worth the time spent obsessing or playing tricks, because at least 90% of the time, there just isn't anything there. Don't obsess over it; just go talk to her and ask her out. If you two click, then that's more then good enough, and if you don't, then you haven't wasted too much time and can move on to other prospects. If that guy wanted to really do a service to his clients, he'd smack them, tell them to forget about whoever they're obsessing over, then take them to a bar and make them talk to every single woman there.
Based on what I have heard about it, I do support it. The threat of terrorism is ridiculed a lot around here, but the fact is that there are terrorists out there who do want to kill us. You can't not know this if you pay any attention at all to the news. If you want the Government to have a shot at stopping them, they need to have some surveillance/intelligence abilities.
Most of the outrage here strikes me as political posturing. I.E. whenever a Republican is in power, Democrats argue against everything he does with any halfway plausible argument they can think up, but you never hear them saying what exactly you want him to do, and then approving when he does that, complete with all of the unintended consequences that result. And of course, Republicans do the same thing when a Democrat is in power. Just more of the same. A terrorist attack happens, and it's "Why didn't you stop it, you moron!". Then they increase surveillance and such to try to stop the next one, and it's "Don't you dare invade my privacy, you bastard!"
If you want to convince me that you really do oppose any kind of similar surveillance on ideological grounds (not just knee-jerk Bush bashing), what I want to hear you say is that when another terrorist attack happens, or even in regard to 9/11, that the Government can't be expected to stop it. That you prefer that they be limited in their ability to stop it if it means that you get more privacy. That you look at the blood of dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of your countrymen dead and say that it's too bad, but you'd rather have more privacy. These are the consequences of taking such positions in the real world. It's easy to argue for such things on an internet board, but it's much harder to implement them in the real world and deal with the consequences that you didn't think about or take seriously.
Don't mistake the above for a strawman attack - personally, I'd like to see more of that attitude. I'd rather see more people take responsibility for keeping themselves safe then cry to the Government for more protection every time some people get killed. I'd rather see us hitting terrorists and their support structure overseas then trying to crack down on everything and everyone here at home. But I'm sure some of you posting here - you know who you are - have argued for stop the terrorist attacks + don't send the military to attack anyone + don't spy on me. I'd love to live in the perfect fantasy world where that was possible, but it just doesn't exist. There really are people out there who want to hurt you, and if you don't stop them one way or another, they will succeed eventually.
I have to agree - I'm far from being an artist or anything, but I've found GIMP to be reasonably easy to use for the tasks I've used it for. It has its quirks, but so does every other program I've ever used, and you don't really notice it once you get used to them. I don't need all that many features, and I'm not real interested in shelling out $500 or whatever for Photoshop.
I can't figure out why people are complaining about cropping. Click the crop tool, drag a rectangle, the part to be cropped is helpfully shaded and you can drag the crop area around or adjust the numbers in a dialog, and then you click once to crop. How could this be done easier?
Well if they are someday harmed in some provable way, then they can sue for compensation of that harm. Psychological harm? Gimme a break. I'd prefer that the courts deal in things that are provable and quantitative. I think we'd be in a much bigger mess if you could sue for mental distress over something that you can't prove ever happened and has no measurable effect on you.
"If you have to ask your doctor if you have cancer, that in itself serves as proof that you were not harmed any way by cancer (if it does exist)." Just because you don't (yet) know about the cause of harm done to you, doesn't mean that harm has not been done.
Uhh yeah, that has nothing to do with the situation. Doctors diagnose the underlying cause of problems and fix them, if possible. Civil courts compensate people for direct and measurable harms done unto them unjustly by another party.
If you're saying (2) I don't think that being a taxpayer is the grounds for standing. It's that they are likely to be illegally wiretapped under what's publicly known about the eavesdropping program. A preponderance of evidence suggests they are being affected by the program, just as a preponderance of evidence might give standing to town members who are getting cancer at statistically high rates against the sludge-dumping chemical plant nearby.
Really? Sounds like there's no evidence that they are affected by the program in any way. If they had such evidence, they wouldn't have to ask the Government whether they were being wiretapped.
courts aren't supposed to judge the effects of laws?
Nope, they judge whether laws violate the Constitution or not. Judging the effects of laws is the Legislature's job. Have you read the Constitution lately?
Okay, I can see how you could sue for something like that if you suffered some sort of harm, such as property rightfully yours was damaged or seized, your reputation was harmed, or it was used as evidence against you in a court of law. But where's the harm for them to sue over in this case? How can they sue if they can't show that anything happened to them as a result of the alleged act?
Well, I guess I am about to be modded into oblivion by the anti-Bush crowd, but I don't see anything wrong with this ruling.
IANAL, but to my knowledge, in order to sue over an act (tort), you have to prove that you were not just negatively affected by that act, but affected in a specific dollar amount which the court can award you as compensation for the act. What measurable harm have these guys suffered? I don't think that the possibility that one of your conversations might be in a secret NSA database causes you any measurable harm that a court could compensate you for. If they have to ask the NSA whether they have any such records, that in and of itself serves as proof that they were not harmed in any way by the records (if they do exist), since if they were harmed in any way, they would be able to prove that in court.
I don't think it's a good idea either to seek to challenge laws in court on the grounds that you paid the taxes that support the program or somesuch. That is trying to place the courts in a role they were never meant to take - of judging the effect of laws. Passing and repealing laws is the job of our elected representatives in Congress and the President. Provided that the laws do not directly contradict the Constitution, the Courts have no say in what those laws are. (yes, I know that we seem to be steadily accumulating laws that do directly contradict the Constitution, but that's another post) If you don't like the laws, you're going to have to take it up with your elected Representatives, and you're going to have to accept that the American people do not necessarily agree with you on all issues, and they have as much right to their views as you do. If you want to change things, you have to convince your fellow Americans that you are right and they should vote your way.
I agree with just about all of that (and I'd give a mod point if I had one today) except for OBL's expected response to 9/11. I think he really expected us to do next to nothing, or maybe pull troops out of the Middle East.
See, to most Americans, America is the country that won WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, the first country to develop nuclear weapons and the first and so far the only one to use them in anger. We believe that the USA has the most powerful military in the world, and is capable of doing just about anything if the will is there.
But OBL had no reason to see things that way. To him, we were the country that hasn't done anything significant in response to dozens of terrorist attacks against our people and our interests, the country that pulls out of a conflict whenever it gets tough, paper tigers happy to drop bombs from 30k ft, but with no stomach for a hard fight. Given what he's seen the last 10-20 years in the Middle East, he has every reason to think that way.
I believe that, when he managed to pull off the 9/11 attacks, OBL expected us to give up and decrease our influence in the Middle East. I think he was genuinely stunned to see us respond by overthrowing the Taliban effortlessly (compared to the Soviets), and then later overthrowing Saddam with similar ease.
That's not censorship. Censorship is the Government throwing people in prison for saying things that don't harm anyone directly. A corporation not publishing something that it doesn't think its customers are interested in has nothing to do with censorship. People not listening to you is not censorship.
You have the right to express your opinion without being arrested and thrown in prison for it. You do not have the right to shove your opinion down my throat, or anyone else's.