It's people making lots of money in ways that are completely inaccessible to the rest of us. Even the people making the algorithms to make the trades aren't really paid most of the money that's made. I really doubt that there's a significant gain in liquidity by allowing sub-second trades (at least, liquidity in any sense that matters for the average investor), and flash trading is siphoning off money while doing no work. But maybe I happen to think that investing actually means holding onto something for more than a fraction of a second and that the value of a company cannot swing noticeable amounts from one second to the next for no apparent reason.
The REAL problem is that because the left is so outraged that war ain't nice, they scream at the wrong things and then allow the really bad things to be hidden instead.
The real problem is that the right has been trying to paint us as white knights riding in on horses to save the Iraqis from a brutal regime. Yet here we are, imposing our own form of brutality. It's not as bad as the brutality before us, but it's still wrong. If it's a fact of war that bad things happen, then why is the US government so mad about the documents describing what we should already know? Probably because they don't want us to know. It shatters the illusion that we are paragons of truth, justice, democracy, mom, and apple pie that they've been trying their damndest to create.
War is hell, accept that. Civilians are going to be killed especially in wars were the enemy has no qualms about hiding among them.
Undoubtedly. Which is why we get pissed when a president sells us on a weekend war against Saddam where afterward the population will greet us with with open arms and lay our lawn chairs on the beach and bring us mai tais.
THEN you can go and question why so many died, why it needs to be kept hidden. Remove the left fringe and you can then force a real discussion and demand that REAL figures are always shown because then the pentagon wouldn't claim they need to hide them to keep the radical left from using the horrors of war against them. We ask the pentagon to go to war, then we have to accept the results. But we can then also demand to know the full results and ask, if there was no other way.
So a "real discussion" only involves people who don't have a problem with civilian deaths (or at least enough of a problem to do anything about it)?
Defining a broadly scoped law hasn't stopped them from (trying) to enforce the DMCA, which restricts your free speech just as much as an encryption ban would. I doubt that they would completely ban encryption, more like ban any encryption that doesn't have a back door for "law enforcement purposes". Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, it'd probably be upheld.
No. No it isn't obvious. In 2000, 4 Americans were charged with violating the Lacey Act because they imported lobster tails from Honduras in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes, which isn't illegal under US law, but is against a Honduran regulation (and the kicker is that Honduras sent an amicus brief telling the court that the law wasn't even valid anymore). Three of them were sentenced to 8 years in jail. For lobster tails. Seriously. This isn't just, fair, or sane. It is arbitrary punishment. You're right that I wouldn't like a system teachable to high school students in a semester. I'd just like a system where it doesn't take 4 years of undergrad just to understand the language used to write laws (what something says in English and what it says in Lawyerese are two very different things).
Hell, if we want to actually be progressive, we shouldn't look at base income, but on the percentage of disposable income. Here it gets even worse, where the rich are even more ahead. Everyone else has debts to pay, in terms of student loans, mortgage/rent, putting food on the table, paying down debt, car, gas, health etc. People below the national median just plain don't have a lot of disposable income (though this somewhat depends on where you are, if you're married vs single, kids or not, etc, but $44,000 for a house of 3 isn't a lot), so there isn't any way to get more money out of them (and like it or not, we'll have to pay off our debt eventually, so pay moderately higher taxes now, or much higher later).
You forgot the part where the tenth man shipped the jobs that used to be done by the first through fourth man over to the Chinese bar down the street, and brings in workers from the Indian bar to depress the wages of the fifth through sixth. This tenth man happens to have four times the wealth of the rest of the 9 men combined, due to the aforementioned screwing over of most of the rest of the group.
He used to pay an even higher percentage but since the rules tend to be made by him, he changed it so that he wouldn't have to pay as high a percentage and managed to convince everyone else that it was ok because now he could trickle down his afterwash into the other men's mouths and they would get more alcohol because of that. And now when people are realizing that they've been screwed over by this man and want him to do the decent thing and give back to the group after screwing them all over, he bluffs that he's going to take his money and go... to where? The bars that are more expensive? Or the bars that serve nothing but non-alcoholic beer? Oh, wait, he opens a tab in the Cayman Islands Bar, though he never actually goes there, and manages to trick the bartender in Ameribar to still give him beer, but to make the other 9 guys pay for it.
The other guys rightfully get pissed, then the beat the shit out of the first guy for being a trust fund baby who's never worked a day in his life (ok, really more like the top 1-10% of the first guy, but the analogy is kinda stupid, so fuck it). The tenth guy, if he's not retarded, learns a lesson and stops being such a prat and treats everyone else with some basic respect. Then he doesn't have to pick up as high a bar tab because the other 9 guys can actually make a decent living and buy some of their own beer.
Of course, the bar analogy is completely retarded because it ignores that poor people do pay taxes (and as a percentage, secretaries pay more of their income to the government than CEOs do). You don't get to complain about having to pay a higher amount of taxes than others when you are making 400 times the average worker and still try to hide your income. Besides, rich people get a lot more use out of government services (corporations using roads to transport goods, having the FAA there for safety when they fly, the internet creating an entire new market that people got rich off of, national defense protecting industry, court systems that the rich use to beat people over the head with, etc), than poor people, so really they want something for nothing. Guess what, there's no free lunch.
Households making over $250,000 are 1.5% of the population. Getting 19% of the total is a huge amount (and a lot of that is skewed towards people who are making well above $250,000). Your estimate is way off (like many people's estimation of how much income/wealth is owned by each quintile). Increasing taxes on income over $250,000 doesn't even really hurt even the upper middle class (outside of maybe New York, LA, San Francisco and other areas with extreme costs of living).
We could cut payroll taxes on the poor (or give the equivalent in refundable income tax credits) and remove the ~$100,000 cutoff point where payroll taxes stop being paid. That could cut the poor's taxes from the effective rate of 15.4% (yes, poor people do in fact pay taxes). Don't just look at the IRS income taxes. They hide a lot. And sure, even with that the vast majority of taxes are still paid by a small number of people, but so what? 10% of the country owns 80% of the wealth while the bottom 90% has 73% of the debt. You can't get blood from a stone, so I fail to see why we should aim to shift more tax burden onto less well off folks.
If 24 hour news networks regularly broadcasted in depth, unbiased looks at the issues today, they might actually be a wonderful source of information to the public. I know that during the health care debate, it would've been extremely helpful to send reporters out into the field to interview everyone from patients to nurses to doctors to hospital administration to insurance company CEOs to the insurance company grunts to the drug company CEOs to researchers at those companies who actually develop new drugs to the government bureaucrats who approve or deny them, etc, etc. Take all that information, do research, compile statistics, and maybe even end with a real honest discussion between the various groups. That would be the sort of actual reporting that would help us. Instead we get celebrity gossip and the latest politician soundbites with no fact checking or calling them out on their hypocrisy. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert do more fact checking than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News put together, and that's our problem.
Ahhh, the liberal core belief - if one is successful or wealthy they got there by a) heredity (ie being created rich)
Many are. Bill Gates went from being the son of a lawyer and high level businesswoman to being a very wealthy man. Rags to riches he was not, more like riches to extreme riches.
b) cheating c) luck.
It happens. Many businesses have been great on paper, yet failed. Others have been shitty on paper and succeeded. There was no real reason for Facebook to suddenly take off the way it did, at least not over any other idea.
Therefore it follows that it is perfectly fine to take away their wealth (tax the rich into the stone age)
Everyone gets taxed. Sack up. Even with 50% income tax on all income over $250,000, people making millions would still be insanely wealthy, so what's there to complain about? Yes, sure, I'll let you keep your own money, as soon as you buy your own roads, police, fire departments, and military (at a minimum).
and their rights (you can't broadcast your own views on your own radio station) in the name of "fairness".
There's only so many radio stations that can broadcast in a certain area. If a resource is limited (radio, broadcast TV), allowing a monopoly on that resource would be extremely detrimental to the public at large, especially since it's the government granting you a monopoly in the first place (otherwise you'd have to fight any idiot with a transmitter and things probably wouldn't work). If a resource is unlimited (shouting on a sidewalk, pamphleting on streets, newspapers, the internet, cable TV), then by all means, say all and only what you think and I'll support you.
Of course you can. You can buy one.;-)
That's a joke so funny I forgot to laugh. Then I realized there are people that think this. Then I got sad.
What a pathetic argument. Nice slogan though. You know very well that "free speech" refers to being able to say what you believe without the government throwing you in jail for saying it. It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with guaranteeing that everyone gets the same megaphone or audience.
I worry when the government starts handing out megaphones to only a handful of people.
To contort the first amendment in that way is a classic liberal gambit.
Hey, at least we can get conservatives to admit that liberals have been around for awhile (and that it wasn't just something out of the 1960s).
This country is founded on equal OPPORTUNITY, not equal OUTCOMES.
Founded on equal opportunity for white land owning males. Everyone else tended to get the raw deal for awhile. Also, people born to crack whores do not have the same opportunity as people born to millionaires. That is a fact, and if you can't see why it's a fact you have issues. And no one is saying that there should be equal outcomes for everything, just that a handful of people shouldn't be able to bribe (oh, sorry, "contribute to the campaign of") our elected officials.
Some people are smarter than others. Some work harder. Yes, some are luckier and some are "born on third base". Get over it. Stop trying to use the Constitution to make everything "FAIR" (a liberal's favorite 4 letter word that begins with "F"). It won't work. It can't work. And it totally screws up the country.
I want a country where people don't have to fear for the lives of themselves and their loved ones just because they don't have enough money. I want a country where elected officials don't feel beholden to a tiny fraction of moneyed interests instead of the bulk of their constituency. I want a country where the rich don't constantly bitch about how "hard it is to be rich and have to pay all these taxes" (yes, fine, they have the right to do so, but I at least wish more people would call them on their bullshit). Yes, I'd like for things to be "fair" in some sense, mostly because I don't want a society where people with money end up being "more equal" than the rest of us.
d = vt + (1/2)at^2
Assume no initial velocity and rearrange.
t = sqrt(2d/a)
t = sqrt(2*100,000,000 km/9.78 (m/s^2))
t = 1.66 days
But wait, there's a small problem...
v = at
v = (9.78 m/s^2)*1.66 days
v = 1,400,000 m/s
Splat. Also that's 20 times the speed of the fastest man made object. More fun with physics:
Let's assume that we can somehow make this as something that's approximately the mass of the space shuttle orbiter (extremely unlikely, even just based off fuel), so 109,000 kg.
Ek = (1/2)mv^2
Ek = (1/2)109,000 kg * (1,400,000 m/s)^2
Ek = 1.07 × 10^17 joules
Maybe doable if you've got half a kilogram of antimatter laying around.
Of course, if you don't want to leave a crater on the surface of Mars, this gets worse, since you need to start slowing down halfway there. Doable in 2.3 days (again, needing half a kilo of antimatter). Still, the power requirements on this are in the range of a fifth of the average US power consumption (and we're assuming a very small shuttle), so getting a 1g acceleration all the way to Mars would require a couple of generations worth of new power sources.
Wait until computers come preloaded from $Big_computer_manufacturer with your name in the evercookie and online advertisers link into databases to find out your income, address, if you're married, if you have kids, if you're republican or democrat, if you've got a pet, if you have a hunting/fishing/gun license, etc. They'll still send you ads for things you don't give a shit about, but if you don't start buying they'll slowly get creepier and creepier, and then the computer will tell you that it could replace you with a poorly paid actor if you don't cooperate. Before you know it, terminators are roaming the world looking for John Connor. Ok, the first part will still probably happen, then enough people will complain that some congresscritter comes up with a hamfisted solution that is completely unworkable, unenforceable, and without teeth if it were enforceable. But people will feel like something good happened.
But imagine how awesome it'd be if an asteroid were coming down to have a huge rock concert right where it's going to hit. I can see the tag line now: Thrash till the crash!
A lot of it still is perfectly drinkable, if you don't mind emptying the contents of your bowels at mach 3 for the next few days. And the idea that people a few centuries ago were drinking from streams all the time and didn't have any problems is a myth. Water borne diseases were rampant. A lot of people (even children) drank small beer (non-alcoholic beer), since it was relatively safe and still hydrated you.
Michael Dell's net worth is 14 billion dollars. Fining him 4 million dollars isn't even a slap on the wrist, it's a joke. Fine him a few billion dollars and he might get a message.
And an even longer list of questions that show the absurdity of the court's reasoning:
Let's say you had a gate, but left it open, do you lose your privacy? How high does a fence have to be until it constitutes an "expectation of privacy"? Knee high? Waist high? Head high? More? What if local building codes don't allow a fence that high (or any fence at all)? Does it matter if the fence is solid brick or iron bars (you can see through bars, so no privacy for you!)? What if your car is in your garage, but the garage door is open? Does it matter if the garage is separated from the house? What about attaching trackers to RVs? Does it matter where the RV is parked (trailer park/campsite/parking lot)? What if your car shares a parking area with a neighbor? What about if it shares it with an apartment building (one with a fence around the lot and access restricted to residents)?
Really, this should be very simple. Get a warrant and you can attach whatever to whereever. No warrant, and you can't. Seriously, are warrants such a huge hassle to real investigations that they need to skip them? If they've got a good reason to spend the time to go through the logs for the GPS, then they should be able to articulate that reason to a judge before intruding into people's lives.
They probably want to have engineers tear it apart to see what kind of stresses it took and how well it holds up (both to space and to entering the atmosphere). Think of it as a prototype that they'll try to work the kinks out of.
Though that's still not very convenient if you want to log in from a public box (assuming you're not paranoid enough to think that every public box might have a key logger ready to steal your personal data).
People who want sex but don't want to infect or get infected with HIV.
there is a thing called abstinence in the world
You don't have to remind those of us on Slashdot that there's such a thing as abstinence. That said, you're living in a fantasy world if you think that telling people "just don't have sex!" will actually stop them from having sex any more than telling people "just make a sandwich!" will stop world hunger.
Do kitchen knives cause stabbings? Do cars cause car accidents? Do computers cause bugs?
Do people tell you you're going to hell if you don't use their particular brand of knife, car, or computer, and that if you modify them in any way to suit your needs that you will still spend eternity in a place of pure torture?
If you read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you will find that the Church does not approve of war at all except for purely defensive purposes.
That would've been relevant back in the Middle Ages when they were invading Muslim countries and slaughtering the inhabitants (regardless of religion), or taking land in Italy and France. It's a lot easier to be peaceful when you're the size of a few city blocks and you don't have the means to actually wage war.
Just because some people in history use their twisted view of one religion or another for violence automatically means that all religion is bad because of extremists?
Irrational beliefs cause someone to behave irrationally. I cannot support organized religions that tell their believers that they need to think things are true that they have no evidence for.
Mao Zedong, Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Vietnam War, Korean War, etc. were all instances where religion was not a driving force for war (except for killing people who participated in religion, which does not count). Atheists as well as members of every religion ever (virtually) have used religious beliefs for violence, but what matters are the underlying principles, not what people do because of them!
Yes. Other people have done shitty things for shitty reasons. No one denies that. Mao, Hitler, and Stalin are dead. The Vietnam War is over. The Korean War has been essentially over for 50 years. The Catholic Church is still around, and still doing bad things.
Catholicism has a very pacifist stance, as does almost every denomination of Christianity.
I've yet to see the vast majority of Christians adopt a pacifist stance. It would be nice if they did.
Just because some people mis-use the name of God for war does not logically mean, as I've said, that all religion is evil.
The pope said video games lead to "indifference to real life", I'm just saying that he's in no position to cast stones.
You know, it's funny to hear the pope talk about not being able to distinguish fiction from reality (setting aside that that's the whole premise of religion), but when I hear the pope call anyone out on "indifference towards real life", it makes my blood boil. We're talking about an organization that covered up molestation of kids, that tells Africans that condoms are bad despite the rampant AIDS epidemic, the sheer opulence of the Vatican contrasted with the poverty they claim to serve. And this is just from current events. Do I really need to go back and dig through the annals of history to dig up all the horrifying things that the Catholic church has done? I bet I can find exponentially more people who've used religion as an excuse to kill, enslave, torture, kill some more, and guilt others into killing too.
Unless all the profits were put into a separate company that just happens to have the exact same leadership. Then you'll get nothing, because gosh, there's no assets here. Accountants are the silent partner in crime to lawyers. A lawyer defends company assets by twisting words, an accountant defends company assets by twisting numbers.
If we encouraged more 5th graders to get the skill set of an astronaut we might be better off. You'll probably never meet an astronaut who thinks that the world is 6000 years old, or that homeopathy is effective treatment for anything, or that stars in the Zodiac control their entire life.
Of course the bigger worry in the chemistry classes is kids mixing chemicals willy nilly. Of course, this is somewhat justified (you probably don't want to give kids full access to the chemical closet), but from the chemistry I remember in high school all the labs were done from a set of scripted instructions. No real chance to say "well I wonder what would happen if...". Hell, this is all at the high school level, by which point education has beaten the curiosity out of most kids. I can barely remember doing anything interesting in elementary school. I think the most we got was putting together a model rocket kit (kinda, I don't remember much other than it involving more decorating your rocket than building it). Where's the chemistry sets? Where's the egg drops? Hell, use Hot Wheels cars to teach some physics.
Or even easier take a percentage of revenue (and really dig into the books too, lest Hollywood accounting show that Disney has somehow not made any money this year, and really, having to have their books looked at will be enough to deter them).
Slashdot Mirror
It's people making lots of money in ways that are completely inaccessible to the rest of us. Even the people making the algorithms to make the trades aren't really paid most of the money that's made. I really doubt that there's a significant gain in liquidity by allowing sub-second trades (at least, liquidity in any sense that matters for the average investor), and flash trading is siphoning off money while doing no work. But maybe I happen to think that investing actually means holding onto something for more than a fraction of a second and that the value of a company cannot swing noticeable amounts from one second to the next for no apparent reason.
The REAL problem is that because the left is so outraged that war ain't nice, they scream at the wrong things and then allow the really bad things to be hidden instead.
The real problem is that the right has been trying to paint us as white knights riding in on horses to save the Iraqis from a brutal regime. Yet here we are, imposing our own form of brutality. It's not as bad as the brutality before us, but it's still wrong. If it's a fact of war that bad things happen, then why is the US government so mad about the documents describing what we should already know? Probably because they don't want us to know. It shatters the illusion that we are paragons of truth, justice, democracy, mom, and apple pie that they've been trying their damndest to create.
War is hell, accept that. Civilians are going to be killed especially in wars were the enemy has no qualms about hiding among them.
Undoubtedly. Which is why we get pissed when a president sells us on a weekend war against Saddam where afterward the population will greet us with with open arms and lay our lawn chairs on the beach and bring us mai tais.
THEN you can go and question why so many died, why it needs to be kept hidden. Remove the left fringe and you can then force a real discussion and demand that REAL figures are always shown because then the pentagon wouldn't claim they need to hide them to keep the radical left from using the horrors of war against them. We ask the pentagon to go to war, then we have to accept the results. But we can then also demand to know the full results and ask, if there was no other way.
So a "real discussion" only involves people who don't have a problem with civilian deaths (or at least enough of a problem to do anything about it)?
Defining a broadly scoped law hasn't stopped them from (trying) to enforce the DMCA, which restricts your free speech just as much as an encryption ban would. I doubt that they would completely ban encryption, more like ban any encryption that doesn't have a back door for "law enforcement purposes". Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, it'd probably be upheld.
No. No it isn't obvious. In 2000, 4 Americans were charged with violating the Lacey Act because they imported lobster tails from Honduras in plastic bags instead of cardboard boxes, which isn't illegal under US law, but is against a Honduran regulation (and the kicker is that Honduras sent an amicus brief telling the court that the law wasn't even valid anymore). Three of them were sentenced to 8 years in jail. For lobster tails. Seriously. This isn't just, fair, or sane. It is arbitrary punishment. You're right that I wouldn't like a system teachable to high school students in a semester. I'd just like a system where it doesn't take 4 years of undergrad just to understand the language used to write laws (what something says in English and what it says in Lawyerese are two very different things).
Hell, if we want to actually be progressive, we shouldn't look at base income, but on the percentage of disposable income. Here it gets even worse, where the rich are even more ahead. Everyone else has debts to pay, in terms of student loans, mortgage/rent, putting food on the table, paying down debt, car, gas, health etc. People below the national median just plain don't have a lot of disposable income (though this somewhat depends on where you are, if you're married vs single, kids or not, etc, but $44,000 for a house of 3 isn't a lot), so there isn't any way to get more money out of them (and like it or not, we'll have to pay off our debt eventually, so pay moderately higher taxes now, or much higher later).
You forgot the part where the tenth man shipped the jobs that used to be done by the first through fourth man over to the Chinese bar down the street, and brings in workers from the Indian bar to depress the wages of the fifth through sixth. This tenth man happens to have four times the wealth of the rest of the 9 men combined, due to the aforementioned screwing over of most of the rest of the group.
He used to pay an even higher percentage but since the rules tend to be made by him, he changed it so that he wouldn't have to pay as high a percentage and managed to convince everyone else that it was ok because now he could trickle down his afterwash into the other men's mouths and they would get more alcohol because of that. And now when people are realizing that they've been screwed over by this man and want him to do the decent thing and give back to the group after screwing them all over, he bluffs that he's going to take his money and go... to where? The bars that are more expensive? Or the bars that serve nothing but non-alcoholic beer? Oh, wait, he opens a tab in the Cayman Islands Bar, though he never actually goes there, and manages to trick the bartender in Ameribar to still give him beer, but to make the other 9 guys pay for it.
The other guys rightfully get pissed, then the beat the shit out of the first guy for being a trust fund baby who's never worked a day in his life (ok, really more like the top 1-10% of the first guy, but the analogy is kinda stupid, so fuck it). The tenth guy, if he's not retarded, learns a lesson and stops being such a prat and treats everyone else with some basic respect. Then he doesn't have to pick up as high a bar tab because the other 9 guys can actually make a decent living and buy some of their own beer.
Of course, the bar analogy is completely retarded because it ignores that poor people do pay taxes (and as a percentage, secretaries pay more of their income to the government than CEOs do). You don't get to complain about having to pay a higher amount of taxes than others when you are making 400 times the average worker and still try to hide your income. Besides, rich people get a lot more use out of government services (corporations using roads to transport goods, having the FAA there for safety when they fly, the internet creating an entire new market that people got rich off of, national defense protecting industry, court systems that the rich use to beat people over the head with, etc), than poor people, so really they want something for nothing. Guess what, there's no free lunch.
Households making over $250,000 are 1.5% of the population. Getting 19% of the total is a huge amount (and a lot of that is skewed towards people who are making well above $250,000). Your estimate is way off (like many people's estimation of how much income/wealth is owned by each quintile). Increasing taxes on income over $250,000 doesn't even really hurt even the upper middle class (outside of maybe New York, LA, San Francisco and other areas with extreme costs of living).
We could cut payroll taxes on the poor (or give the equivalent in refundable income tax credits) and remove the ~$100,000 cutoff point where payroll taxes stop being paid. That could cut the poor's taxes from the effective rate of 15.4% (yes, poor people do in fact pay taxes). Don't just look at the IRS income taxes. They hide a lot. And sure, even with that the vast majority of taxes are still paid by a small number of people, but so what? 10% of the country owns 80% of the wealth while the bottom 90% has 73% of the debt. You can't get blood from a stone, so I fail to see why we should aim to shift more tax burden onto less well off folks.
If 24 hour news networks regularly broadcasted in depth, unbiased looks at the issues today, they might actually be a wonderful source of information to the public. I know that during the health care debate, it would've been extremely helpful to send reporters out into the field to interview everyone from patients to nurses to doctors to hospital administration to insurance company CEOs to the insurance company grunts to the drug company CEOs to researchers at those companies who actually develop new drugs to the government bureaucrats who approve or deny them, etc, etc. Take all that information, do research, compile statistics, and maybe even end with a real honest discussion between the various groups. That would be the sort of actual reporting that would help us. Instead we get celebrity gossip and the latest politician soundbites with no fact checking or calling them out on their hypocrisy. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert do more fact checking than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News put together, and that's our problem.
Ahhh, the liberal core belief - if one is successful or wealthy they got there by a) heredity (ie being created rich)
Many are. Bill Gates went from being the son of a lawyer and high level businesswoman to being a very wealthy man. Rags to riches he was not, more like riches to extreme riches.
b) cheating c) luck.
It happens. Many businesses have been great on paper, yet failed. Others have been shitty on paper and succeeded. There was no real reason for Facebook to suddenly take off the way it did, at least not over any other idea.
Therefore it follows that it is perfectly fine to take away their wealth (tax the rich into the stone age)
Everyone gets taxed. Sack up. Even with 50% income tax on all income over $250,000, people making millions would still be insanely wealthy, so what's there to complain about? Yes, sure, I'll let you keep your own money, as soon as you buy your own roads, police, fire departments, and military (at a minimum).
and their rights (you can't broadcast your own views on your own radio station) in the name of "fairness".
There's only so many radio stations that can broadcast in a certain area. If a resource is limited (radio, broadcast TV), allowing a monopoly on that resource would be extremely detrimental to the public at large, especially since it's the government granting you a monopoly in the first place (otherwise you'd have to fight any idiot with a transmitter and things probably wouldn't work). If a resource is unlimited (shouting on a sidewalk, pamphleting on streets, newspapers, the internet, cable TV), then by all means, say all and only what you think and I'll support you.
Of course you can. You can buy one. ;-)
That's a joke so funny I forgot to laugh. Then I realized there are people that think this. Then I got sad.
What a pathetic argument. Nice slogan though. You know very well that "free speech" refers to being able to say what you believe without the government throwing you in jail for saying it. It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with guaranteeing that everyone gets the same megaphone or audience.
I worry when the government starts handing out megaphones to only a handful of people.
To contort the first amendment in that way is a classic liberal gambit.
Hey, at least we can get conservatives to admit that liberals have been around for awhile (and that it wasn't just something out of the 1960s).
This country is founded on equal OPPORTUNITY, not equal OUTCOMES.
Founded on equal opportunity for white land owning males. Everyone else tended to get the raw deal for awhile. Also, people born to crack whores do not have the same opportunity as people born to millionaires. That is a fact, and if you can't see why it's a fact you have issues. And no one is saying that there should be equal outcomes for everything, just that a handful of people shouldn't be able to bribe (oh, sorry, "contribute to the campaign of") our elected officials.
Some people are smarter than others. Some work harder. Yes, some are luckier and some are "born on third base". Get over it. Stop trying to use the Constitution to make everything "FAIR" (a liberal's favorite 4 letter word that begins with "F"). It won't work. It can't work. And it totally screws up the country.
I want a country where people don't have to fear for the lives of themselves and their loved ones just because they don't have enough money. I want a country where elected officials don't feel beholden to a tiny fraction of moneyed interests instead of the bulk of their constituency. I want a country where the rich don't constantly bitch about how "hard it is to be rich and have to pay all these taxes" (yes, fine, they have the right to do so, but I at least wish more people would call them on their bullshit). Yes, I'd like for things to be "fair" in some sense, mostly because I don't want a society where people with money end up being "more equal" than the rest of us.
d = vt + (1/2)at^2
Assume no initial velocity and rearrange.
t = sqrt(2d/a)
t = sqrt(2*100,000,000 km/9.78 (m/s^2))
t = 1.66 days
But wait, there's a small problem...
v = at
v = (9.78 m/s^2)*1.66 days
v = 1,400,000 m/s
Splat. Also that's 20 times the speed of the fastest man made object. More fun with physics:
Let's assume that we can somehow make this as something that's approximately the mass of the space shuttle orbiter (extremely unlikely, even just based off fuel), so 109,000 kg.
Ek = (1/2)mv^2
Ek = (1/2)109,000 kg * (1,400,000 m/s)^2
Ek = 1.07 × 10^17 joules
Maybe doable if you've got half a kilogram of antimatter laying around.
Of course, if you don't want to leave a crater on the surface of Mars, this gets worse, since you need to start slowing down halfway there. Doable in 2.3 days (again, needing half a kilo of antimatter). Still, the power requirements on this are in the range of a fifth of the average US power consumption (and we're assuming a very small shuttle), so getting a 1g acceleration all the way to Mars would require a couple of generations worth of new power sources.
Wait until computers come preloaded from $Big_computer_manufacturer with your name in the evercookie and online advertisers link into databases to find out your income, address, if you're married, if you have kids, if you're republican or democrat, if you've got a pet, if you have a hunting/fishing/gun license, etc. They'll still send you ads for things you don't give a shit about, but if you don't start buying they'll slowly get creepier and creepier, and then the computer will tell you that it could replace you with a poorly paid actor if you don't cooperate. Before you know it, terminators are roaming the world looking for John Connor. Ok, the first part will still probably happen, then enough people will complain that some congresscritter comes up with a hamfisted solution that is completely unworkable, unenforceable, and without teeth if it were enforceable. But people will feel like something good happened.
But imagine how awesome it'd be if an asteroid were coming down to have a huge rock concert right where it's going to hit. I can see the tag line now: Thrash till the crash!
The only STD that the pill prevents is pregnancy.
A lot of it still is perfectly drinkable, if you don't mind emptying the contents of your bowels at mach 3 for the next few days. And the idea that people a few centuries ago were drinking from streams all the time and didn't have any problems is a myth. Water borne diseases were rampant. A lot of people (even children) drank small beer (non-alcoholic beer), since it was relatively safe and still hydrated you.
Michael Dell's net worth is 14 billion dollars. Fining him 4 million dollars isn't even a slap on the wrist, it's a joke. Fine him a few billion dollars and he might get a message.
And an even longer list of questions that show the absurdity of the court's reasoning:
Let's say you had a gate, but left it open, do you lose your privacy? How high does a fence have to be until it constitutes an "expectation of privacy"? Knee high? Waist high? Head high? More? What if local building codes don't allow a fence that high (or any fence at all)? Does it matter if the fence is solid brick or iron bars (you can see through bars, so no privacy for you!)? What if your car is in your garage, but the garage door is open? Does it matter if the garage is separated from the house? What about attaching trackers to RVs? Does it matter where the RV is parked (trailer park/campsite/parking lot)? What if your car shares a parking area with a neighbor? What about if it shares it with an apartment building (one with a fence around the lot and access restricted to residents)?
Really, this should be very simple. Get a warrant and you can attach whatever to whereever. No warrant, and you can't. Seriously, are warrants such a huge hassle to real investigations that they need to skip them? If they've got a good reason to spend the time to go through the logs for the GPS, then they should be able to articulate that reason to a judge before intruding into people's lives.
They probably want to have engineers tear it apart to see what kind of stresses it took and how well it holds up (both to space and to entering the atmosphere). Think of it as a prototype that they'll try to work the kinks out of.
Though that's still not very convenient if you want to log in from a public box (assuming you're not paranoid enough to think that every public box might have a key logger ready to steal your personal data).
Exactly what would condoms solve?
People who want sex but don't want to infect or get infected with HIV.
there is a thing called abstinence in the world
You don't have to remind those of us on Slashdot that there's such a thing as abstinence. That said, you're living in a fantasy world if you think that telling people "just don't have sex!" will actually stop them from having sex any more than telling people "just make a sandwich!" will stop world hunger.
Do kitchen knives cause stabbings? Do cars cause car accidents? Do computers cause bugs?
Do people tell you you're going to hell if you don't use their particular brand of knife, car, or computer, and that if you modify them in any way to suit your needs that you will still spend eternity in a place of pure torture?
If you read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you will find that the Church does not approve of war at all except for purely defensive purposes.
That would've been relevant back in the Middle Ages when they were invading Muslim countries and slaughtering the inhabitants (regardless of religion), or taking land in Italy and France. It's a lot easier to be peaceful when you're the size of a few city blocks and you don't have the means to actually wage war.
Just because some people in history use their twisted view of one religion or another for violence automatically means that all religion is bad because of extremists?
Irrational beliefs cause someone to behave irrationally. I cannot support organized religions that tell their believers that they need to think things are true that they have no evidence for.
Mao Zedong, Hitler, Joseph Stalin, the Vietnam War, Korean War, etc. were all instances where religion was not a driving force for war (except for killing people who participated in religion, which does not count). Atheists as well as members of every religion ever (virtually) have used religious beliefs for violence, but what matters are the underlying principles, not what people do because of them!
Yes. Other people have done shitty things for shitty reasons. No one denies that. Mao, Hitler, and Stalin are dead. The Vietnam War is over. The Korean War has been essentially over for 50 years. The Catholic Church is still around, and still doing bad things.
Catholicism has a very pacifist stance, as does almost every denomination of Christianity.
I've yet to see the vast majority of Christians adopt a pacifist stance. It would be nice if they did.
Just because some people mis-use the name of God for war does not logically mean, as I've said, that all religion is evil.
The pope said video games lead to "indifference to real life", I'm just saying that he's in no position to cast stones.
You know, it's funny to hear the pope talk about not being able to distinguish fiction from reality (setting aside that that's the whole premise of religion), but when I hear the pope call anyone out on "indifference towards real life", it makes my blood boil. We're talking about an organization that covered up molestation of kids, that tells Africans that condoms are bad despite the rampant AIDS epidemic, the sheer opulence of the Vatican contrasted with the poverty they claim to serve. And this is just from current events. Do I really need to go back and dig through the annals of history to dig up all the horrifying things that the Catholic church has done? I bet I can find exponentially more people who've used religion as an excuse to kill, enslave, torture, kill some more, and guilt others into killing too.
Unless all the profits were put into a separate company that just happens to have the exact same leadership. Then you'll get nothing, because gosh, there's no assets here. Accountants are the silent partner in crime to lawyers. A lawyer defends company assets by twisting words, an accountant defends company assets by twisting numbers.
If we encouraged more 5th graders to get the skill set of an astronaut we might be better off. You'll probably never meet an astronaut who thinks that the world is 6000 years old, or that homeopathy is effective treatment for anything, or that stars in the Zodiac control their entire life.
Of course the bigger worry in the chemistry classes is kids mixing chemicals willy nilly. Of course, this is somewhat justified (you probably don't want to give kids full access to the chemical closet), but from the chemistry I remember in high school all the labs were done from a set of scripted instructions. No real chance to say "well I wonder what would happen if...". Hell, this is all at the high school level, by which point education has beaten the curiosity out of most kids. I can barely remember doing anything interesting in elementary school. I think the most we got was putting together a model rocket kit (kinda, I don't remember much other than it involving more decorating your rocket than building it). Where's the chemistry sets? Where's the egg drops? Hell, use Hot Wheels cars to teach some physics.
Or even easier take a percentage of revenue (and really dig into the books too, lest Hollywood accounting show that Disney has somehow not made any money this year, and really, having to have their books looked at will be enough to deter them).