In 2012, it insisted that the very idea of Net neutrality squished its First and Fifth Amendment right,"
Someone should tell Verizon that the Bill of Rights isn't to be taken seriously either since you know they were written just before the time of steam locomotives and the telegraph!
Obamacare REQUIRED insurance policies to cover conditions that were not previously required (ex: maternity care for a 60 year old woman).
Can you explain how this actually makes insurance cost more? Do lots of 60 year olds file insurance claims for maternity related bills?
It seems like an silly excuse for insurance to cost more, and I think a lot of people are buying it since I've heard this repeated often.
Insurance costs are way out of hand. I can't afford to even use my coverage because I can't even begin to afford the deductible plus co-insurance BS in the first place. If I had something happen to me that forced me to use my full deductible I would be force to file for bankruptcy.
I am not being fasicious when I say that I share this sentiment exactly. Though, as an American, my concern is mostly with US busy bodies. Bloated government deserves a hard reset. Politicians should remember from where their so called power derives - from our collective decision each day to NOT behead them all and start over. (Otherwise known as conset of the governed). It seems these days that the busy bodies go for the frog in slowly boiling water approach, however, taking little bits at a time. When the frog finally explodes it will sure be messy.
AC was me, written on a stupid virtual keyboard of course.
It doea take longer to type and corrections are far more frequently required.
I am also on tmoblie (love them), and I really miss my motorola droid 2 physical keyboard. Though now I use a samsung galaxy note 3 for the very reason that it has so much screen real estate that rhe keyboard (usually) doesn't get in the way.
Well, according to Wikipedia there are 289 cities in the United States alone with a population of 100,000 or more. Almost every one of these cities is likely to have multiple knowledge-cache locations serving these populations such as schools, libraries, and museums. Not to mention the infrastructure supporting these areas. Its also worth noting that the U.S. is 3.794 million sq miles in land area (wikipedia).
Can you seriously imagine a disaster that would destroy all of these locations (and thus all of their knoweledge and infrastructure) entirely and near simultaneously that would also leave any significant number of human survivors such that they'd have a shot at rebuilding society anyway?
Keep in mind that every other country would have to suffer a simar fate near simultaneously in order for society as a whole to be completely doomed (since, to me anyway, a true apocalypse situation transcends national boundaries; ie a war is not an appocalypse unless the whole earth is going down with it, but I digress). Not to mention we are completely ignoring all of the libraries and such in the towns smaller than 100k in population.
So either there will be at least a great deal of knoweledge left for survivors to work with, or there won't be any survivors at all and the point is moot.
Bitcoin sucks. See stories of millions of stolen bitcoins posted here on Slashdot only weeks ago. Not that its a bad idea outright, just that bitcoin is far from a perfect implementation of a crypo currencey, and fan boys like you keep touting it like the end all be all solution. It is NOT imunne to exploitation and theft.
THIS is what I want to happen sooner rather than later. The whole point of the Internet is to be decentralized, I never got why that didn't extend to the DNS system too. Fuck ICANN
We should have single payer health coverage. We all deserve to share the benifits of modern medicine just as we all share the benifits of the safety of modern road construction.
We are supposed to be a fucking society after all. Why, then, is anything labeled socialist automatically dismissed or attacked outright?
This. Yes, way too much money was definitely thrown at this project.
People can whine all about about how complex the law is and that various different databases that needed to be connected were so different but I call bullshit. Its a website, not a figher jet. And certainly shouldn't be 10 times as expensive as a jet that needs to work at the speed of sound.. Seriously, just the costs of building (never mind the initial development) the F/A Hornet should dwarf a website project, not the other way around.
Its this kind of thing that makes me sick about the current state of the US.
These are my feelings exactly on this, and I couldn't have said it better myself.
That said, I'd like to add a little:
Video game publishers/developers/etc are running BUSINESSES, and no business has a right to profit, only the right to try to make a profit based on the choices THEY make as businesses.
The possibility of failure comes with the territory, and is something anybody running a business must accept as a result of THEIR choices as a business, not the choices of others.
If customers aren't buying a business's product/service (and aren't stealing it either, as that's another discussion altogether), it is up to the business to adapt their strategy to bring in new or more customers. If they can't adapt, then another company eventually will, and the original company may lose their business.
In this case potential customers are choosing used games over new ones. It is up to publishers to adapt to a changing market (which of course they are), and to reduce the Hollywood-like budgets and waste going into modern games.
This all has nothing to do with used game sales, and all about what people are willing to spend on a new (to them) game. The markets for used goods of all kinds will always exist (ebay and craiglist are quite popular), and thet aren't going anywhere.
Seriously: It took ~ $5 million to produce GTA IV. I felt at least a little ripped off after paying $50 for a game that barely runs on my PC with the settings turned down, despite it exceeding the RECOMMENDED specs for the game. Not to mention the lackluster storyline. This sort of thing loses the trust of customers. Why would I buy a new game if it will almost certainly be buggy on release? I could just as easily wait until well after release and then get a game with the bugs ironed out for a lower price to boot. As far as the game play, story and other in-game content is concerned, if I had bought a used game, I could have relied on existing peer review, rather than bought-and-paid-for reviews that are put out for upcoming and new titles.
There are many areas that the used games market is favorable over the new games market. And it is up to the publishers to adapt to this, and give their (potential) customers reasons to trust them with their money by putting out quality products that people WANT to pay for to get new, not to attack a legitimate competing market.
No one saw man created out of dirt and breathed to life by God, but by the same token, no one saw a single-celled organism spring to life in the primordial soup and continue re-writing itself until it became a human.
Neither group actually "knows" how these things came to be, they've just adopted a view of it that they are comfortable with. What I don't understand is how the evolutionists, who are supposed to be the more objective and open minded of the two groups, can be so "holier than thou" as to suggest that the creationists' theory doesn't even deserve a place.
I agree with you. We should give equal consideration to all theories, since no one has any actual evidence of what's true anyway. I think Florida should also give consideration to the theory that I believe is actual fact: Pastafarianism. I mean, nobody actually saw His Noodly Appendage create the entire universe (though I find its pretty obviously true).
You have the ability to say "No" (or to silently resists if you happen to be mute) to anyone who tries to deny you those rights that you claim are "created in the mind of man". The Constitution and the Bill of Rights simply tell the government where they do and don't have authority over its citizens, who in turn agree to submit themselves to that authority.
Your ability to resist imposed authority is as natural as the law of gravity, therefore the only time your rights don't naturally exist, is when you don't defend them.
You are right: the remedy for breaking the law is jail. In fact, you can be jailed for much less than murder. Now, warrantless wiretapping is illegal, and therefore those involved must be tried and jailed. I don't see how this can be dismissed. Our public servants need to be held accountable to those whom they represent.
that some of the reasoning for using electronic voting in the first place was to prevent all those problems people where having with punch cards.
I don't agree with that logic, but if that is the argument, doesn't this demonstrate that these machines are at least no better - if not worse off than paper ballots/punch cards?
I just don't get why some people still think that these machines are an improvement in any way.
I have one of these, of course the 512MB version is now the same price, which wasn't the case when I bought mine a year or so ago.
Still, it does the job, just with more limited storage. It even has an FM tuner that works pretty well.
I just don't understand the need to have several gigs of music copied to yet another device. I keep my music on my harddrive, and on semi-permanant backup CDs (soon to be DVDs), as I do most of my music enjoying from my computer. To me it seems pointless to have a complete copy of that to another device.
The convienence of not having to go to my computer every once in a while to change my music is not worth $200+ to me, sorry. I just don't see the need to always have access to all of my music 100% of the time. If the music gets old while I'm away from my computer, I just turn it off, and *gasp* think my own thoughts and reflect on myself. I really think that music has become a bit too pervasive in many peoples' lives in today's society. I mean, if noone has any time to hear themselves think over the sound of constant music, then how will people ever reflect on themselves and grow emotionally?
But, then again, everyone else has an iPod or some such, so I guess they must have good reason for shelling out such money. I can't think of any that would make me pay so much though...
Sounds like you actually believe that this government functions properly. Whatever you're smoking - I want some.
this country is run by pandering to special interests and appeasing the public with the right spin on anything that might threaten an agenda.
It doesn't actually need to DO anything. The people just need to believe that it has done something.
For the current administration it is `we protect you from the scary terrorists at any cost'. For the next administration it will likely be 'we can clean up this mess that the last guy made'
So the government just has to bumble along slowly at their publicly stated goals, all the while pushing their agendas on the side. By the next election they give a progress report along with `See? We've done something, but, c'mon guys - we need more time! So, elect us again and we'll really finish up, promise!'
In the end it doesn't really make any difference what a party says it stands for.
I think we're all forgetting one thing: People will never even bother to find out about what the Pirate Party stands for.
The general public is just so amazingly ignorant that they'll readily follow whatever the dominate party's spin machine tells them to think.
In this case, people won't ever even care what the Pirate Party actually stands for: they'll just think the party is childish.
I mean, god forbid anyone should be so childishly naive to not just trust the government to do their job to represent We, the people. [that last line there was sarcasm for those who can't pick that sort of thing up]
Bleh, I wish i could afford to move abroad. At least while other countries still exist that don't have narcissistic, freedom molesting, nosey governments.
Well, after RTFB, I've changed my mind about this *slightly*.
The bill says, in effect, that if any state laws that require public notification might hinder a federal investigation, then the notification would be suspended for 30 days or until it is deemed not to be an impediment to investigation. Of course, such an investgation could drag on for several months or years before the federal investigators deem it safe to notify the public.
Otherwise, I'd say that the bill is, in spirit at least, attempting to get a handle on the problem of identity theft due to stolen SSNs (issued by a government administration). Its debatable, however, if this is the right way to go about solving the problem.
While I understand how this may help in apprehending those involved in identity theft, I don't see this as any real step towards fixing the problem.
Perhaps it would be better for the government to punish businesses who use SSNs for identification purposes (which they are not supposed to be used for), and force them to use some other identification method. Though, short of starting a national ID system (which the gov is bound to foul up big time), I'm not aware of any decent method of tracking individuals IDs reliably.
However, my personal viewpoint is that <flame>the US government has become much to bloated, and is being micromanaged to death by legislation that will only lead to tyranny.</flame>
Slashdot Mirror
It gets better:
In 2012, it insisted that the very idea of Net neutrality squished its First and Fifth Amendment right,"
Someone should tell Verizon that the Bill of Rights isn't to be taken seriously either since you know they were written just before the time of steam locomotives and the telegraph!
They wouldn't want to be hypocrites after all.
Obamacare REQUIRED insurance policies to cover conditions that were not previously required (ex: maternity care for a 60 year old woman).
Can you explain how this actually makes insurance cost more? Do lots of 60 year olds file insurance claims for maternity related bills?
It seems like an silly excuse for insurance to cost more, and I think a lot of people are buying it since I've heard this repeated often.
Insurance costs are way out of hand. I can't afford to even use my coverage because I can't even begin to afford the deductible plus co-insurance BS in the first place. If I had something happen to me that forced me to use my full deductible I would be force to file for bankruptcy.
Octopuses arent cute...
Says you
I am not being fasicious when I say that I share this sentiment exactly. Though, as an American, my concern is mostly with US busy bodies. Bloated government deserves a hard reset. Politicians should remember from where their so called power derives - from our collective decision each day to NOT behead them all and start over. (Otherwise known as conset of the governed). It seems these days that the busy bodies go for the frog in slowly boiling water approach, however, taking little bits at a time. When the frog finally explodes it will sure be messy.
AC was me, written on a stupid virtual keyboard of course.
It doea take longer to type and corrections are far more frequently required.
I am also on tmoblie (love them), and I really miss my motorola droid 2 physical keyboard. Though now I use a samsung galaxy note 3 for the very reason that it has so much screen real estate that rhe keyboard (usually) doesn't get in the way.
Well, according to Wikipedia there are 289 cities in the United States alone with a population of 100,000 or more. Almost every one of these cities is likely to have multiple knowledge-cache locations serving these populations such as schools, libraries, and museums. Not to mention the infrastructure supporting these areas. Its also worth noting that the U.S. is 3.794 million sq miles in land area (wikipedia).
Can you seriously imagine a disaster that would destroy all of these locations (and thus all of their knoweledge and infrastructure) entirely and near simultaneously that would also leave any significant number of human survivors such that they'd have a shot at rebuilding society anyway?
Keep in mind that every other country would have to suffer a simar fate near simultaneously in order for society as a whole to be completely doomed (since, to me anyway, a true apocalypse situation transcends national boundaries; ie a war is not an appocalypse unless the whole earth is going down with it, but I digress). Not to mention we are completely ignoring all of the libraries and such in the towns smaller than 100k in population.
So either there will be at least a great deal of knoweledge left for survivors to work with, or there won't be any survivors at all and the point is moot.
Bitcoin sucks. See stories of millions of stolen bitcoins posted here on Slashdot only weeks ago. Not that its a bad idea outright, just that bitcoin is far from a perfect implementation of a crypo currencey, and fan boys like you keep touting it like the end all be all solution. It is NOT imunne to exploitation and theft.
THIS is what I want to happen sooner rather than later. The whole point of the Internet is to be decentralized, I never got why that didn't extend to the DNS system too. Fuck ICANN
THIS.
We should have single payer health coverage. We all deserve to share the benifits of modern medicine just as we all share the benifits of the safety of modern road construction.
We are supposed to be a fucking society after all. Why, then, is anything labeled socialist automatically dismissed or attacked outright?
This. Yes, way too much money was definitely thrown at this project.
People can whine all about about how complex the law is and that various different databases that needed to be connected were so different but I call bullshit. Its a website, not a figher jet. And certainly shouldn't be 10 times as expensive as a jet that needs to work at the speed of sound.. Seriously, just the costs of building (never mind the initial development) the F/A Hornet should dwarf a website project, not the other way around.
Its this kind of thing that makes me sick about the current state of the US.
...was not drawing himself a permit too!
Exactly. I don't think any real honest mistakes are happening in the realm of electronic voting at all.
...for April Fools Day. This is a joke, right?
These are my feelings exactly on this, and I couldn't have said it better myself.
That said, I'd like to add a little:
Video game publishers/developers/etc are running BUSINESSES, and no business has a right to profit, only the right to try to make a profit based on the choices THEY make as businesses.
The possibility of failure comes with the territory, and is something anybody running a business must accept as a result of THEIR choices as a business, not the choices of others.
If customers aren't buying a business's product/service (and aren't stealing it either, as that's another discussion altogether), it is up to the business to adapt their strategy to bring in new or more customers. If they can't adapt, then another company eventually will, and the original company may lose their business.
In this case potential customers are choosing used games over new ones. It is up to publishers to adapt to a changing market (which of course they are), and to reduce the Hollywood-like budgets and waste going into modern games.
This all has nothing to do with used game sales, and all about what people are willing to spend on a new (to them) game. The markets for used goods of all kinds will always exist (ebay and craiglist are quite popular), and thet aren't going anywhere.
Seriously: It took ~ $5 million to produce GTA IV. I felt at least a little ripped off after paying $50 for a game that barely runs on my PC with the settings turned down, despite it exceeding the RECOMMENDED specs for the game. Not to mention the lackluster storyline. This sort of thing loses the trust of customers. Why would I buy a new game if it will almost certainly be buggy on release? I could just as easily wait until well after release and then get a game with the bugs ironed out for a lower price to boot. As far as the game play, story and other in-game content is concerned, if I had bought a used game, I could have relied on existing peer review, rather than bought-and-paid-for reviews that are put out for upcoming and new titles.
There are many areas that the used games market is favorable over the new games market. And it is up to the publishers to adapt to this, and give their (potential) customers reasons to trust them with their money by putting out quality products that people WANT to pay for to get new, not to attack a legitimate competing market.
I saw that movie!
I agree with you. We should give equal consideration to all theories, since no one has any actual evidence of what's true anyway. I think Florida should also give consideration to the theory that I believe is actual fact: Pastafarianism. I mean, nobody actually saw His Noodly Appendage create the entire universe (though I find its pretty obviously true).
You have the ability to say "No" (or to silently resists if you happen to be mute) to anyone who tries to deny you those rights that you claim are "created in the mind of man". The Constitution and the Bill of Rights simply tell the government where they do and don't have authority over its citizens, who in turn agree to submit themselves to that authority.
Your ability to resist imposed authority is as natural as the law of gravity, therefore the only time your rights don't naturally exist, is when you don't defend them.
You are right: the remedy for breaking the law is jail. In fact, you can be jailed for much less than murder. Now, warrantless wiretapping is illegal, and therefore those involved must be tried and jailed. I don't see how this can be dismissed. Our public servants need to be held accountable to those whom they represent.
that some of the reasoning for using electronic voting in the first place was to prevent all those problems people where having with punch cards.
I don't agree with that logic, but if that is the argument, doesn't this demonstrate that these machines are at least no better - if not worse off than paper ballots/punch cards?
I just don't get why some people still think that these machines are an improvement in any way.
I have one of these, of course the 512MB version is now the same price, which wasn't the case when I bought mine a year or so ago.
Still, it does the job, just with more limited storage. It even has an FM tuner that works pretty well.
I just don't understand the need to have several gigs of music copied to yet another device. I keep my music on my harddrive, and on semi-permanant backup CDs (soon to be DVDs), as I do most of my music enjoying from my computer. To me it seems pointless to have a complete copy of that to another device.
The convienence of not having to go to my computer every once in a while to change my music is not worth $200+ to me, sorry. I just don't see the need to always have access to all of my music 100% of the time. If the music gets old while I'm away from my computer, I just turn it off, and *gasp* think my own thoughts and reflect on myself. I really think that music has become a bit too pervasive in many peoples' lives in today's society. I mean, if noone has any time to hear themselves think over the sound of constant music, then how will people ever reflect on themselves and grow emotionally?
But, then again, everyone else has an iPod or some such, so I guess they must have good reason for shelling out such money. I can't think of any that would make me pay so much though...
Maybe I've missed something though. Thoughts?
> but that won't run a government...
Sounds like you actually believe that this government functions properly. Whatever you're smoking - I want some.
this country is run by pandering to special interests and appeasing the public with the right spin on anything that might threaten an agenda.
It doesn't actually need to DO anything. The people just need to believe that it has done something.
For the current administration it is `we protect you from the scary terrorists at any cost'.
For the next administration it will likely be 'we can clean up this mess that the last guy made'
So the government just has to bumble along slowly at their publicly stated goals, all the while pushing their agendas on the side. By the next election they give a progress report along with `See? We've done something, but, c'mon guys - we need more time! So, elect us again and we'll really finish up, promise!'
In the end it doesn't really make any difference what a party says it stands for.
Actions speak much louder than words.
I think we're all forgetting one thing: People will never even bother to find out about what the Pirate Party stands for.
The general public is just so amazingly ignorant that they'll readily follow whatever the dominate party's spin machine tells them to think.
In this case, people won't ever even care what the Pirate Party actually stands for: they'll just think the party is childish.
I mean, god forbid anyone should be so childishly naive to not just trust the government to do their job to represent We, the people. [that last line there was sarcasm for those who can't pick that sort of thing up]
Bleh, I wish i could afford to move abroad. At least while other countries still exist that don't have narcissistic, freedom molesting, nosey governments.
Well, after RTFB, I've changed my mind about this *slightly*.
The bill says, in effect, that if any state laws that require public notification might hinder a federal investigation, then the notification would be suspended for 30 days or until it is deemed not to be an impediment to investigation. Of course, such an investgation could drag on for several months or years before the federal investigators deem it safe to notify the public.
Otherwise, I'd say that the bill is, in spirit at least, attempting to get a handle on the problem of identity theft due to stolen SSNs (issued by a government administration). Its debatable, however, if this is the right way to go about solving the problem.
While I understand how this may help in apprehending those involved in identity theft, I don't see this as any real step towards fixing the problem.
Perhaps it would be better for the government to punish businesses who use SSNs for identification purposes (which they are not supposed to be used for), and force them to use some other identification method. Though, short of starting a national ID system (which the gov is bound to foul up big time), I'm not aware of any decent method of tracking individuals IDs reliably.
However, my personal viewpoint is that <flame>the US government has become much to bloated, and is being micromanaged to death by legislation that will only lead to tyranny.</flame>