Mentally ill people - those that have been declared legally "mentally ill" - can't buy guns at gun stores today.
Criminals buy guns on the street, not from legally-controlled gun dealers. Can't stop it without rounding up all the criminals. You can see how much success that is having.
Declaring someone "mentally ill" is a pretty complicated process, at least as far as getting them legally committed to an institution. Back 50 years or so ago, it was much simpler. The police could arrest someone that was behaving oddly and then a doctor could look at them and say "Yup, he's nuts." and that would be the end of the matter. Committed for life.
  Today it is a little harder that that because it is somehow thought that these people might have rights. Rights which in most cases supercede the rights of people not to be bothered and harrassed by the mentally ill. So we have panhandlers on the street which are clearly mentally ill but cannot be institutionalized because it would "take away their rights". You also have mentally ill people going on shooting sprees. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way?
  Anyway, the point is until someone is legally declared mentally ill they have rights, including the right to buy guns. If you managed to make all gun sales illegal, you would will have people buying guns. It would just be illegal. So when you caught them you could charge them with another crime - buying a gun - in addition to whatever they did with the gun. Pointless.
Sure, if there was any liability. Read the fine print that comes with everything, including open source software.
The purchaser/user is warned specifically that you can't claim consequential damages. If you don't like it, return it. If the store won't take it back, the publisher will. If you find a bug that causes all your data to be lost after 6 months you might have some trouble getting your money back but some will still give you a refund.
But no way are you getting consequential damages for software. There are too many ways to misuse it.
How about people start taking things very serious and start suing some of these vendors... "My personal information was compromised because of shoddy program X class action lawsuits." Hit em where it hurts, eventually they will either listen or go broke.
I've never heard of a product that didn't disclaim liability for problems using the software. How do you discern - it court - between a bug in the program and a user error? No debugger, no "let's see", just the documentation and the user saying "I lost my stuff" with a bunch of lawyers. No, I don't see how you could tell the difference at all. So every user error becomes actionable back to the developer if you open the door to this kind of liability. And be assured there would be plenty of users ready to sue.
I sure as heck wouldn't be in the software business if customers could sue because of user errors.
OK, let's limit it just to security issues. User saves data to an insecure remote server, data is compromised. User blames software - the software did not encrypt the data to protect it. User error, bug or a feature for a future release? Interoperability goes out the window if every program saves output in a proprietary encrypted format, so maybe that's not such a hot idea. But if you leave defining appropriate security up to lawyers that is where it is going to go.
I believe the point #6 is that Toyota has no recycling in place and no plans. Sure, you could lug the battery pack to Radio Shack and put it in their recycling container... where it would be trashed just as well.
Yes, NiMH batteries can be recycled. That doesn't mean they are. Or that there is any value to attempting to do so.
What kind of sensor would that be? A mileage sensor?
What you are seeing is the result of a calculation by a trip computer that is tied into the engine computer to get the amount of gasoline being fed to the engine. Using this with the odometer sensor gets you feet-per-droplet which after applying the proper scale factors gets you miles per gallon (or kilometers per liter).
The trip computer is the expensive part. It usually also shows miles-to-empty and a bunch of other timers and such. Raw mileage isn't that hard to get, but you need a new computer because the engine computer isn't connected to the odometer.
This comes from the abundant need to assign blame. If you are driving and hit something, it is first and foremost considered to be an "accident". Until blame is assigned, that is. Once someone has been found to be at fault, because of action or inaction, it is no longer an accident. Then comes the insurance companies and someone getting a big payoff.
So if someone is driving and (stupidly) texting and the result is an "accident" the first thing that happens is everyone madly searches for some liability, some law, regulation or other violation. If there aren't any, it is an accident and there is no liability.
You can pretty much bet that this is what happened in the state of Washington. It wasn't illegal to be texting while driving so some accident wasn't anyone's fault. Clearly someone found this to be very unfair because they didn't get a big payoff from an insurance company. Now that has been fixed so if this were to happen again, the victim (person not texting) would get that nice payoff.
Lots of posts here are saying why isn't it just illegal to hit things while driving. Because the entire question of liability rests on finding someone at fault. We call traffic incidents "accidents" for some reason but most of the time someone is really at fault for causing it. Finding fault and assigning blame doesn't work unless there is some objective legal standard. There wasn't before in Washington but it would seem there is now.
The problem is that content costs money to create. Everyone wants something for nothing. It is certainly possible to put the content producers out of business, probably pretty soon. If that is what people want to do.
Will that lead to no content? Of course not. It will lead to an explosion of unprofessional, low-cost content. It will lead to content produced by people that think they have something to say and want to get it out to the world. Think about American Idol tryouts - these people believe they have something to say and want to get it out to the world. They utterly outnumber the finalists by 100 to 1. This is where low-cost content is headed.
So, we can have high-cost content that people pay for, or low-cost content that most people aren't going to want. I think the media companies are just about ready to give up fighting protection of their assets and going to throw in the towel. We will see where music sales go in the next 12 months and this is likely to be the deciding factor for movies and other stuff.
Problem is, the Internet is without any accountability and is anonymous. ISP's will fight to protect their customers from any sort of comeuppance that is due them because it might look bad.
So you find a picture on the Internet of yourself engaged in sexual congress with a goat. Clearly, according to you, it is a fake. If you work for some place where they frown on such things it probably is a lot less clearly faked to them. So what do you do? Want to get said picture taken down? Ha. That isn't going to happen. No matter how much you squirm and threaten, the person that has that picture posted is just going to laugh at you.
After you get fired (especially if you work with children), you might try suing. Sue who? An IP address? The ISP? Best just take your licks and go home... er, by now you are sleeping in your car so home may not be all that much of a comfort. But put it behind you and move on, because you aren't going to get that picture taken down. Ever.
Vonage came up with a business model that requires the existing phone companies to exist - they do not displace them until every single person has converted. And Vonage doesn't have the corporate capability to convert everyone. So Verizon, SBC and the others are a necessary component of Vonage's business.
Next, let's assume Verizon went out of the telephone business. Who would then own and maintain the copper used by all of Vonage's DSL customers? Nobody. Because it is assured to be a money-losing business. The only reason it makes sense to maintain all that copper today is because of the telephone network that operates over it. So again, the current telephone companies are a necessary part of Vonage's business.
I am pretty sure if you read their IPO prospectus or initial pitches to VC folks you will find it clearly stated that they have no intention of providing a replacement to the existing telephone network. Their plan is just skimming off the top layer of telephone customers with big bills that will see an improvement switching to a untariffed supplier.
What would happen if Vonage became the predominant telephone service supplier in a state, even a little place like Vermont? You can bet the Vermont PUC (or whatever they call it) would then immediately inform Vonage that they have to supply free service to some people and submit all their rates to the PUC for approval, just like the predominant telephone carriers do today. Why? Because that is how telephone service got to be both cheap and universal in the US today. Do you not think the states will force this back on VOIP providers when (if) they become big enough? That would virtually erase any profit Vonage has today and put them on an equal footing with Verizon, SBC, etc.
No, Vonage is a leech skimming high value customers away from the telecom companies and using the telecom companies own infrastructure to service these customers. They can't replace Verizon because Verizon supplies their customers with cheap DSL service, subsidized by telephone service.
It is an interesting business model but one doomed to failure. Some people will get rich off the plan in the short term, but it can't last. And you can bet Verizon has decided the time has come to end the game and remove Vonage.
In humans in general, you get behaviors that are rewarded or reinforced. You reward hacking, cracking and exploits and you will get more of it. Mostly focused in directions you didn't even dream of originally.
And the new crop of victims will never know who to thank.
OK, so it is some kind of virtual playground where nobody gets hurt. Sort of.
Except it is easily shown that what is going on here is reinforcing this behavior and rewarding it.
For a bully being able to bully people in a virtual world where all the victims meekly submit and cower pretty much assures the bully that this is a good thing and encourages acting out in the real world. I see the same thing here.
We need to clearly identify behavior as acceptable or unacceptable and enforce that in all venues, virtual or not. If being a bully is acceptable, then they can practice their bullying anywhere at any time without restriction. If being a pedophile is acceptable, then they should be able to seduce little children whenever and whereever they want. By acceptable I mean acceptable to society - not just a few people but pretty much everyone that could potentially be affected. Today, that means more than just their local community.
Alternatively, if being a bully or pedophile is not acceptable then they should not be able to practice it anywhere, real or virtual, or even talk about how they would really like to do it but are currently restraining themselves. No "reinforcing" behavior, no simulations, no gameplaying. Utter ban.
Pretty much as a society it has been decided that calling black people niggers and "nappy haired ho's" is not acceptable in any venue. You do it once and get fired from your job. You do not find virtual worlds where people get to practice calling black people niggers. Creating such a virtual place would result in a large outcry and banning such a thing. We can develop the courage to ban other activities just as completely.
The problem is that the US is trying to be far too "multiculrtural" and liberally-minded. The thinking goes that if Scientology can be criticised openly and insulted, then the Muslims can be as well. So can the Moonies and every other fringe group that considers itself a religion. Wicca, for example.
Well, we have seen how amazingly tolerant the Muslim faith is towards any sort of criticism. They respond with riots and killings, not court actions. So you can consider it a small price to pay that for this law to be on the books that people are sent to jail for criticising a religion. Think of the alternative!
Freedom of speach doesn't include the rights to criticise, inflame, insult or anything else that someone else finds personally offensive, especially in the US where the idea of "hate crimes" has latched on fully.
Why would you assume that qualfied voters are capable of making proper, verifiable marks on said piece of paper?
What if they are blind or without hands? Are such voters to be disenfranchised or reliant on helpers?
What if they are of such limited capabilities that they cannot understand the instructions, such as the Florida November 2000 voters could not understand how to punch out cards to vote? Are such people to be disenfranchised?
All a paper ballot is is a test for the voter and we threw out poll tests years ago. You can now be as dumb as a box of rocks and still vote. You may not understand the candidates message, but you can vote. You may not understand how to put marks on a ballot so it can be unambigously counted, but you can vote.
I could post a credit card number here and you could use it to buy stuff from some clueless merchant. Oh wow, I would get charged for that. Theft! Theft! Theft!
Wrong. I get the bill, look at it and call the credit card company and say I did't make those charges. They get taken off the bill and the merchant loses. Today, no matter what the merchant loses. Not the card holder and not the credit card issuer.
So what's the big problem with some credit card numbers getting out? It's a hassle for someone, but it isn't a problem for me.
How are most criminals caught? Because they did something incredibly stupid. Like bragging about their exploits or what they were going to be doing.
In the current workplace environment some people are just a hair away from "going postal". At least once a month there is national news of a workplace shooting.
You misunderstand. If I come in to work and I don't like the way your haircut looks, as your boss I can fire you. You're gone and have no recourse other than to collect unemployment.
What I cannot do is fire you because you are black, female, have AIDS or are a homosexual. There are a few other protected classes as well, but not that many.
Your best bet is to become a member of a protected class and then the amount of documentation required to lay you off or fire you becomes prohibitive. They will keep you as the "token" no matter what because you are too much trouble to fire.
This is almost the complete opposite of Europe. In most European countries after you have been employed after a brief probationary period you pretty much cannot be fired for any reason. They can make your life hell, but they can't fire you.
There is also government mandates that schools have to give tests that all of the kids pass. This will show they are all up to grade level.
This is combined with a mandate to "mainstream" kids that can't function "at grade level." And holding someone back to repeat a grade is a social decision, not an educational one. It would be a social disaster to be put back in a class with younger kids who would know the child couldn't handle it.
The combination of these things is a school where the grade level is pushed further and further down with agreement of all parties concerned. The tests then get passed and everyone can say how excellently all of the children are doing.
Of course, you end up with a high school graduate that can't read this way but everyone feels good about it. Except maybe the kid that can't read when he figures out he's been screwed.
The problem for a school with porn is really simple. Either they are for it or against it. There is no middle ground possible. And being "for" porn isn't a position they can take.
One computer gets access to some porn site or download a video. Student shows other students the material. At that point the school has a simple choice. Either turn a blind eye to it and tacitly endorse it or take every measure to stop it. I'm sure you know a parent that would not approve of their preteen daughter watching a rape video and coming home with questions. And if said parent found out the school wasn't doing everything possible to prevent this from ever happening (or ever happening again), it would be time for a new school administration. The community would riot.
No, porn in schools is going to get passed around and passed around to people that even you would object to. And the parents aren't going to tolerate that for a moment. It has nothing to do with the parents of the child accessing porn - it has to do with every parent in the school. You can't tell a seventh grader "don't show this to anyone else" and have it stick.
Social security money taken from you doesn't go to you. That is part of the problem. Some folks think it goes into a big savings account for when they retire. Sorry, but that isn't how it works. You pay in now and they pay it out to the current crop of retired and disabled people. Then when you retire or are disabled the workers then (fewer) get to pay for you.
Someone proposed that we change the system so that your money goes for your benefit. This was immediately decried as a horrible thing to do and would destroy the entire system. It would require a transition between the two systems, but it would hardly destroy it. However, you can cross that off the list of things that might happen - most people still believe their money is somehow "saved" for their benefit later on. If they aren't saving for themselves, they aren't going to get any, ever.
Mostly, there are no alternatives other than something like changing your fax number or turning off the ability to receive faxes.
If you can live with not getting purchase orders and the like faxed in, you can just turn it off. Email isn't a solution - it is unreliable. What is the difference between a company using email and a spammer, anyway?
Legally, you would think that someone would be able to stop a business from sending illegal faxes. The problem is that you, as the recipient can sue but the police can't just step in an arrest and fine them. So to really make them stop you would need to get a large number of recipients together. A law firm was trying to collect on junk faxes this way years ago until they realized nobody was spending the time to follow through.
Yes, junk faxes cost you money. Suing the sender will cost more time and more money. So much so that it is a better deal for most people to just eat the cost and ignore it.
Sure, you can sue, but it isn't going to get you anywhere.
No lawyer wants to waste their time with this sort of thing because most of the senders are nearly untracable. You can waste your own time on it, but very few people actually even get the senders to stop.
Right. It is going to collapse, there is no question about that. The revenue isn't there to support commercial media after the old folks that keep buying stuff die. The younger people know about downloading it for free.
The question is what will be left? There might be some attempt at ad-supported movies where commercials are either cut in (like network television) or incorporated into the story. You know, where the character stops what he is doing and launches into a monolog about how great some brand of condoms is. I don't see that having much of a future, though.
The future that I see is people with a true love of the art will continue to make their own movies and music. They will be able to publish this and you will be able to get it for free. Unfortunately, the number of people that can afford to dedicate their lives to polishing their craft (music, movies, or whatever) without compensation are relatively few. So you might have some rich folks that are highly polished and a lot of folks that think they are highly polished.
I'm sure Darwin Reedy (American Idol) thinks today that her performance was highly polished and that people will fall all over themselves to hear her sing. Since publishing will be free she will indeed be able to get her work out for the masses to enjoy without any restriction.
The big question for the next 100 years or so is going to be will anyone care? If you haven't heard Darwin sing, by all means you need to check her our. Possibly one of the better voices that we will be hearing from.
Right, it's not like people are there to be educated about the world or anything.
Actually, if the Universities ignore this that would be teaching the students about the world - everything is free, don't pay for anything you don't have to and share with everyone.
Kill the corporations.
Unfortunately, some of them will be deeply conflicted when they graduate and discover that they actually need to get paid by one of these evil corporations in order to eat.
If I can edit and recut the debate, I can make a YouTube video where the candidates are saying what I want them to say, not what they said actually. Creative Commons certainly would give me that right. It's just a humorous mix, right?
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Today it is a little harder that that because it is somehow thought that these people might have rights. Rights which in most cases supercede the rights of people not to be bothered and harrassed by the mentally ill. So we have panhandlers on the street which are clearly mentally ill but cannot be institutionalized because it would "take away their rights". You also have mentally ill people going on shooting sprees. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way?
 
Anyway, the point is until someone is legally declared mentally ill they have rights, including the right to buy guns. If you managed to make all gun sales illegal, you would will have people buying guns. It would just be illegal. So when you caught them you could charge them with another crime - buying a gun - in addition to whatever they did with the gun. Pointless.
Sure, if there was any liability. Read the fine print that comes with everything, including open source software.
The purchaser/user is warned specifically that you can't claim consequential damages. If you don't like it, return it. If the store won't take it back, the publisher will. If you find a bug that causes all your data to be lost after 6 months you might have some trouble getting your money back but some will still give you a refund.
But no way are you getting consequential damages for software. There are too many ways to misuse it.
I've never heard of a product that didn't disclaim liability for problems using the software. How do you discern - it court - between a bug in the program and a user error? No debugger, no "let's see", just the documentation and the user saying "I lost my stuff" with a bunch of lawyers. No, I don't see how you could tell the difference at all. So every user error becomes actionable back to the developer if you open the door to this kind of liability. And be assured there would be plenty of users ready to sue.
I sure as heck wouldn't be in the software business if customers could sue because of user errors.
OK, let's limit it just to security issues. User saves data to an insecure remote server, data is compromised. User blames software - the software did not encrypt the data to protect it. User error, bug or a feature for a future release? Interoperability goes out the window if every program saves output in a proprietary encrypted format, so maybe that's not such a hot idea. But if you leave defining appropriate security up to lawyers that is where it is going to go.
I believe the point #6 is that Toyota has no recycling in place and no plans. Sure, you could lug the battery pack to Radio Shack and put it in their recycling container... where it would be trashed just as well.
Yes, NiMH batteries can be recycled. That doesn't mean they are. Or that there is any value to attempting to do so.
What kind of sensor would that be? A mileage sensor?
What you are seeing is the result of a calculation by a trip computer that is tied into the engine computer to get the amount of gasoline being fed to the engine. Using this with the odometer sensor gets you feet-per-droplet which after applying the proper scale factors gets you miles per gallon (or kilometers per liter).
The trip computer is the expensive part. It usually also shows miles-to-empty and a bunch of other timers and such. Raw mileage isn't that hard to get, but you need a new computer because the engine computer isn't connected to the odometer.
This comes from the abundant need to assign blame. If you are driving and hit something, it is first and foremost considered to be an "accident". Until blame is assigned, that is. Once someone has been found to be at fault, because of action or inaction, it is no longer an accident. Then comes the insurance companies and someone getting a big payoff.
So if someone is driving and (stupidly) texting and the result is an "accident" the first thing that happens is everyone madly searches for some liability, some law, regulation or other violation. If there aren't any, it is an accident and there is no liability.
You can pretty much bet that this is what happened in the state of Washington. It wasn't illegal to be texting while driving so some accident wasn't anyone's fault. Clearly someone found this to be very unfair because they didn't get a big payoff from an insurance company. Now that has been fixed so if this were to happen again, the victim (person not texting) would get that nice payoff.
Lots of posts here are saying why isn't it just illegal to hit things while driving. Because the entire question of liability rests on finding someone at fault. We call traffic incidents "accidents" for some reason but most of the time someone is really at fault for causing it. Finding fault and assigning blame doesn't work unless there is some objective legal standard. There wasn't before in Washington but it would seem there is now.
The problem is that content costs money to create. Everyone wants something for nothing. It is certainly possible to put the content producers out of business, probably pretty soon. If that is what people want to do.
Will that lead to no content? Of course not. It will lead to an explosion of unprofessional, low-cost content. It will lead to content produced by people that think they have something to say and want to get it out to the world. Think about American Idol tryouts - these people believe they have something to say and want to get it out to the world. They utterly outnumber the finalists by 100 to 1. This is where low-cost content is headed.
So, we can have high-cost content that people pay for, or low-cost content that most people aren't going to want. I think the media companies are just about ready to give up fighting protection of their assets and going to throw in the towel. We will see where music sales go in the next 12 months and this is likely to be the deciding factor for movies and other stuff.
Problem is, the Internet is without any accountability and is anonymous. ISP's will fight to protect their customers from any sort of comeuppance that is due them because it might look bad.
So you find a picture on the Internet of yourself engaged in sexual congress with a goat. Clearly, according to you, it is a fake. If you work for some place where they frown on such things it probably is a lot less clearly faked to them. So what do you do? Want to get said picture taken down? Ha. That isn't going to happen. No matter how much you squirm and threaten, the person that has that picture posted is just going to laugh at you.
After you get fired (especially if you work with children), you might try suing. Sue who? An IP address? The ISP? Best just take your licks and go home... er, by now you are sleeping in your car so home may not be all that much of a comfort. But put it behind you and move on, because you aren't going to get that picture taken down. Ever.
Vonage came up with a business model that requires the existing phone companies to exist - they do not displace them until every single person has converted. And Vonage doesn't have the corporate capability to convert everyone. So Verizon, SBC and the others are a necessary component of Vonage's business.
Next, let's assume Verizon went out of the telephone business. Who would then own and maintain the copper used by all of Vonage's DSL customers? Nobody. Because it is assured to be a money-losing business. The only reason it makes sense to maintain all that copper today is because of the telephone network that operates over it. So again, the current telephone companies are a necessary part of Vonage's business.
I am pretty sure if you read their IPO prospectus or initial pitches to VC folks you will find it clearly stated that they have no intention of providing a replacement to the existing telephone network. Their plan is just skimming off the top layer of telephone customers with big bills that will see an improvement switching to a untariffed supplier.
What would happen if Vonage became the predominant telephone service supplier in a state, even a little place like Vermont? You can bet the Vermont PUC (or whatever they call it) would then immediately inform Vonage that they have to supply free service to some people and submit all their rates to the PUC for approval, just like the predominant telephone carriers do today. Why? Because that is how telephone service got to be both cheap and universal in the US today. Do you not think the states will force this back on VOIP providers when (if) they become big enough? That would virtually erase any profit Vonage has today and put them on an equal footing with Verizon, SBC, etc.
No, Vonage is a leech skimming high value customers away from the telecom companies and using the telecom companies own infrastructure to service these customers. They can't replace Verizon because Verizon supplies their customers with cheap DSL service, subsidized by telephone service.
It is an interesting business model but one doomed to failure. Some people will get rich off the plan in the short term, but it can't last. And you can bet Verizon has decided the time has come to end the game and remove Vonage.
In humans in general, you get behaviors that are rewarded or reinforced. You reward hacking, cracking and exploits and you will get more of it. Mostly focused in directions you didn't even dream of originally.
And the new crop of victims will never know who to thank.
OK, so it is some kind of virtual playground where nobody gets hurt. Sort of.
Except it is easily shown that what is going on here is reinforcing this behavior and rewarding it.
For a bully being able to bully people in a virtual world where all the victims meekly submit and cower pretty much assures the bully that this is a good thing and encourages acting out in the real world. I see the same thing here.
We need to clearly identify behavior as acceptable or unacceptable and enforce that in all venues, virtual or not. If being a bully is acceptable, then they can practice their bullying anywhere at any time without restriction. If being a pedophile is acceptable, then they should be able to seduce little children whenever and whereever they want. By acceptable I mean acceptable to society - not just a few people but pretty much everyone that could potentially be affected. Today, that means more than just their local community.
Alternatively, if being a bully or pedophile is not acceptable then they should not be able to practice it anywhere, real or virtual, or even talk about how they would really like to do it but are currently restraining themselves. No "reinforcing" behavior, no simulations, no gameplaying. Utter ban.
Pretty much as a society it has been decided that calling black people niggers and "nappy haired ho's" is not acceptable in any venue. You do it once and get fired from your job. You do not find virtual worlds where people get to practice calling black people niggers. Creating such a virtual place would result in a large outcry and banning such a thing. We can develop the courage to ban other activities just as completely.
Doesn't allowing them to "practice" their fetish in a virtual world count as reinforcement? Perhaps even connecting their activities with rewards?
The problem is that the US is trying to be far too "multiculrtural" and liberally-minded. The thinking goes that if Scientology can be criticised openly and insulted, then the Muslims can be as well. So can the Moonies and every other fringe group that considers itself a religion. Wicca, for example.
Well, we have seen how amazingly tolerant the Muslim faith is towards any sort of criticism. They respond with riots and killings, not court actions. So you can consider it a small price to pay that for this law to be on the books that people are sent to jail for criticising a religion. Think of the alternative!
Freedom of speach doesn't include the rights to criticise, inflame, insult or anything else that someone else finds personally offensive, especially in the US where the idea of "hate crimes" has latched on fully.
Why would you assume that qualfied voters are capable of making proper, verifiable marks on said piece of paper?
What if they are blind or without hands? Are such voters to be disenfranchised or reliant on helpers?
What if they are of such limited capabilities that they cannot understand the instructions, such as the Florida November 2000 voters could not understand how to punch out cards to vote? Are such people to be disenfranchised?
All a paper ballot is is a test for the voter and we threw out poll tests years ago. You can now be as dumb as a box of rocks and still vote. You may not understand the candidates message, but you can vote. You may not understand how to put marks on a ballot so it can be unambigously counted, but you can vote.
I could post a credit card number here and you could use it to buy stuff from some clueless merchant. Oh wow, I would get charged for that. Theft! Theft! Theft!
Wrong. I get the bill, look at it and call the credit card company and say I did't make those charges. They get taken off the bill and the merchant loses. Today, no matter what the merchant loses. Not the card holder and not the credit card issuer.
So what's the big problem with some credit card numbers getting out? It's a hassle for someone, but it isn't a problem for me.
How are most criminals caught? Because they did something incredibly stupid. Like bragging about their exploits or what they were going to be doing.
In the current workplace environment some people are just a hair away from "going postal". At least once a month there is national news of a workplace shooting.
You misunderstand. If I come in to work and I don't like the way your haircut looks, as your boss I can fire you. You're gone and have no recourse other than to collect unemployment.
What I cannot do is fire you because you are black, female, have AIDS or are a homosexual. There are a few other protected classes as well, but not that many.
Your best bet is to become a member of a protected class and then the amount of documentation required to lay you off or fire you becomes prohibitive. They will keep you as the "token" no matter what because you are too much trouble to fire.
This is almost the complete opposite of Europe. In most European countries after you have been employed after a brief probationary period you pretty much cannot be fired for any reason. They can make your life hell, but they can't fire you.
There is also government mandates that schools have to give tests that all of the kids pass. This will show they are all up to grade level.
This is combined with a mandate to "mainstream" kids that can't function "at grade level." And holding someone back to repeat a grade is a social decision, not an educational one. It would be a social disaster to be put back in a class with younger kids who would know the child couldn't handle it.
The combination of these things is a school where the grade level is pushed further and further down with agreement of all parties concerned. The tests then get passed and everyone can say how excellently all of the children are doing.
Of course, you end up with a high school graduate that can't read this way but everyone feels good about it. Except maybe the kid that can't read when he figures out he's been screwed.
The problem for a school with porn is really simple. Either they are for it or against it. There is no middle ground possible. And being "for" porn isn't a position they can take.
One computer gets access to some porn site or download a video. Student shows other students the material. At that point the school has a simple choice. Either turn a blind eye to it and tacitly endorse it or take every measure to stop it. I'm sure you know a parent that would not approve of their preteen daughter watching a rape video and coming home with questions. And if said parent found out the school wasn't doing everything possible to prevent this from ever happening (or ever happening again), it would be time for a new school administration. The community would riot.
No, porn in schools is going to get passed around and passed around to people that even you would object to. And the parents aren't going to tolerate that for a moment. It has nothing to do with the parents of the child accessing porn - it has to do with every parent in the school. You can't tell a seventh grader "don't show this to anyone else" and have it stick.
Social security money taken from you doesn't go to you. That is part of the problem. Some folks think it goes into a big savings account for when they retire. Sorry, but that isn't how it works. You pay in now and they pay it out to the current crop of retired and disabled people. Then when you retire or are disabled the workers then (fewer) get to pay for you.
Someone proposed that we change the system so that your money goes for your benefit. This was immediately decried as a horrible thing to do and would destroy the entire system. It would require a transition between the two systems, but it would hardly destroy it. However, you can cross that off the list of things that might happen - most people still believe their money is somehow "saved" for their benefit later on. If they aren't saving for themselves, they aren't going to get any, ever.
Mostly, there are no alternatives other than something like changing your fax number or turning off the ability to receive faxes.
If you can live with not getting purchase orders and the like faxed in, you can just turn it off. Email isn't a solution - it is unreliable. What is the difference between a company using email and a spammer, anyway?
Legally, you would think that someone would be able to stop a business from sending illegal faxes. The problem is that you, as the recipient can sue but the police can't just step in an arrest and fine them. So to really make them stop you would need to get a large number of recipients together. A law firm was trying to collect on junk faxes this way years ago until they realized nobody was spending the time to follow through.
Yes, junk faxes cost you money. Suing the sender will cost more time and more money. So much so that it is a better deal for most people to just eat the cost and ignore it.
Sure, you can sue, but it isn't going to get you anywhere.
No lawyer wants to waste their time with this sort of thing because most of the senders are nearly untracable. You can waste your own time on it, but very few people actually even get the senders to stop.
Right. It is going to collapse, there is no question about that. The revenue isn't there to support commercial media after the old folks that keep buying stuff die. The younger people know about downloading it for free.
The question is what will be left? There might be some attempt at ad-supported movies where commercials are either cut in (like network television) or incorporated into the story. You know, where the character stops what he is doing and launches into a monolog about how great some brand of condoms is. I don't see that having much of a future, though.
The future that I see is people with a true love of the art will continue to make their own movies and music. They will be able to publish this and you will be able to get it for free. Unfortunately, the number of people that can afford to dedicate their lives to polishing their craft (music, movies, or whatever) without compensation are relatively few. So you might have some rich folks that are highly polished and a lot of folks that think they are highly polished.
I'm sure Darwin Reedy (American Idol) thinks today that her performance was highly polished and that people will fall all over themselves to hear her sing. Since publishing will be free she will indeed be able to get her work out for the masses to enjoy without any restriction.
The big question for the next 100 years or so is going to be will anyone care? If you haven't heard Darwin sing, by all means you need to check her our. Possibly one of the better voices that we will be hearing from.
Right, it's not like people are there to be educated about the world or anything.
Actually, if the Universities ignore this that would be teaching the students about the world - everything is free, don't pay for anything you don't have to and share with everyone.
Kill the corporations.
Unfortunately, some of them will be deeply conflicted when they graduate and discover that they actually need to get paid by one of these evil corporations in order to eat.
If I can edit and recut the debate, I can make a YouTube video where the candidates are saying what I want them to say, not what they said actually. Creative Commons certainly would give me that right. It's just a humorous mix, right?