The foreign workers are here not because the USA needs them, but because they can be here. Currently, there are more people on welfare receiving government handouts than there are illegal workers. It is within our power to reverse this.
The illegal workers also distort a great deal of the economy and have created the situation today where it is possible to get a job that does not pay enough to live in the community. It turns out that the wage being paid is just fine with the illegals that live 10 to a room and send 70% of their wages back to the dirt-poor relatives back home. It is more than they could ever earn in their country.
Today, every employer reads the I-9 form that says they need to check the documentation of every worker, and sees they are not responsible for ensuring the validity of the documents. So, you make up a card that says "Drever's Lisense" in crayon and show it to the employer. The employer has no way to say that it is not valid and turn the person in to the INS. He must accept it as a driver's license. That is what happened in 1986, the last time we went through this.
We need to make the USA less friendly for illegal workers, just like every other country on the face of the earth. What do they do in EU countries, even those which accept many temporary immigrants who do not have the right to work?
The First Amendment refers to the government's ability to pass laws to restrict speech. It has limited effect on states, cities, villages and other municipalities.
It has no effect on companies, contract law, or anything else.
There is no "first amendment right to access the system". Period. You do not have any rights at all - you have privileges that the operator of the system gives you. And these can be revoked at any time. Without cause or explanation.
Yes, that means AOL can cancel your account without telling you why.
Yes, that means when your employer says not to do something and you do it anyway you are exposing yourself to consequences. Sometimes legal consequences in addition to just getting fired.
Students, young adults and eventually everyone uses all forms of digital media without paying anybody. Content creators, copyright owners and organizations contracted to enforce copyright restrictions will continue to fight until they finally give up. Giving up means that "professional" media creation will cease to exist and we will be left with "hobby" and "for the fun of it" media.
People get the message and figure out they can either pay or not use.
Sure, there might be some other short-term solution, but the end result is going to be one of these two alternatives. China has already discovered this, and there is no more "professional" CD audio production for sale.
Sorry, a really usable open format cannot be "extensible". You can't change it without serious thought as to the consequences, even to add stuff that is ignored by other readers when it is not understood.
For example, it is quite important to have italics in the right places. Let's assume that the first version doesn't support italics and there is an "extension" to that version that does. I would offer that this generates the possiblity of having a reader which will not render something in italics when it is required. Bad. Bad. Bad.
OK, so italics is a trivial example, but there are others. The problem with an evolving open format is what is really needed is a fixed, unchanging open format that is THE standard. Period.
Sadly, when you grew up there were few things that would kill a child and not that many that would maim for life.
Today, a child can read some porn, experiment with sex with a neighbor child and get AIDS. Result isn't knowledge but a very short painful life.
Today, a child can walk into a mall and be abducted by someone that might, someday be caught. When we were children such a thing was unheard of because people in the area would stop it.
Today, a child can misuse all sorts of kitchen tools which will remove fingers, hair or zap them with microwaves. When I grew up the only person I ever met with injuries like that was a girl that put her hand into a hand-cranked meat grinder and lost several fingers. Compare that to some of the more recent appliances.
It is a lot more hazardous to be a child today. Yes, there has been some overreaction, but not as much as you would like to paint it.
Oh yes, everything will be much better with stem cells.
Except for the babies.
What babies? Well, in case you haven't been keeping up, there are a couple of issues with stem cells and rejection. It pretty much requires a complete genetic match to the recepient. Now, that isn't all that hard to do with some basic cloning, but it does involve cloning human tissue. This pretty much requires an egg cell for each clone as well, so there needs to be some "egg donor" for this.
Because of the genetic match requirement, cloning stem cells isn't all that useful - you need ones that genetically match the recipient. This means the whole process with an egg donor, human cloning, etc. is required for each treatment.
There is another way that removes the specter of human cloning is simply the one baby, one cure technique. Using currently available IVF procedures it isn't that hard to get an embryo with the correct genetic makeup. Of course, there might be some other ethical considerations to this sort of thing.
The long and the short of it is that it will always be massively expensive, use currently banned or strongly disapproved methods and open doors for selling human egg cells, creating human clones, and a bunch of other stuff. It will be a treatment for the uber-rich who can afford to flaunt any existing laws, customs and so on.
One baby, one cure. Just keep that in mind. Yeah, stem cells are going to be the answer for health care in the future.
to block any (and all) email they want to. Your ISP is under no obligation to deliever "all" email - if they did they could not block spam. Collateral damage could not occur. Most virulent anti-spammers would be out of luck.
The problem is that delivery of email is not a neutral, third-party kind of thing. How can a any email sender prove (and I mean "beyond a reasonable doubt") they are not a spammer? They can't. Rule 1 is Spammers Lie. Therefore, no matter what someone says, if they send you an email you don't want, they are by definition a spammer. At least in some people's eyes.
The problem is that ISP's are influenced by these people and feel the need to take "action", regardless of how ill-advised or inappropriate that action might be. The result is that people don't get all the email that people are sending to them. Unfortunately, this is now viewed as a problem with the sender being at the mercy of the ISP or other delivery agent. And now, they want to charge completely unreasonable amounts of money for delivering purchase receipts to customers.
This is a huge problem for my company that we have to deal with every day. The answer is not "prove you're not a spammer and we'll let you through", because that kind of proof is Bonded Sender and Goodmail.
Absolute minimum of paid workers - nobody wants to do it. No unpaid "volunteers". Staff mostly comes from civil service positions where they work for a week every two years but have to be on city/county payroll as full time civil service positions.
All voting is at least county level, sometimes finer. I voted last week and there were three different ballots for a single precinct. Magnify this by the number of precincts nationwide - over 50,000 maybe more.
Comparing this to other countries is pointless - nobody has as fine-grained voting, absurd expectations from the news-watching population and "zero participation". No purely paper system can keep up any longer, not because of "hanging chads" but because the news media will release "results" (real or made up) as soon as they can. Any delay for counting - by non-existent "volunteers" - is reported as potential fraud by the news media.
Sure, some kind of countable paper might be nice, but it leads to silly things. If you sit five people down to count marks on 100,000 pieces of paper you will not get one result. At best, you will get two or three. And, it is not repeatable. We have had close elections recently that have gone through several recounts only to still be decided by one party giving up. I believe it was most recently the Govenor of Washington that was decided this way because the results were less than 1,000 votes different and each count produced different results, with a different winner.
I know paper isn't the answer.
As to the reasonablness of the $40K fee, it is real simple. Diebold is being asked to recertify the machines and they can charge anything they want. Government contracts like this always result in signficant charges like this because there is no option. It is stupid and naive to assume the fee would be anything like time-and-materials for a couple of real workers. There is also virtually unlimited liability if it is done wrong or not done at all. Compare this to recertifying a heart-lung machine for a hospital and consider that it would only be one person dead if it was wrong.
5. Fleischmann believes he has found something, has investors that believe it as well. Something happens but it isn't really "cold fusion", but it does seem to produce some heat. People buy into the idea that it is "cold fusion" and, with little or no scientific basis in reality, go chasing after an elusive and ephemeral dream.
Read up on what Lysenko did to the Russians. This is probably the absolute worst case, but it is also the most likely unless Fleischmann is a true con man. Far better for us all that he is running a con and we find out all about it in the next year or so.
you, as a dedicated RIAA-hater and music lover illegally download music and take whatever risk is associated with that. Then, with no apparent benefit, you go and pay the RIAA and the rest of the industry that you would like to change.
Why? Guilt?
If you are going to download, why purchase? You aren't getting your point across. The only way folks are going to convince the content owners, artists, composers and so on and so forth that they must release their material for free is to STOP BUYING.
OK, if you are a dedicated law-abiding citizen that fears the reprisals if they download a song, fine - do without. But if you are downloading anyway WHAT ARE YOU DOING PAYING FOR IT? This destroys the entire concept of "it has to be free or we will just steal it" that everyone is pushing for.
Please, understand what you are fighting for. It is the elimination of the possibility of any financial reward for anything that can be expressed in digital media. While this view may not be shared by everyone, it certainly should be shared by all "downloaders".
Most of the folks out there are really quite susceptable to the argument that they have two choices:
Protect the heck out of it, whatever the consequences to the consumer.
Sell one copy which is immediately posted on the Internet for everyone to "share"
Until that perception is corrected, DRM is a fact of life.
So how do we correct this perception? Maybe by being responsible consumers and not "sharing" all digital media with the planet without permission. If the artist, composer or whatever releases it with "redistribute freely", then by all means, post it, share it, copy it. But, if it is released with "no redistribution allowed" then nobody shares it, copies it, etc.
If that were to start happening market forces could then (perhaps) influence the licensing of music, video and other digital media. I do not see this happening anytime soon or even in my lifetime. Therefore, DRM is a live-or-die proposition to content owners. They can either protect it or sell one copy.
If not, and they have problems or issues understanding your product, what is to prevent them from just telling everyone that your product is crap because they can't make it work?
Assuming even a small ratio of 2 non-paying users for every supported paying user you could have a real problem on your hands.
You cannot restrict public financing to three or any other number of "qualified" candidates - that is how they keep a lid on the candidates in Iran. Everyone that comes forward must be funded equally, or it is discriminatory. Can you imagine how it would be if three white candidates were funded and a black candidate got nothing or even just less?
A requirement that they show up with some evidence that they stand some chance of getting elected can also be discriminatory - look at what happened to the petition signing for Nader. He was kept off ballots because of petitions that were disqualified, thus again restricting the pool of candidates.
The candidate is going to give up at least a year of any sort of employment to run for election. Lately, in the US it has become almost a two-year commitment. To prevent this from being a "you gotta be rich" sort of thing, the funding for candidates have to include a healty stipend for their support and for their families.
So, why can we not have 1,000 candidates for mayor for a city, each receiving a fully-funded free ride for a couple of years? How long will it take before every citizen in the US understands all they need to do is run for every office possible (think 25,000,000 candidates for president) so as to be fully supported by the Federal Election Commission?
Come on, is that where you really want to go? Or is it that you think it would be better if the candidates were narrowed to just a few "qualified" candidates selected by the incumbents?
They tried that. Originally all theaters were owned by the studios, or at least most of them. The theaters were enormous constructions with flashy decor designed to show off both the "movie experience" and the studio's style as well.
However, as Standard Oil proved earlier, it is illegal for a company to own the production and distribution for a product. So, all the studios were forced to sell off their theaters.
That doesn't mean the studios do no still keep a very tight leash on what their relatively captive theaters can do. It just means they do not own them any longer.
Sadly, that is now against International Law. Should the US impose restrictive tariffs on imports from WTO members the result is that all WTO members get to impose restrictive tariffs on the US, and we may need to pay fines to the WTO.
Sorry, but if the market decides that all programming is worth is $8 an hour, no government or labor union is going to be able to change this, at least over a long term.
Labor unions did manage to require railroads to keep "firemen" on the trains long after the job was eliminated. However, today the job is gone. Along with a lot of the railroad companies that employed those firemen.
All a labor union can eventually do is drive the company out of business. It might be able to grab some more benefits and salary for the members of the union, but eventually it will catch up with them. Look at auto workers in the US. We will not be making cars in the US much longer because of labor costs.
Transportation has reached the point where labor will move to the cheapest location, worldwide. No union is going to be able to prevent that.
Has nothing to do with "company property". If you have information under your control that you have any reason to believe might be the subject of a future subpeona and you destroy it you have committed a criminal act. Period. End of story.
It does not matter if nobody ever comes for the information. There are some rules about how long materials must be preserved (mostly for tax reasons) and there is the statute of limitations for criminal matters. I believe the rule is 2 years for most civil matters.
Now, after you destroy evidence it may not be possible to determine exactly what the evidence would have led to. However, it is not going go easy on you in court because of the destruction of evidence. This is going to follow the case around and it is going to be viewed as extremely prejudicial.
What this guy evidently thought was that by using a secure delete program he could get rid of all of the evidence that he was competing with his employer and therefore he could not be sued for doing so. He might get away from the lawsuit but end up with a criminal charge for destroying evidence. Alternatively, a jury could easily decide that whatever evidence there was before it was destroyed would prove him at fault in a civil trial and just decide in the plaintiff's favor anyway. I have heard of judges encouraging this sort of decision because the destruction of evidence is viewed as very prejudcial. Sort of, it had to be bad or you wouldn't have deleted it.
The problem is that it is illegal to destroy materials that are the subject of discovery and/or subpeona. I think this can extend pretty easily to being illegal to destroy materials that you have any reason to believe might be the subject of a future subpeona.
This means if you have information that says you did something wrong, you can screw yourself further if you get rid of it. Finding a "secure delete" program on a computer is pretty much clear-cut evidence that you were trying to hide something. What, exactly, might you have had that warranted such behavior? Well, since they can't find that you better hope there isn't anything at all that is even remotely incriminating. Because if there is even a hint that you did actually destroy evidence, the judge is going to make your life hell.
The instructions to the jury can go something like "Since we don't actually know what happened to the evidence, or if the evidence would have proven the defendent is guilty, but we do know there was such evidence and that it disappeared, it is your duty to consider that this evidence did exist and was intentionally destroyed by the defendent. This may be taken as further evidence of guilt."
Spoilation of evidence is what it is called in both criminal and civil matters. You do not want to run afoul of this.
Unfortunately, while it might be nice to think about just paper ballots, there are expectations in the US that make it almost impossible to continue using them.
First, is the accessability issue. You have voters that can't understand instructions and can't follow them when they are explained. A paper ballot that isn't verified for correctness immediately results in the "undervote" and "overvote" situation where they have either not enough marks or too many marks to figure out what the voter intended. Unless someone or something checks the ballots immediately, this will be a problem.
The next problem is also related to accessability. We are faced with a situation where volunteering to work in a polling place is almost unheard of. So, they go to the Senior Citizens Center and recruit people from there. You would think that people would do anything to get out and do something different - not in the US. They struggle to get the minimum number of people that are legally required for the county and have to live with that.
This means there are no "extra" helpers for people that can't read the paper or can't see the writing there. Or need some other kind of assistance. So any mechanical aid that can work with Braille or whatever else is required (writing 3x the size, etc.) is a requirement. If the machine can talk to them, even better.
The last requirement is that if the legal and accurate results of voting are not available five minutes after the polls close, the news programs will just make stuff up. They will rely on exit polls or talking with party spokespersons to find out what the results might be.
The idea that the voting results could wait for three days (or even a couple of weeks) after voting has completed is utterly unacceptable to the news media. They need results in minutes and they will do whatever it takes to get results to people. Accurate or not, it doesn't matter. Speed is the only thing that counts.
This obsession with feeding results to people has seriously hurt us in the past and most recently in 2000. Announcing the winner of an election or even that a candidate is ahead or behind while the polls are still open should be a crime. It isn't today.
Therefore, we are left with "imaginary results" if the real vote count doesn't come along fast enough. Can you imaging the chaos if the TV news programs announced a winner and three days later when the official count was done - not just the exit polls - it was some other candidate?
Face it, immediate tabulation of vote results is a requirement. We are going to have results at 7:01 PM if the polls close at 7:00 PM, one way or another. And we are going to have "accessible" voting that does not require helpers, because there are no "helpers" - nobody wants to volunteer. We are going to have immediately verified ballots, because to do otherwise results in Florida in 2000 all over again.
The one thing we are not going to have, at any point in the foreseeable future, is nationwide consistency in voting. It will be state-by-state and county-by-county until the end of "State's Rights". Not likely to happen any time soon, because it would require people to give up power they have in public offices. Ever heard of a politician doing that?
Idiot. You are thinking extremely shallowly and it shows.
Universal healthcare would be great, right? It would end "rationing" of healthcare and make it available to everyone, right? Unfortunately, that isn't the way it works in other countries that have it.
Let's say I am a smoker. I will therefore have significantly higher healthcare expenses than you, the non-smoker. Under any sort of "universal healthcare" system I have heard of, you will therefore in one way or another receive a bill for some part of my expenses. I will at the same time get a credit - lower expenses. Why is this fair? Because I am doing something that increases costs for my benefit I am making everyone else pay for it. Same thing goes for lots and lots of self-induced healthcare problems.
Another issue with supposedly "universal healthcare" is today people crossing the border from Mexico can pretty much go to any hospital with an emergency and receive the same care that anyone else in that area can get. But what if it isn't an emergency? Well, today they pretty much toss them out in the street. Exactly how "universal" would it be if these people were denied care? Today in California the healthcare system is on the verge of collapse because of the immigrant population changing the way healthcare services are used and the number of people using them. This would undoubtably force the entire system onto the state or federal government. Are we ready for that?
I suppose an alternative might be to just check someone's official US Citizen ID card, except every step that has been made in that direction has pretty much ended up including the undocumented immigrant population as well. So, I doubt very much if hospitals and clincs are going to be in any way capable of deciding who gets care and who does not.
There are plenty of studies that say there is "enough money to go around" in the system today. Yes, but a great deal of that is coming from places that are tracable to individuals and individual behavior. So people that need more services pay more. Any sort of universal healthcare plan would almost certainly remove that connection so that we are all paying for people that need services - with significantly more being spent by people that today are paying little or nothing.
Little or nothing? How can that be? Well, you take your average moderately-employed 20-something and ask how much they are paying for health insurance and what extra coverages they are paying for. The answer in most cases is they have the most restrictive, cheapest plan. And no expenditures above what the company provides. Their plans are simple - I'm not getting sick. And in general this position works pretty well for them.
Yes, universal healthcare would be nice for some people, but it would significantly change who pays what and where they pay it. A lot more people would be paying for lifestyle choices of a few that end up needing lots of services. Are we prepared to have the government also tell us what lifestyle choices we can make because of this?
No, I don't have absolute numbers for what the cost differences would be, but I assure you that if we adopted a universal healthcare plan there would be significant changes. In income for a lot of lower-middle class people. In treatment options for everyone if the system was anywhere near as restrictive as it is in some countries now. In how much government would involve itself in people's lives if the benefits of preventing some activities (smoking, drinking, overeating, etc.) resulted in lower taxes for everyone.
Think it through. Universal, government-managed healthcare would be the perfect excuse to monitor everyone's health and lifestyle continuously all in the name of saving money. Lots of money.
Children in the US do not have free will. If it isn't their parents telling them what to do, it is the schools, the testing organizations, the childcare companies and all the psychologists saying "it's for the children". There is no more free will left in children.
A parent that buys a game for a child (10-16 years old) is implicitly condoning that game and all that goes with it. If, in the course of the game you must kill and mutilate to win, this will absolutely be seen as direct parent->game->child approval. It is therefore approved by the parent to kill and mutilate.
There are some children that are capable of discerning the difference between the "game world" and the world where they live and go to school. In some cases, the world where they live is less comprehensible than the game world. What would you have the child do then?
we have all heard of the proposal to make Pi=3.0, right? After all, if enough people decide that it should be so instead of some sequence of irrational digits then we can have it that way, right?
It is announced that the role of the "programmer" has ended. Either the new stuff is just so simple that anyone can do it without any training at all, or the machine will program itself as it learns what you want to do.
This has been going on since the beginning of 4th generation langauges, which came about in the late 1970's. There were actually some reasonable achievements which have been utterly lost now. But nothing that would replace programming completely.
While there is lots of benefits to including users into a project to make sure it remains useful and usable, this doesn't mean trying to help non-programmers join in the programming effort. It isn't the programming training they lack, it is the programming orientation towards thinking about the problem they lack.
Sure, if you need a fingerprint that withstands some sort of cursory optical examination, that can be done without too much trouble.
But, if they are actually using any of the better techniques, like a guy with an ink roller or a sensor that isn't optically based, you can forget about faking it.
Actually, even just having someone watching as your fingerprint is read is going to deter about 90% (maybe 99%) of fake attempts. You don't get to use a fake finger or most things on your finger if someone is actually watching and looking for that. Not 100% certain, for sure, but nowhere near as weak as you seem to think.
The problem is that most anti-spam filtering systems also block an unknown (and unknowable) amount of email. When this happens at the ISP level, the user generally has no recourse and no way to even find out that the mail has been blocked.
Email is now utterly unreliable for anything except personal correspondence. It is no longer practical for any business communication to customers - especially things like confirmations and receipts.
This situation has been brought on by both spammers and vigilante anti-spammers.
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Idiocy.
The foreign workers are here not because the USA needs them, but because they can be here. Currently, there are more people on welfare receiving government handouts than there are illegal workers. It is within our power to reverse this.
The illegal workers also distort a great deal of the economy and have created the situation today where it is possible to get a job that does not pay enough to live in the community. It turns out that the wage being paid is just fine with the illegals that live 10 to a room and send 70% of their wages back to the dirt-poor relatives back home. It is more than they could ever earn in their country.
Today, every employer reads the I-9 form that says they need to check the documentation of every worker, and sees they are not responsible for ensuring the validity of the documents. So, you make up a card that says "Drever's Lisense" in crayon and show it to the employer. The employer has no way to say that it is not valid and turn the person in to the INS. He must accept it as a driver's license. That is what happened in 1986, the last time we went through this.
We need to make the USA less friendly for illegal workers, just like every other country on the face of the earth. What do they do in EU countries, even those which accept many temporary immigrants who do not have the right to work?
The First Amendment refers to the government's ability to pass laws to restrict speech. It has limited effect on states, cities, villages and other municipalities.
It has no effect on companies, contract law, or anything else.
There is no "first amendment right to access the system". Period. You do not have any rights at all - you have privileges that the operator of the system gives you. And these can be revoked at any time. Without cause or explanation.
Yes, that means AOL can cancel your account without telling you why.
Yes, that means when your employer says not to do something and you do it anyway you are exposing yourself to consequences. Sometimes legal consequences in addition to just getting fired.
Sure, there might be some other short-term solution, but the end result is going to be one of these two alternatives. China has already discovered this, and there is no more "professional" CD audio production for sale.
Sorry, a really usable open format cannot be "extensible". You can't change it without serious thought as to the consequences, even to add stuff that is ignored by other readers when it is not understood.
For example, it is quite important to have italics in the right places. Let's assume that the first version doesn't support italics and there is an "extension" to that version that does. I would offer that this generates the possiblity of having a reader which will not render something in italics when it is required. Bad. Bad. Bad.
OK, so italics is a trivial example, but there are others. The problem with an evolving open format is what is really needed is a fixed, unchanging open format that is THE standard. Period.
Come back in five years when such a thing exists.
Sadly, when you grew up there were few things that would kill a child and not that many that would maim for life.
Today, a child can read some porn, experiment with sex with a neighbor child and get AIDS. Result isn't knowledge but a very short painful life.
Today, a child can walk into a mall and be abducted by someone that might, someday be caught. When we were children such a thing was unheard of because people in the area would stop it.
Today, a child can misuse all sorts of kitchen tools which will remove fingers, hair or zap them with microwaves. When I grew up the only person I ever met with injuries like that was a girl that put her hand into a hand-cranked meat grinder and lost several fingers. Compare that to some of the more recent appliances.
It is a lot more hazardous to be a child today. Yes, there has been some overreaction, but not as much as you would like to paint it.
Oh yes, everything will be much better with stem cells.
Except for the babies.
What babies? Well, in case you haven't been keeping up, there are a couple of issues with stem cells and rejection. It pretty much requires a complete genetic match to the recepient. Now, that isn't all that hard to do with some basic cloning, but it does involve cloning human tissue. This pretty much requires an egg cell for each clone as well, so there needs to be some "egg donor" for this.
Because of the genetic match requirement, cloning stem cells isn't all that useful - you need ones that genetically match the recipient. This means the whole process with an egg donor, human cloning, etc. is required for each treatment.
There is another way that removes the specter of human cloning is simply the one baby, one cure technique. Using currently available IVF procedures it isn't that hard to get an embryo with the correct genetic makeup. Of course, there might be some other ethical considerations to this sort of thing.
The long and the short of it is that it will always be massively expensive, use currently banned or strongly disapproved methods and open doors for selling human egg cells, creating human clones, and a bunch of other stuff. It will be a treatment for the uber-rich who can afford to flaunt any existing laws, customs and so on.
One baby, one cure. Just keep that in mind. Yeah, stem cells are going to be the answer for health care in the future.
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to block any (and all) email they want to. Your ISP is under no obligation to deliever "all" email - if they did they could not block spam. Collateral damage could not occur. Most virulent anti-spammers would be out of luck.
The problem is that delivery of email is not a neutral, third-party kind of thing. How can a any email sender prove (and I mean "beyond a reasonable doubt") they are not a spammer? They can't. Rule 1 is Spammers Lie. Therefore, no matter what someone says, if they send you an email you don't want, they are by definition a spammer. At least in some people's eyes.
The problem is that ISP's are influenced by these people and feel the need to take "action", regardless of how ill-advised or inappropriate that action might be. The result is that people don't get all the email that people are sending to them. Unfortunately, this is now viewed as a problem with the sender being at the mercy of the ISP or other delivery agent. And now, they want to charge completely unreasonable amounts of money for delivering purchase receipts to customers.
This is a huge problem for my company that we have to deal with every day. The answer is not "prove you're not a spammer and we'll let you through", because that kind of proof is Bonded Sender and Goodmail.
Comparing this to other countries is pointless - nobody has as fine-grained voting, absurd expectations from the news-watching population and "zero participation". No purely paper system can keep up any longer, not because of "hanging chads" but because the news media will release "results" (real or made up) as soon as they can. Any delay for counting - by non-existent "volunteers" - is reported as potential fraud by the news media.
Sure, some kind of countable paper might be nice, but it leads to silly things. If you sit five people down to count marks on 100,000 pieces of paper you will not get one result. At best, you will get two or three. And, it is not repeatable. We have had close elections recently that have gone through several recounts only to still be decided by one party giving up. I believe it was most recently the Govenor of Washington that was decided this way because the results were less than 1,000 votes different and each count produced different results, with a different winner.
I know paper isn't the answer.
As to the reasonablness of the $40K fee, it is real simple. Diebold is being asked to recertify the machines and they can charge anything they want. Government contracts like this always result in signficant charges like this because there is no option. It is stupid and naive to assume the fee would be anything like time-and-materials for a couple of real workers. There is also virtually unlimited liability if it is done wrong or not done at all. Compare this to recertifying a heart-lung machine for a hospital and consider that it would only be one person dead if it was wrong.
5. Fleischmann believes he has found something, has investors that believe it as well. Something happens but it isn't really "cold fusion", but it does seem to produce some heat. People buy into the idea that it is "cold fusion" and, with little or no scientific basis in reality, go chasing after an elusive and ephemeral dream.
Read up on what Lysenko did to the Russians. This is probably the absolute worst case, but it is also the most likely unless Fleischmann is a true con man. Far better for us all that he is running a con and we find out all about it in the next year or so.
you, as a dedicated RIAA-hater and music lover illegally download music and take whatever risk is associated with that. Then, with no apparent benefit, you go and pay the RIAA and the rest of the industry that you would like to change.
Why? Guilt?
If you are going to download, why purchase? You aren't getting your point across. The only way folks are going to convince the content owners, artists, composers and so on and so forth that they must release their material for free is to STOP BUYING.
OK, if you are a dedicated law-abiding citizen that fears the reprisals if they download a song, fine - do without. But if you are downloading anyway WHAT ARE YOU DOING PAYING FOR IT? This destroys the entire concept of "it has to be free or we will just steal it" that everyone is pushing for.
Please, understand what you are fighting for. It is the elimination of the possibility of any financial reward for anything that can be expressed in digital media. While this view may not be shared by everyone, it certainly should be shared by all "downloaders".
Until that perception is corrected, DRM is a fact of life.
So how do we correct this perception? Maybe by being responsible consumers and not "sharing" all digital media with the planet without permission. If the artist, composer or whatever releases it with "redistribute freely", then by all means, post it, share it, copy it. But, if it is released with "no redistribution allowed" then nobody shares it, copies it, etc.
If that were to start happening market forces could then (perhaps) influence the licensing of music, video and other digital media. I do not see this happening anytime soon or even in my lifetime. Therefore, DRM is a live-or-die proposition to content owners. They can either protect it or sell one copy.
Do you provide free support to non-paying users?
If not, and they have problems or issues understanding your product, what is to prevent them from just telling everyone that your product is crap because they can't make it work?
Assuming even a small ratio of 2 non-paying users for every supported paying user you could have a real problem on your hands.
You cannot restrict public financing to three or any other number of "qualified" candidates - that is how they keep a lid on the candidates in Iran. Everyone that comes forward must be funded equally, or it is discriminatory. Can you imagine how it would be if three white candidates were funded and a black candidate got nothing or even just less?
A requirement that they show up with some evidence that they stand some chance of getting elected can also be discriminatory - look at what happened to the petition signing for Nader. He was kept off ballots because of petitions that were disqualified, thus again restricting the pool of candidates.
The candidate is going to give up at least a year of any sort of employment to run for election. Lately, in the US it has become almost a two-year commitment. To prevent this from being a "you gotta be rich" sort of thing, the funding for candidates have to include a healty stipend for their support and for their families.
So, why can we not have 1,000 candidates for mayor for a city, each receiving a fully-funded free ride for a couple of years? How long will it take before every citizen in the US understands all they need to do is run for every office possible (think 25,000,000 candidates for president) so as to be fully supported by the Federal Election Commission?
Come on, is that where you really want to go? Or is it that you think it would be better if the candidates were narrowed to just a few "qualified" candidates selected by the incumbents?
They tried that. Originally all theaters were owned by the studios, or at least most of them. The theaters were enormous constructions with flashy decor designed to show off both the "movie experience" and the studio's style as well.
However, as Standard Oil proved earlier, it is illegal for a company to own the production and distribution for a product. So, all the studios were forced to sell off their theaters.
That doesn't mean the studios do no still keep a very tight leash on what their relatively captive theaters can do. It just means they do not own them any longer.
Sadly, that is now against International Law. Should the US impose restrictive tariffs on imports from WTO members the result is that all WTO members get to impose restrictive tariffs on the US, and we may need to pay fines to the WTO.
Sorry, but if the market decides that all programming is worth is $8 an hour, no government or labor union is going to be able to change this, at least over a long term.
Labor unions did manage to require railroads to keep "firemen" on the trains long after the job was eliminated. However, today the job is gone. Along with a lot of the railroad companies that employed those firemen.
All a labor union can eventually do is drive the company out of business. It might be able to grab some more benefits and salary for the members of the union, but eventually it will catch up with them. Look at auto workers in the US. We will not be making cars in the US much longer because of labor costs.
Transportation has reached the point where labor will move to the cheapest location, worldwide. No union is going to be able to prevent that.
Has nothing to do with "company property". If you have information under your control that you have any reason to believe might be the subject of a future subpeona and you destroy it you have committed a criminal act. Period. End of story.
It does not matter if nobody ever comes for the information. There are some rules about how long materials must be preserved (mostly for tax reasons) and there is the statute of limitations for criminal matters. I believe the rule is 2 years for most civil matters.
Now, after you destroy evidence it may not be possible to determine exactly what the evidence would have led to. However, it is not going go easy on you in court because of the destruction of evidence. This is going to follow the case around and it is going to be viewed as extremely prejudicial.
What this guy evidently thought was that by using a secure delete program he could get rid of all of the evidence that he was competing with his employer and therefore he could not be sued for doing so. He might get away from the lawsuit but end up with a criminal charge for destroying evidence. Alternatively, a jury could easily decide that whatever evidence there was before it was destroyed would prove him at fault in a civil trial and just decide in the plaintiff's favor anyway. I have heard of judges encouraging this sort of decision because the destruction of evidence is viewed as very prejudcial. Sort of, it had to be bad or you wouldn't have deleted it.
The problem is that it is illegal to destroy materials that are the subject of discovery and/or subpeona. I think this can extend pretty easily to being illegal to destroy materials that you have any reason to believe might be the subject of a future subpeona.
This means if you have information that says you did something wrong, you can screw yourself further if you get rid of it. Finding a "secure delete" program on a computer is pretty much clear-cut evidence that you were trying to hide something. What, exactly, might you have had that warranted such behavior? Well, since they can't find that you better hope there isn't anything at all that is even remotely incriminating. Because if there is even a hint that you did actually destroy evidence, the judge is going to make your life hell.
The instructions to the jury can go something like "Since we don't actually know what happened to the evidence, or if the evidence would have proven the defendent is guilty, but we do know there was such evidence and that it disappeared, it is your duty to consider that this evidence did exist and was intentionally destroyed by the defendent. This may be taken as further evidence of guilt."
Spoilation of evidence is what it is called in both criminal and civil matters. You do not want to run afoul of this.
First, is the accessability issue. You have voters that can't understand instructions and can't follow them when they are explained. A paper ballot that isn't verified for correctness immediately results in the "undervote" and "overvote" situation where they have either not enough marks or too many marks to figure out what the voter intended. Unless someone or something checks the ballots immediately, this will be a problem.
The next problem is also related to accessability. We are faced with a situation where volunteering to work in a polling place is almost unheard of. So, they go to the Senior Citizens Center and recruit people from there. You would think that people would do anything to get out and do something different - not in the US. They struggle to get the minimum number of people that are legally required for the county and have to live with that.
This means there are no "extra" helpers for people that can't read the paper or can't see the writing there. Or need some other kind of assistance. So any mechanical aid that can work with Braille or whatever else is required (writing 3x the size, etc.) is a requirement. If the machine can talk to them, even better.
The last requirement is that if the legal and accurate results of voting are not available five minutes after the polls close, the news programs will just make stuff up. They will rely on exit polls or talking with party spokespersons to find out what the results might be.
The idea that the voting results could wait for three days (or even a couple of weeks) after voting has completed is utterly unacceptable to the news media. They need results in minutes and they will do whatever it takes to get results to people. Accurate or not, it doesn't matter. Speed is the only thing that counts.
This obsession with feeding results to people has seriously hurt us in the past and most recently in 2000. Announcing the winner of an election or even that a candidate is ahead or behind while the polls are still open should be a crime. It isn't today.
Therefore, we are left with "imaginary results" if the real vote count doesn't come along fast enough. Can you imaging the chaos if the TV news programs announced a winner and three days later when the official count was done - not just the exit polls - it was some other candidate?
Face it, immediate tabulation of vote results is a requirement. We are going to have results at 7:01 PM if the polls close at 7:00 PM, one way or another. And we are going to have "accessible" voting that does not require helpers, because there are no "helpers" - nobody wants to volunteer. We are going to have immediately verified ballots, because to do otherwise results in Florida in 2000 all over again.
The one thing we are not going to have, at any point in the foreseeable future, is nationwide consistency in voting. It will be state-by-state and county-by-county until the end of "State's Rights". Not likely to happen any time soon, because it would require people to give up power they have in public offices. Ever heard of a politician doing that?
Idiot. You are thinking extremely shallowly and it shows.
Universal healthcare would be great, right? It would end "rationing" of healthcare and make it available to everyone, right? Unfortunately, that isn't the way it works in other countries that have it.
Let's say I am a smoker. I will therefore have significantly higher healthcare expenses than you, the non-smoker. Under any sort of "universal healthcare" system I have heard of, you will therefore in one way or another receive a bill for some part of my expenses. I will at the same time get a credit - lower expenses. Why is this fair? Because I am doing something that increases costs for my benefit I am making everyone else pay for it. Same thing goes for lots and lots of self-induced healthcare problems.
Another issue with supposedly "universal healthcare" is today people crossing the border from Mexico can pretty much go to any hospital with an emergency and receive the same care that anyone else in that area can get. But what if it isn't an emergency? Well, today they pretty much toss them out in the street. Exactly how "universal" would it be if these people were denied care? Today in California the healthcare system is on the verge of collapse because of the immigrant population changing the way healthcare services are used and the number of people using them. This would undoubtably force the entire system onto the state or federal government. Are we ready for that?
I suppose an alternative might be to just check someone's official US Citizen ID card, except every step that has been made in that direction has pretty much ended up including the undocumented immigrant population as well. So, I doubt very much if hospitals and clincs are going to be in any way capable of deciding who gets care and who does not.
There are plenty of studies that say there is "enough money to go around" in the system today. Yes, but a great deal of that is coming from places that are tracable to individuals and individual behavior. So people that need more services pay more. Any sort of universal healthcare plan would almost certainly remove that connection so that we are all paying for people that need services - with significantly more being spent by people that today are paying little or nothing.
Little or nothing? How can that be? Well, you take your average moderately-employed 20-something and ask how much they are paying for health insurance and what extra coverages they are paying for. The answer in most cases is they have the most restrictive, cheapest plan. And no expenditures above what the company provides. Their plans are simple - I'm not getting sick. And in general this position works pretty well for them.
Yes, universal healthcare would be nice for some people, but it would significantly change who pays what and where they pay it. A lot more people would be paying for lifestyle choices of a few that end up needing lots of services. Are we prepared to have the government also tell us what lifestyle choices we can make because of this?
No, I don't have absolute numbers for what the cost differences would be, but I assure you that if we adopted a universal healthcare plan there would be significant changes. In income for a lot of lower-middle class people. In treatment options for everyone if the system was anywhere near as restrictive as it is in some countries now. In how much government would involve itself in people's lives if the benefits of preventing some activities (smoking, drinking, overeating, etc.) resulted in lower taxes for everyone.
Think it through. Universal, government-managed healthcare would be the perfect excuse to monitor everyone's health and lifestyle continuously all in the name of saving money. Lots of money.
Children in the US do not have free will. If it isn't their parents telling them what to do, it is the schools, the testing organizations, the childcare companies and all the psychologists saying "it's for the children". There is no more free will left in children.
A parent that buys a game for a child (10-16 years old) is implicitly condoning that game and all that goes with it. If, in the course of the game you must kill and mutilate to win, this will absolutely be seen as direct parent->game->child approval. It is therefore approved by the parent to kill and mutilate.
There are some children that are capable of discerning the difference between the "game world" and the world where they live and go to school. In some cases, the world where they live is less comprehensible than the game world. What would you have the child do then?
we have all heard of the proposal to make Pi=3.0, right? After all, if enough people decide that it should be so instead of some sequence of irrational digits then we can have it that way, right?
It is announced that the role of the "programmer" has ended. Either the new stuff is just so simple that anyone can do it without any training at all, or the machine will program itself as it learns what you want to do.
This has been going on since the beginning of 4th generation langauges, which came about in the late 1970's. There were actually some reasonable achievements which have been utterly lost now. But nothing that would replace programming completely.
While there is lots of benefits to including users into a project to make sure it remains useful and usable, this doesn't mean trying to help non-programmers join in the programming effort. It isn't the programming training they lack, it is the programming orientation towards thinking about the problem they lack.
Making "fake" fingerprints isn't all that simple.
Sure, if you need a fingerprint that withstands some sort of cursory optical examination, that can be done without too much trouble.
But, if they are actually using any of the better techniques, like a guy with an ink roller or a sensor that isn't optically based, you can forget about faking it.
Actually, even just having someone watching as your fingerprint is read is going to deter about 90% (maybe 99%) of fake attempts. You don't get to use a fake finger or most things on your finger if someone is actually watching and looking for that. Not 100% certain, for sure, but nowhere near as weak as you seem to think.
The problem is that most anti-spam filtering systems also block an unknown (and unknowable) amount of email. When this happens at the ISP level, the user generally has no recourse and no way to even find out that the mail has been blocked.
Email is now utterly unreliable for anything except personal correspondence. It is no longer practical for any business communication to customers - especially things like confirmations and receipts.
This situation has been brought on by both spammers and vigilante anti-spammers.