I'm not specifically talking about GP, but to answer your question, while some people hold a wealth of information on computers, mathematics, and/or science, they cannot see outside of their mom's basement.
So just because their comments on science and technology may be +5's, their comments on social topics might end up being -1. Or, maybe they just have an agenda to push; just because someone's smart doesn't mean they're good or moral.
And since surveillance is clearly one of the things the government is empowered to do, and such uses of surveillance aren't expressly forbidden, there is a school of Constitutional thought that says this is allowable.
It's not in the constitution. The constitution doesn't explicitly say anything about surveillance, which, if it really was indeed literally read, would mean that these powers are given to the state and to the people. The constitution does forbid government from searching and seizing without a warrant. That's as close to surveillance as it gets. A literalist's interpretation would be that surveillance is a state and people's right. A moderate reader would extend the fourth amendment to cover surveillance on private property. Only people who selectively read the constitution would think that it gives the federal government such a power. As an aside, I sometimes wonder if it's the same selective reading as one does with inconsistent religious texts.
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses.
No, there's no bug in the Bill of Rights. It's a bug in society and human nature, which has affected our representation in the government. The bill of rights is a bill to prevent the government from taking away rights. It never was a bill to grant rights, and it never was intended as such. We have all the rights. We are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights." This is established in the declaration of independence, the second most important document in constitutional law. The government can only take away our rights, and the Bill of Rights enumerates the rights that they cannot take away.
The bug is in thinking that the government grants us rights. The bug is in not caring about our rights, in apathy. The bug is in taking for granted that the government will not take away our rights and that if it does so, it's for our own good (related to the first "bug", where the mentality usually goes, the government can taketh what it can give). The bug is in us. We elected those people to represent us, or did you not vote last election? And if you didn't but were qualified to (over 18), it's even more your fault that the jackasses who are in office made it there. We put these people in a position to represent us. If that's not the representation we want, then it's time to replace them.
they had learned "aiming skills" instead of "driving skills".
Well to be fair, if you had bad aim and hit her in the eye while driving, you'd be a road hazard too.
But on a serious note, driving too slow is a problem. The worst of these are the slow drivers camping on the left or center lane. Those guys are the equivalent of moving road hazards.
Oh, and the only reason they enforce drunk driving the way they do is because of activist groups like MADD.
Are you European by any chance? Things are a little different there. Allow me to elaborate:
First off, we are allowed to carry guns. This right was upheld very recently. And we are allowed to make arrests if we see wrongdoing. It's called citizen's arrest. In some places, we're even allowed to shoot people who tresspass onto private property.
Second, the police are not the upright moral citizens of society that they might be elsewhere (yeah, if you really believe that, keep dreaming). The police in the US are the trash who dropped out of high school, the former bullies who cut class just to terrorize other kids, and the dried out jocks. Most of them care barely read, and a good majority of them have never even read a summary of the laws they're supposed to enforce. The smarter law enforcement types typically get promoted off the streets very quickly, or work as an FBI agent or some such. In the cities at least, they're quickly out of patrol and into more sophisticated cases. But in small towns, it's a mixed bag.
Surgeons
Third, to pick apart your examples, doctors' prescriptions are honored by insurance and the pharmacy. It's very difficult to get your hands on drugs without a prescription, but it's not impossible. Drug companies don't like that though, because they can still be held liable if anything happens. So it's like law enforcement not engaging in warrantless wiretapping because they're afraid any evidence would get thrown out (which it would).
Legal citizens are allowed to give advice to lawyers. Anyone can give advice to anyone; it's just advice. Lawyers, because they are held to a certain standard by their peers (the bar), are liable for the legal advice they give. The average citizen is not, because they're not considered a peer of a lawyer. But you can represent yourself as your own lawyer if you want. You have that right.
Postmen have no right to open your letters for the same reason police can't enter someone's property without a warrant. The line has been blurred recently only because the federal government doesn't hold itself to the constitution. But postmen opening letters is forbidden by the constitution. Heck, even warrantless opening letters by law enforcement is forbidden.
And finally, citizens do cut open surgeons. What, does a surgeon cut himself open when he's got an appendix infection? Is a doctor not a citizen? Having a surgeon cut you open is about trust. You have to trust your surgeon. It's your choice who gets to cut you up. And sometimes, your surgeon is bad anyway. Nobody asks the police to be trailed, or wiretapped, or have the doors to their home knocked down. Nobody wants anyone sifting through their private belongings. You want your surgeon to operate on you. If your surgeon wants you to operate on him or her, there's nothing illegal about that. The question is, would your surgeon ask such a question, and do you want to operate on your surgeon? And if you were a surgeon yourself, or you had such training and it was an emergency, maybe the answer to both questions is yes.
For most places, there are no exceptions to seat belt wearing. Nobody has exceptions. It's just that the police don't bother to cite seat belt violations for people who spend more time getting in and out than actually driving. That doesn't mean they can't, and it doesn't mean a judge won't find you guilty.
We are not all equal. But that applies to natural talent. Some people are better at certain things than others. That's what "we are not all equal" means. In the eyes of the law, especially with respect to what rights we have and don't, we are or ideally should be all equal. The legal system is not supposed to create social classes. If we were not all equal in the eyes of the law, then it would be doing exactly that. And the problem currently is, police think they're legally in a social class above everyone else, and that simply isn't true.
It's one thing to play a game for it's own sake if you're doing it for fun. But if you want to go out there and engage in your endeavour seriously, then it's all about winning. It's about self confidence, pride in onself and one's achivements, and discipline. It's about pushing onself to accomplish something, even if there's someone better than you, you know you've done the absolute best you could, and you can be proud of that. If you play for fun, then you're not playing at your best, and you'll always think, "I can beat him if I played seriously." You'll always be the champion in your own mind, while going nowhere in reality. And that means you'll never feel the sense of accomplishment or achivement.
Winning is how you determine who's better, and who can play at what level. When you're good at something, it's not worth your while to compete seriously against an amatuer. You want to compete against people who are as good as you, or better. These are the people worth competing against, and worth striving to beat. If you don't compete to win, you'll never know where you're standing, and realize your potential. Or, as I previously mentioned, you'll delude yourself and simply not go anywhere.
To be able to even qualify for the olympics and world championships, to be able to compete with the best of the best from all around the world, that alone is something worthy of being proud of. And to be able to beat them, that's even better. And until you understand how that feels, you'll never understand why people compete to win. Your drivel about how people should play for the sake of playing smacks of the everybody-is-a-winner-and-nobody-is-a-loser mentality. And that mentality is what's destroying the US today.
Striving to win isn't the disease. The disease is winning for the sake of the trail of money that follows. Not even fame from winning would do such a thing, as fame is a popularity contest, and people who cheat quickly fall out of favor from the populace. It's money.
The problem with doping is that if it is allowed, only the wealthy who can afford the drugs would win. It'd be a matter of how much money and access to medical research, and not a matter of training and natural talent. If it comes to that, you might as well make competitions consist of one event that sees who's dick stays up for longer after taking viagra.
Yes, there are inequalities between poor societies and wealthy ones. The dominance of the US in olympic medal count is anecdotal evidence of this. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that the smaller, poor countries simply can't compete. The vast number of medalists, especially gold medalists, from small and usually poor countries is anecdotal evidence of this. So the olympics, irrespective of a person or a country's financial standing, is pretty damn fair. And it's only able to be fair because there's little to no money involved in getting good, only lots of hard work.
Since the fall of the U.S.S.R, Russia's been working hard at westernizing. They're just completing the transition by invading another smaller country for oil under the pretext of national security.
This is one of two truly insightful comments in the entire thread. The other post is about how gas giants that wander towards the star might have their gasses blown away by the star over time, and leave only the core.
Just because the configuration of a star system isn't exactly like ours, doesn't mean it can't support life. Our gas giants have a multitude of moons, many of whom are very close to Earth in composition. And it's not like gas giants suddenly up and leave their moons behind when they head towards the sun. If any of them wandered closer to the sun, I'll bet some of those moons will have a high probability of life.
Furthermore, the smaller rocky planets in the center certainly have a chance of becoming the moon of a gas giant as it passes by. Granted, any existing complex life on those planets might be wiped out by the change, but that doesn't mean new complex life wouldn't arise afterwards once the gas giant settles into a stable orbit.
The conclusion that our type of system is rare is probably valid based on the new models. But the conclusion that intelligent life is equally as rare is probably invalid.
"With great power comes great responsibility." This is a quote I think everyone knows, especially after the movie came out.
Freedom is this great power. Freedom is the greatest power. To decide for ourselves what we want to be, to do, to think is the ultimate responsibility. It is not only that we have a choice, but that we understand that we have this choice, and we know the options before us, that is freedom.
And it scares the crap out of most people today. That there are choices means that there is a question. And that there is a question means that there is a need for a logically justified answer. After all, if a question can be answered irrationally, then there really never was a question. And to have freedom, everything must be questioned, and any answers to the questions must be justified. Instead, most people want to be told what to do, to be told how to think and what is right and wrong, because they cannot or do not want to by themselves decide such important things. They hold on to religion and tradition for this reason, because they find comfort and security in not having to think, to question their choices at every turn, to fully understand the ramifications of their actions. They want the simple, content life of following directions, so that they won't have to question, so that they won't have to take responsibility for their answers. It is fairly obvious that the trend over the past 60 years has been to point fingers at other people, to find blame in others at our own shortcomings. We have often wondered what happened to personal accountability. The paradigm shift away from thinking about "what not to do next time" to "how to make someone else pay for my mistake" has resulted in the desire to give up the power to rule onself.
So in the US, everyone has freedom, most of whom do not want it, more of whom do not understand what it fully means. Some of whom want it think it is something it really isn't. How can a democracy remain free if an overwhelming majority desire comfort and not freedom?
This is correct. Civil disobedience requires that one follow the laws of the land. Which is to say, if the law demands a certain amount of jail time for a certain infraction, then the person being civil disobedient needs to serve that jail time after commiting the infraction. Otherwise, it's just blatant disregard for the presence of a legal system. And that's effectively anarchy, or the support of anarchy.
The caveat is that civil disobedience doesn't really apply to civil suits and corporations.
They also tend to be malnourished, and hence look underdeveloped, not to mention that gymnasts tend to be on the shorter side. And when I say malnourished, it's relative to the food available in the west, and in particular, the US. They're probably very well fed compared to other people in China.
It would kind of suck if you were filming yourself get electrocuted and your audience got electrocuted as well when they watched it. It'd be some kind of sick horror film come to life if you had died and your audience died with you.
Much of the appeal of film on the big screen is that you get to fill in the gaps with your own experiences. That makes what's happening on the screen feel much more personal. The audience doesn't really want to feel what you feel. The audience wants to feel what they think they would be feeling if they were in your shoes.
The only reason the country swings back to relative sanity is because of the public backlash, the outcry that results from the government going too far. If people suddenly became apathetic, and everything indicates they are growing increasingly apathetic, there won't be any going back. Your apathetic attitude towards the patriot act is illustrative of my point.
Yet, we still haven't gotten past the civil rights problems the Cold War introduced. It's still bad in the government's eyes to be socialist or communist. We talk of unbiased hiring practices and complain when government agencies get "politicised", but when it comes to people with leftist ideals, they can't get a government job even if they wanted to, thanks to McCarthyism and the red scare.
In fact, look at, FISA, a product of the Cold War. Even that level of secrecy in the government would've made the founders raise their eyebrows. After all, it can't be a government for the people if the people don't know, and thus cannot comment on, what the government is doing. And now, the current government makes the one that enacted FISA look tame.
Just because there are bumps on the slope, doesn't mean it's not a slope, or slippery.
You just contradicted your point in the same post.
It doesn't have to be that there's a losing side and a winning side, just because one side makes a profit and the other doesn't.
There's always economies of scale. It might cost you $10 to buy a set of those rubber thingys under your laptop, but it might cost Apple $6 to buy them in bulk and ship them to you. Even if you didn't get your money's worth of the service with other broken parts and support calls, and it ends up effectively costing you $8 (out of $250 say) for those rubber thingys, they're still making money, and you're still saving money.
It works the same way for every company, not just Apple.
But granted, extended warranties tend to be a massive ripoff, and they tend to be how companies like Best Buy and Circuit City made most of their money. Devices usually fail within the warranty period, or they tend to fail around the life expectency of the device. Very few devices fail in between.
Think about how difficult it is to counterfeit paper money. Think about how difficult it traditionally has been to do so. Certainly, most countries try to stay ahead of the curve. But the timeframe is typically measured in the decades. It's easy to simply encode basic biometric information into a passport (like a barcode), which could only be decoded by the passport system itself. You don't need fancy microchips and whatnot.
Putting microchips into passports was probably the fancy idea of some technologically-retarded representative or ten who were sold on the idea by a lobbyist from the company making the microchips. The free trips on the company's private jet probably helped too.
Typically, a terrorist wouldn't have a fake passport anyway. The 9/11 hijackers certainly didn't. They might have had multiple credentials, but they got those credentials from their native country's government. So all of this is rather pointless anyway. I'd rather put the money into something more useful, like training air marshals.
The patriot act isn't terrible, it's just putting the whole country on a slippery slope. If the next president has any sense, everything would turn out ok. If the next president will be as contemptuous of the constitution as the current one, the patriot act only puts the country that much closer to being a real police state.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know the initials for the federal law enforcement agency in China was FBI too...
How do you post at +2 with trolls like that?
I'm not specifically talking about GP, but to answer your question, while some people hold a wealth of information on computers, mathematics, and/or science, they cannot see outside of their mom's basement.
So just because their comments on science and technology may be +5's, their comments on social topics might end up being -1. Or, maybe they just have an agenda to push; just because someone's smart doesn't mean they're good or moral.
And since surveillance is clearly one of the things the government is empowered to do, and such uses of surveillance aren't expressly forbidden, there is a school of Constitutional thought that says this is allowable.
It's not in the constitution. The constitution doesn't explicitly say anything about surveillance, which, if it really was indeed literally read, would mean that these powers are given to the state and to the people. The constitution does forbid government from searching and seizing without a warrant. That's as close to surveillance as it gets. A literalist's interpretation would be that surveillance is a state and people's right. A moderate reader would extend the fourth amendment to cover surveillance on private property. Only people who selectively read the constitution would think that it gives the federal government such a power. As an aside, I sometimes wonder if it's the same selective reading as one does with inconsistent religious texts.
This is a bug in the Bill of Rights. It was hacked together all too hastily, therefore it isn't very good about laying out actual rights. It's more focused on curbing specific abuses.
No, there's no bug in the Bill of Rights. It's a bug in society and human nature, which has affected our representation in the government. The bill of rights is a bill to prevent the government from taking away rights. It never was a bill to grant rights, and it never was intended as such. We have all the rights. We are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable rights." This is established in the declaration of independence, the second most important document in constitutional law. The government can only take away our rights, and the Bill of Rights enumerates the rights that they cannot take away.
The bug is in thinking that the government grants us rights. The bug is in not caring about our rights, in apathy. The bug is in taking for granted that the government will not take away our rights and that if it does so, it's for our own good (related to the first "bug", where the mentality usually goes, the government can taketh what it can give). The bug is in us. We elected those people to represent us, or did you not vote last election? And if you didn't but were qualified to (over 18), it's even more your fault that the jackasses who are in office made it there. We put these people in a position to represent us. If that's not the representation we want, then it's time to replace them.
they had learned "aiming skills" instead of "driving skills".
Well to be fair, if you had bad aim and hit her in the eye while driving, you'd be a road hazard too.
But on a serious note, driving too slow is a problem. The worst of these are the slow drivers camping on the left or center lane. Those guys are the equivalent of moving road hazards.
Oh, and the only reason they enforce drunk driving the way they do is because of activist groups like MADD.
Are you European by any chance? Things are a little different there. Allow me to elaborate:
First off, we are allowed to carry guns. This right was upheld very recently. And we are allowed to make arrests if we see wrongdoing. It's called citizen's arrest. In some places, we're even allowed to shoot people who tresspass onto private property.
Second, the police are not the upright moral citizens of society that they might be elsewhere (yeah, if you really believe that, keep dreaming). The police in the US are the trash who dropped out of high school, the former bullies who cut class just to terrorize other kids, and the dried out jocks. Most of them care barely read, and a good majority of them have never even read a summary of the laws they're supposed to enforce. The smarter law enforcement types typically get promoted off the streets very quickly, or work as an FBI agent or some such. In the cities at least, they're quickly out of patrol and into more sophisticated cases. But in small towns, it's a mixed bag.
Surgeons
Third, to pick apart your examples, doctors' prescriptions are honored by insurance and the pharmacy. It's very difficult to get your hands on drugs without a prescription, but it's not impossible. Drug companies don't like that though, because they can still be held liable if anything happens. So it's like law enforcement not engaging in warrantless wiretapping because they're afraid any evidence would get thrown out (which it would).
Legal citizens are allowed to give advice to lawyers. Anyone can give advice to anyone; it's just advice. Lawyers, because they are held to a certain standard by their peers (the bar), are liable for the legal advice they give. The average citizen is not, because they're not considered a peer of a lawyer. But you can represent yourself as your own lawyer if you want. You have that right.
Postmen have no right to open your letters for the same reason police can't enter someone's property without a warrant. The line has been blurred recently only because the federal government doesn't hold itself to the constitution. But postmen opening letters is forbidden by the constitution. Heck, even warrantless opening letters by law enforcement is forbidden.
And finally, citizens do cut open surgeons. What, does a surgeon cut himself open when he's got an appendix infection? Is a doctor not a citizen? Having a surgeon cut you open is about trust. You have to trust your surgeon. It's your choice who gets to cut you up. And sometimes, your surgeon is bad anyway. Nobody asks the police to be trailed, or wiretapped, or have the doors to their home knocked down. Nobody wants anyone sifting through their private belongings. You want your surgeon to operate on you. If your surgeon wants you to operate on him or her, there's nothing illegal about that. The question is, would your surgeon ask such a question, and do you want to operate on your surgeon? And if you were a surgeon yourself, or you had such training and it was an emergency, maybe the answer to both questions is yes.
For most places, there are no exceptions to seat belt wearing. Nobody has exceptions. It's just that the police don't bother to cite seat belt violations for people who spend more time getting in and out than actually driving. That doesn't mean they can't, and it doesn't mean a judge won't find you guilty.
We are not all equal. But that applies to natural talent. Some people are better at certain things than others. That's what "we are not all equal" means. In the eyes of the law, especially with respect to what rights we have and don't, we are or ideally should be all equal. The legal system is not supposed to create social classes. If we were not all equal in the eyes of the law, then it would be doing exactly that. And the problem currently is, police think they're legally in a social class above everyone else, and that simply isn't true.
It's one thing to play a game for it's own sake if you're doing it for fun. But if you want to go out there and engage in your endeavour seriously, then it's all about winning. It's about self confidence, pride in onself and one's achivements, and discipline. It's about pushing onself to accomplish something, even if there's someone better than you, you know you've done the absolute best you could, and you can be proud of that. If you play for fun, then you're not playing at your best, and you'll always think, "I can beat him if I played seriously." You'll always be the champion in your own mind, while going nowhere in reality. And that means you'll never feel the sense of accomplishment or achivement.
Winning is how you determine who's better, and who can play at what level. When you're good at something, it's not worth your while to compete seriously against an amatuer. You want to compete against people who are as good as you, or better. These are the people worth competing against, and worth striving to beat. If you don't compete to win, you'll never know where you're standing, and realize your potential. Or, as I previously mentioned, you'll delude yourself and simply not go anywhere.
To be able to even qualify for the olympics and world championships, to be able to compete with the best of the best from all around the world, that alone is something worthy of being proud of. And to be able to beat them, that's even better. And until you understand how that feels, you'll never understand why people compete to win. Your drivel about how people should play for the sake of playing smacks of the everybody-is-a-winner-and-nobody-is-a-loser mentality. And that mentality is what's destroying the US today.
Striving to win isn't the disease. The disease is winning for the sake of the trail of money that follows. Not even fame from winning would do such a thing, as fame is a popularity contest, and people who cheat quickly fall out of favor from the populace. It's money.
The problem with doping is that if it is allowed, only the wealthy who can afford the drugs would win. It'd be a matter of how much money and access to medical research, and not a matter of training and natural talent. If it comes to that, you might as well make competitions consist of one event that sees who's dick stays up for longer after taking viagra.
Yes, there are inequalities between poor societies and wealthy ones. The dominance of the US in olympic medal count is anecdotal evidence of this. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that the smaller, poor countries simply can't compete. The vast number of medalists, especially gold medalists, from small and usually poor countries is anecdotal evidence of this. So the olympics, irrespective of a person or a country's financial standing, is pretty damn fair. And it's only able to be fair because there's little to no money involved in getting good, only lots of hard work.
Since the fall of the U.S.S.R, Russia's been working hard at westernizing. They're just completing the transition by invading another smaller country for oil under the pretext of national security.
Tongue-in-cheek of course.
This is one of two truly insightful comments in the entire thread. The other post is about how gas giants that wander towards the star might have their gasses blown away by the star over time, and leave only the core.
Just because the configuration of a star system isn't exactly like ours, doesn't mean it can't support life. Our gas giants have a multitude of moons, many of whom are very close to Earth in composition. And it's not like gas giants suddenly up and leave their moons behind when they head towards the sun. If any of them wandered closer to the sun, I'll bet some of those moons will have a high probability of life.
Furthermore, the smaller rocky planets in the center certainly have a chance of becoming the moon of a gas giant as it passes by. Granted, any existing complex life on those planets might be wiped out by the change, but that doesn't mean new complex life wouldn't arise afterwards once the gas giant settles into a stable orbit.
The conclusion that our type of system is rare is probably valid based on the new models. But the conclusion that intelligent life is equally as rare is probably invalid.
Depends on how thick that line is.
there's a reason why the death rate among chemists has dropped, and its because we don't work like this guy does.
And the ones who do can't die a second time.
"With great power comes great responsibility." This is a quote I think everyone knows, especially after the movie came out.
Freedom is this great power. Freedom is the greatest power. To decide for ourselves what we want to be, to do, to think is the ultimate responsibility. It is not only that we have a choice, but that we understand that we have this choice, and we know the options before us, that is freedom.
And it scares the crap out of most people today. That there are choices means that there is a question. And that there is a question means that there is a need for a logically justified answer. After all, if a question can be answered irrationally, then there really never was a question. And to have freedom, everything must be questioned, and any answers to the questions must be justified. Instead, most people want to be told what to do, to be told how to think and what is right and wrong, because they cannot or do not want to by themselves decide such important things. They hold on to religion and tradition for this reason, because they find comfort and security in not having to think, to question their choices at every turn, to fully understand the ramifications of their actions. They want the simple, content life of following directions, so that they won't have to question, so that they won't have to take responsibility for their answers. It is fairly obvious that the trend over the past 60 years has been to point fingers at other people, to find blame in others at our own shortcomings. We have often wondered what happened to personal accountability. The paradigm shift away from thinking about "what not to do next time" to "how to make someone else pay for my mistake" has resulted in the desire to give up the power to rule onself.
So in the US, everyone has freedom, most of whom do not want it, more of whom do not understand what it fully means. Some of whom want it think it is something it really isn't. How can a democracy remain free if an overwhelming majority desire comfort and not freedom?
I still bring up Total Annihilation on the occasion. That was released in '97.
Not if you had really stubby feet.
This is correct. Civil disobedience requires that one follow the laws of the land. Which is to say, if the law demands a certain amount of jail time for a certain infraction, then the person being civil disobedient needs to serve that jail time after commiting the infraction. Otherwise, it's just blatant disregard for the presence of a legal system. And that's effectively anarchy, or the support of anarchy.
The caveat is that civil disobedience doesn't really apply to civil suits and corporations.
They also tend to be malnourished, and hence look underdeveloped, not to mention that gymnasts tend to be on the shorter side. And when I say malnourished, it's relative to the food available in the west, and in particular, the US. They're probably very well fed compared to other people in China.
A few days later, Bush will announce the Patriot Act II, which will provide federal funding to the states to suck more.
It would kind of suck if you were filming yourself get electrocuted and your audience got electrocuted as well when they watched it. It'd be some kind of sick horror film come to life if you had died and your audience died with you.
Much of the appeal of film on the big screen is that you get to fill in the gaps with your own experiences. That makes what's happening on the screen feel much more personal. The audience doesn't really want to feel what you feel. The audience wants to feel what they think they would be feeling if they were in your shoes.
The only reason the country swings back to relative sanity is because of the public backlash, the outcry that results from the government going too far. If people suddenly became apathetic, and everything indicates they are growing increasingly apathetic, there won't be any going back. Your apathetic attitude towards the patriot act is illustrative of my point.
Yet, we still haven't gotten past the civil rights problems the Cold War introduced. It's still bad in the government's eyes to be socialist or communist. We talk of unbiased hiring practices and complain when government agencies get "politicised", but when it comes to people with leftist ideals, they can't get a government job even if they wanted to, thanks to McCarthyism and the red scare.
In fact, look at, FISA, a product of the Cold War. Even that level of secrecy in the government would've made the founders raise their eyebrows. After all, it can't be a government for the people if the people don't know, and thus cannot comment on, what the government is doing. And now, the current government makes the one that enacted FISA look tame.
Just because there are bumps on the slope, doesn't mean it's not a slope, or slippery.
You just contradicted your point in the same post.
It doesn't have to be that there's a losing side and a winning side, just because one side makes a profit and the other doesn't.
There's always economies of scale. It might cost you $10 to buy a set of those rubber thingys under your laptop, but it might cost Apple $6 to buy them in bulk and ship them to you. Even if you didn't get your money's worth of the service with other broken parts and support calls, and it ends up effectively costing you $8 (out of $250 say) for those rubber thingys, they're still making money, and you're still saving money.
It works the same way for every company, not just Apple.
But granted, extended warranties tend to be a massive ripoff, and they tend to be how companies like Best Buy and Circuit City made most of their money. Devices usually fail within the warranty period, or they tend to fail around the life expectency of the device. Very few devices fail in between.
Didn't you read the fine print? They don't ship to P.O. boxes.
Think about how difficult it is to counterfeit paper money. Think about how difficult it traditionally has been to do so. Certainly, most countries try to stay ahead of the curve. But the timeframe is typically measured in the decades. It's easy to simply encode basic biometric information into a passport (like a barcode), which could only be decoded by the passport system itself. You don't need fancy microchips and whatnot.
Putting microchips into passports was probably the fancy idea of some technologically-retarded representative or ten who were sold on the idea by a lobbyist from the company making the microchips. The free trips on the company's private jet probably helped too.
Typically, a terrorist wouldn't have a fake passport anyway. The 9/11 hijackers certainly didn't. They might have had multiple credentials, but they got those credentials from their native country's government. So all of this is rather pointless anyway. I'd rather put the money into something more useful, like training air marshals.
The patriot act isn't terrible, it's just putting the whole country on a slippery slope. If the next president has any sense, everything would turn out ok. If the next president will be as contemptuous of the constitution as the current one, the patriot act only puts the country that much closer to being a real police state.
You stroked 8 times, and you're already limp?
Yep, they have to train to hold it in for the longest time possible, and know what to do when the dam breaks.