Many of us do NOT believe in the all powerful Nanny state. We believe that we can do many things, like provide for our own retirement, health concerns more efficiently if we keep more of our own money, and invest and save it towards such things.
This works rather nicely if you assume everyone earns enough money to provide for their own retirement and healthcare; this simply isn't true. Taking a look at America, the self-styled champion of this Conservative ideology, 10.5 percent of elderly people are living below the poverty line - and this percentage tends to be made up of minorites; 8% of those over 65 are black, but 24% of the elderly poor are. Right now in America, working for your entire life - up to 65 - at 45% of the average wage will still put you below the poverty line after you retire; this hardly seems fair, should the Government really not intervene?
It works even better if you assume that privatisation is more efficient; this isn't true either. Take healthcare, for example; if private companies are "more efficient" than government schemes, why is it that the USA spends more on healthcare per capita than any other developed country (OECD, 1998) without, according to the NBER, an improvement in survival or recovery rates? Surely this is an indication that a centralised system of healthcare is less wasteful than one in which everyone pays for the cover they want - if they can afford it.
I'm not saying that the govt. doesn't have its place. For common good...we do need it for defense, law enforcement, etc. But, shy of things that really cannot be best done by private citizens...I feel they need to let me keep most of the money I earn, and let ME decide my fate by allowing me to plan, and invest for the future.
Why draw the line there? Surely if you could be allowed to choose the level of law enforcement you needed, and pay for it, you could do a better job than the Government? After all, the problems in this area are similiar to those in healthcare: those who need it most are often poor and those who need it often don't anticipate the need. And as America has shown us, a profit driven atmosphere will lead only to improvements in efficiency, not in sacrificing peoples needs for profit. I'm sure there's a justification for costs to go up by three times the increase in wages, while simultaneously hospitals across the country shrink the profit-haemorrhaging Emergency Department that doesn't involve the word "greed".
Taxes on activities carried out in the Real World (tm) are taxes because those activities depend on certain services which are funded by tax monies.
This mindset is, in my opinion, both incorrect and disturbing. Firstly, activities carried out in the Real World are dependent on services funded by the government, but it does not follow that these taxes serve only to reimburse the Government for the money spent to provide these services. This is where the "disturbing" aspect comes in, in my opinion. There are a lot of services that the Government should, in my opinion, provide but which aren't directly funded by taxes on their use. Healthcare would be one such option; a universal health care system, as seen in many European states, is funded indirectly. Education, for another. And other services: unemployment support, pensions, even things like police forces. These require money, which needs to come from taxes, and income tax is not enough alone.
That's what's gonna dictate whether it will be seen on the battlefield or not. If it's cheaper to produce another gunship or tank than to stealth an existing one, it will probably only be used on first strike weapons.
Fortunately, this isn't meant to be seen on the battlefield at all.
This would be true if it had never been prohibited. Ask an average person which is worse for you, alcohol or drugs, and they'll say drugs. Now, I suspect they can't list the different health issues of the two, but I bet they can tell you that drugs are illegal. Legalizing drugs would be a signal that the Government no longer considered them bad. The fact that oranges are legal isn't a sign that they're Government-sanctioned, but the fact that paracetamol became legal is a sign that it has been researched and found to be a useful medication with few side effects.
There is illegal bootlegging and counterfieting of tobacco and liquor products. High prices and taxes pratty well ensures that. Legal drugs will probably be the same.
I would agree with you if it weren't for the massive foundation of the illegal drug trade. While you can buy "black market" alcohol and cigarettes the practice isn't widespread because the two having been legal for so long means the supply has to grow and find a demand. With drugs, the situation is the opposite; drugs are illegal, so a massive supply operation has grown up. With legalisation this operation would have to find a different demographic to target its products.
I used to work late hours in a Service Station on weekends. Working my way through Uni. Bunch of pissed guys from the local pub or bunch of stoners looking for a few munchies? I knew which was much more pleasant to deal with, less blood and mess to clean up afterwards.
A fair point, but you do need to bear in mind that legalizing cannabis alone isn't really an option, at least if you really want to cut off funds to organized crime. And other drugs can cause much more serious societal problems than cannabis or alcohol.
There is of course a problem with that - the people who traffic drugs are making millions of dollars, and they aren't just going to give up and find honest work. If you want to kill of their business then you have to totally seize the market. That means rock-bottom prices and no restrictions on who you sell to. If you sell drugs legally under the same controls as alcohol you're just going to force the dealers to target children. If you try to make tax money from it they'll undercut you. And this is without even considering the fact that it send a signal that taking drugs is safe and Government-approved; that's going to make it much more difficult for parents to keep their children away from drugs.
While the code name system is admittedly a little random, the version numbering is quite logical: year.month. Feisty will be 7.04 because it will be released in April 2007, the fourth month of the '7th' year. Releases are normally 6 months apart (exception being made for versions designed for long term support, like Dapper Drake. So the next release (Grumpy Groundhog) will probably be 7.10.
Completely, and seeing how we (I mean by that all major nuclear nations) can blow our own planet several dozen of times, I think it's completely in the feasible range:) When people talk of our ability to blow the planet up "several dozens of times", they mean that we could kill everyone and everything on it. We don't have nearly the power to literally destroy the entire planet.
If the DVDs are cheap enough, renting out 1000 a day - at least some days - isn't really that extreme at all; of course the chances of the MPAA allowing prices to drop at all are fairly remote...
If it's popular it's going to need to be far more than 144 DVDs a day - more like 1000+. Searching Google gives a ballpark figure of 30,000 customers each day for a larger supermarket (taken from Morrisons' data). If this is convenient and has a large enough library to pull from, at a reasonable price, people will make good use of it.
None - if it's a kiosk it can have terabyte of storage right there with the most popular movies stored and a high-speed link to the main repository - say 10MB/s (ISPs will happily give massive discounts if you can tell them exactly where you'll be connecting to, so the price will be low).
Surely that would just end up being a conversation between two proxies?
I'd love to see what a proxy trained on my conversations would come up with... although getting arrested when it said something I'd meant jokingly to the police would be a downer.
There's a gaping hole in this logic (which makes sense at first glance, until you think about it..)
He was able to get a trojan onto his home computer. Why on earth should we believe he wasn't able to get that, or a different, trojan onto his work computer?
But as the GP pointed out, unless it was a magic trojan that plants physical evidence it's still not an explanation.
The supreme court ruled 37 years ago that bullying is not protected speech, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: "conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason - whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior - materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech."
OpenID is as secure as you make it; you control the "backend" and you choose how much it's going to do to check it's you before it tells the website that it is. If you want convenience, it might always authenticate you if you're on your home IP, or if you've got a particular cookie. If you want security, it could ask for a username and password, or 2-factor authentication. You could require you to digitally sign a random piece of plaintext, supply biometric data and scan in 3 proofs of address, the security is limited only by your paranoia.
Of course, if you don't fancy making your own system, you'll have to use whatever livejournal/whatever makes available. The difference between this and the current system is that you can use one password for everything, without one rogue site being able to pinch it and log in wherever they want.
And to answer your question, OpenID is targeted at social networking/blogs/forums etc. Low risk sites in themselves, but if you use the same password everywhere currently they provide a chink in the armour of commercial sites. OpenID closes that chink.
Single sign-on across the internet is a bad idea. As more sites require it, people's web browsing habits will be tracked on an unprecedented scale. Seriously, what benefit does it provide?
This isn't aimed at e-commerce sites, it's aimed at blogs. And it doesn't associate your browsing habits with a person, it associates them with a webpage. What it allows for is authentication and attribution of comments, articles and the like so that you know that you're talking to the same person throughout an exchange, wherever that takes place. Your bank isn't interested in knowing whether you really own fred13.blogsite.com, only in whether you're the owner of the account, so they won't be interested in this. Finally, you don't have to reveal anything about your identity that you don't want to, since you control the backend, and they make it clear that this would be provided as an alternative to, not a replacement of, traditional logins.
The openid is just the "username". It has to be authenticated before it can be used, and what that authentication involves is up to you, or whoever you delegate the running of your openid account to. You want it to ask for a 30-digit passphrase, 2 part authentication or biometrics? You can. This is only less secure than normal if you set up your backend system to be insecure.
Asking everyone to own their own road system is more like asking everyone to own their own health care practice that asking them to pay health insurance. As you yourself said, all you're advocating is people paying for their own health insurance - what could be fairer? Similarly, everyone should pay for:
The amount of road they use, as a proportion of the cost to build and maintain it
The amount of protection they want from the police
The amount of time they need from judges
The amount of a politician's time they need or want
After all, it's not like the poorest people tend to need to use roads, need police protection, need criminal justice or need political representation as much or more than the rest of us! If they insist on living in dangerous neighborhoods, wanting to change the country's 'unfair' laws (voting rights? Whiners!) or any of the other unnecessary things they insist on doing, they can at least pay for it. No reason the rest of us should have to pay extra!
Gee those Swiss are civilised. If the car park was outside an Australian casino the EULA would have to make you certify that you didn't leave your children in the car.
I'm not sure I'd call it that civilized to keep your children alive while on car journeys...
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has a few things to say about copyright, strangely enough. In this case, it provides safe harbour for providers if their users upload infringing files, as long as they remove the copyrighted files when they receive a request.
It is none of the government's business. Any lawful powers a government can have must have been delegated, directly or indirectly, by the people. But people do not have the right to control the purchasing decisions of others - only their own. Since that right does not exist, it cannot be delegated, and cannot be among the lawful powers of the California government, nor of any other. Of course all governments exercise illegitimate, usurped powers all the time, but it is not right, it is not lawful, it should not happen, and those responsible should, at a bare minimum, be removed from office, and held civilly and criminally accountable for any harm they may have caused.
People don't have the right to control the sexual habits of others - but we prohibit sex with minors because it's in the public interest. People don't have the right to control the actions of others - but we prohibit drug trafficking because it's in the public interest. People don't have the right to control the purchases of others - but we control gun ownership because it's in the public interest. Those are fairly 'extreme' cases, granted, but there are hundreds of others; licenses, migration laws, noise control...
The government has the right to control things that are harmful to the good of the people. Pollution is harmful to the people, and so the government has every right to control it. Whether this law is a good idea is debatable - there are obvious problems, but since I haven't seen the actual text I reserve comment - but it is every bit the government's right to restrict the use of overly damaging appliances.
The problem with that plan at the moment is the sync speed - at 2.1 Mb/s Bluetooth isn't really fast enough to copy an entire setup across in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps you could use multiple connections, but even running 10 at a time you'd be looking at 3 minutes to transfer a 500MB image - allowing people to run different operating systems would need more, and many programs would take a good 10 minutes to even copy the files across, before even starting the program.
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Many of us do NOT believe in the all powerful Nanny state. We believe that we can do many things, like provide for our own retirement, health concerns more efficiently if we keep more of our own money, and invest and save it towards such things.
This works rather nicely if you assume everyone earns enough money to provide for their own retirement and healthcare; this simply isn't true. Taking a look at America, the self-styled champion of this Conservative ideology, 10.5 percent of elderly people are living below the poverty line - and this percentage tends to be made up of minorites; 8% of those over 65 are black, but 24% of the elderly poor are. Right now in America, working for your entire life - up to 65 - at 45% of the average wage will still put you below the poverty line after you retire; this hardly seems fair, should the Government really not intervene?
It works even better if you assume that privatisation is more efficient; this isn't true either. Take healthcare, for example; if private companies are "more efficient" than government schemes, why is it that the USA spends more on healthcare per capita than any other developed country (OECD, 1998) without, according to the NBER, an improvement in survival or recovery rates? Surely this is an indication that a centralised system of healthcare is less wasteful than one in which everyone pays for the cover they want - if they can afford it.
I'm not saying that the govt. doesn't have its place. For common good...we do need it for defense, law enforcement, etc. But, shy of things that really cannot be best done by private citizens...I feel they need to let me keep most of the money I earn, and let ME decide my fate by allowing me to plan, and invest for the future.Why draw the line there? Surely if you could be allowed to choose the level of law enforcement you needed, and pay for it, you could do a better job than the Government? After all, the problems in this area are similiar to those in healthcare: those who need it most are often poor and those who need it often don't anticipate the need. And as America has shown us, a profit driven atmosphere will lead only to improvements in efficiency, not in sacrificing peoples needs for profit. I'm sure there's a justification for costs to go up by three times the increase in wages, while simultaneously hospitals across the country shrink the profit-haemorrhaging Emergency Department that doesn't involve the word "greed".
Taxes on activities carried out in the Real World (tm) are taxes because those activities depend on certain services which are funded by tax monies.
This mindset is, in my opinion, both incorrect and disturbing. Firstly, activities carried out in the Real World are dependent on services funded by the government, but it does not follow that these taxes serve only to reimburse the Government for the money spent to provide these services. This is where the "disturbing" aspect comes in, in my opinion. There are a lot of services that the Government should, in my opinion, provide but which aren't directly funded by taxes on their use. Healthcare would be one such option; a universal health care system, as seen in many European states, is funded indirectly. Education, for another. And other services: unemployment support, pensions, even things like police forces. These require money, which needs to come from taxes, and income tax is not enough alone.
Fortunately, this isn't meant to be seen on the battlefield at all.
This would be true if it had never been prohibited. Ask an average person which is worse for you, alcohol or drugs, and they'll say drugs. Now, I suspect they can't list the different health issues of the two, but I bet they can tell you that drugs are illegal. Legalizing drugs would be a signal that the Government no longer considered them bad. The fact that oranges are legal isn't a sign that they're Government-sanctioned, but the fact that paracetamol became legal is a sign that it has been researched and found to be a useful medication with few side effects.
There is illegal bootlegging and counterfieting of tobacco and liquor products. High prices and taxes pratty well ensures that. Legal drugs will probably be the same.I would agree with you if it weren't for the massive foundation of the illegal drug trade. While you can buy "black market" alcohol and cigarettes the practice isn't widespread because the two having been legal for so long means the supply has to grow and find a demand. With drugs, the situation is the opposite; drugs are illegal, so a massive supply operation has grown up. With legalisation this operation would have to find a different demographic to target its products.
I used to work late hours in a Service Station on weekends. Working my way through Uni. Bunch of pissed guys from the local pub or bunch of stoners looking for a few munchies? I knew which was much more pleasant to deal with, less blood and mess to clean up afterwards.A fair point, but you do need to bear in mind that legalizing cannabis alone isn't really an option, at least if you really want to cut off funds to organized crime. And other drugs can cause much more serious societal problems than cannabis or alcohol.
There is of course a problem with that - the people who traffic drugs are making millions of dollars, and they aren't just going to give up and find honest work. If you want to kill of their business then you have to totally seize the market. That means rock-bottom prices and no restrictions on who you sell to. If you sell drugs legally under the same controls as alcohol you're just going to force the dealers to target children. If you try to make tax money from it they'll undercut you. And this is without even considering the fact that it send a signal that taking drugs is safe and Government-approved; that's going to make it much more difficult for parents to keep their children away from drugs.
While the code name system is admittedly a little random, the version numbering is quite logical: year.month. Feisty will be 7.04 because it will be released in April 2007, the fourth month of the '7th' year. Releases are normally 6 months apart (exception being made for versions designed for long term support, like Dapper Drake. So the next release (Grumpy Groundhog) will probably be 7.10.
If the DVDs are cheap enough, renting out 1000 a day - at least some days - isn't really that extreme at all; of course the chances of the MPAA allowing prices to drop at all are fairly remote...
If it's popular it's going to need to be far more than 144 DVDs a day - more like 1000+. Searching Google gives a ballpark figure of 30,000 customers each day for a larger supermarket (taken from Morrisons' data). If this is convenient and has a large enough library to pull from, at a reasonable price, people will make good use of it.
None - if it's a kiosk it can have terabyte of storage right there with the most popular movies stored and a high-speed link to the main repository - say 10MB/s (ISPs will happily give massive discounts if you can tell them exactly where you'll be connecting to, so the price will be low).
Surely that would just end up being a conversation between two proxies?
I'd love to see what a proxy trained on my conversations would come up with... although getting arrested when it said something I'd meant jokingly to the police would be a downer.
There's a gaping hole in this logic (which makes sense at first glance, until you think about it..)
He was able to get a trojan onto his home computer. Why on earth should we believe he wasn't able to get that, or a different, trojan onto his work computer?
But as the GP pointed out, unless it was a magic trojan that plants physical evidence it's still not an explanation.If I remember rightly, years ago Ford bought up inner-city land and created Ford-only carparks. It increased demand for Ford cars considerably.
The supreme court ruled 37 years ago that bullying is not protected speech, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: "conduct by the student, in class or out of it, which for any reason - whether it stems from time, place, or type of behavior - materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others is, of course, not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech."
OpenID is as secure as you make it; you control the "backend" and you choose how much it's going to do to check it's you before it tells the website that it is. If you want convenience, it might always authenticate you if you're on your home IP, or if you've got a particular cookie. If you want security, it could ask for a username and password, or 2-factor authentication. You could require you to digitally sign a random piece of plaintext, supply biometric data and scan in 3 proofs of address, the security is limited only by your paranoia.
Of course, if you don't fancy making your own system, you'll have to use whatever livejournal/whatever makes available. The difference between this and the current system is that you can use one password for everything, without one rogue site being able to pinch it and log in wherever they want.
And to answer your question, OpenID is targeted at social networking/blogs/forums etc. Low risk sites in themselves, but if you use the same password everywhere currently they provide a chink in the armour of commercial sites. OpenID closes that chink.
This isn't aimed at e-commerce sites, it's aimed at blogs. And it doesn't associate your browsing habits with a person, it associates them with a webpage. What it allows for is authentication and attribution of comments, articles and the like so that you know that you're talking to the same person throughout an exchange, wherever that takes place. Your bank isn't interested in knowing whether you really own fred13.blogsite.com, only in whether you're the owner of the account, so they won't be interested in this. Finally, you don't have to reveal anything about your identity that you don't want to, since you control the backend, and they make it clear that this would be provided as an alternative to, not a replacement of, traditional logins.
The openid is just the "username". It has to be authenticated before it can be used, and what that authentication involves is up to you, or whoever you delegate the running of your openid account to. You want it to ask for a 30-digit passphrase, 2 part authentication or biometrics? You can. This is only less secure than normal if you set up your backend system to be insecure.
BBQ.
Diculous? Is that meant to be like ridiculous*, but just the first time? And is a scenarious a serious scenario?
*I realise this isn't the re- prefix. It's a joke. Laugh.
Asking everyone to own their own road system is more like asking everyone to own their own health care practice that asking them to pay health insurance. As you yourself said, all you're advocating is people paying for their own health insurance - what could be fairer? Similarly, everyone should pay for:
After all, it's not like the poorest people tend to need to use roads, need police protection, need criminal justice or need political representation as much or more than the rest of us! If they insist on living in dangerous neighborhoods, wanting to change the country's 'unfair' laws (voting rights? Whiners!) or any of the other unnecessary things they insist on doing, they can at least pay for it. No reason the rest of us should have to pay extra!
I'm not sure I'd call it that civilized to keep your children alive while on car journeys...
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act has a few things to say about copyright, strangely enough. In this case, it provides safe harbour for providers if their users upload infringing files, as long as they remove the copyrighted files when they receive a request.
People don't have the right to control the sexual habits of others - but we prohibit sex with minors because it's in the public interest. People don't have the right to control the actions of others - but we prohibit drug trafficking because it's in the public interest. People don't have the right to control the purchases of others - but we control gun ownership because it's in the public interest. Those are fairly 'extreme' cases, granted, but there are hundreds of others; licenses, migration laws, noise control...
The government has the right to control things that are harmful to the good of the people. Pollution is harmful to the people, and so the government has every right to control it. Whether this law is a good idea is debatable - there are obvious problems, but since I haven't seen the actual text I reserve comment - but it is every bit the government's right to restrict the use of overly damaging appliances.
The problem with that plan at the moment is the sync speed - at 2.1 Mb/s Bluetooth isn't really fast enough to copy an entire setup across in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps you could use multiple connections, but even running 10 at a time you'd be looking at 3 minutes to transfer a 500MB image - allowing people to run different operating systems would need more, and many programs would take a good 10 minutes to even copy the files across, before even starting the program.
But in eBay no one's waiting around the corner to knife you and take it back...