That's interesting. Every time I've tried to contact a representative about some issue which they don't already support, I've gotten politely listened to by a lackey (er, assistant), and then nothing seems to come of it. How did you get to meet with them?... on the other hand, as Duradin says below, trying takes effort, and I didn't try very hard to contact my representative. Next time I should think carefully about whether the issue warrants taking the time for an invitation to lunch and a nicely hand-written letter. (I wonder if calligraphy would be legible enough to get the message across, and unique enough to pique their interest...)
And there are many more people who would love to hire other people to be Active for them. It's not financially lucrative enough that people do it (?), but in theory someone like you or I could pay money to We Sit For You Incorporated and they would sit on our behalf, while maintaining our anonymity.
No picketer ever stopped someone from entering a store. Such an action would be an arrestable offence, as it would involve, at minimum, the physical assault of prospective customers, and probably trespass.
What if you were to somehow build a temporary (yet durable) wall around the complete perimeter of the business? That would neither assault customers nor tresspass on the business's property. I'm not saying people have done that, but it seems theoretically possible to prevent someone from entering a business without assault or tresspass. It's probably still illegal to do that, I bet.
History strongly suggests that not going to war saves more lives in the long run.
When has the human race ever had a "long run" where we didn't go to war or were not killing one another?
Sorry, it's kindof snarky -- clearly, not being at war saves a lot of lives. The death toll of the Civil War was tremendous in US history, for example.
Germany got pretty soundly shafted by the Treaty of Versailles. The allies determined the war reparations, and Germany didn't get to contest it. Repayment was estimated to last ~50 years, in contrast to previous treaties between France and Germany (France had repaid in ~3 years). Industrial equipemt was carted out of Germany and moved to France and other places. They were assigned full "guilt" for the war, when it was more a clusterfuck of epic proportions deriving from preexisting treaty entanglements. The costs of reparations basically completely raped what was left of the German economy, to the point that many (such as Keynes) felt it was impossible for them to actually pay them.
Others point out that history shows they were less screwed than they though -- given that they WERE able to recover enough to wage war, weren't occupied after WWI, and so on. However, the perception of the German people were that they were unfairly (and thoroughly) screwed. That dissatisfaction was one of the contributing factors in the Nazi regime coming to power. Perhaps if Germany hadn't been as unilaterally blamed, there might not have been a second world war... or if there had been, it might not have involved the sorts of exterminations that the Nazis inflicted on the world.
I could be wrong on all this. One of the few things I remember from my high school AP European History class was "Germany got screwed by the treaty of Versailles", and I may be interpreting the Wikipedia article incorrectly.
As an American, I'm pretty sad to say that the US pretty effectively "won" in the warfare it pursued against the natives. It was war. On the one hand, I can't imagine being able to "give it back" (see the amazing TED talk video about the Lakotah), but on the other hand... it wasn't my ancestors doing it, since they hadn't immigrated yet. Sorry.
I tend to blow all of my moderation points on one or two threads, and then sit back and read more. I also rarely have things worth posting as contributing, but generally I take moderating as a Duty that I should participate in, and thus am willing to sacrifice my potentially good writing for the sake of making sure others get modded up. I usually end up modding up posts which I find either interesting, or are written-better-than-I-would-have.
There are probably about five times a year when I am willing to cancel my mods to write something. Perhaps a third of those are postings to undo mis-clicks on moderation in the new system. I have roughly a similar number of times that I post something, and then regret not being able to mod something in a thread... probably because I read a lot more before I'm willing to comment.
It doesn't work that well, let me tell you. User data is there, but programs need to be reinstalled to access it. System comes back squeaky clean, but everything needs to be changed to my personal liking.
Have you considered using a disk imaging program like Norton Ghost to take a snapshot of your system after you've installed all of your programs and configured your workspace to your preferences?
Just because your life is worse than his doesn't make his problem less real. The reality is, many people live from paycheck to paycheck, and asking them to take an 80% pay cut for two weeks or a month is undue hardship for them. I'm tremendously grateful that I'm not in your shoes, but I also think you might consider extending some empathy for people who are also in an unfortunate situation. There's always someone worse off than you, just as there's (almost) always someone more wealthy.
I think the wasps have already developed an implantation procedure, but animal human trials have met with some resistance. The implant donors have had some nasty side effects, too.
On the other hand, there are a huge number of parents who might sign up if it means they can instant-queue the Little Mermaid or Aladdin or Bolt or Monsters Inc or Toy Story over and over again for their kids without worrying about scratching up a DVD.
The convenience factor is such that I'll use it even when I own the DVD, sometimes. Skipping menus and commercials and "don't steal this" BS is wonderful.
What are the costs of scaling this up to cover the infrastructure needed to handle an entire neighborhood, city, or state? What are the costs of supporting it, both in terms of technicians and people manning phone lines?
I suspect you're right, though, in that those costs probably don't scale as much with traffic as it does with subscribers.
The courts seem to say otherwise. When naked photos (or drawings, or stick figures) get considered pornography, it's pretty much up to the judge, not the intent of the producer.
However, after 9-11, just about everyone realizes that your choices are certain death now, or certain death later when we crash the plane into a juicy target. We've already seen that passengers prefer the former, as it happened that very day to when they forced the fourth plane to crash.
I'd heard claims of such, but had also read counterclaims that had said it'd been debunked, so I wasn't really sure. Thanks for the reference to lgw's post. I haven't seen names, but then I haven't gone looking.
Given how many people get killed by our military, not to mention opposition forces, and that Wikileaks tried hard to redact as many as they could (?), I have a hard time condemning Assange.
Slashdot Mirror
And by "up a wall", you mean "into other peoples' pockets", right?
Why does freeing it make it easier to read?
You might wam them up first, yeah.
That's interesting. Every time I've tried to contact a representative about some issue which they don't already support, I've gotten politely listened to by a lackey (er, assistant), and then nothing seems to come of it. How did you get to meet with them? ... on the other hand, as Duradin says below, trying takes effort, and I didn't try very hard to contact my representative. Next time I should think carefully about whether the issue warrants taking the time for an invitation to lunch and a nicely hand-written letter. (I wonder if calligraphy would be legible enough to get the message across, and unique enough to pique their interest...)
And there are many more people who would love to hire other people to be Active for them. It's not financially lucrative enough that people do it (?), but in theory someone like you or I could pay money to We Sit For You Incorporated and they would sit on our behalf, while maintaining our anonymity.
No picketer ever stopped someone from entering a store. Such an action would be an arrestable offence, as it would involve, at minimum, the physical assault of prospective customers, and probably trespass.
What if you were to somehow build a temporary (yet durable) wall around the complete perimeter of the business? That would neither assault customers nor tresspass on the business's property. I'm not saying people have done that, but it seems theoretically possible to prevent someone from entering a business without assault or tresspass. It's probably still illegal to do that, I bet.
I imagine they'd like to see if a herd of ED-209s would help prevent/discourage it.
History strongly suggests that not going to war saves more lives in the long run.
When has the human race ever had a "long run" where we didn't go to war or were not killing one another?
Sorry, it's kindof snarky -- clearly, not being at war saves a lot of lives. The death toll of the Civil War was tremendous in US history, for example.
High tech Soldier-Saving toys = better medical training techniques for non-military personnel also.
Germany got pretty soundly shafted by the Treaty of Versailles. The allies determined the war reparations, and Germany didn't get to contest it. Repayment was estimated to last ~50 years, in contrast to previous treaties between France and Germany (France had repaid in ~3 years). Industrial equipemt was carted out of Germany and moved to France and other places. They were assigned full "guilt" for the war, when it was more a clusterfuck of epic proportions deriving from preexisting treaty entanglements. The costs of reparations basically completely raped what was left of the German economy, to the point that many (such as Keynes) felt it was impossible for them to actually pay them.
Others point out that history shows they were less screwed than they though -- given that they WERE able to recover enough to wage war, weren't occupied after WWI, and so on. However, the perception of the German people were that they were unfairly (and thoroughly) screwed. That dissatisfaction was one of the contributing factors in the Nazi regime coming to power. Perhaps if Germany hadn't been as unilaterally blamed, there might not have been a second world war... or if there had been, it might not have involved the sorts of exterminations that the Nazis inflicted on the world.
I could be wrong on all this. One of the few things I remember from my high school AP European History class was "Germany got screwed by the treaty of Versailles", and I may be interpreting the Wikipedia article incorrectly.
As an American, I'm pretty sad to say that the US pretty effectively "won" in the warfare it pursued against the natives. It was war. On the one hand, I can't imagine being able to "give it back" (see the amazing TED talk video about the Lakotah), but on the other hand ... it wasn't my ancestors doing it, since they hadn't immigrated yet. Sorry.
I tend to blow all of my moderation points on one or two threads, and then sit back and read more. I also rarely have things worth posting as contributing, but generally I take moderating as a Duty that I should participate in, and thus am willing to sacrifice my potentially good writing for the sake of making sure others get modded up. I usually end up modding up posts which I find either interesting, or are written-better-than-I-would-have.
There are probably about five times a year when I am willing to cancel my mods to write something. Perhaps a third of those are postings to undo mis-clicks on moderation in the new system. I have roughly a similar number of times that I post something, and then regret not being able to mod something in a thread... probably because I read a lot more before I'm willing to comment.
It doesn't work that well, let me tell you. User data is there, but programs need to be reinstalled to access it. System comes back squeaky clean, but everything needs to be changed to my personal liking.
Have you considered using a disk imaging program like Norton Ghost to take a snapshot of your system after you've installed all of your programs and configured your workspace to your preferences?
Just because your life is worse than his doesn't make his problem less real. The reality is, many people live from paycheck to paycheck, and asking them to take an 80% pay cut for two weeks or a month is undue hardship for them. I'm tremendously grateful that I'm not in your shoes, but I also think you might consider extending some empathy for people who are also in an unfortunate situation. There's always someone worse off than you, just as there's (almost) always someone more wealthy.
I hear you can milk anything with nipples. ;)
tanks
You're welcome. ;)
I think the wasps have already developed an implantation procedure, but animal human trials have met with some resistance. The implant donors have had some nasty side effects, too.
On the other hand, there are a huge number of parents who might sign up if it means they can instant-queue the Little Mermaid or Aladdin or Bolt or Monsters Inc or Toy Story over and over again for their kids without worrying about scratching up a DVD.
The convenience factor is such that I'll use it even when I own the DVD, sometimes. Skipping menus and commercials and "don't steal this" BS is wonderful.
What are the costs of scaling this up to cover the infrastructure needed to handle an entire neighborhood, city, or state? What are the costs of supporting it, both in terms of technicians and people manning phone lines?
I suspect you're right, though, in that those costs probably don't scale as much with traffic as it does with subscribers.
I thought the article yesterday said that he'd also had ~$30k of his personal funds frozen as well? I could be wrong.
When I google "12.7 mm in inches", it tells me that 12.7mm is 0.5 inches. So, .50 cal handguns should be okay.
The courts seem to say otherwise. When naked photos (or drawings, or stick figures) get considered pornography, it's pretty much up to the judge, not the intent of the producer.
However, after 9-11, just about everyone realizes that your choices are certain death now, or certain death later when we crash the plane into a juicy target. We've already seen that passengers prefer the former, as it happened that very day to when they forced the fourth plane to crash.
Assange may not consider the US his enemy, but the US government surely considers him an enemy.
I'd heard claims of such, but had also read counterclaims that had said it'd been debunked, so I wasn't really sure. Thanks for the reference to lgw's post. I haven't seen names, but then I haven't gone looking.
Given how many people get killed by our military, not to mention opposition forces, and that Wikileaks tried hard to redact as many as they could (?), I have a hard time condemning Assange.