If you measure by the only useful metric there is, per capita charitable donations (which include the private donations your statistics do not) the US crushes everyone. By miles.
The myth that Americans are stingy has been repeatedly debunked and only the most disingenuous individual could argue agans the fact that Americans win on total giving hands down.
First, that metric is fairly useless as it ignores the wealth of the countries and looks only at the dollar amount. An analogy would be yourself donating $50K to charity and Bill Gates donating the same amount. Who is the more generous? A much more balanced comparison would be each of you donating X% of your total funds and assets.
So let's take wealth into account (as measured by the GNI) and see what the PDF you linked to says.
Chart I shows that, in 2004, the US net ODA was 0.17% of the GNI. Chart II shows that the total ODA was $19.7 Billion. Table I says that the "total economic engagement" was $99 Billion -- I assume that was the data you referred to.
A simple calculation shows that the "total economic engagement" was about 0.85% of the GNI.
As no information for the "total economic engagement" was given for any other country, no meaningful comparisons can be made. However, the net ODA of Norway (0.87%) and Denmark (0.85%) is already at or above that level.
Also, a non-trivial amount of private donations by Luxembourg (0.83%) and probably Sweden (0.78%) and the Netherlands (0.73%) will put them above that line.
Let's check this. A quick googling found an International Herald Tribune article that says:
Even when measured as a percent of gross national income, the U.S. ranks in the top third when all forms of international giving - official aid, philanthropy and remittances - are counted. (The top two givers are Sweden and Luxembourg.)
I am not a native English speaker but I'd wager a guess that "in the top third" (which usually means somewhere between the 26th and 33rd percentile) is synonymous neither with "crushes everyone by miles" nor with "wins hands down".
So yes, you are not as stingy as some would make you appear but definitely not as generous as you'd like to be viewed.
F*** you, Bev. You're not getting my vote. And I'll do what I can to get my neighbours to not vote for you too.
Please note the bolded part. In the current system, your vote isn't worth the paper it is recorded on unless you manage to convince enough people to vote with you.
or shot with live rounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings The ones killed weren't even involved in the protest, they where just in the line of fire. Anytime someone says the US government would never use military force on US citizens or open fire on them I remind them of Kent State, May 4, 1970
"Citizens of the world are striking back at 24/7 state surveillance by pulling out their cameraphones and filming inept officials, deadly healthcare lapses and thuggish cops. So-called Sous-veillance is seeing more and more people posting damning footage of official misdemenours to sites such as YouTube to shame them into action."
"shame them into action"?
You have a state-sponsored organized crime organization with the power to fuck you over five ways till Sunday on a whim and absolutely no oversight, personal responsibility and no consequences for their actions. And the best solution you can think about is to "shame" them???
What a great idea! Why don't you apply it to the rest of your criminals. Murderers? Shame them! Rapists? Shame them! At the least it will free a lot of space in your overcrowded prisons.
Instead, start contacting your local representatives en-masse and tell them that if they want to be re-elected, they better do something about corruption and abuse of authority.
Learn something from MADD. Whether you you agree with their cause or not, their tactics are quite effective.
Power corrupts. The only thing that will keep people in a position of power (police, politicians, teachers, whatever) from abusing it is knowledge that the consequences -- for them personally -- will be so damaging as to outweigh any possible benefits. Make the risk not worth it.
I *WANT* to respect the police force, I *WANT* to be secure in the knowledge that they "serve and protect" me, but as long as it is possible for them to be corrupt or abusive with impunity, that is not going to happen.
Though most policemen are good people, I've heard stories of various 'Rambos' and other scummy types in police departments that would give the Zimbabwe PD a good run for the money. Most of these abuses are not reported by other cops because of guaranteed retribution. We need the anonymous blogs to get this crap in the open and dealt with. This case needs to be unsealed (public office after-all) and dealt with fairly.
Here's the problem: Policemen are given a mandate to use violence without adequate public oversight on how they exercise their power.
Since the police, as an organization, advocates and acts against increasing such oversight, they are a corrupt organization, not much better than organized crime gangs.
No, I take it back. They are worse than organized crime gangs since their job is to protect us.
Any person who knowingly belongs to a corrupt organization and does not actively seeks to clean it up, is not "good people".
I didn't really read the article. I just remembered that Jinx was supposed to be about 5-6 times more massive than Earth and have a surface gravity 1.7-1.8 g.
Too much gang fighting can worsen your skills on one-on-one combat. I knew of this one guy who got really good at fighting gangs for local charities and stuff. He was huge, and he didn't even work out. He got his ass kicked by one man. You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half-a-dozen people than when your only fighting just one person.
Next thing you're gonna tell us that you're not left-handed.
If you keep your documents and correspondence on a 3rd-party documents, what happens if at some time the regime declares your interests illegal and the service provider is persuaded (or eager) to support a fishing expedition?
> It's possible this guy had set this all up in the case he got fired, and then we he saw it was going to happen he put it into motion.
And it is also possible that Childs is completely innocent, because what we have is just a newspaper article full of "he said, she said" allegations. The whole story is as one-sided as it gets.
Allow me to highlight the important parts:
(07-14) 19:23 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco's new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.
Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer network administrator who lives in Pittsburg, has been charged with four counts of computer tampering and is scheduled to be arraigned today.
Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored.
Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn't work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.
He was taken into custody Sunday. City officials said late Monday that they had made some headway into cracking his pass codes and regaining access to the system.
Childs has worked for the city for about five years. One official with knowledge of the case said he had been disciplined on the job in recent months for poor performance and that his supervisors had tried to fire him.
"They weren't able to do it - this was kind of his insurance policy," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the attempted firing was a personnel matter.
Authorities say Childs began tampering with the computer system June 20. The damage is still being assessed, but authorities say undoing his denial of access to other system administrators could cost millions of dollars.
Officials also said they feared that although Childs is in jail, he may have enabled a third party to access the system by telephone or other electronic device and order the destruction of hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents.
Authorities have searched Childs' home and car for a device that could be used in such an attack, but so far no such evidence has been found.
As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said.
Childs became the target of suspicions inside the technology agency this year, and the case was referred for police investigation in late June, authorities say.
At a news conference announcing Childs' arrest, District Attorney Kamala Harris was tightlipped about what his motive may have been.
"Motive is not necessarily an element of a crime," Harris said. "This city employee committed four felonies."
She added, "This involves compromising a public system that we rely on. Its integrity has been compromised."
The system continues to operate even though administrators have limited or no access, officials said.
"Right now our system is up and running and we haven't had any problems so far," said Ron Vinson, chief administrative officer for the Department of Technology.
Vinson said the city is "working around the clock" to make sure the system is maintained and operable.
Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom, said the mayor was "confident that (the Department of Technology) is doing everything necessary to maintain the integrity of the city's computer networks."
Childs appeared in court Monday but did not have a lawyer assigned to him.
>But no guns. Heaven forbid you buy a scope on craigslist:)
It's a problem if you live in Canada.
I got a set of Lazer Tag "guns". They are lots of fun but my son complained that he cannot hit with them. So, I got a holo (red dot) sight to mount on his gun. Problem is, the LCD screens interferes with the mounting so I needed to buy a riser.
This is not a gun nor a weapon of any kind, not even a scope. Just two pieces of machined metal held together with a screw. Worth about $10 online.
Not a single store I could find agreed to ship to Canada. And don't talk to me about postage. Wherever the warehouse is, Ontario is closer to it than at least 5 states.
A lot of plans do not involve paying for received SMS. But even if yours doesn't, you are not paying for air time since that is charged at a constant by-minute or by-second rate, no matter what you do.
On top of the air time, you can get extra charges: SMS, long distance, roaming, etc.
> This still does not make it any more sensible to argue against it by making an analogy to not paying for incoming calls, since you do pay for those on most cell phones.
No, you don't. You pay for the "air time", which is a different concept. In effect, you are paying for the time that you are "connected" to the network (oversimplified but you get the idea).
The caller incurs long distance charges (if any) and all other fees. The recipient only pays for the time they were connected (per second or per minute or have the length of the session deducted from their plan). If, for example, the recipient did not answer and the caller was directed to the voice mail, the caller would pay in full but the recipient will pay nothing (until they dial to their voice mail box and listen to the message, then they will pay for the duration of their call).
Please tell me how you feel about reading books about enlarging your genitalia. Would that make you feel more like a man, or more like a woman? And please don't leave out any details.
What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. How do you feel?
Many of my clients use eNom as does my current employer and I've never heard an ill word against them.
Then allow mine to be the first.
I have several domains registered with eNom. I originally chose them because their resellers offered a fairly complete package (DNS, web & email forwarding, etc.) for a competitive price. Turned out that the specific reseller I went with opened a reseller account for me as well, which simplified things a bit when family members needed their own domains, but I digress...
The problems started when I discovered that I was missing some important emails. After quite a bit of back and forth with eNom and my 3rd party email provider, it turned out that eNom had set up aggressive "spam filters" on their email forwarding service and silently dropped anything that triggered them.
The funny part was that I was still getting dozens spam messages (which my 3rd party email provider's caught with >99% success) but some legitimate messages were silently nuked.
I finally managed to get high enough on eNom's support to get real answers. They flatly refused to fix it in any of the ways I suggested: - Allow people to opt out of their spam filtering. - Quarantine the messages for a set amount of time instead of dropping them, with online access. - Send the recipient a summary of messages that were dropped (title, sender and date). - Send a bounce message to the sender of the alleged spammer.
They readily admitted that the bandwidth it saves them outweighs any concerns of false positives. They just don't care.
My only recourse was to use a different DNS provider so I ended up paying extra for something that should have been included in the package.
Slashdot Mirror
First, that metric is fairly useless as it ignores the wealth of the countries and looks only at the dollar amount.
An analogy would be yourself donating $50K to charity and Bill Gates donating the same amount. Who is the more generous?
A much more balanced comparison would be each of you donating X% of your total funds and assets.
So let's take wealth into account (as measured by the GNI) and see what the PDF you linked to says.
Chart I shows that, in 2004, the US net ODA was 0.17% of the GNI.
Chart II shows that the total ODA was $19.7 Billion.
Table I says that the "total economic engagement" was $99 Billion -- I assume that was the data you referred to.
A simple calculation shows that the "total economic engagement" was about 0.85% of the GNI.
As no information for the "total economic engagement" was given for any other country, no meaningful comparisons can be made.
However, the net ODA of Norway (0.87%) and Denmark (0.85%) is already at or above that level.
Also, a non-trivial amount of private donations by Luxembourg (0.83%) and probably Sweden (0.78%) and the Netherlands (0.73%) will put them above that line.
Let's check this. A quick googling found an International Herald Tribune article that says:
I am not a native English speaker but I'd wager a guess that "in the top third" (which usually means somewhere between the 26th and 33rd percentile) is synonymous neither with "crushes everyone by miles" nor with "wins hands down".
So yes, you are not as stingy as some would make you appear but definitely not as generous as you'd like to be viewed.
There is no research.
Can someone forward this note to the Canadian ISPs (Rogers, Bell) as an example of how this should be handled?
Please note the bolded part.
In the current system, your vote isn't worth the paper it is recorded on unless you manage to convince enough people to vote with you.
Science is all about falsifiable claims and testable predictions.
Don't see anything faith-related there.
And here I am, all out of mod points...
"shame them into action"?
You have a state-sponsored organized crime organization with the power to fuck you over five ways till Sunday on a whim and absolutely no oversight, personal responsibility and no consequences for their actions. And the best solution you can think about is to "shame" them???
What a great idea! Why don't you apply it to the rest of your criminals. Murderers? Shame them! Rapists? Shame them!
At the least it will free a lot of space in your overcrowded prisons.
Instead, start contacting your local representatives en-masse and tell them that if they want to be re-elected, they better do something about corruption and abuse of authority.
Learn something from MADD. Whether you you agree with their cause or not, their tactics are quite effective.
Power corrupts. The only thing that will keep people in a position of power (police, politicians, teachers, whatever) from abusing it is knowledge that the consequences -- for them personally -- will be so damaging as to outweigh any possible benefits. Make the risk not worth it.
I *WANT* to respect the police force, I *WANT* to be secure in the knowledge that they "serve and protect" me, but as long as it is possible for them to be corrupt or abusive with impunity, that is not going to happen.
Here's the problem:
Policemen are given a mandate to use violence without adequate public oversight on how they exercise their power.
Since the police, as an organization, advocates and acts against increasing such oversight, they are a corrupt organization, not much better than organized crime gangs.
No, I take it back. They are worse than organized crime gangs since their job is to protect us.
Any person who knowingly belongs to a corrupt organization and does not actively seeks to clean it up, is not "good people".
Why do we, as a society, tolerate it?
I didn't really read the article.
I just remembered that Jinx was supposed to be about 5-6 times more massive than Earth and have a surface gravity 1.7-1.8 g.
The similarity to TFA struck me as funny.
Finally, we can breed Jinxians!
Next thing you're gonna tell us that you're not left-handed.
If you keep your documents and correspondence on a 3rd-party documents, what happens if at some time the regime declares your interests illegal and the service provider is persuaded (or eager) to support a fishing expedition?
> It's possible this guy had set this all up in the case he got fired, and then we he saw it was going to happen he put it into motion.
And it is also possible that Childs is completely innocent, because what we have is just a newspaper article full of "he said, she said" allegations. The whole story is as one-sided as it gets.
Allow me to highlight the important parts:
>But no guns. Heaven forbid you buy a scope on craigslist :)
It's a problem if you live in Canada.
I got a set of Lazer Tag "guns". They are lots of fun but my son complained that he cannot hit with them.
So, I got a holo (red dot) sight to mount on his gun.
Problem is, the LCD screens interferes with the mounting so I needed to buy a riser.
This is not a gun nor a weapon of any kind, not even a scope. Just two pieces of machined metal held together with a screw. Worth about $10 online.
Not a single store I could find agreed to ship to Canada.
And don't talk to me about postage. Wherever the warehouse is, Ontario is closer to it than at least 5 states.
How long until that argument is extended to making a "copy" of a tune or written material in your memory can also constitute copyright infringement?
(No, I am not going to link to "the right to read" here, find it yourself).
Incorrect.
A lot of plans do not involve paying for received SMS.
But even if yours doesn't, you are not paying for air time since that is charged at a constant by-minute or by-second rate, no matter what you do.
On top of the air time, you can get extra charges: SMS, long distance, roaming, etc.
> This still does not make it any more sensible to argue against it by making an analogy to not paying for incoming calls, since you do pay for those on most cell phones.
No, you don't. You pay for the "air time", which is a different concept. In effect, you are paying for the time that you are "connected" to the network (oversimplified but you get the idea).
The caller incurs long distance charges (if any) and all other fees.
The recipient only pays for the time they were connected (per second or per minute or have the length of the session deducted from their plan).
If, for example, the recipient did not answer and the caller was directed to the voice mail, the caller would pay in full but the recipient will pay nothing (until they dial to their voice mail box and listen to the message, then they will pay for the duration of their call).
What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. How do you feel?
Then allow mine to be the first.
I have several domains registered with eNom. I originally chose them because their resellers offered a fairly complete package (DNS, web & email forwarding, etc.) for a competitive price. Turned out that the specific reseller I went with opened a reseller account for me as well, which simplified things a bit when family members needed their own domains, but I digress...
The problems started when I discovered that I was missing some important emails.
After quite a bit of back and forth with eNom and my 3rd party email provider, it turned out that eNom had set up aggressive "spam filters" on their email forwarding service and silently dropped anything that triggered them.
The funny part was that I was still getting dozens spam messages (which my 3rd party email provider's caught with >99% success) but some legitimate messages were silently nuked.
I finally managed to get high enough on eNom's support to get real answers. They flatly refused to fix it in any of the ways I suggested:
- Allow people to opt out of their spam filtering.
- Quarantine the messages for a set amount of time instead of dropping them, with online access.
- Send the recipient a summary of messages that were dropped (title, sender and date).
- Send a bounce message to the sender of the alleged spammer.
They readily admitted that the bandwidth it saves them outweighs any concerns of false positives. They just don't care.
My only recourse was to use a different DNS provider so I ended up paying extra for something that should have been included in the package.
Are there still 8GB fast dual-channel SLC USB sticks available?
Under NAFTA, we cannot.
Where's the Adobe Flash support?