Oracle has been losing mindshare in the government market for years. They cost too damn much and people are starting to realize that PostgreSQL, MySQL and MS SQL Server really do the exact same damn thing as Oracle for 95% of the meaningful use cases out there. Add on to that that a highly qualified system administrator can learn how to become a decent administrator of any of those with a little ramp up time and of course Oracle is scared of open source (and Microsoft but that's a different story).
Is to let federal project managers directly hire their own contractor teams and have them report to the government. Federal managers need more latitude in how they spend money with their evaluation criteria being primarily on how effective the team's delivery actually was. If responsibility and authority were both in their hands, and federal managers could be fired based on how poorly their teams executed an initiative you'd suddenly find a lot more federal contract teams working together smoothly.
The federal government doesn't have the culture to actually create and run something like this and just stamping your feet while insisting it much change won't change it. The civil service system itself militates against what you want because it makes it hard for the government to actually hire the right people, fire the wrong people and reward people based on performance. There is nothing intrinsic to government work that says this cannot happen, but our system as it actually exists all but ensures that you'll not have the ability to build this sort of team. Add on top of that even if you did, you'd need looser rules of procurement to let these employees take risks, try new things, etc. You know like when someone on staff says "hey let's buy 500 small servers instead of 50 REALLY expensive blades" and the experiment gets caught up in procurement kabuki until the whole purchase order is, well, OBE...
The powerful can absorb the costs more. If you have $20m in cash and inflation reduces your currency's value by 50% that is a negligible loss for you in terms of being able to live comfortably. However, someone who had only $20k in cash savings has been effectively crippled because the loss to their savings has a much nearer term effect on their quality of life. That is to say, a millionaire can get by on inflated millions in savings and be fine until they die if they live a middle class life style, but a middle class person may have just much of their ability to survive unemployment wiped out or reduced from a year down to 3 or six months.
Such a shame that Nintendo didn't learn from how quickly the Wiimote was copied by their competitors that gimmicks can be quickly copied and nullified as competitive advantages. The Wii U is a really nice console, but they just don't have a clue how to take on Sony and Microsoft...
I'm 30 and just at the very edge of the gen x-millennial divide. One thing that has been a major problem for me and most of the gen exers and millennials I know that are somewhat intelligent with regard to the boomers is respecting them as a generation. Sure, there are individuals worthy of respect but in my experience they are, as much as any generation can be, the epitome of what is wrong with and killing America. This is true of them, taken as a whole, regardless of whether or not they are liberal, moderate, conservative, etc.
The fact is that when the generations before the boomers handed over the reigns of power starting in 1992, we saw a precipitous decline in the quality of governance in corporate America, governments and everywhere else you looked. Boomers can squawk "correlation is not causation" until they are all entitled to Medicare paid out of my generation's meager earnings, but you cannot deny the *ahem* "correlation" there. Since the WWII and Silent generations have waned in their influence, our society has gone off a fucking cliff.
And you know what the worst part is? I have "conservative" boomer acquaintances who merely find a conservative angle for their entitled attitude. They'll say "I earned my Social Security, you young fucker" and I say back to them that it's mathematically impossible for most of my generation to even have a shot at that, we're still paying and you motherfucker want to tell me how you are entitled to cut of my paycheck because you didn't vote for anyone who was willing to restore the Social Security trust fund LBJ liquidated to fund Vietnam? Piss off! If they got started in 1992, it would probably be fixed by now.
Ballmer left the company in shambles in terms of their standing and momentum in the industry. Whoever takes over is going to have to be very aggressive and will probably run head long into antitrust issues if they are too serious about rebuilding Microsoft's standing and momentum. What Microsoft needs at this point:
1. Release Windows 8.2 with the start menu fully restored, Metro apps able to run on the desktop mode and Metro only a primary UI option on touch screen PCs unless the user configures otherwise (either way should still be an option). 2. Release Windows RT 2 tablet in $200 and $300 32gb and 64gb options with full Microsoft Office. Microsoft needs to just flood the market with low cost, Kindle-like Windows tablets that'll run any traditional Windows app recompiled for ARM (another restriction that needs to go from Windows 8). 3. Attack the living room not just with the XBox One, but alternatives to protocols like AirPlay that are open, documented and patent-free for other vendors to implement. Microsoft can isolate Apple even more by returning to its roots of being of one of the most open big vendors in the industry.
In the site/book Stuff White People Like, the article about "Awareness" summed up much of this mentality:
This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges. Because, the only challenge of raising awareness is people not being aware. In a worst case scenario, if you fail someone doesn’t know about the problem. End of story.
Getting clean water consistently in a hell hole like much of Africa is a truly transformative experience for many people. Public sanitation, reliable electricity, etc. Nothing your mobile/web app is doing is as transformative for the world as replicating consistent, basic utilities for all of mankind. It's unsexy work that is more commonly associated with redneck laborers (guys who actually make these systems work) than hipsters.
He "exceeded his access privileges" or whatever the language used in the CFAA is. The CFAA is so loose that I would surprised if he didn't violate it somehow in doing this.
And you know what, you morons who modded me flamebait, I don't think it should be considered a legal issue. However it probably is a violation of the CFAA and courts tend to look very favorably on taking away any funds that appear to be proceeds related to a crime. Heck, prisoners are often blocked from selling media rights to their stories so they cannot profit.
And when it reaches a certain level, Facebook may swoop in with their lawyers and claim that it can block him receiving them back it's money earned from a technically criminal act.
Is to just hire Sinofsky back and give him carte blanche to fire anyone and everyone who supported Ballmer as a job perk. With the chance to fire the woman who forced Metro on him as a job perk, they could probably get him more reasonable on the compensation package.
But it'll be very interesting to see what happens when they use it on the severely retarded and possibly find that they have at best the consciousness of a dog. The "ethics" of the medical profession are already starting to take a real downward spiral at the higher levels with people like Peter Singer (a respected "bioethicist" at Princeton) and now the Oxford Medical Journal saying that literal infanticide is no different than abortion.
This is what we pro-lifers mean when we talk about the "culture of death." If you asked the average woman about this, she'd think you're a complete monster for suggesting the existence of a "woman's right to kill a 6 week old infant." Yet this is what at least one wing of our ruling class is increasingly coming to believe is a real right. The average guy on the street has no idea how his simple understanding of an issue often is quite reasonable while our ruling class's take is just evil by comparison. Similarly, this is how you get the delta between what the Republican base feels Capitalism means and what the RNC feels Capitalism means which should explain to many why a lot of people vote the way they do seemingly "against their interests." What always matters is what the guy at the top thinks an issue means.
BYOD is already starting to see push back from IT in a serious way because companies are starting to realize that at the very least they need some sort of "enterprise Android" they can control. You want to bring some crappy $100 Android phone that'll never get updated into a big company? That's the height of stupidity. That's about as smart as letting your employees bring their virus-laden Windows boxes and probably barely ever patched Macs (most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!) and use them for official company business on site.
Another thing that very well may help BlackBerry recover is that BB10 and BES 10 just got ATOs from the Department of Defense and the DoD's public announcement about the iPhone more or less said the iPhone would be crippled and managed by BES 10 anyway.
By the time this thread gets up to 200 comments, there will probably be several people saying "but Christianity/Judaism did X for thousands of years too!" to try to downplay the fact that Islamic societies are really not that much different in many ways from where they started. Go back 2,000 years and you'll find that the level of behavior we all find barbaric (crucifiction, torture, rape-as-war-tactic and many others) were very common all across the world. What you'll find, though, is that the societies that systematically started moving away from them the hardest are the ones that embraced monotheism of the Judao-Christian line.
The problem isn't the Arabs, Persians, Egyptians, etc. The communities that embrace the other Abrahamic religions in those countries are peaceful. A Christian Arab is no more likely to violently attack The Other on the street than a typical mainline American Christian. Similarly, white American converts to Islam are often as violent and extreme as conservative Arab and Persian Muslims.
If Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Coptic, not Islamic, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
As a resident of Virginia, where taxes are low and there a lot of good software engineers employed tenuously in the government contracting business, I'd just like to say thank you to the Massachusetts legislature. Send your people here, have them write an interstate contract enforceable in Virginia not Massachusetts and reap the savings!
If when a company like Facebook gets caught (as I believe they did recently) grabbing contact data without authorization they'd get the "CFAA-book" thrown at them by the federal government. Novel idea, right? Your mobile phone is your computer system in the palm of your hand. They greatly exceeded reasonable access. They're "hackers**" so eff them and eff them hard in the federal court for "hacking."
**Term Nazis: we all know Hacker != Cracker outside of an African-American Studies program on race in IT...;)
Microsoft is a software company targetting hardware here. Android vendors are hardware companies targetting software here. It's bad for the former to bring the cost of software down to $0. Likewise, it's bad for the latter for Microsoft to practically give the hardware away. Since Android's marketshare is now so much higher than that of Windows 8, and iOS would barely even notice the loss, the only companies that might have a real claim of injury would be Blackberry and those behind things like FirefoxOS.
When I read Leviticus and Deuteronomy, what struck me the most about them was how fair they were to the defendant. Modern liberals and even many conservatives roll their eyes and treat the Old Testament Law as barbaric, but in reality it was actually more advanced in protecting the defendant than our system. Nothing equivalent to a felony (that I can remember) in the Old Testament was convictable with less than two credible eye witnesses and the punishment for false testimony was to be punished according to the standard for the charges. That means anyone who bears false witness in a murder case is automatically going to be executed no matter the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The "testilying" cops of today would be mercilessly stoned to death under Old Testament Law and if the defendant could prove that the prosecutor knowingly brought their perjury into the case could possibly get the prosecutor executed as well.
I'd like to see that standard of perjury brought to our legal system and I'd also like to see the Old Testament's open court proceedings where more than one person can be convicted simultaneously in the same proceeding as well. Cases would take longer, but it would provide a lot of balance. For example, today a defense attorney would be allowed to bring charges against a testilying cop and have the jury consider the perjury charges during their deliberations.
At one point, I saw a stat saying that there about 600-700 laws in the Old Testament that cover the entire civil-criminal-religious legal life of ancient Israel. There are approximately 4,200 federal criminal acts one can commit. Many of these are not even genuine crimes but charges that can be used to get around the 8th amendment like "possession of a firearm while committing a drug crime." Really. Either you are actually committing a violent felony with said firearm or it's just a way of overcharging someone for a fact that is at best ancillary to the primary criminal act.
1. Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Act 2. Triple the budget of the reestablished US Border Patrol and direct it to hire at least 40k new agents for the southern border and at least 10k new agents for the northern border. 3. Double the size of the US Coast Guard. 4. Spend the remainder of Homeland Security's former annual budget on hardening the electrical grid against an EMP attack. 5. Suspend all travel visas from countries that have a serious problem with their citizens being recruited by radical Islamic countries.
See? No war, no torture, no idenfinite detention, no one's junk getting man-handled at the airport. Homeland security is 95% "keep the borders secure, keep the known problem populations away from our territory."
Of course, it'll never happen because even if the MIC and DHS could be overpowered politically, you'd have half the country saying "no sir, I'd rather maintain the status quo than be perceived to be discriminating against people from different countries."
The case was a battle between those who would privatize good health, making it a privilege to be enjoyed in proportion to wealth, and those who see it as a right for all — and a central component of a fair society and well-functioning economy
Another central component of a fair society and well-functioning economy is a feedback mechanism for bad behaviors that discourages people from committing them before they become social parasites. We live in a society that is extremely self-indulgent in all of the vices and then many still shriek about a right which amounts to bailing them out of their own bad behavior at tax payer expense.
You know what that sounds like? The poor man's equivalent of TARP.
And I say this as someone who is actually not opposed to a social safety net for indigent children, the truly disabled, the retarded, and others who cannot really support themselves or bear responsibility for their choices.
And yet women are set to overtake men in terms of higher education achievement (if they haven't already in your country -- they have here).
1. Women are also typically in "fluff majors" that have lower career prospects. 2. Women also lead the way in student loan debt making a lot of middle class girls undesirable marriage prospects. Want to get married and have a home? Fantastic. Nothing says that more than having the better part of a new mortgage in inescapable student loan debt already going into the marriage! 3. Women in STEM fields also benefit heavily from either affirmative action programs or a mindset of "let's fast track her because we need more diversity!" 4. Grade inflation. Nuff said.
The constitutional convention was called in order to draft updates to the Articles of Confederation because the existing government didn't work. In fact, many elected officials in it didn't even bother showing up for office because it was so weak and pointless. What they discovered was that it was probably a better idea to simply draft a new constitution altogether than try to piecemeal the thing into a working form of government.
Now why was it done in secret? Because the founding fathers feared that Britain or one of the continental powers would exploit the situation if they discovered that the states were so discontented with the strength of their national government that they were preparing major revisions. They feared that perceived weakness could cause a second war after the states were financially exhausted from the first one.
And as to why it was done without popular approval, it was done effectively as a form of a treaty between the states. There was nothing stopping the people from ousting their legislature and voting to rescind membership in the federation. In fact, the people of the New England states did almost precisely that during Thomas Jefferson's presidency over the way his neutrality acts crippled their economy. The US was a voluntary union of states until the Civil War. Right or wrong, the Civil War removed the legal right of a state to rescind membership, though this was done by the threat of raw military power being exercised extralegally.
So in fact, they are quite different situations as until around 1860 any state wishing to leave peacefully had the freedom to rescind membership in the Union.
Does the whole church count as a mass-murderer in this case? E.g. the Crusades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades [wikipedia.org] ) caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
Around the time of the first crusade, there was may be 100 million people living in the territory between Portugal and Persia. "Hudreds of millions" would mean most of the human population around the entire planet was exterminated. Exaggeration on this order is important because it is not a minor twisting of the truth, but an outright lie when presented to gullable people who have little concept of history.
Another thing, did you know that the state of Texas executes as many people per year as the Spanish Inquisition did per year? You'd never know that from the propaganda about the Inquisition. You'd also never know that a) it explicitly had by royal decree no jurisdiction over avowed Jews and Muslims, b) it had the highest standards of conduct for any royal court of law in continental Europe in the land and c) it spent much of its time processing out secular criminals that pretended to be "conversos" (Jews and Muslims pretending to be Catholics) in order to get into its jurisdiction because secular courts were far more inhumane. Oh and it was run by the Spanish secular state and was only created when the King of Spain threatened to withdraw his troops from Italy if the Pope didn't give him an Inquisition under his royal authority. That is to say... the Roman Catholic Church as a matter of public record opposed the institution of the Spanish Inquisition until the Pope was forced to face the political prospects of fractured Italy facing the Ottoman army alone.
Re:Lets take it to its logical conclusion
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Beware the Internet
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Gross criminal negligence leading to homicide has been considered a form of murder in most civilizations since the dawn of time. It is technically still murder in even in the US. In addition to that, the same is true of serious felonies where there is a possibility of killing someone during the commission of the felony. For example, if you rape a woman and accidentally kill her by trying to knock her out that is felony murder regardless of your intent to kill.
Consider this scenario. You have a nuclear power plant connected to the Internet. Some Chinese general decides to stick one to us with or without Beijing's blessing and gets their hackers to mess with it, causing it to go into a meltdown. The result is thousands of people suddenly killed or dying slowly of radiation poisoning.
Was that foreesable? Yes. Was that preventable? Yes. Did the power plant's owners take any measures to disconnect those systems from the general public? No. So it was preventable, it was known to be a serious risk and the owners didn't do a damn thing about. Got news for you, that is extremely serious negligence.
None of these problems are hard to solve
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Beware the Internet
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Utilities connected to the public internet? Make doing that except on a one time, emergency basis a felony and threaten to charge the entire management with felony murder if anyone dies because of a "cyber attack." The possibility of facing the death penalty for criminal negligence leading to homicide will cause them to suddenly find a way to invest whatever resources are needed to get off the internet post haste.
Stolen trade secrets? Just build a private company network with no internet access. ZOMG it's so expensive that like... you can buy a "corporate machine" for like $400 now. A KVM or dual monitor set up would be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Oracle has been losing mindshare in the government market for years. They cost too damn much and people are starting to realize that PostgreSQL, MySQL and MS SQL Server really do the exact same damn thing as Oracle for 95% of the meaningful use cases out there. Add on to that that a highly qualified system administrator can learn how to become a decent administrator of any of those with a little ramp up time and of course Oracle is scared of open source (and Microsoft but that's a different story).
Is to let federal project managers directly hire their own contractor teams and have them report to the government. Federal managers need more latitude in how they spend money with their evaluation criteria being primarily on how effective the team's delivery actually was. If responsibility and authority were both in their hands, and federal managers could be fired based on how poorly their teams executed an initiative you'd suddenly find a lot more federal contract teams working together smoothly.
The federal government doesn't have the culture to actually create and run something like this and just stamping your feet while insisting it much change won't change it. The civil service system itself militates against what you want because it makes it hard for the government to actually hire the right people, fire the wrong people and reward people based on performance. There is nothing intrinsic to government work that says this cannot happen, but our system as it actually exists all but ensures that you'll not have the ability to build this sort of team. Add on top of that even if you did, you'd need looser rules of procurement to let these employees take risks, try new things, etc. You know like when someone on staff says "hey let's buy 500 small servers instead of 50 REALLY expensive blades" and the experiment gets caught up in procurement kabuki until the whole purchase order is, well, OBE...
The powerful can absorb the costs more. If you have $20m in cash and inflation reduces your currency's value by 50% that is a negligible loss for you in terms of being able to live comfortably. However, someone who had only $20k in cash savings has been effectively crippled because the loss to their savings has a much nearer term effect on their quality of life. That is to say, a millionaire can get by on inflated millions in savings and be fine until they die if they live a middle class life style, but a middle class person may have just much of their ability to survive unemployment wiped out or reduced from a year down to 3 or six months.
Such a shame that Nintendo didn't learn from how quickly the Wiimote was copied by their competitors that gimmicks can be quickly copied and nullified as competitive advantages. The Wii U is a really nice console, but they just don't have a clue how to take on Sony and Microsoft...
I'm 30 and just at the very edge of the gen x-millennial divide. One thing that has been a major problem for me and most of the gen exers and millennials I know that are somewhat intelligent with regard to the boomers is respecting them as a generation. Sure, there are individuals worthy of respect but in my experience they are, as much as any generation can be, the epitome of what is wrong with and killing America. This is true of them, taken as a whole, regardless of whether or not they are liberal, moderate, conservative, etc.
The fact is that when the generations before the boomers handed over the reigns of power starting in 1992, we saw a precipitous decline in the quality of governance in corporate America, governments and everywhere else you looked. Boomers can squawk "correlation is not causation" until they are all entitled to Medicare paid out of my generation's meager earnings, but you cannot deny the *ahem* "correlation" there. Since the WWII and Silent generations have waned in their influence, our society has gone off a fucking cliff.
And you know what the worst part is? I have "conservative" boomer acquaintances who merely find a conservative angle for their entitled attitude. They'll say "I earned my Social Security, you young fucker" and I say back to them that it's mathematically impossible for most of my generation to even have a shot at that, we're still paying and you motherfucker want to tell me how you are entitled to cut of my paycheck because you didn't vote for anyone who was willing to restore the Social Security trust fund LBJ liquidated to fund Vietnam? Piss off! If they got started in 1992, it would probably be fixed by now.
And then they get to tell us how evil we are...
Ballmer left the company in shambles in terms of their standing and momentum in the industry. Whoever takes over is going to have to be very aggressive and will probably run head long into antitrust issues if they are too serious about rebuilding Microsoft's standing and momentum. What Microsoft needs at this point:
1. Release Windows 8.2 with the start menu fully restored, Metro apps able to run on the desktop mode and Metro only a primary UI option on touch screen PCs unless the user configures otherwise (either way should still be an option).
2. Release Windows RT 2 tablet in $200 and $300 32gb and 64gb options with full Microsoft Office. Microsoft needs to just flood the market with low cost, Kindle-like Windows tablets that'll run any traditional Windows app recompiled for ARM (another restriction that needs to go from Windows 8).
3. Attack the living room not just with the XBox One, but alternatives to protocols like AirPlay that are open, documented and patent-free for other vendors to implement. Microsoft can isolate Apple even more by returning to its roots of being of one of the most open big vendors in the industry.
In the site/book Stuff White People Like, the article about "Awareness" summed up much of this mentality:
Getting clean water consistently in a hell hole like much of Africa is a truly transformative experience for many people. Public sanitation, reliable electricity, etc. Nothing your mobile/web app is doing is as transformative for the world as replicating consistent, basic utilities for all of mankind. It's unsexy work that is more commonly associated with redneck laborers (guys who actually make these systems work) than hipsters.
He "exceeded his access privileges" or whatever the language used in the CFAA is. The CFAA is so loose that I would surprised if he didn't violate it somehow in doing this.
And you know what, you morons who modded me flamebait, I don't think it should be considered a legal issue. However it probably is a violation of the CFAA and courts tend to look very favorably on taking away any funds that appear to be proceeds related to a crime. Heck, prisoners are often blocked from selling media rights to their stories so they cannot profit.
And when it reaches a certain level, Facebook may swoop in with their lawyers and claim that it can block him receiving them back it's money earned from a technically criminal act.
Is to just hire Sinofsky back and give him carte blanche to fire anyone and everyone who supported Ballmer as a job perk. With the chance to fire the woman who forced Metro on him as a job perk, they could probably get him more reasonable on the compensation package.
But it'll be very interesting to see what happens when they use it on the severely retarded and possibly find that they have at best the consciousness of a dog. The "ethics" of the medical profession are already starting to take a real downward spiral at the higher levels with people like Peter Singer (a respected "bioethicist" at Princeton) and now the Oxford Medical Journal saying that literal infanticide is no different than abortion.
This is what we pro-lifers mean when we talk about the "culture of death." If you asked the average woman about this, she'd think you're a complete monster for suggesting the existence of a "woman's right to kill a 6 week old infant." Yet this is what at least one wing of our ruling class is increasingly coming to believe is a real right. The average guy on the street has no idea how his simple understanding of an issue often is quite reasonable while our ruling class's take is just evil by comparison. Similarly, this is how you get the delta between what the Republican base feels Capitalism means and what the RNC feels Capitalism means which should explain to many why a lot of people vote the way they do seemingly "against their interests." What always matters is what the guy at the top thinks an issue means.
BYOD is already starting to see push back from IT in a serious way because companies are starting to realize that at the very least they need some sort of "enterprise Android" they can control. You want to bring some crappy $100 Android phone that'll never get updated into a big company? That's the height of stupidity. That's about as smart as letting your employees bring their virus-laden Windows boxes and probably barely ever patched Macs (most Mac users I know don't even know what version of OS X they're using!) and use them for official company business on site.
Another thing that very well may help BlackBerry recover is that BB10 and BES 10 just got ATOs from the Department of Defense and the DoD's public announcement about the iPhone more or less said the iPhone would be crippled and managed by BES 10 anyway.
By the time this thread gets up to 200 comments, there will probably be several people saying "but Christianity/Judaism did X for thousands of years too!" to try to downplay the fact that Islamic societies are really not that much different in many ways from where they started. Go back 2,000 years and you'll find that the level of behavior we all find barbaric (crucifiction, torture, rape-as-war-tactic and many others) were very common all across the world. What you'll find, though, is that the societies that systematically started moving away from them the hardest are the ones that embraced monotheism of the Judao-Christian line.
The problem isn't the Arabs, Persians, Egyptians, etc. The communities that embrace the other Abrahamic religions in those countries are peaceful. A Christian Arab is no more likely to violently attack The Other on the street than a typical mainline American Christian. Similarly, white American converts to Islam are often as violent and extreme as conservative Arab and Persian Muslims.
If Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Coptic, not Islamic, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
As a resident of Virginia, where taxes are low and there a lot of good software engineers employed tenuously in the government contracting business, I'd just like to say thank you to the Massachusetts legislature. Send your people here, have them write an interstate contract enforceable in Virginia not Massachusetts and reap the savings!
If when a company like Facebook gets caught (as I believe they did recently) grabbing contact data without authorization they'd get the "CFAA-book" thrown at them by the federal government. Novel idea, right? Your mobile phone is your computer system in the palm of your hand. They greatly exceeded reasonable access. They're "hackers**" so eff them and eff them hard in the federal court for "hacking."
**Term Nazis: we all know Hacker != Cracker outside of an African-American Studies program on race in IT... ;)
Microsoft is a software company targetting hardware here. Android vendors are hardware companies targetting software here. It's bad for the former to bring the cost of software down to $0. Likewise, it's bad for the latter for Microsoft to practically give the hardware away. Since Android's marketshare is now so much higher than that of Windows 8, and iOS would barely even notice the loss, the only companies that might have a real claim of injury would be Blackberry and those behind things like FirefoxOS.
When I read Leviticus and Deuteronomy, what struck me the most about them was how fair they were to the defendant. Modern liberals and even many conservatives roll their eyes and treat the Old Testament Law as barbaric, but in reality it was actually more advanced in protecting the defendant than our system. Nothing equivalent to a felony (that I can remember) in the Old Testament was convictable with less than two credible eye witnesses and the punishment for false testimony was to be punished according to the standard for the charges. That means anyone who bears false witness in a murder case is automatically going to be executed no matter the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The "testilying" cops of today would be mercilessly stoned to death under Old Testament Law and if the defendant could prove that the prosecutor knowingly brought their perjury into the case could possibly get the prosecutor executed as well.
I'd like to see that standard of perjury brought to our legal system and I'd also like to see the Old Testament's open court proceedings where more than one person can be convicted simultaneously in the same proceeding as well. Cases would take longer, but it would provide a lot of balance. For example, today a defense attorney would be allowed to bring charges against a testilying cop and have the jury consider the perjury charges during their deliberations.
At one point, I saw a stat saying that there about 600-700 laws in the Old Testament that cover the entire civil-criminal-religious legal life of ancient Israel. There are approximately 4,200 federal criminal acts one can commit. Many of these are not even genuine crimes but charges that can be used to get around the 8th amendment like "possession of a firearm while committing a drug crime." Really. Either you are actually committing a violent felony with said firearm or it's just a way of overcharging someone for a fact that is at best ancillary to the primary criminal act.
1. Repeal the USA PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Act
2. Triple the budget of the reestablished US Border Patrol and direct it to hire at least 40k new agents for the southern border and at least 10k new agents for the northern border.
3. Double the size of the US Coast Guard.
4. Spend the remainder of Homeland Security's former annual budget on hardening the electrical grid against an EMP attack.
5. Suspend all travel visas from countries that have a serious problem with their citizens being recruited by radical Islamic countries.
See? No war, no torture, no idenfinite detention, no one's junk getting man-handled at the airport. Homeland security is 95% "keep the borders secure, keep the known problem populations away from our territory."
Of course, it'll never happen because even if the MIC and DHS could be overpowered politically, you'd have half the country saying "no sir, I'd rather maintain the status quo than be perceived to be discriminating against people from different countries."
Another central component of a fair society and well-functioning economy is a feedback mechanism for bad behaviors that discourages people from committing them before they become social parasites. We live in a society that is extremely self-indulgent in all of the vices and then many still shriek about a right which amounts to bailing them out of their own bad behavior at tax payer expense.
You know what that sounds like? The poor man's equivalent of TARP.
And I say this as someone who is actually not opposed to a social safety net for indigent children, the truly disabled, the retarded, and others who cannot really support themselves or bear responsibility for their choices.
1. Women are also typically in "fluff majors" that have lower career prospects.
2. Women also lead the way in student loan debt making a lot of middle class girls undesirable marriage prospects. Want to get married and have a home? Fantastic. Nothing says that more than having the better part of a new mortgage in inescapable student loan debt already going into the marriage!
3. Women in STEM fields also benefit heavily from either affirmative action programs or a mindset of "let's fast track her because we need more diversity!"
4. Grade inflation. Nuff said.
The constitutional convention was called in order to draft updates to the Articles of Confederation because the existing government didn't work. In fact, many elected officials in it didn't even bother showing up for office because it was so weak and pointless. What they discovered was that it was probably a better idea to simply draft a new constitution altogether than try to piecemeal the thing into a working form of government.
Now why was it done in secret? Because the founding fathers feared that Britain or one of the continental powers would exploit the situation if they discovered that the states were so discontented with the strength of their national government that they were preparing major revisions. They feared that perceived weakness could cause a second war after the states were financially exhausted from the first one.
And as to why it was done without popular approval, it was done effectively as a form of a treaty between the states. There was nothing stopping the people from ousting their legislature and voting to rescind membership in the federation. In fact, the people of the New England states did almost precisely that during Thomas Jefferson's presidency over the way his neutrality acts crippled their economy. The US was a voluntary union of states until the Civil War. Right or wrong, the Civil War removed the legal right of a state to rescind membership, though this was done by the threat of raw military power being exercised extralegally.
So in fact, they are quite different situations as until around 1860 any state wishing to leave peacefully had the freedom to rescind membership in the Union.
Around the time of the first crusade, there was may be 100 million people living in the territory between Portugal and Persia. "Hudreds of millions" would mean most of the human population around the entire planet was exterminated. Exaggeration on this order is important because it is not a minor twisting of the truth, but an outright lie when presented to gullable people who have little concept of history.
Another thing, did you know that the state of Texas executes as many people per year as the Spanish Inquisition did per year? You'd never know that from the propaganda about the Inquisition. You'd also never know that a) it explicitly had by royal decree no jurisdiction over avowed Jews and Muslims, b) it had the highest standards of conduct for any royal court of law in continental Europe in the land and c) it spent much of its time processing out secular criminals that pretended to be "conversos" (Jews and Muslims pretending to be Catholics) in order to get into its jurisdiction because secular courts were far more inhumane. Oh and it was run by the Spanish secular state and was only created when the King of Spain threatened to withdraw his troops from Italy if the Pope didn't give him an Inquisition under his royal authority. That is to say... the Roman Catholic Church as a matter of public record opposed the institution of the Spanish Inquisition until the Pope was forced to face the political prospects of fractured Italy facing the Ottoman army alone.
Gross criminal negligence leading to homicide has been considered a form of murder in most civilizations since the dawn of time. It is technically still murder in even in the US. In addition to that, the same is true of serious felonies where there is a possibility of killing someone during the commission of the felony. For example, if you rape a woman and accidentally kill her by trying to knock her out that is felony murder regardless of your intent to kill.
Consider this scenario. You have a nuclear power plant connected to the Internet. Some Chinese general decides to stick one to us with or without Beijing's blessing and gets their hackers to mess with it, causing it to go into a meltdown. The result is thousands of people suddenly killed or dying slowly of radiation poisoning.
Was that foreesable? Yes. Was that preventable? Yes. Did the power plant's owners take any measures to disconnect those systems from the general public? No. So it was preventable, it was known to be a serious risk and the owners didn't do a damn thing about. Got news for you, that is extremely serious negligence.
Utilities connected to the public internet? Make doing that except on a one time, emergency basis a felony and threaten to charge the entire management with felony murder if anyone dies because of a "cyber attack." The possibility of facing the death penalty for criminal negligence leading to homicide will cause them to suddenly find a way to invest whatever resources are needed to get off the internet post haste.
Stolen trade secrets? Just build a private company network with no internet access. ZOMG it's so expensive that like... you can buy a "corporate machine" for like $400 now. A KVM or dual monitor set up would be fine.