People in general have a desire to feel effective within the confines of their world. Players addicted to video games aren't really addicted to video games. They're addicted to being successful. Video games just give them an avenue to feel successful while the rest of their life falls apart.
I'd have to second this assessment. This behavior and its consequences seem to be exactly the same as what happens to people who put their career first. The person focuses so intensely on his or her job that all other aspects of his or her life start to suffer. I'd even argue that the same drivers exist. At a job you are in a race with other people to be promoted. You want to look better than the other guy and move up the corporate ladder a rank. The tasks put ahead of you often have a set amount of work required, much like how MMORPG'ers "grind". With each step of the ladder you get some token benefits, but there is always a next step to persue.
In fact, I'd have to say the only difference between a good MMORPG like World of Warcraft and the corporate ladder climbers is that in WoW you have better defined goals that can be reasonably achieved. I think the only reason people want to classify this type of gaming as an addiction is that it is potentially replacing the corporate rat race as gaming is not considered "productive", while corporate slogging is.
If anything both types of behaviors should be studied as they have similar social motivators and consequences.
Of the $9 billion, as of 2006 $3.6 billion was unaccounted for. Not that $3.6 billion isn't a hunka change, but the OP is obviously prone to exaggeration. His argument can hardly be worthy of a 5 rating, given his errors and his exaggerations.
So it was closer to 144 tons of cash, which is still quite a hefty sum. (More than I or anyone I'll ever know will have seen in his or her lifetime.) I'd have to wager that the poor of a couple major metropolitan areas could have been housed and boarded for a year with that sum.
And it was one fact that was accidentally misquoted, not a whole slew of facts being misrepresented. In addition, it wasn't even a key supporting issue to the argument I was making. It was a statement that claimed that the public is apathetic to the amount of cash exchanging hands. Whether it was 360 or 144 doesn't make much difference, the public still didn't care about it.
I figure all governments hate the Internet, secretly or otherwise.
I don't know about hate, but they are definitely starting to fear the capabilities of the internet, which is probably the strongest indication that democracy is still attempting to thrive in the face of authoritarianism. The day that freedom of speech disappears on the internet is the day democracy dies.
Yes. As has been noted here on Slashdot in the past, the King of Thailand is actually a pretty nice guy. There have been more than a few people who have chimed in on here that the military general who holds the reign of power over there often punishes dissidents through laws which the King has often expressed little support for. That PR stint with the person accused of portraying the king next to feet seemed to be more of a warning to keep dissidents in line than anything else.
If I were a writer, I'd have the following plotlines going on:
Wild Guess #1
The 4 cylons who were "activated" in the season 3 finale try to kill Hera, while continuing to enable Galactica to locate Earth (ultimately with the goal to obliterate it). The reasoning could be that the 4 were activated to "correct" the pro-human behavior that the cylons have been exhibiting, and keep the cylon goal of human extermination on track. Each of the 4 has risen to a unique position of power that allows them to enable the humans on their quest for Earth, and gives them direct insight into cylon-human relations. The 4 would essentially be considered a planned countermeasure to insure the initial cylon groupthink.
Wild Guess #2 (Warning: Season 3 Spoiler)
Chief Tyrol's child may not actually be his. If it was his child, it would mean that there are two hybrid human-cylons that exist. If it is his child, and the 4 are actually attempting to kill Hera, it's likely that the Chief's child would also meet the same fate. If it actually isn't the Chief's child, it'd make an interesting episode to see how Tyrol reacts to it.
Wild Guess #3
There's still one last cylon model unaccounted for. My guess would be that this cylon is likely the one tasked with destroying Earth, and will likely not reveal him or herself until the final episodes.
Endings
Cool Ending #1:
They get to Earth, they find it's the cylon homeworld, and that they're all actually cylons. The truth is that the cylons successfully exterminated the human race thousands of years ago. The entire 12 colonies and the human-cylon struggle was an experiment (possibly one of many) that the cylons did to attempt to become "more human", and to attempt to understand what the human race went through the when the cylons succeeded the first time. They proceed to design and plan the next version of the experiment, to send out another 12 colonies to repeat the experiment. (It would explain why both humans and cylons both arrived at the temple when the supernova was going to blow, 'cause they were programmed to. It would also explain why baltar sees the cylon and occasionally "knows" things.)
Cool Ending #2:
They arrive at Earth, which is technologically advanced and populated by humans. The Earth humans reveal that the entire Battlestar contingent are actually all cylons (or the Earth humans just refuse to accept that they're human). The Earth humans essentially say, "This isn't the first time you cylons have tried to destroy Earth. Now all of you shoo (or we'll blast you), and stop trying to use our myths of the 12 lost colonies to obliterate our planet." (Alt Twist: The Battlestar crew is believed to be who they say they are, the last cylon activates and obliterates the race.)
Lame Ending:
They arrive at Earth, which is populated by humans, cylons and hybrids (or the remains of such a society is found), which magically causes the tension between the cylons and humans to dissappear and they live happily ever after.
They went to war because they thought they could win easily, and it would be a good idea. They were wrong, on a number of levels, but that doesn't mean they're happy about or moreover intended the current situation over there, and to imply anything else, like I said, is pretty ridiculous.
They did win easily. Saddam was toppled in a matter of minutes. But it's becoming blatantly apparent that they were more interested in a prolonged conflict, so they can deluge money on all the defense contractors and other direct supporters of the current administration. Once the money reaches Iraq, there is no legal accountability for anything. If you receive money to build a school, and don't, there's nothing illegal about it as long as you put up a half-assed attempt at trying to build one. (Meaning if you rented a bulldozer and claimed the security for it bankrupted you, you're off the hook.) Heck, 360 tons of cash went missing and the public did nothing about it.
After reading up on how the Department of Homeland Security was basically turned into the equivalent of a government contractor eBay, it seemed to confirm it. I've been told that the standing orders from the people who work there are that the department is not allowed to do anything themselves, they must contract everything out. So again the main focus seems to be funneling money to the contractors.
Contrary to the national media image (which by the way is controlled by their supporters) this administration is not dumb. This administration is quite adept at funneling money from the taxpayers to the contractors. All the rest of what they're doing just seems to support and protect this goal of theirs. As for Gitmo and "getting tough" on terrorists, they just know what show their base wants to see.
When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.
McCain is ignoring a key caveat. Namely that the communication industry does not, and has not, participated in the "free market" in quite a while now. They were given a federally protected monopoly a number of decades ago.
Start preaching about taking a wrecking ball to the communication industry's legal monopoly, and then I'll talk "free market" with him. The industry is quite devoid of competition, so the "market" will likely NOT favor the consumer. Competition drives price down, a monopoly drives prices up. No competition = high prices.
I do give points to McCain though. He's picked a stance that will please his corporate overlords and fool the majority of people into thinking he's pro-consumer. But then again, seeing the government's current record on "fixing" things, it's quite possibly a better solution than allowing a politician to mess with it and ruin it utterly.
It is thus logical that a truly superior human will learn to abandon any primitive altruistic tendencies.
Actually I'd argue the opposite. The fact that generosity is linked to deeply ingrained urges like sex and food implies that it was a critical evolutionary advantage to homo sapien and its ancestors. There are other examples throughout history (both human and animal) of generosity and altruism benefiting the community as a whole. (Ants would be a prime example.)
It also implies strongly that non-altruistic behavior is actually detrimental to the survival of a species. Granted, this doesn't mean altruism is always a boon (ie: lemmings), just that it has an evolutionary advantage overall.
He was not a customer so he was not entitled to use the wi-fi.
It depends. If the advertisement in the shop was simply "Free WiFi", any decent lawyer could argue that he was granted permission to use it. If the ad instead read "Free WiFi* (some restrictions may apply)", I'd say it's likely he did not have permission, as the restrictions were likely that the person needed to be a customer or in the establishment.
In the parent's example, if the coffee shop was advertising "Free Electricity", I'd say walking in with a extension cord and plugging in would be legal. However, I would imagine that the owner would quickly amend the ad to limit it to customers.
As it stands right now, the guy could probably sue the coffee shop for false advertising. I'd find it difficult to believe that the Wi-Fi can truly be considered "free" when a person who used the "free" service ends up paying fines and gets charged with a felony. Any ambulance chaser worth his salt would be lining up to sue the coffee shop over this one.
So yes, I'd say the Chief of Police did a bang up job here. A person with no criminal intent or awareness of wrongdoing got charged, and the likelihood of the coffee shop getting sued out of business just went through the roof. Good job, Wiggum.
You're making the classic misapprehension that laws must make sense, and must be just. Just because the cop thought it was a stupid law, the judge thought it was stupid law, and the person charged thought it was a stupid law, doesn't mean those individuals can ignore it. Their jobs are to enforce (cop, judge) and follow the laws (everyone).
Ideally what should happen in cases like these are that the people who made the bill into law should have their names billboarded up on every website and publicly allowed place possible so that the fools can't do any more damage. Hold them accountable for their actions, and dumb laws like these will go away.
I'd be less worried about the growing loss of privacy if I knew less of human nature and politics.
Google figuring out what I like and offering up appropriate advertisements does not bother me. They are observing my browsing habits, and really don't care about the specifics of the person on the other side of the glass. They only care about things that directly impact their ad revenue.
Contrast this with people in power. People in power tend to gravitate towards the public having their lives exposed completely, while they themselves maintain an ever increasing code of secrecy. The less you know about a person, the less likely you are to exert power over that individual.
This is the exact opposite of good government. Publicly elected officials should have little or no privacy when acting in the government's capacity. The only exception to this rule should be items of national security, which should remain only open to those who have security clearances.
While I'd like to think that this younger generation is promoting a blanket-wide "openness" of private life, from my point of view they outright suck at it. They are making the general populace's lives more open, but have considerably failed to make the doings of elected officials and related government more transparent. (Wiretaps, unprotected whistleblowers and vote rigging, oh my) If this pattern continues, we will be coasting into a true dictatorship / fascist society, and it will become very difficult to pull us out of it.
I'm in favor of more openness. But let's be reasonable here. The government needs to be at the forefront of this endeavor. If they aren't, we're likely to have problems that will make Soviet Era Russia look like Disneyland.
What a dumb article though. Really, how can anyone believe that they can clean up the chat rooms where people with anonymity reside. It just wont happen. It takes people years of online participation in one community or another to stop using LOL let along stop attacking people.
A better question would be why that person believes that everyone else should conform to his or her view of reality and social norms? If I want to express myself in a certain way, what gives that person the right punish me? Or more importantly, why does that person's view of what's right and wrong hold more sway than mine?
If that person doesn't like it, there are tools in place to make their experience more enjoyable via ignore and leaving channels altogether.
The united states government can't cover up a blow job from a 21 year old intern in the privacy of the oval office. What makes you think they can cover up an assassination on a crowded street at noon?
That incident did not have the affect of changing the existing power structure in the US in a hugely dramatic way.
A anti-Vietnam political leader was assassinated, and a pro-Vietnam political leader came into power. The war industry made billions off of Vietnam. The mafia and CIA were abandoned by Kennedy in Cuba, resulting in lost / captured men. To me those seem like a valid motive to consider either of those groups a suspect.
Numerous eyewitnesses reported suspicious behavior immediately before and after the event. (Construction workers with odd implements, people potentially signaling before the incident, and every bit of photographic evidence confiscated and promptly lost, never to be seen by the public again.) The Secret Service did not follow the rules and guidelines to protect the president that would have been followed on any other day (which could be incompetence, but is also suspect). Reports of multiple gunshots coming from different locations. The accused shooter was killed before he or she could give any real testimony of the event. To me that sounds like case evidence and obstruction of a "crime".
Now what happened in the aftermath is that one of the suspects (US federal gov't) proceded to conduct the investigation. The end result of this investigation was that a single shooter was responsible for the assassination. A photo of the man holding a rifle was provided and made the cover of a magazine, which has since been proven as a forgery by a number of experts. I have also seen enough guilty suspects being walked by policemen to know that Oswald did not have the typical expression most people do when they've committed a serious crime. Most people either smile and wave, or have a stonewall look to them. Oswald looked completely terrified. The only reason a person would be terrified would be if the event was done in the heat of the moment, or they were being setup.
Now I'm not going to say who did assassinate JFK, but there seems to be a substantial amount of evidence that reinforces the assertion that it was not a one-man job. There also seems to be enough evidence to leave credence to the idea that it was also not a small team operation, and that a substantial organization was involved. It also seems reasonable that Ozwald was chosen as the fall guy because prosecutors felt there was "enough" information to get a conviction, whether or not it was true (let's face it, when a president gets shot, someone needs to take the blame, and quickly).
If I were in charge of an organization capable of assassinating a president, the steps that would need to be taken to insure success seem to neatly match up with the events that took place that day. The steps for a single person to insure success seem less likely, and an extreme amount of luck would need to be involved. (As to who did it and why, we might never know for sure. But it seems reasonable that an organization was involved, not a lone gunman.)
That's an interesting theory, but I think it has more to do with Cuomo following the Eliot Spitzer School of Getting Yourself Elected Governor of New York. It mostly involves bringing high profile cases against nationally recognized big corporations.
And it's a very good way to earn my vote. With the entire federal government bending over to any corporate type that happens to walk by, I can't think of an easier way to get my vote than by suing major corporations over stuff like this. No one's holding large corporations accountable right now for any of their misdeeds, so I'd say it's a safe bet.
Granted, if it turns into a festival of frivolous lawsuits I'll lose my zeal. But for now, hell yeah, it's a way to get my vote. Make the world a little better by suing corporations over screwing the consumer isn't likely to be a "bad" PR move.
Regarding the firings, the Democrats are behaving true to political form (which is to say, behaving exactly like the Republicans would behave if the roles were reversed) and objecting to President Bush's administration doing something that the law and political convention allows them to do.
The law actually prohibits replacing civil servants on the basis of political beliefs. Federal employees are supposed to be non-partisan. The people the president appoints can be selected based on shared political beliefs, but the people working underneath the appointed people can not. This is per the Hatch Act.
This would be a non-issue only if the attorneys in question were fired for incompetence. If they were fired for not being "loyal bushies", it is in clear violation of the Hatch Act, and you and every other American should be demanding explanations and repercussions. If you let this president get away with it, the next one will also get away with it, and pretty soon will have a full-out fascism on our hands.
There are limits to partisan actions for a reason. It is not beneficial to the public when the "drones" become aligned to a single party. If federal employees were allowed to be hired based on political beliefs, you'd have to fire the entire government staff for every flippin' election!
While everyone can agree that it's wrong for the RIAA to prosecute people who do not have the means to commit copyright infringement, let's not forget that it's still against the law when it does happen.
Reminder: (legal != right) && (illegal != wrong)
Just because a law exists saying something is illegal does not mean that law is right or just. For reference, you can examine the laws of any dictatorship or fascist government.
Fair use and not-for-profit media distribution has a definite place in society, and the fact that piracy is still quite rampant means that we have yet to find an acceptable place for it yet. Cowering before those who have money or power is not an acceptable response.
I don't understand why Slashdot has to report on every bullshit bill that comes before congress.
Because if they didn't, little bills like these might sneak through and become law.
Lifetime imprisonment for using software, pirated or not? Gimmie a break. This won't pass.
This bill may not pass, but who is to say the next bill like this will not pass. The buttholes in congress introduce bills like these to see how much they can get away with. There's a good chance this bill will pass, in some shape. Congress likes to "negotiate" and pass diluted bills through the system.
It's quite possible that Gonzales proposed all these items just so they could "negotiate" the wiretap clause into being passed. Gonzales likely doesn't care about the majority of the items in the proposed bill, he probably is only cares about one or two items. The rest of the bill is likely bait.
I can't help thinking that if the wiretap clause were to be passed, it could be then be used as a defense of all the illegal wiretapping currently going on. On a technical level, anyone using a internet browser could arguably be accused of "attempted" copyright infringement, as your browser downloads the content in order to display it. As such any person with a computer connected to the internet could be wiretapped.
The bottom line is that our congressmen and women need to be smarter than they currently are in order to do their job. Their inability to spot potential exploits like these are going to be our undoing.
Closing all vulnerabilities is not practical. In any sufficiently complex piece of software, there will be bugs and security holes. Obviously, you need to close the nasty ones, but many of these exploits are not particularly high risk. In these cases, especially if the fix would involve a major redesign or other highly disruptive solution, it may be best to just leave them alone.
Having worked on commercial software for a few years now, I'd have to agree with the parent. All complex programs come with bugs, period. I'd have to wager any application that is completely free of bugs is either a non-commercial product, or is in a stagnant market. The bugs that are fixed for patches are usually the ones deemed during the triage process as being the most critical and/or most time-efficient to fix.
As a developer, while I'd like to fix all the bugs in the system, the truth is there will always be a few that require architecture changes or impact large sections of code, and as such tend to persist in the application. Since these bugs tend to require a large time investment for almost no perceptible gain for the end-user, they are often ignored in favor of devoting time to new features.
Should all bugs be fixed? Yes. Should all bugs take precedence over new features? No. This is not to say developers do not try to fix long-standing issues, just that the churn rate for bugs tends to be rather constant. (Once an older bug is fixed, a new one takes its place.)
Since Free Speech is enshrined directly in the Constitution while Privacy is not (it's an indirect right. See Roe Vs Wade for more info), they could have a good (legally, not morally) argument.
Verizon is a corporation, not a citizen. The Constitution protects the rights of individuals, not businesses. Nor can a business rightly make claim to any of the rights granted in the Constitution, as the founding fathers definitely did not intend for it to protect the wealthy merchants by screwing the individuals. Businesses are protected by a different set of laws, and the Constitution does not cover them.
So no, they do not have a good argument. This is nothing more than a PR attempt to garner some grass roots support for them. They're trying to obscure the fact that they gave away all the information you shared with them that you consider to be private, and now they don't want to be punished for it. Don't fall for it.
Sueing is a marketing tactic that has proven to be quite good at grabbing free press. Verizon is doing what corporations do best, attempting to lessen the amount of customer backlash and protect it's stock price. I give them points for being creative, but this lawsuit would be thrown out of most courts.
Neither the American Constitution nor the Bill of Rights "grant" rights. The "enumerate" them--that is, "specify one after another; list".
The idea of a "Bill of Rights" was a very tenuous idea to the founding fathers. By listing out a set of rights, they feared that future generations would claim that an individual's rights would be limited to that same set of rights. However, if no rights were listed, it was feared that future generations would have all rights stolen away from them. So they compromised and allowed the Bill of Rights with the provision of the 9th amendment that essentially states: "anything we haven't explicitly covered belongs to either the people or the states, and are off-limits to the federal government."
"Rights" were essentially defined as inherent actions and beliefs that persist with human nature. I would argue that the right to protect oneself, raise a family, travel unimpeded, work as you want, and believe whatever you want to are the key aspects to define these rights. The fact that the federal government is limited these rights is irrelevant. The Constitution was written so that when lapses such as these occurred the people would have means to restore these rights.
(Remember that, if you nullified copyright today, it would apply to every OSS project in existence. MS could take Linux with impunity, Apple could (and would) give a big finger to BSD, and everyone from IBM to Dell would never pay another dollar to an out-of-house software developer ever again -- because they've already got all that they need.)
More to the point without copyright there is no incentive for individuals to create anything of value for society. If anything you or I create can be stolen and exploited by a bigger fish (read: corporation), why would the person even make the attempt? Copyright and patents grant the creator a window of opportunity to make money on an idea. Copyrights and patents should expire within a reasonable amount of time because the rest of society should also be allowed to make money on an idea in their own way.
Just because a person came up with an original idea does not mean he or she is using its full potential.
Slashdot Mirror
Wisconsin passed a similar law over a year ago. [Article]
In fact, I'd have to say the only difference between a good MMORPG like World of Warcraft and the corporate ladder climbers is that in WoW you have better defined goals that can be reasonably achieved. I think the only reason people want to classify this type of gaming as an addiction is that it is potentially replacing the corporate rat race as gaming is not considered "productive", while corporate slogging is.
If anything both types of behaviors should be studied as they have similar social motivators and consequences.
So it was closer to 144 tons of cash, which is still quite a hefty sum. (More than I or anyone I'll ever know will have seen in his or her lifetime.) I'd have to wager that the poor of a couple major metropolitan areas could have been housed and boarded for a year with that sum.
And it was one fact that was accidentally misquoted, not a whole slew of facts being misrepresented. In addition, it wasn't even a key supporting issue to the argument I was making. It was a statement that claimed that the public is apathetic to the amount of cash exchanging hands. Whether it was 360 or 144 doesn't make much difference, the public still didn't care about it.
I don't know about hate, but they are definitely starting to fear the capabilities of the internet, which is probably the strongest indication that democracy is still attempting to thrive in the face of authoritarianism. The day that freedom of speech disappears on the internet is the day democracy dies.
Yes. As has been noted here on Slashdot in the past, the King of Thailand is actually a pretty nice guy. There have been more than a few people who have chimed in on here that the military general who holds the reign of power over there often punishes dissidents through laws which the King has often expressed little support for. That PR stint with the person accused of portraying the king next to feet seemed to be more of a warning to keep dissidents in line than anything else.
If I were a writer, I'd have the following plotlines going on:
Wild Guess #1
The 4 cylons who were "activated" in the season 3 finale try to kill Hera, while continuing to enable Galactica to locate Earth (ultimately with the goal to obliterate it). The reasoning could be that the 4 were activated to "correct" the pro-human behavior that the cylons have been exhibiting, and keep the cylon goal of human extermination on track. Each of the 4 has risen to a unique position of power that allows them to enable the humans on their quest for Earth, and gives them direct insight into cylon-human relations. The 4 would essentially be considered a planned countermeasure to insure the initial cylon groupthink.
Wild Guess #2 (Warning: Season 3 Spoiler)
Chief Tyrol's child may not actually be his. If it was his child, it would mean that there are two hybrid human-cylons that exist. If it is his child, and the 4 are actually attempting to kill Hera, it's likely that the Chief's child would also meet the same fate. If it actually isn't the Chief's child, it'd make an interesting episode to see how Tyrol reacts to it.
Wild Guess #3
There's still one last cylon model unaccounted for. My guess would be that this cylon is likely the one tasked with destroying Earth, and will likely not reveal him or herself until the final episodes.
Endings
Cool Ending #1:
They get to Earth, they find it's the cylon homeworld, and that they're all actually cylons. The truth is that the cylons successfully exterminated the human race thousands of years ago. The entire 12 colonies and the human-cylon struggle was an experiment (possibly one of many) that the cylons did to attempt to become "more human", and to attempt to understand what the human race went through the when the cylons succeeded the first time. They proceed to design and plan the next version of the experiment, to send out another 12 colonies to repeat the experiment. (It would explain why both humans and cylons both arrived at the temple when the supernova was going to blow, 'cause they were programmed to. It would also explain why baltar sees the cylon and occasionally "knows" things.)
Cool Ending #2:
They arrive at Earth, which is technologically advanced and populated by humans. The Earth humans reveal that the entire Battlestar contingent are actually all cylons (or the Earth humans just refuse to accept that they're human). The Earth humans essentially say, "This isn't the first time you cylons have tried to destroy Earth. Now all of you shoo (or we'll blast you), and stop trying to use our myths of the 12 lost colonies to obliterate our planet." (Alt Twist: The Battlestar crew is believed to be who they say they are, the last cylon activates and obliterates the race.)
Lame Ending:
They arrive at Earth, which is populated by humans, cylons and hybrids (or the remains of such a society is found), which magically causes the tension between the cylons and humans to dissappear and they live happily ever after.
They did win easily. Saddam was toppled in a matter of minutes. But it's becoming blatantly apparent that they were more interested in a prolonged conflict, so they can deluge money on all the defense contractors and other direct supporters of the current administration. Once the money reaches Iraq, there is no legal accountability for anything. If you receive money to build a school, and don't, there's nothing illegal about it as long as you put up a half-assed attempt at trying to build one. (Meaning if you rented a bulldozer and claimed the security for it bankrupted you, you're off the hook.) Heck, 360 tons of cash went missing and the public did nothing about it.
After reading up on how the Department of Homeland Security was basically turned into the equivalent of a government contractor eBay, it seemed to confirm it. I've been told that the standing orders from the people who work there are that the department is not allowed to do anything themselves, they must contract everything out. So again the main focus seems to be funneling money to the contractors.
Contrary to the national media image (which by the way is controlled by their supporters) this administration is not dumb. This administration is quite adept at funneling money from the taxpayers to the contractors. All the rest of what they're doing just seems to support and protect this goal of theirs. As for Gitmo and "getting tough" on terrorists, they just know what show their base wants to see.
McCain is ignoring a key caveat. Namely that the communication industry does not, and has not, participated in the "free market" in quite a while now. They were given a federally protected monopoly a number of decades ago.
Start preaching about taking a wrecking ball to the communication industry's legal monopoly, and then I'll talk "free market" with him. The industry is quite devoid of competition, so the "market" will likely NOT favor the consumer. Competition drives price down, a monopoly drives prices up. No competition = high prices.
I do give points to McCain though. He's picked a stance that will please his corporate overlords and fool the majority of people into thinking he's pro-consumer. But then again, seeing the government's current record on "fixing" things, it's quite possibly a better solution than allowing a politician to mess with it and ruin it utterly.
Actually I'd argue the opposite. The fact that generosity is linked to deeply ingrained urges like sex and food implies that it was a critical evolutionary advantage to homo sapien and its ancestors. There are other examples throughout history (both human and animal) of generosity and altruism benefiting the community as a whole. (Ants would be a prime example.)
It also implies strongly that non-altruistic behavior is actually detrimental to the survival of a species. Granted, this doesn't mean altruism is always a boon (ie: lemmings), just that it has an evolutionary advantage overall.
In the parent's example, if the coffee shop was advertising "Free Electricity", I'd say walking in with a extension cord and plugging in would be legal. However, I would imagine that the owner would quickly amend the ad to limit it to customers.
As it stands right now, the guy could probably sue the coffee shop for false advertising. I'd find it difficult to believe that the Wi-Fi can truly be considered "free" when a person who used the "free" service ends up paying fines and gets charged with a felony. Any ambulance chaser worth his salt would be lining up to sue the coffee shop over this one.
So yes, I'd say the Chief of Police did a bang up job here. A person with no criminal intent or awareness of wrongdoing got charged, and the likelihood of the coffee shop getting sued out of business just went through the roof. Good job, Wiggum.
You're making the classic misapprehension that laws must make sense, and must be just. Just because the cop thought it was a stupid law, the judge thought it was stupid law, and the person charged thought it was a stupid law, doesn't mean those individuals can ignore it. Their jobs are to enforce (cop, judge) and follow the laws (everyone).
Ideally what should happen in cases like these are that the people who made the bill into law should have their names billboarded up on every website and publicly allowed place possible so that the fools can't do any more damage. Hold them accountable for their actions, and dumb laws like these will go away.
I'd be less worried about the growing loss of privacy if I knew less of human nature and politics.
Google figuring out what I like and offering up appropriate advertisements does not bother me. They are observing my browsing habits, and really don't care about the specifics of the person on the other side of the glass. They only care about things that directly impact their ad revenue.
Contrast this with people in power. People in power tend to gravitate towards the public having their lives exposed completely, while they themselves maintain an ever increasing code of secrecy. The less you know about a person, the less likely you are to exert power over that individual.
This is the exact opposite of good government. Publicly elected officials should have little or no privacy when acting in the government's capacity. The only exception to this rule should be items of national security, which should remain only open to those who have security clearances.
While I'd like to think that this younger generation is promoting a blanket-wide "openness" of private life, from my point of view they outright suck at it. They are making the general populace's lives more open, but have considerably failed to make the doings of elected officials and related government more transparent. (Wiretaps, unprotected whistleblowers and vote rigging, oh my) If this pattern continues, we will be coasting into a true dictatorship / fascist society, and it will become very difficult to pull us out of it.
I'm in favor of more openness. But let's be reasonable here. The government needs to be at the forefront of this endeavor. If they aren't, we're likely to have problems that will make Soviet Era Russia look like Disneyland.
A better question would be why that person believes that everyone else should conform to his or her view of reality and social norms? If I want to express myself in a certain way, what gives that person the right punish me? Or more importantly, why does that person's view of what's right and wrong hold more sway than mine?
If that person doesn't like it, there are tools in place to make their experience more enjoyable via ignore and leaving channels altogether.
Oh, you meant actual physical contact. They'd enable that feature, but they're too scared it'll turn X-rated within seconds.
A anti-Vietnam political leader was assassinated, and a pro-Vietnam political leader came into power. The war industry made billions off of Vietnam. The mafia and CIA were abandoned by Kennedy in Cuba, resulting in lost / captured men. To me those seem like a valid motive to consider either of those groups a suspect.
Numerous eyewitnesses reported suspicious behavior immediately before and after the event. (Construction workers with odd implements, people potentially signaling before the incident, and every bit of photographic evidence confiscated and promptly lost, never to be seen by the public again.) The Secret Service did not follow the rules and guidelines to protect the president that would have been followed on any other day (which could be incompetence, but is also suspect). Reports of multiple gunshots coming from different locations. The accused shooter was killed before he or she could give any real testimony of the event. To me that sounds like case evidence and obstruction of a "crime".
Now what happened in the aftermath is that one of the suspects (US federal gov't) proceded to conduct the investigation. The end result of this investigation was that a single shooter was responsible for the assassination. A photo of the man holding a rifle was provided and made the cover of a magazine, which has since been proven as a forgery by a number of experts. I have also seen enough guilty suspects being walked by policemen to know that Oswald did not have the typical expression most people do when they've committed a serious crime. Most people either smile and wave, or have a stonewall look to them. Oswald looked completely terrified. The only reason a person would be terrified would be if the event was done in the heat of the moment, or they were being setup.
Now I'm not going to say who did assassinate JFK, but there seems to be a substantial amount of evidence that reinforces the assertion that it was not a one-man job. There also seems to be enough evidence to leave credence to the idea that it was also not a small team operation, and that a substantial organization was involved. It also seems reasonable that Ozwald was chosen as the fall guy because prosecutors felt there was "enough" information to get a conviction, whether or not it was true (let's face it, when a president gets shot, someone needs to take the blame, and quickly).
If I were in charge of an organization capable of assassinating a president, the steps that would need to be taken to insure success seem to neatly match up with the events that took place that day. The steps for a single person to insure success seem less likely, and an extreme amount of luck would need to be involved. (As to who did it and why, we might never know for sure. But it seems reasonable that an organization was involved, not a lone gunman.)
Granted, if it turns into a festival of frivolous lawsuits I'll lose my zeal. But for now, hell yeah, it's a way to get my vote. Make the world a little better by suing corporations over screwing the consumer isn't likely to be a "bad" PR move.
This would be a non-issue only if the attorneys in question were fired for incompetence. If they were fired for not being "loyal bushies", it is in clear violation of the Hatch Act, and you and every other American should be demanding explanations and repercussions. If you let this president get away with it, the next one will also get away with it, and pretty soon will have a full-out fascism on our hands.
There are limits to partisan actions for a reason. It is not beneficial to the public when the "drones" become aligned to a single party. If federal employees were allowed to be hired based on political beliefs, you'd have to fire the entire government staff for every flippin' election!
Just because a law exists saying something is illegal does not mean that law is right or just. For reference, you can examine the laws of any dictatorship or fascist government.
Fair use and not-for-profit media distribution has a definite place in society, and the fact that piracy is still quite rampant means that we have yet to find an acceptable place for it yet. Cowering before those who have money or power is not an acceptable response.
This bill may not pass, but who is to say the next bill like this will not pass. The buttholes in congress introduce bills like these to see how much they can get away with. There's a good chance this bill will pass, in some shape. Congress likes to "negotiate" and pass diluted bills through the system.
It's quite possible that Gonzales proposed all these items just so they could "negotiate" the wiretap clause into being passed. Gonzales likely doesn't care about the majority of the items in the proposed bill, he probably is only cares about one or two items. The rest of the bill is likely bait.
I can't help thinking that if the wiretap clause were to be passed, it could be then be used as a defense of all the illegal wiretapping currently going on. On a technical level, anyone using a internet browser could arguably be accused of "attempted" copyright infringement, as your browser downloads the content in order to display it. As such any person with a computer connected to the internet could be wiretapped.
The bottom line is that our congressmen and women need to be smarter than they currently are in order to do their job. Their inability to spot potential exploits like these are going to be our undoing.
As a developer, while I'd like to fix all the bugs in the system, the truth is there will always be a few that require architecture changes or impact large sections of code, and as such tend to persist in the application. Since these bugs tend to require a large time investment for almost no perceptible gain for the end-user, they are often ignored in favor of devoting time to new features.
Should all bugs be fixed? Yes. Should all bugs take precedence over new features? No. This is not to say developers do not try to fix long-standing issues, just that the churn rate for bugs tends to be rather constant. (Once an older bug is fixed, a new one takes its place.)
So no, they do not have a good argument. This is nothing more than a PR attempt to garner some grass roots support for them. They're trying to obscure the fact that they gave away all the information you shared with them that you consider to be private, and now they don't want to be punished for it. Don't fall for it.
Sueing is a marketing tactic that has proven to be quite good at grabbing free press. Verizon is doing what corporations do best, attempting to lessen the amount of customer backlash and protect it's stock price. I give them points for being creative, but this lawsuit would be thrown out of most courts.
"Rights" were essentially defined as inherent actions and beliefs that persist with human nature. I would argue that the right to protect oneself, raise a family, travel unimpeded, work as you want, and believe whatever you want to are the key aspects to define these rights. The fact that the federal government is limited these rights is irrelevant. The Constitution was written so that when lapses such as these occurred the people would have means to restore these rights.
Just because a person came up with an original idea does not mean he or she is using its full potential.