No. How many hunters do you see taking a wheelbarrow with them deer hunting? Wheels suck in the woods. Hauling a 200lb+ animal out over fallen trees, brambles, etc practically requires a travois. The haulers with wheels even incorporate rails if they are any good.
Because when the authoritarians are limited in jurisdiction, there are always other jurisdictions.
Humanity needs a pressure release. In the past it was the frontier. Currently, with no real frontier, those upset with the current system must have the ability to emigrate to one that better fits their needs to avoid real conflict.
It's a real problem with the 'superstates' like China or the US (and still seen in Russia). It is inevitable that these large states will include minorities that don't agree with the federal or supreme governments.
Ideally, this wouldn't be a problem for governments that operated in a truly limited manner as their actual impact/interaction on the local level would be almost unnoticed. But the more you allow the majority to govern closer to the local level, you end up with people who are impacted by laws that they find completely flawed with no real legal mechanism to alter them.
Again, in the past, if you didn't like the laws, you could pack up and leave. Sure it wasn't the ideal situation, but you had that option. Now, you can't even pack up and leave. Jurisdictions expand, and all viable land is claimed, so the inevitable destination is violence once the pressure builds up too high.
And the pressure will build up, because everyone 'knows' their philosophy is the 'right' philosophy. Even if you agree with the current views of a nation or group, you would have to be a fool to think that there is any 'right' solution or that trending towards a positive outcome is somehow guaranteed.
It's not asking for trouble, it's just a fact of nature that if you introduce any variance into the system you will necessarily alter the performance of the system.
A critical system utilizes technology Y and has an error rate of 1% It has a backup to technology Y, but when utilizing that backup it has an error rate of 2%. You are 'reliant' on technology Y in order to achieve an error rate of 1%, not that you are reliant on technology Y to perform at all.
Think about a hospital. They have emergency backup generators. All the patients won't immediately drop dead if the hospital loses grid power, but you should expect that their service would be degraded until grid power is back up. That's what they mean by reliant on GPS. We are reliant on it in order to achieve our current performance.
In real terms, an ambulance responding to an emergency is likely going to use GPS, but they also have a map in the glove box (and a driver who knows the roads). A loss of GPS will result in increased response time. Reliant on GPS to achieve their current performance.
The government is the perfect example of 'not my department.' The government doesn't have to care what gets crushed under the wheels of 'justice'. The people who are supposed to care were the ones who pointed the government in that direction and said 'GO'.
ie: the government has the excuse in the form of: The people told me to go do this, it's not my job to question, it's my job to do. They told me to do this by passing the laws that gave me the power to do this. I must assume that they factored in the costs and potential outcome when they granted this power in the first place.
This is why your first worry shouldn't be 'Will this give the government the power to solve problem xyz' but 'How is it possible for this power to be abused? And when it is inevitably abused in that manner, is it worth the cost?"
Analog tilt works best when the thing you are feeding input to is something that is an analog tilt mechanism (Flaps, ailerons, wheel tilt, etc)
Point and click (mouse) works best when you are feeding input to a primarily point and click mechanism, and firearms are pretty much the pinnacle of 'point' and 'click'.
It's not that your thumbstick can't keep up with the same level of precision, its that the thumbstick is forcing you to control something with a behavior that isn't inherent in the object you are controlling.
With a firearm, you typically don't need to control the rate at which your barrel traverses from point A to point B, you want it to exist at point 'B'. However with something like a car wheel, you don't want it to go from 90 degrees to 45 degrees in 0.01s, that would cause you to lose control. You want it to traverse from 90 to 45 at a limited rate of degrees per second. In essence, the traverse IS the important part, not the final location.
Sometimes people fight for what is right. And speaking as a US citizen, if we even thought about embarking on what you propose, you would find that some of us would fight for what is right.
We are the US. It's tough, but we are better than that. No one ever said that doing the right thing was easier or cheaper.
Yeah, I think they would. In fact, if I feared a country so much that I thought they would 'Bomb our cities, kill our leaders and convert us to their religion.". The answer is that Martyrs are more powerful than your military.
Or is your solution going so far as to cause fear like the Romans did. Because you know how well persecution and absolutely brutal responses worked for them in the Middle East.
The rules are the rules, and woe be to anyone who breaks them, or worse, suggests that they be relaxed.
My dorm had this issue:
1. The minimum number of handicapped spaces is set by the size of the parking lot. 2. This parking lot was oddly shaped. About 12 spots near the dorm, a long path area (with curb parking) and then 500 more spaces about 0.5km away.
The result is that all of the parking spaces next to the dorm were required to be handicapped spaces. This really sucks when you LIVE in that location and you have no option to unload groceries (Campus parking ticketers don't care that you are carrying up your food). You can see how annoying it would be if you had to make multiple trips to unload your car.
What really got me was this: No one in the dorm was disabled. Not a single person. So every single parking space less than 0.5km from the dorm was reserved for non-existent people.
It would have been very nice if these rules were flexible for businesses (like requiring a minimum of 1 for a visitor, and scaling it up to accommodate any disabled resident if they moved in. Unfortunately the laws are very draconian in both interpretation and punishment.
My apologies, I wasn't completely clear. It wasn't the speeding ticket alone that caused me to come to this method of action. I paid the speeding ticket, and felt that the additional surcharges were not with the spirit of a law governed society. I should have a reasonable expectation that the punishment should be commensurate with the crime.
It was a later infraction, which caused me to take a hard-line stance and challenge every ticket I'm ever issued. I got burned this second time, and I can't trust the government not to do it again.
The second incident:
In the jurisdiction, there is a hard cap on fines for a set of infractions. This is set into law. However, the local jurisdiction has discovered that since the law specifically mentioned 'fine' if you call it a fee or a surcharge, it is not technically a 'fine' in the very narrow definition. They are NOT required to list what these surcharges or fees will be, or even when they may or may not be assessed.
Here is what happened:
Officer: Your inspection sticker is in the wrong location. Me: Oh, I didn't realize that this state requires the sticker to be in xyz location, my previous state required it to be here. Officer: Here is a citation for improper display of the inspection sticker.
So I drove home, fixed the sticker, and looked up the law. The officer was right, the inspection sticker was supposed to be in a very specific location. I also noticed that the fine for an improperly displayed inspection sticker 'SHALL BE NO GREATER THAN $25'
It made sense to me, it was just a sticker, my car WAS inspected, and while I thought it was rather a lame excuse to be pulled over and cited since I had been acting in good faith as it was just a simple confusion on location, I decided that $25 wasn't too bad and not worth the time it would take to ask for leniency. I signed the ticket pleading guilty and sent it in with the $25 money order.
2 months later I received a bill from the local jurisdiction. for $150 in fees and surcharges.
No where in the code of that state did it allow for a fine of greater than $25. However, the local jurisdiction was not specifically prohibited from adding fees/surcharges and thus, they did. The legislature of that area has since closed that loophole, but it left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.
There was no way for me to know that by pleading guilty to an infraction that listed a maximum fine of $25 that I would end up being required to pay $175.
I can't trust the government not to do that again, so I challenge my tickets in court.
(Caveat: This post was written while I was on the phone with customer service and probably didn't get the full attention an issue like this deserves. I'll respond to clarify if you have questions. )
His main point is that we are running this country in a much too centralized manner, so EVERYTHING becomes applicable to EVERYONE in the United States. One of the reasons I can support Ron Paul even though I disagree with a lot of his subissues is that I find it more important that we decentralize a lot of topics like this.
His main issue is one that helps compartmentalize the damage that a voting group can do. It is much more agreeable to me that poor laws can be limited to a subset of states than to have poor laws applied to ALL of the states.
For example, we have drug legislation that applies to ALL states uniformly. As a result, you have many states like Colorado or California in which their citizens have chosen to legalize Marijuana on a limited basis. You have other states such as New York or Utah in which their citizens have chosen NOT to legalize marijuana.
It allows local groups of people much greater freedom in deciding what works for them. Naturally we can come up with a whole assortment of issues which we feel should apply to everyone, and each of us is going to have a different set of issues. That's why I can support Ron Paul even though I disagree with him on certain aspects.
One of the reasons I don't live in DC is because I dislike their local laws. I live in Virginia, but I don't like their personal property taxes. I'm considering moving to Pennsylvania but their alcohol laws are something that has bothered me in the past.
When it comes to something like marriage, I don't think it should be a federal issue at all, and in that respect, I agree with congressman Paul even though I'm on the completely opposite side from him when it comes to who can get married.
For me, it's much more important that we don't try to run every issue in this country from Washington DC, because to pretend that there is a uniform US culture, is really going to hurt us in the long run. We can see it now in these repeated deadlocks in which issues which COULD be resolved on more regional/local levels are becoming federal issues because we have given the federal government way too much jurisdiction.
It's more important to me that things be run in a manner which still allows for a chance to 'escape' from laws which I do not agree with (by moving to a different state), than the very real fear that a slim majority may be able to apply laws which will impact everyone no matter where they go in the country.
There is no guarantee that 'my' people will be in charge forever, and I think it is much more important to keep the protections for minority groups from being abused by the majority than it is to have a government which can be unlimited in authority.
It's a bit odd, because I think the best way to ensure that we don't end up with a LOT of bad laws which limit our freedom, is to not allow the federal government absolute power in all areas. In some cases that may mean some regions are 'less free' with respect to a specific issue, but it will also mean that we won't end up with all regions being 'less free' with respect to a specific issue.
In this political climate, an amendment to the constitution in order to do something grand (for either side) would never pass (regardless of its importance).
That's fine. If it became a more pressing issue, the political climate would have to adapt to it. It's better than saying "Oh, our politicians are so incompetent that we might as well just give them unlimited authority in the long term because we need them to do something in the short term"
Circumventing the Constitution because doing so makes it easier to get your good ideas through just means that you are enforcing your ideas without consent from the governed.
I did that once. Was doing 84 in a 65 (1 AM on the PA turnpike. 300 miles of straight)
It was a $25 fine. And an EMT fee, a surcharge, another fee, and another and another.
In the end it was $150 (about a decade ago). It isn't that it was so much money, but the absurd way in which legislators have worked go turn the damned system into a tax revenue mechanism that caused me to first start challenging tickets on principle.
It didn't help that I later received a series of tickets (over the next decade) for things which I DID NOT DO. Had I paid the tickets, I would be out several thousand dollars and that doesn't even count what would have happened to my insurance.
When the police cease to be a revenue collection system, I'll stop 'overburdening' the courts.
Make tickets give points only. No fine. Revoke driving privileges at a certain number of points, add short 1 day stays in jail (at no cost) if you continue.
I've got enough cash now that I would shrug off a $200 fine. The unlucky fellow who works at Walmart, not so much. But neither of us can afford to be without our cars or worse, a day in jail.
I'll make it easy. Stick with the traditional interpretation and follow it like plain language. If you treat the Constitution as a list of government permissions and not a set of restrictions, and ditch the attempts to interpret the enumerated rights as somehow limiting anything not mentioned...
The Constitution is VERY easy to interpret when you are trying to argue on the behalf of freedom. The only time you need a crack lawyer to argue an interpretation is when you are trying to present an interpretation that seeks to limit freedom.
Some argue that such a simple approach is flawed as it would prevent the government from performing functions that we want them to do such as the EPA, Dept of Ed., etc. That is not true because for anything so important and universal that it requires the federal government, then we need to go through the effort to amend the constitution to grant the government the authority to do that. If it really is that important then passing the amendment will happen. If it doesnt pass that means you either were proposing something that more people than you didn't want, or you need to spend more time convincing people that they want the government to do what you say they should do.
Imagine you hire someone to repair a wall in your house. While he is working he sees you have a broken window and decides that you would be better off and fixes the window of his own volition. What he didn't know is that you were going to build an addition and the window was being removed anyway.
The repairman exceeded his authority and even though he was doing something 'good', but the right way to do it would be to ask you to amend his contract to grant him the authority to fix the window in addition to the wall.
Sure, its harder, but hat process ensures that you have to 'opt in' to increased government rather than the easier method that requires us to actively 'opt out' by continually passing new 'protections' each time the government figures a way around the old protections.
The Fed doesnt care what your degree is to any great extent. There are a few restrictions on things like engineering jobs, but it's really just a checkbox. The real BS is that they won't hire people with experience if they can't mark the checkbox. I've worked with people who had 30 yrs of experience but not the 'right' degree. They couldn't get past the data entry phase of the process.
So the solution is to require all vehicles to spend some money, and contribute to noise pollution.
Some problems aren't worth solving. I've been prohibited from working certain jobs because I'm colorblind, and a lot of the reasons for that could be eliminated with nothing more than a policy shift in some cases. (phasing out the use of red/green indicators when other colors can be substituted)
This isn't as big of an issue as people make it to be. Why not affix a bright warning light or flag on the end of a stick that you could wave at the intersection to prove even more alerts to drivers. Every time you step off the curb give it a wave first. I'd think that would go further than hoping you could hear a simulated engine noise in a low speed area.
Pedestrians have the right of way in the US, make cutting past a flag waver a four point violation, and you would have ALL drivers paying more attention. That would do more to increase safety for everyone, not just the blind.
You also dont get the option to loan your book to friends. That crap system they call loaning is nothing of the sort. So we are expected to pay more for less.
I wouldn't exactly call OtherOS "advertised". Yes, Slashdot readers knew about it, and maybe a few other geeks, but the masses didn't know and wouldn't care.
Except that it was advertised, and just because you don't find it useful, or didn't use it, doesn't mean they didn't take it away from a lot of people who did.
I used it, a lot. I loved tinkering around with it because it had everything I wanted packaged together on a front end system.
What Sony did, was act like an asshole company that decided it was cheaper to deal with the lawsuits and bad publicity of fucking over a minority of its customers than to actually deal with the problem.
So, I don't buy Sony, and actively recommend people purchase products of their competitors (except any product by a similarly sleazy company).
I hate to break it to you, but there are several games (Mass Effect 2) which tie aspects of the game to one-time use codes.
If you buy the game used, you have to buy the code to use that aspect of the game. It's going to happen on Xbox live. So don't worry, it will suck there too.
(It already sucks there for for things like Netflix. Why the hell am I supposed to pay for the privilege to stream content from a third party, via my network, to hardware that I own?)
Slashdot Mirror
No. How many hunters do you see taking a wheelbarrow with them deer hunting? Wheels suck in the woods. Hauling a 200lb+ animal out over fallen trees, brambles, etc practically requires a travois. The haulers with wheels even incorporate rails if they are any good.
Because when the authoritarians are limited in jurisdiction, there are always other jurisdictions.
Humanity needs a pressure release. In the past it was the frontier. Currently, with no real frontier, those upset with the current system must have the ability to emigrate to one that better fits their needs to avoid real conflict.
It's a real problem with the 'superstates' like China or the US (and still seen in Russia). It is inevitable that these large states will include minorities that don't agree with the federal or supreme governments.
Ideally, this wouldn't be a problem for governments that operated in a truly limited manner as their actual impact/interaction on the local level would be almost unnoticed. But the more you allow the majority to govern closer to the local level, you end up with people who are impacted by laws that they find completely flawed with no real legal mechanism to alter them.
Again, in the past, if you didn't like the laws, you could pack up and leave. Sure it wasn't the ideal situation, but you had that option. Now, you can't even pack up and leave. Jurisdictions expand, and all viable land is claimed, so the inevitable destination is violence once the pressure builds up too high.
And the pressure will build up, because everyone 'knows' their philosophy is the 'right' philosophy. Even if you agree with the current views of a nation or group, you would have to be a fool to think that there is any 'right' solution or that trending towards a positive outcome is somehow guaranteed.
It's not asking for trouble, it's just a fact of nature that if you introduce any variance into the system you will necessarily alter the performance of the system.
A critical system utilizes technology Y and has an error rate of 1% It has a backup to technology Y, but when utilizing that backup it has an error rate of 2%. You are 'reliant' on technology Y in order to achieve an error rate of 1%, not that you are reliant on technology Y to perform at all.
Think about a hospital. They have emergency backup generators. All the patients won't immediately drop dead if the hospital loses grid power, but you should expect that their service would be degraded until grid power is back up. That's what they mean by reliant on GPS. We are reliant on it in order to achieve our current performance.
In real terms, an ambulance responding to an emergency is likely going to use GPS, but they also have a map in the glove box (and a driver who knows the roads). A loss of GPS will result in increased response time. Reliant on GPS to achieve their current performance.
Counter-lawsuit? Against what?
The government is the perfect example of 'not my department.' The government doesn't have to care what gets crushed under the wheels of 'justice'. The people who are supposed to care were the ones who pointed the government in that direction and said 'GO'.
ie: the government has the excuse in the form of: The people told me to go do this, it's not my job to question, it's my job to do. They told me to do this by passing the laws that gave me the power to do this. I must assume that they factored in the costs and potential outcome when they granted this power in the first place.
This is why your first worry shouldn't be 'Will this give the government the power to solve problem xyz' but 'How is it possible for this power to be abused? And when it is inevitably abused in that manner, is it worth the cost?"
It's pretty simple:
Analog tilt works best when the thing you are feeding input to is something that is an analog tilt mechanism (Flaps, ailerons, wheel tilt, etc)
Point and click (mouse) works best when you are feeding input to a primarily point and click mechanism, and firearms are pretty much the pinnacle of 'point' and 'click'.
It's not that your thumbstick can't keep up with the same level of precision, its that the thumbstick is forcing you to control something with a behavior that isn't inherent in the object you are controlling.
With a firearm, you typically don't need to control the rate at which your barrel traverses from point A to point B, you want it to exist at point 'B'. However with something like a car wheel, you don't want it to go from 90 degrees to 45 degrees in 0.01s, that would cause you to lose control. You want it to traverse from 90 to 45 at a limited rate of degrees per second. In essence, the traverse IS the important part, not the final location.
That also explains why there was no French or Polish resistance.
Sometimes people fight for what is right. And speaking as a US citizen, if we even thought about embarking on what you propose, you would find that some of us would fight for what is right.
We are the US. It's tough, but we are better than that. No one ever said that doing the right thing was easier or cheaper.
Yeah, I think they would. In fact, if I feared a country so much that I thought they would 'Bomb our cities, kill our leaders and convert us to their religion.". The answer is that Martyrs are more powerful than your military.
Or is your solution going so far as to cause fear like the Romans did. Because you know how well persecution and absolutely brutal responses worked for them in the Middle East.
The rules are the rules, and woe be to anyone who breaks them, or worse, suggests that they be relaxed.
My dorm had this issue:
1. The minimum number of handicapped spaces is set by the size of the parking lot.
2. This parking lot was oddly shaped. About 12 spots near the dorm, a long path area (with curb parking) and then 500 more spaces about 0.5km away.
The result is that all of the parking spaces next to the dorm were required to be handicapped spaces. This really sucks when you LIVE in that location and you have no option to unload groceries (Campus parking ticketers don't care that you are carrying up your food). You can see how annoying it would be if you had to make multiple trips to unload your car.
What really got me was this: No one in the dorm was disabled. Not a single person. So every single parking space less than 0.5km from the dorm was reserved for non-existent people.
It would have been very nice if these rules were flexible for businesses (like requiring a minimum of 1 for a visitor, and scaling it up to accommodate any disabled resident if they moved in. Unfortunately the laws are very draconian in both interpretation and punishment.
My apologies, I wasn't completely clear. It wasn't the speeding ticket alone that caused me to come to this method of action. I paid the speeding ticket, and felt that the additional surcharges were not with the spirit of a law governed society. I should have a reasonable expectation that the punishment should be commensurate with the crime.
It was a later infraction, which caused me to take a hard-line stance and challenge every ticket I'm ever issued. I got burned this second time, and I can't trust the government not to do it again.
The second incident:
In the jurisdiction, there is a hard cap on fines for a set of infractions. This is set into law. However, the local jurisdiction has discovered that since the law specifically mentioned 'fine' if you call it a fee or a surcharge, it is not technically a 'fine' in the very narrow definition. They are NOT required to list what these surcharges or fees will be, or even when they may or may not be assessed.
Here is what happened:
Officer: Your inspection sticker is in the wrong location.
Me: Oh, I didn't realize that this state requires the sticker to be in xyz location, my previous state required it to be here.
Officer: Here is a citation for improper display of the inspection sticker.
So I drove home, fixed the sticker, and looked up the law. The officer was right, the inspection sticker was supposed to be in a very specific location. I also noticed that the fine for an improperly displayed inspection sticker 'SHALL BE NO GREATER THAN $25'
It made sense to me, it was just a sticker, my car WAS inspected, and while I thought it was rather a lame excuse to be pulled over and cited since I had been acting in good faith as it was just a simple confusion on location, I decided that $25 wasn't too bad and not worth the time it would take to ask for leniency. I signed the ticket pleading guilty and sent it in with the $25 money order.
2 months later I received a bill from the local jurisdiction. for $150 in fees and surcharges.
No where in the code of that state did it allow for a fine of greater than $25. However, the local jurisdiction was not specifically prohibited from adding fees/surcharges and thus, they did. The legislature of that area has since closed that loophole, but it left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.
There was no way for me to know that by pleading guilty to an infraction that listed a maximum fine of $25 that I would end up being required to pay $175.
I can't trust the government not to do that again, so I challenge my tickets in court.
(Caveat: This post was written while I was on the phone with customer service and probably didn't get the full attention an issue like this deserves. I'll respond to clarify if you have questions. )
His main point is that we are running this country in a much too centralized manner, so EVERYTHING becomes applicable to EVERYONE in the United States. One of the reasons I can support Ron Paul even though I disagree with a lot of his subissues is that I find it more important that we decentralize a lot of topics like this.
His main issue is one that helps compartmentalize the damage that a voting group can do. It is much more agreeable to me that poor laws can be limited to a subset of states than to have poor laws applied to ALL of the states.
For example, we have drug legislation that applies to ALL states uniformly. As a result, you have many states like Colorado or California in which their citizens have chosen to legalize Marijuana on a limited basis. You have other states such as New York or Utah in which their citizens have chosen NOT to legalize marijuana.
It allows local groups of people much greater freedom in deciding what works for them. Naturally we can come up with a whole assortment of issues which we feel should apply to everyone, and each of us is going to have a different set of issues. That's why I can support Ron Paul even though I disagree with him on certain aspects.
One of the reasons I don't live in DC is because I dislike their local laws. I live in Virginia, but I don't like their personal property taxes. I'm considering moving to Pennsylvania but their alcohol laws are something that has bothered me in the past.
When it comes to something like marriage, I don't think it should be a federal issue at all, and in that respect, I agree with congressman Paul even though I'm on the completely opposite side from him when it comes to who can get married.
For me, it's much more important that we don't try to run every issue in this country from Washington DC, because to pretend that there is a uniform US culture, is really going to hurt us in the long run. We can see it now in these repeated deadlocks in which issues which COULD be resolved on more regional/local levels are becoming federal issues because we have given the federal government way too much jurisdiction.
It's more important to me that things be run in a manner which still allows for a chance to 'escape' from laws which I do not agree with (by moving to a different state), than the very real fear that a slim majority may be able to apply laws which will impact everyone no matter where they go in the country.
There is no guarantee that 'my' people will be in charge forever, and I think it is much more important to keep the protections for minority groups from being abused by the majority than it is to have a government which can be unlimited in authority.
It's a bit odd, because I think the best way to ensure that we don't end up with a LOT of bad laws which limit our freedom, is to not allow the federal government absolute power in all areas. In some cases that may mean some regions are 'less free' with respect to a specific issue, but it will also mean that we won't end up with all regions being 'less free' with respect to a specific issue.
In this political climate, an amendment to the constitution in order to do something grand (for either side) would never pass (regardless of its importance).
That's fine. If it became a more pressing issue, the political climate would have to adapt to it. It's better than saying "Oh, our politicians are so incompetent that we might as well just give them unlimited authority in the long term because we need them to do something in the short term"
Circumventing the Constitution because doing so makes it easier to get your good ideas through just means that you are enforcing your ideas without consent from the governed.
I did that once. Was doing 84 in a 65 (1 AM on the PA turnpike. 300 miles of straight)
It was a $25 fine. And an EMT fee, a surcharge, another fee, and another and another.
In the end it was $150 (about a decade ago). It isn't that it was so much money, but the absurd way in which legislators have worked go turn the damned system into a tax revenue mechanism that caused me to first start challenging tickets on principle.
It didn't help that I later received a series of tickets (over the next decade) for things which I DID NOT DO. Had I paid the tickets, I would be out several thousand dollars and that doesn't even count what would have happened to my insurance.
When the police cease to be a revenue collection system, I'll stop 'overburdening' the courts.
Make tickets give points only. No fine. Revoke driving privileges at a certain number of points, add short 1 day stays in jail (at no cost) if you continue.
I've got enough cash now that I would shrug off a $200 fine. The unlucky fellow who works at Walmart, not so much. But neither of us can afford to be without our cars or worse, a day in jail.
How do you know WE aren't the extremophiles?
Oceans full of a solvent, we breathe a caustic gas... and so on.
I'll make it easy. Stick with the traditional interpretation and follow it like plain language. If you treat the Constitution as a list of government permissions and not a set of restrictions, and ditch the attempts to interpret the enumerated rights as somehow limiting anything not mentioned...
The Constitution is VERY easy to interpret when you are trying to argue on the behalf of freedom. The only time you need a crack lawyer to argue an interpretation is when you are trying to present an interpretation that seeks to limit freedom.
Some argue that such a simple approach is flawed as it would prevent the government from performing functions that we want them to do such as the EPA, Dept of Ed., etc. That is not true because for anything so important and universal that it requires the federal government, then we need to go through the effort to amend the constitution to grant the government the authority to do that. If it really is that important then passing the amendment will happen. If it doesnt pass that means you either were proposing something that more people than you didn't want, or you need to spend more time convincing people that they want the government to do what you say they should do.
Imagine you hire someone to repair a wall in your house. While he is working he sees you have a broken window and decides that you would be better off and fixes the window of his own volition. What he didn't know is that you were going to build an addition and the window was being removed anyway.
The repairman exceeded his authority and even though he was doing something 'good', but the right way to do it would be to ask you to amend his contract to grant him the authority to fix the window in addition to the wall.
Sure, its harder, but hat process ensures that you have to 'opt in' to increased government rather than the easier method that requires us to actively 'opt out' by continually passing new 'protections' each time the government figures a way around the old protections.
The Fed doesnt care what your degree is to any great extent. There are a few restrictions on things like engineering jobs, but it's really just a checkbox. The real BS is that they won't hire people with experience if they can't mark the checkbox. I've worked with people who had 30 yrs of experience but not the 'right' degree. They couldn't get past the data entry phase of the process.
If there are lots of people, ask one of them if there are any cars coming.
So the solution is to require all vehicles to spend some money, and contribute to noise pollution.
Some problems aren't worth solving. I've been prohibited from working certain jobs because I'm colorblind, and a lot of the reasons for that could be eliminated with nothing more than a policy shift in some cases. (phasing out the use of red/green indicators when other colors can be substituted)
This isn't as big of an issue as people make it to be. Why not affix a bright warning light or flag on the end of a stick that you could wave at the intersection to prove even more alerts to drivers. Every time you step off the curb give it a wave first. I'd think that would go further than hoping you could hear a simulated engine noise in a low speed area.
Pedestrians have the right of way in the US, make cutting past a flag waver a four point violation, and you would have ALL drivers paying more attention. That would do more to increase safety for everyone, not just the blind.
Because non MS software works well without patches...
You also dont get the option to loan your book to friends. That crap system they call loaning is nothing of the sort. So we are expected to pay more for less.
I wouldn't exactly call OtherOS "advertised". Yes, Slashdot readers knew about it, and maybe a few other geeks, but the masses didn't know and wouldn't care.
Except that it was advertised, and just because you don't find it useful, or didn't use it, doesn't mean they didn't take it away from a lot of people who did.
I used it, a lot. I loved tinkering around with it because it had everything I wanted packaged together on a front end system.
What Sony did, was act like an asshole company that decided it was cheaper to deal with the lawsuits and bad publicity of fucking over a minority of its customers than to actually deal with the problem.
So, I don't buy Sony, and actively recommend people purchase products of their competitors (except any product by a similarly sleazy company).
I hate to break it to you, but there are several games (Mass Effect 2) which tie aspects of the game to one-time use codes.
If you buy the game used, you have to buy the code to use that aspect of the game. It's going to happen on Xbox live. So don't worry, it will suck there too.
(It already sucks there for for things like Netflix. Why the hell am I supposed to pay for the privilege to stream content from a third party, via my network, to hardware that I own?)
Better than Steam. As much as people love that system, it pisses me the hell off that I can't let my daughter play a game I bought several years ago.
In what world does someone get a fine every time they fill up their gas tank?
So an infringement on our liberties is ok because it serves your political purposes?