It was social pressure that compelled you not to ask if you could leave. No teacher threatened you with discipline if you didn't hug the parent, you could have just walked up and looked and left.
Isn't this the argument that people used to justify school prayer? If you don't want to participate, just stand there quietly. But apparently, for some people, being asked to stand quietly for a few minutes is too much of an intrusion on their rights.
Yes, on a friend's recommendation, I removed Symantec/Norton from my home system and installed AVG. Seems to work fine. However, when I tried to uninstall Symantec, I used their "uninstaller", but still found some of their apps running in background. So I went to the command prompt, and tried "del *.*" in the Symantec subdirectory. Guess what? Even though I'm running as admin, there are a couple of files it will not let me delete. I've tried killing every process through the task manager, but I can't get theirs to quit.
So now, every time I boot the system, I get a dialog box from Symantec telling me some of their software is missing or damaged, and "click here to fix this problem".
It's awfully nice to see you computer guys get the message that's been burned into the soul of every telecom engineer for the last 80 years. Welcome aboard!
It's not a question of it being the police. Anyone who is given coercive power over another individual turns brutish in a remarkably short period of time. There are many psych experiments where the students are divided into "prisoners" and "guards". Almost inevitably, the guards begin displaying cruel behaviour towards the prisoners. Some of the "guards" are shocked at their own behaviour when shown it on videotape.
but I don't really see how any of the recommended measures, if taken incrementally to make the money-grubbing politicians and blood-sucking lawyers happy, will be bad for us on the whole
Clearly you are unfamiliar with the mechanisms of the Kyoto protocol. In Canada, if we were to close the entire Albertan oil industry, and shut down all electricity generation in Ontario that generates CO2, we still wouldn't be close to meeting our so-called targets. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people would be out of work, national finance would be in the toilet (less tax revenue, more welfare), our brightest people would flee to more sensible countries, and we would experience a general depression that would make the 1930's look like a picnic. Meanwhile, as China builds 250 new coal fired electricity plants - because they're exempt from Kyoto, you see - all the Canadian changes won't do a damn thing to lower global CO2 levels; in fact, they'll go up. Kyoto was an act of political grandstanding by a bunch of dolts who didn't understand the implications. I'll be damned if my whole country has to go in the toilet for a futile, useless program while China and India can pollute as much as they want.
If you have an alcoholic who is so affected by his drinking that he becomes unproductive, you should fire them.
Right. And if someone has cancer, and is exhausted and nauseous after receiving their chemotherapy, you should fire him too?
Most medical professionals consider alcoholism a disease. I would expect a firm to assist the employee with treatment and support for some period of time. If the employee continues to abuse drink, it's not that difficult to set up a testing program. Long term drinkers can appear normal with very high levels of alcohol in their blood. Sooner or later, he'll arrive at work with enough alcohol in him to fail a test, and then you have a legal right to terminate him. But at least you've given him a chance to clean up.
These are things I've learned as the son of an alcoholic.
Neal Stephenson wrote a pretty complete and interesting article for Wired:
www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
It described the project known as FLAG - fiber loop around globe. The technology is quite fascinating and has an amazing history. I think you'll enjoy it.
Well, in backward Toronto, Canada, the largest cable provider, Rogers, offers 4 levels of internet service, from "Ultra-lite" (124kbps down/68 up, $21.95 Cdn/month), to "Extreme" (6.0 Mbps down/800 k up, $51.95 Cdn/month). And this is true for most major Cdn ISP's. So I'd say that the faster connections consumers wanted have materialized, contrary to your assertion, except perhaps in your service area.
In 1970, gold's price was $35/0z, as set by the US government. Nixon closed the gold window a few years later, and gold's price took off. Also, in 1970, at age 14, I pumped gas at the local Texaco. I distinctly remember prices in the range of $0.60 Cdn/gallon, and since the Cdn/US $ exchange was close to 1, we can use $0.60/gallon US. That gives a ratio for gold/oil of 58:1.
I think it's an exaggeration to say gas is $3.25/gallon in the US; I was in Chicago a few months back, and Buffalo last month, and I saw prices in the $2.50-2.70 range. That gives a gold/oil ratio of about 240 since gold is about $670; even if you use the $3.25 price, the ratio is over 200.
So oil is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 as expensive in terms of gold as it was in 1970.
WOW! Just WOW!!! So, someone pays about $500 more in income tax on their $30k income, so that they can save how much in GST??? Let's see. IF and only IF they DO NOT spend anything on suck trivial items like food or housing (rent,mortgage), both tax free, then they can save $30*1%=>$300!! WOW! Real offset! Now, if you spend $20k on food and housing, you end up with max saving of $100 on GST so -$400 net saving!! YEY!!!
Another tard. The feds raised the rate from 15% to 15.5% on the first $37k. You don't pay a dime on the first $8,900. So your tax on $30k - $8.9k = $21,100 went from $3,165 to $3,270 - assuming you had no other deductions, like say children. That's an additional $105, since you're clearly slow at arithmetic. To save that by a 1% GST cut, you only need to spend $850/month on taxable items. Let's see now - gasoline? telephone? cable? internet? eating out? clothes? It's not hard for me to find $850 month I spend on GST eligible items. But even if you cut that in half to $425/month, you still end up saving $50 in GST, so the tax hike costs you at most $55 a year - gee, $0.17 a day. Cry me a river. And they've promised another 1% cut if re-elected, which would completely eliminate the difference.
And as for the seniors and others who had everything invested in income trusts: the first rule of investing is diversify. If you're so stupid as to keep all your assets in a single income class, you deserve to have your head handed to you, just like all the tards who were fully invested in high tech in 1999. Decent financial advice would have protected them, but they got greedy and chased yield. Richard Russell, who has written the Dow Theory letters for the last 45 years, has written "more money has been lost chasing yield than in any other investment decision". I manage over $2 million for my extended family, and I never put more than 10% into any sector other than T-Bills, where I park funds until I spot an opportunity to deploy them. And it's not like the income trust sector cratered like Nortel (I had friends at Nortel who had $1,000,000 in their RRSP's in 1999; now they have less than $50,000); IIRC, it's down about 20% overall. So if you had $1m before yielding 8%, and now you have $800k yielding 6%, your gross has come down from $80k to $48k. But instead of paying tax on $80k as a single payer, you pay tax on $24k - which is pretty low, about $2,250 each. So your net income now is $43k versus $60k - I agree that's a loss, but it's one that could have been avoided or minimized with a modicum of common sense. Use the same numbers with 50% in income trusts, and 50% in bonds, and what do you get? $500k in income trusts at 8% becomes $400k at 6%, while $500k in bonds stays about the same at 5%. Income goes from $65k at single payer rates to $49k at split income rates. Now you're talking about a loss of less than $4k on family income. Where is it guaranteed that investments outside of GICs are without risk? These fools ignored it, and they're paying the price.
And, although this is beside the point, I was glad to see the Tories change their mind on the income trust issue. That structure, while possibly advantageous for industries like oil and gas, was not good for technology industries that need to invest in R&D. If the overriding imperative for your firm is to return cash to shareholders NOW, you end up neglecting the future. I'm not suggesting Bell, Telus, Rogers, etc. are wonderful corporate citizens, but they do currently employ a lot of people in R&D. I'd rather see some of those jobs remain in Canada, instead of fleeing to Japan, Europe, or the US, so a bunch of economically ignorant senior citizens can be insulated from their stupid decisions.
Uh, you do realise "common carriers" have a responsibility, in return for their granted monopolies, to carry all traffic? If you were talking about strictly wireless entities who were paying market prices for their frequencies, you might have a point. But to talk about telcos/cable cos who are granted monopolies and say "If I invest my money.." is ludicrous.
And I've read Ayn Rand; as Tom Wolfe said about Marshall Macluhan, she hit some "very big nails not quite squarely on the head". She was right about many things, wrong about others, and slavishly quoting her is a sign of intellectual poverty.
http, ftp, bittorrent, et all, typically aren't particularly sensitive to latency, but some things, VOIP and online games, in particular, are rather sensitive to latency, so those time-critical things should be given priority over the bulk traffic.
Er, why? If I'm paying $50/month for internet access, and you're paying $50/month for the same access, why does your traffic (I don't play on-line games or use VOIP) deserve higher priority than mine? Now, if you, as a user, don't want to pay extra to your ISP so your games/VOIP get a better QoS, why should I, as a user, accept a much lower QoS on my p2p apps? And, as I noted elsewhere on this topic, Rogers, my Canadian ISP, throttles p2p to 1-2 kbps, making it virtually useless.
I don't have a problem with Robb^H^Hgers establishing download limits; tell me I'm only allowed X MB or whatever a month, and price it at different levels - as they do for speed - and that's fine. (For those who don't know, they have 4 different levels of internet access, all based on maximum speed; why don't they just add levels of data transfer to the matrix?)
The more I think about this, the more sense it makes: charge users on the combination of their speed, and their maximum data transfer. If you want high speed transfers of massive amounts of pr0n, pay for it. If you want fast access to sites that are not bit-intensive, pay less. If you want to download massive amounts of pr0n, and are willing to wait a few days for each new movie, pay less. If you want guaranteed QoS for VOIP, pay a little extra. Surely this gives the ISP's a chance to charge for the level of service they provide, without restricting the ability of small website owners/bloggers to provide content?
What a tard you are.. according to StatsCan there are just over 1 million unemployed in Canada, half a million fewer than your "fact". The unemployment rate has fallen over the last year to a 30-year low. http://www.statcan.ca/english/Subjects/Labour/LFS/ lfs-en.htm And almost all the employment growth has come from Western Canada, which mostly votes Conservative.
Harper cut the GST by 1%, to offset the income tax rate hike. He allowed seniors to split income, to make up for the income trust decision. He hasn't gutted social programs, as the Libs/NDP alleged, but he has ended public funding for politically driven advocacy groups, such as the SoW council. (I have no problem with the SoW existing, but I'll be damned if my taxes are used to support them, while no conservative women groups get funds.) He's given more tax points to the provinces, which pushes power down to lower levels, something most business gurus have been preaching for years. He got an agreement on softwood lumber which the Liberals failed to get in over 13 years; yes, it wasn't a perfect agreement, but then hasn't the hallmark of a good compromise been that neither party is completely satisfied? He gave parents cash to fund their daycare needs as they see fit, instead of creating a massive new child care bureaucracy to impose their statist agenda on our kids.
All in all, he has taken incremental steps that seem like perfectly reasonable compromises. Even on the environmental file, on which I'll agree his recent change of heart is as sudden as Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, he still refuses to accept the Kyoto pile of doo-doo, which will penalize Canada by billions of dollars, throwing people out of work, and causing all of us to live poorer lives, while allowing China and India to create more new CO2 emissions than Canada would cut, and thus do absolutely nothing to affect climate change.
Funny you should mention that. It was first posited in an article by Richard Posner, then teaching at University of Chicago, IIRC, and now a judge. The basic idea is the utility being regulated has funds, expertise, and a vested interest in persuading the regulator to see things their way. The public has few funds, perceived lower expertise, and has "less" to lose on an individual basis then the utility does (e.g. $5 more a month for phone service is only $5 for you but $5 million for the utility). Eventually, the regulatory body becomes "captured" by the industry, and does what industry wants, not the public it is supposed to protect.
But here's the ironic thing: Posner's article appeared in the now discontinued "Bell System Journal of Economics", a meaty little journal that contained many articles about pricing theory for utilities, etc. Bell underwrote the whole thing from its monopoly profits; after the breakup, they wouldn't pay for it anymore.
Actually, 90% of Canadians live in a strip 100 miles north of the US border. Outside that - dare I say tube? - I agree population density is very low, but within it, it actually exceeds the US average.
Your experience is not correct for Canada. Rogers, one of the largest cable internet providers, throttles p2p traffic to a trickle; 1 kbps means it takes a couple of days to download a movie. Not sure if other vendors do so, but I don't have any other choice in my area (can't get DSL or dial-up as no wireline phone, and no wi-fi at my location yet).
Yes, you don't understand the problem. The issue is not what content the ISP provides; the issue is that they will require companies to pay them in order to get preferential treatment. So Joe Blow's - who likely can't afford to pay extra - weblog that I like may take 10 minutes to load, while Kraft or Molson's sites - who will write off the extra cost as advertising or marketing expense - load in seconds.
Put another way, companies that can afford to pay the extra fees will be high-speed, while companies that can't will be on dial-up speed. Wanna go surfing at 1200 bps again?
Basically, globalization in combination with monopoly rights are the monopoly holders wet dream;
And since 99% of the goods traded in the world are non-monopoly (think food, cars, energy, etc. - how much of your disposable income goes on monopoly products? - why should we care?
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Isn't this the argument that people used to justify school prayer? If you don't want to participate, just stand there quietly. But apparently, for some people, being asked to stand quietly for a few minutes is too much of an intrusion on their rights.
So now, every time I boot the system, I get a dialog box from Symantec telling me some of their software is missing or damaged, and "click here to fix this problem".
It's awfully nice to see you computer guys get the message that's been burned into the soul of every telecom engineer for the last 80 years. Welcome aboard!
Unbelievable. No, you moron, it was fake real blood. Oh, wait, maybe...
Nevermind.
You must be new here. The chance that a woman reads any given post on /. is minute, if not infinitesimal.
Yay! I'm gonna get a Mr. Fusion!
Clearly you are unfamiliar with the mechanisms of the Kyoto protocol. In Canada, if we were to close the entire Albertan oil industry, and shut down all electricity generation in Ontario that generates CO2, we still wouldn't be close to meeting our so-called targets. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people would be out of work, national finance would be in the toilet (less tax revenue, more welfare), our brightest people would flee to more sensible countries, and we would experience a general depression that would make the 1930's look like a picnic. Meanwhile, as China builds 250 new coal fired electricity plants - because they're exempt from Kyoto, you see - all the Canadian changes won't do a damn thing to lower global CO2 levels; in fact, they'll go up. Kyoto was an act of political grandstanding by a bunch of dolts who didn't understand the implications. I'll be damned if my whole country has to go in the toilet for a futile, useless program while China and India can pollute as much as they want.
No, the important question is "Is it a crunchy frog?".
Right. And if someone has cancer, and is exhausted and nauseous after receiving their chemotherapy, you should fire him too?
Most medical professionals consider alcoholism a disease. I would expect a firm to assist the employee with treatment and support for some period of time. If the employee continues to abuse drink, it's not that difficult to set up a testing program. Long term drinkers can appear normal with very high levels of alcohol in their blood. Sooner or later, he'll arrive at work with enough alcohol in him to fail a test, and then you have a legal right to terminate him. But at least you've given him a chance to clean up.
These are things I've learned as the son of an alcoholic.
www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
It described the project known as FLAG - fiber loop around globe. The technology is quite fascinating and has an amazing history. I think you'll enjoy it.
Well, in backward Toronto, Canada, the largest cable provider, Rogers, offers 4 levels of internet service, from "Ultra-lite" (124kbps down/68 up, $21.95 Cdn/month), to "Extreme" (6.0 Mbps down/800 k up, $51.95 Cdn/month). And this is true for most major Cdn ISP's. So I'd say that the faster connections consumers wanted have materialized, contrary to your assertion, except perhaps in your service area.
I think it's an exaggeration to say gas is $3.25/gallon in the US; I was in Chicago a few months back, and Buffalo last month, and I saw prices in the $2.50-2.70 range. That gives a gold/oil ratio of about 240 since gold is about $670; even if you use the $3.25 price, the ratio is over 200.
So oil is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 as expensive in terms of gold as it was in 1970.
Another tard. The feds raised the rate from 15% to 15.5% on the first $37k. You don't pay a dime on the first $8,900. So your tax on $30k - $8.9k = $21,100 went from $3,165 to $3,270 - assuming you had no other deductions, like say children. That's an additional $105, since you're clearly slow at arithmetic. To save that by a 1% GST cut, you only need to spend $850/month on taxable items. Let's see now - gasoline? telephone? cable? internet? eating out? clothes? It's not hard for me to find $850 month I spend on GST eligible items. But even if you cut that in half to $425/month, you still end up saving $50 in GST, so the tax hike costs you at most $55 a year - gee, $0.17 a day. Cry me a river. And they've promised another 1% cut if re-elected, which would completely eliminate the difference.
And as for the seniors and others who had everything invested in income trusts: the first rule of investing is diversify. If you're so stupid as to keep all your assets in a single income class, you deserve to have your head handed to you, just like all the tards who were fully invested in high tech in 1999. Decent financial advice would have protected them, but they got greedy and chased yield. Richard Russell, who has written the Dow Theory letters for the last 45 years, has written "more money has been lost chasing yield than in any other investment decision". I manage over $2 million for my extended family, and I never put more than 10% into any sector other than T-Bills, where I park funds until I spot an opportunity to deploy them. And it's not like the income trust sector cratered like Nortel (I had friends at Nortel who had $1,000,000 in their RRSP's in 1999; now they have less than $50,000); IIRC, it's down about 20% overall. So if you had $1m before yielding 8%, and now you have $800k yielding 6%, your gross has come down from $80k to $48k. But instead of paying tax on $80k as a single payer, you pay tax on $24k - which is pretty low, about $2,250 each. So your net income now is $43k versus $60k - I agree that's a loss, but it's one that could have been avoided or minimized with a modicum of common sense. Use the same numbers with 50% in income trusts, and 50% in bonds, and what do you get? $500k in income trusts at 8% becomes $400k at 6%, while $500k in bonds stays about the same at 5%. Income goes from $65k at single payer rates to $49k at split income rates. Now you're talking about a loss of less than $4k on family income. Where is it guaranteed that investments outside of GICs are without risk? These fools ignored it, and they're paying the price.
And, although this is beside the point, I was glad to see the Tories change their mind on the income trust issue. That structure, while possibly advantageous for industries like oil and gas, was not good for technology industries that need to invest in R&D. If the overriding imperative for your firm is to return cash to shareholders NOW, you end up neglecting the future. I'm not suggesting Bell, Telus, Rogers, etc. are wonderful corporate citizens, but they do currently employ a lot of people in R&D. I'd rather see some of those jobs remain in Canada, instead of fleeing to Japan, Europe, or the US, so a bunch of economically ignorant senior citizens can be insulated from their stupid decisions.
And I've read Ayn Rand; as Tom Wolfe said about Marshall Macluhan, she hit some "very big nails not quite squarely on the head". She was right about many things, wrong about others, and slavishly quoting her is a sign of intellectual poverty.
Er, why? If I'm paying $50/month for internet access, and you're paying $50/month for the same access, why does your traffic (I don't play on-line games or use VOIP) deserve higher priority than mine? Now, if you, as a user, don't want to pay extra to your ISP so your games/VOIP get a better QoS, why should I, as a user, accept a much lower QoS on my p2p apps? And, as I noted elsewhere on this topic, Rogers, my Canadian ISP, throttles p2p to 1-2 kbps, making it virtually useless.
I don't have a problem with Robb^H^Hgers establishing download limits; tell me I'm only allowed X MB or whatever a month, and price it at different levels - as they do for speed - and that's fine. (For those who don't know, they have 4 different levels of internet access, all based on maximum speed; why don't they just add levels of data transfer to the matrix?)
The more I think about this, the more sense it makes: charge users on the combination of their speed, and their maximum data transfer. If you want high speed transfers of massive amounts of pr0n, pay for it. If you want fast access to sites that are not bit-intensive, pay less. If you want to download massive amounts of pr0n, and are willing to wait a few days for each new movie, pay less. If you want guaranteed QoS for VOIP, pay a little extra. Surely this gives the ISP's a chance to charge for the level of service they provide, without restricting the ability of small website owners/bloggers to provide content?
Harper cut the GST by 1%, to offset the income tax rate hike. He allowed seniors to split income, to make up for the income trust decision. He hasn't gutted social programs, as the Libs/NDP alleged, but he has ended public funding for politically driven advocacy groups, such as the SoW council. (I have no problem with the SoW existing, but I'll be damned if my taxes are used to support them, while no conservative women groups get funds.) He's given more tax points to the provinces, which pushes power down to lower levels, something most business gurus have been preaching for years. He got an agreement on softwood lumber which the Liberals failed to get in over 13 years; yes, it wasn't a perfect agreement, but then hasn't the hallmark of a good compromise been that neither party is completely satisfied? He gave parents cash to fund their daycare needs as they see fit, instead of creating a massive new child care bureaucracy to impose their statist agenda on our kids.
All in all, he has taken incremental steps that seem like perfectly reasonable compromises. Even on the environmental file, on which I'll agree his recent change of heart is as sudden as Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, he still refuses to accept the Kyoto pile of doo-doo, which will penalize Canada by billions of dollars, throwing people out of work, and causing all of us to live poorer lives, while allowing China and India to create more new CO2 emissions than Canada would cut, and thus do absolutely nothing to affect climate change.
It saddens me that tards like you get a vote.
But here's the ironic thing: Posner's article appeared in the now discontinued "Bell System Journal of Economics", a meaty little journal that contained many articles about pricing theory for utilities, etc. Bell underwrote the whole thing from its monopoly profits; after the breakup, they wouldn't pay for it anymore.
Actually, 90% of Canadians live in a strip 100 miles north of the US border. Outside that - dare I say tube? - I agree population density is very low, but within it, it actually exceeds the US average.
Your experience is not correct for Canada. Rogers, one of the largest cable internet providers, throttles p2p traffic to a trickle; 1 kbps means it takes a couple of days to download a movie. Not sure if other vendors do so, but I don't have any other choice in my area (can't get DSL or dial-up as no wireline phone, and no wi-fi at my location yet).
Put another way, companies that can afford to pay the extra fees will be high-speed, while companies that can't will be on dial-up speed. Wanna go surfing at 1200 bps again?
And since 99% of the goods traded in the world are non-monopoly (think food, cars, energy, etc. - how much of your disposable income goes on monopoly products? - why should we care?
Someone objectionable?
All right! A Herbie reference..interesting. Are you a little fat nothing?
Cory has written stories that I enjoy. You haven't. I have a suggestion as to where you can stick your "SuperBanana".