The public health fascists have claimed a couple of scalps in my home state. It’s too bad there wasn’t a grassroots organization like Ban the Ban around to speak up for freedom and common sense.

movies preteen sexsex vibrator machine movies3d maker moviemovies home amatuernudity movies in celebrityggg moviesmovies kissing sapphicwho that girl movie Map

viagra generic cialis 5xanax side affectadderal xanax withabout xanax5 viagra sildenafilviagra herbal 0prices tramadol 100 ultramalcohol xanax Map

Did I really just hear Kerry promise to only send our troops to war when it’s necessary to protect American security? Seriously? I think that would be fantastic, but somehow I doubt he’s repudiating the record of President Clinton– who deployed troops to Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and lord knows where else. None of those places were vital to our national security.

Matt has an excellent post about extending antidiscrimination laws to sexual orientation. I think he’s exactly right: antidiscrimination laws that protect racial minorities (and to a lesser extent, women) can be justified on the basis of our history. Although gay people have certainly faced their share of discrimination over the years, for a variety of reasons they simply aren’t an oppressed class today they way blacks were in the 1960s. Gay people are, by and large, wealthy and successful. And while anti-gay bigotry is still widespread in many areas, it’s generally concentrated in red states that are unlikely to pass anti-discrimination laws anyway. And so while I personally would not want to associate with people who discriminate against gay people, I don’t that’s a sufficient reason to fine them or throw them in jail.

This relates, I think, to Will’s argument about Rawlsian “political libertarianism.” Matt seems to be that rare leftist who is willing to step back from his own cultural prejudices and advocate policies of liberal neutrality even if the outcome would not be precisely to his liking, based on a respect for the equal rights of others to live their lives as they see fit. He understands the vital distinction between moral condemnation and legal penalties– that relying on the former whenever possible increases social harmony.

Too many people on the left seem just as eager to impose their cultural prejudices on the country as cultural warriors on the right. I wince when I see liberals who casually declare that people, say don’t need to be packing heat, driving SUV’s, or smoking in bars. That seems to be of a piece with conservatives who say people don’t need be looking at pornography, smoking dope, or having ass-sex. Sure, the leftists who want to restrict guns, SUV’s and cigarettes will be able to give you some plausible-sounding arguments for why those particular things should be banned, taxed, regulated, or whatever. But it’s pretty clear that at root, they are from a culture where those things are just considered bad, and that that was a major influence on how they came to their particular position on the matter. (after all, conservatives will tell you all about the harmful social consequences of porn, pot, and gay sex too) And many on the left, if pressed, would admit that they’d be perfectly happy banning guns, SUV’s and cigarettes entirely if they had the chance.

Me, I find guns, cigarettes, SUVs, dope, and ass-sex weird and/or distasteful (I’ll admit porn has a certain appeal). But I feel fortunate that I live in a country where all of those things (except pot, which I plan to help change) is legal. A free society is a society in which people you don’t like very much get to do things you don’t approve of. In exchange, those people let you do the things they don’t approve of. I wish both liberals and conservatives would spend more time thinking about how their own dogmatic promotion of their own cultural prejudices fuels the divisiveness of the culture wars. It is possible for left and right to co-exist peacfully, but only if both sides learn to treat the philosophical and cultural commitments of the other side with respect.

Ars is covering a pair of depressing intellectual property disputes today. The first is word that Id Software, maker of the legendary Doom video game, is licensing a patented algorithm from Creative and bundling it in the engine for its upcoming Doom 3. What’s important about this is that game engines like this are expensive to develop, and the few companies with pockets deep enough to do so often license them to lots of smaller game companies who make other games with them. That means that Creative will be able to demand royalties from every company making use of the Doom 3 engine. Here’s the kicker:

What’s really irritating about this situation is that the issue is not about the patented code itself — Creative’s patent covers a similar technique, and they are using that patent to lay claim to the idea of Carmack’s Reverse. Claiming patent rights not just on a specific piece of code, but on an algorithm is hardly different from claiming to hold a patent on the quadratic equation. Given the costs of fighting a court battle and the likelihood that a judge might fail to recognize the difference, Carmack’s decision to cut a deal with Creative was, regrettably, the most pragmatic option he had.

Software patents are evil! Creative’s patent (and lawsuit) do absolutely nothing to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” To the contrary, Carmack–who everyone admits developed his algorithm without Creative’s help–nearly decided to use an inferior algorithm so he could evade the scope of Creative’s patent. The whole fiasco was a boon to the lawyers, but accomplished little else.

In a completely unrelated area of intellectual property law, the holders of the copyright on Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land is My Land” are suing JibJab for copyright infringement. This seems like constitutionally protected fair use if I ever saw it. Ars seems to think there’s a relevant distinction between parody and satire, but my understanding (and the EFF seems to aggree) is that both usually receive robust protection against copyright challenges.

In any event, the bottom line is that our current intellectual property system leaves far too much scope for legal blackmail. The good guys in both of these cases would probably win in court, but only at considerable legal expense. And so instead of fighting a protracted court battle, they settle. That emboldens copyright holders and casts a shadow over future intellectual freedom, leading to more lawsuits and more settlements in the future. The few sacrificial lambs that choose to fight often win in court and get forced out of business anyway.

What should be done? I have lots of suggestions, but until the geek community develops some lobbying clout, none of them have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting through Congress.

personal $7000 loans

Some facilities install signal-jamming equipment to prevent their use, although in many countries, including secured loans fast such equipment is illegal.

I’m simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the way the glare of the media and the limited attention span of the average voter foreshortens campaign messages. Each voter seems to retain about a minute worth of each candidate’s standard pitch–two or three major issues, a very brief sketch of a candidate’s personality, a glancing impression of one or two pivotal media events. Each candidate spends close to a year trying to control what one-minute impression of each candidate the voters take to the voting booth.

Sometimes that key impression is made by a fluke media event that catches the public imagination– think the Dean scream, Dukakis in the tank, or the elder Bush looking at his watch. This has got to be maddening for campaign strategists, who see carefully laid plans obliterated by a random media moment they could have neither predicted or controlled.

More often, however, campaigns attempt to build elaborate, stylized narratives about their own candidate and the other guy…
(more…)

Verizon has joined the VoIP bandwagon, offering a service that allows people to make phone calls over their broadband internet connections. It looks like pretty standard stuff, but there’s one thing about it that jumps out as an obvious flaw: the price. At $39.95, it’s hard to see who would sign up for the service.

Vonage has them beat by $10, for a service that’s more mature and isn’t tied to an evil local phone monopoly. I’m not sure what local phone service costs out here on the East Coast, but at least where I come from, you can get a landline with bells and whistles for considerably less than $40. And they offer a pitiful $5 discount to their DSL customers.

So I don’t really understand who they expect to sign up for this service. Maybe they priced it so as not to undercut their local phone business, but if so that’s an awfully short-sighted approach, since the erosion of traditional landline service revenue is probably inevitable. On the phone side, they’re competing not only with services like Vonage, but with cell phones as well. And on the broadband front, they’re getting clobbered by cable, which offers faster connection speeds. They just don’t have a lot of market power to play with.

So, um… what the hell? Is there some killer feature to this service that I’m missing, or are they just trapped by bureaucratic inertia?

mature gallery moviemilf movies sexmodel solution moviemonty movie clips pythonbox office movie grossdancing dirty moviemovie monster pornwarehouse poster movie Map

military loans

[17] This aspect of the mobile telephony business is, in itself, loan plus federal e.

I don’t know who wrote this copy I’m editing, so I’ll just rant at my three readers instead: What is the deal with people who use the “from… to” construction when they’re just trying to present an unordered list? For example people will write things like “I like fruit of all kinds– from apples and kiwis to bananas and tangerines.” Isn’t the whole point of the “from… to” construction to indicate that the things in question span the both extremes of some relevant dimension? Phrases like “From Maine to Alaska,” “from Shaq to Calista Flockheart,” or “from Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter to Ralph Nader and Michael Moore” convey obvious contrasts, and indicate that you’re referring to entities at both those extremes and everything in between.

But if you’re just presenting a laundry list of 13 items that don’t fit along any identifiable spectrum, can you just separate the items with commas and precede the last item with the word “and?” Please?

mp3 metropcs ringtones

Eventually ringtones 24 show tv spread and in 1999 the Philippines launched the first commercial mobile payments systems, on the mobile operators Globe and Smart.

interest low for loan housing

[31] The health concerns have grown as loans payday personal penetration rates throughout Europe reached 80%–90% levels earlier in this decade and prolonged exposure studies have been carried out in almost all European countries again most reporting no effect, and the most alarming studies only reporting loans payday personal effect.

It appears that typepad offers no way to put straight HTML in the sidebar of this page. I’ve got a “plus” account, the middle one. I realize that they’re trying to give people an incentive to spring for their “pro” version, which I gather is full-blown Movable Type with all the bells and whistles, but this is ridiculous. I can get a full-blown web hosting service for not much more than typepad charges for this crippleware blogging software.

Now that google owns blogger, maybe it’s time to start looking over there. Unfortunately, I’m stuck with typepad until November…

spanking of clips movieclips cave pokemon moviemovie nextdoor girlmovie nudes starmusclemen moviesmovies nude in girlssex clips sample xxx clips moviemovie sapphic Map

aaro mp3 meeti viralaassi helany mp3mp3 kannumai aayirammiguel mp3 33 album luismp3 x 451mp3 abdelaziz statimp3 nickatina abdremp3 tippin aaronn Map

Will Wilkinson has been prolific lately. Here’s his latest gem:

I’ve got to say that it’s just sort of embarrassing to see the AdBusting, culture jamming, No-Logoites wandering my neighborhood armed with clipboards marching door-to-door plumping for John Forbes Kerry, as if Civilization Depends Upon It. The whole industry of pop leftism–Michael Moore, Al Franken, Thomas Frank, Move On, etc.–, turns out to be a device, among other things, for getting earnest kids superficially worried about autonomy and alienation to hit the sidewalk and maximize taps on the Diebold flatscreen for the greater glory of a self-infatuated millionaire blowhard whose policies suspiciously resemble the bumbling, Jesus-spouting halfwit they’ve learned to hate with a delicious half-mad zeal. They labor happily, bent to the will of the political class, animated by a comically absurd set of beliefs and desires that could not truly be their own.

Read the whole thing.

I’m becoming less and less enthusiastic about voting this year. Kerry will carry DC overwhelmingly, DC has no representation in Congress, and I’m not sure I’m going to be in DC long enough to care who gets to pretend to govern DC itself. Ultimately voting would serve no purpose other than as an affirmation of my civic-mindedness, and a vote of confidence in whomever I choose to vote for. But with the lonely exception of Carol Schwartz, I expect to loathe everyone on the ballot. Why exactly should I spend an hour of my time casting a vote of confidence in a system that produces candidates I uniformly can’t stand?

The blogosphere is abuzz over this article arguing that minimum wage increases don’t cause unemployment. These guys seem to be convinced. I’m not.

One of the things that I think is missing in all of this analysis is a distinction between short-run and long-run effects. Most businesses in a modern industrial society have large sunk capital costs and long planning horizons. If I build a factory expecting to be able to pay assembly-line workers $5/hour and the minimum wage gets raised to $6/hour, I’m going to raise my wages and keep running the factory, because I’ve already sunk a lot of money into the factory and want to recoup as many of my losses as possible. Once you’ve spent a lot of money setting up a business, your demand for labor becomes highly inelastic.

So conceptually, I think that explains why we don’t see a large drop in employment immediately after a minimum-wage hike. But that doesn’t mean an increase has no effect. In the long run, the employer’s calculation looks rather different. If I’m thinking about building a factory, the current minimum wage is going to be an important consideration in deciding whether the factory will turn a profit. It might be that on the margin, there are some businesses that crunch the numbers and find they can’t make a profit at the higher minimum wage.

And even if that rarely happens in practice, there are certainly going to be plenty of businesses that find ways to use fewer workers in response to wage increases– for example, by increasing automation, shifting to less labor-intensive products, or hiring fewer high-skilled workers rather than more low-skilled ones. The important point is that those sorts of changes take time, and it won’t necessarily be obvious to those on the ground that the minimum wage increase was the precipitating cause of the decision to automate or to phase out a labor-intensive product.

What about the empirical evidence? I’m skeptical that it’s possible to test this sort of thing empirically. There are no controlled experiments on questions like this, and the natural experiments that do occur are liable to have a lot of methodological challenges. The longer the time horizon being studied, and the subtler the alleged effect, the harder it’s going to be to control confounding variables and separate out signal from noise. That’s particularly true in the United States, where the minimum wage is now so low as to be almost irrelevant in many parts of the country. Here in the DC area, I have the impression that unskilled entry level jobs often pay $6-$8/hour. In that climate, any effects of a wage increase from $4.25 to $5.15 is likely to be limited.

So does the minimum wage increase unemployment? To the extent that it does anything (and in wealthier areas it may not) I think the answer has to be yes. Not by immediately throwing people out of work, but by discouraging the creation of new jobs and encouraging employers to focus on ways to reduce their payrolls over the long term. But the thing is, those sorts of effects seem like they would be exceedingly difficult to measure, so I’m not at all confident I’ll ever see economic studies conclusively proving the point.

0 mortgage down bad creditreporting 3 agencies credit majorfor addresses for bankruptcy filing creditorsstudy accreditationfree accept card creditcourses graduate 4 credit0 percent credit and cardscards check accepting credit Map

OK, OK, in the interests of full disclosure: another browser exploit was discovered this week, this one in Mozilla. If you followed my advice last week and got firefox, go get the patch.

So while it’s disappointing that Mozilla is not, in fact, flawless, I stand by my advice from last week. First of all, this is the first Mozilla exploit discovered in months, whereas Internet Explorer has had a steady stream of exploits discovered. Secondly, the Mozilla hackers appear to have promptly issued a patch that fixed the problem, whereas the patch Microsoft released didn’t quite do the trick.

There’s a deeper reason to expect Internet Explorer to have more problems than Mozilla and its derivatives in the future though. In designing Internet Explorer, Microsoft prioritized features and integration with the OS, while Mozilla prioritized cross-platform compatibility. One of the nice bi-products of prioritizing cross-platform capabilities is that interactions between the browser and the OS are going to be mostly well-documented, arms-length interfaces, which are easier to secure and easier for third parties to scrutinize and detect potential problems.

In contrast, Internet Explorer supports ActiveX controls, which are Windows-only applets that have access to Windows-specific features. Many security experts argue that a browser just shouldn’t allow web pages to do many of the things that ActiveX allows them to do, like (as the Ars story above explains) reading and writing files to the user’s PC. Now, it’s possible to allow that sort of thing securely, but Microsoft seems not to have paid as much attention as they should have to the problem. And worse, the incestuous relationship between IE and Windows makes it extremely difficult to be sure you’ve fixed the problem.

So… no browser is perfect, and no matter what browser you have you need to be aware of security issues, but I still recommend getting Firefox if you’re running IE on Windows.

Oh, and of course those of us who have joined the cult of Steve were unaffected by any of last week’s problems.

dosing xanax

[2] These manufacturers account for over 80% of all bars xanax sale for s sold and produce phones for sale in most countries.

Matt Yglesias has a pair of posts casting aspersions on the Endangered Species Act. That set off a flurry of outraged, patronizing comments explaining that the world is all… like… connected, man. In the second post, Matt links to some libertarian critiques of the ESA.

Now, it seems to me that there are at least three distinct issues here, that have gotten lumped together rather haphazardly in the comments to Matt’s posts. Let’s see if I can disentangle them:

1. Endangered species are critical to human survival: This was Matt’s explicit point, and I think he’s right that this is nonsense. For evidence, look to Europe: Europeans killed off all of its large wild animals and deforested almost all of its land three thousand years ago. You can argue about what kinds of negative effects this had, but it’s pretty clear that the Europeans survived. We don’t know what native species were killed by ancient Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Celts, etc, but it’s a safe bet that Europe had some native species that are no longer with us, and it’s obvious that they weren’t critical to the survival of European humans.

Now, one might argue that Europe has been somehow free-riding off of the beneficial environmental effects of wild areas elsewhere in the world. I’m skeptical about this, but even if this is true, it’s hard to see how diversity, per se, is the issue. It might be, for example, that a minimum number of trees is needed to have a breathable atmosphere. But if that’s the case, it’s not obvious why you need to preserve every tree species. As long as you have enough of some kind of tree, that’s probably sufficient. And as long as we have a few kinds of trees that can grow in each climate, we can always plant more trees as needed.

2. Endangered species are aesthetically or scientifically valuable: This is largely a matter of opinion. Personally, I’m agnostic on the subject. I like biodiversity in the abstract, but I’m not sure how much I personally would be willing to pay to preserve a particular increment of biodiversity. But notice the critical difference between this and the first issue: there’s no tipping point. Preserving 90% of biodiversity is almost as good as preserving 100% of it. Ordinary cost-benefit analysis is appropriate. Spending a dollar to save a dozen species is clearly worthwhile. Spending a trillion dollars to save one species is probably not worthwhile.

3. The Endangered Species Act doesn’t protect species (or even hurts them): This is the argument that most of the libertarians Matt links to make, and notice that it’s independent of the first two issues. If you buy this argument, then you should support repealing the ESA even if you strongly believe that endangered species are intrinsically valuable and crucial to human survival. Personally, I think this critique is probably right– by making endangered species a threat to landowners’ livelihood, the ESA creates perverse incentives to want to destroy habitat and drive away (or kill) species before their presence is discovered on your land. Now, I’m not really looking to argue this point in any detail, but I think those on the left can at least acknowledge that it’s a point worth addressing in any defense of the ESA: clearly, the Act creates some perverse incentives that to at least some extent encourage land owners to “shoot, shovel, and shut up.”

Most pro-ESA people seem to focus (without offering a lot of evidence) on point #1, using a sort of flaky, “everything is connected to everything else” argument. Most anti-ESA types, on the other hand, seem to focus mostly on point #3, without really taking seriously the first two issues. You get the sense that most of those people don’t really care if the ESA is effective or not, because they didn’t much like endangered species in the first place. Not only is that a bad debating tactic, but I think it undermines their argument, in the sense that to be taken seriously in one’s critique of the ESA, one needs to be able to offer a compelling alternative.

The bottom line, though, is that people in this debate appear to be talking past each other. Pro-ESA people seem to never consider whether the ESA actually works the way it’s supposed to, while anti-ESA appear not to really care if species get saved. In other words, neither side cares if the law works– albeit for different reasons. Which is unfortunate, because I think that if people on each side engaged and took seriously the concerns of their opponents, it would be possible to reform things in ways that both sides would find congenial.

Voice of America needs to learn the difference between “that” and “which:”

As a first-term senator who has held no other elective office, the Republican Party noted that Mr. Edwards has never been the lead sponsor on any legislation, which has become law.

What he’s trying to say is “…any legislation that has become law.” “That” is restrictive, and limits the scope of the noun it modifies. Which, on the other hand, is unrestrictive, and merely provides additional information about the noun it modifies. “which has become law” makes no sense unless it’s intended to be restrictive.

Some would argue that which can be used in a restrictive sense, but at the very least, that requires removing the superfluous comma, which makes it unambiguously unrestrictive.

Also, doesn’t it seem to be saying that the Republican Party is a first-term senator?

quick loan fax 10 payday 1410 loan accounts 15 savings payday1000 loan up paydaychoose payday 12 personal loan loanequity refi refinance 125 home loanshome equity 125 loans tennesseepersonal 15000 credit bad loanprocessor home 216 residential loan34 24 loan payday wa4 online payday arizona loan 6

services credit americanbusiness of credit million line $1card bank credit of america acceptallowing use to credit friends2bcredit accept 2bcardsfederal credit union affinity 07481divinity accreditation aabc in mastersfederal madawaska credit union maine acadia Map

I apologize for constantly returning to this subject, but it’s just so easy, and I think hypocricy needs to be pointed out:

Some of you might remember the big debate over campaign finance reform. Left-wingers earnestly insisted we need to get big corporate money out of politics. Moreover, they said, we need to ban “sham issue ads” that purport to be about a particular issue but are really disguised campaign ads.

When people like me raised the first amendment issue, they had a ready answer: “Money isn’t speech!” they said. “We’re not preventing you from expressing your opinion, we’re just limiting how much money you can spend to disseminate it.”

Well, apparently now money is speech. The left’s current golden boy is shocked–shocked– that rightwing organizations are trampling on his constitutionally protected right to… um… spend tens of millions of dollars of corporate money to promote a movie that he himself admits is aimed at getting W booted from office.

So maybe I’m an idiot, but it seems to me like what he’s saying is that money is speech. And speech is protected by the first amendment. Which means BCRA is unconstitutional.

Or, maybe what he really means is that his corporate-funded campaign commercials are by definition not corrupting (since he’s one of the good guys) and so attempts to shut him up are unconstitutional restrictions on free speech. It’s only when bad corporations try to promote bad candidates (i.e. Republicans) that BCRA should step in to stop it.

hentai disney

The eyes are nude me part of the body known to be poor at dissipating heat.