There's a big difference between "it will lose the data you put on it" and "it will infect your computer and destroy the data you put everywhere". If I wanted to conduct secure transactions with my bank over the internet, it doesn't really matter (much) if my computer is running off of an unreliable hard drive. It might crash in the middle, but I probably won't lose money over it. But if the hard drive infected the operating system, the infection could undermine the security of my transactions and drain my bank account. When we apply that logic to a piece of removable storage instead of the main system drive, an unreliable flash drive or SD card won't crash your computer (unless you're using it for memory paging), but an insecure one could still drain my bank account.
I won't say that everyone knows the risks of faulty storage coming from east Asia. But the OP has chimed in in reply saying that he understands the risks and bought it anyway. So would everyone please stop saying the same damn thing over and over again and take a look at what is really the much more interesting question of whether SD cards are a meaningful attack vector with autorun disabled?
Once software is open source, the open source version can never be closed again. If Microsoft made
But then I suppose that "supported" is different from "legally available". But any open source project can pull support, and most don't have great support to begin with, so it's a moot point.
[T]here is a fine line between collaboration and cheating in computer science
No Mercy
All introductory CS students are born with an intuitive and always-correct understanding of when they cross the "fine line"! They have all been subject to rigorous academic standards for plagiarism, right? So they all know exactly what is expected of them on day 1 of their life in college!
I don't believe in hateful divisions along lines of gender, race, heritage, education level,
Does that mean you deny that hateful divisions and classes even exist? Because as much as most people would like that to be true, it really, really isn't. That does still leave a wide open question as to how the government should deal with it, if at all.
If government stays out of racism/sexism/etc. issues, then people will pretty much stay the same. There are of course other ways to fight it, and maybe they would work better. But plenty of people just distrust black people, and everybody has an opinion on the role of men and women in society. You can't deny that different people are treated differently for often stupid reasons. But you are entitled to your opinion on what government can/should do about it.
If government stays out of class issues, that allows people to become striated by income and allow the wealthy to become very wealthy and cement their family as part of a permanent ruling class. This is just a natural fact of humanity; some people work harder, some people are really lucky, and a rare few are both, and power corrupts a person's character to maintain their power at all costs. A class system is inevitable without distributing power differently (such as in a democracy) and using that power to redistribute the wealth. But that doesn't mean a democratic government should. It is not reasonable to deny what would happen if the government just didn't do anything, or even worse acted to help the wealthy gain more wealth. However, you are entitled to your opinion on what government can/should do.
The open questions are: what is the ideal society to work towards; what is our government's role in reaching that goal, and; how effective is our government in doing so. The first question is about as difficult to answer as asking what is the meaning of life. The other two can be answered with research, but politics is in the way of actually doing science on our own government (because everybody has something to hide). Unfortunately, that means our attempts to reach our personal ideal society are subject to politics.
Democrats and Republicans all have their own answers to these questions, and individual politicians usually have their own little twists as well. But there are more than two answers. Even worse, our political system has tended towards favoring the very wealthy. Explain to me why both Democrats and Republicans favor billions of dollars in subsidies for oil companies and bailing out huge banks that took stupid risks with money that wasn't theirs. Explain to me why Democrats and Republicans all want to spend tax money to favor one role or another for women in society. Explain to me why Democrats and Republicans support huge wasteful spending on the procurement hell of our military, despite it already the largest and most advanced in the world.
You sound like a Tea Party type to me. I respect that. But your enemy is not liberals. Your enemy is Democrats and Republicans. Don't let yourself be manipulated into supporting the rich assholes that want to use your tax dollars to enrich themselves. Don't support those who will themselves be manipulated. Unfortunately, the only way to solve our problems is to get involved; no matter who is elected, you send them to Washington and they become Washington people. When it comes down to it, we shouldn't be voting for people who agree with our own poorly considered opinions on the best way to do things. We should be voting for people that share our goals and are smart enough to get them done without falling prey to the lobbyists.
I find your boogeyman treatment of art and artists to be highly distasteful. Whatever caricature you've dreamt up is not representative of the majority of people receiving food stamps. Furthermore, funding those truly in need while preventing the kind of excess you're afraid of would take more government bureaucracy, resulting in more wasted taxpayer money. The beauty of the food stamps program is that it is cheap to administer while still mostly affecting only the people that really need it.
We as one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist have more than enough food to feed everyone. Do you have a problem with people studying the arts? Do you think it's wasteful to learn how to design pleasant visuals and work/living spaces? Is it wrong for people to want to learn how to make a difference to socially disadvantaged people? Are the arts not our only lasting message as a culture, our greatest means to reveal the realities of our own humanity and our generation in a way that informs the future and hopefully allows them to build on our successes and failures?
But even more than the fact that we can and should support those people who want to spend their lives carrying on our culture for the future is the fact that food stamps don't just benefit the people who receive them. When the government buys somebody food, that person gets food, and the food seller/maker gets paid. Agriculture is the foundation of every society and it becomes more and more difficult for our farmers to maintain their lifestyle with every passing year. Food stamps are one way that the government supports farmers by making sure that when tough times come, they don't lose huge parts of their market. It's not just about the starving children that we hope to feed (and the other hungry mouths we feed along the way). It's about the food in our markets that would otherwise waste away and be thrown away. It's about the hard working farmers and ranchers and even factory workers who depend on that food being sold. It's about the truckers and the retailers. It's about the small town communities that depend on farmers to bring capital out of the city so that they can run schools, court houses, cafes, small stores, and churches.
What I'm saying is that every government handout affects a multitude of people. The money that pays for poor people to have opportunity is the money that keeps the wide foundations of our entire economy stable. No matter how much you personally feel the beneficiaries didn't deserve it, if you take away that money, you are taking away our foundation.
Maybe you don't want welfare to be part of the foundations of our society. I don't particularly like it either. It hasn't always been this way. But the foundations we had have disappeared due to wage stagnation and the unequal distribution of the benefits of technology and automation. A lot of that foundation has also been shipped abroad, where it is slowly building the societies of places like China and Bangladesh. We've been left with no advantage but our own prosperity, and if that prosperity should falter - if our poorest people were forced to drop out of the consumer market completely - the bottom will drop out of our society and everyone will suffer. Especially the hard-working middle class, when our employers faced with dwindling markets and therefore shrinking revenues.
Let's advance the conversation beyond the righteous anger many people feel about government handouts. Clearly there are outliers to be angry about, whether or not they are representative of beneficiaries or would be worth throwing out of the programs. But what is our solution? How do we build a society where our poorest people can still find a job that keeps them from needing government handouts? We have to look into our past. We have to look at what brought our poverty down from 30% to 15%, as you said. What happened in that time? A number of things: we had a high minimum wage (relative to now); we funded millions of WWII veterans to go to college and buy a home; we faced a technological revolution focused mainly on consumer appliances and infrastructure; we built the entire interstate highway system with government money; even without education, many people could train to work as skilled laborers with incredible job security and even pensions for simple factory work; labor unions experienced their peak enrollment and influence on society. It's clear to me that a lot of government spending went into building the middle class of the 1950s and 1960s. It's also clear that the corporate landscape was far more labor-friendly, either due to labor unions or just because employers were looking to build long-term success rather than quick profits. It's also clear to me that skilled blue collar jobs, like the welding and plumbing trades you mentioned, were more common and respected than they are now.
I dream of large scale government investments in the middle class and massive cultural changes in our financial sector. I believe the the most visionary liberal politicians share this dream. I also believe that the majority of politicians on both sides are hopelessly beholden to big money interests. We need to start by getting the corrupt financial sector out of our policy decisions. Then we need to build a sense of civic duty and responsibility, based on a sense of civic empowerment, among everyone in this country. Let's build our patriotism starting on the local level. Let's make politics about solving the big issues that affect us, not about bickering over which side is right or wrong. Then let's get to work investing in the country we love. America can be great again. All it takes for our zombie-apocalypse-obsessed nation is the chance for our choices and hard work to have a real, meaningful impact on our own lives and the lives of those around us.
Ooh, the food stamp boogeyman is going to steal all our money. How much does it really cost to eat roasted rabbit with butter tarragon, and sweet potatoes? Well...I don't know, because I've never seen rabbit for sale and have always assumed it's the sort of meat that you have to hunt (or breed) yourself if you really want it. Which most people wouldn't from what I've heard. Eating good food is a function of how well you can cook more than how much money you can spend on it, unless you're eating out which food stamps does not cover.
Also, it shouldn't be too incredible for a college graduate with a practical degree to feel entitled to a $80k job. Such people work hard for several years, taking on enormous debt, with the promise that they'll never be able to get a high paying job without doing so. But the entitlement is a problem, because the job market doesn't reward people for their skills and hard work. It mostly rewards them for the connections, and after that their good fortune.
You say 50 years and $22T+. It's true we've wasted a lot of money and failed to find the best solution. But every attempted solution we've had was a compromise. Social reform is big and complicated and takes a grand vision, and when you take a grand vision and cut little bits and pieces out of it so that Congress will pass it, that compromise may just completely break what would have made the vision work. So what's the solution? We take our best ideas and try them out in controlled environments. Do science with regional policy changes. Then take what we've learned and apply it at the national level. No more of this ideological horse shit.
Medical protocols suggest twice daily monitoring of their temperatures and responding based on those results. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good.
This is what we should be doing. These doctors and nurses coming back are probably the world's leading experts on Ebola diagnosis and treatment at this point. Let them diagnose themselves and decide when they are actually a risk. Not that I think we can trust anybody to be completely objective; we should probably mandate that they submit their twice-daily temperatures and reports of incidental symptoms to an independent health organization. Just to make sure they actually do it and they aren't biased because it's themselves. But mandatory quarantines just for having been in west Africa? Ridiculous.
With your bare hands?!?