This is incorrect.

In the past we found undesirable behavior with private fire fighting organizations. This does NOT lead to the necessary conclusion that fire fighting MUST be a government provided service. It just means that we need mechanisms, legal or otherwise, to prevent bad behavior. There were also good aspects to private fire fighters.

For example, I personally like the idea of two fire fighting companies racing to my house as fast as they can, because only the first one on scene gets paid by the insurance company. This incentivizes timely response and placement of many fire stations in order to minimize distance.

In the Tennessee case, I think that the right thing to have done would have been to put out the fire and then send the guy a bill for the cost of putting the fire out. Not out of kindness, but just to avoid bad PR. In an area with high building density then there must be a fire response, and this model would work there as well. Already some cities charge you if you have a traffic accident and knock down a light pole, for instance.

I just don't think government is particularly good at anything, and I don't think that de jure monopolies result in the best outcomes.

Read the linked article. Saving gas is NOT the self-identified main reason that most people buy Prius. As I said, most people who buy Prius, by far the dominant hybrid, is because of, in their own words, "it makes a statement about me". This is smug; it's another way of saying "I'm better than you". Even your holier than thou "I use half the gas that you do" response is smug. You have no idea what kind of car I drive, or if I even drive at all, so your statement is unsupported by facts.

The decision to buy a hybrid is usually emotional, not rational. A 2007 survey indicates that most (57%) Prius owners' primary motivation for purchasing the vehicle is because "it makes a statement about me". As other posters (and a South Park episode) have commented, buying a hybrid is just a new way to be smug.

RFID toll tokens have already been successfully used to prove location and travel:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericfitz/archive/2007/08/10/ez-pass-logs-used-in-divorce-cases.aspx

That was my first thought as well. If you don't want people to ever see something, then don't ever record it in the first place, and for god's sake, don't record it on the web using equipment that belongs to your boss.

There have been court rulings (and probably will be more in the future) that allow bosses to monitor your communications on equipment that belongs to them. So just stay away from that.

Also, the internet never forgets- if you don't want something visible in the future, then you better keep it off the web now.

Crypto degrades over time as processing power and mathematical research improve, so it doesn't make sense to say " uses with , just use that". Who knows? The day after you die they might break the product implementation or the crypto algorithm or come up with a way to try the entire universe of key space in O(1), so encrypting something but leaving it lying around is not a safe thing to do.

Better to never create the information if you don't ever want anyone to see it. Keep it in your head. There are lots of mnemonic tricks for remembering things that you want to recall later.

Regardless of which side you fall on, read the pdf and then ask yourself if you feel the investigation methodology was satisfactory.

The investigation into Mann was essentially "we read the emails and didn't find a statement like 'I committed fraud'", and then we interviewed the guy, and he said he didn't do it. Ergo, he must be innocent, right?

Can you imagine if we ran criminal courts the same way?

The investigations were a worthless waste of everyone's time. Because of the lack of diligence, not only fail to resolve the dispute, but tend to have the opposite effect. A non-thorough investigation always looks like a cover-up.

I am not stating or even implying that there was any effort to cover up wrongdoing, and I am not saying that Mann did anything wrong. I am saying that you cannot reasonably conclude either point due to the methodology of the investigation.

As I said, read it yourself and draw your own conclusion. I know I'm going to be modded down and ridiculed for even failing to accept the results of the investigation as gospel; draw your own conclusions about people who behave that way.

Which is precisely why you will never be in such a situation.

Doc Ruby, you are a Troll.

Show me the bill that anyone tried to get passed in the last 30 years that tried to outlaw contraception (some flake submitting a bill that died in committee doesn't count). Show me a bill that anyone tried to get passed which attempts to prohibit or limit the practice of any religion except Christianity, or for that matter, has any effect that tends to diminish the practice of any religion.

The issues with abortion and creationism are complex and although you obviously have a strong opinion on the matter which precludes debate, it is a reasonable thing that if we are going to force children to learn a state-imposed curriculum, then the community should have input into that curriculum. Likewise it is a reasonable thing to discuss whether/when a fetus turns into a baby, whether abortion is infanticide, etc. It doesn't mean that the other side wants to impose its religious views on you. It's that they don't want YOU imposing YOUR views on them.

There's a small percentage of the population at either end who would willfully force the rest of the population to comply with their worldview. The rest of us realize that we live in a democratic republic and that individual communities might choose to pass laws that we would personally find distasteful.

The position you advocate, which is that people who hold these views (evidenced by a survey of people's beliefs) are trying to establish a theocracy. This is absurd and intellectually dishonest.

I *WANT* people's beliefs to influence their lawmaking. If someone believes that gays being denied the right to marry is a violation of their civil rights, then I want that person to sponsor and drive legislation to change the matter. If someone believes that evolution is a crock and that God created the earth in 7 days, then I want them to fight for inclusion of that in the curriculum. I might not want them to win, and in practice I usually find that there is some underlying principle that we disagree on that needs addressing (why does the government sanction/perform marriage? is creationism science?) but I want them to have their chance to debate the issue civilly.

There are flakes on both ends of the spectrum, but they are so far out of mainstream that they typically have no effect on anything. That is, until they get elected by hiding their agenda and then push through ideology-driven laws that the majority of the country oppose. But by and large the system is self regulating and corrects itself.

It's trolls like you who incorrectly stereotype people and use variants of Godwin's Law to attribute evil motives to people with whom you disagree.

This is one of the most ass-hat illogical arguments I have ever heard.

There is no logical contradiction to someone being anti-abortion and being pro-capital punishment.

The anti-abortion folks think that abortion is murder- initiation of violence against an innocent person. The anti-abortion position is NOT that "it's always 100% wrong ever to take a human life". Anti-abortion folks are instead saying that it is never right to take a human life in this circumstance.

The pro-capital punishment folks think that accountability for one's actions might include forfeiture of one's life if one is proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, to have committed certain egregious crimes that involve the initiation of violence against innocent persons.

I am not advocating for or against either position. Certainly reasonable people can disagree with either position or both, and both have many contentious side issues. But they are not logically incompatible.

Only intellectually lazy ideologues would imply that these positions are inconsistent.

No, YOU don't get it, do you? Any application can corrupt its own memory space. There is no evidence in the post that anything outside the application process was affected.

The above message is the first one I saw on the entire post that is worth reading. What the OP doesn't get is that he's asking the wrong question.

Your users aren't programmers. They don't care about "General file i/o error reading drive 0". WFT does that mean to your mom?

First, you need to think about AVOIDANCE. You can't write to the file? Couldn't you figure that out at the time the user opened the document, and tell the user unobtrusively that they can't edit? For example, Microsoft Word attempts to detect whether a file is writable at open. If not (for example, due to permissions or sharing), then Word will open the document in "Read-Only" mode and disable editing functionality. You have to "save as" successfully before it will enable editing.

Next, all of your error messages must be actionable. Users will forgive badly worded error messages that tell them how to fix the problem. They will ignore error messages that don't tell them how to resolve the problem, and might even get annoyed if you keep "nagging" them.

Think about the error condition from the user's point of view. Does your program's average user have any prayer of solving the problem themselves? If not, then your action is "call support": "Serious error #1234 has occurred. Please contact EXAMPLECOMPANY tech support to resolve this error at 555-1212 or techsupport@example.com [Email] [Exit Program]"

If the user is likely to be able to solve the problem themself, then present them with instructions on how to do so:

          "Error #1234 has occurred. You will need this code if you call tech support.

          This error occurs when you put a coffee cup on your CD-ROM tray instead of the program CD.

          To resolve this problem, please put the program CD into your CD-ROM drive and close the drive, then restart the program."

The user action is the key to getting your users to fix their own problems. But be aware of who your user is, it's easy to present instructions which your users will be unable to complete:

        "Error 0xDEADBEEF occurred in module obtuse.c
        "This occurs because the memory value at location 0x80123456 should have been 0xA2, but was actually 0xA9.
        "To fix this problem, please attach a software debugger such as GDB to this process and change the memory value to 0xA9. Then modify initializememory.cfg to set the value correctly on startup. The man page for initializememory.cfg can be found on www.somerandomdudessiteinlatinamerica.biz".