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Capitol Hill Quiet On Tech
An anonymous reader writes "This year's Democratic-controlled Congress largely ignored technological issues in favor of social problems, CNet notes in another 2007 retrospective. Issues important to the tech industry (such as net neutrality) received short shrift, while the political body spent a considerable amount of time decrying the evils of the Internet. 'Hot topics this time around included foreign cybersecurity threats to U.S. government systems, terrorist cells flourishing on the Web, inadvertent file sharing through peer-to-peer networks, and sexual predators ensnaring unsuspecting youth through online social sites. And for a third time, the House passed not just one, but two, different bills aimed at deterring spyware.'"
Don't bother
Click the link, it's perfectly safe, I swear.
...just, make sure to tell me what happens, oh brave soul!
-Coward
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Because, that's what your typical voter is concerned about because that's what they understand and what's been hyped in the media. Of course Congress is going to spout off about those things. They want to get elected. The other topics are topics that only the tech folks are really concerned about and there's not enough of them to pander to to get elected. Joe "Tech Ignorant, Keep my job and Family values" Schmoe is were to get the votes.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
What is that myminicity crap?
In any case, you're the troll who pushed me over the edge to block the entire domain.
Maybe not
The "evils" of the internet is more likely to stir up emotions among most of the current voting class (i'm talking out of my a$$ but I think that's logical). If techies gathered together to create a MASS voting group (is there one?) that will likely affect elections, then you bet they'd try to get on issues that stir up emotions of the *new* voting class. :-D
after a quick web search, i found a way to block such links
Then again Luddites aren't necessarily as ignorant or anti-progress as these politicians.
Everything.
You have NO rights. This is the United Gulags of America.
Have a Bush_Cheney_Rice-free week of festivities.
PatRIOTically as always,
Kilgore Trout
Can this be good?
Considering the nature of at least some of the tech laws that come out. The good laws are few and usually are not enforced because the bad guys (malware writers/spammers) are smart enough to know how to hide. The bad laws (MAFIAA) are better enforced (grandma's not good at hiding) and are more common (because we know who funds campaigns).
Especially when you consider how badly they're dealing with the social ones. Keep them away from tech until we are willing to vote for more freedom minded legislators. Gridlock is good. It slows the creation of bad, authoritarian laws.
What?
Anarchy in '08
It might take a flame thrower to light these people's candles.
I think I'm going to stop bothering to tell people and actually block that domain.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They only passed about 5 real bills that got signed into law -- not including renaming parks and airports and other insubstantial legislation.
Cyril Northcote Parkinson knew it already. Not only does work fill up all available time for its completation, the most discussed items at an agenda are not the ones most important, but the ones most participants believe to know something about.
Funding for (computer) science research also got the shaft this year, in the budget for FY 2008, despite a prior commitment to double the budget over the next 10 years.
USACM has a nice perspective: http://usacm.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index.php?p=558 and so does the Computing Research Association: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/archives/000646.html
Unfortunately, pork $$$ in the near-term wins over long-term benefits for the entire country...
happy holidays,alex
Because, that's what your typical voter is concerned about because that's what they understand and what's been hyped in the media.
The keyword here is YOUR.
Whose voters are these, anyway?
Well, the summary of the article gives it away:
I don't think most high-IQ leftist intellectuals [e.g. your typical university professors] yet realize quite how profoundly stupid the typical Democrat voter has become.
Frankly, there are vast armies of Democrat voting blocks which are, for all intents and purposes, mentally retarded.
By the way, this question - namely, the catastrophic decline of intelligence, and the exponential rise in stupidity - will very soon come to dwarf all other socio-political phenomena.
If you want to get an excellent preview of the general day-to-day rhythm & tenor of the remainder of your life, then rent Idiocracy: If smart people don't start making more babies, and start making them soon, then we are all doomed.
Democrats concentrated on social issues...this is a shock?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That's a silly, artifical divide. Pretty much all the issues discussed in the article are both tech and social issues; so are net neutrality and other issues near and dear to techies' hearts. If Congress were focusing on "pure" tech issues, we'd have legislators trying to tell us how to program, what CPU's to use, etc. Do you want that? I sure as hell don't.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Democrats don't give a damn about technology issues in general or the Internet in particular. Democrats only care about social issues and making you overpaid nerds pay more taxes so they can fund more giveaways to their core voters (which are not you).
Most of the Congresscritters that cared about the Internet are gone this year.
the bill should require signatures on all software so that we can identify who is responsible for maleware
our minor offenders need to be in re-hab and these maleware merchants need to be brought to justice
NO SIGNATURE? NO EXECUTE.
Referring our congress as "democrat-controlled" is either an example of parroting republic party talking points or showing a profound ignorance of both the make-up and the way congress works. The Senate is 49-49 with two independants, one of whom votes with Democrats, the other (Lieberman) with Republicans on defense, civil liberties and trade issues. If there is a tie, the Vice President breaks it, however ties are unlikely as partisan issues are never voted on as it takes 60 votes to break a filibuster. The merciful lack of laws being passed is the result of neither party controlling congress.
In fairness, the previous congress, who brought us the DCMA was not controlled by Republicans either.
Woverly Harris Gooch, IV CTO American Fire and Bomb, LLC
It's a feature of democracy, not a bug.
Govt can't fix and provide simple systems, say, levees, roads, can't get itself to undertake rather simple means necessary to fix the school system. How could it fix a lot more intricate, complicated and advanced realm like technology then?
And beware of the negative side effects, like with "net neutrality" that is a bad idea whose time has come and, fortunately for us all, gone.
Suppose govt signs obsolete & proprietary tech into law (need I point at some document standards?). That would stifle innovation instead of invigorating it.
No, tech is better off without govt meddling. It's only basic research that it can't screw up because physics laws fortunately can't be screwed up by govt incompetence, at worst it can waste money or underfund important science like ITER.
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
They don't actually solve social problems, they merely talk about solving social problems, and then create even more problems with their idea of a solution. It's a form of job security, albeit a rather pathetic one.
There are many people who will switch their vote to the other guy (or in many cases get out and vote for someone when they wouldn't otherwise have) just because one side says "we will do x" or "we wont do x".
"block filth on the internet", "keep kids safe from scumbags online", "keep terrorists and bad foriegn governments from using the internet to attack America", "help me stop my kid downloading illegal stuff from the internet"
These are all "hot button issues" for voters.
On the other hand, issues like "stop hackers from stealing my credit card numbers/bank details", "stop AT&T from messing with my google search results", "stop Microsoft from trying to kill free software" are issues that geeks and tech people care about but the general public doesn't give a stuff for the most part.
What we need is a way to make the general public care (particularly about phishing and identity theft)
You're racist scum.
Look, you might very well be able to convince yourself to adopt definitions of "racist" and "scum" which are perfectly applicable to me.
But none of your ad hominem will change the underlying tautology of the matter:
By the way, "very soon" will be within then next 15 years or so: Sometime around 2020, just about 50% of all young adults in the United States will be functionally mentally retarded.
For instance, we're already at the point where more than 50% of all adults [not just young adults, but all adults] in Los Angeles are illiterate [SOURCE].
...and sexual predators ensnaring unsuspecting youth through online social sites. How many times has this actually occurred (discounting law enforcement agents pretending to be teenagers)?I know it gets the politicians a lot of votes, but it seems like Congress' time would be better spent passing anti-lightning-bolt legislation.
go check out the text of the new "I-Spy" anti malware law they ain't fussy yer software tampers with somebody's computer it is malware and you can land in the can for 5 years all that remains is for us to INSIST on SIGNATURES for ALL executables either directly, or by site authorization as is already in service for https sites
"This year's democrat-controlled Congress largely ignored technological issues in favor of social problems"...
The issues facing technology, especially internet technology, absolutely qualifies as a social problem. Its the most prevalent way people connect and transact with one another. They need to understand their priorities before assigning them.
Attempting to support your claim of, "the catastrophic decline of intelligence, and the exponential rise in stupidity," by linking to an article on increasing birthrates among racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. should meet, I think, any objective definition of the term "racist". The definition of "scum" may be left as an excercise to the reader.
You can call me every name in the book; in fact, here's a book with lots of different names in it:
You're welcome to spend the next 20 years learning every name in that book and calling me every one of them.
But when you're finished, 20 years from now, it won't have altered the underlying truth of my message, nor will it have altered the future you will be inhabiting.
Unless you die of some rare form of cancer, or get run over by a truck, or get struck by lightning, you WILL live to experience the horrible, catastrophic, apocalyptic consequences of dysgenic fertility.
And you will look back upon these as having been the Good Ol' Days.
PS: If you want to make the future a slighty less awful place to visit [much less be imprisoned in], then seek out the smartest girl you know [and if you haven't met her yet, then get off your lazy ass and go find her], and make as many babies with her as is humanly possible.
One problem with this article is that is posed H-1b expansion as a "tech" issue. I would agree that many technical folks are deeply concerned about this issue. However, most US tech workers oppose the expansion of these visas-and many managers and many of the actual owners of major tech companies support the expansion of these visas.
Russian CS researchers were jailed under the DMCA.
With the complete subjugation of the tech sector to hollywood under laws of this ilk, why would they encourage the advancement of such evil piracy as the study of the security of encryption standards commonly used by our major corporations, or the viability of drm.
It's clear cs majors are not wanted. After all, the RIAA in one lawsuit tried to demand one cs major abandon that academic track for something more tame like gun repair or refrigeration.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
see title
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
and technology in general, and he is still there.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
"They never adhere to a fundamentally fallacious economic policy which ignores such basic concepts as moral hazard."
This is favorite gut reflex of left-liberals (there's nothing classically liberal about contemporary "liberals", they are sort of libertines in favor of government regulating hedonism, everyone gets their share of tax-funded orgasmic experiences).
"They never try to mingle church and state."
Ever met conservatives that _really, actually try or argue_ to do that? You just wrote vague innuendo. And I'm not even conservative, just a plain vanilla libertarian.
As someone insightfully noted, western theocrats do happen, but they are rarer than hen's teeth. State your facts, not your hysteries and hatreds.
"They never try to "protect us from ourselves" by outlawing common everyday activities"
Like what? Riding a bike without a helmet? Smoking? Eating fat foods? Doing a business? Drinking, except for adolescents?
About the only common activity that conservatives try to outlaw is dope.
Again, you're just a gut-motivated maniac, not a fact researcher.
"They never try to protect our freedom by destroying it through such authoritarian policies as:
----requiring permits for protests and limiting them to "free speech zones".
----allowing warrantless wiretaps and sifting of people's emails, then trying to pass ex post facto laws to protect a president who performed them.
----blackballing dissenters/opposition to their policies, and even going so far as to label them as "enemy combatants" and "disappear" them to gitmo.
----demanding the establishment of a "papers please" society."
This is what the left wants. Tony Blair in UK has established exactly such a society, perfectly controlled so the kid's parents could be fined if they don't give the kid fruits three times a day. The left is after social utility, "social justice", not liberty, freedom of speech, etc. These are all secondary or tertiary priorities to the left, what matters to the left is that everyone behaves in a manner loved and prescribed by the left. They are after the full stomach of their beloved puppies, so tyranny and totalitarianism are not a measure that the left will abstain from.
In contrast, conservatives are after _small_ govt, limited to military and security, domestic and external. So their state is limited, so like a typical liar you ignore the totalitarian tendencies of left and overblow conservatives' tendencies.
Most of this "homeland security" nonsense was done by Bush only because unfortunately, voters expected security first and foremost. So it was done by conservatives for political reasons, but exactly opposite to what you try to suggest, they don't really like it.
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
Acheson's rule of bureaucracy - the report is not supposed to inform the reader, but to protect the author.
From there, it only gets worse.
Python is nice quick and flexible... but it provides so much rope a monkey would hang the whole ecosystem with it. -- in
Very well put :-)
What?
Its all about Big Business. It always will be. Congress is not there for us (US), they are there for themselves.
Doug Woodall
I am very familiar with the definition of ad hominem:
As for the definition of the word "racist": There are only a tiny handful of peoples who are capable of producing a man who can win a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize in Physics: Largely they are Caucasians [to include the Ashkenazim & the Lebanese Christians], Pacific Rim Asians, and [only] the very highest castes from the Indian Subcontinent; conversely, the finals of the 100 meter dash at the Olympics will always consist almost entirely of men who are descended from the tribes of West Africa [or at least the finals would consist almost entirely of such men if national quotas didn't unfairly and unnaturally limit and restrict the participants at the Olympics].
No one - not even the most ardent marxist academic - bothers to try to convince himself otherwise anymore.
But, of course, the modern definition of "racist" does not identify, as the villain, he who notices these differences - we all notice them - but rather the word "racist" has come to apply to anyone who has the temerity [or foolhardiness] to verbalize the observation.
On the other hand, that's not what the word "racist" is supposed to mean: A racist is supposed to be someone who believes that a government should enforce [with the barrel of a gun] an agenda which:
So it's impossible for any classical liberal - one who believes that men should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by rather the content of their character, and who believes that governments, and their gun barrels, really ought not exist in the first place - it is impossible for him to be a "racist" within the bounds of any meaning which that word was intended to connote.
But, again, as I have said over and over in this little conversation of ours: NONE OF THE SEMANTIC DISTINCTIONS ARE OF ANY IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER.
What is important is the underlying truth of the matter: Barring some unforseen tragedy [your being struck by lightning, etc], YOU WILL LIVE TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMINENT TRAGEDY [& CATASTROPHE] OF DYSGENIC FERTILITY.
In the meantime, perform your very small - yet almost infinitely important - role in making the future a better place for us all [both we who are already born, and those of us who are yet-to-be-born]: Go find the smartest girl yo
However, people who flock to social programs tend to be in a state of non-self-determination. Their hands are more tied and thus form lower income strata.
Their "non-self-determination" stems from the fact that they lack the gray matter necessary to perform almost any work which is much more productive than, say, mowing your yard, or clipping your hedges [and if the discipline of robotics ever advances to the point that robots can perform those jobs, then they're gonna be S.O.L.].
They will never grow up to be rocket scientists or brain surgeons - they can't "succeed" in a free-market economy [the way that a George Soros or a Warren Buffet can be wildly successful] because they don't have the intellect for it.
We're talking entire blocks of voters whose average IQ is below [or well below] 90 - and a child needs an IQ of about 90 just to have any hope of being able to benefit from even the most modest of educations.
As children's IQ's head south of 90, they very, very rapidly become ineducable.
And these children already form, effectively, almost half of our population - which is to say, they will determine one half of our future.
PS: Did you know that the average ineducable high-school dropout costs the taxpayer more than $19,500?
Per Year?
IN PERPETUITY, UNTIL THE END OF HIS LIFE?!?
Your connection of declining intelligence to liberals is nothing more than a fanciful leap of logic.
I* am not saying that "Liberals" cause stupidity.
I am saying, however, that their disinterest in "technological" issues [vis-a-vis their obsession with "social" issues], as evidenced by their performance in our current Congress, does reflect the underlying stupidity of their constituencies.
[Parenthetically: Were you aware that Obama wants to defund NASA's next generation of launch vehicles so as to be able to throw even more booty at his constituents in the National "Education" Association?]
*On the other hand, in his original work on the subject, Charles Murray did take the point of view that "Liberal" social policies have a dysgenic effect: If our government taxes the lives & behaviors of smart, industrious people, and subsidizes the lives & behaviors of lazy, stupid people, then we shouldn't be surprised when smart, industrious people come to have more and more difficulty in finding the time & financial resources necessary to make & raise babies, and that neither should we be surprised if lazy, stupid people are more than happy to move in and occupy that nature-abhorred vacuum.
[Again, parenthetically: Did you know that the bottom 50% of Americans pay no income taxes whatsoever? Or that the top 1% of Americans pay more income tax than the bottom 90%? Or that the average low-skilled citizen costs the government more than $19,500 per year every year of his life?]
Now I agree with Murray that the financial aspects of government social policy can impart some inertia in the general direction of fertility rates [be those rates dysgenic or eugenic], but I don't think for a second that the fiscal burden of "Liberalism" is the primary culprit here: There is something far more evil at work in the Death of the Civilized World, and "Liberalism" is merely a very poor, rather dim shadow of that Evil.
A shadow of A Shadow, if you will.
... how many people can name, say, even a handful of instances in the last decade of Congress taking on a major technology issue? Just so we have it straight -- is there a previous, tech-savvy Republican-controlled Congress that impressed the submitter of this "article"? Hahahahaha. Yeah, OK. I'll give you electronic voting. Yep, they impressed me there.
oh look, someone blindly and without any basis whatsoever declared this a "gut reflex"?
I'm degreed in the field, it has nothing to do with "gut reflex"
We had an actual, in practice, "hands off" approach to capitalism at the turn of the century which led to vast and horrendous poverty and eventually to the depression and the collapse of the economy as a whole.
Then we had a "supply side" approach which attempted to create jobs by offering wealth to corporate owners and controllers, which ALSO led to recession because the worker was not receiving that wealth to spend on finished goods.
Both of these approaches ignore the moral hazard, or to put it in laymen's terms, they ignore the "Greedy #$@ corporate weasels".
Without regulation to insure a middle class there won't be one because the owners will suck up every bit of profit they can at their expense
Let's not even mention the fact that today's multinational conglomerates have power rivaling or even surpassing government, and need to be required to obide by the constitutional standards of life, liberty, property, and due process (see corporate governance of property after sale with things like DRM firmware on gaming consoles)
People like yourselves speak in blind absolutes with no regard to reality, and hurt our society by doing so.
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