And I've never read a story about cloning dinosaurs that didn't go horribly awry. Although if it didn't why would I read it?
I actually just read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" last week and while I enjoyed the book I don't consider it a very effective "how-to start a lunar libertarian revolution." It's a great story, but it also presupposes a great many things for the plot and motivations to work. Not the least of which being that humanity becomes Malthusian enough to require the space on the moon and that convicts/political dissidents from all over the world are sent up there to kill each other off. If we got to the point where a self sufficient lunar colony could stage a revolt I would call that a big win overall.
After a lot of thought, I actually reached the opposite conclusion as you. One of the core objections leading to the U.S. Revolutionary war was "No taxation without representation." That's a principle I think most people would still agree makes sense. And since I believe corporations should have no influence on government, I can't simultaneously justify to myself wanting to tax them.
I don't find it difficult to justify, and think your position a bit absurd. First, each of the individual persons within the corporation has representation and that would not change. Second, corporation are the heaviest users of public infrastructure like roads and post system, subsidized infrastructure like the electrical grid, and the internet, and subsidized materials like corn and petroleum. TANSTAAFL! applies to private enterprise too:-)
Sort of, a starting nurse will make more than a doctor until they are out of residency, and that's not including the 2 extra years of negative income. Nurses' salaries will probably come down more, especially if doctors' salaries do.
But that's not even taking into account if you go into a low paying field like general practice which demand is high for, but the salary of 90K to 160K just isn't enough to pay off 250K in debt before even looking at a mortgage.
Salaries are better now, but Israeli doctors don't get rich. The belief that doctors are or should normally be rich men is a peculiar characteristic of 20th Century U.S. medicine.
Well doctors didn't have to go through 7+ years of post graduate school before either. And with that schooling comes the crazy student loan debt (at least in the U.S.).
Being a doctor is a lot less lucrative than the final high salary seems because you lose 4 earning years right off that bat due to med school and then spend another 3-7 years on a resident's salary. Nursing is more lucrative than being a doctor in a lot of ways.
It's not just the hospitals. I know a surgeon that not only works her job, but also moonlights at other hospitals.
Her first year after passing her boards, she wrote a 6 figure check and paid off her student loans - then bought a high end BMW.
Either her family had money to begin with or you're just making stuff up. Residency pays squat if you had to take out a quarter of a million in loans for med school.
While I agree with your points about sensationalistic journalism seeping into scientific publishing, I don't think "capitalistic" research is in any way immune to this as well.
Also, your second paragraph is the opposite of what I've observed. When the CRU emails were released the academic researchers were investigated and would have lost their positions had any serious errors been found. While on the other hand companies like Philip Morris were able to publish studies year after year claiming no significant link was found between cigarettes and cancer.
In short I agree with your premise that money can influence research negatively, I just don't necessarily agree with which direction you go.
Don't forget an enemy at the gates to unite and an enemy within to segregate the country into patriotic supporters and evil opponents. Bread and circus will gain you popularity, but the other two will allow you to abuse that power.
Again, you should probably read the definition of official before you claim it is interpreted incorrectly:
An official is someone who holds an office (function or mandate, regardless whether it carries an actual working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority (either his own or that of his superior and/or employer, public or legally private).
It would only be censorship if a publisher came to Sears with a profitable venture to sell said novels and Sears turned them down based on moral objections.
And don't put words in my mouth regarding the ACLU and illegality. I suggest you start acting like a rational adult instead of using straw men and hyperbole to try and get your point across.
Could it possibly be that these titles aren't selling well, which accounts for the apparent discrepancies between apparently similar titles? The ones left are selling well?
Would that be considered censorship?
No it would not because it was not a decision based on moral objections. I think the definition is pretty clear about that.
If you don't like those standards then you are free to patronize another company
Absolutely, there is a lot of competition in the bookseller market.
or start your own.
... And if I don't like this country I can just move to another one right? Please. Just because people are Free to do something(which they should be) doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect them to do so. It doesn't make any more sense for me to quit my job to enter a business I know little about, than it does for me to move to another country because I don't like some policy or another. It makes more sense for me to voice my displeasure to the censor.
I'm just baffled that Slashdot users would still have such a difficult time distinguishing censorship from private business action. It cheapens the very seriousness of the term "censorship" to use it in such an improper, and frivolous way.
Maybe you should actually read the definition of a censor before you go proclaiming everyone on/. is using the word incorrectly.
a person who supervises conduct and morals: as
a : an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter
Amazon is acting as a censor in this case, therefore it is censorship. You may agree with the morals of the censor but that doesn't mean it's not censorship.
I'm impressed with how ably you've managed to steer the conversation. You're original post referenced many things:
The usefulness of the released cables
The usefulness of "Collateral Murder"
The usefulness of everything WikiLeaks has released
The general idea that The People need to know what The Gov't is doing
And you've used conflation of these ideas as a rhetoric attack and defense. If someone's not paying you for this they should be.
Personally, I'm not happy about how the cables have been released. A lot of the cables don't show corruption and are indeed things that should have been left private to diplomats. However there is important evidence of corruption in there. Some examples: the Afghani president's missing 52 million dollars(which is someone's tax payer money), tax subsidised DynCorps providing children to lavish parties, Hillary Clinton's and Condoleezza Rice's UN spying orders.
There's a reasonable debate whether the need of exposing corruption such as this is worth the harm to diplomatic relations it causes, but that's not the point you're making. You're saying because dgatwood won't expose his private email server, there is no argument for WikiLeaks exposing any state secrets. You side-step his point about The People in a democracy needing to be informed about their Gov't. by invoking a slippery slope argument.
The point that dgatwood was trying to make was not that diplomatic cables should be viewed by all, but that transparency is key in a functioning democracy that has any goal of being moral. There is a line where safety trumps transparency, but that line has been over extended where everything is a secret. A lot of the Afghan War documents were not that shocking to anyone who understands we're in a war, but this administration and the past one have been doing their darndest to make the American public forget we are in a war. Almost all of the stuff in the released documents were things that would have been reported in newspapers 50 years ago. But in this age of embedded journalism, military officers working as media pundits The People is missing the key ingredient to preventing war, understanding how terrible it is.
Bye-Bye torrents; the government has now codified it's perfectly reasonable to block traffic considered "unlawful".
All that remains is for the MPAA to put forth the pipeline to feed ISP's the torrents the ISP's must block.
Remember the word "lawful" did not have to be in there at all, it's used in a few places - and it's not an accidental term.
You're focusing on the wrong thing. Of course it specifies lawful traffic. Otherwise the FCC would be forced into ridiculous situations like fining ISP's for blocking things like child pornography websites. The important question is whether deep packet inspection is allowed to determine "lawful" traffic or if it is like common carriers where they're not going to know about it until someone brings it to their attention.
The core of the problem is the FCC getting into the mix here where they clearly lack the authority to act at all, and where this really ought to be a congressional issue or better yet something where the government simply stays out of the whole issue altogether.
The problem is that if the gov't stays out of the issue there's no market incentive to maintain net neutrality and lots of incentives to break it. And I simply don't understand how the FCC "clearly lack[s] the authority" when they regulate literally every other form of communication. I agree with the EFF's position that the network neutrality regulations should be based on common carrier status rather than the current FCC proposal, but that would only server to make the FCC's authority more clear.
It is also a problem where just a few gatekeepers have somehow been able to get themselves to a position where they can in theory "control" the internet, and I contend it is because of too much regulation of the internet that this situation has happened. If private individuals were allowed to connect to whomever and however they wanted for a network connection, most of these problems would go away. It is the legal restrictions which enact barriers to competition and the encouragement of government-backed monopolies which has forced this situation to a head.
I agree regulatory capture at the state and town level has been a problem, but this, maybe counter intuitively, is actually a perfect example of how lack of regulation has increased the barriers you're rightfully concerned with. Telephone companies are required by the FCC to lease their lines at a fair rate to any taker(another reason why I think ISPs should just be put under Common Carrier laws), but ISP's have no such requirement. This has allowed ISPs to essentially lock down an area, sometimes through local regulation, and sometimes through the simple cost of putting in that last mile of cable. The reason ISPs were subsidized in the first place is because of how tremendously expensive laying those wires can be.
Unfortunately, this isn't what the current proposal of network neutrality is about. It's strictly concerned with not allowing ISPs to use anti-trust like practices with their traffic(like degrading the performance of NetFlix in order to promote your own On-Demand offerings). It's an extremely conservative take on network neutrality that is sadly and successfully being painted as The Fairness Doctrine reborn.
Nope, I've worked for several online retailers. The credit card issues a chargeback stating the transaction was fraudulent. Retailers are on the hook to verify their transactions are legal.
All fraud losses incurred from the use of the compromised account numbers from the date of compromise forward.
I wonder what "losses" covers exactly. Retailers are generally the only ones that lose out in credit card fraud and I doubt this money is going to them.
There is a tech solution. Invent it. Build it. Patent/open-source it. Sell it. Get it out there.
But DON'T just sit there whining that ulterior-motive politicians and bureaucrats won't do things your way.
One solution:
Build a cheap, open, legal, spread-spectrum, compact, no-setup, easy network relay box. Set broadcast power within legal no-license limits. Make a gazillion of them, plug 'em in wherever you can. Make a giant ad-hoc network. You know what I'm getting at.
Heck, this should already be in place between the innumerable cellphones & wireless routers out there. Get the ad-hoc network big enough, and the individual load should be minimal and the total disruptions minimal. TCP/IP is intended to circumvent network failures, so long as there is a path. Make a path.
And stop expecting powermongers to give you freedom.
That's a fake solution. We have and awesome network that is mostly open, reliable, and fast. I am not sorry for "whining" about wanting to keep it that way.
Even if such a device were possible, there's no way you're going to be able to cross oceans with it short of launching your own satellites. I doubt you'd be able to penetrate very far in into the country either. There's a lot more land than people in most places and gaps will give you islands of people that can talk to each other but not the outside.Simply, you're not going to ever beat wires for long distance travel.
You're not going to be able to build a legal cellular tower in your yard, and certainly not a cheap one. If you want range like the cellular networks you're going to have to pay big bucks in terms of power and metal.
All this for what? A dubiously legal second rate network that will probably be taken over or broken by the regulatory capture cellular companies currently enjoy? No the solution is not to create a new network, it's to make the ones we have better.
Slashdot Mirror
And I've never read a story about cloning dinosaurs that didn't go horribly awry. Although if it didn't why would I read it?
I actually just read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" last week and while I enjoyed the book I don't consider it a very effective "how-to start a lunar libertarian revolution." It's a great story, but it also presupposes a great many things for the plot and motivations to work. Not the least of which being that humanity becomes Malthusian enough to require the space on the moon and that convicts/political dissidents from all over the world are sent up there to kill each other off. If we got to the point where a self sufficient lunar colony could stage a revolt I would call that a big win overall.
After a lot of thought, I actually reached the opposite conclusion as you. One of the core objections leading to the U.S. Revolutionary war was "No taxation without representation." That's a principle I think most people would still agree makes sense. And since I believe corporations should have no influence on government, I can't simultaneously justify to myself wanting to tax them.
I don't find it difficult to justify, and think your position a bit absurd. First, each of the individual persons within the corporation has representation and that would not change. Second, corporation are the heaviest users of public infrastructure like roads and post system, subsidized infrastructure like the electrical grid, and the internet, and subsidized materials like corn and petroleum. TANSTAAFL! applies to private enterprise too :-)
It's certainly doable, but the point is there has to be a benefit for all that extra time and money if you want more doctors rather than fewer.
Sort of, a starting nurse will make more than a doctor until they are out of residency, and that's not including the 2 extra years of negative income. Nurses' salaries will probably come down more, especially if doctors' salaries do.
But that's not even taking into account if you go into a low paying field like general practice which demand is high for, but the salary of 90K to 160K just isn't enough to pay off 250K in debt before even looking at a mortgage.
I'd like to believe that, but college tuition suggests otherwise.
You could have said the same about roman aqueducts and irrigation 2000 years ago.
As a prerequisite to 4.) you need to reduce medical school tuition or else you'll end up with the same doctor shortage issues.
Salaries are better now, but Israeli doctors don't get rich. The belief that doctors are or should normally be rich men is a peculiar characteristic of 20th Century U.S. medicine.
Well doctors didn't have to go through 7+ years of post graduate school before either. And with that schooling comes the crazy student loan debt (at least in the U.S.).
Being a doctor is a lot less lucrative than the final high salary seems because you lose 4 earning years right off that bat due to med school and then spend another 3-7 years on a resident's salary. Nursing is more lucrative than being a doctor in a lot of ways.
It's not just the hospitals. I know a surgeon that not only works her job, but also moonlights at other hospitals.
Her first year after passing her boards, she wrote a 6 figure check and paid off her student loans - then bought a high end BMW.
Either her family had money to begin with or you're just making stuff up. Residency pays squat if you had to take out a quarter of a million in loans for med school.
Yes, this is more like "Using technology to break bad habits". With apologies to Chris Rock, ain't nothing wrong with that!
While I agree with your points about sensationalistic journalism seeping into scientific publishing, I don't think "capitalistic" research is in any way immune to this as well.
Also, your second paragraph is the opposite of what I've observed. When the CRU emails were released the academic researchers were investigated and would have lost their positions had any serious errors been found. While on the other hand companies like Philip Morris were able to publish studies year after year claiming no significant link was found between cigarettes and cancer.
In short I agree with your premise that money can influence research negatively, I just don't necessarily agree with which direction you go.
Out of curiousity, is there any evidence to support your hypothesis? ;-)
Don't forget an enemy at the gates to unite and an enemy within to segregate the country into patriotic supporters and evil opponents. Bread and circus will gain you popularity, but the other two will allow you to abuse that power.
An official is someone who holds an office (function or mandate, regardless whether it carries an actual working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority (either his own or that of his superior and/or employer, public or legally private).
It would only be censorship if a publisher came to Sears with a profitable venture to sell said novels and Sears turned them down based on moral objections.
And don't put words in my mouth regarding the ACLU and illegality. I suggest you start acting like a rational adult instead of using straw men and hyperbole to try and get your point across.
Could it possibly be that these titles aren't selling well, which accounts for the apparent discrepancies between apparently similar titles? The ones left are selling well?
Would that be considered censorship?
No it would not because it was not a decision based on moral objections. I think the definition is pretty clear about that.
If you don't like those standards then you are free to patronize another company
Absolutely, there is a lot of competition in the bookseller market.
or start your own.
I'm just baffled that Slashdot users would still have such a difficult time distinguishing censorship from private business action. It cheapens the very seriousness of the term "censorship" to use it in such an improper, and frivolous way.
Maybe you should actually read the definition of a censor before you go proclaiming everyone on /. is using the word incorrectly.
Amazon is acting as a censor in this case, therefore it is censorship. You may agree with the morals of the censor but that doesn't mean it's not censorship.
I'm impressed with how ably you've managed to steer the conversation. You're original post referenced many things:
The usefulness of the released cables
The usefulness of "Collateral Murder"
The usefulness of everything WikiLeaks has released
The general idea that The People need to know what The Gov't is doing
And you've used conflation of these ideas as a rhetoric attack and defense. If someone's not paying you for this they should be.
Personally, I'm not happy about how the cables have been released. A lot of the cables don't show corruption and are indeed things that should have been left private to diplomats. However there is important evidence of corruption in there. Some examples: the Afghani president's missing 52 million dollars(which is someone's tax payer money), tax subsidised DynCorps providing children to lavish parties, Hillary Clinton's and Condoleezza Rice's UN spying orders.
There's a reasonable debate whether the need of exposing corruption such as this is worth the harm to diplomatic relations it causes, but that's not the point you're making. You're saying because dgatwood won't expose his private email server, there is no argument for WikiLeaks exposing any state secrets. You side-step his point about The People in a democracy needing to be informed about their Gov't. by invoking a slippery slope argument.
The point that dgatwood was trying to make was not that diplomatic cables should be viewed by all, but that transparency is key in a functioning democracy that has any goal of being moral. There is a line where safety trumps transparency, but that line has been over extended where everything is a secret. A lot of the Afghan War documents were not that shocking to anyone who understands we're in a war, but this administration and the past one have been doing their darndest to make the American public forget we are in a war. Almost all of the stuff in the released documents were things that would have been reported in newspapers 50 years ago. But in this age of embedded journalism, military officers working as media pundits The People is missing the key ingredient to preventing war, understanding how terrible it is.
Bye-Bye torrents; the government has now codified it's perfectly reasonable to block traffic considered "unlawful".
All that remains is for the MPAA to put forth the pipeline to feed ISP's the torrents the ISP's must block.
Remember the word "lawful" did not have to be in there at all, it's used in a few places - and it's not an accidental term.
You're focusing on the wrong thing. Of course it specifies lawful traffic. Otherwise the FCC would be forced into ridiculous situations like fining ISP's for blocking things like child pornography websites. The important question is whether deep packet inspection is allowed to determine "lawful" traffic or if it is like common carriers where they're not going to know about it until someone brings it to their attention.
The core of the problem is the FCC getting into the mix here where they clearly lack the authority to act at all, and where this really ought to be a congressional issue or better yet something where the government simply stays out of the whole issue altogether.
The problem is that if the gov't stays out of the issue there's no market incentive to maintain net neutrality and lots of incentives to break it. And I simply don't understand how the FCC "clearly lack[s] the authority" when they regulate literally every other form of communication. I agree with the EFF's position that the network neutrality regulations should be based on common carrier status rather than the current FCC proposal, but that would only server to make the FCC's authority more clear.
It is also a problem where just a few gatekeepers have somehow been able to get themselves to a position where they can in theory "control" the internet, and I contend it is because of too much regulation of the internet that this situation has happened. If private individuals were allowed to connect to whomever and however they wanted for a network connection, most of these problems would go away. It is the legal restrictions which enact barriers to competition and the encouragement of government-backed monopolies which has forced this situation to a head.
I agree regulatory capture at the state and town level has been a problem, but this, maybe counter intuitively, is actually a perfect example of how lack of regulation has increased the barriers you're rightfully concerned with. Telephone companies are required by the FCC to lease their lines at a fair rate to any taker(another reason why I think ISPs should just be put under Common Carrier laws), but ISP's have no such requirement. This has allowed ISPs to essentially lock down an area, sometimes through local regulation, and sometimes through the simple cost of putting in that last mile of cable. The reason ISPs were subsidized in the first place is because of how tremendously expensive laying those wires can be.
Unfortunately, this isn't what the current proposal of network neutrality is about. It's strictly concerned with not allowing ISPs to use anti-trust like practices with their traffic(like degrading the performance of NetFlix in order to promote your own On-Demand offerings). It's an extremely conservative take on network neutrality that is sadly and successfully being painted as The Fairness Doctrine reborn.
More than that, you should see an increase in crime in places where there aren't cameras.
Nope, I've worked for several online retailers. The credit card issues a chargeback stating the transaction was fraudulent. Retailers are on the hook to verify their transactions are legal.
Credit Card Companies have a very sweet deal.
All fraud losses incurred from the use of the compromised account numbers from the date of compromise forward.
I wonder what "losses" covers exactly. Retailers are generally the only ones that lose out in credit card fraud and I doubt this money is going to them.
Is this "news for nerds" or "news for lusers"?
There is a tech solution. Invent it. Build it. Patent/open-source it. Sell it. Get it out there.
But DON'T just sit there whining that ulterior-motive politicians and bureaucrats won't do things your way.
One solution: Build a cheap, open, legal, spread-spectrum, compact, no-setup, easy network relay box. Set broadcast power within legal no-license limits. Make a gazillion of them, plug 'em in wherever you can. Make a giant ad-hoc network. You know what I'm getting at.
Heck, this should already be in place between the innumerable cellphones & wireless routers out there. Get the ad-hoc network big enough, and the individual load should be minimal and the total disruptions minimal. TCP/IP is intended to circumvent network failures, so long as there is a path. Make a path.
And stop expecting powermongers to give you freedom.
That's a fake solution. We have and awesome network that is mostly open, reliable, and fast. I am not sorry for "whining" about wanting to keep it that way.
Even if such a device were possible, there's no way you're going to be able to cross oceans with it short of launching your own satellites. I doubt you'd be able to penetrate very far in into the country either. There's a lot more land than people in most places and gaps will give you islands of people that can talk to each other but not the outside.Simply, you're not going to ever beat wires for long distance travel.
You're not going to be able to build a legal cellular tower in your yard, and certainly not a cheap one. If you want range like the cellular networks you're going to have to pay big bucks in terms of power and metal.
All this for what? A dubiously legal second rate network that will probably be taken over or broken by the regulatory capture cellular companies currently enjoy? No the solution is not to create a new network, it's to make the ones we have better.