As an AC pointed out, only in an ideal world, where the differences are additive.
But when you have constant government pressure (feedback) on only one side of the equation, a strong one-sided bias is in fact hard to escape. We have ample evidence of such feedback, which climate scientists are prone to call "forcing" when discussing physical phenomena. It's a good word to describe politics, too.
Apropos of nothing, how does possession of a firearm in an illegal mail order business increase the chances of people being hurt?
That's a good question. However, they caught him in a U.S. post office (which is supposedly Federal property) with a gun on his person, during commission of a crime (he was there to pick up drugs).
While one still has to wonder how that would endanger anybody, except for cops who might do something stupid, it did involve him interacting with others in person.
Still, I'm basically on your side in this argument. It should take a very serious crime indeed to deprive someone of the right to self-defense, by any available means.
The Supreme Court actually reversed *all nine* of the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal on the issue of whether simply carrying a firearm during the commission of a felony was enough to prosecute them for "using" the firearm. It was kind of a landmark case. That being said, Congress just amended the law to make carrying the firearm during the commission of a felony an additional offense.
But that additional offense is a 5-year "enhancement" of the other sentence. Nowhere does that say anything about "life". So I'm wondering where the life sentence supposedly came from.
I can think of one scenario: he was on probation for some other capital offense, and carrying the firearm was a violation leading to escalation of his previous sentence. Or some such.
How many failed capitalist experiments are we going to be subjected to before corporations are no longer people, and the fruits of labor are distributed much more equitably here in the US? What is so much better about CEOs making 500 times as much as their office workers, than having some kind of rational basis for compensating workers, when it is the workers who are doing all the work? I am very tired of the failed, trickle-down capitalist experiments in the US and Europe, and will be very interested to see how much better Greece does when they don't tow the austerity line (austerity for the workers, or course, not the wealthy).
CEOs shouldn't make 500 times as much money. But that has almost zero to do with actual capitalism. It has A LOT to do with corporate-government revolving doors and "crony capitalism", which isn't actual capitalism.
Real capitalism works, when it is allowed by government to work. History shows us this very clearly. It i the best system ever devised, and it works fine as long as government keeps its damned hands off, except where truly necessary (such as antitrust law).
The monopoly happens when Staples, Office Depot, and Office Max banded together still aren't strong enough to survive the onslaughts of Wal-Mart/Sam's and Costco on the B&M side
2 of your 3 examples are not even retail stores.
And I'm not going to boo-hoo competition from Amazon or Quill. Montgomery Ward and Sears became mail-order powerhouses more than 150 years ago. Nothing has changed except for the way in which the catalogs are delivered and payments are made. Everything else is still THE SAME.
That is a subtle mis-statement. The argument is "those evil, rich oil companies have so much more incentive to create biased research studies."
And that post is even more of a mis-statement, perhaps not quite so subtle.
The most extreme interpretation of the GAO report says there has been an average of $5B/year of revenue aka incentive for 'global warming industry.' Compare that to the oil industry, which at current numbers (90m barrels per day @ $45/barrel, ignoring other forms of petroleum) has about $4B/day of revenue.
Revenue and profit are two vastly different things, and even then, profit is vastly different from expenditure. The GAO report was about expenditure, and had nothing to do with revenue.
Saying "Its a newspaper" is inadequate - the National Enquirer qualifies, so does the New York Times.
Why is it inadequate? The New York Times has been known -- and not infrequently, I might add -- to publish stories of a quality similar to the National Enquirer. Especially when it comes to climate change, I might also add.
Also, libel and defamation laws in Canada and the UK are very different from those here in the U.S.
I almost forgot: the new video chat feature in Firefox is nice, too. I was surprised to see it first from them. And again, they took steps to respect your privacy at the same time. So: when practical I will use that over Skype from now on.
I would agree, and add that we haven't seen the end of this, as HTML5 is changing everything. Chrome development seems to not only be heavy-handed, but sometimes smacks of the old days of Microsoft in terms of compatibility/heterogeneity. Plodding as it might be, I'll take FF, just like I'll wait for Debian to do something. I seem to be rewarded by being a little patient.
It seems to me sometimes that Google doesn't know how to do anything that ISN'T heavy-handed anymore. And they are certainly not protective of your privacy... which is one of Firefox's specialties.
And as long as it remains so, I think Firefox will continue to gain in popularity. The only reason I use Chrome anymore at all is to check compatibility with web apps. Other than that it stays locked in its cage.
And it will continue to work fine. People in all walks of life are getting fed up with this proprietary protectionist bullshit. It's anti-competitive by its very nature.
30 years ago, the basic right to work on your own car would have never been questioned. Believe it or not, you have Hollywood and other copyright trolls to thank for this. DMCA and its ilk.
Further, it's likely an example of the typing chimpanzees scenario: the person who presented it probably cherry-picked it out of thousands of other, even more nonsensical candidates generated by the computer.
Many years ago now, I programmed my "pocket" calculator to generate text using Markov chains based on seed text that you input. It almost made sense a lot of the time, and could make perfect sense occasionally, and was even quite hilarious at times. Like for example if half of the seed text was from the King James Bible, and the other half from Shakespeare or a physics textbook.
The broadband industry has been strongly opposed to using Title II, arguing it would saddle companies with outdated regulations and depress investment in upgrading their networks.
The irony here is that it was precisely the lack of Title II regulation which has allowed US cable companies (and mobile broadband) to pocket all that cash, rather than invest in better infrastructure to the extent the rest of the Western world has.
The result has been slower internet, for more money, than elsewhere.
No wonder they oppose it. It would mean much of their free lunch is over.
The fact that according to OP the FTC has "changed its position" has no bearing on whether FTC should change its position. Monopoly is monopoly, and there is nothing in society or the economy that has changed that makes it any less bad today than it ever was.
... whose jobs are dependant on a federal grant getting renewed.
A recent GAO report said that $106 BILLION was spent by the US government through 2010 on global warming research. If you figure that was through the end of 2010, that was still 4 years ago, so the number is now much larger.
That number absolutely dwarfs even the imagined amount of money that fossil fuel companies have been accused of spending in campaigns against "climate change". I mean it's easily more than 2 orders of magnitude larger.
Even scientists are human, and they are smart enough to know which side of their bread the butter is on.
The greatest income inequality in the developed world can be found in probably the least statist country, the US.
Just two comments here, though there are many I could make.
First, income inequality is NOT the real issue. Why should you care who is or is not rich? The PROBLEM is poverty.
Second, my whole point was that it is very easy to show that income inequality has become WORSE, the more statist the U.S has become. I'm not saying that correlation proves causation, but the existence of a correlation is indisputable.
hint: there's no such thing as a public domain "license"
This is a patently ridiculous assertion. A copyright holder can voluntarily place a work in the public domain (that's what GPL and Creative Commons are all about, for example). In fact that's what this whole discussion is ABOUT. Have you read any of it?
There is no law in the US that allows something to be appropriated from the public domain without modification
Another patently ridiculous assertion. There doesn't have to be a law "allowing" it. That's not how the law works. It would not be possible only if there were a law against it.
The FACT is, not many years ago Congress passed a law that put millions of works that were formerly in the public domain back under copyright. That is the incident that caused EFF to start pushing for a law that would make that no longer possible.
Ummm. Are you saying that the peoples' will is to keep the skies over the White House open to drones of all sorts? Really?
Or are you just looking for any vaguely political story onto which to dump your anti-government bullshit...
Don't be a jerk. The question is whether all drones should be restricted just because the President is a candy-ass.
A Federal court has already ruled that the FAA does not have authority to regulate drones, except those that enter "navigable airways". REGARDLESS of whether their use is commercial. Their regulatory authority is limited to interstate commerce, which is the basis for the definition of navigable airways.
The solution to the Whitehouse problem is simply to make it illegal to fly drones THERE. Not to regulate them everywhere else.
The FAA has appealed the court's ruling, but based on evidence and precedent it is pretty clear the FAA will lose that appeal.
Now that they've got theirs, it's fine if regulations hold back everyone else.
I have nothing against people being rich, if they got there honestly and without coercion. Government lobbying, for example, is one form of coercion because it influences regulation of others via money.
But let's face it: most of them did not get there quite honestly or without resorting to coercion. And in fact, regulations helped to get them there. Not only is that obvious on its face, you can see it in the statistics: the more "statist" and regulatory governments have been, the less well economies have done and the more income inequality we've seen.
Now they're proposing to try to fix the problem they created, by doing more of what created it. Typical government idiocy.
And as for "unrest", they aren't going to be able to regulate that away. On the contrary: at least here in the U.S., if they don't start lightening up on Federal regulation, they're going to see far worse problems and more unrest than they have so far.
The only way it would put cops in danger were if someone were out there with the sole intention of killing cops... and not some particular cop, but any cop. Because the app just says "cop", not who.
So either this sherriff's association has their heads completely up their asses, or what they're really doing is boo-hooing over the fact that people are interfering with their daily traffic ticket quota. Which means they have their heads up their asses, because what they should be doing is solving crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, "Ideas for which the science is highly questionable" is definitely in there.
As an AC pointed out, only in an ideal world, where the differences are additive.
But when you have constant government pressure (feedback) on only one side of the equation, a strong one-sided bias is in fact hard to escape. We have ample evidence of such feedback, which climate scientists are prone to call "forcing" when discussing physical phenomena. It's a good word to describe politics, too.
Apropos of nothing, how does possession of a firearm in an illegal mail order business increase the chances of people being hurt?
That's a good question. However, they caught him in a U.S. post office (which is supposedly Federal property) with a gun on his person, during commission of a crime (he was there to pick up drugs).
While one still has to wonder how that would endanger anybody, except for cops who might do something stupid, it did involve him interacting with others in person.
Still, I'm basically on your side in this argument. It should take a very serious crime indeed to deprive someone of the right to self-defense, by any available means.
The Supreme Court actually reversed *all nine* of the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal on the issue of whether simply carrying a firearm during the commission of a felony was enough to prosecute them for "using" the firearm. It was kind of a landmark case. That being said, Congress just amended the law to make carrying the firearm during the commission of a felony an additional offense.
But that additional offense is a 5-year "enhancement" of the other sentence. Nowhere does that say anything about "life". So I'm wondering where the life sentence supposedly came from.
I can think of one scenario: he was on probation for some other capital offense, and carrying the firearm was a violation leading to escalation of his previous sentence. Or some such.
I think their philosophy is bizarre on its face, and I don't understand why people would fall for it.
(A) Essentially renege on your debt.
(B) Promise to give away free stuff to everybody.
(C) Neglect to mention where any of the money will come from, other than Nazi war debt, or maybe the printing press.
Yeah, right.
How many failed capitalist experiments are we going to be subjected to before corporations are no longer people, and the fruits of labor are distributed much more equitably here in the US? What is so much better about CEOs making 500 times as much as their office workers, than having some kind of rational basis for compensating workers, when it is the workers who are doing all the work? I am very tired of the failed, trickle-down capitalist experiments in the US and Europe, and will be very interested to see how much better Greece does when they don't tow the austerity line (austerity for the workers, or course, not the wealthy).
CEOs shouldn't make 500 times as much money. But that has almost zero to do with actual capitalism. It has A LOT to do with corporate-government revolving doors and "crony capitalism", which isn't actual capitalism.
Real capitalism works, when it is allowed by government to work. History shows us this very clearly. It i the best system ever devised, and it works fine as long as government keeps its damned hands off, except where truly necessary (such as antitrust law).
The monopoly happens when Staples, Office Depot, and Office Max banded together still aren't strong enough to survive the onslaughts of Wal-Mart/Sam's and Costco on the B&M side
2 of your 3 examples are not even retail stores.
And I'm not going to boo-hoo competition from Amazon or Quill. Montgomery Ward and Sears became mail-order powerhouses more than 150 years ago. Nothing has changed except for the way in which the catalogs are delivered and payments are made. Everything else is still THE SAME.
That is a subtle mis-statement. The argument is "those evil, rich oil companies have so much more incentive to create biased research studies."
And that post is even more of a mis-statement, perhaps not quite so subtle.
The most extreme interpretation of the GAO report says there has been an average of $5B/year of revenue aka incentive for 'global warming industry.' Compare that to the oil industry, which at current numbers (90m barrels per day @ $45/barrel, ignoring other forms of petroleum) has about $4B/day of revenue.
Revenue and profit are two vastly different things, and even then, profit is vastly different from expenditure. The GAO report was about expenditure, and had nothing to do with revenue.
Saying "Its a newspaper" is inadequate - the National Enquirer qualifies, so does the New York Times.
Why is it inadequate? The New York Times has been known -- and not infrequently, I might add -- to publish stories of a quality similar to the National Enquirer. Especially when it comes to climate change, I might also add.
Also, libel and defamation laws in Canada and the UK are very different from those here in the U.S.
I almost forgot: the new video chat feature in Firefox is nice, too. I was surprised to see it first from them. And again, they took steps to respect your privacy at the same time. So: when practical I will use that over Skype from now on.
I would agree, and add that we haven't seen the end of this, as HTML5 is changing everything. Chrome development seems to not only be heavy-handed, but sometimes smacks of the old days of Microsoft in terms of compatibility/heterogeneity. Plodding as it might be, I'll take FF, just like I'll wait for Debian to do something. I seem to be rewarded by being a little patient.
It seems to me sometimes that Google doesn't know how to do anything that ISN'T heavy-handed anymore. And they are certainly not protective of your privacy... which is one of Firefox's specialties.
And as long as it remains so, I think Firefox will continue to gain in popularity. The only reason I use Chrome anymore at all is to check compatibility with web apps. Other than that it stays locked in its cage.
And it will continue to work fine. People in all walks of life are getting fed up with this proprietary protectionist bullshit. It's anti-competitive by its very nature.
30 years ago, the basic right to work on your own car would have never been questioned. Believe it or not, you have Hollywood and other copyright trolls to thank for this. DMCA and its ilk.
Further, it's likely an example of the typing chimpanzees scenario: the person who presented it probably cherry-picked it out of thousands of other, even more nonsensical candidates generated by the computer.
Many years ago now, I programmed my "pocket" calculator to generate text using Markov chains based on seed text that you input. It almost made sense a lot of the time, and could make perfect sense occasionally, and was even quite hilarious at times. Like for example if half of the seed text was from the King James Bible, and the other half from Shakespeare or a physics textbook.
But the majority of it was still mostly nonsense.
The broadband industry has been strongly opposed to using Title II, arguing it would saddle companies with outdated regulations and depress investment in upgrading their networks.
The irony here is that it was precisely the lack of Title II regulation which has allowed US cable companies (and mobile broadband) to pocket all that cash, rather than invest in better infrastructure to the extent the rest of the Western world has.
The result has been slower internet, for more money, than elsewhere.
No wonder they oppose it. It would mean much of their free lunch is over.
The fact that according to OP the FTC has "changed its position" has no bearing on whether FTC should change its position. Monopoly is monopoly, and there is nothing in society or the economy that has changed that makes it any less bad today than it ever was.
... whose jobs are dependant on a federal grant getting renewed.
A recent GAO report said that $106 BILLION was spent by the US government through 2010 on global warming research. If you figure that was through the end of 2010, that was still 4 years ago, so the number is now much larger.
That number absolutely dwarfs even the imagined amount of money that fossil fuel companies have been accused of spending in campaigns against "climate change". I mean it's easily more than 2 orders of magnitude larger.
Even scientists are human, and they are smart enough to know which side of their bread the butter is on.
Once they introduce the new head + materials, others will copy them. Then we can buy the products from those others.
So it isn't a total waste.
Get in line.
GPL and Creative Commons aren't public domain licenses.
Technically that is correct, which was the point of this whole topic. But that is the basic intent and they are about as close as it comes.
The greatest income inequality in the developed world can be found in probably the least statist country, the US.
Just two comments here, though there are many I could make.
First, income inequality is NOT the real issue. Why should you care who is or is not rich? The PROBLEM is poverty.
Second, my whole point was that it is very easy to show that income inequality has become WORSE, the more statist the U.S has become. I'm not saying that correlation proves causation, but the existence of a correlation is indisputable.
I'm very hesitant to download it much less sign up for it...the amount of info they seem to get from you is pretty bad.
Waze wasn't bad about collecting information until it was acquired by Google.
hint: there's no such thing as a public domain "license"
This is a patently ridiculous assertion. A copyright holder can voluntarily place a work in the public domain (that's what GPL and Creative Commons are all about, for example). In fact that's what this whole discussion is ABOUT. Have you read any of it?
There is no law in the US that allows something to be appropriated from the public domain without modification
Another patently ridiculous assertion. There doesn't have to be a law "allowing" it. That's not how the law works. It would not be possible only if there were a law against it.
The FACT is, not many years ago Congress passed a law that put millions of works that were formerly in the public domain back under copyright. That is the incident that caused EFF to start pushing for a law that would make that no longer possible.
So you are WAY out in left field.
Ummm. Are you saying that the peoples' will is to keep the skies over the White House open to drones of all sorts? Really?
Or are you just looking for any vaguely political story onto which to dump your anti-government bullshit...
Don't be a jerk. The question is whether all drones should be restricted just because the President is a candy-ass.
A Federal court has already ruled that the FAA does not have authority to regulate drones, except those that enter "navigable airways". REGARDLESS of whether their use is commercial. Their regulatory authority is limited to interstate commerce, which is the basis for the definition of navigable airways.
The solution to the Whitehouse problem is simply to make it illegal to fly drones THERE. Not to regulate them everywhere else.
The FAA has appealed the court's ruling, but based on evidence and precedent it is pretty clear the FAA will lose that appeal.
Now that they've got theirs, it's fine if regulations hold back everyone else.
I have nothing against people being rich, if they got there honestly and without coercion. Government lobbying, for example, is one form of coercion because it influences regulation of others via money.
But let's face it: most of them did not get there quite honestly or without resorting to coercion. And in fact, regulations helped to get them there. Not only is that obvious on its face, you can see it in the statistics: the more "statist" and regulatory governments have been, the less well economies have done and the more income inequality we've seen.
Now they're proposing to try to fix the problem they created, by doing more of what created it. Typical government idiocy.
And as for "unrest", they aren't going to be able to regulate that away. On the contrary: at least here in the U.S., if they don't start lightening up on Federal regulation, they're going to see far worse problems and more unrest than they have so far.
The only way it would put cops in danger were if someone were out there with the sole intention of killing cops... and not some particular cop, but any cop. Because the app just says "cop", not who.
So either this sherriff's association has their heads completely up their asses, or what they're really doing is boo-hooing over the fact that people are interfering with their daily traffic ticket quota. Which means they have their heads up their asses, because what they should be doing is solving crimes.