Never mind that it's what created this fuckup in the first place, and the whole push against net neutrality is asking the government to remove the regulations and let them be as crooked as they want to. Wrong. The local government not going after the false-advertising bar for fraud caused the problem. A free market only exists when there are laws against crooked behavior like fraud and theft.
I never understood the opposition to the V-Chip. Why shouldn't the multimedia client (TV) come with a network screening app? Because I never asked for the technology in my multimedia client, and because it's a federal mandate (for devices larger than 33") there are no multimedia client manufacturers who exclude said technology. Thus, I pay a higher price for my multimedia client because other people have demanded the government step in. It boils down to freedom of choice, the freedom for me to buy a TV without a V-chip in it.
I'm no animal rights advocate by a long shot; but intentionally giving mice schizophrenia seems a bit wrong to me. What makes complex psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia possible is the fact that the human mind is complex. We still don't really understand the mind, and we understand its various diseases even less. I'm not at all convinced mice have the biological and psychological requirements for schizophrenia.
Let's see it running multiple, hi-res Xvid or h264 videos without dropping a frame. I can still play multiple DivX videos (at the typical 720x480) on a PIII running BeOS. And yes, it's still responsive.
If it was as well designed as the fanboys always claim then it would have been easy to write drivers and applications for it. The BeAPI was/is a dream to work with as any C++ programmer who's had the privilege to do so will tell you. There's a myriad number of Be apps at BeBits.com given the size of the community.
However, from the user's perspective, it's a very big deal.
Running eight movies in parallel is important... why? Running eight movies in parallel isn't what's important; it's the fact the system can do that and still have a responsive UI. BeOS didn't have an hourglass for no reason, and your average user likes not having to wait for the interface to respond.
Even Linux on modern hardware doesn't come close to the snappiness of BeOS.
Sure it does. What makes Linux less responsive than BeOS is the apps and the configuration people choose to run, not the kernel. We're not talking complete OS versus a kernel. We're talking OS versus OS, and Linux here is being used to describe the entire OS distribution. I'm sure Linux can be fine-tuned to be quite snappy, but BeOS doesn't require such tuning.
You also can't beat the fact that it could boot from BIOS to the desktop in under 10 seconds (again, on a *very* modest PC).
Sure I can: Linux could (and can) boot that fast as well. The reason distributions don't is because the flexibility of the boot script system is more important than faster boot times. (Another reason is that some modern hardware takes a long time to initialize.) Again, we're talking OS versus OS (distro). Of course you can get Linux booted fast, much faster than BeOS, but you won't end up with a desktop OS comparable to BeOS.
(Remember that BeOS was released alongside Mac OS 9 and Windows 98)
Yes, about 30 years after the concepts in BeOS were originally invented. The fact that Apple and Microsoft released even more obsolete operating systems around that time doesn't make BeOS modern or elegant. I don't think anyone denies BeOS brought little to the table in terms of new concepts (though, it certainly did bring some respectable ones). The elegance, however, was that it brought the best from all the existing systems at the time with the goal to create a better desktop OS.
The BeOS designers believed that the areas that they optimized and were working on were more important than compatibility and functionality, but the market proved conclusively that they were wrong. If BeOS were open sourced tomorrow, I predict it would also fail. If BeOS were open sourced tomorrow, it definitely would fail. But that's because it's outdated (10+ years old afterall), and Haiku has pretty much recreated all the hard parts and improved on that. The market didn't prove anything; the decisions made by the Be executives (such as being greedy when Apple made them an offer for the BeOS IP) and Microsoft's arguably anti-trust tactics to keep BeOS off of OEM PCs is what sealed the fate of BeOS, not bad system design decisions.
I'm beginning to wonder if you used the OS that much or simple tinkered with it a time or two.
It's not about YOU using it, SOMEONE uses it, maybe they have their account there from before they knew better, or maybe they do it just to piss you off, whatever the cause, if you're sending out a newsletter, or a payment receipt, or responding to a craigslist ad, or use a mialing list, or whatever you're doing, and you're on the "spam" list, your email might never see your customer/client/whatever. There is no guarantee when it comes to e-mail delivery. When you send an e-mail, the e-mail client basically says: "Hey server, please give this message to user X on your system." How again do you, as the sender, deserve that message be delivered? You did nothing for the server; in fact, you created work for the server.
Now if the server in question is such a dick as to demand you, the sender, pay a fee to have the mail delivered to users on said server's system... too bad for the users on that system. You've done your part; you delivered the mail you promised you would send them. It's their e-mail service that screwed up, and they should complain to that service provider or find a new one.
So in summary, is Hotmail a dick for doing this? Absolutely. Is it their right to be a dick? Absolutely. It's also each Hotmail user's right to go elsewhere if they don't like the service (or lack thereof, since not all of their e-mail is being delivered to them) they're receiving.
It's advertised as an e-mail service. It is indeed reasonable to assume that an e-mail service delivers e-mails. Spam is e-mail too, but many e-mail services do not deliver that form of e-mail. The point is that buyer should BEWARE and read the fine print (even on things they aren't actually paying for). You get what you pay for usually, and when you don't you can go to the next company. It's call competition, and last time I checked Hotmail wasn't the only dog in town.
Let us say you have a business, and as part of that business, you send emails to your customers that sign up for it. Not spam, this is information your customers want from you. If I have any sense, I'll tell Hotmail to go fuck themselves and politely tell my customers their free e-mail service does not accept our e-mails and that they should complain or find a new provider.
It's amusing how often people forget there is still such a thing as choice, even when it comes to free services.
Nitrous oxide is a disassociative (same category as PCP and ketamine), and you often don't want to do anything but sit or lie where you are. I can't see nitrous oxide working as a non-lethal weapon (especially delivered in bullets, I mean... WTF?), but I can't see it "backfiring" as one either.
Cops are not part of the judicial system, nor should they be. Does a person who willingly puts others in harm's way deserve punishment? Absolutely. But they also deserve a trial just like everyone else.
1) If you're going to play the word game "philosophy" has different meanings in different contexts. Even if you're not going to play the word game there are many branches of philosophy, your comparison is not accurate within this context. Not trying to play the word game. By philosophy, I simply mean a way of thinking, understanding, and seeing the world around you. If that does not fit your learned definition of the word, I apologize.
2) Science is not an idea, it is an approach to answering questions. Wrong. The scientific method is the approach; science is the philosophy that presumes that things can be proven/disproven through the use of the scientific method. And this, child, is the root of my argument.
3) The difference between the scientific approach and religion is that science can falsify information. By using the scientific approach we can determine what is most likely to be true by process of elimination. Religion--for this debate--is a belief that something happened. Science is a belief that you can know--or, at the very least, guess--what has happened via the scientific method. I'm glad you state "what is most likely" because I never argued science doesn't give us what is most logically probable.
4) Again, a major difference between the scientific approach and religion is that religion assumes the answer. This is arguably true, however, science assumes the answer is knowable in the first place. Science further assumes this knowledge is achievable through the scientific method.
The scientific approach is to make as few assumptions as possible and distance the assumptions from the solution, requiring logical arguments in order to "prove" the solution. This means that any invalid assumption or logical argument can be used to disprove the solution. Since religion assumes the solution, and provides no logical arguments, the solution cannot be disproven through falsification. My argument is that science and religion are both ways of seeing the world, perspectives. It is science's goal to avoid assumptions if at all possible, but at the end of the day it assumes something just as does religion. See philosophy of epistemology.
I'm not going to pick apart the rest of your post, but if you look carefully then you will find that some of your statements are incongruent. I think what we have is simply a misunderstanding; it happens all the time, and is--I believe--the major cause of historical "tension" between science and philosophy.
Philosophy--the traditional meaning--at the end of the day says, "Nothing is certain." Science says, "That may be true, but we think it's possible to figure out what is most probable." (Science assuming its model of probability is accurate, negating the first premise.) We both agree religion is on a different world as far as assumptions go, but all I'm saying is that any assertion is inherently flawed by assumption. (Which leads to a self-paradox, from a philosophical perspective... but that's a debate for another time.;))
I hope I've cleared some of my arguments up; I think if you manage to understand what I'm trying to say, you'll see we're not quite at odds with one another.
When the federal government passes laws regarding issues not enumerated in the Constitution, they are ignoring the 10th amendment. Pretty cut and dry, you would think...
Buddhism is a philosophy. So is Christianity. So is science.
They're all ideas, and we can evaluate the possibility of their correctness but we can never prove for certain what is true and what is false. All "fact" begins with some assumption. It doesn't matter if you're talking about gravity or you're talking about Christ.
Granted, I think we can all agree some ideas are more logically enforceable with scientific observations, but to exalt those ideas are "true" is to assume the observations they are based on are true, and unfortunately we cannot be sure of our senses... of our perceptions.
Science is a philosophy. Logic and reason are philosophies. Religions are philosophies. Please don't be arrogant to assume your philosophy is more valid than anyone else's. Believe what you want, and I'll do the same, and we can both promise not to push our beliefs on one another.
Am I the only one that got the moral of South Park's Go God Go episodes? Dawkins didn't, and I guess neither did the atheists here on/. (I'm buddhist and agnostic, BTW, so don't assume I'm religious in the traditional sense.)
The problem is not the lack of government regulation. The problem is the presence of government-supported monopolies (or near-monopolies). Stop treating big business different from everyone else, so that we have competition and you've got your net neutrality problem solved.
What market is he talking about? Being a broadband provider is a regulated monopoly. There are only two in my area: Comcast cable and Verizon DSL. Nobody else is allowed in now that the telcos don't have to lease their lines. This is absolutely true; we don't have a free market, and therefore non-existent as it is it cannot solve the problem.
Ironically, net neutrality is what would restore fair competition to the market. Without that, the issue can't solve itself. The solution, is not more government regulation. The solution is to get government OUT of the Internet market. Let's have a true free market when it comes to Internet access; no more government subsidies; no more municipal monopolies. Once businesses are free to compete without special treatment from the government, net neutrality will exist.
Look at Dell for example. They switched over to India for their customer support even though the customer demanded otherwise. And I'm sure Dell has lost customers from this decision. Economics is not majority rules, which is the very reason why it's so often a better solution than public policy. Those who don't care about having Indian customer support can choose to continue being a Dell customer. Those who, like myself, want to speak to someone who's fluent in English can drop Dell and go somewhere else.
Provided there isn't government regulation standing in the way, there will always be an eager businessman ready to jump in the moment a near-monopoly decides to take advantage of their customers.
Who needs regulation when market competition is more efficient? Oh, except:
1. no transparency without regulation, 2. no competition without regulation. Hint: a market is temporarily competitive and evolves to a mature market. 3. no accountability without regulation.
Yet another misguided attempt to falsely attribute market-based anything with efficiency or effectiveness. You realize all three of these things affect the government and its policies you're advocating, right? The difference with businesses is that you can vote with your dollars--and you don't have to wait two, four, or eight years to dump a bad service.
1) I could care less about transparency of my ISP, as long as they're giving me the service I demand at the cost we've agreed on. 2) You have it bass ackwards here. Regulations brings forth red tape, increase cost of doing business, and discourages the creation of new service providers, thereby decreasing competition. 3) As long as the business is providing me the service I demand at the agreed-upon rates, there's nothing to be accountable for.
Yes, free markets are a good thing but when business has been receiving, and still receives, tons of money in subsidies, you can't now claim that you want the free market to decide what the outcome will be. It's not a free market when businesses are receiving tons of money in subsidies.
So, yes, we can claim we want the free market to decide the outcome. The problem is we don't have a free market; if we did, net neutrality would exist.
Yeah, the market will indeed decide. I can only get one high-speed provider in my house, and I'm sure that provider will make excellent decisions on my behalf. Funny you mention that. I too only have access to one provider of high speed at my current residence. Want to guess why? It's because a local ordinance forbids any cable provider to compete against the "city-owned" cable service. Cox, for example, can't offer high speed in my area because the city government has a monopoly on it. The only alternative is DSL through the phone company, but alas, I'm on the edge of city limits out of range for anything remotely close to decent DSL.
If the government would get out of the way, i.e. drop these municipal monopolies that prevent market competition, there would be enough choices for the consumer and the market would indeed be able to solve the problem.
It's designed to get the 3rd world hooked on Windows....duh. So. Fucking. What?
Kids in the 3rd world using.... Windows... *gasp!!* I think it's awesome if they get a laptop, regardless of what OS it has. When they get older and need a better system, they can choose Linux if they want. It's not like MS will be giving/subsidizing Windows forever in these countries, so cost of the OS will be a factor at some point.
So, let's assume that the earth is getting warmer and that human activity is the main contributing factor. What's the solution? Obviously it's to stop doing the activities that's causing the climate change. And I'm all for that, but do we need government to step in for it to happen? Absolutely not.
Oil is increasing in price, and consumers are rightfully bitching about it when they pay at the pumps. And alas, the market is responding; hybrid this, alternative-fuel that... the market is going to fix the problem faster than public policy ever could. In 30 years, we won't be driving gasoline vehicles anymore, not because our public policy has outlawed them but for the same reason we don't use typewriters anymore: they simply will no longer be cost effective in relation to the alternatives the market provides.
This doesn't stop at cars, though. Ever get things shipped to your doorstep? The cost of those kinds of services have "hidden" fuel surcharge taxes (imposed by the business, not government) attached to them. When the efficiency of fuel increases (due to whatever solutions the market provides), the cost of those services will go down. (As a side effect, the cost of goods that are shipped inter-business will go down as well.)
One thing the government could do to help the market solve our global warming problem sooner rather than later is to get rid of the oil subsidies. This would cause the price of gasoline to increase even more (towards the extent it would be in a free market), and consumers will demand that much more for more cheaper alternatives to gasoline.
The biggest gripe I have about it is the same gripe I have about there being a federal law against marijuana and a federal law *for* abortion: the 10th amendment and the concept of state sovereignty:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.
What it means is any power not specifically granted to the US federal government in the Constitution is in the jurisdiction of the various states. Issues like abortion and drug prohibition are to be decided by each state; the founders did this for a reason--you could move to the state whose politics most closely matched your own. The more centralized the federal government has become, the less choice we've had in regards to the policies governing us.
(Not to mention that the Real ID won't help us catch terrorists, but I figured that was a given.)
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Running eight movies in parallel is important
Sure it does. What makes Linux less responsive than BeOS is the apps and the configuration people choose to run, not the kernel. We're not talking complete OS versus a kernel. We're talking OS versus OS, and Linux here is being used to describe the entire OS distribution. I'm sure Linux can be fine-tuned to be quite snappy, but BeOS doesn't require such tuning. You also can't beat the fact that it could boot from BIOS to the desktop in under 10 seconds (again, on a *very* modest PC).
Sure I can: Linux could (and can) boot that fast as well. The reason distributions don't is because the flexibility of the boot script system is more important than faster boot times. (Another reason is that some modern hardware takes a long time to initialize.) Again, we're talking OS versus OS (distro). Of course you can get Linux booted fast, much faster than BeOS, but you won't end up with a desktop OS comparable to BeOS. (Remember that BeOS was released alongside Mac OS 9 and Windows 98)
Yes, about 30 years after the concepts in BeOS were originally invented. The fact that Apple and Microsoft released even more obsolete operating systems around that time doesn't make BeOS modern or elegant. I don't think anyone denies BeOS brought little to the table in terms of new concepts (though, it certainly did bring some respectable ones). The elegance, however, was that it brought the best from all the existing systems at the time with the goal to create a better desktop OS. The BeOS designers believed that the areas that they optimized and were working on were more important than compatibility and functionality, but the market proved conclusively that they were wrong. If BeOS were open sourced tomorrow, I predict it would also fail. If BeOS were open sourced tomorrow, it definitely would fail. But that's because it's outdated (10+ years old afterall), and Haiku has pretty much recreated all the hard parts and improved on that. The market didn't prove anything; the decisions made by the Be executives (such as being greedy when Apple made them an offer for the BeOS IP) and Microsoft's arguably anti-trust tactics to keep BeOS off of OEM PCs is what sealed the fate of BeOS, not bad system design decisions.
I'm beginning to wonder if you used the OS that much or simple tinkered with it a time or two.
Now if the server in question is such a dick as to demand you, the sender, pay a fee to have the mail delivered to users on said server's system... too bad for the users on that system. You've done your part; you delivered the mail you promised you would send them. It's their e-mail service that screwed up, and they should complain to that service provider or find a new one.
So in summary, is Hotmail a dick for doing this? Absolutely. Is it their right to be a dick? Absolutely. It's also each Hotmail user's right to go elsewhere if they don't like the service (or lack thereof, since not all of their e-mail is being delivered to them) they're receiving.
It's amusing how often people forget there is still such a thing as choice, even when it comes to free services.
Nitrous oxide is a disassociative (same category as PCP and ketamine), and you often don't want to do anything but sit or lie where you are. I can't see nitrous oxide working as a non-lethal weapon (especially delivered in bullets, I mean... WTF?), but I can't see it "backfiring" as one either.
Cops are not part of the judicial system, nor should they be. Does a person who willingly puts others in harm's way deserve punishment? Absolutely. But they also deserve a trial just like everyone else.
Philosophy--the traditional meaning--at the end of the day says, "Nothing is certain." Science says, "That may be true, but we think it's possible to figure out what is most probable." (Science assuming its model of probability is accurate, negating the first premise.) We both agree religion is on a different world as far as assumptions go, but all I'm saying is that any assertion is inherently flawed by assumption. (Which leads to a self-paradox, from a philosophical perspective... but that's a debate for another time.
I hope I've cleared some of my arguments up; I think if you manage to understand what I'm trying to say, you'll see we're not quite at odds with one another.
When the federal government passes laws regarding issues not enumerated in the Constitution, they are ignoring the 10th amendment. Pretty cut and dry, you would think...
So is science.
They're all ideas, and we can evaluate the possibility of their correctness but we can never prove for certain what is true and what is false. All "fact" begins with some assumption. It doesn't matter if you're talking about gravity or you're talking about Christ.
Granted, I think we can all agree some ideas are more logically enforceable with scientific observations, but to exalt those ideas are "true" is to assume the observations they are based on are true, and unfortunately we cannot be sure of our senses... of our perceptions.
Science is a philosophy. Logic and reason are philosophies. Religions are philosophies. Please don't be arrogant to assume your philosophy is more valid than anyone else's. Believe what you want, and I'll do the same, and we can both promise not to push our beliefs on one another.
Am I the only one that got the moral of South Park's Go God Go episodes? Dawkins didn't, and I guess neither did the atheists here on
The problem is not the lack of government regulation. The problem is the presence of government-supported monopolies (or near-monopolies). Stop treating big business different from everyone else, so that we have competition and you've got your net neutrality problem solved.
Provided there isn't government regulation standing in the way, there will always be an eager businessman ready to jump in the moment a near-monopoly decides to take advantage of their customers.
1. no transparency without regulation,
2. no competition without regulation. Hint: a market is temporarily competitive and evolves to a mature market.
3. no accountability without regulation.
Yet another misguided attempt to falsely attribute market-based anything with efficiency or effectiveness. You realize all three of these things affect the government and its policies you're advocating, right? The difference with businesses is that you can vote with your dollars--and you don't have to wait two, four, or eight years to dump a bad service.
1) I could care less about transparency of my ISP, as long as they're giving me the service I demand at the cost we've agreed on.
2) You have it bass ackwards here. Regulations brings forth red tape, increase cost of doing business, and discourages the creation of new service providers, thereby decreasing competition.
3) As long as the business is providing me the service I demand at the agreed-upon rates, there's nothing to be accountable for.
If the government would get out of the way, i.e. drop these municipal monopolies that prevent market competition, there would be enough choices for the consumer and the market would indeed be able to solve the problem.
Everything the government touches turns to shit; get used to it.
Kids in the 3rd world using.... Windows... *gasp!!* I think it's awesome if they get a laptop, regardless of what OS it has. When they get older and need a better system, they can choose Linux if they want. It's not like MS will be giving/subsidizing Windows forever in these countries, so cost of the OS will be a factor at some point.
So, let's assume that the earth is getting warmer and that human activity is the main contributing factor. What's the solution? Obviously it's to stop doing the activities that's causing the climate change. And I'm all for that, but do we need government to step in for it to happen? Absolutely not.
Oil is increasing in price, and consumers are rightfully bitching about it when they pay at the pumps. And alas, the market is responding; hybrid this, alternative-fuel that... the market is going to fix the problem faster than public policy ever could. In 30 years, we won't be driving gasoline vehicles anymore, not because our public policy has outlawed them but for the same reason we don't use typewriters anymore: they simply will no longer be cost effective in relation to the alternatives the market provides.
This doesn't stop at cars, though. Ever get things shipped to your doorstep? The cost of those kinds of services have "hidden" fuel surcharge taxes (imposed by the business, not government) attached to them. When the efficiency of fuel increases (due to whatever solutions the market provides), the cost of those services will go down. (As a side effect, the cost of goods that are shipped inter-business will go down as well.)
One thing the government could do to help the market solve our global warming problem sooner rather than later is to get rid of the oil subsidies. This would cause the price of gasoline to increase even more (towards the extent it would be in a free market), and consumers will demand that much more for more cheaper alternatives to gasoline.
What it means is any power not specifically granted to the US federal government in the Constitution is in the jurisdiction of the various states. Issues like abortion and drug prohibition are to be decided by each state; the founders did this for a reason--you could move to the state whose politics most closely matched your own. The more centralized the federal government has become, the less choice we've had in regards to the policies governing us.
(Not to mention that the Real ID won't help us catch terrorists, but I figured that was a given.)