Do you personally know any? Or are you basing that comment on what the Democratic Party Press (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NYT, Washington Post, etc) tells you?
Oh, come on, they gave several Pulitzer's to the New York Times, why not The Onion? There's at least as much fact in Onion stories as the ones the NYT won Pulitzers for.
If Obama can get a nobel peace prize for doing absolutely nothing...
That's extremely unfair. He got it for not being the warmongering fuck that George Bush was. Or simply not being George Bush, if you prefer.
How is that working out for ya? How many fewer wars is Obama waging than George Bush did? Oh that's right, he has continued both of Bush's wars and started another one. And unlike Bush, he did not bother to get Congress to approve his new war.
No, that is not true, at least not by U.S. standards. In the U.S., conservatives do NOT favor central planning of the economy(a basic concept of progressive ideology). This is a basic misconception that was developed by progressives. Progressives created a political continuum that extended from fascism to communism, thus taking all non-central planning concepts off of the table. Fascism is but one more ideology that favors government control of all aspects of the economy, conservatives in the U.S. oppose all but the most minimal government involvement in the economy.
You mean as opposed to communism, which always turns out as appalling and oppressive for 99% plus of a country's citizens?
You seem to be mixing a bunch of historical evils together and blaming them on capitalism.
Actually, the argument could be made that in the long run, all of the evils you mentioned are contrary to the self interest of those on the economic top of the pile. Evidence suggests that slave labor is unable to compete with free labor on a long term basis. All of the things you mentioned introduce inefficiencies into the market place, economies that get rid of them are more productive than those that have them.
Additionally, as another person points out, the force behind getting rid of those things is not "communism", but is instead altruism. All of those things, except the last two are as consistent with communism as they are with capitalism.
The problem I have is that people attack capitalism on the basis of the way it turns out in the real world, but defend communism based on its "ideal". You can either compare the ideal of capitalism to the ideal of communism, or you can compare the way they each work out when people attempt to implement them.
The distance between communist and fascist is very narrow, both are variants on progressive ideology. China crossed over from communist to fascist in the late 70s/early 80s (although it is still officially Communist).
The ruling does not say that states cannot set stricter rules within their border. It says that they cannot sue in federal court to influence the actions of companies in other states.
Actually, they will start doing so in 2013, if Obama is re-elected, but not before. The Obama Administration is afraid that if they start sooner, the price of electricity will rise too high before next year's election.
Where do you propose to get that power from? It may be that someday in the future we will be able to get a significant portion of our electrical power from renewable energy sources, but that day is not near.
The systems may not be "under strain" at this time, but if usage patterns continue as they are currently trending, they will be. And under current pricing models, at some point, usage will exceed the ability of revenues to support expansion of the networks. When profits drop below a certain percentage of revenues, companies stop investing any revenue in improving, or even maintaining, the structure to deliver that good or service.
You know you say that about the tax breaks from the 90s as if they did not significantly build out the ability to access high speed internet since then. Where I live now, there was no high speed internet access available in the 90s, only dial up (not even DSL). I now have the choice of cable or FIOS. For that matter, going back to the 90s, significant portions of the cable networks would have been strained if a significant portion of their subscribers had wanted internet access over cable.
This does not mean that the ISPs are not exagerating the situation in order to come out of this with even more profits, just that something like what they are talking about is going to be necessary to pay for and maintain the kind of data usage that people are moving towards.
So, basically, you are suggesting that you put the tax payer on the hook for how much the companies are willing to hire regulators away from the regulatory agency. The problem is that even without regulatory capture, people with experience enforcing the regulations are valuable for the companies being regulated. The fact of the matter is that most government regulations are subject to interpretation. The best way for a company to ensure that it is in compliance with the regulations is to hire someone who was trained by the agency that enforces the regulations and spent several years enforcing those regulations. That someone understands how the agency interprets the regulations (which means that it is in the company's economic interest to offer regulators more than they are making for the government). On the other side, the best way for a regulatory agency to get people who understand how an industry works and where companies hide regulatory violations is to hire people who have worked in the industry. The problem is this results in a revolving door between the regulated industry and the regulating agency.
Even without the revolving door between industry and regulators, there is still significant interaction between industry and regulators and there needs to be. Regulated industry needs to understand how the regulatory agency interprets the rules it is enforcing in order to comply with those rules and the regulatory agency has to understand how the industry operates in order to create regulations that do not result in more danger than the danger they are designed to mitigate.
Even in trashy romance novels, there are words used that describe things other than sexual organs. In particular, there are words that are used to describe many different articles of clothing, different types of furniture, many of them even have words about different styles of architecture (usually old styles, but still). Most of the actual authors (as opposed to the names on the cover, which are often publisher owned psuedonyms) are people who are attempting to break into the publishing business. This means that while they are writing these novels to a formula, they are, also, attempting to demonstrate that they have writing skills that will allow them to break out of that genre. The reason I know this about these books is because I used to work in the book business and prided myself on my ability to select books a customer would like based on what they had read (I, also, made it a point of trying to wean readers off of the trashy boilerplate series--harlequin romance, star trek novels, dragonlance novels, etc).
If it wasn't for Gary Gygax, Steve Jackson would never had made Car Wars (or any of the other games he made). For that matter, Lucasarts Games would probably have never existed. D&D is the original RPG. On the other hand, the point at which you were not a geek if you were not at least familiar with the history of D&D is far enough in the past that they probably should have at least given a link to his Wikipedia page.
All that would happen in that case is that libraries would become privately funded (just as they were originally). Of course, the problem with your argument is that members of the tea party movement read more than the average American by quite a bit.
Actually, books do not burn all that well when they are stored packed side by side, or even just individually (difficulty of getting enough oxygen to the paper to get it to burn).
This is cheap to carry out, and it's very secure. I can print the hash-function file on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere, and no hypothetical evil government can make the piece of paper go away if they don't know I have it. There is no single point of failure, because any number of people can store the hash function.
The problem is this, what if the government produces a hash function of the new work and claims that that is the hash of the original. How do you prove that your hash-function is the real original? You are correct that a cache of paper books is not any better.
You do know that 1.5 years is well within the remaining lifetime of the overwhelming majority of people posting on slashdot? As opposed to the end of the 21st Century, which is most likely beyond the end of the lifetime of the majority of people currently posting on slashdot? Which is the point that the poster you responded to was making. If you want to make a prediction about the future of technology that is worth anything, you need to predict what is going to happen in the next 5-10 years. Every prediction that I have seen in my lifetime that stretched beyond that has been mostly nonsense. There are too many things that can happen in the meantime for current trends to mean anything.
The problem with the comparison to lions is that the average person is more likely to see a lion today than at any time before 1950. Lions were never common in the parts of the world that most people live in.
Ultimately, the problem with ebooks is, how do you know when what is in your copy of the book was actually put there. Think about the people who have claimed to make predictions that came true that when you go back and actually read what they wrote, you realize that you can only say that what they wrote was an accurate prediction of events by the wildest stretch of the imagination (or by the shotgun effect--they made so many predictions that it is no surprise that one of them came true, while the rest turned out to be completely off the mark). Now, remember what Amazon did with "1984". Even if there are people who keep a copy of the unaltered electronic copy, when people argue about what the original said, how will you know who has the actual unaltered original?
I'm sorry, but you are using Lost as an example of a complicated story line in a TV show. Now, compare that with the Wheel of Time series of books. Or the Harry Potter books. The Harry Potter books had just as big (if not bigger) community of people following the ins and outs of the plots and trying to put together the peices to figure out where it was going. The Wheel of Time books had a series of puzzles about what was going on that make the "mysteries" of Lost look insignificant. The entire Lost story arc is the equivalent of just one of The Wheel of Time books (at best).
In no way would I say she benefited intellectually from reading these books vs. watching the same stories as films (porn for women, IMO). If you look at it objectively, there's really nothing inherently better about books vs. other forms of entertainment.
Then you really do not understand what reading does for someone. I have long said that someone who reads anything (even something as trashy as serial romance novels, or really bad comic books) is a better person than someone who reads nothing. For one thing, people who read have more extensive vocabularies than those who do not read. I just came across a study that shows that people who read extensively starting at a young age are much more able to express themselves clearly in writing than those who do not read (sorry, I do not recall where I saw the reference so I cannot produce a citation for it). As George Orwell pointed out, in order to be able to think about an idea in depth you need a word for it.
As others pointed out, books, also, provide greater stimulus for the imagination. In a movie, you know exactly what something looks like. Often, that is different from what you would have pictured from reading the book (when it is a movie based on a book).
A better solution would be for ISPs to start fulfilling their promises rather than using savings to beef up executive compensation.
Part of the problem here is a conflict of understanding. When ISPs began offering "unlimited" Internet access, they were referring to time, not bandwidth. At the time, the limits on connection speed and number of total users meant that people were not going to use enough bandwidth to strain the system. Of course, the fact that ISPs oversold their capacity gives the people complaining (incorrectly) about it not being "unlimited the way they said it would be", a legitimate gripe that the ISPs are advertising a product that they cannot deliver. The ISPs banked on a certain usage level, but marketed the possibility of a greater usage level than that and now find their networks overwhelmed by the early adopters who understood the possibilities sooner. The ISPs created the situation and have just realized that their pricing model will not support the network expansion that will be necessary to meet the demand for bandwidth that will come as the average person starts to understand the possibilities that the early adopters are paving the way for.
The Constitution at no point defines what constitutes declaring war. It is a perfectly reasonable argument that the Congressional act authorizing the use of force against Saddam was legally a declaration of war. It is certainly a stronger argument than the one that the Obama Administration is trying to use here.
I have noticed that no one has mentioned another element of Obama's argument: that he does not need Congressional authorization in Libya because he has UN authorization.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you personally know any? Or are you basing that comment on what the Democratic Party Press (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NYT, Washington Post, etc) tells you?
Oh, come on, they gave several Pulitzer's to the New York Times, why not The Onion? There's at least as much fact in Onion stories as the ones the NYT won Pulitzers for.
That's extremely unfair. He got it for not being the warmongering fuck that George Bush was. Or simply not being George Bush, if you prefer.
How is that working out for ya? How many fewer wars is Obama waging than George Bush did? Oh that's right, he has continued both of Bush's wars and started another one. And unlike Bush, he did not bother to get Congress to approve his new war.
At the Tea Party rallies.
No, that is not true, at least not by U.S. standards. In the U.S., conservatives do NOT favor central planning of the economy(a basic concept of progressive ideology). This is a basic misconception that was developed by progressives. Progressives created a political continuum that extended from fascism to communism, thus taking all non-central planning concepts off of the table. Fascism is but one more ideology that favors government control of all aspects of the economy, conservatives in the U.S. oppose all but the most minimal government involvement in the economy.
You mean as opposed to communism, which always turns out as appalling and oppressive for 99% plus of a country's citizens?
You seem to be mixing a bunch of historical evils together and blaming them on capitalism.
Actually, the argument could be made that in the long run, all of the evils you mentioned are contrary to the self interest of those on the economic top of the pile. Evidence suggests that slave labor is unable to compete with free labor on a long term basis. All of the things you mentioned introduce inefficiencies into the market place, economies that get rid of them are more productive than those that have them.
Additionally, as another person points out, the force behind getting rid of those things is not "communism", but is instead altruism. All of those things, except the last two are as consistent with communism as they are with capitalism.
The problem I have is that people attack capitalism on the basis of the way it turns out in the real world, but defend communism based on its "ideal". You can either compare the ideal of capitalism to the ideal of communism, or you can compare the way they each work out when people attempt to implement them.
The distance between communist and fascist is very narrow, both are variants on progressive ideology. China crossed over from communist to fascist in the late 70s/early 80s (although it is still officially Communist).
How is preventing these people from forcing electric companies to raise the cost of electricity a "defeat for consumers"?
The ruling does not say that states cannot set stricter rules within their border. It says that they cannot sue in federal court to influence the actions of companies in other states.
Actually, they will start doing so in 2013, if Obama is re-elected, but not before. The Obama Administration is afraid that if they start sooner, the price of electricity will rise too high before next year's election.
Where do you propose to get that power from? It may be that someday in the future we will be able to get a significant portion of our electrical power from renewable energy sources, but that day is not near.
The systems may not be "under strain" at this time, but if usage patterns continue as they are currently trending, they will be. And under current pricing models, at some point, usage will exceed the ability of revenues to support expansion of the networks. When profits drop below a certain percentage of revenues, companies stop investing any revenue in improving, or even maintaining, the structure to deliver that good or service.
You know you say that about the tax breaks from the 90s as if they did not significantly build out the ability to access high speed internet since then. Where I live now, there was no high speed internet access available in the 90s, only dial up (not even DSL). I now have the choice of cable or FIOS. For that matter, going back to the 90s, significant portions of the cable networks would have been strained if a significant portion of their subscribers had wanted internet access over cable.
This does not mean that the ISPs are not exagerating the situation in order to come out of this with even more profits, just that something like what they are talking about is going to be necessary to pay for and maintain the kind of data usage that people are moving towards.
So, basically, you are suggesting that you put the tax payer on the hook for how much the companies are willing to hire regulators away from the regulatory agency. The problem is that even without regulatory capture, people with experience enforcing the regulations are valuable for the companies being regulated. The fact of the matter is that most government regulations are subject to interpretation. The best way for a company to ensure that it is in compliance with the regulations is to hire someone who was trained by the agency that enforces the regulations and spent several years enforcing those regulations. That someone understands how the agency interprets the regulations (which means that it is in the company's economic interest to offer regulators more than they are making for the government). On the other side, the best way for a regulatory agency to get people who understand how an industry works and where companies hide regulatory violations is to hire people who have worked in the industry. The problem is this results in a revolving door between the regulated industry and the regulating agency.
Even without the revolving door between industry and regulators, there is still significant interaction between industry and regulators and there needs to be. Regulated industry needs to understand how the regulatory agency interprets the rules it is enforcing in order to comply with those rules and the regulatory agency has to understand how the industry operates in order to create regulations that do not result in more danger than the danger they are designed to mitigate.
Even in trashy romance novels, there are words used that describe things other than sexual organs. In particular, there are words that are used to describe many different articles of clothing, different types of furniture, many of them even have words about different styles of architecture (usually old styles, but still). Most of the actual authors (as opposed to the names on the cover, which are often publisher owned psuedonyms) are people who are attempting to break into the publishing business. This means that while they are writing these novels to a formula, they are, also, attempting to demonstrate that they have writing skills that will allow them to break out of that genre. The reason I know this about these books is because I used to work in the book business and prided myself on my ability to select books a customer would like based on what they had read (I, also, made it a point of trying to wean readers off of the trashy boilerplate series--harlequin romance, star trek novels, dragonlance novels, etc).
If it wasn't for Gary Gygax, Steve Jackson would never had made Car Wars (or any of the other games he made). For that matter, Lucasarts Games would probably have never existed. D&D is the original RPG. On the other hand, the point at which you were not a geek if you were not at least familiar with the history of D&D is far enough in the past that they probably should have at least given a link to his Wikipedia page.
All that would happen in that case is that libraries would become privately funded (just as they were originally). Of course, the problem with your argument is that members of the tea party movement read more than the average American by quite a bit.
Actually, books do not burn all that well when they are stored packed side by side, or even just individually (difficulty of getting enough oxygen to the paper to get it to burn).
This is cheap to carry out, and it's very secure. I can print the hash-function file on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere, and no hypothetical evil government can make the piece of paper go away if they don't know I have it. There is no single point of failure, because any number of people can store the hash function.
The problem is this, what if the government produces a hash function of the new work and claims that that is the hash of the original. How do you prove that your hash-function is the real original? You are correct that a cache of paper books is not any better.
You do know that 1.5 years is well within the remaining lifetime of the overwhelming majority of people posting on slashdot? As opposed to the end of the 21st Century, which is most likely beyond the end of the lifetime of the majority of people currently posting on slashdot? Which is the point that the poster you responded to was making. If you want to make a prediction about the future of technology that is worth anything, you need to predict what is going to happen in the next 5-10 years. Every prediction that I have seen in my lifetime that stretched beyond that has been mostly nonsense. There are too many things that can happen in the meantime for current trends to mean anything.
The problem with the comparison to lions is that the average person is more likely to see a lion today than at any time before 1950. Lions were never common in the parts of the world that most people live in.
Ultimately, the problem with ebooks is, how do you know when what is in your copy of the book was actually put there. Think about the people who have claimed to make predictions that came true that when you go back and actually read what they wrote, you realize that you can only say that what they wrote was an accurate prediction of events by the wildest stretch of the imagination (or by the shotgun effect--they made so many predictions that it is no surprise that one of them came true, while the rest turned out to be completely off the mark). Now, remember what Amazon did with "1984". Even if there are people who keep a copy of the unaltered electronic copy, when people argue about what the original said, how will you know who has the actual unaltered original?
I'm sorry, but you are using Lost as an example of a complicated story line in a TV show. Now, compare that with the Wheel of Time series of books. Or the Harry Potter books. The Harry Potter books had just as big (if not bigger) community of people following the ins and outs of the plots and trying to put together the peices to figure out where it was going. The Wheel of Time books had a series of puzzles about what was going on that make the "mysteries" of Lost look insignificant. The entire Lost story arc is the equivalent of just one of The Wheel of Time books (at best).
In no way would I say she benefited intellectually from reading these books vs. watching the same stories as films (porn for women, IMO). If you look at it objectively, there's really nothing inherently better about books vs. other forms of entertainment.
Then you really do not understand what reading does for someone. I have long said that someone who reads anything (even something as trashy as serial romance novels, or really bad comic books) is a better person than someone who reads nothing. For one thing, people who read have more extensive vocabularies than those who do not read. I just came across a study that shows that people who read extensively starting at a young age are much more able to express themselves clearly in writing than those who do not read (sorry, I do not recall where I saw the reference so I cannot produce a citation for it). As George Orwell pointed out, in order to be able to think about an idea in depth you need a word for it.
As others pointed out, books, also, provide greater stimulus for the imagination. In a movie, you know exactly what something looks like. Often, that is different from what you would have pictured from reading the book (when it is a movie based on a book).
A better solution would be for ISPs to start fulfilling their promises rather than using savings to beef up executive compensation.
Part of the problem here is a conflict of understanding. When ISPs began offering "unlimited" Internet access, they were referring to time, not bandwidth. At the time, the limits on connection speed and number of total users meant that people were not going to use enough bandwidth to strain the system. Of course, the fact that ISPs oversold their capacity gives the people complaining (incorrectly) about it not being "unlimited the way they said it would be", a legitimate gripe that the ISPs are advertising a product that they cannot deliver. The ISPs banked on a certain usage level, but marketed the possibility of a greater usage level than that and now find their networks overwhelmed by the early adopters who understood the possibilities sooner. The ISPs created the situation and have just realized that their pricing model will not support the network expansion that will be necessary to meet the demand for bandwidth that will come as the average person starts to understand the possibilities that the early adopters are paving the way for.
The Constitution at no point defines what constitutes declaring war. It is a perfectly reasonable argument that the Congressional act authorizing the use of force against Saddam was legally a declaration of war. It is certainly a stronger argument than the one that the Obama Administration is trying to use here.
I have noticed that no one has mentioned another element of Obama's argument: that he does not need Congressional authorization in Libya because he has UN authorization.