"To date, the FCC hasn't ruled out increasing its power further by using the phone monopoly laws, directly or indirectly regulating rates someday, or expanding its reach deeper into mobile broadband services. The most expansive regulatory regimes frequently started out modest and innocuous before incrementally growing into heavy-handed behemoths."
If the passed regulation plan does not meet any of the goals of the net neutrality supporters (as huff po article suggests) then why pass it? I am inclined to believe that net neutrality is less of the goal of the FCC here that to establish a principle that the Internet is subject to FCC regulation even though the Congress has never given it any such powers.
Psychologists should be writing books about this kind of thinking, it really is something and it is so common as well. Let me rephrase what you just said so it's more clear: Government causes trouble, in this case by not allowing USPS to raise rates to a realistic level. Why is that so? Presumably out of some misguided altruistic motives, so that poor people can afford to send mail etc or at least because that way it appears that they care more about the poor and all that crap, but lets assume for a moment that you are correct and it is because they are bribed by the businesses. Where is the real problem? With the fact that the government officials accept bribes or with the businessmen who bribe them? Lets say the government has the power to affect business in a dramatic way through regulation (as it does), it is corrupt (it is) and it is willing to accept bribes to help one company or another. If you are an honest businessman who refuses to pay bribes (like Rearden in Atlas Shrugged) you will pretty soon be buried by your competitors who reap all the advantages of having powerful politicians on their side. Pretty soon there will be no more businessmen who are honest because the environment created by the government power makes that impossible.
Citation needed. From personal experience just in the last year, I've had my mail stolen once, I received other people's mail several times and I failed to receive some mail that I know was sent - probably delivered wrongly to god knows whom. Meanwhile, going to the post office is one of the most dreaded things for me because it ALWAYS means waiting in line for at least an hour and dealing with employees there who are understaffed, overwhelmed by the number of angry customers, demoralized and rude. I can't think of a private business that has the same problems.
UPS won't send a postcard from Alaska to Florida for 28 cents, either.
You don't know that because right now they are forbidden by law to do so.
What is the real cost of sending that postcard? Of course if you carried just that one postcard by a special flight it would be thousands of dollars, but that's not how it works. A better question is what is the cost of delivering all the postcards in the US divided by the number of postcards? In any case, the real cost of something is the real cost, it can't be avoided. If it costs 48c to send that postcard you can't magically make it 28c by regulation. The cost is just shifted somewhere else, it still has to be paid by someone.
That doesn't work because it's not their money. People run things far more efficiently when it's their money or their bosses money on the line, rather than "everybody's" (i.e nobody's) money.
What bias? Slasdhot editors support Wikileaks. Show me one good reason why they shouldn't?
Joe Biden called Assange a terrorist! We all know that Joe Biden is a genius who knows everything and he wasn't picked as VP just to make Obama look good so that's good enough for me.
I hope you haven't been reading the New York Times either, or other international newspapers^^^^^^^^^^^^ terrorist journals, otherwise you might be guilty of learning the truth about your government and others around the world (many of which are far worse than the US government, if perhaps less hypocritical in their actions).
So reading New York Times = learning the truth, right? Just like when NYT was the leading voice in support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on its own fabricated stories about WMD?
As with so many questions, the answer is it depends. By going to elite school you get to hang out with people who are both smarter on average (to be able to get in) and whose families are wealthier on average (to be able to afford it). It's not a coincidence that so many successful startups come from Stanford, Harvard etc and not at some random state university. The faculty have better connections to (at Stanford you are likely to bump into a few Nobel prize winners when you wander around campus) and your future employees are likely to be impressed more by your resume. So there are plenty of advantages whether or not you actually learn anything.
Do NOT use Dropbox. It is so buggy it will sometimes corrupt all your files and even delete them altogether! It also keeps the copies of your files in their system forever even after you delete them and forwards them to the FBI AND the CIA. Be warned!!!
Alan Turing was gay. Therefore all news to do with gays, even if they have nothing to do with technology, belong in a technology forum. Is that your point?
All those apply to Texas and yet Texas is not bankrupt and is doing far better than California. Here is a reason you forgot to add to your list:
- High taxes that are driving businesses and productive individuals out of the state (and attracting leechers who don't pay taxes) and still don't bring enough income to cover the reckless spending that's been going on for decades
And yet California still sends tax money to bail out shit holes like South Carolina or Alaska
For your information: 1) California has a lover per capita GDP than Alaska and it's the California that is bankrupt and needs a bail out. 2) Of course coastal states with large population and major cities like LA or New York will have more trade and create more wealth overall than middle of nowhere states like Mississippi. It simple geography that makes California create more wealth, not anything special about "Californians". 3) California is a blue state mainly because of the large immigrant population and block voting by unions. More productive and more educated people are in California, the more likely they are to vote Republican (look at the exit polls for the last election, I think they are still up on CNN).
In which areas only one company offers Internet access? Initially I believed that there is no real competition which people always bring up when talking about Net Neutrality but the more I look at it the more competition I see. In any city you have several options, cable, competing DSL providers, direct fibre, cellular networks etc. Perhaps some rural areas only have one option but would companies really change their nationwide policies in a way that caused them to lose their city customers in order to screw rural customers who don't have any choices?
Because of the competition in text messaging "plans" (where the price per message has actually been falling). The other three carriers copied AT&T marketing practice which was to encourage people to sign up for plans by increasing rates per message and reduce the plan rates. Dept. of Justice looked into this and found no collusion to raise prices, but obviously you know better.
I don't think the word openness means what he thinks it means. He publishes some files and withholds others according to unknown criteria, he redacts some of them and not the others, apparently he withholds some for purposes of blackmail.
They didn't. At the time invasion started in 2003, there was a policy of containment where Iraq was under UN sanctions (which by the way killed more Iraqi's than the war and destroyed Iraq's economy), and no-fly zones that stopped Saddam from bombing Kurds and Shias, that weakened Saddam to the point where eventually a push for independence by the Kurds in the north was just a matter of time and Shias in the south were just waiting for their opportunity to rise up like they did after the first Gulf war, only to be massacred by Saddam. These problems predate US invasion. Some wanted to keep the sanctions going and hope for the best, others wanted to remove Saddam and hope that Iraqi's welcome the US troops as liberators and everything turns peachy. Sometimes there are no perfect options available and you have to choose the one that is least bad. For the record, I was against the war, but I am against ignorance as well.
If we stopped the wars, and doubled the NSF budget, we'd be so much better off in a couple years.
We'd be so much worse off a few years after that through, when civil war in Iraq that will follow our withdrawal, Turkish invasion of the Kurd areas in the north, Iran's proxy rule in Iraq through Iraq's Shia majority (which threatens stability of all Arab states in the region that are friendly to us) and finally acquisition of nuclear bomb by Iran (which btw will put pressure on Saudis to get one too, which they can) throws fragile Middle East into an all out chaos and the skyrocketing oil prices bring world economies including ours into another depression. Worst case scenario perhaps, but not unrealistic at all and apparently one you are not even considering in your simplistic view of the world.
Multiple FAIL: It is not Republicans who put up this site but a Republican, Rep. Cantor. "YouCut Targets National Science Foundation Budget" is unnecessarily inflammatory and factually incorrect: one or two of the science grants with titles like "collaboration among soccer players" and "sound of breaking objects" were given as examples of unnecessary gov. spending. No cuts to NSF budget were proposed or voted in by anybody. It is ridiculous that something like this is posted on the front page. I long noticed the leftist bias among slashdot editors but at this point they seem to be turning this site into "another dailykos for the nerds, stuff that matters to liberals only"
I agree that unity100 is an ignorant semi-literate foaming-at-the-mouth liberal troll, but I would just like to point out that if you are going to correct someone's writing you need to learn the difference between capitol letters and capital letters.
Meanwhile, Republicans are seriously(?) talking about cutting the entire National Science Foundation.
I guess this is how rumors spread. A dumb blogger says something about one of the items proposed to cut (not voted in as a chosen cut) is some grant about "collaboration among soccer players". A dumber slashdot article submitter translates this into Republicans are proposing cuts to the NSF. An even dumber slashdot poster translates this into Republicans are proposing to cut the entire National Science Foundations. This is really pathetic.
Since the blog linked in the summary is down, here is the link to the site itself: http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/ I might be missing something but I don't see anything about the National Science Foundation, never mind being the "first target". The first chosen cut was something called "New Non-Reformed Welfare Program"
If you want a truly free market, you can always just move to Somalia or something.
First line in wikipedia article on the free market: A free market is a market in which there is no economic intervention and regulation by the state, except to enforce private contracts and the ownership of property. So, since you obviously didn't go to college or the ignorant liberals who call themselves professors these days didn't teach you: anarchy != free market.
Slashdot Mirror
To balance the crazy left-wing nutcase view of huffington post here is the opinion of one of the FCC commissioners who is against the proposal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576023452250748540.html
"To date, the FCC hasn't ruled out increasing its power further by using the phone monopoly laws, directly or indirectly regulating rates someday, or expanding its reach deeper into mobile broadband services. The most expansive regulatory regimes frequently started out modest and innocuous before incrementally growing into heavy-handed behemoths."
If the passed regulation plan does not meet any of the goals of the net neutrality supporters (as huff po article suggests) then why pass it? I am inclined to believe that net neutrality is less of the goal of the FCC here that to establish a principle that the Internet is subject to FCC regulation even though the Congress has never given it any such powers.
So, blaming human nature for not fitting in with the system rather than other way around. Good luck in the real world.
Psychologists should be writing books about this kind of thinking, it really is something and it is so common as well. Let me rephrase what you just said so it's more clear: Government causes trouble, in this case by not allowing USPS to raise rates to a realistic level. Why is that so? Presumably out of some misguided altruistic motives, so that poor people can afford to send mail etc or at least because that way it appears that they care more about the poor and all that crap, but lets assume for a moment that you are correct and it is because they are bribed by the businesses. Where is the real problem? With the fact that the government officials accept bribes or with the businessmen who bribe them? Lets say the government has the power to affect business in a dramatic way through regulation (as it does), it is corrupt (it is) and it is willing to accept bribes to help one company or another. If you are an honest businessman who refuses to pay bribes (like Rearden in Atlas Shrugged) you will pretty soon be buried by your competitors who reap all the advantages of having powerful politicians on their side. Pretty soon there will be no more businessmen who are honest because the environment created by the government power makes that impossible.
Citation needed. From personal experience just in the last year, I've had my mail stolen once, I received other people's mail several times and I failed to receive some mail that I know was sent - probably delivered wrongly to god knows whom. Meanwhile, going to the post office is one of the most dreaded things for me because it ALWAYS means waiting in line for at least an hour and dealing with employees there who are understaffed, overwhelmed by the number of angry customers, demoralized and rude. I can't think of a private business that has the same problems.
UPS won't send a postcard from Alaska to Florida for 28 cents, either.
You don't know that because right now they are forbidden by law to do so.
What is the real cost of sending that postcard? Of course if you carried just that one postcard by a special flight it would be thousands of dollars, but that's not how it works. A better question is what is the cost of delivering all the postcards in the US divided by the number of postcards? In any case, the real cost of something is the real cost, it can't be avoided. If it costs 48c to send that postcard you can't magically make it 28c by regulation. The cost is just shifted somewhere else, it still has to be paid by someone.
That doesn't work because it's not their money. People run things far more efficiently when it's their money or their bosses money on the line, rather than "everybody's" (i.e nobody's) money.
Privatize it. UPS didn't lose $8.5 billion, it made $2.15 billion in profit.
What bias? Slasdhot editors support Wikileaks. Show me one good reason why they shouldn't?
Joe Biden called Assange a terrorist! We all know that Joe Biden is a genius who knows everything and he wasn't picked as VP just to make Obama look good so that's good enough for me.
I hope you haven't been reading the New York Times either, or other international newspapers^^^^^^^^^^^^ terrorist journals, otherwise you might be guilty of learning the truth about your government and others around the world (many of which are far worse than the US government, if perhaps less hypocritical in their actions).
So reading New York Times = learning the truth, right? Just like when NYT was the leading voice in support of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on its own fabricated stories about WMD?
As with so many questions, the answer is it depends. By going to elite school you get to hang out with people who are both smarter on average (to be able to get in) and whose families are wealthier on average (to be able to afford it). It's not a coincidence that so many successful startups come from Stanford, Harvard etc and not at some random state university. The faculty have better connections to (at Stanford you are likely to bump into a few Nobel prize winners when you wander around campus) and your future employees are likely to be impressed more by your resume. So there are plenty of advantages whether or not you actually learn anything.
Do NOT use Dropbox. It is so buggy it will sometimes corrupt all your files and even delete them altogether! It also keeps the copies of your files in their system forever even after you delete them and forwards them to the FBI AND the CIA. Be warned!!!
Alan Turing was gay. Therefore all news to do with gays, even if they have nothing to do with technology, belong in a technology forum. Is that your point?
All those make things worse though. What has he done to make things better?
All those apply to Texas and yet Texas is not bankrupt and is doing far better than California. Here is a reason you forgot to add to your list:
- High taxes that are driving businesses and productive individuals out of the state (and attracting leechers who don't pay taxes) and still don't bring enough income to cover the reckless spending that's been going on for decades
And yet California still sends tax money to bail out shit holes like South Carolina or Alaska
For your information: 1) California has a lover per capita GDP than Alaska and it's the California that is bankrupt and needs a bail out. 2) Of course coastal states with large population and major cities like LA or New York will have more trade and create more wealth overall than middle of nowhere states like Mississippi. It simple geography that makes California create more wealth, not anything special about "Californians". 3) California is a blue state mainly because of the large immigrant population and block voting by unions. More productive and more educated people are in California, the more likely they are to vote Republican (look at the exit polls for the last election, I think they are still up on CNN).
In which areas only one company offers Internet access? Initially I believed that there is no real competition which people always bring up when talking about Net Neutrality but the more I look at it the more competition I see. In any city you have several options, cable, competing DSL providers, direct fibre, cellular networks etc. Perhaps some rural areas only have one option but would companies really change their nationwide policies in a way that caused them to lose their city customers in order to screw rural customers who don't have any choices?
Because of the competition in text messaging "plans" (where the price per message has actually been falling). The other three carriers copied AT&T marketing practice which was to encourage people to sign up for plans by increasing rates per message and reduce the plan rates. Dept. of Justice looked into this and found no collusion to raise prices, but obviously you know better.
I don't think the word openness means what he thinks it means. He publishes some files and withholds others according to unknown criteria, he redacts some of them and not the others, apparently he withholds some for purposes of blackmail.
They didn't. At the time invasion started in 2003, there was a policy of containment where Iraq was under UN sanctions (which by the way killed more Iraqi's than the war and destroyed Iraq's economy), and no-fly zones that stopped Saddam from bombing Kurds and Shias, that weakened Saddam to the point where eventually a push for independence by the Kurds in the north was just a matter of time and Shias in the south were just waiting for their opportunity to rise up like they did after the first Gulf war, only to be massacred by Saddam. These problems predate US invasion. Some wanted to keep the sanctions going and hope for the best, others wanted to remove Saddam and hope that Iraqi's welcome the US troops as liberators and everything turns peachy. Sometimes there are no perfect options available and you have to choose the one that is least bad. For the record, I was against the war, but I am against ignorance as well.
If we stopped the wars, and doubled the NSF budget, we'd be so much better off in a couple years.
We'd be so much worse off a few years after that through, when civil war in Iraq that will follow our withdrawal, Turkish invasion of the Kurd areas in the north, Iran's proxy rule in Iraq through Iraq's Shia majority (which threatens stability of all Arab states in the region that are friendly to us) and finally acquisition of nuclear bomb by Iran (which btw will put pressure on Saudis to get one too, which they can) throws fragile Middle East into an all out chaos and the skyrocketing oil prices bring world economies including ours into another depression. Worst case scenario perhaps, but not unrealistic at all and apparently one you are not even considering in your simplistic view of the world.
Multiple FAIL: It is not Republicans who put up this site but a Republican, Rep. Cantor. "YouCut Targets National Science Foundation Budget" is unnecessarily inflammatory and factually incorrect: one or two of the science grants with titles like "collaboration among soccer players" and "sound of breaking objects" were given as examples of unnecessary gov. spending. No cuts to NSF budget were proposed or voted in by anybody. It is ridiculous that something like this is posted on the front page. I long noticed the leftist bias among slashdot editors but at this point they seem to be turning this site into "another dailykos for the nerds, stuff that matters to liberals only"
I agree that unity100 is an ignorant semi-literate foaming-at-the-mouth liberal troll, but I would just like to point out that if you are going to correct someone's writing you need to learn the difference between capitol letters and capital letters.
Meanwhile, Republicans are seriously(?) talking about cutting the entire National Science Foundation.
I guess this is how rumors spread. A dumb blogger says something about one of the items proposed to cut (not voted in as a chosen cut) is some grant about "collaboration among soccer players". A dumber slashdot article submitter translates this into Republicans are proposing cuts to the NSF. An even dumber slashdot poster translates this into Republicans are proposing to cut the entire National Science Foundations. This is really pathetic.
Since the blog linked in the summary is down, here is the link to the site itself: http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/ I might be missing something but I don't see anything about the National Science Foundation, never mind being the "first target". The first chosen cut was something called "New Non-Reformed Welfare Program"
If you want a truly free market, you can always just move to Somalia or something.
First line in wikipedia article on the free market: A free market is a market in which there is no economic intervention and regulation by the state, except to enforce private contracts and the ownership of property. So, since you obviously didn't go to college or the ignorant liberals who call themselves professors these days didn't teach you: anarchy != free market.