Just because campaign finance reform is hard... does not mean we shouldn't strive for campaign finance reform
You mean campaign finance reform the way YOU want it to happen. You didn't take issue with the poster's claim that said reforms would serve mostly to preserve the demican/republicrat duopoly.
The funny thing about most people in power is that their first priority tends to be to *keep and expand that power*, and afterwards think of what is best for their constituents. That is one reason why libertarians seek to limit the power of the government. Now you could argue that a libertarian government would only serve the rich, white libertarians, effectively increasingly their power. And I would take issue with that, but that's another debate;-)
Sure, the cancer is gone... but the cost is high.
That's a nice claim to make. Very powerful speech. But without anything to back it up, it's meaningless.
"just large enough to protect what I have, but not so large as to restrict me at all".
Bingo. I think that's what most libertarians (aside from the far-north extremists) would agree to (substituting "I/me" with "all US citizens", of course).
Sigh. It seems as though there's something inherently futile about debating political generalities on/. For both sides. How bout next time we pick a more specific issue. Deal?:-)
You're right, there are times when fixing bugs requires additional code and new features. I should know better than to spout off at 7am when I'm barely conscious;-)
However, I still think a huge, poorly-managed and completely ad-hocked piece of legacy software is a great metaphor for the US Gov't. Sometimes it's a good idea to pare back some of the more excessive features and rewrite others so that the package can do a few things well (and let other more efficient packages handle the rest) rather than attempt to do many things poorly.
RFC 2142 outlines the standard mailbox names that every organization should have. (I tried to paste the list in, but the stupid lameness filter kept complaining about "junk characters".)
Have you actually ever written any "computer source code"?
Kludging more code over top of already buggy code is how bloated pieces of crap like, say, MSFT products come about. You don't fix bugs by expanding the size and scope of the program.
I think it's a great analogy for the federal government.
In fact, for the rest of your scenarios (except for the math one, the only way to do a math problem is using math, but there are many ways to do what the govt does), it seems very plausible to me that you could be so terrible at reasoning or writing that it would be better for you to just give up and let someone else handle it, so you can focus on what you really do well.
There are plenty of ideas about other ways tasks the govt does poorly could be handled, by people who are not, by the way, college freshmen. You ought to look them up, and spend your time arguing against them, rather than crap like this.
Actually, the market handled Enron perfectly. Bad companies have to be allowed to go bust under a market economy. I hope whoever broke the law and created that fiasco is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (and then some in the afterlife), but if they're not you should be criticizing the DOJ (or God), not "the market." It sucks that people had their pensions and such invested in that stock, but seriously, there's no reason why they shouldn;t have diversified. I just hope everyone else will learn from their mistakes.
The California energy markets were one seriously fucked-up situation. Read an economic analysis of it sometime, it's remarkable how stupidly the whole thing was done. Basically, they "deregulated" the industry only to provide them with a market so hampered with new regulations that prevented the market from correcting itself when things started going wrong. I could go on but I'm off-topic enough as it is.
The market would be doing a fine job of handling digital media, too, unfortunately not the way some of us might like to. Essentially, the broadcasters and cable companies would rather take the HDTV bandwidth given to them and use it to pack more normal-resolution digital channels downstream, because, frankly, not enough people care about HDTV for them to make a buck.
Thanks, man, that was really cool. I had it saved on my computer from way back when. It's nice to have things like that for personal reference (or just a laugh), but I only recently realized that it's better to be able to attribute funny/insightful quotes when I want to quote them (or be a karma whore).
I write software for digital cable television systems, so I really appreciated the humor of the whole thing.
(unfortunately I can't take credit for this one. It was written by a fellow slashdotter a while back, and I've lost the attribution. If the author is still out there, let me know and I'll send you a beer;-) )
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Here's how it went:
Broadcast Industry asks for bandwidth for HDTV FCC says "OK, we'll set aside bandwidth for HDTV" FCC says "What standards?" Industry says 'No Standards Please' and come up with EIGHTEEN recommended formats for HDTV. I am not shitting you. FCC says "Isn't 18 different standards a bit much?" Industry says "Shut the fuck up FCC, we know what we are doing. The 'market' will handle this!" Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!" FCC says "OK, it's your call on standards, 18 formats is fine, infact there are NO STANDARDS AT ALL, 'cause we are letting the 'market decide', but you start broadcasting HDTV now or we take back the FREE bandwidth." Industry says "What? We really just want the free bandwidth. You really want us to do HDTV?? Congress says "Fuck you Industry. Broadcast HDTV or we'll legislate your asses back to Sun-day!" Industry says "We're fucked. 18 formats? Why the hell did we do that? Let's change it." Consumer Electronics dudes say "You ain't changing shit. We are already building the boxes you said you wanted built." FCC says "Yah, ya boneheads we told you 18 was too many, now you gotta live with it." Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies carry the HDTV at no charge?" Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!" FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting 'the market' handle that" Industry says "We are so fucked. We are spending 5-10 million per TV station in hardware alone and have 1000 HDTV viewers per city, even in LA!" Consumer at home says "Where is my HDTV? Why does it cost so much? Fuck it, I'm sticking with cable/DirecTV."
Consumer electronics dudes, broadcast industry, FCC, and congress all cry. Cable companies laugh and make even bigger profits.
Fortunately, the researchers at CERN probably were physics majors, so they knew that while, yes, when antimatter collides with matter and disappears it releases (comparatively) huge amounts of energy, they only have a few thousand atoms collected together in their trap.
If you remember anything form high-school physics, you'll know that's not many.
Or, as the researcher interviewed put it, "you would get only a tiny amount of energy by combining the antimatter with matter--not even enough to warm a small cup of coffee."
Well, obviously if you're a student operating on a typical student's budget, $1K is a lot to spend on compromising your roommate's box.
But to even the smallest corporation or local government, a thousand dollars is pocket change, particularly when you consider the value of the information that could be gained with such a device.
(and as the other poster pointed out, they're actually only $200, which does make it a viable option for getting at your roommate's pr0n (assuming you aren't clever enough to find a cheaper alternative))
The hacked Divx version you're talking about has nothing to do with this article. It is a completely different animal released a while back by a different group. It ain't open source because it's owned by Microsoft. And if the current Divx project took their name from a bunch of hackers I couldn't care less.
Anyway, now that we're talking about the same codec (the legit one that was written from scratch), the FAQ says what's OSS and what's not. Also do a little bit of research on the difference between Open Source and Free Software.
Q: Is the OpenDivX(TM) codec the same as the DivX(TM) codec?
A: Yes and no. Yes, they are both versions of DivX compression technology. The OpenDivX codec was launched as an open-source project on Project Mayo in January 2001. Today, the project continues as a collaborative, educational development effort, focusing more on improving visual quality than optimizing performance. The latest generation of the DivX codec (version 4.x) was released in July 2001. The new DivX codec is technically completely different from OpenDivX, and is built from a different codebase. It has been optimized for greater performance and visual quality and has more features than OpenDivX. It's important to note that the two codecs produce compatible formats, meaning content encoded with OpenDivX can be played back with DivX, and vice versa. The DivX codec will from now on be the version with the most new features and widest compatibility across platforms, so this is the version we recommend you use.
Q: Is DivX(TM) video technology a hack of Microsoft code?
A: Absolutely not. A lot of people seem to think we're not making ourselves clear here, so pay attention: the DivX(TM) codec is a patent-pending (as in, patents owned by DivXNetworks) technology created from scratch (as in blank screen, blinking cursor) by DARC (the DivX Advanced Research Center) and the team at DivXNetworks. We hope this puts that issue to rest.
Glad you like it.
Feel free to redistribute it so long as you credit it to my/. username, unless it's going to be in print or in a serious publication (online or dead tree), in which case email me and I'll give you my real name.
Thanks.
The Revolution Will Not Be Webcast
on
The End of Cyber BS
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The Revolution Will Not Be Webcast
(with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron)
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to jack in, log on, and zone out.
You will not be able to download pr0n and warez,
Eat ramen while waiting for a Flash movie to load,
Because the revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will not be load-balanced by Akamai
Across huge server farms to maintain the proper bandwidth.
The revolution will not bring you.jpgs of Bill Gates
Giving a Powerpoint presentation with Steve
Ballmer, Jeff Raikes, and Craig Mundie to demonstrate
How.NET will change your computing experience.
The revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will not be served to you by
Scott McNealy's Sun Microsystems and will not
feature a backend by Larry Ellison's Oracle.
The revolution will not optimize your internet connection.
The revolution will not consolidate all your debts into one easy monthly payment
The revolution will not let you punch the monkey
To win twenty dollars, because
The revolution will not be webcast, brother.
There will be no pictures of Sam Donaldson and Vint Cerf
At the Webby Awards in San Francisco with
Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences members Matt Groening and Beck.
Plastic, Peter Pan, PBS and Plus Magazine
Are not going to win crap.
The revolution will not be webcast.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
WTO Protesters on indymedia.com
There will be no pictures of ICANN board members
Receiving bribes from Network Solutions, Inc.
There will be no Real Video or JPEG stills of John
C. Dvorak muttering conspiracy theories and no articles by
Jon Katz with the bleeding heart that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.
Wired News, Salon.com, and Slashdot.org
will no longer be so damned relevant, and
No one will care what Wil Wheaton has to
Say on his weblog because the geeks
will be in the streets looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be webcast.
There will be no pages of webcams refreshing every
30 seconds with no pictures of half-naked women
Prancing and pimply-faced males scratching themselves.
The theme song will not be posted to MP3.com and
Will not be shared using Napster, Audiogalaxy, Gnutella,
iMesh, BearShare or Kazaa.
The revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will never return a 404 Not Found,
403 Forbidden, or 500 Internal Server Error.
You will never have to worry about the virus in your
Email, the cracker at your firewall, or the bug in your OS.
The revolution will not waste 2 million dollars on a Superbowl Ad.
The revolution will not find you job opportunities.
The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat.
The revolution will not be webcast, WILL not be webcast,
WILL NOT BE WEBCAST.
The revolution will not be in cyberspace, brothers;
As if half of the "technology" news on major sites isn't copied straight out of corporate press releases anyway. The story about "100x Compression" Slashdot featured a little while ago was from Reuters, but that doesn't mean it wasn't 99% marketing baloney.
Not that blurring the line between news and advertising is a good thing, but I do sympathize with Yahoo's position. Money must be tight over there, and every ad they link to as "news" means less time paying writers to rewrite coporate advertising into "pseudo-news"!
This provision will ensure that computer manufacturers and software developers are able to take full advantage of the options granted to them under the proposed Final Judgment without fear of reprisal.
I'm pretty sure my pastor said in church last week that when the Final Judgement comes Bill Gates will be going to Hell. Something about avarice, gluttony, sloth, etc. Let's hear it for the DoJ recognising who's really in charge here.
What turned me off of Altavista was when the news hit that they were selling the top 10 results for certain searches to companies for advertising purposes. I noticed it seemed to be true, and when I do a search I'm usually NOT looking for a company's webpage.
Around the same time I heard about a new search engine with a more comprehensive search, caching, and a light interface. I was hooked.
I do miss boolean searching, but Google's targeted-text ads are way better than Altavista's destroy-the-entire-usefulness-of-the-search-engine wholesale-whoring-out-their-service-to-corporate-p imps advertisements.
The differences in definitions could be due to the fact that we Americans have watched you Europeans fuck things up so many times.
The gulf between the apparent simplicity of the British definition and the harsh reality of the American one could be an indication of how flawed the idea actually is.
I mean, Sure, the means of production should be in the hands of the community. That guy who founded your company, he's not a part of the community, he's a fat, evil, cigar-chomping capitalist trying to keep you down, so there's no way you could actually start your own business, you are stuck as a tool of the system.
Oh by the way, the entire community can't actually be in charge of all the means of production, so we need to set up an authoritarian central government, which will be led by me, since I'm the smart one with all the bright ideas. You will give everything you produce to me, meaning the government, meaning you, so that it can be fairly redistributed to those who need. You will continue working on your farms and at your factories, but now instead of working to feed your family, you are working for the glory of the state! You are now happy and free! Free from the being tools of The Man!
Will our soldiers' tech-equipped vehicles, equipment and weapons give them an edge over the the Russians, who were chewed to bits in their conflict with Afghanistan guerrillas, but whose equipment was comparatively primitive?
One point: The Russians were chewed to bits by the Afghan guerrillas because the Afgans had our support, first in the form of funding and Russian-made weapons to disguise or involvement, then we flat out gave them our tech-equipped weapons (the stinger missiles, which were deadly effective in neutralizing the Russian's helicopters).
Personally, I'm going to trust our military strategists and their technology and hope that they know what they're doing, because right now there's not much else I can do otherwise except for carry on with my life as best as I can.
First, the USPS has a Government-granted monopoly on letter-delivering, and they also loose money like a dot-com. Now, in the economics you mention you're talking about monopoly pricing. Under market conditions approaching perfect competition, a company's goal does effectively become providing their services at "the lowest possible price, given their expenses." If the network owner did have a monopoly (and it wouldn't necessarily have to) in some form, I would be in favor of enacting more restrictions on their operations, to prevent them from acting "antisocially." Otherwise, it should be up to the people to choose which company is best serving their community's needs.
"
It's run as a governmental department, but it's supported entirely by the sale of its services, just as a municipal ISP might be. " Ignoring the fact that this isn't entirely true, we need to ask ourselves what could the government given these constraints that a private company could not. How could a "governmental department supported entirely by the sale of its services" operate more effectively than a private ISP?
Oh, ouch. I don't think you took the time to read the entire thread before posting because you would have seen someone point out that there's nothing that keeps local governments from falling into the same problems that the US Gov't (what you take the phrase I used, "US Gov't," to mean is a matter of semantics; I was referring to all governments in the US and not just the national government because in this case they all operate under the same ideas and they all fall victim to the same flaws) falls into every time it tries to socialize something a private company could provide. Local governments can also still receive funding from the upper levels, and be controlled in that way.
Because every yahoo with some "family values" agenda to push will be demanding filtering and God knows what else on these "public" pipes. I do not want add any more reasons for people to feel they can restrict what I do on the internet, and making my connection "public property" sounds like a prime candidate for the far Right to try to push their values on me.
Plus, the US Gov't doesn't have the greatest track record on building things on-time or on-budget, nor on keeping things in shape.
I'd rather see more Gov't incentives for private companies to build private infrastructure and Gov't regulations to insure consumers are protected.
Wouldn't it be possible to check for strange processes running? Or Win2K now has "hit ctrl-alt-del to logon", would it be possible to implement systemwide encryption in a manner similar to that?
Or if it's in hardware, do you keep your keyboard on your person 24/7? Or use only a laptop and do the same?
Slashdot Mirror
You mean campaign finance reform the way YOU want it to happen. You didn't take issue with the poster's claim that said reforms would serve mostly to preserve the demican/republicrat duopoly.
The funny thing about most people in power is that their first priority tends to be to *keep and expand that power*, and afterwards think of what is best for their constituents. That is one reason why libertarians seek to limit the power of the government. Now you could argue that a libertarian government would only serve the rich, white libertarians, effectively increasingly their power. And I would take issue with that, but that's another debate ;-)
That's a nice claim to make. Very powerful speech. But without anything to back it up, it's meaningless.
Bingo. I think that's what most libertarians (aside from the far-north extremists) would agree to (substituting "I/me" with "all US citizens", of course).
Sigh. It seems as though there's something inherently futile about debating political generalities on
However, I still think a huge, poorly-managed and completely ad-hocked piece of legacy software is a great metaphor for the US Gov't. Sometimes it's a good idea to pare back some of the more excessive features and rewrite others so that the package can do a few things well (and let other more efficient packages handle the rest) rather than attempt to do many things poorly.
RFC 2142 outlines the standard mailbox names that every organization should have. (I tried to paste the list in, but the stupid lameness filter kept complaining about "junk characters".)
Kludging more code over top of already buggy code is how bloated pieces of crap like, say, MSFT products come about. You don't fix bugs by expanding the size and scope of the program.
I think it's a great analogy for the federal government.
In fact, for the rest of your scenarios (except for the math one, the only way to do a math problem is using math, but there are many ways to do what the govt does), it seems very plausible to me that you could be so terrible at reasoning or writing that it would be better for you to just give up and let someone else handle it, so you can focus on what you really do well.
There are plenty of ideas about other ways tasks the govt does poorly could be handled, by people who are not, by the way, college freshmen. You ought to look them up, and spend your time arguing against them, rather than crap like this.
Actually, the market handled Enron perfectly. Bad companies have to be allowed to go bust under a market economy. I hope whoever broke the law and created that fiasco is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (and then some in the afterlife), but if they're not you should be criticizing the DOJ (or God), not "the market." It sucks that people had their pensions and such invested in that stock, but seriously, there's no reason why they shouldn;t have diversified. I just hope everyone else will learn from their mistakes.
The California energy markets were one seriously fucked-up situation. Read an economic analysis of it sometime, it's remarkable how stupidly the whole thing was done. Basically, they "deregulated" the industry only to provide them with a market so hampered with new regulations that prevented the market from correcting itself when things started going wrong. I could go on but I'm off-topic enough as it is.
The market would be doing a fine job of handling digital media, too, unfortunately not the way some of us might like to. Essentially, the broadcasters and cable companies would rather take the HDTV bandwidth given to them and use it to pack more normal-resolution digital channels downstream, because, frankly, not enough people care about HDTV for them to make a buck.
Thanks, man, that was really cool. I had it saved on my computer from way back when. It's nice to have things like that for personal reference (or just a laugh), but I only recently realized that it's better to be able to attribute funny/insightful quotes when I want to quote them (or be a karma whore).
I write software for digital cable television systems, so I really appreciated the humor of the whole thing.
Cheers!
(unfortunately I can't take credit for this one. It was written by a fellow slashdotter a while back, and I've lost the attribution. If the author is still out there, let me know and I'll send you a beer ;-) )
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Here's how it went:
Broadcast Industry asks for bandwidth for HDTV
FCC says "OK, we'll set aside bandwidth for HDTV"
FCC says "What standards?"
Industry says 'No Standards Please' and come up with EIGHTEEN recommended formats for HDTV. I am not shitting you.
FCC says "Isn't 18 different standards a bit much?"
Industry says "Shut the fuck up FCC, we know what we are doing. The 'market' will handle this!"
Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!"
FCC says "OK, it's your call on standards, 18 formats is fine, infact there are NO STANDARDS AT ALL, 'cause we are letting the 'market decide', but you start broadcasting HDTV now or we take back the FREE bandwidth."
Industry says "What? We really just want the free bandwidth. You really want us to do HDTV??
Congress says "Fuck you Industry. Broadcast HDTV or we'll legislate your asses back to Sun-day!"
Industry says "We're fucked. 18 formats? Why the hell did we do that? Let's change it."
Consumer Electronics dudes say "You ain't changing shit. We are already building the boxes you said you wanted built."
FCC says "Yah, ya boneheads we told you 18 was too many, now you gotta live with it."
Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies carry the HDTV at no charge?"
Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!"
FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting 'the market' handle that"
Industry says "We are so fucked. We are spending 5-10 million per TV station in hardware alone and have 1000 HDTV viewers per city, even in LA!"
Consumer at home says "Where is my HDTV? Why does it cost so much? Fuck it, I'm sticking with cable/DirecTV."
Consumer electronics dudes, broadcast industry, FCC, and congress all cry. Cable companies laugh and make even bigger profits.
Fortunately, the researchers at CERN probably were physics majors, so they knew that while, yes, when antimatter collides with matter and disappears it releases (comparatively) huge amounts of energy, they only have a few thousand atoms collected together in their trap.
If you remember anything form high-school physics, you'll know that's not many.
Or, as the researcher interviewed put it, "you would get only a tiny amount of energy by combining the antimatter with matter--not even enough to warm a small cup of coffee."
Well, obviously if you're a student operating on a typical student's budget, $1K is a lot to spend on compromising your roommate's box.
But to even the smallest corporation or local government, a thousand dollars is pocket change, particularly when you consider the value of the information that could be gained with such a device.
(and as the other poster pointed out, they're actually only $200, which does make it a viable option for getting at your roommate's pr0n (assuming you aren't clever enough to find a cheaper alternative))
Anyway, now that we're talking about the same codec (the legit one that was written from scratch), the FAQ says what's OSS and what's not. Also do a little bit of research on the difference between Open Source and Free Software.
Q: Is the OpenDivX(TM) codec the same as the DivX(TM) codec?
A: Yes and no. Yes, they are both versions of DivX compression technology. The OpenDivX codec was launched as an open-source project on Project Mayo in January 2001. Today, the project continues as a collaborative, educational development effort, focusing more on improving visual quality than optimizing performance. The latest generation of the DivX codec (version 4.x) was released in July 2001. The new DivX codec is technically completely different from OpenDivX, and is built from a different codebase. It has been optimized for greater performance and visual quality and has more features than OpenDivX. It's important to note that the two codecs produce compatible formats, meaning content encoded with OpenDivX can be played back with DivX, and vice versa. The DivX codec will from now on be the version with the most new features and widest compatibility across platforms, so this is the version we recommend you use.
Q: Is DivX(TM) video technology a hack of Microsoft code?
A: Absolutely not. A lot of people seem to think we're not making ourselves clear here, so pay attention: the DivX(TM) codec is a patent-pending (as in, patents owned by DivXNetworks) technology created from scratch (as in blank screen, blinking cursor) by DARC (the DivX Advanced Research Center) and the team at DivXNetworks. We hope this puts that issue to rest.
Glad you like it. Feel free to redistribute it so long as you credit it to my /. username, unless it's going to be in print or in a serious publication (online or dead tree), in which case email me and I'll give you my real name.
Thanks.
The Revolution Will Not Be Webcast
.jpgs of Bill Gates
.NET will change your computing experience.
(with apologies to Gil Scott-Heron)
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to jack in, log on, and zone out.
You will not be able to download pr0n and warez,
Eat ramen while waiting for a Flash movie to load,
Because the revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will not be load-balanced by Akamai
Across huge server farms to maintain the proper bandwidth.
The revolution will not bring you
Giving a Powerpoint presentation with Steve
Ballmer, Jeff Raikes, and Craig Mundie to demonstrate
How
The revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will not be served to you by
Scott McNealy's Sun Microsystems and will not
feature a backend by Larry Ellison's Oracle.
The revolution will not optimize your internet connection.
The revolution will not consolidate all your debts into one easy monthly payment
The revolution will not let you punch the monkey
To win twenty dollars, because
The revolution will not be webcast, brother.
There will be no pictures of Sam Donaldson and Vint Cerf
At the Webby Awards in San Francisco with
Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences members Matt Groening and Beck.
Plastic, Peter Pan, PBS and Plus Magazine
Are not going to win crap.
The revolution will not be webcast.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
WTO Protesters on indymedia.com
There will be no pictures of ICANN board members
Receiving bribes from Network Solutions, Inc.
There will be no Real Video or JPEG stills of John
C. Dvorak muttering conspiracy theories and no articles by
Jon Katz with the bleeding heart that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.
Wired News, Salon.com, and Slashdot.org
will no longer be so damned relevant, and
No one will care what Wil Wheaton has to
Say on his weblog because the geeks
will be in the streets looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be webcast.
There will be no pages of webcams refreshing every
30 seconds with no pictures of half-naked women
Prancing and pimply-faced males scratching themselves.
The theme song will not be posted to MP3.com and
Will not be shared using Napster, Audiogalaxy, Gnutella,
iMesh, BearShare or Kazaa.
The revolution will not be webcast.
The revolution will never return a 404 Not Found,
403 Forbidden, or 500 Internal Server Error.
You will never have to worry about the virus in your
Email, the cracker at your firewall, or the bug in your OS.
The revolution will not waste 2 million dollars on a Superbowl Ad.
The revolution will not find you job opportunities.
The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat.
The revolution will not be webcast, WILL not be webcast,
WILL NOT BE WEBCAST.
The revolution will not be in cyberspace, brothers;
The revolution will be live.
Perl has their camels, Awk got a picture of an awk....
Couldn't they find an 18th-century woodcut of a taco?
Not that blurring the line between news and advertising is a good thing, but I do sympathize with Yahoo's position. Money must be tight over there, and every ad they link to as "news" means less time paying writers to rewrite coporate advertising into "pseudo-news"!
I'm pretty sure my pastor said in church last week that when the Final Judgement comes Bill Gates will be going to Hell. Something about avarice, gluttony, sloth, etc. Let's hear it for the DoJ recognising who's really in charge here.
Around the same time I heard about a new search engine with a more comprehensive search, caching, and a light interface. I was hooked.
I do miss boolean searching, but Google's targeted-text ads are way better than Altavista's destroy-the-entire-usefulness-of-the-search-engine wholesale-whoring-out-their-service-to-corporate-p imps advertisements.
The gulf between the apparent simplicity of the British definition and the harsh reality of the American one could be an indication of how flawed the idea actually is.
I mean, Sure, the means of production should be in the hands of the community. That guy who founded your company, he's not a part of the community, he's a fat, evil, cigar-chomping capitalist trying to keep you down, so there's no way you could actually start your own business, you are stuck as a tool of the system.
Oh by the way, the entire community can't actually be in charge of all the means of production, so we need to set up an authoritarian central government, which will be led by me, since I'm the smart one with all the bright ideas. You will give everything you produce to me, meaning the government, meaning you, so that it can be fairly redistributed to those who need. You will continue working on your farms and at your factories, but now instead of working to feed your family, you are working for the glory of the state! You are now happy and free! Free from the being tools of The Man!
Hooray!
One point: The Russians were chewed to bits by the Afghan guerrillas because the Afgans had our support, first in the form of funding and Russian-made weapons to disguise or involvement, then we flat out gave them our tech-equipped weapons (the stinger missiles, which were deadly effective in neutralizing the Russian's helicopters).
Personally, I'm going to trust our military strategists and their technology and hope that they know what they're doing, because right now there's not much else I can do otherwise except for carry on with my life as best as I can.
First, the USPS has a Government-granted monopoly on letter-delivering, and they also loose money like a dot-com. Now, in the economics you mention you're talking about monopoly pricing. Under market conditions approaching perfect competition, a company's goal does effectively become providing their services at "the lowest possible price, given their expenses." If the network owner did have a monopoly (and it wouldn't necessarily have to) in some form, I would be in favor of enacting more restrictions on their operations, to prevent them from acting "antisocially." Otherwise, it should be up to the people to choose which company is best serving their community's needs.
I'm sure if this was possible, they would try.
"
It's run as a governmental department, but it's supported entirely by the sale of its services, just as a municipal ISP might be. "
Ignoring the fact that this isn't entirely true, we need to ask ourselves what could the government given these constraints that a private company could not. How could a "governmental department supported entirely by the sale of its services" operate more effectively than a private ISP?
Oh, ouch. I don't think you took the time to read the entire thread before posting because you would have seen someone point out that there's nothing that keeps local governments from falling into the same problems that the US Gov't (what you take the phrase I used, "US Gov't," to mean is a matter of semantics; I was referring to all governments in the US and not just the national government because in this case they all operate under the same ideas and they all fall victim to the same flaws) falls into every time it tries to socialize something a private company could provide. Local governments can also still receive funding from the upper levels, and be controlled in that way.
Plus, the US Gov't doesn't have the greatest track record on building things on-time or on-budget, nor on keeping things in shape.
I'd rather see more Gov't incentives for private companies to build private infrastructure and Gov't regulations to insure consumers are protected.
Wouldn't it be possible to check for strange processes running? Or Win2K now has "hit ctrl-alt-del to logon", would it be possible to implement systemwide encryption in a manner similar to that?
Or if it's in hardware, do you keep your keyboard on your person 24/7? Or use only a laptop and do the same?