Honestly, universal health care scares me a bit. I had cancer last year, and I'm on an email list of people with the same cancer. The people on the list from Canada have huge waits just to see doctors.
Yes, that's because they didn't have money. In the US, if you don't have money, you don't wait months -- you just die.
This is why audio CDR media costs more than data CDR media -- but you can burn audio to data CDR media, and in fact audio CDR media is hard to find. So, in effect, while there is such a tax nobody pays it.
The BSA.... aren't they the ones that terrorize small businesses and threaten to audit their software licenses? (And without a glimmer of a search warrant, either.)
That's what happens when sign a draconian proprietary software license. If you don't want to be audited for your software licenses use free software. Otherwise, no sympathy from me.
How can this come as a surprise to anybody even remotely attuned to American politics? How does this differ from how they've been running everything else?
While this is not unique in its anti-democratic character, it is certainly a new tactic, and one that could be very potent.
A successful GOP strategy of discouraging corporate funding for the Democrats would be sufficient to keep them out of the White House perpetually.
This is also novel because it quite clearly proves that the ACLU right about the abuse potential of the new campaign finance reforms. (I never really believed them myself until now).
The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
1. Our canned response to a a frequently asked question produced hostility in some customers.
2. Therefore, the customers are idiots.
3. ????
4. Profit!
What does a tech support phone operator care whether his company makes money? Fuck the customer. The best you can do for yourself is get some entertainment value out of the whole affair.
Anyone is free to do whatever they want on their own dime. Another group is trying to pass a law that says the state of Texas won't pay for it. If you think the state of Texas should pay for it, and you live in Texas, then I suggest you lobby your legislators.
I doubt implementing the filtering would save any money, actually. It would probably cost money. Money that comes partially out of the pockets of people who -- horror of horrors -- download pornography.
Thinking about government this way (as if it were some sort of contractual resource-sharing arrangement among citizens) is just absurd. Whoever is in power takes everybody's money and does what they want with it. On any issue, x% of the people are trying to spend the money of the other (100-x)%, and vice-versa, but this is very rarely a useful way to look at the situation.
The iPod locks consumers into iTunes for online music purchases.
I'd love to see you try to support that argument.
I'm not aware of any other online music store offering iPod-compatible files (except allofmp3). However, it's not a matter of argument, but just fact. Is there another?
I have an iPod and I haven't purchased one thing from Apple's music store. Not only does the reality suggest that I truly am not 'locked in' as you suggest, but I don't even feel like buying from iTunes is my only option.
I only said locked in for online music purchases.
I don't expect congress to force Apple to implement playback of every possible format and pay any licensing fees that my be required in the name of "compatibility."
This is completely different from the solution proposed, which is to allow other companies to release music in direct competition with iTunes. What is so bad about competition? Why should Apple be allowed to avoid it by technical means?
It is no different than printers using technical means to lock out competing ink cartridges. Why should we allow this? It is not in our interests.
I agree in theory, but I would love to see how you think that Apple has been able to decrease the quality of a competitor's product in this case, I just don't see that.
There's a name for Apple's practice here: vendor lock-in. The iPod locks consumers into iTunes for online music purchases. The iPod's competitors' are crippled by incompatibility with iTunes -- a situation deliberately created by Apple. Certainly, Apple does not have a monopoly in the strictest sense -- but that sense is rather ill-defined in any case. Monopoly is always a matter of degree, and as the saying goes, every company has a monopoly on its own product. Apple certainly does have a local monopoly, and the difference between that and monopoly proper is merely conventional.
In fact, in my example, how would Sony or MS be affecting the quality of the other company's product?
See Microsoft's Halloween documents for a general outline of their anti-competitive strategy. To cite the most famous example, creating incompatibilities in their own web browser served to alter the format of the entire web -- all with the purpose of making Netscape less functional. (The Halloween documents make clear that this was intentional strategy).
I won't address Sony, although I'm sure they've done their fair share of vendor lock-in.
The inability for other online stores to offer DRM-free downloads should not necessitate Apple changing its product do allow someone else to work with it. It would be better, sure, but it's not against the law in any way.
No, it's not -- but the whole debate here is whether it should be. I see no reason why not, unless Congress wishes merely to serve the economic interests of Apple. If that is the case, they should still mandate compatibility, and simply pay Apple directly out of the national treasury.
If the only difference between the PS2 and XBox format was a single bit on the DVD, do you think Either company should be forced by congress to change their bit so it can plan on someone else's machine?
Of course! Why on earth not? This would undoubtedly help many people, and its effect on the market would be only to limit monopoly; i.e., to increase competitiveness.
I use the word "market" liberally since, of course, monopolies are not markets, but the precise opposite. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to refrain, ever, from preventing anti-competitive business practices, so long as it can be done effectively. In case it is unclear what this means: Congress has every reason, whenever feasible, to limit corporations from competing through making their competitors' products worse. Why should we allow Microsoft to profit from intentionally breaking Netscape's software? What market purpose does this serve except to lower the quality of web browsing for society?
Once more: a market serves society only when companies increase the quality of their own products; this is competitive. A market only harms society when companies decrease the quality of their competitors' products; this is anti-competitive.
This is true only regarding the benefit of reduced traffic -- which I had not even considered. If the system were sufficiently popular it would be possible for society to maintain fewer cars and use less fuel: a far more significant benefit, and the one which motivated the idea.
I'd like a search engine for car pooling. The only reason 90% of the cars on the road have no passengers is the inability to organize a more efficient scheme; this would require only centralized planning. A computer service would be ideal for the task, so long as it had sufficient start-up popularity. Google does. Get on it, Google; save us some gas money.
If 80% of eligible Americans voted, and they did plenty of research ahead of time to see who would best serve their interests, corporate lobbyists would lose all their power
Of course, it would be much easier, and much more likely, if only.0001% of eligible Americans voted, and they did plenty of research. The problem is that voting is irrational -- it is not in any individual's interests to vote at all, and therefore it is not in any individual's interests to vote correctly. Most research in the area of voting behavior has focused on the act of voting itself, when in fact the far more important act is the selection of a candidate for whom to vote. There is something of a mystery in the former case (why do people vote when it does not benefit them?), but there is no mystery in the latter: everything is in order. People have no self-interested reason to make educated voting decisions, and they do not do so. Yet that is surely the more important problem.
I partly agree, but speaking as a former creationist myself, the thing that made it easy for me to persist in my beliefs was that most people responded to them either with condescending tolerance or with personal attacks and insults -- there was no middle ground.
I think this is part of the same phenomenon, rather than an opposite -- people are so unaccustomed to reasoned debate that any argument descends quickly into a fight. This is both a cause and effect of the lack of dialogue.
I should add, it takes a great deal of magnanimity and open-mindedness to admit ones errors after committing to a position. This ability is surely the foundation of dialogue and science.
because most people would immediately assume I was an idiot for even considering creationism
This social fiction is another element of the same problem -- that is, the social fiction that error is typically due to reasoning disability or ignorance, when in fact it is far more typically due to bias. No one wishes to admit this because it would expose us all as susceptible to error.
Hacking Google Print article on kuro5hin.org, explains how Google Print uses cookies to track your access and ensure you don't look at too many pages. Solution: acquire lots of cookies. Firefox GreaseMonkey scripts -- scroll to "Google Butler"; it will make saving Google Print pages work without extra effort in Firefox.
Also please note that nobody cared to dissect the Bible and discern exactly what age it suggested the world to be until we actually had some scientific indication of what age it is. Which is to say, the people originally reading the text were not reading it to determine the age of the universe, &c -- they were reading it for some other (better!) reason, which seems to be lost completely on Biblical literalists.
(I'm reminded of the nerds pointing out continuity errors in "Xena: Warrior Princess" on episode BABF01 of The Simpsons).
I don't mean there's nothing significant in the story (quite to the contrary), but the story is not about the physical history of the universe at all. To revisit the Vishnu example, each arm represents a sacred principle -- but that is just as a rhetorical device to explain the principles. Supposing Vishnu had tentacles instead of arms, the story wouldn't change in meaning at all, the religion would be identical.
If you took the days out of Genesis, and instead you had God saying directly to take every seventh day and dedicate it to appreciating the wonderous things He created just for you, humans on Earth, then you would still have the whole point of Genesis right there -- it just wouldn't sound as good, it wouldn't fit together as well. But the religion would be identical.
Nope. She's an idiot. Being true to the truth requires you to dismiss people now and then. Whereas you have observable phenomenon that have demonstrated evolution occurs, which apparently isn't good enough proof. She has a 2000 year old book with no proof, that is proof enough. Thats bullshit, and stop trying to convince yourself its not for the sake of multi-culturalism.
Moreover, this sort of condescending tolerance creates a social atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty, a taboo around the sort of dialogue that science uses to resolve disputes over facts. This taboo is a major source of popular ignorance, because where there is no rational dialogue between disagreeing individuals, memes travel in only one direction: top-down, from TV to viewer, from propagandist to information-consumer. In such an environment, truth can never succeed over well-funded PR.
FWIW, my local parish priest was the Dean of Chemistry at a local State University. I mention this because I would like readers to be aware that the pro-science side has its own lunatic fringe that likes to pretend that hard science and religion are incompatible.
They are compatible only insofar as religion is submissive to science; i.e., only insofar as religion asserts nothing within the sphere of scientific knowledge. Since this sphere is constantly increasing in scope, the scope of religion (if it is to maintain compatible with science) is continually decreasing; thus, the religion which today seems compatible may not be tomorrow.
Only a religion which asserted nothing about the natural world whatever would be fundamentally compatible with science, and this sort of religion does indeed seem to be emerging today. But that is no traditional religion, and not what people are talking about when they say religion is incompatible with science. It does not take any sort of lunacy to make that conclusion.
How can it be an oil grab if the oil is not in our hands, and if the money is going to an elected Iraqi governmant rather than Saddam, the UN, the French, and various others?
The oil is going to us. Of course, it would be overly-simplistic to say the war is about oil, but then it is certainly not about what the PR for the war says it is about -- so the "no blood for oil" people are at least on the right track. Whatever its form, the war is certainly about power.
I find myself in the very uncomfortable position, on the Iraqi war, of despising the modern means of publicizing a war and thus agreeing with the protestors, and yet also realizing that American power over the world is currently very fragile, and yet is the world's best or only hope for (long-term) peace. So I don't know what to think, really. I'm not ultimately sure what is more important: that unjustified war be politically impossible, or that justified war be politically possible.
Science doesn't always have the answer. It might not be clear why we're against abortion.
On the contrary, it would make a fascinating scientific study. I mean how can someone stop a woman from aborting a fetus with a genetic defect and then let the child die drowning in her own saliva because they also banned stem cell research? Such a profound personality disorder got to show on MRI.
In fact, the reasons are quite well understood, but the fields of study are sociology and (on the applied side) PR -- not neurology.
Slashdot Mirror
Healthcare is available already, in every country, to anyone who can pay for it. In the US, it's not even cheap: http://google.com/search?q=medical+tourism.
This is why audio CDR media costs more than data CDR media -- but you can burn audio to data CDR media, and in fact audio CDR media is hard to find. So, in effect, while there is such a tax nobody pays it.
gcc wouldn't have been created if it weren't for copyright law? I think its creator, rms, would beg to differ.
A successful GOP strategy of discouraging corporate funding for the Democrats would be sufficient to keep them out of the White House perpetually.
This is also novel because it quite clearly proves that the ACLU right about the abuse potential of the new campaign finance reforms. (I never really believed them myself until now).
The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.
Thinking about government this way (as if it were some sort of contractual resource-sharing arrangement among citizens) is just absurd. Whoever is in power takes everybody's money and does what they want with it. On any issue, x% of the people are trying to spend the money of the other (100-x)%, and vice-versa, but this is very rarely a useful way to look at the situation.
This is not an allocational issue.
It is no different than printers using technical means to lock out competing ink cartridges. Why should we allow this? It is not in our interests.
I won't address Sony, although I'm sure they've done their fair share of vendor lock-in.
No, it's not -- but the whole debate here is whether it should be. I see no reason why not, unless Congress wishes merely to serve the economic interests of Apple. If that is the case, they should still mandate compatibility, and simply pay Apple directly out of the national treasury.I use the word "market" liberally since, of course, monopolies are not markets, but the precise opposite. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to refrain, ever, from preventing anti-competitive business practices, so long as it can be done effectively. In case it is unclear what this means: Congress has every reason, whenever feasible, to limit corporations from competing through making their competitors' products worse. Why should we allow Microsoft to profit from intentionally breaking Netscape's software? What market purpose does this serve except to lower the quality of web browsing for society?
Once more: a market serves society only when companies increase the quality of their own products; this is competitive. A market only harms society when companies decrease the quality of their competitors' products; this is anti-competitive.
This is true only regarding the benefit of reduced traffic -- which I had not even considered. If the system were sufficiently popular it would be possible for society to maintain fewer cars and use less fuel: a far more significant benefit, and the one which motivated the idea.
I'd like a search engine for car pooling. The only reason 90% of the cars on the road have no passengers is the inability to organize a more efficient scheme; this would require only centralized planning. A computer service would be ideal for the task, so long as it had sufficient start-up popularity. Google does. Get on it, Google; save us some gas money.
Mental apartheid -- what a perfect phrasing! I will be sure to steal it.
I should add, it takes a great deal of magnanimity and open-mindedness to admit ones errors after committing to a position. This ability is surely the foundation of dialogue and science.
This social fiction is another element of the same problem -- that is, the social fiction that error is typically due to reasoning disability or ignorance, when in fact it is far more typically due to bias. No one wishes to admit this because it would expose us all as susceptible to error.Hacking Google Print article on kuro5hin.org, explains how Google Print uses cookies to track your access and ensure you don't look at too many pages. Solution: acquire lots of cookies.
Firefox GreaseMonkey scripts -- scroll to "Google Butler"; it will make saving Google Print pages work without extra effort in Firefox.
(I'm reminded of the nerds pointing out continuity errors in "Xena: Warrior Princess" on episode BABF01 of The Simpsons).
If you took the days out of Genesis, and instead you had God saying directly to take every seventh day and dedicate it to appreciating the wonderous things He created just for you, humans on Earth, then you would still have the whole point of Genesis right there -- it just wouldn't sound as good, it wouldn't fit together as well. But the religion would be identical.
Only a religion which asserted nothing about the natural world whatever would be fundamentally compatible with science, and this sort of religion does indeed seem to be emerging today. But that is no traditional religion, and not what people are talking about when they say religion is incompatible with science. It does not take any sort of lunacy to make that conclusion.
I find myself in the very uncomfortable position, on the Iraqi war, of despising the modern means of publicizing a war and thus agreeing with the protestors, and yet also realizing that American power over the world is currently very fragile, and yet is the world's best or only hope for (long-term) peace. So I don't know what to think, really. I'm not ultimately sure what is more important: that unjustified war be politically impossible, or that justified war be politically possible.