I've worked with this software in the past. You can't hide from it, period. I even saw one that considered TOR browser as a data point to help identify you. Even staying off the net wont help. They have deals with your grocery store, walmart, your car dealership, everything... They get all your data all the time. Our only saving grace right now is its so much detailed information they don't even know what to do with it all. They can send you adds that might better appeal to you, but other than that they're not really sure what else to do. I suspect that at some point, someone will figure out how to do horrible things with this kind of information, and then this will suck.
Ok, I don't know if USB3 has enough wattage to do that. I've no idea what kind of plastic they're using, and that's going to be the most important factor here. As far as we know the things they created will melt if left in the window on a warm day. If that were the case, I'm fairly sure USB3 would have enough wattage.
When I was much younger I worked for a time running injection molding machines. As with most things in a factory the machines were getting old and had issues. One of them was that they'd leak after they were put into standby. 2 very heavy steel molds would come together and a nozzle would come forward and put 30 tons of pressure behind hot plastic. When it was break time I'd put the machine in standby which would keep the plastic and nozzle hot but relieve the pressure. Well, not all the pressure was gone so the nozzle would leak rather slowly. I quickly learned that if I took a piece of cardboard I could manipulate the flow of plastic out of the nozzle and make neat shapes. They looked almost exactly what they made in those videos. I find that a bit too much of a coincidences, so I'd have to say there's at least some credibility to what they're doing.
That being said, notice you can never see their other hand? I believe they are having to manually feed the plastic. Also, I don't think they are building vertically as it appears. The plastic probably wouldn't cool fast enough to allow that. I believe they are laying the plastic out on the paper, letting it could, then moving its position and tacking it there with a spot of new plastic. This was what I'd do. I made screwy flow pots, vases, coasters, etc... Finally, I want to point on that the ability to make stuff pretty much ends with what you see in the video. There wasn't much else you could do with it. Making anything that was robust enough for actual use would be nearly impossible.
Eric Schmidt isn't upheld as some sort of paragon of virtue. Also, Jobs and Apple came up with the scheme and threatened patent lawsuits against companies that refused to co-operate. Jobs was the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. Lastly, as far as I know, Eric Schmidt isn't going out of his way to steal parking spaces from the handicapped.
So we're defending Steve Jobs with "Well, everyone does it, of course he does to" now? Steve Jobs was a terrible person. He setup a deal with a local car dealership to switch cars on a regular basis for the sole purpose of never having to get a license plate so he could park in handicap spaces without getting a ticket. He could have had his own parking spot damned near anywhere he went, but no, he was such a huge asshole he couldn't just have the spot, he had to take it from someone else that needed it. Jobs fanboys always like to sweep that fact under the rug... now we also have to sweep the plethora of federal laws he broke just to win... and again, it always had to be at someone else's expense. The guy was a grade A jerk, and hope time will eventually reflect that once everyone finally gets their rose colored glasses off.
Ok, mod me down Apple fanatics. It's worth the karma.
Cable boxes already have terrible games on them that you can play. All this seems like to me is a licensing deal. EA is willing to slap their label on some of the shit games. I suspect we'll have some version of Tetris with football shaped blocks and a big picture of John Madden of to the side.
Of course they're being dishonest. It's called advertising. You can dislike it all you want, but its the profession that got that first guy to buy the oldest profession in the first place.
Telecom is NOT cable. Cable companies are almost completely un-regulated. They get to pick and choose who to serve. Telephone companies cannot. The Cable companies have their own problems, but I've not worked for them so I can't speak with authority on that. I do know that Coax is a lot more problematic than copper, so I Suspect their maintenance costs are rather high.
ok, but if you want guaranteed speeds its going to cost the same as a business line. So $500+ a month. and I'm not kidding, that's what it would cost and the ISP would probably be losing money. They keep those rates as low as possible because the real profit is in services like Managed phones, VOIP, cloud storage, etc... I'm the head DBA for a major telecom's sales force so I know the numbers. Data lines are always sold at a loss. This idea people seem to have that they should be able to get 10mb\s+ of guaranteed bandwidth for under $50/month is laughable to anyone that works in the industry. That rate wouldn't even pay for the card you're plugged into back at the CO for YEARS. That's not even including all the intermediary equipment, cables, fiber optics, repairs, installs, manpower. It's a joke.
Now if the ISP can get you to pay them $100 per month to "manage" you phone system... which basically means you're using some software package they threw together and basically costs them nothing... now it starts to become profitable. Cloud storage, backup software, antivirus. All that stuff is basically free, or close to it for the ISP, so they can start making money off the customer. But if you're sitting there on a Resi line with no other services, and many customers aren't even in contracts anymore... they're losing money on you big time. If you're using netflix heavily? You're a huge problem for them, and likely generating support tickets with their other customers that are having latency issues and therefor costing them even more money. You don't have to feel sorry for us in the telecom industry, but we're certainly not raking in huge profits at your expense as many seem to think. My industry is dying.
...Yahoo! only paid for half of their bandwidth requirements. They had their own national network that they would deliver content directly to ISP's. It was a win-win because the traffic would stay off the transit links of both Yahoo! and the ISP's.
Exactly right. This is what most major content providers do. Google, Microsoft, etc... etc... There are actually major companies that help facilitate this sort of thing. This was the central problem with Netflix. The refused to do any of this. The told the ISPs to go to hell, they'd do what they wanted rather than get themselves locked into an agreement that my prevent them from saving money on a better peering deal down the road. Netflix forced the Net Neutrality issue on the ISPs and the ISPs unfortunately won.
They must provide me uncongested access to all of their interconnects.
No they don't. It all depends on your contract. If you have residential internet service they are under no obligation to provide you any service at all. Granted you could dump their service if it were bad enough. If you want guaranteed uncongested access to all their interconnects you'd need that stated in your contract. Those are generally considered "Business lines" and are your classic T1s, T3s, etc... and even those can have issues. But you have your contract to back you up should you have a problem.
"Sure there is. Granted, there's about a zillion forms of Libertarianism, just like everything else. " Nice dodge, and you expect us to swallow this? It is akin to talking to a communist who claims communism has never really been tried...maybe because whenever it has it led to totalitarianism.
I don't think you read that at all. He said there was no definition for Libertarianism. I disagreed. You can go look it up in the dictionary or on Wikipedia. There are lots of different forms of Libertarianism as there are lots of different forms of Communism. No country is 100% of any party. The United States was about as Libertarian as has ever been tried when it was founded... but there were clearly some major issues with regard to slavery, social issues, etc... at the time. For example, I really don't think you could claim to be libertarian and also want to ban gay marriage at the same time. Ok, there are idiots in every party so I'm sure we could find someone. But the whole point to the party is that old Wiccen Rede "Do what you will, so long as it harms none"
Earnest question: if the primary restrictions on an individual's freedom are a direct result of economic circumstances (read: being poor), are laws that promote an equitable distribution of wealth compatible with Neo-Classical Libertarianism?
For example, killing and redistributing the wealth of the ten richest Americans would yield roughly $1000 per American. This would be a dramatic decrease in freedom for ten individuals (perhaps an understatement), but a modest increase in freedom for hundreds of millions of other individuals. How would such a policy be seen in the context of your preferred flavor of Libertarianism?
Good question. And yes, you're pointing out the most debated facet of Libertarianism. When do the rights of the public as a whole outweigh the rights of the individual? To a Libertarian this would be a very rare circumstance. They'd argue that the individuals liberties almost always outweigh the public interest. Especially in your example. In some circumstances infringing the rights of the individual can't be avoided... public waterways for example.
But you're framing the argument in a world that is in a very anti-liberty state. Our country is in this quasi-socialist / quasi-capitalist system. There are aspects of both individual liberty and social justice all working together in a not-so-good way. There are laws that are intended to manipulate the economy with the intended spirit being "Social Justice" but our Constitution was not designed for social justice. So those that have money use the Constitution to then manipulate those laws into something entirely different. Tax breaks intended to create jobs, instead simply increase profits. Laws intended to save small farms and improve the environment are corrupted to instead be big subsidies to giant corporate farms. From the libertarian point of view we shouldn't have such laws, and if we didn't income inequality wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is now. Those that work hard and earn lots of money should be able to use that money to do what they want. But unjust laws that lead to people becoming insanely rich also give them an unequal and more importantly unearned advantage.
Despite that, we are in the world we're in. We're not in a Libertarians ideal state. So if Libertarianism did gain more traction how could we implement their ideas in a way that wouldn't exacerbate and already unequal system? Leaving all the Rich guys rich and then letting them do whatever they wanted to with their money would mean they'd quickly subvert the Libertarian party by buying most of congress (probably already happening) So it's an important debate to have. I don't feel I have the answer to that unfortunately. But with the system we have already, our socialist policies are driving us the way of Russia and the Oligarchs gain more and more power every day.
Libertarians inevitably support the 'freedom' to pollute and exploit my environment without consequences. Because government regulation is bad. If someone threatens my air/water supply, I should be at liberty to kill them.
Then argue your point. You have a good one. What you're talking about is something that, at least I feel, is a big controversy amongst Libertarians right now. The great thing about libertarianism is that because of its very nature there is no "party line" that you have to abide by. Everyone's expected to shout their ideas until their horse. That's the whole idea!
Is this even a question? If the IE bug isn't important to you, and you don't want people switching browsers, then why the hell would you communicate the bug to anyone? You should only be sending out notifications if your users need to take action or you're trying to communicate an outage. If you're email consists of "There's this problem you don't need to do anything about..." then you're wasting their time and they will quickly learn to ignore your notifications.
Users do not care about security issues or bugs. They want you to tell them if they need to do something. Otherwise leave them alone. If you have a few users that are worry warts and want to know about that thing they heard on the radio this morning, start a wiki page and just post it there. They can come and look at it if they have questions. But I'd avoid that. Documenting the reasons for your lack of action on a security issue is not a good idea. You may very well have good reasons, but uneducated poorly informed managers can make your life miserable if the bug ends up costing the company money.
That's while the nylon was surrounded by a world rife with food for the bacteria and countless varieties of pathogens. Evolution works on chance and brute force. The chance that any given mutation can happen is exceedingly low, but given the countless numbers of bacteria a nylon eating bacteria becomes an almost inevitability. What are the chances that a bacteria that can live on humans will survive long enough on an alien world to find a material is can metabolize? I think it really depends on just how similar that world is to ours. I have a feeling we're going to find out there's lots of life out there, but it's absolutely nothing like what we thought it would be.
That said, this is still a worry. Even if the chances are low, the outcome could be genocide... of either them or us.
Good! I'm generally a Google fan, but the default Google search on my phone that I can't remove is annoying to say the least. The voice search garbage that nobody uses makes it even worse. I don't think I'd mind if I could just remove it... but the fact that its locked onto my screen top center and I have no way to ever remove it makes it seem an awful lot like IE was in XP.
Sure there is. Granted, there's about a zillion forms of Libertarianism, just like everything else. But I'm talking about the currently popular version of it (the form I support), Noe-Classical Libertarianism that bases its economic policy on laissez-faire capitalism. The idea being that individual liberty is more important than most things. Government restrictions of business restrict the liberties of the owners of those businesses. That's why regulation is frowned upon. But whats frequently forgotten is that Libertarian ideals have a fundamental mistrust of both government AND business. Corporations tend to construct deals that mislead individuals and there-by restrict their liberties. Hence the desire for laws that increase transparency. Libertarians support laws that let individuals make informed decisions. They do not support laws that make it illegal for an individual to make a mistake and sign a terrible contract. They just want to ensure that the persons fully aware of what they are signing when they do so.
Remember, one of the largest groups at those "Occupy" rallies were Libertarians. I know it's hard to fit Libertarians into your black and white democrat/republican world view, but the fact is most libertarians are more socially liberal than most democrats... an more fiscally conservative than most republicans. I've been a libertarian since the early 90s and I have to say it's been an honor being hated by both political parties all this time.
I can almost smell his clutch burning as he mentally shifts back and forth between "currency must be free of government intervention" and "currency must be backed by gold or silver"...
Another person that doesn't understand Libertarian ideals. What a surprise. Libertarians do not believe markets should be totally unregulated. What they do believe is that government regulation should have one goal, which is to increase transparency. Laws that require Credit Card companies to display their terms in clear, easy to understand ways for consumers are good laws in Libertarian eyes. Laws against insider trading, secret deals, etc... are all compatible. Where they draw the line is when the laws dictate prices or interest rates etc. Also, I don't think he thinks we should legally require that any currency be backed by Gold and Silver, he just thinks its a good idea. Whatever the standard US currency is should be backed by tangible assets but legally requiring such a system for a currency unregulated by the government like Bitcoin would not be Libertarian. That said, no one, not even Ron or Rand Paul, is 100% Libertarian. We all have our own ideas that are a mix of different political ideologies and there's nothing wrong with that.
I just want to jump in here and make sure everyone knows Larry Niven is a terrible author. If you like furry sex, then by all means read the ringworld series. But if you're not into scifi vampires creating furry orgies between giants and tiger people using their pheromones you'll likely just feel uncomfortable while reading them and wonder what asshole gave this guy a pen.
None, and that is his point. The majority can outspend them. Sam Walton got rich from lots of small contributions from the middle class.
Their power is more than just their wealth. Why do you think they can go bankrupt multiple times and still end up driving another business into the ground a few years later? Being lower, middle or upper class has nothing to do with money. Congress is made up of people that already belong to the class or people who desperately want to be.
This is why there is no CCR, and why Fogerty gave up music entirely out of disgust after this lawsuit. We missed decades of great music from a genius that we'll never get back. Remember this the next time a record company tells you that piracy is theft.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked with this software in the past. You can't hide from it, period. I even saw one that considered TOR browser as a data point to help identify you. Even staying off the net wont help. They have deals with your grocery store, walmart, your car dealership, everything... They get all your data all the time. Our only saving grace right now is its so much detailed information they don't even know what to do with it all. They can send you adds that might better appeal to you, but other than that they're not really sure what else to do. I suspect that at some point, someone will figure out how to do horrible things with this kind of information, and then this will suck.
Ok, I don't know if USB3 has enough wattage to do that. I've no idea what kind of plastic they're using, and that's going to be the most important factor here. As far as we know the things they created will melt if left in the window on a warm day. If that were the case, I'm fairly sure USB3 would have enough wattage.
When I was much younger I worked for a time running injection molding machines. As with most things in a factory the machines were getting old and had issues. One of them was that they'd leak after they were put into standby. 2 very heavy steel molds would come together and a nozzle would come forward and put 30 tons of pressure behind hot plastic. When it was break time I'd put the machine in standby which would keep the plastic and nozzle hot but relieve the pressure. Well, not all the pressure was gone so the nozzle would leak rather slowly. I quickly learned that if I took a piece of cardboard I could manipulate the flow of plastic out of the nozzle and make neat shapes. They looked almost exactly what they made in those videos. I find that a bit too much of a coincidences, so I'd have to say there's at least some credibility to what they're doing.
That being said, notice you can never see their other hand? I believe they are having to manually feed the plastic. Also, I don't think they are building vertically as it appears. The plastic probably wouldn't cool fast enough to allow that. I believe they are laying the plastic out on the paper, letting it could, then moving its position and tacking it there with a spot of new plastic. This was what I'd do. I made screwy flow pots, vases, coasters, etc... Finally, I want to point on that the ability to make stuff pretty much ends with what you see in the video. There wasn't much else you could do with it. Making anything that was robust enough for actual use would be nearly impossible.
I'm also a fan of soft pretzels. Amazingly I can still eat corndogs while at the fair.
Boom! Just blew your mind.
Eric Schmidt isn't upheld as some sort of paragon of virtue. Also, Jobs and Apple came up with the scheme and threatened patent lawsuits against companies that refused to co-operate. Jobs was the evil mastermind behind the whole thing. Lastly, as far as I know, Eric Schmidt isn't going out of his way to steal parking spaces from the handicapped.
So we're defending Steve Jobs with "Well, everyone does it, of course he does to" now? Steve Jobs was a terrible person. He setup a deal with a local car dealership to switch cars on a regular basis for the sole purpose of never having to get a license plate so he could park in handicap spaces without getting a ticket. He could have had his own parking spot damned near anywhere he went, but no, he was such a huge asshole he couldn't just have the spot, he had to take it from someone else that needed it. Jobs fanboys always like to sweep that fact under the rug... now we also have to sweep the plethora of federal laws he broke just to win... and again, it always had to be at someone else's expense. The guy was a grade A jerk, and hope time will eventually reflect that once everyone finally gets their rose colored glasses off.
Ok, mod me down Apple fanatics. It's worth the karma.
Cable boxes already have terrible games on them that you can play. All this seems like to me is a licensing deal. EA is willing to slap their label on some of the shit games. I suspect we'll have some version of Tetris with football shaped blocks and a big picture of John Madden of to the side.
Of course they're being dishonest. It's called advertising. You can dislike it all you want, but its the profession that got that first guy to buy the oldest profession in the first place.
Telecom is NOT cable. Cable companies are almost completely un-regulated. They get to pick and choose who to serve. Telephone companies cannot. The Cable companies have their own problems, but I've not worked for them so I can't speak with authority on that. I do know that Coax is a lot more problematic than copper, so I Suspect their maintenance costs are rather high.
ok, but if you want guaranteed speeds its going to cost the same as a business line. So $500+ a month. and I'm not kidding, that's what it would cost and the ISP would probably be losing money. They keep those rates as low as possible because the real profit is in services like Managed phones, VOIP, cloud storage, etc... I'm the head DBA for a major telecom's sales force so I know the numbers. Data lines are always sold at a loss. This idea people seem to have that they should be able to get 10mb\s+ of guaranteed bandwidth for under $50/month is laughable to anyone that works in the industry. That rate wouldn't even pay for the card you're plugged into back at the CO for YEARS. That's not even including all the intermediary equipment, cables, fiber optics, repairs, installs, manpower. It's a joke.
Now if the ISP can get you to pay them $100 per month to "manage" you phone system... which basically means you're using some software package they threw together and basically costs them nothing... now it starts to become profitable. Cloud storage, backup software, antivirus. All that stuff is basically free, or close to it for the ISP, so they can start making money off the customer. But if you're sitting there on a Resi line with no other services, and many customers aren't even in contracts anymore... they're losing money on you big time. If you're using netflix heavily? You're a huge problem for them, and likely generating support tickets with their other customers that are having latency issues and therefor costing them even more money. You don't have to feel sorry for us in the telecom industry, but we're certainly not raking in huge profits at your expense as many seem to think. My industry is dying.
...Yahoo! only paid for half of their bandwidth requirements. They had their own national network that they would deliver content directly to ISP's. It was a win-win because the traffic would stay off the transit links of both Yahoo! and the ISP's.
Exactly right. This is what most major content providers do. Google, Microsoft, etc... etc... There are actually major companies that help facilitate this sort of thing. This was the central problem with Netflix. The refused to do any of this. The told the ISPs to go to hell, they'd do what they wanted rather than get themselves locked into an agreement that my prevent them from saving money on a better peering deal down the road. Netflix forced the Net Neutrality issue on the ISPs and the ISPs unfortunately won.
They must provide me uncongested access to all of their interconnects.
No they don't. It all depends on your contract. If you have residential internet service they are under no obligation to provide you any service at all. Granted you could dump their service if it were bad enough. If you want guaranteed uncongested access to all their interconnects you'd need that stated in your contract. Those are generally considered "Business lines" and are your classic T1s, T3s, etc... and even those can have issues. But you have your contract to back you up should you have a problem.
"Sure there is. Granted, there's about a zillion forms of Libertarianism, just like everything else. " Nice dodge, and you expect us to swallow this? It is akin to talking to a communist who claims communism has never really been tried...maybe because whenever it has it led to totalitarianism.
I don't think you read that at all. He said there was no definition for Libertarianism. I disagreed. You can go look it up in the dictionary or on Wikipedia. There are lots of different forms of Libertarianism as there are lots of different forms of Communism. No country is 100% of any party. The United States was about as Libertarian as has ever been tried when it was founded... but there were clearly some major issues with regard to slavery, social issues, etc... at the time. For example, I really don't think you could claim to be libertarian and also want to ban gay marriage at the same time. Ok, there are idiots in every party so I'm sure we could find someone. But the whole point to the party is that old Wiccen Rede "Do what you will, so long as it harms none"
Earnest question: if the primary restrictions on an individual's freedom are a direct result of economic circumstances (read: being poor), are laws that promote an equitable distribution of wealth compatible with Neo-Classical Libertarianism?
For example, killing and redistributing the wealth of the ten richest Americans would yield roughly $1000 per American. This would be a dramatic decrease in freedom for ten individuals (perhaps an understatement), but a modest increase in freedom for hundreds of millions of other individuals. How would such a policy be seen in the context of your preferred flavor of Libertarianism?
Good question. And yes, you're pointing out the most debated facet of Libertarianism. When do the rights of the public as a whole outweigh the rights of the individual? To a Libertarian this would be a very rare circumstance. They'd argue that the individuals liberties almost always outweigh the public interest. Especially in your example. In some circumstances infringing the rights of the individual can't be avoided... public waterways for example.
But you're framing the argument in a world that is in a very anti-liberty state. Our country is in this quasi-socialist / quasi-capitalist system. There are aspects of both individual liberty and social justice all working together in a not-so-good way. There are laws that are intended to manipulate the economy with the intended spirit being "Social Justice" but our Constitution was not designed for social justice. So those that have money use the Constitution to then manipulate those laws into something entirely different. Tax breaks intended to create jobs, instead simply increase profits. Laws intended to save small farms and improve the environment are corrupted to instead be big subsidies to giant corporate farms. From the libertarian point of view we shouldn't have such laws, and if we didn't income inequality wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is now. Those that work hard and earn lots of money should be able to use that money to do what they want. But unjust laws that lead to people becoming insanely rich also give them an unequal and more importantly unearned advantage.
Despite that, we are in the world we're in. We're not in a Libertarians ideal state. So if Libertarianism did gain more traction how could we implement their ideas in a way that wouldn't exacerbate and already unequal system? Leaving all the Rich guys rich and then letting them do whatever they wanted to with their money would mean they'd quickly subvert the Libertarian party by buying most of congress (probably already happening) So it's an important debate to have. I don't feel I have the answer to that unfortunately. But with the system we have already, our socialist policies are driving us the way of Russia and the Oligarchs gain more and more power every day.
Libertarians inevitably support the 'freedom' to pollute and exploit my environment without consequences. Because government regulation is bad.
If someone threatens my air/water supply, I should be at liberty to kill them.
Then argue your point. You have a good one. What you're talking about is something that, at least I feel, is a big controversy amongst Libertarians right now. The great thing about libertarianism is that because of its very nature there is no "party line" that you have to abide by. Everyone's expected to shout their ideas until their horse. That's the whole idea!
Is this even a question? If the IE bug isn't important to you, and you don't want people switching browsers, then why the hell would you communicate the bug to anyone? You should only be sending out notifications if your users need to take action or you're trying to communicate an outage. If you're email consists of "There's this problem you don't need to do anything about..." then you're wasting their time and they will quickly learn to ignore your notifications.
Users do not care about security issues or bugs. They want you to tell them if they need to do something. Otherwise leave them alone. If you have a few users that are worry warts and want to know about that thing they heard on the radio this morning, start a wiki page and just post it there. They can come and look at it if they have questions. But I'd avoid that. Documenting the reasons for your lack of action on a security issue is not a good idea. You may very well have good reasons, but uneducated poorly informed managers can make your life miserable if the bug ends up costing the company money.
There is no party for the little guy.
Alan Eggleston would disagree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
That's while the nylon was surrounded by a world rife with food for the bacteria and countless varieties of pathogens. Evolution works on chance and brute force. The chance that any given mutation can happen is exceedingly low, but given the countless numbers of bacteria a nylon eating bacteria becomes an almost inevitability. What are the chances that a bacteria that can live on humans will survive long enough on an alien world to find a material is can metabolize? I think it really depends on just how similar that world is to ours. I have a feeling we're going to find out there's lots of life out there, but it's absolutely nothing like what we thought it would be.
That said, this is still a worry. Even if the chances are low, the outcome could be genocide... of either them or us.
So we're surprised when a government agency uses common sense when enforcing a law now? This sounds exactly like what the FAA should be regulating...
Good! I'm generally a Google fan, but the default Google search on my phone that I can't remove is annoying to say the least. The voice search garbage that nobody uses makes it even worse. I don't think I'd mind if I could just remove it... but the fact that its locked onto my screen top center and I have no way to ever remove it makes it seem an awful lot like IE was in XP.
Is there a better search engine than Google?
That depends on what your goals are. If you find anonimity important at all, then the answer is "all of them"
Sure there is. Granted, there's about a zillion forms of Libertarianism, just like everything else. But I'm talking about the currently popular version of it (the form I support), Noe-Classical Libertarianism that bases its economic policy on laissez-faire capitalism. The idea being that individual liberty is more important than most things. Government restrictions of business restrict the liberties of the owners of those businesses. That's why regulation is frowned upon. But whats frequently forgotten is that Libertarian ideals have a fundamental mistrust of both government AND business. Corporations tend to construct deals that mislead individuals and there-by restrict their liberties. Hence the desire for laws that increase transparency. Libertarians support laws that let individuals make informed decisions. They do not support laws that make it illegal for an individual to make a mistake and sign a terrible contract. They just want to ensure that the persons fully aware of what they are signing when they do so.
Remember, one of the largest groups at those "Occupy" rallies were Libertarians. I know it's hard to fit Libertarians into your black and white democrat/republican world view, but the fact is most libertarians are more socially liberal than most democrats... an more fiscally conservative than most republicans. I've been a libertarian since the early 90s and I have to say it's been an honor being hated by both political parties all this time.
There is no such thing as a former KGB man.
Vladimir Putin - May 2000
...the concept of the "mutual fund".
I can almost smell his clutch burning as he mentally shifts back and forth between "currency must be free of government intervention" and "currency must be backed by gold or silver"...
Another person that doesn't understand Libertarian ideals. What a surprise. Libertarians do not believe markets should be totally unregulated. What they do believe is that government regulation should have one goal, which is to increase transparency. Laws that require Credit Card companies to display their terms in clear, easy to understand ways for consumers are good laws in Libertarian eyes. Laws against insider trading, secret deals, etc... are all compatible. Where they draw the line is when the laws dictate prices or interest rates etc. Also, I don't think he thinks we should legally require that any currency be backed by Gold and Silver, he just thinks its a good idea. Whatever the standard US currency is should be backed by tangible assets but legally requiring such a system for a currency unregulated by the government like Bitcoin would not be Libertarian. That said, no one, not even Ron or Rand Paul, is 100% Libertarian. We all have our own ideas that are a mix of different political ideologies and there's nothing wrong with that.
I just want to jump in here and make sure everyone knows Larry Niven is a terrible author. If you like furry sex, then by all means read the ringworld series. But if you're not into scifi vampires creating furry orgies between giants and tiger people using their pheromones you'll likely just feel uncomfortable while reading them and wonder what asshole gave this guy a pen.
None, and that is his point. The majority can outspend them. Sam Walton got rich from lots of small contributions from the middle class.
Their power is more than just their wealth. Why do you think they can go bankrupt multiple times and still end up driving another business into the ground a few years later? Being lower, middle or upper class has nothing to do with money. Congress is made up of people that already belong to the class or people who desperately want to be.
This has happened before...
http://scholar.google.com/scho...
This is why there is no CCR, and why Fogerty gave up music entirely out of disgust after this lawsuit. We missed decades of great music from a genius that we'll never get back. Remember this the next time a record company tells you that piracy is theft.