The UK did quite well during the industrial revolution with big government. I agree the UK did quite well, but the monarchies' power diminished while merchants were gaining more real power, turning the monarchs into mere figureheads, in all the European countries at that time. The statement that the country did quite well, with "big government" unqualified as you presented it, is not accurate compared to its size and success before, and after.
Perhaps the biggest critique, against using that time as an example is that it wasn't self-sustaining... Not very many things are self-sustaining, certainly not liberty. Effort is required, but like aging, it beats the shit out of the alternative.
--all governments got bigger, not smaller & it was partly to fix what was socially wrong at this time. That was indeed the sales pitch. Society takes better care of itself one by one, and with assistance on request, than with a chronic, cradle-to-grave "compassionate" "hand up."
... cheaper water, cheaper wastewater, cheaper trash pickup, cheaper broadband, cheaper medical insurance, cheaper emergency services, or cheaper universities. As long as government regulates industries and/or acts as a supplier of services, it effects the demand curves, and makes each of your points partially or completely moot.
Why should we expect it to produce cheaper elementary or high schools? Because it already does! Although families must pay their own tuition instead of having help from all taxpayers to subsidize the cost of educating their children, the cost per student of a year at private schools is less than at public schools.
I think plenty of people could do better, but I don't know if they can do so a lower cost. Now you do.
How many moderates want to destroy our public schools (especially as plenty federal dems and GOPers have successfully campaigned on it & and support it through legislation)? Destroy? Don't you think that's a little melodramatic, considering how poorly they function now? I mean, assuming the free market does not begin providing educational services in its stead, to go to nothing, from the current state of the public school system, would be a small delta.
How many moderates are so supportive of big oil and yet denounce alternative energy sources? Denounce small energy sources, or oppose governmental funding of endeavors that will become sources of private profit if they work, and be a net loss to the people if they do not?
How many want to get rid of social security? Everybody under... how long until the system runs dry? Definitely everybody under 30. Maybe 40, but I don't know about that yet.
Ron Paul does not appeal at all to the moderate majority, which is why he's doing so poorly in the primaries. We've had only a relatively short time to bring him to the attention of the national, mainstream audience, and I think we're doing quite well, all things considered. It might take until 2012 to get him into the Oval Office, but I think you overestimate the "centrism" of the moderate majority and underestimate our preference that government do no harm. There are many worst-case scenarios that are unique to oversized, centralized governments with dependent citizens. The People will notice eventually, if we keep explaining it to them.
Libertarians on slashdot are the modern day Marxists. They have a truly wonderful and interesting theory, but they can't point to any place where it actually works all that well. I can point to several places, and an interval of about a century. The Industrial Revolution occurred when individual rights were peaking in the United States and Europe, in the nineteenth century, as theocratic and monarchical collectivism ebbed and before Marxist collectivism began to take hold. I guess that might all be coincidence, but if so, that's an awfully big coincidence.
Although they're both annoying for forcing users to make an effort to opt-out of advertising instead of to opt-in, the Mac way looks easier and less likely to cause casual users to need to re-install than editing the registry in Windows.
Who voted for this article to be featured, anyway? Just another excuse for pointless debate... Who coined the term "adware?" To what, or to whose products, is it defined to apply? Although I already held this opinion, I think the article does a good job of hinting, without clobbering you with the thesis, that "adware" is a term coined by the market share leaders to describe behavior practiced by all sellers of software, but the qualifier "third-party" diverts attention so that gratuitous advertising only reflects negatively on newcomers to the market. The way I see it, any program that isn't a worm, virus, trojan or keylogger is not malware, it's just software I don't want. Oh, provided it un-installs gracefully. Programs that don't do that, are their own class of malware, in my book: clingware.
By opposing the federal ban on the states restricting abortion, which is ultimately what Roe v Wade is, he's saying that people no longer get the right to choose for themselves, their state governments get to dictate to them what their options are. I see no reason to suspect that appointing judges that believe in personal rights and responsibilities, except on the topic of abortion, will be on Dr. Paul's agenda when he is elected President this November.
True, but governments (at least, not mine) don't exactly have a great track record when it comes to getting the facts strait before rushing half-assed into things. That's the fault of governments, and the civilians who aren't activist enough, not of science.
It would help if more libertarians & Libertarians understood, and expressed, these points in the same breath as the more conventional "shrink government" talking points. I'll start doing so now.
I can't afford an aircraft carrier and I know plenty of people besides myself that would love to buy one so the demand for a cheap aircraft carrier is definitely there. When should we expect a less-expensive aircraft carrier to be available for purchase? How many people do you know who have the knowledge to build aircraft carriers less expensively? How many people do you know who have the knowledge to administer primary & secondary schools less expensively? See why your point is moot?
The problem is that Republican candidates advocate a limited government, but only when it comes to wealth redistribution. Not Ron Paul. His agenda is to -- how did you put it? -- "de-escalate federal power in an issue-neutral manner."
They are perfectly happy to expand domestic surveillance programs, pass laws imposing their moral standards on everyone else (why should marriage definition be a federal issue?), subsiding big corporations of lobbyist buddies and so on. Basically, they want a government good for old, rich white men. I think smaller government would be a great improvement for young, rich white men, too. And, of course, for green polka-dotted people of every age and socioeconomic status. Everybody else will be screwed, mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Seriously, what the moderate majority like you want is what Ron Paul offers: less federal government in the areas where it's been making news, and of course, continued federal government in the areas where it's actually needed. Presidential Candidate Comparison
Let some states decline to criminalize prostitution, internet gambling or smoking pot and learn from their own experience if they are willing to live with the consequences. Let liberal-leaning locales create their own universal health care and living wage programs as long as the residents are willing to pay the taxes. Let South Dakota outlaw abortion and teach biology from the Bible and deal with the consequences of most young women and college graduates leaving the state for California. To "let" states have jurisdiction over those things, the federal government has to get out of them, first. I hope you'll learn more about Dr. Paul before his 2012 campaign for the Presidency.
"We should even have a government blogging team where people in agencies are constantly telling all of you, the taxpayers, the citizens of America, everything that's going on so that you have up to the minute information about what your government is doing so that you, too, can be informed and hold the government accountable." Good catch, gaspar! What I think would do much more to "hold the government accountable" is the kind of database & OLAP reporting that's popular commercially, in products like Business Objects. I'd love to run a daily report on what my Senators and Congressional representative voted on today, showing me the amount of each separate expenditure in each bill, and a brief summary of the purpose of each expenditure, with a hyperlink to the full text. Reading the thousands of pages that the Senators themselves delegate to their interns to read & write isn't feasible. Keeping up-to-date on a well-organized summary, which their interns are required to keep current, would be very feasible.
This is why I think Libertarians are among the most historically ignorant people to be found. For a rather good example of how diminished state funding can lead to decline, look what happened in Rome. Virtually all the great public works projects, all the engineering innovations and the like were made early on. BY Constantine's time, Rome's technical abilities had fallen to the point where craftsmen would actually have to loot older monuments. You went all the way back to ancient Rome, and you still really only found an example of the harm done by state-supplied bread & circuses. Free stuff makes people lazy, then not studying their craft makes them incompetent. The absence of free stuff is not a problem.
Private industry needs returns on investments that can be measured in years. There's nothing wrong with that, people want to make money on their investment. Basic research, however, is absolutely critical to long-term scientific advancement. Those big, expensive particle accelerators that open up the secrets of the universe will never be built by private industry, because there's almost zero chance of any meaningful financially-rewarding application. And yet, in the timeline of decades or perhaps even centuries, basic physics research may open up technologies we can't really imagine now. You've never a met a professional research physicist, have you? They wouldn't like it, but they would form professional associations, collect dues, market their research, rent their facilities, and hold bake sales if necessary, to keep their particle colliders operating. That's really a hilarious example. I see the point that you're trying to make, and to address it more directly, the United States didn't advance from a backwater to a leader of the Industrial Revolution with the level of government funding for research we see today. It just isn't necessary, and the free market provides incentives for having the knowledge of scientific theories to develop innovative products. Consider DuPont.
That's a good point about security of property. I also have no worries about what would happen to "American Science" if funding for it was flipped, like a light switch, to non-federal sources only. There might be an adjustment period in that labor market, but private universities and private industries would hire them quickly enough, while state universities figured out what to do with their surplus equipment, or adjusted their budgets to keep it in use.
It follows very quickly from the theory of global warming (more specifically from the human responsibility for it), that the industrialized countries have to go through large pains and expenses to alter their behavior and lose some of their competitive advantage in the process. Inside those countries, "the rich" are also made to undertake the most changes to their lifestyles. It is not beyond reasonable to suspect, some of those conclusions are produced with "social justice" and similar crappy theories in mind... Facts? Yes, those are objective in themselves (unless fabricated), but their compilations usually aren't -- a skillful omission here and there and you are good... Let's see some. Document this "skillful omission here and there" that you're equating with climate science, please, because I have researched the science, and no such selective omission is necessary. Also, science has provided better things to burn than petroleum. Wired: $1/Gallon Ethanol, a recent Slashdot story.
The Earth has undergone drastic changes in climate and otherwise long before humans even existed and some when we did exist, but were unable to affect the planet in a noticeable way. There is no proof, we are responsible for the warming weather today. Whether that is true or not, the debate has long ago gone political... What's your point? A majority of voters believes differently than you do, and vote differently. You can use this free forum, though, to dispute the science, or the politics, if you want. You non-global-warming types are kinda cute, except when you act like victims.
You also shouldn't mix up the political "global warming" arguments with the actual science. No, s/he shouldn't, but our politicians should also cite the sources that lead them to their positions on matters of science. I think it would be hilarious, instead of hearing vague statements from 435 Congresspersons, to hear from their thousands [?] of science advisors, aka lobbyists, who are really making the "decisions" on these matters.
That his accusations reveal severe bias against Republican candidates, was the point of my posting, which started this thread. Republicans do disproportionately espouse, publicly and as policy, faith-based agendas that conflict directly with well-known, firmly established scientific knowledge. That is a fact. Pointing it out is not bias, it is journalistic reporting of fact.
I hope Krauss is prepared for decades of this.
on
Science Debate 2008
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"How could being scientifically illiterate be perfectly acceptable?" Krauss asks. "No one would accept a candidate who, say, denied the Holocaust." That's a really good point. Most people do not see adherence to fact generally to be a moral issue, unless malice is involved. Stupid, unmotivated ignorance is supposed to be "forgiven."
"We have all become painfully aware in recent years that it is not only irresponsible but dangerous and expensive to distort and repackage scientific conclusions for political purposes," Otto explained in a recent editorial on the Salon Web site.
A couple of examples: The Bush Administration's conviction that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons might not have survived had the White House heeded scientists who pointed out that the aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq (cited as evidence of weapons building) were actually the wrong size for uranium enrichment, says Krauss. Or perhaps the Administration wouldn't have started its $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative if it had asked the National Academy of Sciences for advice first, instead of after. (The NAS was tepid on the idea, feeling its contribution to solving the nation's dependence on oil wasn't as great as the Administration claimed.)
There's no guarantee, of course, that any Presidential Administration will follow the science when the politics point in a different direction. Rice University professor and former White House science adviser Neal Lane recalls how President Bill Clinton backed away from expanding needle-exchange programs, even though the approach had clearly been shown to reduce transmission of AIDS and other diseases from dirty needles. Scientific illiteracy among the "deciders" of this country is not new. Our most recent Democrat President didn't feel that solid statistical evidence of humanitarian benefit in the form of reduced spread of AIDS, among users and to non-users, would trump public superstitions about "encouraging" or "validating" drug use, for which there was never any evidence. He was probably right. The problem is not only with the honesty of the politicians, but the honesty and literacy of most of the voters. The politicians, I suspect, all know better, but well over half couldn't be elected in their districts while being forthright about what they know about science and what statistically would be better for all of their constituents than the campaign promises they want to hear.
Too easy.
There's probably something to be discovered about human belief systems there - someone should do a sociology/psychology paper on it. A physics paper would be much more instructive. The notion of Perpetual Motion survives because of people who don't know what to measure, and what measurements are missing from a demonstration like this. What's the rotational energy of the wheel, at the rate at which he charged his magic coil? Which parts of his apparatus were the leads attached when the displayed "potential difference" was brought to the viewers' attention? Why weren't we given a complete schematic of the entire apparatus, in both [all?] of its states of assembly? [with the steel rod in the brass tube and outside of it, with the coil being charged, then powering the wheel, etc.] Without complete voltage measurements, and accounting of every part of the apparatus, there is nothing to even believe, nor disbelieve. There is nothing remarkable in a vague, non-claim accompanied by a bunch of hand-waving and bullshit.
The number of potential dupes is directly proportional to general knowledge of electricity, magnetism, and first-year chemistry and/or physics, both of which include the Law of Conservation of Energy.
I don't blame the teachers for that, I blame the class clowns among the students.
This is problem with how science is taught -- this is not how science is practiced. I do agree, however, that science educators (at least in the U.S.) do a horrible job of actually teaching how and why science actually works. Excuse me? When my homework was memorization of the Periodic Table of the Elements, I was told that the key to being a good scientist is asking the right questions. Until I had a sufficient body of knowledge, I was unqualified to contribute to the forefront of the field -- that is, to doing original scientific research -- and I was honest enough to recognize that as a genuine fact. As Werthless5 noted, there are plenty of students who waste the time good students and professors have together [W5 said it more tactfully] with stupid "objections" based on nothing, or based on some wing-nut theological claptrap that has never been proven, or even tested, such as the "Electric Universe" or "Intelligent Design." Presenting the basics of the scientific method plus its fundamental results in physics, biology and chemistry, would be a good base of knowledge for high school students to decide whether any of those or closely-related fields are of interest to them as careers. To change the curriculum in favor of boobs, losers and crooks whose objections are invalid, would reward the liars and punish the honest people.
If teachers would spend more time on explaining critical thinking and the scientific method, we'd have a much better educated populace, and one that was better equipped to examine the pseudoscientific claims that show up all the time (like this story). I see evidence of the opposite. What I see above are not people who don't know how to logically analyze what little they've been taught, but people who have such a pathetically minute body of knowledge of the electromagnetic force, that they don't even know what to speculate and how to test its plausibility analytically, as gedankenexperiment, and shoot them down themselves. Wikipedia: thought experiment. Instead, a couple people are shooting down one cockamamie idea after another, because the rest of them just don't know enough about electricity and how, microscopically, it causes magnetism, to invalidate their own first hopeful speculations about a perpetual motion device. If they were taught the rudimentary facts, most of them seem to have the intellectual capacity to understand that energy can only be converted from one form to another [including, in extreme circumstances, matter], but never created or destroyed, and this thread could go away. If you want to help the students, don't help them cop-out.
What would be a productive use for these terabytes of wasted space?... Something that could offer the fault-tolerance and ease-of-use of ZFS across a network of PCs would be great for small-to-medium organizations. There might be some costs to save in some places, but the fact that you begin by asking for, not telling about, "a productive use for these terabytes of wasted space" suggests that at most, striping empty shared partitions into a monster drive would be "good," not "great for [some] small-to-medium organizations." I think providing end users with imaging software, and reminding them that giga = 9 zeroes if they're being miserly with their space and discarding important files, is as ambitious as I'd like a network admin to get about utilizing unused disk space, if you worked for me. Storage is cheap.
I shudder to think how much tin-foil some people must have around their heads and homes, to actually believe that microsoft would deliberately single out facebook, and prevent it from loading especially since Slashdot widely reported and speculated upon Microsoft's multi-million dollar investment in facebook last year. I don't know where you got the idea that anybody was claiming Microsoft singled out Facebook exactly. It looked to me like that was just picked as a good example of an oversight that matters to a significant share of the market, because Facebook is a popular destination. For that to not be accessible out of the box is a dramatic display of non-ease-of-use, and manual-only workarounds for exceptions that should have been anticipated by the project architects. Not everybody uses IPv6 yet, and as it is gradually adopted, software for general use should be able to support both out of the box. It's like somebody forgot an 'else' statement, and the project architect must have never told anybody to make that switchover gracefully, without user intervention.
I would, by the way, not lay that specifically on the testing department at Microsoft, or any other company's testing department, though, because I don't know that much about how the project lead divided up responsibilities. It's a subtle enough point, and I've seen QA done close enough to a helpdesk-type script, that I would put that on the person in charge, somebody whose title is probably more like 'principal architect' than 'software testing.' The guy with the "last word" obviously did not put that on the to-do list, or did not put it on the right people's to-do lists, including both dev and testing teams. That said, I would probably fault Microsoft more and Facebook's admin less than you did, because IPv4 has been in use for some time, and IPv6 is still the relatively new method, which I would consider optional as Facebook or their host seemingly does. If Microsoft wants to be on the forefront of obsoleting the previous version and switch over as quickly as possible to the next big thing, fine, but when that makes using the current standard a hassle to the end user, it makes Microsoft look bad. To the end-user, "it works in Linux and MacOS," so Microsoft is the one that looks stupid. That's all. It's not a "tin foil" thing, it's simply an observation of something that many people will expect to work easily, but doesn't. And I'm adding to that, a top-down priority problem that places newness for its own sake too high, and abandons support for current standards as soon as they're planned for obsolescence, instead of when they are actually out of use.
I guess in the average slashdotter's mind, it went something like 'Hey Steve, put that chair down and listen for a moment... you know how we just spent a huge pile of cash buying shares in facebook? You know what would be a great idea? If we set vista up so that it can't connect to facebook! Wouldn't that be great for our investment?' Your version is much funnier, but I don't see any reason to posit sabotage; incompetence explains these observations much more succinctly, and without contradicting existing Theory.
I say this every time one of these "look what those RIAA bastards are up to now" articles appears.
This is yet another reason to boycott RIAA artists. Completely.
Shut off televisions or radios that have RIAA music playing. Done. Now what?
Whenever you stumble across them promoting a RIAA musician online, and you have an opportunity to 'rate' it, give it the lowest rating. Ohh, that sounds like so much fun, I bet Congress will ban it soon!
Support independent artists. Purchase music from them. Done, and doing.
Call up/email corporate radio stations and request independent musicians, knowing full well they're not going to play them. Do you mind if I automate that? I really don't want to talk to "those guys."
Neener-neener-neener, that's protected Free Speech, ya boobs!
I'm glad to see that the AutoAdmit.com case was mentioned in the current article, because I still have more to say about it and hopefully, I can comment on it without being down-modded off-topic.
The content above was satire, and the name-calling is obviously not intended literally, thus cannot be considered libel, according to the aforementioned. What follows, in contrast, is meant to be interpreted literally.
The two plaintiffs, anonymously listed as Doe I and Doe II, are female students at Yale Law School and claim that the users of a third-party law school message board have consistently and regularly made such disparaging remarks about their characters that it has cost them not only their emotional wellbeing, but internships and jobs. And despite repeated requests to remove the offensive posts, the site's administrators continually refused to do so.
On what grounds did AutoAdmit.com refuse to remove libelous messages? On what grounds did they later claim to be unable to identify the defendants?
In the complaint as seen by Ars Technica, Doe I and II claim to have lost sleep, fallen behind on schoolwork, suffered strained personal relationships with their families, and were forced to attend therapy as a result of the postings on AutoAdmit. Additionally, Doe I claims to have lost job prospects. She says that at some point, she applied for 16 different on-campus interviews at Yale, which resulted in a mere four callbacks and zero offers. "On information and belief, it is unprecedented for a second-year law student from Yale to participate in so many interviews without obtaining a single summer associate offer," the complaint reads. Her academic qualifications were similar to that of other classmates who had received offers, the complaint says.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I need to be, to see that the plaintiffs can demonstrate real, measurable damages.
The posts occurred on AutoAdmit, a site that describes itself as the world's "most prestigious" college discussion board and claims to help students with law school information, hiring practices at law firms, and more.
Assuming they're any good at anything they do, how is it possible that they both refuse, when requested, to remove content that is so obviously incitement to violence and defamation of character, but also neglect to keep records pertaining to that content? Even if AutoAdmit.com had no "no outing" policy [see the linked article], a marginally competent administrator and a marginally competent lawyer should, between the two of them, have the expertise & intellectual capacity to at least have concluded that responsible hosting of a discussion forum requires that they begin keeping records after a pattern of abusive content is observed from some, if not all, of the 28 pseudonyms used to harass Doe I & Doe II, auto-deleting most as is standard maintenance of servers, but specifically archiving those noticed as illegal, either as libel, incitement, or direct threat of illegal actions. I have no Linux certifications or CS degrees, and I can write the cron jobs for that, easily. It is not rocket science!
It is simply not plausible that at no point did anybody at "[t]he most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world" notice the pattern of messages that are not protected by the First Amendment, and know that those messages are, from that point forward, evidence of a crime. As "[t]he most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world," they had a professional responsibility to start logging that information, independent of their declared ["no outing"] site policy. There are really only two [non-e
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like they leaked the information and want to be paid for that.
And if "energy" isn't close enough and you really insist on "electricity," try this: http://solar.rain-barrel.net/united-solar-ovonic/
... cheaper water, cheaper wastewater, cheaper trash pickup, cheaper broadband, cheaper medical insurance, cheaper emergency services, or cheaper universities. As long as government regulates industries and/or acts as a supplier of services, it effects the demand curves, and makes each of your points partially or completely moot. Why should we expect it to produce cheaper elementary or high schools? Because it already does! Although families must pay their own tuition instead of having help from all taxpayers to subsidize the cost of educating their children, the cost per student of a year at private schools is less than at public schools. I think plenty of people could do better, but I don't know if they can do so a lower cost. Now you do.Although they're both annoying for forcing users to make an effort to opt-out of advertising instead of to opt-in, the Mac way looks easier and less likely to cause casual users to need to re-install than editing the registry in Windows.
It would help if more libertarians & Libertarians understood, and expressed, these points in the same breath as the more conventional "shrink government" talking points. I'll start doing so now.
Seriously, what the moderate majority like you want is what Ron Paul offers: less federal government in the areas where it's been making news, and of course, continued federal government in the areas where it's actually needed.
Presidential Candidate Comparison Let some states decline to criminalize prostitution, internet gambling or smoking pot and learn from their own experience if they are willing to live with the consequences. Let liberal-leaning locales create their own universal health care and living wage programs as long as the residents are willing to pay the taxes. Let South Dakota outlaw abortion and teach biology from the Bible and deal with the consequences of most young women and college graduates leaving the state for California. To "let" states have jurisdiction over those things, the federal government has to get out of them, first. I hope you'll learn more about Dr. Paul before his 2012 campaign for the Presidency.
That's a good point about security of property. I also have no worries about what would happen to "American Science" if funding for it was flipped, like a light switch, to non-federal sources only. There might be an adjustment period in that labor market, but private universities and private industries would hire them quickly enough, while state universities figured out what to do with their surplus equipment, or adjusted their budgets to keep it in use.
A couple of examples: The Bush Administration's conviction that Iraq was trying to build nuclear weapons might not have survived had the White House heeded scientists who pointed out that the aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq (cited as evidence of weapons building) were actually the wrong size for uranium enrichment, says Krauss. Or perhaps the Administration wouldn't have started its $1.2 billion Hydrogen Fuel Initiative if it had asked the National Academy of Sciences for advice first, instead of after. (The NAS was tepid on the idea, feeling its contribution to solving the nation's dependence on oil wasn't as great as the Administration claimed.)
There's no guarantee, of course, that any Presidential Administration will follow the science when the politics point in a different direction. Rice University professor and former White House science adviser Neal Lane recalls how President Bill Clinton backed away from expanding needle-exchange programs, even though the approach had clearly been shown to reduce transmission of AIDS and other diseases from dirty needles. Scientific illiteracy among the "deciders" of this country is not new. Our most recent Democrat President didn't feel that solid statistical evidence of humanitarian benefit in the form of reduced spread of AIDS, among users and to non-users, would trump public superstitions about "encouraging" or "validating" drug use, for which there was never any evidence. He was probably right. The problem is not only with the honesty of the politicians, but the honesty and literacy of most of the voters. The politicians, I suspect, all know better, but well over half couldn't be elected in their districts while being forthright about what they know about science and what statistically would be better for all of their constituents than the campaign promises they want to hear.
The number of potential dupes is directly proportional to general knowledge of electricity, magnetism, and first-year chemistry and/or physics, both of which include the Law of Conservation of Energy.
I would, by the way, not lay that specifically on the testing department at Microsoft, or any other company's testing department, though, because I don't know that much about how the project lead divided up responsibilities. It's a subtle enough point, and I've seen QA done close enough to a helpdesk-type script, that I would put that on the person in charge, somebody whose title is probably more like 'principal architect' than 'software testing.' The guy with the "last word" obviously did not put that on the to-do list, or did not put it on the right people's to-do lists, including both dev and testing teams. That said, I would probably fault Microsoft more and Facebook's admin less than you did, because IPv4 has been in use for some time, and IPv6 is still the relatively new method, which I would consider optional as Facebook or their host seemingly does. If Microsoft wants to be on the forefront of obsoleting the previous version and switch over as quickly as possible to the next big thing, fine, but when that makes using the current standard a hassle to the end user, it makes Microsoft look bad. To the end-user, "it works in Linux and MacOS," so Microsoft is the one that looks stupid. That's all. It's not a "tin foil" thing, it's simply an observation of something that many people will expect to work easily, but doesn't. And I'm adding to that, a top-down priority problem that places newness for its own sake too high, and abandons support for current standards as soon as they're planned for obsolescence, instead of when they are actually out of use. I guess in the average slashdotter's mind, it went something like 'Hey Steve, put that chair down and listen for a moment... you know how we just spent a huge pile of cash buying shares in facebook? You know what would be a great idea? If we set vista up so that it can't connect to facebook! Wouldn't that be great for our investment?' Your version is much funnier, but I don't see any reason to posit sabotage; incompetence explains these observations much more succinctly, and without contradicting existing Theory.
This is yet another reason to boycott RIAA artists. Completely.
Shut off televisions or radios that have RIAA music playing. Done. Now what? Whenever you stumble across them promoting a RIAA musician online, and you have an opportunity to 'rate' it, give it the lowest rating. Ohh, that sounds like so much fun, I bet Congress will ban it soon! Support independent artists. Purchase music from them. Done, and doing. Call up/email corporate radio stations and request independent musicians, knowing full well they're not going to play them. Do you mind if I automate that? I really don't want to talk to "those guys."
I'm glad to see that the AutoAdmit.com case was mentioned in the current article, because I still have more to say about it and hopefully, I can comment on it without being down-modded off-topic.
The content above was satire, and the name-calling is obviously not intended literally, thus cannot be considered libel, according to the aforementioned. What follows, in contrast, is meant to be interpreted literally.
Ars Technica, AutoAdmit 1
The two plaintiffs, anonymously listed as Doe I and Doe II, are female students at Yale Law School and claim that the users of a third-party law school message board have consistently and regularly made such disparaging remarks about their characters that it has cost them not only their emotional wellbeing, but internships and jobs. And despite repeated requests to remove the offensive posts, the site's administrators continually refused to do so.
On what grounds did AutoAdmit.com refuse to remove libelous messages? On what grounds did they later claim to be unable to identify the defendants?
In the complaint as seen by Ars Technica, Doe I and II claim to have lost sleep, fallen behind on schoolwork, suffered strained personal relationships with their families, and were forced to attend therapy as a result of the postings on AutoAdmit. Additionally, Doe I claims to have lost job prospects. She says that at some point, she applied for 16 different on-campus interviews at Yale, which resulted in a mere four callbacks and zero offers. "On information and belief, it is unprecedented for a second-year law student from Yale to participate in so many interviews without obtaining a single summer associate offer," the complaint reads. Her academic qualifications were similar to that of other classmates who had received offers, the complaint says.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I need to be, to see that the plaintiffs can demonstrate real, measurable damages.
The posts occurred on AutoAdmit, a site that describes itself as the world's "most prestigious" college discussion board and claims to help students with law school information, hiring practices at law firms, and more.
Assuming they're any good at anything they do, how is it possible that they both refuse, when requested, to remove content that is so obviously incitement to violence and defamation of character, but also neglect to keep records pertaining to that content? Even if AutoAdmit.com had no "no outing" policy [see the linked article], a marginally competent administrator and a marginally competent lawyer should, between the two of them, have the expertise & intellectual capacity to at least have concluded that responsible hosting of a discussion forum requires that they begin keeping records after a pattern of abusive content is observed from some, if not all, of the 28 pseudonyms used to harass Doe I & Doe II, auto-deleting most as is standard maintenance of servers, but specifically archiving those noticed as illegal, either as libel, incitement, or direct threat of illegal actions. I have no Linux certifications or CS degrees, and I can write the cron jobs for that, easily. It is not rocket science!
It is simply not plausible that at no point did anybody at "[t]he most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world" notice the pattern of messages that are not protected by the First Amendment, and know that those messages are, from that point forward, evidence of a crime. As "[t]he most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world," they had a professional responsibility to start logging that information, independent of their declared ["no outing"] site policy. There are really only two [non-e