California. Enron. Bush White House covering by blaming environmentalists. Ideology triumphing sense. Market manipulation.
Remember California when Enron was playing with the energy spigots? It was a mildly regulated market, and they lied, cheated and stole, what, 7 billion bucks from the tax base? And the only guy to cry "thief" is being blamed for the theft, and shortly will be kicked out of office by the WH. And the thieves are laughing in Bermuda.
And that was a LITTLE BIT of manipulation. Imagine what they could have done if they hadn't been so greedy, and bled their victims dry a little bit less obviously over a longer period of time.
And they wanted to control the WATER DISTRIBUTION MARKET!! And other still do, all over the world. Oh, my aching wallet.
Free markets are never free. Adam Smith warned about inevitable monopolization of markets, and it is indeed true. Without regulation, you'd be glued to the ceiling by your Doc Martins for the rest of your life, with a big barrel underneath you for the change falling from your pocket.
Governments are in a sense altruistic, and businesses ARE NOT -- and at least you can vote a government out. Businesses are immortal beings with no moral sense, none whatsoever. Corporations exist to REMOVE responsiblity for personal choices made by the managers.
Free markets can cause a blackout. Take the '03 US blackout that darkened the midwest and the northeast: the energy company in charge of that failing equipment has cut costs for years now. Simple capitalism: spend less, make more. And the equipment ages and fails. Not to mention that there is no incentive for building new power distribution components, and certainly none for redundancy. If you have X number of lines, and they serve your needs and make profits NOW, why spend to improve when you can take the profit? And don't forget, the industry immediately had its hands out for guvmint moola to fix the grid after the blackout. They knew that if all hell broke loose, the taxpayers could be tapped to allay their repair and improvement costs. Free as in free, for them.
Infrastructure, like it or not, is really a government's province. It's the only entity that can spend money to improve power networks without worrying about this quarter's profits and the future stock price. It can repair by fiat.
Profit motivation is wonderful for improving efficiency, but it wants efficiency for RIGHT NOW, not ten years from now. The market is misdefined.
"Look at it, they rant and rave about the "M$ monopoly" throughout."
Microsoft is a legal monopoly. The finding of fact by Judge Jackson is binding and permanent.
Repeating the fact, the legal, recognized fact,the MS is a monopoly is not ranting or raving. It's simply reinforcing a point most in the IT industry would rather not hear.
And, oh yes, forgot to mention, Microsoft is a monopoly.
There is no documented slant at the places you mention, other than that perceived by, yes, the audience of Fox News.
Let me use a anecdotal example, a form very popular on the far right. I was talking with a Foxite friend of mine, who was going on about the liberal this and that person and how they should be killed, etc.
I had a flash of satori, and interrupted him.
"By liberal, do you mean absolutely everyone who doesn't agree with you on everything?"
"YES!!!!", he screamed with joy.
By this example, a real life one at that, basically everyone who doesn't agree with Rupert Murdoch and all of the far, far right wingers on the Fox News channel is a liberal.
By the exclusive definition, everyone on the planet who doesn't cover what Fox does, or doesn't slant what they do, or or slander whom they do, is "slanted".
In other words, if CBS doesn't slander Clinton at every turn, it's slanted. If a story's conclusion doesn't agree with Bush's view of the world, it's slanted. If it's not Republican, it's slanted.
There must be a psychological term for this, but bugger me if I know what it is.
There is no "political motivation" to buck the status quo. It takes guts to tell the people of Earth that they must change their ways. There is no up side to telling people what they do not want to hear.
There is an up side to telling them what they want to hear: "Go on and do whatever you like, and don't listen to these longhaired intellectuals over there".
The vast majority of scientists qualified to hold an opinion have settled this matter as fact. They have no "political advantage" to uphold; as a matter of fact, the present administration of the US has made it abundantly clear than scientists who hold this unpopular-with-industry opinion are no longer welcome to share their opinions, or even to work for the administration.
The only "spin" here are those who want to shout down those who calmly stating the facts. The arguments against the accepted facts closely resemble those against natural selection -- ad hominem nonsense.
Um, release of CO2 into the atmosphere does increase the overall greenhouse retention of heat. This is not "unproven". Lower CO2 levels cools the planet, overall, higher levels heat it up. Venus has an atmosphere composed largely of CO2; it has a runaway greenhouse effect. The surface temperature is higher than that of Mercury.
CO2, you see, permits higher wavelengths of EM through, and blocks the lower wavelenghts of EM reradiated from the planetary surface. The precise balance of energy-in and energy-out causes either cooling or warming. Right now, the Earth is definitely warming. CO2 levels have been at elevated levels for over a hundred years. The effect of excess (for our purposes) tends to build up over time, like silt behind a dam.
I'm all for free trade myself, but sometimes a government, for the good of its people, not just the businessmen, has to take a hand to prevent a disaster -- in this case, a US monopoly dictating computing standards to the entire nation of China.
The government is doing what governments are supposed to do. Serve the interest of all, not just the interested few. By doing this, they will obviously boost their own IT sector, and free it from ruthless exploitation by a runaway US monopoly.
Remember, Microsoft no longer operates in a free market. It is a monopoly, which means it owns and controls the market, no matter how you wiggle around the term "owns".
China, it can be argued, is just leveling the field. Too bad for Bill.
The US has always used government fiat to boost its own businesses. We ignored copyright laws of other countries until the 20th century. The guv built a highway system to crush the railroad companies, build the auto giants, and create massive susburban growth to the detriment of the cities and public education therein.
It chooses winners and losers by awarding defense contracts. It controls interstate commerce. Regulates imports to benefit American interests. It now chooses who can and cannot run foreign countries. In Iraq, the administration has now served notice that the nation MUST permit foreign interests to control their public and private companies.
In comparison, China telling MS to take a hike ain't so bad.
We give up a little liberty, over and over again. And soon there is none left.
I've made the following statement before on Slashdot, but it bears repeating.
First, we tag the pedophiles, real and imagined. This is seen as justified and is welcomed.
Then, we do it "for the children". We tag the children, for after all, they are being kidnapped continually, no? (No, they are not. And any kidnapper would cut out the tracker anyway.)
Then, we do it "for our collective safety". After all, are you for America or for al Queda? Patriot or traitor?
Then, corporate businesses will use trackers for people on the job. After all, they aren't entitled to their jobs, are they? It's a free market, and businesses don't owe people a job. If people don't like being tagged, they can move to another job, no? (No, eventually they can't. Try to get a job without taking a drug test, or having your credit report requested).
Eventually, credit card companies will require one be tagged to obtain a credit card. After all, we aren't owed a credit card, are we? It's a free world, and you don't need a credit card to live.
The military will demand trackers. Just because.
You'll be required to wear a tracker to obtain a passport.
And someday, only trackable people will be allowed into public venues. Or political rallies. Or just to drive. Because people will be used to it, they will look at anyone who objects as a hippy drug using liberal.
Think not? Try refusing a drug test sometime.
We can't allow they to establish the precendent. Listen to an old dude: once you let the bastards get that foothold, they never surrender until they own you. Power is always gained for power's own sake. People who like power are never satisfied with a little taste.
We won't be a damned bit safer with universal human tracking. Any advantage we get by tracking a lost child will be nullified by the ramifications of corporate or political malocontents being tracked and neutralized. We will not see the results of having our every move watched, because they will not be observable. What could happen, WON'T happen because people will know they are being watched. A devastating cloud of suppression is being laid down.
And remember: Bill Gates, GW Bush, or Ken Lay won't be trackable, you can bet your ass. Only the relatively powerless will be under the watchful eye of our corporate bosses.
I'm sitting here listening to TechTV's Screensavers, as Leo LaPorte isinterviewing some ex-miliary type hype a book he's written called "Black Ice". Apparently we're about to be overrun by cyberterrorists any second now.
It's sad that my hero LaPorte is taking this crud seriously. The author is strongly Bushifying the notion that the August blackout was caused by Evil Terrorists. Leo is listening with respect.
WHY? What the hell is "cyber" terrorism? Who the hell would waste their time bringing down network segments for God's cause?
Listen. Terrorism, by which I don't mean guerilla warfare a la Iraq, is a targeted attempt by a agent, not affiliated with any state, to strike FEAR into an enemy, in order to accomplish a desired result, like, say, removing American bases from Saudi Arabia. Governments do not commit terrorism. They commit war.
Terrorism is NOT just randomly destroying targets because you can. The idea is to create terror. Bringing down a network segment or clocking out a web site doesn't strike fear into bloody anyone, and doesn't accomplish anything.
If you want to create terror, you can do it with a gallon of gasoline and a timer. Terror is CHEAP, and simple. You don't need to overthink your methods. Didn't we learn ANYthing from 9-11? They didn't use superior weapons! They just did something we didn't expect, or at least Bush's brain trust couldn't.
And guess what? There hasn't been any acts of "cyberterrorism". It's a bloody stupid piece of fearmongering. If the creation of anticyberterrorist laws has any purpose besides creating a lucrative new corporate/government business to "prevent attacks", it is to create a new, Patriot Act enabled set of laws to make hacking of any sort a terrorist activity, punishable by secret imprisonment with no charges, torture, murder in secret, hell, the sky's the limit when you play on fear.
We're being bamboozled. They are going to lock down the Internet in the name of "terrorism". Remove anonymity. Track people. Keep records of all sorts for future amusing uses. Intimidate political enemies. (Scientology HQ must be wetting themselves with joy since 9-11).
Twenty five years from now, the transformed United States will look back with pride on a spotless record. The patriotic Acts will be credited for the lack of "terror".
The U.S., and probably the entire world, will be a colossal prison state. And no one will notice. They will be "safe" from the "terror" that these fear-crazed opportunists saw under every table.
This garbage almost worked in the Communist-crazy 1950's. But a largely liberal intellectual tradition in the U.S., coupled with 80 million teenagers, body-checked the police state that Nixon and the young Neo-cons were trying to create by executive order.
Now the same young loonies under Nixon are old loonies under Bush II. Faced with the lack of commies, have created a new state of terror from one set of attacks by forty mostly Saudi Arabian political cultists. Instead of showing us we are as unlikely to be killed by loonies as by lightning, they have pumped and exhorted fear into the hearts of Americans. We have become a pack of terrified sheep. We are building ourselves a prison that will last a thousand years... and we will be no "safer" behind out wall of guns and cameras than we were before.
The rest of the world, lacking the cheerleaders of bedwetting fear that the U.S.has, sees things as they really are. Some are going along with our draconian nonsense, but it seems to me they are doing so to snatch frightening new powers over their own people more than for any other reason.
It's happening because so few have the stones to tell the truth: we are creating more enemies by being afraid and striking out murderously in random directions, than by simply cooperating with the once-sympathetic world.
We're killing our own country. Bin Laden is laughing himself to death somewhere.
The thing is, the engineering work for using the Shuttle's components as a Heavy Lift Vehicle was done... THIRTY years ago!
The space colonization and the solar power satellite people both wanted a HLV. NASA wanted an HLV. Hell, you could launch a whole industrial complex to the moon with one shot.
Yes, it is far more cost effective to build a Heavy Lift Vehicle from existing components than to retool Saturn V or reconstitute the Energia program.
What we do need, of course, is what the NASA people have wanted since the sixties. A small reusable spaceplane. An option taken from them by politics and the Air Force back in '72.
NASA wanted both the HLV and a small newer spaceplane. Aerospace companies wanted a supershuttle. Aerospace won, and now we have nothing.
The "damage" was not caused by the greed and recklessness of the Nineties! It's being caused by the greed of TODAY, dammit.
The sucking sound of jobs going to China is NOT caused by the "bad" policies of the Clinton era. It's being caused because of the greed of managers right now. Today.
The software giants are making billions! They are moving operations overseas just to make MORE billions than they are making now. Not because of bad political theories. Because they are greedy, greedy, GREEDY. Microsoft is leading the charge for offshoring the labor. Because of evil politicians? Because of a struggling bottom line? COME ON! Bill wants more billions! That is freaking IT.
Because of cost accounting fictions. It depends on how you define the costs.
The manufacturers of goods and the outsourcers of IT jobs don't pay the downside of unemployment. That is shifted to the general public.
If property taxes have to go up, or welfare has to be increased, or unemployment or COBRA costs go sky high, the companies which had a hand in those costs don't get a bill. We do, one way or another.
The free market is not free. It is manipulated and gamed so that benefits accrue to those who have offshifted the costs of their own profit.
"no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia; "
I know of no clothes made in the USA.
"if you go into your garage and find a ca not made in Mexico;"
There are NO cars manufactured wholly in the U.S. Overseas parts are common.
"if you look on your entertainment rack and find goods made in the first world, not in the third."
First, why would I look for European-made electronics (First World)? Secondly, I don't believe there are any entertainment systems made wholly in the U.S. Zot. None. I'm speaking of what they are made of, BTW, not where they are assembled. The last TV was made in the U.S. over ten years ago. There is no entertainment electronics industry in the U.S.
Hell, a good chuck of the electronics used in our armed forces are made in China! Missle guidance. Lasers. Satellite. We are at the mercy of overseas goverments for replacement parts.
Any government regulation doesn't automatically create a "socialist style gov't". The American labor market has been regulated by laws since we've been Americans. What do you think slavery was? Indentured servitude? Naval impressment? All of those were massive government regulation of labor costs, backed up with guns and prisons.
Socialism != government regulation. This is sloppy semantics that is the direct result of over a hundred years of hard-core rightists debasing the language.
There isn't a socialist government in the entire world. Nor a communist one. What we have are free markets regulated in different ways, no matter what they call themselves.
The Sherman Act is dead with this Congress and President.
They had Microsoft dead to rights and convicted, and even with a friendly neo-con court to mitigate the judgement, the Justice department let them go. Just... let them go, with a wink and a smile.
Anti-monolpoly law is dead for this generation, and possibly for all time.
Copyright. Is. Not. Property. It. Is. Not. Ownership.
Copyright is the control of the license to copy. Period.
It is not, not not NOT ownership of songs. No one owns a song. Songs do not exist in physical space. You cannot own them anymore than you can own a dream.
A song, like a dream, really exists in the mind. Attempts to own patterns in the mind are obscene.
Jefferson and the others were correct. Ideas are the property of all -- with the caveat that the originator may license copies of a idea, for a LIMITED period of time, to encourage creative people. But they never intended products of the mind to be PROPERTY.
And: the law of copyright was a compromise. Limited time, then release it to the public. The IP "owners" now have broken their side of the bargain by effectively eliminating an expiration date, thanks to the idiotically literal Supreme Court justices.
They broke their side of a two hundred+ year old bargain. They want to turn all the works of man after 1920 or so into their private property, to be bought, sold, and hoarded, forever. As far as I am concerned, the contract is void between the public and the record, movie, and book publishers, and they were the ones who voided it with their own greed and memetic manipulation. They sowed the wind. Let them reap the whirlwind.
Back in the day, as I taught myself the basics of binary arithmetic and logic gates, it amused me to think about how most of the esoteric training for programming involved thinking in two digits.
I imagined that if a stable 10-state device could exist, programming would no longer need a mathematical priesthood.
I now think in my old age that someday a stable 10-state device will come. And it will be received with all the joy of wedding guests greeting a police raid. If you take the hex out of coding, how will the elite keep out the hoi polloi?
It's not that simple,:) of course, but a lot of the arcana of programming stems from base 2.
It'll never happen, base10 computing, not in our lifetimes. But it is amusing to think of the unwashed masses waking up one day to realize that coding wasn't that hard after all...
Except, one day you would look for your marble jar after a rare night of marital carousing, and you would be informed that she had sold that stupid jar at the garage sale she held when you were out of town.
Here's the thing. How do you - at the time of the vote -- know what is actually running behind the pretty GUI?
The vendor could claim to do everything the objectors are suggesting they do. So? Are you going to run second by second checks on the servers yourself? On the clients?
It was shown that Diebold was applying "patches" to the code in one election hours before the system went live. HOW can anyone possibly know what are in Diebold's patches? Diebold considers it all their intellectual property. They consider the data of the voting results themselves their IP! They won't let an independent auditor check either the system or the data! And commercial law backs them up!
Open source won't work. They can change the code and compile and patch a cheat and no one could ever know -- by law.
And even if they dropped all IP nonsense and let everyone look at the process, even during realtime execution, who do you think is going to monitor the process? With what manpower and money? You think PAPER was expensive?
Let's face it. A computer based system is hackable. The company making it is Republican. They won't let anyone look at the system. There is infinite motivation to cheat -- trillions of dollars are at stake. Human nature dictates that they are enabling future cheats, if they aren't cheating now. We are facing a hijacking of participatory democracy, made possible by ignorance of the majority of citizens about comp sci, and by the overconfidence of comp sci people.
I know everyone is convinced that chads are the work of the devil, and caused all the problems in the 200 election, but I have to say that everyone is wrong.
There was *no* problem with "hanging chads". The voter's selection had a stick pointed in it. The stick made an indentation, or a partial hole, or a complete hole, or no impression whatsoever. The chad may or may not have been detached. Big woof if not.
The "spectacle" of judges peering at the cards was just that: spectacle. The votes were easily discernable by anyone who was not *trying* to make a fuss. The 'publicans were making a huge, screaming (literally) fuss at the counting tables. There was a non-Republican and a Republican counter at each table, so the validity of the recount was beyond question. If the voter made two choices, or none at all, it was invalid. All others were counted.
The paper ballots worked just fine. It was just politically expedient to pump confusion and hysteria into a normal recount process in order to invalidate the process in the minds of the public.
If Gore had won the initial count, the screams for a recount from the Bushies would have been deafening. This isn't a guess: the political strategy for a close race was already decided. Question the vote. Question the validity of the election, and of the man who won. They had plans for endless lawsuits.
Since Bush won, they used the opposite strategy. And they won not only a cancelled recount from the Supreme Court (well, a half-hour time limit to finish the count is a cancellation), but now the Diebold company, a major Republican player, is replacing a solid and auditable paper system with a system that is emminently cheatable -- and with no recount possible, and no audit trail.
Anyone who's even halfway suspicious of human nature would choke with laughter at the introduction of a private computer system replacing an auditable paper system.
Slashdot Mirror
"Free markets cause power blackouts? "
California. Enron. Bush White House covering by blaming environmentalists. Ideology triumphing sense. Market manipulation.
Remember California when Enron was playing with the energy spigots? It was a mildly regulated market, and they lied, cheated and stole, what, 7 billion bucks from the tax base? And the only guy to cry "thief" is being blamed for the theft, and shortly will be kicked out of office by the WH. And the thieves are laughing in Bermuda.
And that was a LITTLE BIT of manipulation. Imagine what they could have done if they hadn't been so greedy, and bled their victims dry a little bit less obviously over a longer period of time.
And they wanted to control the WATER DISTRIBUTION MARKET!! And other still do, all over the world. Oh, my aching wallet.
Free markets are never free. Adam Smith warned about inevitable monopolization of markets, and it is indeed true. Without regulation, you'd be glued to the ceiling by your Doc Martins for the rest of your life, with a big barrel underneath you for the change falling from your pocket.
Governments are in a sense altruistic, and businesses ARE NOT -- and at least you can vote a government out. Businesses are immortal beings with no moral sense, none whatsoever. Corporations exist to REMOVE responsiblity for personal choices made by the managers.
Free markets can cause a blackout. Take the '03 US blackout that darkened the midwest and the northeast: the energy company in charge of that failing equipment has cut costs for years now. Simple capitalism: spend less, make more. And the equipment ages and fails. Not to mention that there is no incentive for building new power distribution components, and certainly none for redundancy. If you have X number of lines, and they serve your needs and make profits NOW, why spend to improve when you can take the profit? And don't forget, the industry immediately had its hands out for guvmint moola to fix the grid after the blackout. They knew that if all hell broke loose, the taxpayers could be tapped to allay their repair and improvement costs. Free as in free, for them.
Infrastructure, like it or not, is really a government's province. It's the only entity that can spend money to improve power networks without worrying about this quarter's profits and the future stock price. It can repair by fiat.
Profit motivation is wonderful for improving efficiency, but it wants efficiency for RIGHT NOW, not ten years from now. The market is misdefined.
"Look at it, they rant and rave about the "M$ monopoly" throughout."
Microsoft is a legal monopoly. The finding of fact by Judge Jackson is binding and permanent.
Repeating the fact, the legal, recognized fact,the MS is a monopoly is not ranting or raving. It's simply reinforcing a point most in the IT industry would rather not hear.
And, oh yes, forgot to mention, Microsoft is a monopoly.
There is no documented slant at the places you mention, other than that perceived by, yes, the audience of Fox News.
Let me use a anecdotal example, a form very popular on the far right. I was talking with a Foxite friend of mine, who was going on about the liberal this and that person and how they should be killed, etc.
I had a flash of satori, and interrupted him.
"By liberal, do you mean absolutely everyone who doesn't agree with you on everything?"
"YES!!!!", he screamed with joy.
By this example, a real life one at that, basically everyone who doesn't agree with Rupert Murdoch and all of the far, far right wingers on the Fox News channel is a liberal.
By the exclusive definition, everyone on the planet who doesn't cover what Fox does, or doesn't slant what they do, or or slander whom they do, is "slanted".
In other words, if CBS doesn't slander Clinton at every turn, it's slanted. If a story's conclusion doesn't agree with Bush's view of the world, it's slanted. If it's not Republican, it's slanted.
There must be a psychological term for this, but bugger me if I know what it is.
I think I'll stick with the "slanted" news.
There is no "political motivation" to buck the status quo. It takes guts to tell the people of Earth that they must change their ways. There is no up side to telling people what they do not want to hear.
There is an up side to telling them what they want to hear: "Go on and do whatever you like, and don't listen to these longhaired intellectuals over there".
The vast majority of scientists qualified to hold an opinion have settled this matter as fact. They have no "political advantage" to uphold; as a matter of fact, the present administration of the US has made it abundantly clear than scientists who hold this unpopular-with-industry opinion are no longer welcome to share their opinions, or even to work for the administration.
The only "spin" here are those who want to shout down those who calmly stating the facts. The arguments against the accepted facts closely resemble those against natural selection -- ad hominem nonsense.
Um, release of CO2 into the atmosphere does increase the overall greenhouse retention of heat. This is not "unproven". Lower CO2 levels cools the planet, overall, higher levels heat it up. Venus has an atmosphere composed largely of CO2; it has a runaway greenhouse effect. The surface temperature is higher than that of Mercury.
CO2, you see, permits higher wavelengths of EM through, and blocks the lower wavelenghts of EM reradiated from the planetary surface. The precise balance of energy-in and energy-out causes either cooling or warming. Right now, the Earth is definitely warming. CO2 levels have been at elevated levels for over a hundred years. The effect of excess (for our purposes) tends to build up over time, like silt behind a dam.
I'm all for free trade myself, but sometimes a government, for the good of its people, not just the businessmen, has to take a hand to prevent a disaster -- in this case, a US monopoly dictating computing standards to the entire nation of China.
The government is doing what governments are supposed to do. Serve the interest of all, not just the interested few. By doing this, they will obviously boost their own IT sector, and free it from ruthless exploitation by a runaway US monopoly.
Remember, Microsoft no longer operates in a free market. It is a monopoly, which means it owns and controls the market, no matter how you wiggle around the term "owns".
China, it can be argued, is just leveling the field. Too bad for Bill.
The US has always used government fiat to boost its own businesses. We ignored copyright laws of other countries until the 20th century. The guv built a highway system to crush the railroad companies, build the auto giants, and create massive susburban growth to the detriment of the cities and public education therein.
It chooses winners and losers by awarding defense contracts. It controls interstate commerce. Regulates imports to benefit American interests. It now chooses who can and cannot run foreign countries. In Iraq, the administration has now served notice that the nation MUST permit foreign interests to control their public and private companies.
In comparison, China telling MS to take a hike ain't so bad.
NO. He did NOT.
Don't get your news from AM talk radio.
Not quite an RFID story, but it shows the beginning of the end of any pretense of personal liberty.
Here's a story to freeze your soul: 500 paedophiles to be tracked by satellite tags.
We give up a little liberty, over and over again. And soon there is none left.
I've made the following statement before on Slashdot, but it bears repeating.
First, we tag the pedophiles, real and imagined. This is seen as justified and is welcomed.
Then, we do it "for the children". We tag the children, for after all, they are being kidnapped continually, no? (No, they are not. And any kidnapper would cut out the tracker anyway.)
Then, we do it "for our collective safety". After all, are you for America or for al Queda? Patriot or traitor?
Then, corporate businesses will use trackers for people on the job. After all, they aren't entitled to their jobs, are they? It's a free market, and businesses don't owe people a job. If people don't like being tagged, they can move to another job, no? (No, eventually they can't. Try to get a job without taking a drug test, or having your credit report requested).
Eventually, credit card companies will require one be tagged to obtain a credit card. After all, we aren't owed a credit card, are we? It's a free world, and you don't need a credit card to live.
The military will demand trackers. Just because.
You'll be required to wear a tracker to obtain a passport.
And someday, only trackable people will be allowed into public venues. Or political rallies. Or just to drive. Because people will be used to it, they will look at anyone who objects as a hippy drug using liberal.
Think not? Try refusing a drug test sometime.
We can't allow they to establish the precendent. Listen to an old dude: once you let the bastards get that foothold, they never surrender until they own you. Power is always gained for power's own sake. People who like power are never satisfied with a little taste.
We won't be a damned bit safer with universal human tracking. Any advantage we get by tracking a lost child will be nullified by the ramifications of corporate or political malocontents being tracked and neutralized. We will not see the results of having our every move watched, because they will not be observable. What could happen, WON'T happen because people will know they are being watched. A devastating cloud of suppression is being laid down.
And remember: Bill Gates, GW Bush, or Ken Lay won't be trackable, you can bet your ass. Only the relatively powerless will be under the watchful eye of our corporate bosses.
I'm sitting here listening to TechTV's Screensavers, as Leo LaPorte isinterviewing some ex-miliary type hype a book he's written called "Black Ice". Apparently we're about to be overrun by cyberterrorists any second now.
It's sad that my hero LaPorte is taking this crud seriously. The author is strongly Bushifying the notion that the August blackout was caused by Evil Terrorists. Leo is listening with respect.
WHY? What the hell is "cyber" terrorism? Who the hell would waste their time bringing down network segments for God's cause?
Listen. Terrorism, by which I don't mean guerilla warfare a la Iraq, is a targeted attempt by a agent, not affiliated with any state, to strike FEAR into an enemy, in order to accomplish a desired result, like, say, removing American bases from Saudi Arabia. Governments do not commit terrorism. They commit war.
Terrorism is NOT just randomly destroying targets because you can. The idea is to create terror. Bringing down a network segment or clocking out a web site doesn't strike fear into bloody anyone, and doesn't accomplish anything.
If you want to create terror, you can do it with a gallon of gasoline and a timer. Terror is CHEAP, and simple. You don't need to overthink your methods. Didn't we learn ANYthing from 9-11? They didn't use superior weapons! They just did something we didn't expect, or at least Bush's brain trust couldn't.
And guess what? There hasn't been any acts of "cyberterrorism". It's a bloody stupid piece of fearmongering. If the creation of anticyberterrorist laws has any purpose besides creating a lucrative new corporate/government business to "prevent attacks", it is to create a new, Patriot Act enabled set of laws to make hacking of any sort a terrorist activity, punishable by secret imprisonment with no charges, torture, murder in secret, hell, the sky's the limit when you play on fear.
We're being bamboozled. They are going to lock down the Internet in the name of "terrorism". Remove anonymity. Track people. Keep records of all sorts for future amusing uses. Intimidate political enemies. (Scientology HQ must be wetting themselves with joy since 9-11).
Twenty five years from now, the transformed United States will look back with pride on a spotless record. The patriotic Acts will be credited for the lack of "terror".
The U.S., and probably the entire world, will be a colossal prison state. And no one will notice. They will be "safe" from the "terror" that these fear-crazed opportunists saw under every table.
This garbage almost worked in the Communist-crazy 1950's. But a largely liberal intellectual tradition in the U.S., coupled with 80 million teenagers, body-checked the police state that Nixon and the young Neo-cons were trying to create by executive order.
Now the same young loonies under Nixon are old loonies under Bush II. Faced with the lack of commies, have created a new state of terror from one set of attacks by forty mostly Saudi Arabian political cultists. Instead of showing us we are as unlikely to be killed by loonies as by lightning, they have pumped and exhorted fear into the hearts of Americans. We have become a pack of terrified sheep. We are building ourselves a prison that will last a thousand years... and we will be no "safer" behind out wall of guns and cameras than we were before.
The rest of the world, lacking the cheerleaders of bedwetting fear that the U.S.has, sees things as they really are. Some are going along with our draconian nonsense, but it seems to me they are doing so to snatch frightening new powers over their own people more than for any other reason.
It's happening because so few have the stones to tell the truth: we are creating more enemies by being afraid and striking out murderously in random directions, than by simply cooperating with the once-sympathetic world.
We're killing our own country. Bin Laden is laughing himself to death somewhere.
The thing is, the engineering work for using the Shuttle's components as a Heavy Lift Vehicle was done ... THIRTY years ago!
The space colonization and the solar power satellite people both wanted a HLV. NASA wanted an HLV. Hell, you could launch a whole industrial complex to the moon with one shot.
Yes, it is far more cost effective to build a Heavy Lift Vehicle from existing components than to retool Saturn V or reconstitute the Energia program.
What we do need, of course, is what the NASA people have wanted since the sixties. A small reusable spaceplane. An option taken from them by politics and the Air Force back in '72.
NASA wanted both the HLV and a small newer spaceplane. Aerospace companies wanted a supershuttle. Aerospace won, and now we have nothing.
Well, you are absolutely right. If you pay people to be assembly line coders, you will get assembly line code. It's what they were paid for.
Managers believe they can call up code like sixfoot sections of drain pipe. Fine. Let the experiment commence.
The "damage" was not caused by the greed and recklessness of the Nineties! It's being caused by the greed of TODAY, dammit.
The sucking sound of jobs going to China is NOT caused by the "bad" policies of the Clinton era. It's being caused because of the greed of managers right now. Today.
The software giants are making billions! They are moving operations overseas just to make MORE billions than they are making now. Not because of bad political theories. Because they are greedy, greedy, GREEDY. Microsoft is leading the charge for offshoring the labor. Because of evil politicians? Because of a struggling bottom line? COME ON! Bill wants more billions! That is freaking IT.
Because of cost accounting fictions. It depends on how you define the costs.
The manufacturers of goods and the outsourcers of IT jobs don't pay the downside of unemployment. That is shifted to the general public.
If property taxes have to go up, or welfare has to be increased, or unemployment or COBRA costs go sky high, the companies which had a hand in those costs don't get a bill. We do, one way or another.
The free market is not free. It is manipulated and gamed so that benefits accrue to those who have offshifted the costs of their own profit.
"no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia; "
I know of no clothes made in the USA.
"if you go into your garage and find a ca not made in Mexico;"
There are NO cars manufactured wholly in the U.S. Overseas parts are common.
"if you look on your entertainment rack and find goods made in the first world, not in the third."
First, why would I look for European-made electronics (First World)? Secondly, I don't believe there are any entertainment systems made wholly in the U.S. Zot. None. I'm speaking of what they are made of, BTW, not where they are assembled. The last TV was made in the U.S. over ten years ago. There is no entertainment electronics industry in the U.S.
Hell, a good chuck of the electronics used in our armed forces are made in China! Missle guidance. Lasers. Satellite. We are at the mercy of overseas goverments for replacement parts.
All for $$$$.
Any government regulation doesn't automatically create a "socialist style gov't". The American labor market has been regulated by laws since we've been Americans. What do you think slavery was? Indentured servitude? Naval impressment? All of those were massive government regulation of labor costs, backed up with guns and prisons.
Socialism != government regulation. This is sloppy semantics that is the direct result of over a hundred years of hard-core rightists debasing the language.
There isn't a socialist government in the entire world. Nor a communist one. What we have are free markets regulated in different ways, no matter what they call themselves.
Thanks, Rush.
The Sherman Act is dead with this Congress and President.
They had Microsoft dead to rights and convicted, and even with a friendly neo-con court to mitigate the judgement, the Justice department let them go. Just... let them go, with a wink and a smile.
Anti-monolpoly law is dead for this generation, and possibly for all time.
.07 cents. Not 7 cents. 7/100 of a cent.
Copyright. Is. Not. Property. It. Is. Not. Ownership.
Copyright is the control of the license to copy. Period.
It is not, not not NOT ownership of songs. No one owns a song. Songs do not exist in physical space. You cannot own them anymore than you can own a dream.
A song, like a dream, really exists in the mind. Attempts to own patterns in the mind are obscene.
Jefferson and the others were correct. Ideas are the property of all -- with the caveat that the originator may license copies of a idea, for a LIMITED period of time, to encourage creative people. But they never intended products of the mind to be PROPERTY.
And: the law of copyright was a compromise. Limited time, then release it to the public. The IP "owners" now have broken their side of the bargain by effectively eliminating an expiration date, thanks to the idiotically literal Supreme Court justices.
They broke their side of a two hundred+ year old bargain. They want to turn all the works of man after 1920 or so into their private property, to be bought, sold, and hoarded, forever. As far as I am concerned, the contract is void between the public and the record, movie, and book publishers, and they were the ones who voided it with their own greed and memetic manipulation. They sowed the wind. Let them reap the whirlwind.
Back in the day, as I taught myself the basics of binary arithmetic and logic gates, it amused me to think about how most of the esoteric training for programming involved thinking in two digits.
:) of course, but a lot of the arcana of programming stems from base 2.
I imagined that if a stable 10-state device could exist, programming would no longer need a mathematical priesthood.
I now think in my old age that someday a stable 10-state device will come. And it will be received with all the joy of wedding guests greeting a police raid. If you take the hex out of coding, how will the elite keep out the hoi polloi?
It's not that simple,
It'll never happen, base10 computing, not in our lifetimes. But it is amusing to think of the unwashed masses waking up one day to realize that coding wasn't that hard after all...
Separation of which church from the State? People always forget that implied aspect.
Consumerism isn't a replacement for a religion. It's just one of the thousands of different flavors.
Seriously, its hard to take adulthood seriously when people won't get married without a diamond.
Except, one day you would look for your marble jar after a rare night of marital carousing, and you would be informed that she had sold that stupid jar at the garage sale she held when you were out of town.
That is marriage, too.
I am really, really tired of people abusing the moderator system by using points to demote posts they disagree with.
You can't moderate my post as "overrated" if it wasn't rated in the first place.
If you disagree with a post, state your objections like an adult. Don't use your MP as political weaponry.
Win at any costs, huh?
Here's the thing. How do you - at the time of the vote -- know what is actually running behind the pretty GUI?
The vendor could claim to do everything the objectors are suggesting they do. So? Are you going to run second by second checks on the servers yourself? On the clients?
It was shown that Diebold was applying "patches" to the code in one election hours before the system went live. HOW can anyone possibly know what are in Diebold's patches? Diebold considers it all their intellectual property. They consider the data of the voting results themselves their IP! They won't let an independent auditor check either the system or the data! And commercial law backs them up!
Open source won't work. They can change the code and compile and patch a cheat and no one could ever know -- by law.
And even if they dropped all IP nonsense and let everyone look at the process, even during realtime execution, who do you think is going to monitor the process? With what manpower and money? You think PAPER was expensive?
Let's face it. A computer based system is hackable. The company making it is Republican. They won't let anyone look at the system. There is infinite motivation to cheat -- trillions of dollars are at stake. Human nature dictates that they are enabling future cheats, if they aren't cheating now. We are facing a hijacking of participatory democracy, made possible by ignorance of the majority of citizens about comp sci, and by the overconfidence of comp sci people.
I know everyone is convinced that chads are the work of the devil, and caused all the problems in the 200 election, but I have to say that everyone is wrong.
There was *no* problem with "hanging chads". The voter's selection had a stick pointed in it. The stick made an indentation, or a partial hole, or a complete hole, or no impression whatsoever. The chad may or may not have been detached. Big woof if not.
The "spectacle" of judges peering at the cards was just that: spectacle. The votes were easily discernable by anyone who was not *trying* to make a fuss. The 'publicans were making a huge, screaming (literally) fuss at the counting tables. There was a non-Republican and a Republican counter at each table, so the validity of the recount was beyond question. If the voter made two choices, or none at all, it was invalid. All others were counted.
The paper ballots worked just fine. It was just politically expedient to pump confusion and hysteria into a normal recount process in order to invalidate the process in the minds of the public.
If Gore had won the initial count, the screams for a recount from the Bushies would have been deafening. This isn't a guess: the political strategy for a close race was already decided. Question the vote. Question the validity of the election, and of the man who won. They had plans for endless lawsuits.
Since Bush won, they used the opposite strategy. And they won not only a cancelled recount from the Supreme Court (well, a half-hour time limit to finish the count is a cancellation), but now the Diebold company, a major Republican player, is replacing a solid and auditable paper system with a system that is emminently cheatable -- and with no recount possible, and no audit trail.
Anyone who's even halfway suspicious of human nature would choke with laughter at the introduction of a private computer system replacing an auditable paper system.