Goodness, the people who are invested in that "Gore said he invented the Internet" BS quote are abusing the moderation system. Big surprise. If you believe is spreading a lie for political purposes, it's not a problem to use mod points to squish the people who point out the lie.
Sooo, slamming three airliners into buildings was a natural and inevitable part of being part of the animal kingdom.
Saying killing is natural doesn't absolve the bearers of violence from moral judgement. The argument "man is naturally violent" doesn't excuse murdering thousands of people in three buildings -- nor does it exuse our leaders, and our military, from judgement about, say, lying about threats in order to sack a nation's oil supply, while wiping out a few thousand people.
We may be animals, but we are also men. If you want to live by "nature's law", let yourself be airdropped naked into some remote jungle without food or weaponry. If you want to live in a civilization, like a human being, you abide by laws which hold the military up to the same judgement for its actions as an individual man would for his own.
Gore never said that. It was a lovely smear by his enemies, though. The accusation stands up to all the truth hurled at it. Some beliefs are stronger than mere reality.
Re:Who's got the time?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
Oh, I wasn't impugning his g-friending ability. Sorry if I gave that impression.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What you say is true -- on the average. However, individuals deviate from the curve.
Also, there is a fallacy there about the biological "fact" you cite. You give no numbers. You imply that after 35, a person's cognitive ability drops so dramatically, so quickly, that they are unemployable compared to the non-impaired yunguns.
Actually, on the average, cognitive ability drops in a slow, sloooowwwww curve that takes decades to really show a difference. The difference between a 20 year old coder and a 35 year old coder, brain-biologically speaking, is damned near non-existent. Actually, since the 35 year old has 15 more years of experience, his brain can smoke, char, flame, annihilate and flambe the 20 year old.
The real fact is that the 20 year old will never acknowledge that the Old Guy is smarter. The difference between the 20 and 35 year old is how each of them (and the management!) judges ability.
A 20 year old, to keep to the stereotype, judges acuity in the abilities to keep up with trends, chat, game, and all the other things that he finds important. Since those things are not important to the older person, they can never measure up.
The 35 year old, however, measures acuity in more than just being current. They have seasoned judgement, perspective, and have witnessed a lot more pain than the kid has.
When I was 20, I never would have believed any of this, but having gone thru the wringer, I do have the perspective to understand what is important, and what is trivial.
Back to point: your biological fact also omits that the decline after 35 is for the population as a whole. Fallacy. A person who thinks for a living keeps their faculties sharper longer. So a coding 35 year old is a lot sharper, in programming, anyway, than the average 35 year old is.
Re:Who's got the time?
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
I'm an Old Guy, and I do have the time to waste -- more than my younger counterparts, who are timesharing themselves amongst work, video gaming, role playing, live action role playing, renn fairing, amptgarding, more role playing, eating, watching TV, and occasionally girls, who tend to take up ALL their time. I don't know when these boys sleep. Some don't.
Point is, they don't spend all their time on coding - never did.
Now ME, the old guy who isn't welcome at the LARPin', has all the time in the world to learn new languages and code -- yep, no wife or kids.
Thing is, this fact is uncommunicable to an interviewer.
My opinion? The interviewer is looking for a social fit -- hobbywise, language, politics, all the things that people share at work -- more than he is looking for a technical fit. At one outfit my girlfriend worked at, it was more important to be a Star Wars RPGer at the company SWRPG played everyday in the cafeteria than to turn in good code. Good code, bad code, whatever, just make the right decisions when the Stormtroopers raid your base.
It's all about assumptions. They are frequently invalid. Young people less distractable than older ones? Nyuh uh.
A lot of conservatives (or just plain press haters) hate the NYT. The admin surely hates them: they actually investigate charges.
It has been an aim of the far right to discredit the NYT for some time now. Apparently, someone finally found a chink in the armor, and they are HAMMERING it on right wing cable news. They got their wish: a single (sometimes) lying reporter has been turned into the destruction of the paper's reputation.
This makes no sense. Papers have had plaigiarizing reporters discovered every year. Why the Times?
Newspapers, and some news rooms like CBS, still, are the only -- ONLY -- source of independent investigative journalism in this country. There is nothing else standing between you and fascism taking the stage.
To discredit and hound these papers is the wet dream of men who want to rule without oversight. It has been their dream since the Washington Post got the goods on Nixon.
Those who want newspapers as independent and trusted news source discredited are the same who want to create faux news sources, with stories supporting their world view only. Can we say Rupert Murdoch? Fox News, your source for unsourced biased lying?
Nope. Only about 80 million boomers were born. Of that number, many have died. There are about 300 million people in this country.
The boomers are exceptional in that they were the first huge bulge in the American population stream. There have been others: the boom echoes, and the present explosion in the hispanic population which shows no sign of slowing down much.
Boomers will cause the first enormous explosive growth in senior citizens, which is why the de facto elimination of Social Security and other funding will cause such a disruption in the next 10+ years. Population bombs echo for generations.
An "impeachment" is not a conviction or finding of wrongdoing. An impeachment is an accusation.
To "be impeached" is to be accused of a crime by the assembled Congress. Clinton was not convicted: he was not removed.
Impeachment is not a conviction. This confusion of terms was intentional by Clinton's enemies, and has infected the body politic. It is a murder of language, and a calculated one.
Clinton was accused of shading the truth (he didn't lie: he asked for a definition of sex from the judge, who told him intercourse. He'd had oral sex, which gave him an out.
Clinton was simply smarter than the criminals --leaking special prosecutor info is a crime -- who had set him up on a hearing concerning another setup - Paula Jones.
Starr and his elves had found out about Lewinsky the night before the PJ deposition. Clinton knew they knew, so it was a battle of wits with Clinton packing a rocket launcher, and his tormenters armed with a Rush Limbaugh slingshot.
The pieces of work from Starr's office told the judge that Lewinsky's affair with Clinton was pertinent to the Jones deposition. It wasn't. They merely wanted to get Clinton under oath, where he would be forced to make a choice: lie about his sex life, or tell the truth and wreck his personal and public life.
Clinton was smarter than that, and chose the third option: narrow the definition of sex, and then truthfully deny having that kind of sexx described by the judge. He simply was a better lawyer and a better man than the men who lied to the judge about the relevance of Lewinsky to the Jones case.
Of course, Clinton was fined for outsmarting his tormenters. And his witchhunters got away clean with lying to the judge, and got the only real "scandal" they could get after seven long years of trying to find anything other than unsupportable BS from his enemies to charge him with.
The Repubs, and some really stupid f-ing Demos, decided to give this pack of rabid misusers of a tax-paid prosecution the impeachment (accusation) they so achingly wanted.
The combined Congress realized they were being asked to remove a President for getting a blowjob. Sanity broke out.
Flashforward to today: a sitting President fantasized a dire enemy in a ruined country around the world. He lied and lied about the imminent threat to the US. He got his war, killing tens of thousands of men in pickup trucks and T-shirts. He maimed possibly hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.He wrecked the power grid, cut off food for millions of helpless people.
Evidence for his fantasy was nonexistent both before and after the "war" (attack of Starship Troopers vs. the Flintstones). His people profit handsomely from the occupation.
And no one says "impeachment".
A blow job from an intern is more impeachable than the ideologically based murder of tens of thousands, and the theft of a country.
Former FCC chairman: Deregulation is a right-wing power grab
Reed Hundt says Monday's historic vote is "the culmination of the attack by the right on the media."
By Eric Boehlert
May 31, 2003 | The Federal Communications Commission will meet in Washington on Monday for a historic vote on the future of media ownership in the United States. By all accounts, the Republican-dominated commission will ease long-standing rules so that more and more of the nations newspapers and broadcast stations can be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Underlying that agenda, Clinton-era FCC chairman Reed Hundt sees something more primal unfolding: an extraordinary conservative power grab that could shape the political landscape for generations.
For all the philosophical conflict over diversity in the media and the efficiency of the free market, Hunt told Salon this week, the vote is really about an alliance of interests between the political right and the corporate media. "Conservatives," he said, "hope... that the major media will be their friends."
In today's political and media environment, there's plenty of evidence that those hopes will come true. ABC News recently appointed conservative commentator John Stossel to co-host its primetime magazine "20/20." "These are conservative times...," an ABC source told TV Guide. "The network wants somebody to match the times."
The FCC's two Democrats have strongly opposed the deregulation measure that's been pushed by current FCC chairman Michael Powell, a close ally of the Bush White House, and public response to the proposal has been heavily opposed. But Hundt's radical critique is all the more striking because he is an establishment lawyer thoroughly versed in the diplomatic niceties of high government office. He attended prep school with Al Gore and law school with Bill Clinton and served as FCC chairman under Clinton from 1993 to 1997. He is now a senior advisor at McKinsey and Co., the international consulting firm.
The FCC has long had rules regulating media ownership, based on the assumption that the number of broadcast frequencies is limited. The regulations were designed to ensure that radio and television stations remained diverse, independent voices and could withstand predatory conglomerates. But on Monday the FCC is expected to dump those rules.
A company like the News Corp., owned by conservative world-media mogul Rupert Murdoch, will be able to hold newspapers, television stations and radio stations in the same market. Conglomerates such as the News Corp. (Fox TV, Fox News, Fox Sports, 20th Century Fox Studio, the New York Post, HarperCollins Publishers) and Viacom (CBS, MTV, Paramount Studios and the Infinity radio network), would be allowed to snatch up more and more local TV affiliate stations nationwide. And, critics say, small and medium-size broadcast companies and newspaper publishers will likely be swallowed up by bigger competitors.
In the telephone interview Wednesday, Hundt warned that the massive media deregulation will exacerbate the dangerously close relationship that's emerged between sprawling U.S. media companies and the government. "If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today," he said, "he'd be warning us about the dangers of the military-industry-media complex."
During Hundt's term as FCC chairman, the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed. As originally drafted by Republicans in Congress, the legislation would have virtually stripped away all media-ownership limits. In the end, Clinton signed into law a compromise version that allowed only the radio industry to be deregulated.
At the time, Hundt was among the few to warn of the consequences. The new laws would allow "a few companies to buy all the radio licenses in the country," he said then. "I don't believe that's good for this industry or for this country."
Try reading Adam Smith sometime. He not only laid out the market rules for business: he laid out warnings for monopoly and abuse, and the need to control business to prevent such.
Capitalism is a zero sum game. A GAME, not a way of life. We live in a real world, and we need to control gamers so that they do not own everything worth owning, including our futures.
A privately owned network can not only freeze out competition and hike prices. It can progressively control free expression on its network, clamping down on opposing voices and smothering democracy.
I'll take this one, begging the original poster's pardon.
How does what you say have any basis in fairness or common sense
Whenever I see the phrase "common sense", I mentally reach for a shotgun.
What you say makes "sense", if you selective the proper facts and ignore all others that contradict you. It's not common sense, or economics: it's economic theology.
A private company is not an entity in a pure economic thought experiment.
For one, Verizon is government subsidized. Yes, I said they are welfare recipients. For, every dollar they weepingly spend on infrastructure, they DEDUCT FROM THEIR TAXES. When you or I buy a car to go to work, we don't deduct the finance charges, actual payments, refinancing costs, or debt sale costs that Verizon does. Verizon gets this government handout so that it may... actually, I never did understand why. They are powerful, and they get to do this. Period.
Secondly, if Verizon screws up, they DEDUCT THEIR LOSSES FROM THEIR INCOME TAXES. The "risk" that they take is government insured, because the taxpayers will be further taxed to make up for the money Verizon will not pay if they screw up.
Third, Verizon may or may not be granted tax relief from local governments for installing various doodads. Another taxpayer-paid welfare grant.
Fourth, when you create a network that is essentially granted to you by access and rate giveaways by the Federal government, you can set up an effective monopoly -- not only over physical infrastructure, but over the content that is provided over that network. Powell has many times indicated that political bias is hokey-dokey in a medium, because so many other media exist to balance it. So, an ISP who is also a provider can control the messages going over its network. Not only a physical monopoly, but a political one as well. Somehow this would be a bigger showstopper for Powell if that bias was not hard-right, I think.
Now, this monopoly does not have to exist. But Powell's economic theology insists that it must, because, like most libertarians, ignores all factors that do not bear on the illusion of a clean sheet economic problem, ie, a company provides a service, competition can try to compete, all is good. His ideology ignores back room dealings (mainly because he is a consummate backroom artist, being a lobbiest for the telecom companies in his off time!), nasty business manipulation, predatory pricing, in short, all the nasty, dirty tricks that were rampant in the old Standard Oil trust days that have come again.
And, the standard isn't recouping investment. Businesses are there to take over a market, not make back their money. They have no limits.
Private busineses are there to steal a much as possible. This is balanced by government elected by the people which regulates the rascals.
What has happened is that Bush's people have appointed the industry lobbyists to be the regulators of the industries they represent. The rights of the people to actual competition for services is being ignored: businesses are treated as feudal lords who should bear no oversight.
Do you actually think a private company would control who or what drives on a road in a less obsessive fashion than an elected government?
How do you vote the company out of office?
Think of this: a few months ago, a man who bought a peace-now T-shirt in a mall was arrested - ARRESTED - because he refused to take it off.
Apparently over the last 80 years, several stupidly pro-biz Supreme Court decisions have made businesses lords and gods of their private countries. First amendment rights do not apply in a mall, despite the appearance of the space being public. It is not.
A road-owning business would have the right to control the bumperstickers, the models of cars, the types of people in the cars, the years of the cars, the ages of the owners of the cars, the amount of money paid by the cars -- in fact, damned near anything they want to control, they would. And experience shows that business owners slant hard-right when it comes to free speech.
Picture you on a bright afternoon, rolling down Private Interstate 233, with a anti-presidential bumpersticker proudly displayed on your car.
"The problem with the idea of endless worker slavery is that it ignores the fact that eventually labor is no longer plentiful and companies bid up the price on it as much as any other business input. Beyond that, labor does tend to differentiate its pricing based on worker treatment. If you have two equivalently paid jobs, the one that features working for a bad boss will simply not be your choice.
Good treatment of workers lowers labor costs and more and more businesses are figuring that out. "
This would work, if it was a perfect world. You are assuming the Invisible Hand permits a worker to move wherever he needs to; you must assume he has a working vehicle that can move him long distances if necessary. You assume the worker can, after rent and car and medical, can save enough money to switch jobs, with the attendent delay between paychecks.
And you must factor in having a family to support. They need not only food, but stability. Changing jobs and moving every six months is not an option when the kids are in school.
And also, factor in being married. You can't willy-nilly move around the country when your wife or husband has a paying job.
And factor in this: only about 1 in 4 people get a college education. A small percentage of those in turn will not be in careers, like IT, that permit job shopping for advancement.
And factor in: if you have any medical conidtion, at all, you most likely will not be covered under the insurance at your new job. Preexisting condition.
Worker slavery? Yep. Left to their own devices, corporations will shape all ends to their goals. And they are. They want us lower paid, with sinking benefits, locked to the job, and fireable at the least excuse. And no unions, please.
Sorry to be negative, but it is true. Worker choice, for the vast majority, is shrinking to non-exisitence.
" (which begs the question why 'killall Neo' doesn't work but thats besides the point;) "
Because it wouldn't work:)
The machines have a weakness which only now occurs to me: they are deterministic by nature! They only can see the world in strictly cause and effect terms. Their philosophy doesn't believe in free will, because they don't have it -- don't understand it -- and will try endlessly to fit human thought to their way of thinking.
They will always claim that Neo never really has a choice. They don't believe he does.
But they don't try to explain why Neo has deviated from the behavior of his predecessors other than the fact that in this incarnation, he is in love with one person. (and has no problem with killing thousands of pink blobs by shockwaving the city as he moves through it at 100,000 miles an hour to save her).
They archly dismiss his love as chemical receptors in the brain, and deny him his humanity by denying his ability to choose becaues of his love for her.
BUT: His love for her actually broke the Neo Loop! Volition DID change cause and effect. The machines decide, by their nature, that he has simply entered another level of cause and effect.
Keep in mind that the Architect has motive to lie. There have been a hell of a lot of lies told to Neo, and Morpheus, and all of the humans in the world.
It seems what the Architect was primarily trying to do was convince Neo that although he has a choice of doors, he never has a choice at all. "I can see the chemical receptors", etc. A pretty interesting comment, considering that the Architect has no way of detecting the real state of Neo's brain, if what Neo has been told is true. "Neo" is just an avatar of a mentality that is supposedly out of the machines' domain.
So the Architect is trying to convince Neo that he has no choices, only the ability to understand why he makes those choices.
Not to mention that perhaps Neo can make a choice that the Architect doesn't want him to make. Neo was offered two doors, one on the left, and one on the right. Why only two? The doors aren't even really there. Neo's weakness is in his acceptance of the limits to his choices. Perhaps he should have tried to hack the Architect, or the Mainframe, or the root command level he apparently was accessing when he was talking to the Architect.
Instead, he chose thr Trinity door, and Zion 5.0 was fated to fall.
Neo has to stop accepting "facts" given to him ex cathedra, and start generating some new questions. Give him time, it's only been a few months since he woke up, and he's been very busy. Come the Revolutions, he'll hack those smug machines by asking questions no one wanted to ask -- and getting some answers.
Zion isn't what is seems. Neither are the machines, or the Matrix, or the Desert of the Real.
Which is not theft. Theft is the deprivation of property. Coyright infringement is not theft. It is the creation of a copy not licensed by the copyright holder. No property is taken away. No money is stolen.
This point is lost on corporate media, tho I hate to use that phrase. If I hear TechTV anchors report on "pirates" and "theft" one more time, I'm cancelling my cable...
The use of the word "theft" is a semantic assault on reason. It's the hijacking of a emotion caused by the word "theft" and assigning that hijacked reaction to a completely different word, "copying". It's a lie, a manipulation, a fraud.
Not to mention yet another assault on the English language. If the word "theft" can be reassigned at will, then precision of thought itself is ruined.
Note that today the Texas Republicans are calling the rebellious Democrats "terrorists". That is another, and far more ominous, manipulation of the language for fraudulent purposes. If the Democrats are "terrorists", then anti-terrorist laws and emotions apply to them. Such a misuse of the word "terrorist" was slated to happen, once the Patriot Act was created.
BTW, FYI: Homeland Security was used to track the absent Democrats, thus demonstrating that the "civil libertarians", AKA sane people, were right about the danger of a homeland spy agency that was intended to track terrorists. Now it is being used by Rep. Delaney to hunt down politcal foes of his party. But that's okay: they're terrorists, aren't they?
Words are the ultimate power. Control words, you control thinking.
It does in the U.S. That Finding of Fact is permanent, legal, and binding. Their is no room for opinion: they are a monopoly. They must play by monopolist rules, which means they can't use the the market power and the wealth generated by that monopoly to dominate new markets.
The reason we do it that way is to prevent a total takeover, horizontally and vertially, of all markets by a small number of supercorporations, or even just ONE corporation.
If such laws were not passed early in the 20th century, Standard Oil would probably own all of the major businesses in the U.S. today.
Antitrust varies from country to country, and frankly we don't really bother to enforce ours, during this admin. So other countries by default have stronger laws.
It may not be an uncommon business practice, but it is an illegal one if the business is a monopoly.
Which is why Gates hates those laws. And ignores them at every turn.
And it seems they don't apply to him anymore, give Ashcroft's utter surrender in the face of victory when the U.S. finally won the antitrust case. So I guess that Microsoft really doesn't need to follow any laws it finds philosophically aborhent.
"Sun is willing to give OpenOffice away for free, and they even will happily give you the source code. What exactly is the difference between giving away OpenOffice and giving away Microsoft Office?"
The power of monopoly. And the fact it is illegal to use the wealth and power from one monopoly to create another.
Actually, solar power in many regions of the country could be "too cheap to meter". That isn't a speculation, it's a much-proven fact.
And solar equipment is expensive because economies of scale haven't kicked in. It could be cheap to buy. It hasn't had the enormous taxpayer investment that oil companies have enjoyed, if you use real cost accounting that takes into effect the roads, harbors, sanctions, and wars that taxpayers paid for.
And oil companies have indeedy bought up solar power patents and companies, and have shut them down in many cases. And other things as well: I've read (true?) that Texaco has bought up the IP regarding nickel-metal hydride battery technology.
Economies of scale and real technological progress (if it were ever funded properly!) would have made power "too cheap to meter" in sunny states, and probably moderated costs in the gloomier ones as well.
That hasn't happened because power and oil companies don't want it to happen, and ideological fanatics have taken over the Federal government who are ferociously opposed to changing the status quo.
Nuclear reactors, indeed. A cheap solar array, built into new homes roofs, and a nice NMH battery array would provide enough power to keep an electric car running for FREE, and keep some lights on in the house as well. People do this NOW, and are quite happy with the arrangement.
It isn't happening on a large scale because wealthy interests and radically conservative (?) politicians and citizens don't want it to happen.
And I do love the idea of a proto-antiInternet springing up. It can be done, and it will be done, if the men with the jackboots don't show up to stomp the hands of people trying to do it.
Well, try not to think of the network as competitive with the Internet in terms of current usability. Think of it more as an email or chat network, equivalent to the original USENET or IRC.
The cool thing is that it won't be under the control of future uber-Ashcrofts or RIAA.
And speed will increase. Lasers will become cheaper, and software-driven transceivers could make "interference" a non-issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I think I've actually done something very much like that.
But, beware those 19 year old nymphomaniacs. They can take it out of a man.
Goodness, the people who are invested in that "Gore said he invented the Internet" BS quote are abusing the moderation system. Big surprise. If you believe is spreading a lie for political purposes, it's not a problem to use mod points to squish the people who point out the lie.
Sooo, slamming three airliners into buildings was a natural and inevitable part of being part of the animal kingdom.
Saying killing is natural doesn't absolve the bearers of violence from moral judgement. The argument "man is naturally violent" doesn't excuse murdering thousands of people in three buildings -- nor does it exuse our leaders, and our military, from judgement about, say, lying about threats in order to sack a nation's oil supply, while wiping out a few thousand people.
We may be animals, but we are also men. If you want to live by "nature's law", let yourself be airdropped naked into some remote jungle without food or weaponry. If you want to live in a civilization, like a human being, you abide by laws which hold the military up to the same judgement for its actions as an individual man would for his own.
Gore never said that. It was a lovely smear by his enemies, though. The accusation stands up to all the truth hurled at it. Some beliefs are stronger than mere reality.
Oh, I wasn't impugning his g-friending ability. Sorry if I gave that impression.
What you say is true -- on the average. However, individuals deviate from the curve.
Also, there is a fallacy there about the biological "fact" you cite. You give no numbers. You imply that after 35, a person's cognitive ability drops so dramatically, so quickly, that they are unemployable compared to the non-impaired yunguns.
Actually, on the average, cognitive ability drops in a slow, sloooowwwww curve that takes decades to really show a difference. The difference between a 20 year old coder and a 35 year old coder, brain-biologically speaking, is damned near non-existent. Actually, since the 35 year old has 15 more years of experience, his brain can smoke, char, flame, annihilate and flambe the 20 year old.
The real fact is that the 20 year old will never acknowledge that the Old Guy is smarter. The difference between the 20 and 35 year old is how each of them (and the management!) judges ability.
A 20 year old, to keep to the stereotype, judges acuity in the abilities to keep up with trends, chat, game, and all the other things that he finds important. Since those things are not important to the older person, they can never measure up.
The 35 year old, however, measures acuity in more than just being current. They have seasoned judgement, perspective, and have witnessed a lot more pain than the kid has.
When I was 20, I never would have believed any of this, but having gone thru the wringer, I do have the perspective to understand what is important, and what is trivial.
Back to point: your biological fact also omits that the decline after 35 is for the population as a whole. Fallacy. A person who thinks for a living keeps their faculties sharper longer. So a coding 35 year old is a lot sharper, in programming, anyway, than the average 35 year old is.
I'm an Old Guy, and I do have the time to waste -- more than my younger counterparts, who are timesharing themselves amongst work, video gaming, role playing, live action role playing, renn fairing, amptgarding, more role playing, eating, watching TV, and occasionally girls, who tend to take up ALL their time. I don't know when these boys sleep. Some don't.
Point is, they don't spend all their time on coding - never did.
Now ME, the old guy who isn't welcome at the LARPin', has all the time in the world to learn new languages and code -- yep, no wife or kids.
Thing is, this fact is uncommunicable to an interviewer.
My opinion? The interviewer is looking for a social fit -- hobbywise, language, politics, all the things that people share at work -- more than he is looking for a technical fit. At one outfit my girlfriend worked at, it was more important to be a Star Wars RPGer at the company SWRPG played everyday in the cafeteria than to turn in good code. Good code, bad code, whatever, just make the right decisions when the Stormtroopers raid your base.
It's all about assumptions. They are frequently invalid. Young people less distractable than older ones? Nyuh uh.
A few years ago, a Scientology critic joked about hitting one of their compounds with a Tom Cruise Missle.
I believe he's still trying to get political asylum in Canada. No joke. Haven't heard much lately about the poor bugger.
It was one stinking writer. Geez.
A lot of conservatives (or just plain press haters) hate the NYT. The admin surely hates them: they actually investigate charges.
It has been an aim of the far right to discredit the NYT for some time now. Apparently, someone finally found a chink in the armor, and they are HAMMERING it on right wing cable news. They got their wish: a single (sometimes) lying reporter has been turned into the destruction of the paper's reputation.
This makes no sense. Papers have had plaigiarizing reporters discovered every year. Why the Times?
Newspapers, and some news rooms like CBS, still, are the only -- ONLY -- source of independent investigative journalism in this country. There is nothing else standing between you and fascism taking the stage.
To discredit and hound these papers is the wet dream of men who want to rule without oversight. It has been their dream since the Washington Post got the goods on Nixon.
Those who want newspapers as independent and trusted news source discredited are the same who want to create faux news sources, with stories supporting their world view only. Can we say Rupert Murdoch? Fox News, your source for unsourced biased lying?
Nope. Only about 80 million boomers were born. Of that number, many have died. There are about 300 million people in this country.
The boomers are exceptional in that they were the first huge bulge in the American population stream. There have been others: the boom echoes, and the present explosion in the hispanic population which shows no sign of slowing down much.
Boomers will cause the first enormous explosive growth in senior citizens, which is why the de facto elimination of Social Security and other funding will cause such a disruption in the next 10+ years. Population bombs echo for generations.
An "impeachment" is not a conviction or finding of wrongdoing. An impeachment is an accusation.
To "be impeached" is to be accused of a crime by the assembled Congress. Clinton was not convicted: he was not removed.
Impeachment is not a conviction. This confusion of terms was intentional by Clinton's enemies, and has infected the body politic. It is a murder of language, and a calculated one.
Clinton was accused of shading the truth (he didn't lie: he asked for a definition of sex from the judge, who told him intercourse. He'd had oral sex, which gave him an out.
Clinton was simply smarter than the criminals --leaking special prosecutor info is a crime -- who had set him up on a hearing concerning another setup - Paula Jones.
Starr and his elves had found out about Lewinsky the night before the PJ deposition. Clinton knew they knew, so it was a battle of wits with Clinton packing a rocket launcher, and his tormenters armed with a Rush Limbaugh slingshot.
The pieces of work from Starr's office told the judge that Lewinsky's affair with Clinton was pertinent to the Jones deposition. It wasn't. They merely wanted to get Clinton under oath, where he would be forced to make a choice: lie about his sex life, or tell the truth and wreck his personal and public life.
Clinton was smarter than that, and chose the third option: narrow the definition of sex, and then truthfully deny having that kind of sexx described by the judge. He simply was a better lawyer and a better man than the men who lied to the judge about the relevance of Lewinsky to the Jones case.
Of course, Clinton was fined for outsmarting his tormenters. And his witchhunters got away clean with lying to the judge, and got the only real "scandal" they could get after seven long years of trying to find anything other than unsupportable BS from his enemies to charge him with.
The Repubs, and some really stupid f-ing Demos, decided to give this pack of rabid misusers of a tax-paid prosecution the impeachment (accusation) they so achingly wanted.
The combined Congress realized they were being asked to remove a President for getting a blowjob. Sanity broke out.
Flashforward to today: a sitting President fantasized a dire enemy in a ruined country around the world. He lied and lied about the imminent threat to the US. He got his war, killing tens of thousands of men in pickup trucks and T-shirts. He maimed possibly hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children.He wrecked the power grid, cut off food for millions of helpless people.
Evidence for his fantasy was nonexistent both before and after the "war" (attack of Starship Troopers vs. the Flintstones). His people profit handsomely from the occupation.
And no one says "impeachment".
A blow job from an intern is more impeachable than the ideologically based murder of tens of thousands, and the theft of a country.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/31/fcc/i ndex.html
... that the major media will be their friends."
Former FCC chairman: Deregulation is a right-wing power grab
Reed Hundt says Monday's historic vote is "the culmination of the attack by the right on the media."
By Eric Boehlert
May 31, 2003 | The Federal Communications Commission will meet in Washington on Monday for a historic vote on the future of media ownership in the United States. By all accounts, the Republican-dominated commission will ease long-standing rules so that more and more of the nations newspapers and broadcast stations can be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Underlying that agenda, Clinton-era FCC chairman Reed Hundt sees something more primal unfolding: an extraordinary conservative power grab that could shape the political landscape for generations.
For all the philosophical conflict over diversity in the media and the efficiency of the free market, Hunt told Salon this week, the vote is really about an alliance of interests between the political right and the corporate media. "Conservatives," he said, "hope
In today's political and media environment, there's plenty of evidence that those hopes will come true. ABC News recently appointed conservative commentator John Stossel to co-host its primetime magazine "20/20." "These are conservative times...," an ABC source told TV Guide. "The network wants somebody to match the times."
The FCC's two Democrats have strongly opposed the deregulation measure that's been pushed by current FCC chairman Michael Powell, a close ally of the Bush White House, and public response to the proposal has been heavily opposed. But Hundt's radical critique is all the more striking because he is an establishment lawyer thoroughly versed in the diplomatic niceties of high government office. He attended prep school with Al Gore and law school with Bill Clinton and served as FCC chairman under Clinton from 1993 to 1997. He is now a senior advisor at McKinsey and Co., the international consulting firm.
The FCC has long had rules regulating media ownership, based on the assumption that the number of broadcast frequencies is limited. The regulations were designed to ensure that radio and television stations remained diverse, independent voices and could withstand predatory conglomerates. But on Monday the FCC is expected to dump those rules.
A company like the News Corp., owned by conservative world-media mogul Rupert Murdoch, will be able to hold newspapers, television stations and radio stations in the same market. Conglomerates such as the News Corp. (Fox TV, Fox News, Fox Sports, 20th Century Fox Studio, the New York Post, HarperCollins Publishers) and Viacom (CBS, MTV, Paramount Studios and the Infinity radio network), would be allowed to snatch up more and more local TV affiliate stations nationwide. And, critics say, small and medium-size broadcast companies and newspaper publishers will likely be swallowed up by bigger competitors.
In the telephone interview Wednesday, Hundt warned that the massive media deregulation will exacerbate the dangerously close relationship that's emerged between sprawling U.S. media companies and the government. "If Dwight Eisenhower were alive today," he said, "he'd be warning us about the dangers of the military-industry-media complex."
During Hundt's term as FCC chairman, the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed. As originally drafted by Republicans in Congress, the legislation would have virtually stripped away all media-ownership limits. In the end, Clinton signed into law a compromise version that allowed only the radio industry to be deregulated.
At the time, Hundt was among the few to warn of the consequences. The new laws would allow "a few companies to buy all the radio licenses in the country," he said then. "I don't believe that's good for this industry or for this country."
His words proved prophetic. Since
Try reading Adam Smith sometime. He not only laid out the market rules for business: he laid out warnings for monopoly and abuse, and the need to control business to prevent such.
Capitalism is a zero sum game. A GAME, not a way of life. We live in a real world, and we need to control gamers so that they do not own everything worth owning, including our futures.
A privately owned network can not only freeze out competition and hike prices. It can progressively control free expression on its network, clamping down on opposing voices and smothering democracy.
I'll take this one, begging the original poster's pardon.
How does what you say have any basis in fairness or common sense
Whenever I see the phrase "common sense", I mentally reach for a shotgun.
What you say makes "sense", if you selective the proper facts and ignore all others that contradict you. It's not common sense, or economics: it's economic theology.
A private company is not an entity in a pure economic thought experiment.
For one, Verizon is government subsidized. Yes, I said they are welfare recipients. For, every dollar they weepingly spend on infrastructure, they DEDUCT FROM THEIR TAXES. When you or I buy a car to go to work, we don't deduct the finance charges, actual payments, refinancing costs, or debt sale costs that Verizon does. Verizon gets this government handout so that it may... actually, I never did understand why. They are powerful, and they get to do this. Period.
Secondly, if Verizon screws up, they DEDUCT THEIR LOSSES FROM THEIR INCOME TAXES. The "risk" that they take is government insured, because the taxpayers will be further taxed to make up for the money Verizon will not pay if they screw up.
Third, Verizon may or may not be granted tax relief from local governments for installing various doodads. Another taxpayer-paid welfare grant.
Fourth, when you create a network that is essentially granted to you by access and rate giveaways by the Federal government, you can set up an effective monopoly -- not only over physical infrastructure, but over the content that is provided over that network. Powell has many times indicated that political bias is hokey-dokey in a medium, because so many other media exist to balance it. So, an ISP who is also a provider can control the messages going over its network. Not only a physical monopoly, but a political one as well. Somehow this would be a bigger showstopper for Powell if that bias was not hard-right, I think.
Now, this monopoly does not have to exist. But Powell's economic theology insists that it must, because, like most libertarians, ignores all factors that do not bear on the illusion of a clean sheet economic problem, ie, a company provides a service, competition can try to compete, all is good. His ideology ignores back room dealings (mainly because he is a consummate backroom artist, being a lobbiest for the telecom companies in his off time!), nasty business manipulation, predatory pricing, in short, all the nasty, dirty tricks that were rampant in the old Standard Oil trust days that have come again.
And, the standard isn't recouping investment. Businesses are there to take over a market, not make back their money. They have no limits.
Private busineses are there to steal a much as possible. This is balanced by government elected by the people which regulates the rascals.
What has happened is that Bush's people have appointed the industry lobbyists to be the regulators of the industries they represent. The rights of the people to actual competition for services is being ignored: businesses are treated as feudal lords who should bear no oversight.
Um...
Do you actually think a private company would control who or what drives on a road in a less obsessive fashion than an elected government?
How do you vote the company out of office?
Think of this: a few months ago, a man who bought a peace-now T-shirt in a mall was arrested - ARRESTED - because he refused to take it off.
Apparently over the last 80 years, several stupidly pro-biz Supreme Court decisions have made businesses lords and gods of their private countries. First amendment rights do not apply in a mall, despite the appearance of the space being public. It is not.
A road-owning business would have the right to control the bumperstickers, the models of cars, the types of people in the cars, the years of the cars, the ages of the owners of the cars, the amount of money paid by the cars -- in fact, damned near anything they want to control, they would. And experience shows that business owners slant hard-right when it comes to free speech.
Picture you on a bright afternoon, rolling down Private Interstate 233, with a anti-presidential bumpersticker proudly displayed on your car.
Now picture yourself in jail.
There is no valid reason for tagging the money, since anyone who wants a transaction trail could use an e-cash card.
The Powers are going to eliminate the cash economy. Period. Nothing and no one escapes the net.
We are entering a prison like no other in history, for it will be the entire world.
"The problem with the idea of endless worker slavery is that it ignores the fact that eventually labor is no longer plentiful and companies bid up the price on it as much as any other business input. Beyond that, labor does tend to differentiate its pricing based on worker treatment. If you have two equivalently paid jobs, the one that features working for a bad boss will simply not be your choice.
Good treatment of workers lowers labor costs and more and more businesses are figuring that out. "
This would work, if it was a perfect world. You are assuming the Invisible Hand permits a worker to move wherever he needs to; you must assume he has a working vehicle that can move him long distances if necessary. You assume the worker can, after rent and car and medical, can save enough money to switch jobs, with the attendent delay between paychecks.
And you must factor in having a family to support. They need not only food, but stability. Changing jobs and moving every six months is not an option when the kids are in school.
And also, factor in being married. You can't willy-nilly move around the country when your wife or husband has a paying job.
And factor in this: only about 1 in 4 people get a college education. A small percentage of those in turn will not be in careers, like IT, that permit job shopping for advancement.
And factor in: if you have any medical conidtion, at all, you most likely will not be covered under the insurance at your new job. Preexisting condition.
Worker slavery? Yep. Left to their own devices, corporations will shape all ends to their goals. And they are. They want us lower paid, with sinking benefits, locked to the job, and fireable at the least excuse. And no unions, please.
Sorry to be negative, but it is true. Worker choice, for the vast majority, is shrinking to non-exisitence.
" (which begs the question why 'killall Neo' doesn't work but thats besides the point ;) "
:)
Because it wouldn't work
The machines have a weakness which only now occurs to me: they are deterministic by nature! They only can see the world in strictly cause and effect terms. Their philosophy doesn't believe in free will, because they don't have it -- don't understand it -- and will try endlessly to fit human thought to their way of thinking.
They will always claim that Neo never really has a choice. They don't believe he does.
But they don't try to explain why Neo has deviated from the behavior of his predecessors other than the fact that in this incarnation, he is in love with one person. (and has no problem with killing thousands of pink blobs by shockwaving the city as he moves through it at 100,000 miles an hour to save her).
They archly dismiss his love as chemical receptors in the brain, and deny him his humanity by denying his ability to choose becaues of his love for her.
BUT: His love for her actually broke the Neo Loop! Volition DID change cause and effect. The machines decide, by their nature, that he has simply entered another level of cause and effect.
Whee! this is fun!
Keep in mind that the Architect has motive to lie. There have been a hell of a lot of lies told to Neo, and Morpheus, and all of the humans in the world.
It seems what the Architect was primarily trying to do was convince Neo that although he has a choice of doors, he never has a choice at all. "I can see the chemical receptors", etc. A pretty interesting comment, considering that the Architect has no way of detecting the real state of Neo's brain, if what Neo has been told is true. "Neo" is just an avatar of a mentality that is supposedly out of the machines' domain.
So the Architect is trying to convince Neo that he has no choices, only the ability to understand why he makes those choices.
Not to mention that perhaps Neo can make a choice that the Architect doesn't want him to make. Neo was offered two doors, one on the left, and one on the right. Why only two? The doors aren't even really there. Neo's weakness is in his acceptance of the limits to his choices. Perhaps he should have tried to hack the Architect, or the Mainframe, or the root command level he apparently was accessing when he was talking to the Architect.
Instead, he chose thr Trinity door, and Zion 5.0 was fated to fall.
Neo has to stop accepting "facts" given to him ex cathedra, and start generating some new questions. Give him time, it's only been a few months since he woke up, and he's been very busy. Come the Revolutions, he'll hack those smug machines by asking questions no one wanted to ask -- and getting some answers.
Zion isn't what is seems. Neither are the machines, or the Matrix, or the Desert of the Real.
Which is not theft. Theft is the deprivation of property. Coyright infringement is not theft. It is the creation of a copy not licensed by the copyright holder. No property is taken away. No money is stolen.
This point is lost on corporate media, tho I hate to use that phrase. If I hear TechTV anchors report on "pirates" and "theft" one more time, I'm cancelling my cable...
The use of the word "theft" is a semantic assault on reason. It's the hijacking of a emotion caused by the word "theft" and assigning that hijacked reaction to a completely different word, "copying". It's a lie, a manipulation, a fraud.
Not to mention yet another assault on the English language. If the word "theft" can be reassigned at will, then precision of thought itself is ruined.
Note that today the Texas Republicans are calling the rebellious Democrats "terrorists". That is another, and far more ominous, manipulation of the language for fraudulent purposes. If the Democrats are "terrorists", then anti-terrorist laws and emotions apply to them. Such a misuse of the word "terrorist" was slated to happen, once the Patriot Act was created.
BTW, FYI: Homeland Security was used to track the absent Democrats, thus demonstrating that the "civil libertarians", AKA sane people, were right about the danger of a homeland spy agency that was intended to track terrorists. Now it is being used by Rep. Delaney to hunt down politcal foes of his party. But that's okay: they're terrorists, aren't they?
Words are the ultimate power. Control words, you control thinking.
"MS clearly does not have a monopoly "
It does in the U.S. That Finding of Fact is permanent, legal, and binding. Their is no room for opinion: they are a monopoly. They must play by monopolist rules, which means they can't use the the market power and the wealth generated by that monopoly to dominate new markets.
The reason we do it that way is to prevent a total takeover, horizontally and vertially, of all markets by a small number of supercorporations, or even just ONE corporation.
If such laws were not passed early in the 20th century, Standard Oil would probably own all of the major businesses in the U.S. today.
Antitrust varies from country to country, and frankly we don't really bother to enforce ours, during this admin. So other countries by default have stronger laws.
It may not be an uncommon business practice, but it is an illegal one if the business is a monopoly.
Which is why Gates hates those laws. And ignores them at every turn.
And it seems they don't apply to him anymore, give Ashcroft's utter surrender in the face of victory when the U.S. finally won the antitrust case. So I guess that Microsoft really doesn't need to follow any laws it finds philosophically aborhent.
"Sun is willing to give OpenOffice away for free, and they even will happily give you the source code. What exactly is the difference between giving away OpenOffice and giving away Microsoft Office?"
The power of monopoly. And the fact it is illegal to use the wealth and power from one monopoly to create another.
Not that Ashcroft would care.
Actually, solar power in many regions of the country could be "too cheap to meter". That isn't a speculation, it's a much-proven fact.
And solar equipment is expensive because economies of scale haven't kicked in. It could be cheap to buy. It hasn't had the enormous taxpayer investment that oil companies have enjoyed, if you use real cost accounting that takes into effect the roads, harbors, sanctions, and wars that taxpayers paid for.
And oil companies have indeedy bought up solar power patents and companies, and have shut them down in many cases. And other things as well: I've read (true?) that Texaco has bought up the IP regarding nickel-metal hydride battery technology.
Economies of scale and real technological progress (if it were ever funded properly!) would have made power "too cheap to meter" in sunny states, and probably moderated costs in the gloomier ones as well.
That hasn't happened because power and oil companies don't want it to happen, and ideological fanatics have taken over the Federal government who are ferociously opposed to changing the status quo.
Nuclear reactors, indeed. A cheap solar array, built into new homes roofs, and a nice NMH battery array would provide enough power to keep an electric car running for FREE, and keep some lights on in the house as well. People do this NOW, and are quite happy with the arrangement.
It isn't happening on a large scale because wealthy interests and radically conservative (?) politicians and citizens don't want it to happen.
And I do love the idea of a proto-antiInternet springing up. It can be done, and it will be done, if the men with the jackboots don't show up to stomp the hands of people trying to do it.
Well, try not to think of the network as competitive with the Internet in terms of current usability. Think of it more as an email or chat network, equivalent to the original USENET or IRC.
The cool thing is that it won't be under the control of future uber-Ashcrofts or RIAA.
And speed will increase. Lasers will become cheaper, and software-driven transceivers could make "interference" a non-issue.