It therefore follows that public (re: government-run) schools are not suitable institutions for education, because forces external to educators (and families of students) are restricting freedom of speech and expression.
Um, "restricting" what speech and expression? You were going good there until I saw the slow inside pitch.
The court merely points out that "under God" is a religious phrase, and violates the establishment clause. It should never have been inserted into the pledge in the first place.
"Forces external to educators"? Like the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic rightist group, who lobbied to insert the phrase "under God" into a fairly sober and secular pledge in 1954?
The time has come to do away with the public education system. The education of children, like the feeding of children, should be 100% the responsibility of the parents anyway.
The right to a public education is provided by the Constitution of the United States, as I recall. A pesky document. That requirement, by the way, turned us into a glabal powerhouse, instead of an agrarian feudalism with an educated gentry with old money, and Everyone Else, the barely educated peons.
Parents who fail to provide an education for their children should be found guilty of neglect.
Shut down schools, disregard Constitution, create a pauper class. Imprison parents who can't afford kids, and take the kids away. Check!
You are going to have a lot of orphanages and imprisoned parents if affording a 10K/kid/year is the measure of their care.
Education funding for impoverished families should be handled via AFDC and charity, rather than through a department of education.
The always chopped, derided, hated, tiny stipends given to poor families just to feed and clothe them, now funding schools? Oh man, I can imagine what the school for a kid with $50 a month to pay will be like. WORSE than the hostilely underfunded schools NOW?
Quality control of schools could be handled just like the universities are regulated today, only acredited schools could award valid diplomas.
Universities, especially private ones, are financially out of control and becoming impossible to attend if you are neither rich nor gifted. The inflation in expenses is endless, and the budgets are obscure and unshared with the students. A lot of the public universities have sold their souls to college sports. They are horrible examples of controlled educational costs.
Under the alternative I'm suggesting, all parents would be able to decide for themselves whether to send their kids to a school that insists on the Pledge or not.
Ummmmmmm. Let's see, you go to a very expensive religious school, or a very poor religious school, depending on who your parents are.
Reminds me of Kornbluth and Pohl's novel "The Space Merchants" (AKA "Gravy Planet" in magazine form)written around 1950.
The good Senators in the chamber were from United States Steel and other corporations. The country had cut through the intermediaries by having the corporations elect their own reps.
This was back in 1950. I swear, that book made a cynic of me at 12.
It isn't the politicians fault, it's our own, as citizens, for not insisting on tax paid elections, and NO CONTRIBUTIONS from corporations or individuals. Money ain't speech, it's bribery. But without those bribes, you can't get elected. Remember, Bush and company have almost a billion dollars in the election kitty -- they've declined taxpayer money.
But how can you defeat that kind of money? You really can't, not in the long run.
The original argument/question was offtopic. The poster had rhetorically asked about any U.S. wealth redistribution programs currently in effect, and I provided the one, big, All-Father blessed money transfer of all time. And one that is simply not discussed anywhere that I have noticed. It's like ignoring a T. Rex eating your family in the living room whilst you are watching Buffy. Weird. With the money spent on that debt service, we could rebuild all our public schools, finance the space program, give true tax cuts, on and on. But we have a permanent wealth drain leaching 17% of our tax contributions into a chuckling black hole of investors.
There is a Federal debt, about 4 trillion dollars worth. Most of it was run up during the Eighties when major tax cuts were instituted. And the Fed engine is once again running in the red due to the new tax cuts, especially the ones phasing in over the next eight years. It's going to be huge, the debt.
Now here's the income redistribution part. 17% or so of every tax dollar taken in by the IRS is spent to pay the interest on those trillions of dollars of tax-cut spawned debt. Year after year since the middle '80's, 17 percent of our country's gross revenue is peeled off and sent to...
Bond holders. When the Guv, in our name, can't raise enough money to pay for bread and tanks and roads, it has to borrowed. Usually this is done through bonds, paper bought by investors, both in the U.S. and abroad, which will earn interest year by year.
We pipe tens of billions of dollars of our income every year to very wealthy individuals and institutions. A great deal of the wealth in this nation is generated by that distribution. It's better than a gold mine, better than real estate.
Multiply this yearly welfare payment by about 21 years. We have, in the name of tax cuts, pumped hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of people who could afford to buy all those bonds and float all those loans. A goodly number of them are offshore... just about anyone can buy our money-making debt. To be really awestruck, adjust those dollars for inflation and recalculate what wealth we have transferred for a few bucks off our taxes.
Is it no wonder that wealthy people love tax breaks and don't mind a massive debt? Hell, I knew of an economics professor who straight-out declared that reducing or eliminating the national debt would spread destabilization around the world -- and he was right. Investors around the world love the money pump! It's like a rain of gold that will never end.
Now, for an exercise, compare the amount spent on debt service, which goes to wealthy/well off debt owners, to the amounts spent on aid for dependent children or Head Start. It's pitiful. The spending on our debt to the enrichment of the very well to do dwarfs anything we spend on the poor or schools.
The debt and deficit spending due to tax cuts are the biggest wealth redistribution scam in the history of mankind.
Proving Repubs evil was not my intent. In almost all ways, Clinton was the last great Republican president.
My intent in mentioning Bush and Ashcroft was not to fan "Democrats are evil" responses. It is to point out that this administration has rabidly gone after civil liberties and the press, based on its own ideology.
In Afganistan, reporters (well, one) were threatened with being shot if he went to investigate a bombing. Flat out. The hatred of the press is so great that Bush ordered no medevac of injured or dying reporters. In this "War", the reporters have died in their dozens, while we lost... two soldiers? Leaving reporters to die, and remember, these are American citizens, can be chalked up to nothing more than a iron desire to control criticism and a scorching hatred of a free press. Bush does not like criticism. He also doesn't seem to like checks on his power. He, not Clinton, believes himself to be king.
As for Ashcroft, the man lost a Congressional race to a DEAD MAN. Let me repeat that -- in the conservative south, he lost to a d-e-a-d m-a-n because the voters thought he was a looney. He sponsored at least three new amendments to the Constitution, the contents of which escape me... point being, the man does NOT like the Constitution in its present form. And frankly, he's religiously nuts, hence his propensity for morality enforcement.
Do you think the Patriot Act, all those hundred and hundreds of lines, were actually written up in a week? Uh-uh. It was a wish list, by people who wanted a lot of control without liberal civil-liberty mumbo-jumbo to stop them. Bush/Ashcroft took advantage of our national grief to hammer through, without review, an enormously unnecessary and unconstitutional change to our nation. Remember, when they claimed that they needed all those spy powers to gather the information to stop future attacks, they were blocking investigations that would have uncovered the fact that not only was our intelligence capabilty sufficient under current laws, but that the attackers were fingered and alarms were ringing. No Patriot Act or unfettered Duce will help us if the idiots at the top are on vacation for a month when the alarms are ringing.
Do I think Gore would have done the same? No. Gore would not only have read reports, he was on the panel that warned attacks were coming. Gore would not have been on vacation for the month of August, and frankly, Gore reads more than three pages of information a day. His chances of noticing data and integrating it are far greater than a guy who wants to chat with his advisors and skim Presidential Cliff Notes.
I was never a Democrat, but I am forced to conclude that we have a nitwit, a power hungry political fratboy with a vicious temper, as an appointed president. Gore was an accomplished man, a scholar and a statesman. Bush is a privileged boob who fucked up 9/11 royally and had the balls to blame it on his predecessor. And then proceeded to use political capital to block investigation for over half a year -- upon which we learned the reason why.
The Baby Bells have nothing to fear. As Microsoft has demonstrated, even the mightiest case (such as the Clinton DOJ had) can be reduced to nothing by delaying tactics and tons of cash.
And the current DOJ has a philosophical bent against antitrust laws. The top boys don't believe in those laws. And as the past year demonstrated, even with a case already won, they will let it peter out without comment. Oh, who are we kidding, it was Bush's decision.
There is no chance that the current DOJ will prosecute antitrust cases. They have other priorities, such as medical-marijuana laws and tapping the Internet. This is not a troll, simply the truth. The Bush admin will not fight monopolies because it doesn't believe they should be regulated.
And as for the courts, eventually the politically canny people in the White House will break the logjam on the hyperconservative, Chicago School federal judge appointments, and even if a future administration cares to pursue an antitrust case, it will face a solid wall of Reagan/Bush/Bush II appointees who will shoot them down with glee.
As for greedy lawyers in private cases, I just don't get it. If the Feds can't or won't, and no private individual could possibly hope to confront billions of dollars worth of legal opposition, what other possibility for redress of monopolistic practices would be left if the private lawyers weren't trying to profit from class action suits? If you hate lawyers more than the utterly powerful corporations (who are nothing more than lawyers themselves, don't forget!), then who the hell can stop the juggernaut? Let the lawyers make their millions if our executive, legislative, and judicial branches are philosophically incapable of doing their jobs to protect the citizens of the U.S. from out-of-control corporate lords.
She has the potential. If a Randian people, such as we may become, decide that saving a dying people isn't our problem, then she will have nailed her quota.
Mars is not the future for mankind. It's a very romantic idea, since it parallels the development of the Americas, but a growing population (remember our numbers double every 30-40 years! probably faster in an open frontier) will cover Mars pretty quickly, with modern technology
The moon has much the same problem, only without water. The moon is great for metals and oxides, but pretty bad for human colonization.
Let us harken back to the Seventies, and the L5 space colonization studies. Colonies in free space, placed anywhere in the solar system, from Earth orbit, the L1-L5 points, Mars conveyor orbit, Mars orbit, asteroid belt, or just a plain solar orbit, benefit from no gravity well, roll-your-own gravity, and constructed living room potentially millions of time Earth and Mars put together. And yes, birds and trees and all the rest can come along as well.
In the long run, Mars is a park, the Moon is a strip mine, and Earth is the Olde Worlde. Free space economies, with enormous material and energy resources, will have a collective economy that can fund silly things like star probes and colonization of other star systems.
Mars is small potatoes. We've been thinking in that groove because we see it as an extention of the Apollo methodology. Expensive one-shot landings, followed by useless science stations that cost toomuch and are vulnerable to budget murder at any time. For space travel to succeed, you need lots of people who want to go, a place for them to go, wealth to be made, and the possibility of growth to the nth degree.
Mars would be a very expensive Antarctic station. Tho I love the idea of being on Mars, having grown up studying and dreaming about the place, it is in a deep gravity well. Why climb up out of Earth's hole just to climb down another one?
Who decides that the masses affected should die in ignorant bliss? Not that I don't understand what you mean. I actually was thinking of the very idea a few days ago.
If you and only you knew an asteroid was going to obliterate the planet, would you tell anyone if it did no good?
If it were just to hit, say, New Jersey? See where I'm going here? Where does the line stop?
I hope "controlling the message", the process the popular media seem to admire so much about the current message, doesn't progress to the point where a president can make such a decision as that. Let the sun shine on the truth, good or ill.
Well, the reason why Bush is slammed and Clinton is not (by me) is that Bush is president and Clinton is not.
Clinton embraced corporations and copy control, I have no problem admitting. He was in no way perfect.
I'd have to say for the record here that even if Clinton passed the DMCA, he has since said that the consequences were not what he expected.
The problem with Bush is that he has all the bad points of Clinton combined with a hatred of the press, an obsession with secrecy, a willingness to let very shady corporation appoint their own regulators, and most importantly believes in a justice system that so far has behaved in a dictatorial fashion, creating laws and precedent on the fly that enhance executive and corporate power, and marginalizes press coverage and consumer rights.
Then, if we send in a broken or scratched CD to a company that company should send us a new one. Period.
But they won't, will they. No question mark needed.
Copying personal software, books, video, and audio are protected by case law. To end this is an attempt to end-run current law and install the wish list of greedheads.
Yes, people who break CP are the good guys. They are trying to restore a basic fair use to the purchaser of a product.
I like the link between welfare cheaters, fraudulent insurance claims, and people trying to backup something they have purchased.
In the welfare cheat area, there have not been three or four orders of magnitude as much damage done to the taxpayer by giving $175/month to some liar, or ten thousand liars, in comparison to even a single company such as Enron or MS, which has been on welfare to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Why? They don't pay income taxes. Our subsidy of Bill has sucked billions more out of the Treasury than the bogeywomen of black urban welfare queens, which are mostly suburban myths anyway.
In the insurance fraud vein, insurance companies are the wealthiest, most profitable operations in the world. Most of their profit is shunted off the books, so that the true extent of their rapacity can only be estimated. But I do know people on the inside of claim investigations. There is a ongoing effort to improve the already obscene profits of these companies by denying benefits by means of delaying payment through dragging settlement out for years, so the financially exhausted claimants will surrender. And they do. And the HMO system has been a colossal success in siphoning tens of billions (at least!) away from health care and into investors' pockets.
In no way can fraudulent claims (somehow actually paid!) can match the tens of billions of dollars the insurance companies have stolen from their customers in endless ways.
There is theft, and there is theft, indeed.
Now, having responded to that, copy protection. CDs were distributed for years without CP. And software makers raked in billions, BILLIONS of dollars. Remember also that this scenario happened before, in the 80's. I remember CP on Apple II diskettes that attempted to destroy the diskette drives. For years they tried to destroy "pirates". They failed.
Then they relaxed, and stopped trying to squeeze the last drop of blood from their customers' stones, as it were, and the misery ended. Sales still exploded, and much money was made, huzzah.
What we have here is raw greed, firstly. The second thing we see here is the ongoing attempt to redefine a product as something metaphysical, not tangible such as a CD. The new greedheads sense victory in their PR attempts to redefine property as a spiritual concept. These people are capitalist radicals. They want software on a CD to belong to them, not the purchaser.
I and others disagree, and we can be defined as the conservatives. I am a conservative capitalist. I am arguing for the continuation of centuries of law, in that *I* own the box, the CD, and the right to make a copy of it, reverse-engineer it, set it on fire, or use it as jewelry. It is MY PROPERTY.
To give the radicals what they want will require a police state that is enpowered to reach into a citizen's home and catalog what happens there, ie net checks, software audits, PC's reporting to software tracking databases, ISP's digging into logs for whatever reason, etc. The new rules Bush wants are going to dump everything into a giant warrantless data warehouse that anyone can search -- except customers or defendants, I'd bet.
Now, to address the point of the difference between security and CP. I disagee. The only reason security is absolute and CP is not is because they haven't figured out *how* to make it so. If they do, they will. At first they wanted to discourage casual copiers, but observation shows that a little is never enough when control is the issue.
This is about a new corporate order, not about theft.
And even if it did break them (it did not), it certainly broke the U.S.
17% (or so) of every federal tax dollar you send in pays the interest on the debt rung up during those glorious years. That cash goes into bondholders' hands, accounting for a lot of the lopsided wealth distribution in the U.S.
Every time we cut a social program, every time we say "we can't do this" (unless the "this" is a weapon), remember the hundreds of billions of dollars we pay each and every stinking year to wealthy bondholders, institutional and private, who not surprisingly have no interest in reducing that debt. They want more defense spending, more, more!
Killing the Soviet Union did them no favors, either. Russia begged for help to avoid collapse, and little was forthcoming. Now their criminal classes have become a worldwide problem, and Russia is in hell.
If tax breaks are your thing, remember that we could have a 17% cut tomorrow -- if not for the glorious "head fake" that made a lot of people wealthy and impoverished our infrastructure spending.
There was no head fake, and we spent ourselves into fiscal paralysis. And we're doing it again. We've wiped trillions out of our national tax levies in the next ten years -- just gone. Poof. Tax cuts, ya know.
That 17% will climb and climb. And there will be no money for trains, bridges, water pipelines, a thousand thousand other things.
So, basically... no one owns a corporation? No one pays for the debts if it goes Enron... except the taxpayers.
So: corporate socialism.
What a racket! No one is responsible. No one who actually did the deed pays! Everyone makes money, and if it screws up, the U.S. government pays for the shortfalls, in all sorts of ways.
Well, a good reason for kids to use a PDA is the great ability to transmit test answers via the infrared port. A lot of geeks I've known have busily beamed test aid through their line of sight impromptu networks.
And of course, you can store all sorts of things in the memory itself.
No, the idea is to give us, the people, the consumers, the citizenry, the lowest prices possible for unlimited bandwidth.
Bandwidth is not expensive. It has been made expensive by greed up and down the distribution chain. Listen, it's just lasers blinking in a glass tube. The capacity of the those blinkenlights is more than even we can use in the near future. The costs are all those expensive toys that Cisco makes, all those maintenance contracts, network admins, corporate VP's, etc.
The purpose of giving businesses monopoly (and telecoms ARE) is to give the consumers, US, lower costs - NOT TO MAKE INFINITE PROFITS FOR THE MONOPOLY. Business are allowed to incorporate for the the overall welfare, not for their private power! The free market absolutists have lost sight of the contract. Corporations are ALLOWED to exist, for OUR benefit. They are given ficticious personhood. They are given all the rights of a person, and more. But they have increasingly refused, under the guise of an ideologic movement, to accept limits or responsibilities under which a person would normally be subject.
If these corporations want to choke off our ability to use massive bandwidth, then they are useless.
We want enormous bandwidth. It really doesn't cost much more to provide gigabit than megabit. This isn't water or oil, as they are subliminally implying. The resource is almost infinite, even factoring in costs of the adding the switches, at reasonable prices.
The don't want reason, they want profit, more every year. This will inevitably produce eternal inflation. And the normal cure, competition, is being shut off by Powell's FCC. What kind of free market exists when eventually no one can enter the business?
- The current cable companies are merging. - Broadband under the FCC chair Powell is being deregged, which means further concentration of power into fewer multimedia companies. - Years ago, I said that the broadband companies would be assimilated by the entertainment conglmerates so that the could meter and monitor video/audio trading. Guess what? They are. - "Recouping investment" is a red herring. This is simply a move by consolidating corporations to boost prices to become richer. The OC lines cost more now? Well, why is that? Because at all points in the business, there is inflationary pressure caused by greed. The costs of building the structure would be made up over ten years anyway - well, only if greed at all levels weren't a factor. - Greed is good, if it drives down prices at the barrelhead. This however is a textbook (my textbook, thanks) illustration of how a "free" market fails at providing necessary infrastructure. After 18 years, you'd think fiber to the home would be here, and the costs of the system would be maintenance only. But it isn't. It will never be, because the present profit is never, ever enough. This is why utilities were regulated monopolies, and why Enron and the other "providers" raped a state. - The broadband net SHOULD HAVE BEEN A GOVERNMENT PROJECT. The private interest rollout of the broadband network has cost us googles of dollars, far more than a simple guv project of fiber-to-the-living room. And it will cost googleplexes more. And we are now facing the fact that companies hostile to over-the-net private transmission of audio and video have taken control (or soon will complete it) of the networks themselves. - The only solution to all of this is either the election of a Congress and President more attuned to consumer rights than Randian free enterprise (fat chance with election financing through donors) OR we use the IP protocol to create an alternate Internet on 802.11 derived equipment. The last depends, of course, on the broadband corporations willingness to let such a thing exist - and they won't. Karnak predicts that medium-to-long distance transmission over 802.11 connections of unauthorized traffic will become criminalized in some fashion. -Nope, I have no other happy news. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
The companies had no damage. It's all accounting fiction.
It therefore follows that public (re: government-run) schools are not suitable institutions for education, because forces external to educators (and families of students) are restricting freedom of speech and expression.
Um, "restricting" what speech and expression? You were going good there until I saw the slow inside pitch.
The court merely points out that "under God" is a religious phrase, and violates the establishment clause. It should never have been inserted into the pledge in the first place.
"Forces external to educators"? Like the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic rightist group, who lobbied to insert the phrase "under God" into a fairly sober and secular pledge in 1954?
The time has come to do away with the public education system. The education of children, like the feeding of children, should be 100% the responsibility of the parents anyway.
The right to a public education is provided by the Constitution of the United States, as I recall. A pesky document. That requirement, by the way, turned us into a glabal powerhouse, instead of an agrarian feudalism with an educated gentry with old money, and Everyone Else, the barely educated peons.
Parents who fail to provide an education for their children should be found guilty of neglect.
Shut down schools, disregard Constitution, create a pauper class. Imprison parents who can't afford kids, and take the kids away. Check!
You are going to have a lot of orphanages and imprisoned parents if affording a 10K/kid/year is the measure of their care.
Education funding for impoverished families should be handled via AFDC and charity, rather than through a department of education.
The always chopped, derided, hated, tiny stipends given to poor families just to feed and clothe them, now funding schools? Oh man, I can imagine what the school for a kid with $50 a month to pay will be like. WORSE than the hostilely underfunded schools NOW?
Quality control of schools could be handled just like the universities are regulated today, only acredited schools could award valid diplomas.
Universities, especially private ones, are financially out of control and becoming impossible to attend if you are neither rich nor gifted. The inflation in expenses is endless, and the budgets are obscure and unshared with the students. A lot of the public universities have sold their souls to college sports. They are horrible examples of controlled educational costs.
Under the alternative I'm suggesting, all parents would be able to decide for themselves whether to send their kids to a school that insists on the Pledge or not.
Ummmmmmm. Let's see, you go to a very expensive religious school, or a very poor religious school, depending on who your parents are.
I'd leave the country.
Reminds me of Kornbluth and Pohl's novel "The Space Merchants" (AKA "Gravy Planet" in magazine form)written around 1950.
The good Senators in the chamber were from United States Steel and other corporations. The country had cut through the intermediaries by having the corporations elect their own reps.
This was back in 1950. I swear, that book made a cynic of me at 12.
It isn't the politicians fault, it's our own, as citizens, for not insisting on tax paid elections, and NO CONTRIBUTIONS from corporations or individuals. Money ain't speech, it's bribery. But without those bribes, you can't get elected. Remember, Bush and company have almost a billion dollars in the election kitty -- they've declined taxpayer money.
But how can you defeat that kind of money? You really can't, not in the long run.
The U.S. debt is 5.95 trillion, not 3. And the Bushers want the debt ceiling raised by 450 billion, or we default on the debt by next week.
That will be nearly 6.5 thousand billion dollars. And we pay interest on that, every day. It's strangling us. And making some people filthy rich.
BBC online: Monday, 24 June, 2002, 12:07 GMT 13:07 UK
US could default on debt
The original argument/question was offtopic. The poster had rhetorically asked about any U.S. wealth redistribution programs currently in effect, and I provided the one, big, All-Father blessed money transfer of all time. And one that is simply not discussed anywhere that I have noticed. It's like ignoring a T. Rex eating your family in the living room whilst you are watching Buffy. Weird.
With the money spent on that debt service, we could rebuild all our public schools, finance the space program, give true tax cuts, on and on. But we have a permanent wealth drain leaching 17% of our tax contributions into a chuckling black hole of investors.
CNN requires registration for video viewing.
There is a Federal debt, about 4 trillion dollars worth. Most of it was run up during the Eighties when major tax cuts were instituted. And the Fed engine is once again running in the red due to the new tax cuts, especially the ones phasing in over the next eight years. It's going to be huge, the debt.
Now here's the income redistribution part. 17% or so of every tax dollar taken in by the IRS is spent to pay the interest on those trillions of dollars of tax-cut spawned debt. Year after year since the middle '80's, 17 percent of our country's gross revenue is peeled off and sent to...
Bond holders. When the Guv, in our name, can't raise enough money to pay for bread and tanks and roads, it has to borrowed. Usually this is done through bonds, paper bought by investors, both in the U.S. and abroad, which will earn interest year by year.
We pipe tens of billions of dollars of our income every year to very wealthy individuals and institutions. A great deal of the wealth in this nation is generated by that distribution. It's better than a gold mine, better than real estate.
Multiply this yearly welfare payment by about 21 years. We have, in the name of tax cuts, pumped hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of people who could afford to buy all those bonds and float all those loans. A goodly number of them are offshore... just about anyone can buy our money-making debt. To be really awestruck, adjust those dollars for inflation and recalculate what wealth we have transferred for a few bucks off our taxes.
Is it no wonder that wealthy people love tax breaks and don't mind a massive debt? Hell, I knew of an economics professor who straight-out declared that reducing or eliminating the national debt would spread destabilization around the world -- and he was right. Investors around the world love the money pump! It's like a rain of gold that will never end.
Now, for an exercise, compare the amount spent on debt service, which goes to wealthy/well off debt owners, to the amounts spent on aid for dependent children or Head Start. It's pitiful. The spending on our debt to the enrichment of the very well to do dwarfs anything we spend on the poor or schools.
The debt and deficit spending due to tax cuts are the biggest wealth redistribution scam in the history of mankind.
Insightful my red baboon butt.
... two soldiers? Leaving reporters to die, and remember, these are American citizens, can be chalked up to nothing more than a iron desire to control criticism and a scorching hatred of a free press. Bush does not like criticism. He also doesn't seem to like checks on his power. He, not Clinton, believes himself to be king.
Proving Repubs evil was not my intent. In almost all ways, Clinton was the last great Republican president.
My intent in mentioning Bush and Ashcroft was not to fan "Democrats are evil" responses. It is to point out that this administration has rabidly gone after civil liberties and the press, based on its own ideology.
In Afganistan, reporters (well, one) were threatened with being shot if he went to investigate a bombing. Flat out. The hatred of the press is so great that Bush ordered no medevac of injured or dying reporters. In this "War", the reporters have died in their dozens, while we lost
As for Ashcroft, the man lost a Congressional race to a DEAD MAN. Let me repeat that -- in the conservative south, he lost to a d-e-a-d m-a-n because the voters thought he was a looney. He sponsored at least three new amendments to the Constitution, the contents of which escape me... point being, the man does NOT like the Constitution in its present form. And frankly, he's religiously nuts, hence his propensity for morality enforcement.
Do you think the Patriot Act, all those hundred and hundreds of lines, were actually written up in a week? Uh-uh. It was a wish list, by people who wanted a lot of control without liberal civil-liberty mumbo-jumbo to stop them. Bush/Ashcroft took advantage of our national grief to hammer through, without review, an enormously unnecessary and unconstitutional change to our nation. Remember, when they claimed that they needed all those spy powers to gather the information to stop future attacks, they were blocking investigations that would have uncovered the fact that not only was our intelligence capabilty sufficient under current laws, but that the attackers were fingered and alarms were ringing. No Patriot Act or unfettered Duce will help us if the idiots at the top are on vacation for a month when the alarms are ringing.
Do I think Gore would have done the same? No. Gore would not only have read reports, he was on the panel that warned attacks were coming. Gore would not have been on vacation for the month of August, and frankly, Gore reads more than three pages of information a day. His chances of noticing data and integrating it are far greater than a guy who wants to chat with his advisors and skim Presidential Cliff Notes.
I was never a Democrat, but I am forced to conclude that we have a nitwit, a power hungry political fratboy with a vicious temper, as an appointed president. Gore was an accomplished man, a scholar and a statesman. Bush is a privileged boob who fucked up 9/11 royally and had the balls to blame it on his predecessor. And then proceeded to use political capital to block investigation for over half a year -- upon which we learned the reason why.
The Baby Bells have nothing to fear. As Microsoft has demonstrated, even the mightiest case (such as the Clinton DOJ had) can be reduced to nothing by delaying tactics and tons of cash.
And the current DOJ has a philosophical bent against antitrust laws. The top boys don't believe in those laws. And as the past year demonstrated, even with a case already won, they will let it peter out without comment. Oh, who are we kidding, it was Bush's decision.
There is no chance that the current DOJ will prosecute antitrust cases. They have other priorities, such as medical-marijuana laws and tapping the Internet. This is not a troll, simply the truth. The Bush admin will not fight monopolies because it doesn't believe they should be regulated.
And as for the courts, eventually the politically canny people in the White House will break the logjam on the hyperconservative, Chicago School federal judge appointments, and even if a future administration cares to pursue an antitrust case, it will face a solid wall of Reagan/Bush/Bush II appointees who will shoot them down with glee.
As for greedy lawyers in private cases, I just don't get it. If the Feds can't or won't, and no private individual could possibly hope to confront billions of dollars worth of legal opposition, what other possibility for redress of monopolistic practices would be left if the private lawyers weren't trying to profit from class action suits? If you hate lawyers more than the utterly powerful corporations (who are nothing more than lawyers themselves, don't forget!), then who the hell can stop the juggernaut? Let the lawyers make their millions if our executive, legislative, and judicial branches are philosophically incapable of doing their jobs to protect the citizens of the U.S. from out-of-control corporate lords.
She has the potential. If a Randian people, such as we may become, decide that saving a dying people isn't our problem, then she will have nailed her quota.
Mars is not the future for mankind. It's a very romantic idea, since it parallels the development of the Americas, but a growing population (remember our numbers double every 30-40 years! probably faster in an open frontier) will cover Mars pretty quickly, with modern technology
The moon has much the same problem, only without water. The moon is great for metals and oxides, but pretty bad for human colonization.
Let us harken back to the Seventies, and the L5 space colonization studies. Colonies in free space, placed anywhere in the solar system, from Earth orbit, the L1-L5 points, Mars conveyor orbit, Mars orbit, asteroid belt, or just a plain solar orbit, benefit from no gravity well, roll-your-own gravity, and constructed living room potentially millions of time Earth and Mars put together. And yes, birds and trees and all the rest can come along as well.
In the long run, Mars is a park, the Moon is a strip mine, and Earth is the Olde Worlde. Free space economies, with enormous material and energy resources, will have a collective economy that can fund silly things like star probes and colonization of other star systems.
Mars is small potatoes. We've been thinking in that groove because we see it as an extention of the Apollo methodology. Expensive one-shot landings, followed by useless science stations that cost toomuch and are vulnerable to budget murder at any time. For space travel to succeed, you need lots of people who want to go, a place for them to go, wealth to be made, and the possibility of growth to the nth degree.
Mars would be a very expensive Antarctic station. Tho I love the idea of being on Mars, having grown up studying and dreaming about the place, it is in a deep gravity well. Why climb up out of Earth's hole just to climb down another one?
" about the current message"
should be:
about the current administration. Sorry. No matter how well you think you type, always hit "preview"...
Who decides that the masses affected should die in ignorant bliss? Not that I don't understand what you mean. I actually was thinking of the very idea a few days ago.
If you and only you knew an asteroid was going to obliterate the planet, would you tell anyone if it did no good?
If it were just to hit, say, New Jersey? See where I'm going here? Where does the line stop?
I hope "controlling the message", the process the popular media seem to admire so much about the current message, doesn't progress to the point where a president can make such a decision as that. Let the sun shine on the truth, good or ill.
"I'm not going to feel guilty that I might have been able to prevent it. "
A statement that point-blank scares the hell out of me.
Sigh. I think Ayn Rand has done many times the damage to the human spirit than Communism ever dreamed of.
Well, the reason why Bush is slammed and Clinton is not (by me) is that Bush is president and Clinton is not.
Clinton embraced corporations and copy control, I have no problem admitting. He was in no way perfect.
I'd have to say for the record here that even if Clinton passed the DMCA, he has since said that the consequences were not what he expected.
The problem with Bush is that he has all the bad points of Clinton combined with a hatred of the press, an obsession with secrecy, a willingness to let very shady corporation appoint their own regulators, and most importantly believes in a justice system that so far has behaved in a dictatorial fashion, creating laws and precedent on the fly that enhance executive and corporate power, and marginalizes press coverage and consumer rights.
Hm. Comparing people trying to defeat copy control to welfare cheats and insurance frauds is okay, but rebuttal is trolling.
Then, if we send in a broken or scratched CD to a company that company should send us a new one. Period.
But they won't, will they. No question mark needed.
Copying personal software, books, video, and audio are protected by case law. To end this is an attempt to end-run current law and install the wish list of greedheads.
Yes, people who break CP are the good guys. They are trying to restore a basic fair use to the purchaser of a product.
I like the link between welfare cheaters, fraudulent insurance claims, and people trying to backup something they have purchased.
In the welfare cheat area, there have not been three or four orders of magnitude as much damage done to the taxpayer by giving $175/month to some liar, or ten thousand liars, in comparison to even a single company such as Enron or MS, which has been on welfare to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Why? They don't pay income taxes. Our subsidy of Bill has sucked billions more out of the Treasury than the bogeywomen of black urban welfare queens, which are mostly suburban myths anyway.
In the insurance fraud vein, insurance companies are the wealthiest, most profitable operations in the world. Most of their profit is shunted off the books, so that the true extent of their rapacity can only be estimated. But I do know people on the inside of claim investigations. There is a ongoing effort to improve the already obscene profits of these companies by denying benefits by means of delaying payment through dragging settlement out for years, so the financially exhausted claimants will surrender. And they do. And the HMO system has been a colossal success in siphoning tens of billions (at least!) away from health care and into investors' pockets.
In no way can fraudulent claims (somehow actually paid!) can match the tens of billions of dollars the insurance companies have stolen from their customers in endless ways.
There is theft, and there is theft, indeed.
Now, having responded to that, copy protection. CDs were distributed for years without CP. And software makers raked in billions, BILLIONS of dollars. Remember also that this scenario happened before, in the 80's. I remember CP on Apple II diskettes that attempted to destroy the diskette drives. For years they tried to destroy "pirates". They failed.
Then they relaxed, and stopped trying to squeeze the last drop of blood from their customers' stones, as it were, and the misery ended. Sales still exploded, and much money was made, huzzah.
What we have here is raw greed, firstly. The second thing we see here is the ongoing attempt to redefine a product as something metaphysical, not tangible such as a CD. The new greedheads sense victory in their PR attempts to redefine property as a spiritual concept. These people are capitalist radicals. They want software on a CD to belong to them, not the purchaser.
I and others disagree, and we can be defined as the conservatives. I am a conservative capitalist. I am arguing for the continuation of centuries of law, in that *I* own the box, the CD, and the right to make a copy of it, reverse-engineer it, set it on fire, or use it as jewelry. It is MY PROPERTY.
To give the radicals what they want will require a police state that is enpowered to reach into a citizen's home and catalog what happens there, ie net checks, software audits, PC's reporting to software tracking databases, ISP's digging into logs for whatever reason, etc. The new rules Bush wants are going to dump everything into a giant warrantless data warehouse that anyone can search -- except customers or defendants, I'd bet.
Now, to address the point of the difference between security and CP. I disagee. The only reason security is absolute and CP is not is because they haven't figured out *how* to make it so. If they do, they will. At first they wanted to discourage casual copiers, but observation shows that a little is never enough when control is the issue.
This is about a new corporate order, not about theft.
fat, dateless, acne-scarred white suburban twentysomethingmen, thank you very much, and we analyze Buffy's universe, not Star Trek (so last decade).
And even if it did break them (it did not), it certainly broke the U.S.
17% (or so) of every federal tax dollar you send in pays the interest on the debt rung up during those glorious years. That cash goes into bondholders' hands, accounting for a lot of the lopsided wealth distribution in the U.S.
Every time we cut a social program, every time we say "we can't do this" (unless the "this" is a weapon), remember the hundreds of billions of dollars we pay each and every stinking year to wealthy bondholders, institutional and private, who not surprisingly have no interest in reducing that debt. They want more defense spending, more, more!
Killing the Soviet Union did them no favors, either. Russia begged for help to avoid collapse, and little was forthcoming. Now their criminal classes have become a worldwide problem, and Russia is in hell.
If tax breaks are your thing, remember that we could have a 17% cut tomorrow -- if not for the glorious "head fake" that made a lot of people wealthy and impoverished our infrastructure spending.
There was no head fake, and we spent ourselves into fiscal paralysis. And we're doing it again. We've wiped trillions out of our national tax levies in the next ten years -- just gone. Poof. Tax cuts, ya know.
That 17% will climb and climb. And there will be no money for trains, bridges, water pipelines, a thousand thousand other things.
So, basically... no one owns a corporation? No one pays for the debts if it goes Enron... except the taxpayers.
So: corporate socialism.
What a racket! No one is responsible. No one who actually did the deed pays! Everyone makes money, and if it screws up, the U.S. government pays for the shortfalls, in all sorts of ways.
THIS is sanity?
Well, a good reason for kids to use a PDA is the great ability to transmit test answers via the infrared port. A lot of geeks I've known have busily beamed test aid through their line of sight impromptu networks.
And of course, you can store all sorts of things in the memory itself.
No, the idea is to give us, the people, the consumers, the citizenry, the lowest prices possible for unlimited bandwidth.
Bandwidth is not expensive. It has been made expensive by greed up and down the distribution chain. Listen, it's just lasers blinking in a glass tube. The capacity of the those blinkenlights is more than even we can use in the near future. The costs are all those expensive toys that Cisco makes, all those maintenance contracts, network admins, corporate VP's, etc.
The purpose of giving businesses monopoly (and telecoms ARE) is to give the consumers, US, lower costs - NOT TO MAKE INFINITE PROFITS FOR THE MONOPOLY. Business are allowed to incorporate for the the overall welfare, not for their private power! The free market absolutists have lost sight of the contract. Corporations are ALLOWED to exist, for OUR benefit. They are given ficticious personhood. They are given all the rights of a person, and more. But they have increasingly refused, under the guise of an ideologic movement, to accept limits or responsibilities under which a person would normally be subject.
If these corporations want to choke off our ability to use massive bandwidth, then they are useless.
We want enormous bandwidth. It really doesn't cost much more to provide gigabit than megabit. This isn't water or oil, as they are subliminally implying. The resource is almost infinite, even factoring in costs of the adding the switches, at reasonable prices.
The don't want reason, they want profit, more every year. This will inevitably produce eternal inflation. And the normal cure, competition, is being shut off by Powell's FCC. What kind of free market exists when eventually no one can enter the business?
How is harming anyone? The broadband going to be controlled soon anyway. The other users might as well get used to the slowness.
Points:
- The current cable companies are merging.
- Broadband under the FCC chair Powell is being deregged, which means further concentration of power into fewer multimedia companies.
- Years ago, I said that the broadband companies would be assimilated by the entertainment conglmerates so that the could meter and monitor video/audio trading. Guess what? They are.
- "Recouping investment" is a red herring. This is simply a move by consolidating corporations to boost prices to become richer. The OC lines cost more now? Well, why is that? Because at all points in the business, there is inflationary pressure caused by greed. The costs of building the structure would be made up over ten years anyway - well, only if greed at all levels weren't a factor.
- Greed is good, if it drives down prices at the barrelhead. This however is a textbook (my textbook, thanks) illustration of how a "free" market fails at providing necessary infrastructure. After 18 years, you'd think fiber to the home would be here, and the costs of the system would be maintenance only. But it isn't. It will never be, because the present profit is never, ever enough. This is why utilities were regulated monopolies, and why Enron and the other "providers" raped a state.
- The broadband net SHOULD HAVE BEEN A GOVERNMENT PROJECT. The private interest rollout of the broadband network has cost us googles of dollars, far more than a simple guv project of fiber-to-the-living room. And it will cost googleplexes more. And we are now facing the fact that companies hostile to over-the-net private transmission of audio and video have taken control (or soon will complete it) of the networks themselves.
- The only solution to all of this is either the election of a Congress and President more attuned to consumer rights than Randian free enterprise (fat chance with election financing through donors) OR we use the IP protocol to create an alternate Internet on 802.11 derived equipment. The last depends, of course, on the broadband corporations willingness to let such a thing exist - and they won't. Karnak predicts that medium-to-long distance transmission over 802.11 connections of unauthorized traffic will become criminalized in some fashion.
-Nope, I have no other happy news. Sigh.