1. In everyday life, it means an idea. A notion. 2. In science, it's a cohesive explanation that fits all the known facts and has passed peer review. It accounts for what is known and can be used to predict what is unknown. Theories are tested. Extensively. Relentlessly. They are discarded when they no longer work. They are awarded the title "theory" as a end result of being proven true, to the best of our knowledge. What is not known is labeled as such and is set aside for further work.
What you would call a "theory" is what a scientists would call an "idea", or a "notion", or a "thought". When a scientist uses the word, it all but means "fact".
No, actually, the scientific method, practically, does not mean that the idea must be disproved before it can be dismissed. The responsibility for evidence and proof lies with the advocates of the idea, not the scientific community. Scientists are not required to review every idea put forth by any advocate. That's not their job. They have their own work to do.
And really, it's been over a hundred and forty years. The religious idea of creation has had its chance and then some. Either prove it or get out of our collective hair. Write up your ideas and submit it to review. If your ideas don't pass muster, too bad. Preach it from the pulpit. Don't pretend to be science.
And scientists do not require laws to protect themselves from disagreement. Religionists do. Walled gardens.
Term limits mean nothing. The next candidate will also play ball. They all will. They must, because if they don't, those who support "Prohibition III - Now You Are All Criminals" will finance their opponents and third party PR firms. The Citizens United ruling has opened the doors to infinite amounts of corporate money.
The only thing that could stop this - and it should have been done ten years ago - is to remove contributions to political campaigns entirely, public and private. Publicly finance campaigns. Remove the money from the system. But it may now be too late. The money is the government now, and they won't let go of power.
Additionally: 1. Repeal the laws regarding corporate personhood. 2. Pass laws stating that money does not equal free speech. Speech is speech. 3. Remove with utter prejudice the computerized voting system and use Canada's manual count system. It's useless to try to throw the rascals out if they can control the vote totals. They can and will.
Your points are takek, but you allude to a problem you aren't addressing - they aren't phones anymore. They are personal computers, and they are completely transparent to those who want power.
Now, how to make a "superphone" that isn't easily tracked. That's a tech problem. We have the pieces to do it, and no doubt assembling them to solve it will soon be illegal.
Pieces: 1. Mesh networking. No central control. Peer to peer up to a point. 2. Encryption at all points in the communication process. 3. Microphones with a PHYSICAL off switch. Critical. 4. Video cameras with a PHYSCIAL off switch. Critical. 4. GPS with a PHYSICAL off switch. Critical. No software control of the device. Cut off the power at will. 5. A TOR-like onion routing network architecture, to prevent easily tracking the ID of a user. 6. Use internet backbones that are not subject to government interception. No visits from people who have offers you can't refuse. Invent them if we must. 7. Free up, for public use and no other, old TV channel spectrum for mesh networks and new radio backbones for city-city-country comm. 8. Open sourced hardware. No secret sneak circuits. God knows what they are hiding in our PCs and phones now. 9. For superphones to exist, and to address bandwidth issue, restrict users to audio and limited data. If you want to watch TV, get a government-approved cell phone.
Anonymous communications is utterly, almost uniquely necessary to maintain a free society against tyranny. Without it, you are a prisoner, happily eating tacos and watching Lost reruns. As long as you don't bug anyone important (and you'll never know who), you can go on adding hot sauce. But if you ever question, or protest, they have you where they want you. Are you a prisoner, or are you a free human? Choose. Not much time left.
Our real "bosses" in the national security meta-state certainly communicate almost anonymously. They just don't want you to do the same.
I can't add much to what he says, other than read my older posts, going back for years, on the cell phone issue. I rang the bell on this in 2001, when they made GPS mandatory on all phones sold after 2005. 911 my tired ass. They wanted tracking.
It's impossible to dispute. The phone can track you, eavesdrop on you, identify you. It is used that way, without warrant, now. And in the future, it will only become worse.
If you think that's fine, think of this: do you think you could track any government official in the TSA? The intelligence agencies? Corporate gods?
You can be tracked anywhere. They can demand ID at any time. They can photograph you, record video, take your fingerprints, retina scans and DNA at a whim. But - try taking a photo of a cop. Or use crowdsourcing to track a cop car or a Homeland Security honcho. Try protesting Manning's torture, or the wars. That's the key. All the surveillance is for thee, but not for your overlords. Two layers: those with power and those without. To be tracked is to be a prisoner, de facto.
If they can't see who's trading "child porn", then how do they "know" people are trading it???? COME ON. This is insane. They are lying. They are predating on people's kneejerk reactions to anything connecting kids and sex to install a Final Solution internet tracking system.
And who wants this bet: after they get the Panopticon, they won't find much kid porn - but will never disclose that. Or that they are using the Panopticon for political purposes, ie hitting whistleblowers and liberal causes such as antiwar protests and environmental activists.
With what non-existent forests are all these trillions of books to be made from? Can you imagine how many trees it would take to print out all the pages on the internet? There are not enough forests in the world, and they aren't to be allowed to grow, either. Treasure the print books we have, and get used to the e-versions, because cutting those trees is death for us all. And by "we" I mean everyone, not just the US. The rest of the world is going to need books, so our present experience of forestry is obsolete. TRILLIONS of books will be needed.
Don't forget "Time Enough for Love" by Robert A. Heinlein. Lazarus Long has sex with his mother. At least twice. Oh, and "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", and "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls", as well.
This is the problem with the new e-book regime: we don't have book vendors; we have book cops who lend us works for a fee. And keep *careful* records of what we have, and read, with times, dates and credit card numbers. Police states previously never dreamed of such comprehensive surveillance.
Mark this: governments aren't the scary actors. Private entities are, and anyway they are part of the state de facto. Soon any person will be subject to careful analysis - or half-assed automated scrutiny - of any and everything ever read by that person, with consequences for their employment, security clearance - and everything will pretty much be secret soon - schooling, marriage, sex partners, ability to purchase goods, and frankly prison time with 23 of 24 hour solitary confinement if some anonymous someone in the security state doesn't like them all that much. And no one will care, because they have been conditioned since school days to accept 100% lack of privacy.
We need what we needed ten years ago - a simple ebook reader without wireless, without mac addresses, without tracking devices, without "Stores" which track you. A giant worldwide free depository of scanned and e-source books without cost, scrutiny or consequences for illegal thought.
Hydrogen burns straight up, and anyway you can build the lifting chamber with thermally isolated cells.
We drive next to rolling bombs every day and never notice.
The Hindenburg was coated with metal oxide paint; it was like igniting thermite. The flames you see in the video are mostly paint burning. Hydrogen burns with a nearly transparent flame.
We cannot compete with an overpopulated world. The relative few of you that can pipe in with well-paying jobs are a dying breed. The pattern will repeat. Yet you still believe in open markets that have killed 90%+ of the rest of the country, on the chance that you will be the special exceptions.
There is a way to cut the fantastic number of hours that lawyers rack up. But an American populace marinated for almost a century and a half of "capitalist" propaganda would not, could not think of it.
Institute salary and wage controls for lawyers. Chop 'em down to mortal size. Pay them what a file clerk would make, times two. Take out the incentive for infinite profits. (Come to think of it, ditto for doctors and CEO's and boards of directors.) Institute state law schools and subsidize the costs through taxpayers (some countries provide free education) so the burden of the education debt no longer serves as an excuse.
Problem solved.
We've no problem with controlling the wages of poor people by slaughtering their unions and pensions. Yet rich people are sacrosanct, 'cause everyone hopes to be rich and untouchable someday.
Frank Herbert, while speaking in a radio interview on a call-in show around 1984, said that he saw a pilot project of a desert moisture collector while he was doing research as a journalist back in the Sixties.
For those who are labeling this flamebait: how is he wrong? The USA:
1. Has gone fascist in a BIG way, and wants others to follow: secret courts, total surveillance and tapping, pushing hard on the fMRI front to make thought reading machines they can use to scan "criminals", kidnapping, secret prisons, government by corporation.
2. Is ignoring science by refusing to deal with its lifestyle and pretending market forces will stop carbon pollution.
3. IS trying to create a permanent regime where every published word or image is forever owned by a corporation, and every citizen monitored to prevent unpaid-for consumption of same.
It wasn't an adventure novel about blowing up the Bugs - it was about military insanity and the political madness that permits idiot wars that kill millions for no sane cause. The war against Spain, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the War against Communism, the War against Alcohol, the War against Drugs, and the king of them all, the War on Terrorism, which is a war on a noun with no referent, a war on anyone we damned well don't like.
The author was a Vietnam vet fresh back from the Forever War against ???, and he wrote what he knew.
We started as Science Fiction, and then Hollywood - the movie monster idiots of the 1950s - coined the word "sci-fi". Harlan Ellison fired back with SF - Speculative Fiction - a term that evoked respect instead of snickers from those who are now conditioned to think Gamera Vs. Godzilla is science fiction.
But after the SF meltdown caused by the 1980s invasion of the idiocracy "sci-fi" series novels, Star Trek, and most especially TV and anime nonsense, we now have "sci-fi", the term that once meant non-scientific fake SF, the Xylitol of the science fiction universe.
Now THAT is too cerebral. Now we have SyFy, the complete descientification of the fiction. Idiot drivel with shiny happy California actors who have never read SF in their lives making Kabuki imitations of a genre that once launched real rockets to the moon.
Idiocracy. Kornbluth was right. The Marching Morons are here.
Actually, yes. It is a crime punishable by, perhaps, banishment, maybe a savage beating, or even your agonizing death at the hands of a large Italian gentleman from Chicago. You are not allowed to think, you are not allowed to use your brain to work the odds. Somehow, winning is not permitted.
The fact that they can get away with this says all that needs to be said about the USA's love of the Mafia. We really think they are the schiznit.
"One said screams that we need to regulate everything and have the government put everything in order so that everything works one way.
The other side screams that we need to degregulate everything and let companies do what they want to do in order to make more money."
Straw man.
One side says deregulate everything, that government is incapable of doing good, that only business, unencumbered by anything other than the profit motive, can solve problems. That is the right, who call themselves conservative. That truly IS the definition of the right, of Bushism, of Reaganism, of Limbaughism.
And there is everyone else, whom the conservatives call "liberals". And not a one, not a solitary, single, identifiable human-unit of those "liberals" has ever said the government needs to control everything so that everything works one way. Not even communists, should you find the odd one in a coffee shop, would say such a thing.
Your other points are well made. The problem with the argument is the above, because you are letting the right define the terms. No such opponent to the right exists. Our "left" is so far to the right that we can barely find money to buy textbooks. We won't even build schools anymore, for such activity is socialistic. Such cash was cut from the stimulus fund because Republicans find it so.
We had - emphasis *had* - government licensed monopoly in cable TV franchises for two simple reasons. First, it was damned expensive to drop cable to American homes, and no company wanted to do it if another company were to drop cable down as well, causing competition. They impressed upon localities to regulate things so they could make a nice profit by making sure individual companies were gifted with exclusive zones of coverage. Some gimmes like public access and a standard package of broadcast TV was included, and we were off. I was there, I remember.
Secondly, because of *deregulation*, NOT regulation, the cable companies started to absorb each other and formed powerful monopolies of their own design. The few real competing cable companies were ruthlessly forced out of business by underpriced services or being bought outright.
We have a duopoly because, after we collectively decided to open the business up to competition, over the EXTREMELY VOCIFEROUS objections, both vocal and campaign-contribution-wise of the cable companies, we let the telcos in to play. And then let AT&T reform after so agonizingly breaking them up. So now, thanks to dereg, we have two real players left. And they are cutting up the pie according to their own internal profit lines, making enough money to buy god.
Can you imagine how much roads would cost if we had built them up this way, rather than competitive contracts according to government (ie people-driven) specs? Ever tote up how much our "free" market internet has cost us as consumers? Vs. how much it would have cost had a federal plan simply dropped the fiber to every house - once and for all, and let a price controlled, competitive bid system decide who provided the internet access itself?
Polonium Linux. Use it or die. Dosvidanya, comrade.
I like them better before the MiltonFriedmanites looted the place through the World Bank. Before the leaders were ideological, paranoid killers. Now the leaders are capitalistic mobbed up killers with golden toilets and the new KGB back on board with polonium-laced tea.
Entropy holds over systems, such the universe itself, not individual units. Life itself is rather non-entropic. Localities can gain complexity and repair damage. Otherwise life would not exist.
Why license it? Why does everything have to be under someone's control? This is the very definition of the "free market", or would be, if it weren't illegal. Now, slavers and cops control it. Men won't let women sell it because the women would become rich - this has always been the reason.
Factor in total cost of ownership. The fact is, Windows PCs of whatever type depreciate enormously over time, while Macs retain more value over the same period. Subtract the money recouped when you sell the machine from the original cost for each machine, and Macs easily are the same adjusted price as cheap PC's over time. Also, factor in the cost of anti-virus software, and the cost of your time spent making sure your system is not compromised. I never have viruses. I don't run a firewall. I don't have malware problems. My machine is not a secret zombie. Windows Messenger never told me about Viagra. The absence of the very real *certainty* of external takeover is worth a couple hundred bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yes, the theory thing again.
"Theory" has two meanings.
1. In everyday life, it means an idea. A notion.
2. In science, it's a cohesive explanation that fits all the known facts and has passed peer review. It accounts for what is known and can be used to predict what is unknown. Theories are tested. Extensively. Relentlessly. They are discarded when they no longer work. They are awarded the title "theory" as a end result of being proven true, to the best of our knowledge. What is not known is labeled as such and is set aside for further work.
What you would call a "theory" is what a scientists would call an "idea", or a "notion", or a "thought". When a scientist uses the word, it all but means "fact".
No, actually, the scientific method, practically, does not mean that the idea must be disproved before it can be dismissed. The responsibility for evidence and proof lies with the advocates of the idea, not the scientific community. Scientists are not required to review every idea put forth by any advocate. That's not their job. They have their own work to do.
And really, it's been over a hundred and forty years. The religious idea of creation has had its chance and then some. Either prove it or get out of our collective hair. Write up your ideas and submit it to review. If your ideas don't pass muster, too bad. Preach it from the pulpit. Don't pretend to be science.
And scientists do not require laws to protect themselves from disagreement. Religionists do. Walled gardens.
Could you please give the link for this info? Thanks!
Term limits mean nothing. The next candidate will also play ball. They all will. They must, because if they don't, those who support "Prohibition III - Now You Are All Criminals" will finance their opponents and third party PR firms. The Citizens United ruling has opened the doors to infinite amounts of corporate money.
The only thing that could stop this - and it should have been done ten years ago - is to remove contributions to political campaigns entirely, public and private. Publicly finance campaigns. Remove the money from the system. But it may now be too late. The money is the government now, and they won't let go of power.
Additionally:
1. Repeal the laws regarding corporate personhood.
2. Pass laws stating that money does not equal free speech. Speech is speech.
3. Remove with utter prejudice the computerized voting system and use Canada's manual count system. It's useless to try to throw the rascals out if they can control the vote totals. They can and will.
Your points are takek, but you allude to a problem you aren't addressing - they aren't phones anymore. They are personal computers, and they are completely transparent to those who want power.
Now, how to make a "superphone" that isn't easily tracked. That's a tech problem. We have the pieces to do it, and no doubt assembling them to solve it will soon be illegal.
Pieces:
1. Mesh networking. No central control. Peer to peer up to a point.
2. Encryption at all points in the communication process.
3. Microphones with a PHYSICAL off switch. Critical.
4. Video cameras with a PHYSCIAL off switch. Critical.
4. GPS with a PHYSICAL off switch. Critical. No software control of the device. Cut off the power at will.
5. A TOR-like onion routing network architecture, to prevent easily tracking the ID of a user.
6. Use internet backbones that are not subject to government interception. No visits from people who have offers you can't refuse. Invent them if we must.
7. Free up, for public use and no other, old TV channel spectrum for mesh networks and new radio backbones for city-city-country comm.
8. Open sourced hardware. No secret sneak circuits. God knows what they are hiding in our PCs and phones now.
9. For superphones to exist, and to address bandwidth issue, restrict users to audio and limited data. If you want to watch TV, get a government-approved cell phone.
Anonymous communications is utterly, almost uniquely necessary to maintain a free society against tyranny. Without it, you are a prisoner, happily eating tacos and watching Lost reruns. As long as you don't bug anyone important (and you'll never know who), you can go on adding hot sauce. But if you ever question, or protest, they have you where they want you. Are you a prisoner, or are you a free human? Choose. Not much time left.
Our real "bosses" in the national security meta-state certainly communicate almost anonymously. They just don't want you to do the same.
I can't add much to what he says, other than read my older posts, going back for years, on the cell phone issue. I rang the bell on this in 2001, when they made GPS mandatory on all phones sold after 2005. 911 my tired ass. They wanted tracking.
It's impossible to dispute. The phone can track you, eavesdrop on you, identify you. It is used that way, without warrant, now. And in the future, it will only become worse.
If you think that's fine, think of this: do you think you could track any government official in the TSA? The intelligence agencies? Corporate gods?
You can be tracked anywhere. They can demand ID at any time. They can photograph you, record video, take your fingerprints, retina scans and DNA at a whim. But - try taking a photo of a cop. Or use crowdsourcing to track a cop car or a Homeland Security honcho. Try protesting Manning's torture, or the wars. That's the key. All the surveillance is for thee, but not for your overlords. Two layers: those with power and those without. To be tracked is to be a prisoner, de facto.
Years later, I still make the same point:
If they can't see who's trading "child porn", then how do they "know" people are trading it???? COME ON. This is insane. They are lying. They are predating on people's kneejerk reactions to anything connecting kids and sex to install a Final Solution internet tracking system.
And who wants this bet: after they get the Panopticon, they won't find much kid porn - but will never disclose that. Or that they are using the Panopticon for political purposes, ie hitting whistleblowers and liberal causes such as antiwar protests and environmental activists.
With what non-existent forests are all these trillions of books to be made from? Can you imagine how many trees it would take to print out all the pages on the internet? There are not enough forests in the world, and they aren't to be allowed to grow, either. Treasure the print books we have, and get used to the e-versions, because cutting those trees is death for us all. And by "we" I mean everyone, not just the US. The rest of the world is going to need books, so our present experience of forestry is obsolete. TRILLIONS of books will be needed.
Don't forget "Time Enough for Love" by Robert A. Heinlein. Lazarus Long has sex with his mother. At least twice. Oh, and "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", and "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls", as well.
This is the problem with the new e-book regime: we don't have book vendors; we have book cops who lend us works for a fee. And keep *careful* records of what we have, and read, with times, dates and credit card numbers. Police states previously never dreamed of such comprehensive surveillance.
Mark this: governments aren't the scary actors. Private entities are, and anyway they are part of the state de facto. Soon any person will be subject to careful analysis - or half-assed automated scrutiny - of any and everything ever read by that person, with consequences for their employment, security clearance - and everything will pretty much be secret soon - schooling, marriage, sex partners, ability to purchase goods, and frankly prison time with 23 of 24 hour solitary confinement if some anonymous someone in the security state doesn't like them all that much. And no one will care, because they have been conditioned since school days to accept 100% lack of privacy.
We need what we needed ten years ago - a simple ebook reader without wireless, without mac addresses, without tracking devices, without "Stores" which track you. A giant worldwide free depository of scanned and e-source books without cost, scrutiny or consequences for illegal thought.
Not gonna happen. We're done.
Hydrogen burns straight up, and anyway you can build the lifting chamber with thermally isolated cells.
We drive next to rolling bombs every day and never notice.
The Hindenburg was coated with metal oxide paint; it was like igniting thermite. The flames you see in the video are mostly paint burning. Hydrogen burns with a nearly transparent flame.
Everything can be commoditized. Even you.
We cannot compete with an overpopulated world. The relative few of you that can pipe in with well-paying jobs are a dying breed. The pattern will repeat. Yet you still believe in open markets that have killed 90%+ of the rest of the country, on the chance that you will be the special exceptions.
There is a way to cut the fantastic number of hours that lawyers rack up. But an American populace marinated for almost a century and a half of "capitalist" propaganda would not, could not think of it.
Institute salary and wage controls for lawyers. Chop 'em down to mortal size. Pay them what a file clerk would make, times two. Take out the incentive for infinite profits. (Come to think of it, ditto for doctors and CEO's and boards of directors.) Institute state law schools and subsidize the costs through taxpayers (some countries provide free education) so the burden of the education debt no longer serves as an excuse.
Problem solved.
We've no problem with controlling the wages of poor people by slaughtering their unions and pensions. Yet rich people are sacrosanct, 'cause everyone hopes to be rich and untouchable someday.
That would be why it would be called "science" fiction. Which Star Wars pretends to be, or at least its fan base believes it is.
If it ain't scientifically accurate, it's schlock 'sci-fi' or just plain fantasy.
Frank Herbert, while speaking in a radio interview on a call-in show around 1984, said that he saw a pilot project of a desert moisture collector while he was doing research as a journalist back in the Sixties.
For those who are labeling this flamebait: how is he wrong?
The USA:
1. Has gone fascist in a BIG way, and wants others to follow: secret courts, total surveillance and tapping, pushing hard on the fMRI front to make thought reading machines they can use to scan "criminals", kidnapping, secret prisons, government by corporation.
2. Is ignoring science by refusing to deal with its lifestyle and pretending market forces will stop carbon pollution.
3. IS trying to create a permanent regime where every published word or image is forever owned by a corporation, and every citizen monitored to prevent unpaid-for consumption of same.
It wasn't an adventure novel about blowing up the Bugs - it was about military insanity and the political madness that permits idiot wars that kill millions for no sane cause. The war against Spain, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the War against Communism, the War against Alcohol, the War against Drugs, and the king of them all, the War on Terrorism, which is a war on a noun with no referent, a war on anyone we damned well don't like.
The author was a Vietnam vet fresh back from the Forever War against ???, and he wrote what he knew.
We started as Science Fiction, and then Hollywood - the movie monster idiots of the 1950s - coined the word "sci-fi". Harlan Ellison fired back with SF - Speculative Fiction - a term that evoked respect instead of snickers from those who are now conditioned to think Gamera Vs. Godzilla is science fiction.
But after the SF meltdown caused by the 1980s invasion of the idiocracy "sci-fi" series novels, Star Trek, and most especially TV and anime nonsense, we now have "sci-fi", the term that once meant non-scientific fake SF, the Xylitol of the science fiction universe.
Now THAT is too cerebral. Now we have SyFy, the complete descientification of the fiction. Idiot drivel with shiny happy California actors who have never read SF in their lives making Kabuki imitations of a genre that once launched real rockets to the moon.
Idiocracy. Kornbluth was right. The Marching Morons are here.
Actually, yes. It is a crime punishable by, perhaps, banishment, maybe a savage beating, or even your agonizing death at the hands of a large Italian gentleman from Chicago. You are not allowed to think, you are not allowed to use your brain to work the odds. Somehow, winning is not permitted.
The fact that they can get away with this says all that needs to be said about the USA's love of the Mafia. We really think they are the schiznit.
Don't feed the mob. Stay out of Vegas and Reno.
"One said screams that we need to regulate everything and have the government put everything in order so that everything works one way.
The other side screams that we need to degregulate everything and let companies do what they want to do in order to make more money."
Straw man.
One side says deregulate everything, that government is incapable of doing good, that only business, unencumbered by anything other than the profit motive, can solve problems. That is the right, who call themselves conservative. That truly IS the definition of the right, of Bushism, of Reaganism, of Limbaughism.
And there is everyone else, whom the conservatives call "liberals". And not a one, not a solitary, single, identifiable human-unit of those "liberals" has ever said the government needs to control everything so that everything works one way. Not even communists, should you find the odd one in a coffee shop, would say such a thing.
Your other points are well made. The problem with the argument is the above, because you are letting the right define the terms. No such opponent to the right exists. Our "left" is so far to the right that we can barely find money to buy textbooks. We won't even build schools anymore, for such activity is socialistic. Such cash was cut from the stimulus fund because Republicans find it so.
We had - emphasis *had* - government licensed monopoly in cable TV franchises for two simple reasons. First, it was damned expensive to drop cable to American homes, and no company wanted to do it if another company were to drop cable down as well, causing competition. They impressed upon localities to regulate things so they could make a nice profit by making sure individual companies were gifted with exclusive zones of coverage. Some gimmes like public access and a standard package of broadcast TV was included, and we were off. I was there, I remember.
Secondly, because of *deregulation*, NOT regulation, the cable companies started to absorb each other and formed powerful monopolies of their own design. The few real competing cable companies were ruthlessly forced out of business by underpriced services or being bought outright.
We have a duopoly because, after we collectively decided to open the business up to competition, over the EXTREMELY VOCIFEROUS objections, both vocal and campaign-contribution-wise of the cable companies, we let the telcos in to play. And then let AT&T reform after so agonizingly breaking them up. So now, thanks to dereg, we have two real players left. And they are cutting up the pie according to their own internal profit lines, making enough money to buy god.
Can you imagine how much roads would cost if we had built them up this way, rather than competitive contracts according to government (ie people-driven) specs? Ever tote up how much our "free" market internet has cost us as consumers? Vs. how much it would have cost had a federal plan simply dropped the fiber to every house - once and for all, and let a price controlled, competitive bid system decide who provided the internet access itself?
Amusing bit is that the second's store clerk refused to hand over the money. Death before dishonor.
To his credit, I suppose, the Klingon warrior did not slay the peasant.
Polonium Linux. Use it or die. Dosvidanya, comrade.
I like them better before the MiltonFriedmanites looted the place through the World Bank. Before the leaders were ideological, paranoid killers. Now the leaders are capitalistic mobbed up killers with golden toilets and the new KGB back on board with polonium-laced tea.
Entropy holds over systems, such the universe itself, not individual units. Life itself is rather non-entropic. Localities can gain complexity and repair damage. Otherwise life would not exist.
Why license it? Why does everything have to be under someone's control? This is the very definition of the "free market", or would be, if it weren't illegal. Now, slavers and cops control it. Men won't let women sell it because the women would become rich - this has always been the reason.
Factor in total cost of ownership. The fact is, Windows PCs of whatever type depreciate enormously over time, while Macs retain more value over the same period. Subtract the money recouped when you sell the machine from the original cost for each machine, and Macs easily are the same adjusted price as cheap PC's over time. Also, factor in the cost of anti-virus software, and the cost of your time spent making sure your system is not compromised. I never have viruses. I don't run a firewall. I don't have malware problems. My machine is not a secret zombie. Windows Messenger never told me about Viagra. The absence of the very real *certainty* of external takeover is worth a couple hundred bucks.
Has anyone reported being hacked through the Firewire port? A possibility, not a reality, no?