And oh, yes. The non-profit systems are much cheaper than ours, and cost less in taxes. WE'RE paying the bills of millionaire doctors when patients show up at ER's dying from undertreated illnesses. We pay one way or another. Right now, a quarter of our money is being funneled into HMO profits.
There is of course an answer, and it has been implemented everywhere else in the western world but here. Remove the profit motive, eliminate the insurance companies, pay for doctors' education so they can't use it as an excuse to gouge, and regulate prices. It's a pain in the ass, but it beats what we have now, where millions die undertreated but never show up on the TV news. We've a disaster that is never reported by the millionaire talking heads on TV, because they will never see anyone dying in their life from lack of funds to pay millionaires holding the key to life.
Employers, after a certain critical mass of workers obtain cars, will relocate to cheaper land out in the countryside (where they live), thus forcing people to drive to keep a job. Highways will eventually be needed. Taxes will go up to build a new highway system. Pollution will climb. Taxpayers will foot the bill, but cars will never be costed out appropriately to cover the actual cost of their collective existence. As a result of that, light rail will never economically be able to compete, as they will be expected to charge customers fully for their cost, whereas cars' infrastructure will be paid for by general revenues. As a result, cars will take over the country, as they are "free" to the drivers and the employers. As a result, a pedestrian society will become a car society, and pedestrians will be mowed down like wheat, and car crashes will kill millions and cripple tens of millions. Medical costs for the car world will skyrocket. Again, paid for by taxpayers. A new industry, fixing cars, will be created. And the wailing and lamentation will commence. They will be enormous dependence on middle eastern oil AKA the United States oil companies and associated trading games. The cost of transportation will keep climbing. Once constructed, the car transportation system will be unkillable, and they will be stuck spending trillions forever to build and rebuild ribbons of asphalt that always wear out. So one guy can toodle down a hundred million dollar road from his suburb to a shopping mall.
The actual point of a person's economic existence will be to pay for a car to keep a job to pay for a car to keep a job to fix a car to get a job to keep a job to buy a car...
Who benefits? Negroponte and the OLPC project doesn't benefit from booting out Intel. They lose six million dollars. Intel does benefit from undercutting the project from within. Negroponte doesn't gain from lying. Intel does. Cui bono?
Right back atcha: Flamebait was the original poster implying that OLPC would open up the students' world to let them learn about the commies and leftists that rule their world.
The real lessons are about the IMF loans, US historical interventionism, and a vicious right-wing establishment trying to manhandle the world into their control. When we control the horizontal and vertical, we filter out our nasty little secrets. The OLPC is much more likely to open people's world into how we mess with them, not how Che Guevarra was Satan's puppy. Hence my laundry list of questions, for the sarcasm impaired, of a child who actually reads about modern world history. Our hands are on most nastiness kids are experiencing in a lot of countries. A little light on the cockroaches won't hurt. But man, does it make the rightists squawk.
And the public hospitals are being demolished in New Orleans, along with the public schools. The Heritage Foundation large and in charge, telling the poor to get the hell out.
A communication link is not a toy. They can learn to read and write and pledge allegiance to their flag, but they previously only could learn what was fed to them. Now they can read EVERYthing. They don't need no, education... Not going to be a comfortable century for the Catholic Church and government censors.
You know, with so much to be negative about... it's so good to see this happening. And shining proof that people anywhere are ready to step up, given the shot. If you give children the tools, they will build you a new world. They don't need charity as much as they need access. They're going to surprise us all.
As for the we-should-worry-about-their-food-first crowd, well, appears Abraham Maslow still has something to teach us.
"Daddy, what is a union?" "Daddy, what's a homer-segsual?" "Daddy, why are we cutting taxes for the crazy rich?" "Daddy, why was mommy tased?" "Daddy, why did that soldier shoot that protestor dead...?" "Daddy, why are we losing the house?" "Daddy, why is Bush invading us?" "Daddy, why did uncle Muhammed not come back from the American prison camp?" "Daddy, why does god only love the USA?" "Daddy, why did they blow mommy up?"
Knowledge. Keep it from kids until they're growed up right.
1. Light devices of all sorts will be declared weapons and banned from civilian possession. 2. Light devices will very, very soon increase in power, becoming the deadliest hand weapon. Totally silent, immensely destructive, and can range and target before burn. Hm. Think of what you could do with a series hybrid electric car and a laser. Generator, meet light gun. See steel burn. See war protester burn. See your tires burn. Hell, they can just blind you. Remember, George Lucas acolytes, lasers aren't revolvers. They also can fire continuously, so they can spray an entire crowd. One light gun can take out a crowd in seconds. 3. Cops will use them against us, both to burn and to blind. Corporate armies will use them against us and the rest of the world. Corporate police can use them against... you get the picture. They will take them from us and then we'll see them used against us.
Anyone want to take that bet? 4. Same people that boo civvies will cheer cops and armies. Sorry, had to say that.
Amazing how people can affect their laws when they act like informed, involved citizens who participate in their own governmental process rather than cynical consumers who think government is an perncious enemy of mankind. Kudos to Canadians.
We ARE the government. For those few who always complain that we always talk but never do: speech is the tool of revolution, not guns. Guns can hold a man's body in place, but never his mind. We make the world with the words we write and say. The mind is made of symbols. Words are symbols. Governments, businesses, cults can be brought to heel by using the right words in the right places. Words are deeds.
So if the database was accurate, then there would be no problem with privacy. The dead guy and the NancyGraced father would have made a good kill. The problem is just making sure we kill the right people. Check your facts before you kill!
Of course, we can expand those lists of facts to other types of criminals. And we will. Just get the facts straight. And of course, we can add new crimes as well. Like... opposing the ruling party. Soon to come.
For that matter, why are Slashdotters permitted anonymity? There should be a database of our identities, histories, personal schedules, names of children and schools and their bus routes, job addresses. After all, privacy is dead. Why are you all hiding? Let's see the deets! This is the modern era. There should be consequences for inciting people with speech. After all, the first amendment doesn't exist on a private forum or private property, according to common notions, and a majority of our rather interesting rightist Supreme Court justices don't believe the 9th amendment covers unenumerated rights like privacy, so that doesn't exist, a figment of liberal imagination. If the Constitution didn't say it in 1790, it doesn't exist.
"To say that making the public aware of sex offenders online leads to murder is a bit extreme in my opinion."
Extreme? Like saying the Earth is round? The database led to his murder. Fact. He was innocent of said crime. Fact. Database indicated where to find him to kill him. Fact. Presence on said database leads hysterical parents to targets, fact. Database is frequently WRONG. Fact.
I do tend to digress. But I came into this nonsense over ten years ago when the first police raids for copyright were coming down against the alt.reglion.scientology newsgroup and various remailers around the world. Everything is ultimately connected in some way; the Hubbardites' leaders have been stumping around lawmakers for years to criminalize copyright infringement -- it was a civil infraction ten years ago -- and now to really destroy the new "criminal" class. They're constitutionally incapable of NOT buying such laws -- they're required to wage war against their enemies until they are utterly destroyed and friendless, and they've declared a lot of posters entheta. This is the hammer they've been begging to use. They were major players, I'd bet, in removing what anonymity posters have as well.
But, as you say, the thesis I started with is stark and true. Nothing, anywhere on the planet, after the US pounds everyone into submission, nothing copyrighted, will ever enter public domain again. The term limits will be extended in a century, if anyone even bothers to notice the old laws in any case. So many generations will have lived with meters attached to their eyes and ears that the whole thrust of WHY Jefferson and the others made a limited term part of the Constitution will be as forgotten as the reasons for the fractional humanity of slaves and indians. Stare decisis, settled law, custom, will be that stories, songs, lyrics, pictures, video, and -- you've got to see it to believe it, 'cause cops here where I live enforce this violently by confiscating cameras -- VIEWS OF OBJECTS, such as a sightline for a camera, are property, with all that implies. A BUILDING in my city is considered copyrighted! I've had store owners run outside to chase me because I took a shot of their building facade. And the law will back them up here. Try taking a picture of a movie shoot -- they'll steal your camera.
Boil a frog. It's not just copyright as it stands. Every time they effect a new regime of law, they start creeping up with new interpretations of old terms to extend it. Twenty years from now, I guarantee you, they will claim ownership of their intellectual property IN YOUR HEAD. And fine and imprison you for it, or at least charge rent.
Once non-material objects are considered property, anything goes, much like the insane interpretation of a Supreme Court recorder now gives corporations immortal personhood. Once irrationality, magic, is injected into the law, then you're fighting angels with an invisible sword made of dreams.
According to the brain trust around the President, according to a 19th century US Supreme Court decision regarding bounty hunting, the US has the right to enter any nation, kidnap a citizen and drag them back to the US to face trial for breaking US laws. I am not joking. Your local laws are not relevant to the power of Rome, barbarian.
Don't worry, we'll be bankrupt before 2009 arrives. It'll be hard to fly around the world kidnapping college kids when no international airline will take US currency. Broke cops = immobile cops.
"Warrant"? Tee hee, you are so pre-911. We are at war, citizen, the old 18th century notions of "rights" is dead. So we are told. And constitutional rights only apply to Americans on American soil. The rest of you can be tortured in a tropical prison if we create a new mouth noise to describe you. How about, um, copyright combatant? Yeah. And if we set up a Unitary Executive tribunal to determine an American is, say, instigating copyright terrorism, we can then declare him a copyright combatant and send him off to tortureland too! Isn't fascism wonderful? Once you set up the semantic framework, you can murder and torture millions of people and no one will even bother to count the bodies. They won't exist in the news. We'll see reporters dishing up stories of the deaths of brave copyright policemen around the world Saving Democracy from Copyright Criminal Cartels, watch the price of old movies rise to cocaine-like heights, and we'll obsess about whether or not a teenaged girl singer owns handcuffs and drinks a lot for fun. Ohhhh, the dream of America.
"I REALLY don't want to have to go to the extreme of doing mounted volume or full disk encryption schemes on my HOME COMPUTER! But at the rate things are going I'll not have any choice if the gov can appropriate your computer for something like bogus MP3s."
I think they already tried to criminalize that with PATRIOT Act #2. They will layer law upon law until encrypting disks and communications is in itself an admission of guilt -- unless you are in the White House, where it's okay to destroy all your communications and flip off the Congress. These laws don't apply to wealth and power.. England already requires that you surrender encryption keys on their demand, else into gaol you go, terrorist.
The neat thing I notice is that they casually posit that they can send their copyright police (why do I think that Scientologists will be all over these jobs?) anywhere in the world. The Hubbardites must be wetting themselves with joy - no one will be able to discuss their BS online without armored thugs kicking in the doors and dragging them away. According to this President's brain trust, a Supreme Court decision about bounty hunters what, a hundred years ago, gives them the right to kidnap ANYONE on the planet and drag them back to the US for trial for breaking our laws.
We are now a military, police, and economic world empire. The only thing standing between the planet and us is economic ideological suicide by tax cuts, spending, and borrowing, which thank Xenu is now just a few years down the road. I can only hope the UK and similar boot lickers of "intellectual property" owners don't pick up the copyright police state baton after we drop it.
"now almost nothing created in my parent's lifetime will become public domain for me before I die."
Nothing, at all, will become public domain ever again. This is the ratification of a new regime, the corporate ownership of the lore of mankind, ownership by immortal, unkillable clouds that can reach down and ruin and imprison at will.
As if Scientology took over the world, which in a sense is exactly what is happening. Those bastards were the first to use the term "copyright criminal" and to sue people for reprinting and exposing what was in plain sight without regard for fair use/criticism... I wonder how much of this new police state is being built through their bought puppies to keep those sekret skriptures secret... but I digress.
Slashdot Mirror
And oh, yes. The non-profit systems are much cheaper than ours, and cost less in taxes. WE'RE paying the bills of millionaire doctors when patients show up at ER's dying from undertreated illnesses. We pay one way or another. Right now, a quarter of our money is being funneled into HMO profits.
There is of course an answer, and it has been implemented everywhere else in the western world but here. Remove the profit motive, eliminate the insurance companies, pay for doctors' education so they can't use it as an excuse to gouge, and regulate prices. It's a pain in the ass, but it beats what we have now, where millions die undertreated but never show up on the TV news. We've a disaster that is never reported by the millionaire talking heads on TV, because they will never see anyone dying in their life from lack of funds to pay millionaires holding the key to life.
I think I played checkers on the Mac at home maybe seven times, tops. No games on my mini. Don't miss them at all.
Don't forget these inevitablities:
Employers, after a certain critical mass of workers obtain cars, will relocate to cheaper land out in the countryside (where they live), thus forcing people to drive to keep a job.
Highways will eventually be needed.
Taxes will go up to build a new highway system.
Pollution will climb. Taxpayers will foot the bill, but cars will never be costed out appropriately to cover the actual cost of their collective existence.
As a result of that, light rail will never economically be able to compete, as they will be expected to charge customers fully for their cost, whereas cars' infrastructure will be paid for by general revenues.
As a result, cars will take over the country, as they are "free" to the drivers and the employers.
As a result, a pedestrian society will become a car society, and pedestrians will be mowed down like wheat, and car crashes will kill millions and cripple tens of millions. Medical costs for the car world will skyrocket. Again, paid for by taxpayers.
A new industry, fixing cars, will be created. And the wailing and lamentation will commence.
They will be enormous dependence on middle eastern oil AKA the United States oil companies and associated trading games. The cost of transportation will keep climbing.
Once constructed, the car transportation system will be unkillable, and they will be stuck spending trillions forever to build and rebuild ribbons of asphalt that always wear out. So one guy can toodle down a hundred million dollar road from his suburb to a shopping mall.
The actual point of a person's economic existence will be to pay for a car to keep a job to pay for a car to keep a job to fix a car to get a job to keep a job to buy a car...
Who benefits? Negroponte and the OLPC project doesn't benefit from booting out Intel. They lose six million dollars. Intel does benefit from undercutting the project from within. Negroponte doesn't gain from lying. Intel does. Cui bono?
Just mouth noises to describe the same thing.
Right back atcha: Flamebait was the original poster implying that OLPC would open up the students' world to let them learn about the commies and leftists that rule their world.
The real lessons are about the IMF loans, US historical interventionism, and a vicious right-wing establishment trying to manhandle the world into their control. When we control the horizontal and vertical, we filter out our nasty little secrets. The OLPC is much more likely to open people's world into how we mess with them, not how Che Guevarra was Satan's puppy. Hence my laundry list of questions, for the sarcasm impaired, of a child who actually reads about modern world history. Our hands are on most nastiness kids are experiencing in a lot of countries. A little light on the cockroaches won't hurt. But man, does it make the rightists squawk.
Now that they have access, they'll teach themselves.
And the public hospitals are being demolished in New Orleans, along with the public schools. The Heritage Foundation large and in charge, telling the poor to get the hell out.
A communication link is not a toy. They can learn to read and write and pledge allegiance to their flag, but they previously only could learn what was fed to them. Now they can read EVERYthing. They don't need no, education... Not going to be a comfortable century for the Catholic Church and government censors.
You know, with so much to be negative about... it's so good to see this happening. And shining proof that people anywhere are ready to step up, given the shot. If you give children the tools, they will build you a new world. They don't need charity as much as they need access. They're going to surprise us all.
As for the we-should-worry-about-their-food-first crowd, well, appears Abraham Maslow still has something to teach us.
Forgot one:
"Daddy, why did the American soldier call me a terrorist sand n$%@er that wants to destroy Christians?"
I imagine that would come up a lot, OLPC or no.
"Daddy, what is a union?"
"Daddy, what's a homer-segsual?"
"Daddy, why are we cutting taxes for the crazy rich?"
"Daddy, why was mommy tased?"
"Daddy, why did that soldier shoot that protestor dead...?"
"Daddy, why are we losing the house?"
"Daddy, why is Bush invading us?"
"Daddy, why did uncle Muhammed not come back from the American prison camp?"
"Daddy, why does god only love the USA?"
"Daddy, why did they blow mommy up?"
Knowledge. Keep it from kids until they're growed up right.
1. Light devices of all sorts will be declared weapons and banned from civilian possession.
2. Light devices will very, very soon increase in power, becoming the deadliest hand weapon. Totally silent, immensely destructive, and can range and target before burn. Hm. Think of what you could do with a series hybrid electric car and a laser. Generator, meet light gun. See steel burn. See war protester burn. See your tires burn. Hell, they can just blind you. Remember, George Lucas acolytes, lasers aren't revolvers. They also can fire continuously, so they can spray an entire crowd. One light gun can take out a crowd in seconds.
3. Cops will use them against us, both to burn and to blind. Corporate armies will use them against us and the rest of the world. Corporate police can use them against... you get the picture. They will take them from us and then we'll see them used against us.
Anyone want to take that bet?
4. Same people that boo civvies will cheer cops and armies. Sorry, had to say that.
Amazing how people can affect their laws when they act like informed, involved citizens who participate in their own governmental process rather than cynical consumers who think government is an perncious enemy of mankind. Kudos to Canadians.
We ARE the government. For those few who always complain that we always talk but never do: speech is the tool of revolution, not guns. Guns can hold a man's body in place, but never his mind. We make the world with the words we write and say. The mind is made of symbols. Words are symbols. Governments, businesses, cults can be brought to heel by using the right words in the right places. Words are deeds.
So if the database was accurate, then there would be no problem with privacy. The dead guy and the NancyGraced father would have made a good kill. The problem is just making sure we kill the right people. Check your facts before you kill!
Of course, we can expand those lists of facts to other types of criminals. And we will. Just get the facts straight. And of course, we can add new crimes as well. Like... opposing the ruling party. Soon to come.
For that matter, why are Slashdotters permitted anonymity? There should be a database of our identities, histories, personal schedules, names of children and schools and their bus routes, job addresses. After all, privacy is dead. Why are you all hiding? Let's see the deets! This is the modern era. There should be consequences for inciting people with speech. After all, the first amendment doesn't exist on a private forum or private property, according to common notions, and a majority of our rather interesting rightist Supreme Court justices don't believe the 9th amendment covers unenumerated rights like privacy, so that doesn't exist, a figment of liberal imagination. If the Constitution didn't say it in 1790, it doesn't exist.
[this was reductio ad absurdum, BTW]
"To say that making the public aware of sex offenders online leads to murder is a bit extreme in my opinion."
Extreme? Like saying the Earth is round? The database led to his murder. Fact. He was innocent of said crime. Fact. Database indicated where to find him to kill him. Fact. Presence on said database leads hysterical parents to targets, fact. Database is frequently WRONG. Fact.
3G for Europe. Didn't say anything in the US rollout other than that the 3G hardware killed the battery. Maybe when the power requirements drop.
Steve said they would NOT move to 3G, as it was a battery killer. No plans to do so. It'll still kill batteries next spring.
I do tend to digress. But I came into this nonsense over ten years ago when the first police raids for copyright were coming down against the alt.reglion.scientology newsgroup and various remailers around the world. Everything is ultimately connected in some way; the Hubbardites' leaders have been stumping around lawmakers for years to criminalize copyright infringement -- it was a civil infraction ten years ago -- and now to really destroy the new "criminal" class. They're constitutionally incapable of NOT buying such laws -- they're required to wage war against their enemies until they are utterly destroyed and friendless, and they've declared a lot of posters entheta. This is the hammer they've been begging to use. They were major players, I'd bet, in removing what anonymity posters have as well.
But, as you say, the thesis I started with is stark and true. Nothing, anywhere on the planet, after the US pounds everyone into submission, nothing copyrighted, will ever enter public domain again. The term limits will be extended in a century, if anyone even bothers to notice the old laws in any case. So many generations will have lived with meters attached to their eyes and ears that the whole thrust of WHY Jefferson and the others made a limited term part of the Constitution will be as forgotten as the reasons for the fractional humanity of slaves and indians. Stare decisis, settled law, custom, will be that stories, songs, lyrics, pictures, video, and -- you've got to see it to believe it, 'cause cops here where I live enforce this violently by confiscating cameras -- VIEWS OF OBJECTS, such as a sightline for a camera, are property, with all that implies. A BUILDING in my city is considered copyrighted! I've had store owners run outside to chase me because I took a shot of their building facade. And the law will back them up here. Try taking a picture of a movie shoot -- they'll steal your camera.
Boil a frog. It's not just copyright as it stands. Every time they effect a new regime of law, they start creeping up with new interpretations of old terms to extend it. Twenty years from now, I guarantee you, they will claim ownership of their intellectual property IN YOUR HEAD. And fine and imprison you for it, or at least charge rent.
Once non-material objects are considered property, anything goes, much like the insane interpretation of a Supreme Court recorder now gives corporations immortal personhood. Once irrationality, magic, is injected into the law, then you're fighting angels with an invisible sword made of dreams.
According to the brain trust around the President, according to a 19th century US Supreme Court decision regarding bounty hunting, the US has the right to enter any nation, kidnap a citizen and drag them back to the US to face trial for breaking US laws. I am not joking. Your local laws are not relevant to the power of Rome, barbarian.
Don't worry, we'll be bankrupt before 2009 arrives. It'll be hard to fly around the world kidnapping college kids when no international airline will take US currency. Broke cops = immobile cops.
"Warrant"? Tee hee, you are so pre-911. We are at war, citizen, the old 18th century notions of "rights" is dead. So we are told. And constitutional rights only apply to Americans on American soil. The rest of you can be tortured in a tropical prison if we create a new mouth noise to describe you. How about, um, copyright combatant? Yeah. And if we set up a Unitary Executive tribunal to determine an American is, say, instigating copyright terrorism, we can then declare him a copyright combatant and send him off to tortureland too! Isn't fascism wonderful? Once you set up the semantic framework, you can murder and torture millions of people and no one will even bother to count the bodies. They won't exist in the news. We'll see reporters dishing up stories of the deaths of brave copyright policemen around the world Saving Democracy from Copyright Criminal Cartels, watch the price of old movies rise to cocaine-like heights, and we'll obsess about whether or not a teenaged girl singer owns handcuffs and drinks a lot for fun. Ohhhh, the dream of America.
"I REALLY don't want to have to go to the extreme of doing mounted volume or full disk encryption schemes on my HOME COMPUTER! But at the rate things are going I'll not have any choice if the gov can appropriate your computer for something like bogus MP3s."
I think they already tried to criminalize that with PATRIOT Act #2. They will layer law upon law until encrypting disks and communications is in itself an admission of guilt -- unless you are in the White House, where it's okay to destroy all your communications and flip off the Congress. These laws don't apply to wealth and power.. England already requires that you surrender encryption keys on their demand, else into gaol you go, terrorist.
The neat thing I notice is that they casually posit that they can send their copyright police (why do I think that Scientologists will be all over these jobs?) anywhere in the world. The Hubbardites must be wetting themselves with joy - no one will be able to discuss their BS online without armored thugs kicking in the doors and dragging them away. According to this President's brain trust, a Supreme Court decision about bounty hunters what, a hundred years ago, gives them the right to kidnap ANYONE on the planet and drag them back to the US for trial for breaking our laws.
We are now a military, police, and economic world empire. The only thing standing between the planet and us is economic ideological suicide by tax cuts, spending, and borrowing, which thank Xenu is now just a few years down the road. I can only hope the UK and similar boot lickers of "intellectual property" owners don't pick up the copyright police state baton after we drop it.
"now almost nothing created in my parent's lifetime will become public domain for me before I die."
Nothing, at all, will become public domain ever again. This is the ratification of a new regime, the corporate ownership of the lore of mankind, ownership by immortal, unkillable clouds that can reach down and ruin and imprison at will.
As if Scientology took over the world, which in a sense is exactly what is happening. Those bastards were the first to use the term "copyright criminal" and to sue people for reprinting and exposing what was in plain sight without regard for fair use/criticism... I wonder how much of this new police state is being built through their bought puppies to keep those sekret skriptures secret... but I digress.