It's insightful because the GP is pointing out that government interests (NSA) trump even the RIAA's.
Probably fair enough too. I don't trust the Government, but I do care about good government. I actively hate the RIAA, and am inclined to cheer anything that pushes them under.
Oh, and "should" and "shouldn't" are irrelevant. "Do" and "don't" are important: Most people don't think of locks on their doors as defence against abuse of police powers, but against casual criminal activity. Whether rightly or wrongly, I don't feel the need to have strong-enough security on either my doors or my electronics that the government can't get in.
Not so popular with anyone over 50, but immensely popular with everyone under 50. And most of the people paying taxes, unless they happen to be older. The main difference between US healthcare and the rest of the world is that spending ratio. Eliminate it, and all will be well with healthcare spending.
You can't think of a way to eliminate it, can you? You Americans have an amazing capacity to know the evidence that national healthcare would work better than what you have, and ignore it on principle. I hope I am never so stupid.
You might think that all people are so awful as to mistreat their parents, grandparents, and for that matter, other humans. But really, most of us aren't, and I suspect you wouldn't let an old person die in squalor just to save on a bit of tax. If you think would, you need to rethink your personal moral standards, not rail against a system that clearly works.
Could you give some examples? Not that I'm doubting you, I'm just curious.
I've been left without access to mathematica licenses on multiple occasions due to misunderstandings between Wolfram and my institution. Because Mathematica was my primary platform at the time, that meant days that I was unable to do or access my work.
The first time that happened, I decided to learn an open platform; the second time, I migrated. In my projects, I now absolutely avoid writing core functionality in Mathematica.
Another complaint: you can't discover how defaults work in some cases. As far as I can tell, setting things to "Automatic" means "proprietary and undescribed." I've asked Wolfram for details in one case, only to get a "we can't tell you" response.
Oh, and being told off for filing bug reports is pretty unimpressive. I separately reported different manifestations of the same bug, separated by some time. I'd actually forgotten about the first report, but if they'd fixed the bug, the situation wouldn't have arisen. When I've submitted a bug report to open source projects, they have usually been along the lines of "this line is wrong, and this seems to be an acceptable fix."
I think the arguments for open, modifiable, redistributable source code (that is guaranteed to retain those properties) are extremely strong. I.e. the GPL, probably v3. Once you know it well, Mathematica is a stunning programming language and library set, but I now don't care: as a whole, the platform has been unreliable for me.
The swan song of the self deprececating urban 'intellectual'.
Nature's produced a hell of a lot worse and more blood thirsty killers than Humans.
All the GP said was "efficient." We are extremely efficient killers. We are geniuses when it comes to killing. Good for us. It's much better than starving to death, dying from infection, or letting our food animals die slowly. Not only that, we generally know when to restrain our killing.
I'll submit to being trolled in the interests of science. You are pretty badly informed.
Antibiotics don't affect viruses, correct. But they certainly help with secondary pneumonia. It's not the same H1N1 that caused the Spanish Flu. The Spanish Flu rarely killed by cytokine storm, though more often than currently circulating influenzas. The US Navy, for all their strengths, is not a world-renowned public health body.
I may be a moron, but I have studied this field quite closely, including reading all sorts of primary reports from 1918 and now. I have read original medical histories and autopsy reports.
The cytokine storm theory is good in the sense that cytokine storms presumably did occur, but it was not the usual mode of death. Pneumonia was mostly responsible for the deaths in 1918, including in young adults.
One component of the myth is that young adults died in 1918-1919 in just a few days. It is sometimes supported by "data from Sydney". I've looked at that data fairly carefully. There is good evidence for some stunningly quick deaths, but the mean time-to-death (10 days) did not vary significantly across age-groups.
The case-fatality rate was very different in different cohorts in the army infected at the same time. Prevailing co-infections are quite likely to account for that.
Antivirals might prevent some primary viremia, and some progression to pneumonia. However, most deaths would also be avoided by use of antibiotics.
You are right, the selective pressure comes from both the infected person's capacity to infect, and the susceptible person's ability to identify infectives.
Almost all infectious organisms follow the pattern: lots of people have them, they rarely cause serious illness in anyone. HIV is a counterexample to the principle.
The most lethal and consistently symptomatic infectious diseases are arguably smallpox and SARS, and they're extinct because of their extreme virulence.
The flu's a virus. We've only had the facilities to treat the actual virus itself for a very short time (and even then, they're somewhat rarely used).
Most people who die from influenza die from subsequent bacterial pneumonia, not from acute viral infection. That was the case in 1918 too, and if 1918 flu hit again now, most deaths would be averted by use of antibiotics.
However, we've had the tools to treat the symptoms for quite some time. I don't doubt that they were considerably more primitive in 1918, although even the most basic treatments could mean the difference between life and death.
Well, antibiotics are the main ones, so they were more primitive in 1918.
Your theory is kind of nice, but I really don't think the US Navy played nurse to the population of American Samoa. The same pattern is true elsewhere in the world: Australia kept it out till late too, and also had a low case-fatality rate.
Doubt it. There weren't any antibiotics then. The pandemic overwhelmed medical facilities all over the developed world. A couple of piddling US warships could hardly have provided nursing facilities to the entire population.
The reason the idea is dumb is that as time passes, diseases tend to evolve to become more infectious, but less pathogenic. It's an obvious bit of natural selection: you will avoid people you know to be sick, and hence you are more likely to be infected by a less ill person.
The classic example is from Samoa in the 1918 influenza pandemic. Then, 25% of the population of Western Samoa died of flu. The American Navy maintained quarantine around American Samoa, and the flu didn't get there for about a year. Only a small fraction of the (nearly identical) population died.
A well-advised legislature might make better technical decisions than IT departments. In this case, I strongly suspect they have.
Senior IT managers are highly susceptible to being advised, wowed, flattered and bribed into going with whatever $BigCompany tells them is most cost-effective. Given that MS is about maximising their own profits, they have a major conflict of interest when giving advice. Basically, while IT managers might be competent to manage IT, it is not necessarily efficient to have them assess whether Vista is cost-effective.
(For the same reason, each doctor is not personally responsible for testing the safety and mechanism of action of drugs. In principle they could, but it would be a tremendous waste of time and prone to all sorts of mistakes.)
It is quite reasonable for a government to assess whether Vista is cost-effective for "standard installs" once and for all, and there is no reason to redo the analysis at a lower level. So no, it isn't a question of letting IT professionals do their job, but defining their job in such a way as makes them efficient.
400 books would need to be purchased. Were 400 mp3s purchased?
Yes. If you buy 1 computer file, it is the same as buying 2 identical computer files. With computer files, there are two relevant quantities: none (don't have a copy), and one (have a copy). If you have more than one copy, it is no more valuable than having one copy.
And it follows that if 1 copy was purchased, then 400 copies were purchased. That's how computers work, that's what they do. You can want reality to be different, but it isn't. You aren't getting something for nothing, because those 399 copies are worth nothing if you still have the first.
A corollary of this is that computer-copyable creative works are only worth as much as the first copy. I.e. they should be (and will be, and mostly already are) funded by commission, performance, micropayments, or similar means, rather than expecting to make a profit from each copy.
If you are an aspiring musician who wants to make money from CD sales, grow out of it. You should find a patron, charge for performances, or flip burgers---that's reality. Micropayments also work if they (1) guarantee that you get a good copy of what you want, and/or (2) allow people to be micropatrons, to fund the musicians they like.
Richard Stallman may or may not be talking about something important here-but we have some extraordinary pay-offs from his insight 25 or so years ago. People legitimately disagree with him (including me) but only a fool would ignore him.
Just because the man is an uncompromising idealist in no way justifies your cowardly and stupid ridicule. And the moderators who thought you were insightful should the meaning of the word "insight" and moderate accordingly.
Researchers. I'll buy one. I've got a half a million bucks to spend, that by law I can't put in my own pocket. (I'll also get an education discount that will reduce the profit margin to about 30%.)
You could call it a tertiary education sector inefficiency, but it's probably better understood as a cheap perk: it's lot cheaper to give me a computer I'm happy with (marginal cost maybe $2000) than a salary I'm happy with (marginal cost about $20,000).
I see where you are coming from, but I still can't agree that people should eat food and drive cars that they can't afford. I don't to see how health care should be any different.
You'd agree that there is a real difference for things like major surgery, mental health care, etc. I agree you have a point for small, predictable expenses.
But here's a counter-example: women need regular, inexpensive Pap smears and men do not. Insurance allows (in principle) women to be cross-subsidised by men. I think that men should expect to do this as a matter of equity... especially when it is we men who give the women the virus that gives rise to the need for Pap smears.
Good post, though I disagree absolutely with your alternative. You can achieve 3 under a 'socialised' system-- by printing the true price on the label. My grandparents, who are pensioners, are absolutely overjoyed when they get $150 medicine for $5. The government negotiates the price of $150, and pays the first $145. I would pay $30 for the same drug.
Of course, such a system cannot work in theory, though it works extremely well in practise. BTW the problem with the system you advocate is that consumers don't have enough information to drive an efficient market.
Because it is the kind of spending that stimulates the economy now and makes it more efficient in the future. It's not a bailout of irresponsible people.
A lot of it is that you are very quick to reject the successes of other cultures if you perceive them as being the result of socialism, protectionism, "not the American way", etc..
For example, universal health care. Practically every other civilised country has better average health (than USA) for a substantially smaller cost (like, 70%). But you argue against that using killer arguments like "it's socialist!"
For example, your weird understanding of freedom. I understand that freedom is a particularly important notion in the history of the USA, but as soon as someone mentions the f-word, you guys go all silly. "Attack on New York"? No! "Attack on freedom itself"! Basically if you weren't so obsessed with freedom, your dear leader couldn't have used it as a buzzword to persuade the nation to go and do some very silly and expensive things in Iraq.
And so on, and so on. In the case of high tech, it's probably because seriously expensive high tech projects require a fair bit of government intervention and that would upset all your libertarian tendencies.
Basically, you all need to learn to be a bit more utilitarian when you make collective decisions about the role of government. Occasionally, a society needs to have the option of changing itself by the action of a well-informed government.
That's not entirely true. It is possible to have a relationship with the people in the company, and expect them to behave in a certain way because you know the people. For example, I have a relationship with Steve Jobs, that gives me grounds to expect consistently great products because I know what a perfectionist he is. Who am I kidding.
But to the extent that a company maintains a public persona in order to sell their product, you can expect that persona to remain consistent even if it costs them money in the short term. If you replace "my faith in Google just dropped significantly" with "my understanding of Google's public persona has just changed significantly" it's a very reasonable notion expressing much the same thing.
In the very long term, though, companies are just about making money. Part of the problem is trying to figure out what the timescale is.
No, it doesn't. Microsoft's original decision to leverage their OS monopoly stank of illegal and unethical practice, and this is just a matter of those who write the laws and interpret society's ethics (the politicians and judges) catching up with them.
It so happens in this case that law and ethics have an impact on the implementation of some technical decisions. I don't give a crap. The decision to integrate the browser and OS tightly was made on marketing grounds, in a poor attempt to circumvent monopoly law. If they hadn't been trying to manufacture a technical excuse to break the law, they wouldn't be in this situation.
So it's a case of non-technical people making non-technical decisions that have implications for the techies. Happens all the time. It upsets techies when they forget that they are there to serve society instead of the other way around.
Oh, and another thing. Somebody non-technical (or at least, non-Microsoft, which amounts to the same thing) is dictating a kind-of-crap technical solution now. If Microsoft had made their position right before the law ten years ago, this wouldn't be happening.
The bad guys often win when it's "one person, one vote" too. Frankly, lots of voters are fools and they often elect really bad guys [citation needed].
[citation] For example, Italy. The USA. Probably every decent and honourable society has had a rush of blood to the head, and (often under a little stress) elected or approved foul leaders.
It might help you to think about what a lack of stimulus will do: inappropriately inflate the value of cash. Basically, if there is some sort of stimulus, people with skills have an opportunity to sell their skills. Without it, people with skills will go unemployed.
I have ten good job applications sitting on my desk right now. I would happily give any of them the one job. So because I've got a bit of cash to spend, I'll be employing a person better qualified than me to work at a substantially lower rate.
If the government employs now, they will get good value for their money. If they do not spend money now, they will push people out of the high investment professions that make modern society good. (I'm talking unemployed doctors & scientists.)
The only real problem with The Stimulus is that as it stands, it's more likely to prop up inefficient vested interests than genuinely valuable skills.
Maybe they won't like having competition? I doubt it, I assume they're doing it not just for the cash, but because they believe porn &c should be filtered. Either way, good on them for providing a product that people want, and bad on them if they go trying to impose their own moral standards on others.
And---it may be unpopular around here, but---bad on them if they provide a broken filter so that people are paying for something they don't want (access to porn).
Slashdot Mirror
They're not practical. They're fun. Lots of slashdotters probably cut their teeth trying to find odd Mersenne primes. That's good enough reason.
It's insightful because the GP is pointing out that government interests (NSA) trump even the RIAA's.
Probably fair enough too. I don't trust the Government, but I do care about good government. I actively hate the RIAA, and am inclined to cheer anything that pushes them under.
Oh, and "should" and "shouldn't" are irrelevant. "Do" and "don't" are important: Most people don't think of locks on their doors as defence against abuse of police powers, but against casual criminal activity. Whether rightly or wrongly, I don't feel the need to have strong-enough security on either my doors or my electronics that the government can't get in.
"Doesn't have to be?" Dude! Go out on a limb! It certainly isn't a linear curve.
Not so popular with anyone over 50, but immensely popular with everyone under 50. And most of the people paying taxes, unless they happen to be older. The main difference between US healthcare and the rest of the world is that spending ratio. Eliminate it, and all will be well with healthcare spending.
You can't think of a way to eliminate it, can you? You Americans have an amazing capacity to know the evidence that national healthcare would work better than what you have, and ignore it on principle. I hope I am never so stupid.
You might think that all people are so awful as to mistreat their parents, grandparents, and for that matter, other humans. But really, most of us aren't, and I suspect you wouldn't let an old person die in squalor just to save on a bit of tax. If you think would, you need to rethink your personal moral standards, not rail against a system that clearly works.
Could you give some examples? Not that I'm doubting you, I'm just curious.
I've been left without access to mathematica licenses on multiple occasions due to misunderstandings between Wolfram and my institution. Because Mathematica was my primary platform at the time, that meant days that I was unable to do or access my work.
The first time that happened, I decided to learn an open platform; the second time, I migrated. In my projects, I now absolutely avoid writing core functionality in Mathematica.
Another complaint: you can't discover how defaults work in some cases. As far as I can tell, setting things to "Automatic" means "proprietary and undescribed." I've asked Wolfram for details in one case, only to get a "we can't tell you" response.
Oh, and being told off for filing bug reports is pretty unimpressive. I separately reported different manifestations of the same bug, separated by some time. I'd actually forgotten about the first report, but if they'd fixed the bug, the situation wouldn't have arisen. When I've submitted a bug report to open source projects, they have usually been along the lines of "this line is wrong, and this seems to be an acceptable fix."
I think the arguments for open, modifiable, redistributable source code (that is guaranteed to retain those properties) are extremely strong. I.e. the GPL, probably v3. Once you know it well, Mathematica is a stunning programming language and library set, but I now don't care: as a whole, the platform has been unreliable for me.
The swan song of the self deprececating urban 'intellectual'.
Nature's produced a hell of a lot worse and more blood thirsty killers than Humans.
All the GP said was "efficient." We are extremely efficient killers. We are geniuses when it comes to killing. Good for us. It's much better than starving to death, dying from infection, or letting our food animals die slowly. Not only that, we generally know when to restrain our killing.
You dopey anti-intellectual.
I'll submit to being trolled in the interests of science. You are pretty badly informed.
Antibiotics don't affect viruses, correct. But they certainly help with secondary pneumonia. It's not the same H1N1 that caused the Spanish Flu. The Spanish Flu rarely killed by cytokine storm, though more often than currently circulating influenzas. The US Navy, for all their strengths, is not a world-renowned public health body.
I may be a moron, but I have studied this field quite closely, including reading all sorts of primary reports from 1918 and now. I have read original medical histories and autopsy reports.
The cytokine storm theory is good in the sense that cytokine storms presumably did occur, but it was not the usual mode of death. Pneumonia was mostly responsible for the deaths in 1918, including in young adults.
One component of the myth is that young adults died in 1918-1919 in just a few days. It is sometimes supported by "data from Sydney". I've looked at that data fairly carefully. There is good evidence for some stunningly quick deaths, but the mean time-to-death (10 days) did not vary significantly across age-groups.
The case-fatality rate was very different in different cohorts in the army infected at the same time. Prevailing co-infections are quite likely to account for that.
Antivirals might prevent some primary viremia, and some progression to pneumonia. However, most deaths would also be avoided by use of antibiotics.
You are right, the selective pressure comes from both the infected person's capacity to infect, and the susceptible person's ability to identify infectives.
Almost all infectious organisms follow the pattern: lots of people have them, they rarely cause serious illness in anyone. HIV is a counterexample to the principle.
The most lethal and consistently symptomatic infectious diseases are arguably smallpox and SARS, and they're extinct because of their extreme virulence.
The flu's a virus. We've only had the facilities to treat the actual virus itself for a very short time (and even then, they're somewhat rarely used).
Most people who die from influenza die from subsequent bacterial pneumonia, not from acute viral infection. That was the case in 1918 too, and if 1918 flu hit again now, most deaths would be averted by use of antibiotics.
However, we've had the tools to treat the symptoms for quite some time. I don't doubt that they were considerably more primitive in 1918, although even the most basic treatments could mean the difference between life and death.
Well, antibiotics are the main ones, so they were more primitive in 1918.
Your theory is kind of nice, but I really don't think the US Navy played nurse to the population of American Samoa. The same pattern is true elsewhere in the world: Australia kept it out till late too, and also had a low case-fatality rate.
Doubt it. There weren't any antibiotics then. The pandemic overwhelmed medical facilities all over the developed world. A couple of piddling US warships could hardly have provided nursing facilities to the entire population.
The reason the idea is dumb is that as time passes, diseases tend to evolve to become more infectious, but less pathogenic. It's an obvious bit of natural selection: you will avoid people you know to be sick, and hence you are more likely to be infected by a less ill person.
The classic example is from Samoa in the 1918 influenza pandemic. Then, 25% of the population of Western Samoa died of flu. The American Navy maintained quarantine around American Samoa, and the flu didn't get there for about a year. Only a small fraction of the (nearly identical) population died.
So if there's a nasty flu about, get it late.
A well-advised legislature might make better technical decisions than IT departments. In this case, I strongly suspect they have.
Senior IT managers are highly susceptible to being advised, wowed, flattered and bribed into going with whatever $BigCompany tells them is most cost-effective. Given that MS is about maximising their own profits, they have a major conflict of interest when giving advice. Basically, while IT managers might be competent to manage IT, it is not necessarily efficient to have them assess whether Vista is cost-effective.
(For the same reason, each doctor is not personally responsible for testing the safety and mechanism of action of drugs. In principle they could, but it would be a tremendous waste of time and prone to all sorts of mistakes.)
It is quite reasonable for a government to assess whether Vista is cost-effective for "standard installs" once and for all, and there is no reason to redo the analysis at a lower level. So no, it isn't a question of letting IT professionals do their job, but defining their job in such a way as makes them efficient.
400 books would need to be purchased. Were 400 mp3s purchased?
Yes. If you buy 1 computer file, it is the same as buying 2 identical computer files. With computer files, there are two relevant quantities: none (don't have a copy), and one (have a copy). If you have more than one copy, it is no more valuable than having one copy.
And it follows that if 1 copy was purchased, then 400 copies were purchased. That's how computers work, that's what they do. You can want reality to be different, but it isn't. You aren't getting something for nothing, because those 399 copies are worth nothing if you still have the first.
A corollary of this is that computer-copyable creative works are only worth as much as the first copy. I.e. they should be (and will be, and mostly already are) funded by commission, performance, micropayments, or similar means, rather than expecting to make a profit from each copy.
If you are an aspiring musician who wants to make money from CD sales, grow out of it. You should find a patron, charge for performances, or flip burgers---that's reality. Micropayments also work if they (1) guarantee that you get a good copy of what you want, and/or (2) allow people to be micropatrons, to fund the musicians they like.
Richard Stallman may or may not be talking about something important here-but we have some extraordinary pay-offs from his insight 25 or so years ago. People legitimately disagree with him (including me) but only a fool would ignore him.
Just because the man is an uncompromising idealist in no way justifies your cowardly and stupid ridicule. And the moderators who thought you were insightful should the meaning of the word "insight" and moderate accordingly.
Researchers. I'll buy one. I've got a half a million bucks to spend, that by law I can't put in my own pocket. (I'll also get an education discount that will reduce the profit margin to about 30%.)
You could call it a tertiary education sector inefficiency, but it's probably better understood as a cheap perk: it's lot cheaper to give me a computer I'm happy with (marginal cost maybe $2000) than a salary I'm happy with (marginal cost about $20,000).
I see where you are coming from, but I still can't agree that people should eat food and drive cars that they can't afford. I don't to see how health care should be any different.
You'd agree that there is a real difference for things like major surgery, mental health care, etc. I agree you have a point for small, predictable expenses.
But here's a counter-example: women need regular, inexpensive Pap smears and men do not. Insurance allows (in principle) women to be cross-subsidised by men. I think that men should expect to do this as a matter of equity... especially when it is we men who give the women the virus that gives rise to the need for Pap smears.
Good post, though I disagree absolutely with your alternative. You can achieve 3 under a 'socialised' system-- by printing the true price on the label. My grandparents, who are pensioners, are absolutely overjoyed when they get $150 medicine for $5. The government negotiates the price of $150, and pays the first $145. I would pay $30 for the same drug.
Of course, such a system cannot work in theory, though it works extremely well in practise. BTW the problem with the system you advocate is that consumers don't have enough information to drive an efficient market.
Because it is the kind of spending that stimulates the economy now and makes it more efficient in the future. It's not a bailout of irresponsible people.
A lot of it is that you are very quick to reject the successes of other cultures if you perceive them as being the result of socialism, protectionism, "not the American way", etc..
For example, universal health care. Practically every other civilised country has better average health (than USA) for a substantially smaller cost (like, 70%). But you argue against that using killer arguments like "it's socialist!"
For example, your weird understanding of freedom. I understand that freedom is a particularly important notion in the history of the USA, but as soon as someone mentions the f-word, you guys go all silly. "Attack on New York"? No! "Attack on freedom itself"! Basically if you weren't so obsessed with freedom, your dear leader couldn't have used it as a buzzword to persuade the nation to go and do some very silly and expensive things in Iraq.
And so on, and so on. In the case of high tech, it's probably because seriously expensive high tech projects require a fair bit of government intervention and that would upset all your libertarian tendencies.
Basically, you all need to learn to be a bit more utilitarian when you make collective decisions about the role of government. Occasionally, a society needs to have the option of changing itself by the action of a well-informed government.
That's not entirely true. It is possible to have a relationship with the people in the company, and expect them to behave in a certain way because you know the people. For example, I have a relationship with Steve Jobs, that gives me grounds to expect consistently great products because I know what a perfectionist he is. Who am I kidding.
But to the extent that a company maintains a public persona in order to sell their product, you can expect that persona to remain consistent even if it costs them money in the short term. If you replace "my faith in Google just dropped significantly" with "my understanding of Google's public persona has just changed significantly" it's a very reasonable notion expressing much the same thing.
In the very long term, though, companies are just about making money. Part of the problem is trying to figure out what the timescale is.
What about Ubuntu? Does it have to offer a choice as well?
Yes. But only if it obtains an OS monopoly and then uses that to manipulate another market segment illegally.
No, it doesn't. Microsoft's original decision to leverage their OS monopoly stank of illegal and unethical practice, and this is just a matter of those who write the laws and interpret society's ethics (the politicians and judges) catching up with them.
It so happens in this case that law and ethics have an impact on the implementation of some technical decisions. I don't give a crap. The decision to integrate the browser and OS tightly was made on marketing grounds, in a poor attempt to circumvent monopoly law. If they hadn't been trying to manufacture a technical excuse to break the law, they wouldn't be in this situation.
So it's a case of non-technical people making non-technical decisions that have implications for the techies. Happens all the time. It upsets techies when they forget that they are there to serve society instead of the other way around.
Oh, and another thing. Somebody non-technical (or at least, non-Microsoft, which amounts to the same thing) is dictating a kind-of-crap technical solution now. If Microsoft had made their position right before the law ten years ago, this wouldn't be happening.
The bad guys often win when it's "one person, one vote" too. Frankly, lots of voters are fools and they often elect really bad guys [citation needed].
[citation] For example, Italy. The USA. Probably every decent and honourable society has had a rush of blood to the head, and (often under a little stress) elected or approved foul leaders.
It might help you to think about what a lack of stimulus will do: inappropriately inflate the value of cash. Basically, if there is some sort of stimulus, people with skills have an opportunity to sell their skills. Without it, people with skills will go unemployed.
I have ten good job applications sitting on my desk right now. I would happily give any of them the one job. So because I've got a bit of cash to spend, I'll be employing a person better qualified than me to work at a substantially lower rate.
If the government employs now, they will get good value for their money. If they do not spend money now, they will push people out of the high investment professions that make modern society good. (I'm talking unemployed doctors & scientists.)
The only real problem with The Stimulus is that as it stands, it's more likely to prop up inefficient vested interests than genuinely valuable skills.
Maybe they won't like having competition? I doubt it, I assume they're doing it not just for the cash, but because they believe porn &c should be filtered. Either way, good on them for providing a product that people want, and bad on them if they go trying to impose their own moral standards on others.
And---it may be unpopular around here, but---bad on them if they provide a broken filter so that people are paying for something they don't want (access to porn).