There are glaciers that have been receeding, that have not receeded as much in 10 of thousands of years, the ice shelfs are receeding in the artic and ant-arctic. Your graph shows sea ice which is just surface, the major underlying structures that represents the majority of the stored ice that has been around for a long time is going away. Again you look at the surface and not whats underneath.
Well stereotypes have survival value and when you consider that 99.99% of research and 100% of reputable research supports the conclusion that mans efforts at living the good life have effected the climate in such a way that polar ice caps are melting, storms are getting stronger and weather patterns changing. It will be funny to see Cuccinelli trying to get votes from those portions of Virginia like Hampton and Norfolk are as under sea level as New Orleans. Speaking of which they had better build those leevies higher down there.
There is no dispute certainly that there is global warming. The only dispute might be what percentage is due to man's activity. So arguing about who put the hole in the boat while your sinking seems to be counter productive. In this case it effects business, like who needs to add the cost to the planet for their business practices, or who might get sued over their business practices. So he might not be anti science, just pro-"Take the money and run"
We if the utopian veiw of the free market system ala Libertarians had any basis in fact or practical applicaiton it would be in practice today. What we do find is people tauting "Free Market" as a mantra to blind people to their real purpose with is a snatch and grab of as much money, power, wealth as they can. They sell that idea as a marketing ploy to get regulations dropped. We see the effect in the latest market crash and the sucking out of the vital life blood of our countries economy by oursouring critical and essential jobs to other countries. These "Free Marketeers" are not thinking of the world or the good of the people, they are thinking of themselves and pay the people that come up with the Ideologies that say, well yes thinking only of yourself is really thinking of others, let me show you the equations. And they laugh all the way to the bank.
What we as a people must do is find a way to be self protective, usually through government action. Unfortuneately business has found a way to get in the middle and take control of government, and secondly take control of the courts. Or shall we say get "favorable" people in those positions. Its a concerted, covert, power grab and its working so far. We need to just realize that the businesses, countries etc. that pollute need to factor in those costs. Business tries to minimize cost and will omit as many cost factors as they posibly can, because as it stands now the only purpose of business is profit.
Maybe that has to change because in the large that can go against the common good. The role of government is then to complete the package that allows that philosophy of business to continue. Kind of like in our world, the old style, your routine cleaned up its own garbage, In the new paradigm, there is a common garbage collector that picks up after you, making your code more efficient and simpiler.
What has happened is the greedy who have gotten that seperation of function and made tons of money from it (moderated by competition), have lost sight of that needed duality and think they can get along quite well without garbage collection. Because they don't want to pay for that overhead. But they are just spoiled and greedy. These are the same people that don't want to pay taxes, or minimize their tax burden, even though they use the services of the government and most likely benefit to a much greater percentage than the average worker from the services provided by the government.
The other problem we have is the growth of the size of companies in the dual model. Before a business could run for awhile and the garbage that needed to be collected or detected (in the case of pollution or other miss uses of resource, or bad product that is harming or killing or bad practice that is harming or stealing) could be caught in a resonable amount of time and damages limited and jail sentences given etc. But now the bigger corporations can leave much more garbage much more quickly and overshoot available resource and we have markets crash. Or as we have seen with the conservative free marketeers since Regan the dismantaling of the garbage detection/collection function of government with the consequences to us all and the incredible wealth taken from the system by others.
No there is a legitimate role for goverernment that closely follows models and patterns we are familiar with. We need to make sure the system is in balance and that our garbage detection/collection is alive and healthy , and running.
Well Somebody, your right, it does cause harm. Then why hasn't someone come up with a set of out of the distro defaults that are safe and secure? Think about it. If in the community you want Linux to be widespread and generally useful, you come up with a product that is that by default.
We work these problems as we see them, take the seat belt thing with cars. Were the people who drove cars up until the 80's (or whenever the law required seat belts) criminals because a car crash would have hurt their passengers or the people in the other car. I don't think so. But we recognized that this was a problem that could be mitigated by requiring that seat belts be put into cars, and car seats for children, now the regulations that you must have your seat belts on. Why? because even if you get hurt in an accident the cleanup from it medically, financially and other ways effects us all.
The OS community has an opportunity to lock out this problem by crafting distributions that start out secure and those that know can open up what they want. Tall order certainly, and those that know don't want to have to go through that exercize if they don't want to, and like a system that needs them around to lock things down. But the problem of viruses, bots, theft and spam are serious problems. Not only should we find and stop these people but we should remove the food that attracts the rats and roaches of the computer field.
"Corporations can be trusted more when you don't do anything to try to regulate them"
Your fxxxxxx kidding me. We are in probably the worst depression since the great depression and the reason is that Corporations were trusted to do anything they wanted without regulation. Spin back to the Enron, World Com, Savings and Loan crises. This statement is false and has been shown to be false over and over and at the expense of most everyone's pocket.
Well not a dictator but a citizen agency working for the common good. We know the alternative is an escalating money grab until if you want the kind of service you enjoy now you will pay 3 or 4 times as much and the cheap alternatives will be back to dail up modem speeds. Like the "free market" which has been shown to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. They will give you options but all of them designed to squeeze as much money out of the system as possible while suppressing political and competitive information they don't want to see. A consistant playing field with the Internet seen as a common resource owned by all should be the way it is viewed. The internet companies should operate for the common good and a little profit.
More than likely an intern was getting the paperwork in, not trained, under paid, wanting to get out the to bar to meet the gang. Ah, government by the staff.
Your kidding of course, I think Democrats, as well as any sane person would see that banning a fully automatic weapon, designed to kill people (not deer or other game), has little or no place in a modern urban setting. Now in a rural setting, with crazy neighbors that want to trespass on your property and maybe hunt your game, sure, mow them down.
Or if you don't like the FBI or the ATF because they want you to register your Still and make hooch that won't kill people or make them blind, well they don't deserve to live.
Or if you find a person of another faith, not a Christian faith like Islam (wait they worship the same Jewish God too, so not them), that wants to not recognize your right to beat up Gays (most recently on Statten Island). Well you need a little extra fire power to keep the world safe for us gun totting Christian White folks.
So, sorry, what was your argument for the acceptibility of not banning Assualt Weapons in the U.S.?
The great problem is attribution. Here you attribute the varied Democratice voting records to the monolithic voting records to Party Loyalty vs fear of loss of seat, as if those are the only explanations or reasons.
I would counter that the Republican party is more Demogogic and Authoritative and they see that if they stick together and vote together they will keep their seats, and also service their financiers and feather their nests politically and privately with that behavior.
On the other hand the Democrats are more of the people and listen to the diveristy of their constituent and try to serve the people that elected them (not the ones that paid to have them elected) (yes, yes there are some counter examples, but I posit that that is the exception and not the rule). That would explain the less than monolithic voting record of the Democrats. They are not doing things out of fear but listening to and reponding to their constituents, which I claim is what the process should be like, not this opposing everything, even health care for 911 responders.
Speaking of which, what if a 911 responder was an illegal allien. Don't we owe him a deep gratitude and at least health care for the sacrifice he/she made for us at ground Zero. What is this Republican bullshit where they block a vote because they don't want any illegal allien to get health coverage, even if they were a 911 responder.
I don't think the punishment fits the crime here, and exposes some deep seeded and ugly views held by the Republicans.
Thats why they call it a War against Terror instead of a War againt Iraq or Afganistan. We have no declared war with any nation currently, nor did we ever have with Iraq or Afganistan. Bin Laden was the head figure organizer and fundraiser for much of the terroism against the west including 911 which gave Bush the cover to go into Iraq which had nothing to do with 911 or Bin Ladens organization. (the Bin Laden family was visiting the Bush's in Texas I believe when 911 happened and their plane to fly them out of the country was the only plane allowed to fly other than military planes, go figure).
So Bin Laden is the head of an organization that is at war with us, so I think you could say he "started" the war with the first salvo at the Trade Center.
Remeber that movie. The sticker "fatality proof" would only reference those inside the car, not the pedestians, bikers, or other cars that get killed outside the safety zone. Might not that removal of risk cause the drivers of those vehicle to take more risks with others lives. Look what happed to the stock markets when there was no risk to the speculator. We all died a little. Its another posible example of the law of unintended consequences
Seriously, carrying signs that have Obama with a bone in his nose, and Gay bashing, I think we are talking exactly talking about dehumanization. Like they have to live with the fall out of their treating others as second class citizens, walling themselves off with a we vs them mentality that puts something like a third of the population as the them (maybe more). Alliens I say, or less than fully human, you choose.
Wrong, its called risk management. Something that was not used in the Gulf Drilling. There is good examples already of government abuse of priviledge going back to Hoover spying on Marting Luther King and other people that he did not like philosophically. The argument is one of, should we go in that direction, should we have controls and transparency or secrecy? if we have non-transparency and secrecy, how will we know that the spying will be responsible? We have seen that the rush to security has gone wrong, from torture to rendition, to unauthorized internet monitoring. By people I would not want to marry my daughter if I had a daughter. As we have seen with unregulated markets, markets without Citizen interest oversight, people take advantage up to and over the legal lines for personal advantage. So it gets down to risk managment. Are our privacy and freedom and free speech and other constitutional rights at risk? By our own government? can you say 1984 anyone. First push the government to take control of information, then take control of the government. Then you can lock in your control of the government and the people. It has happened before. Its not time to sit back and let someone else take control of things no one should have control over.
The price of Freedom if vigilance, not giving up control to an Uber Group.
It only makes sense to slash dot the legislature and executive about your feelings on this issue. Then and only then will steps be taken to keep the internet like public highways and not privatized toll roads with different cost lanes. Or we will all end up on the frontage road. Can anyone remember Fido?
Right to Health Care?, hardly, more a mandate from the right to force people to pay private companies for health care insurance, one of the very profitable private industries in this country. That is because most of the other profitable industries have been outsourced to other countries. I often wonder how a country can survive on just a service industry. Seems like a clock that is going to run down.
It should have been a Nationalized health care system, like the nationalized War production system. One could take care of the fallout from the other.
The Internet is really an information highway and restrictions on it whether by blocking content or differential pricing restricts the free flow of information for the profit of companies. Not a good long term strategy if you want to maintain your freedoms
Well it take having some power to protect the consumer. At least when the government (our government, that we elected and can be voted out, and has the opportunity to represent us) is an outside not-for-profit regulatory body, It has been shown time and time again that when someone is allowed to gouge the public for money, someone will, we need laws and regulation to keep unbridled greed in check. The net neutrality issue is to not allow a company to discriminate and or make undue profits from a common public resource. The Republicans are trying to pry loose as much of the public commons as they can to own and make a profit from. They have gotten some of that during various Republican administrations where public lands, public mineral rights etc were sold for cheap so someone could make extreme profits from our lands. They keep trying with Social Security. They want to make money off peoples retirements, whether they loose all their money or not. They want a piece of the action. The health bill just passed is halfway that. We just have to stand up and respond with our voice and our votes that unbridled greed is not in our best interest because most of us certainly are not the ones on top skimming the profits, we are the ones being skimmed.
It's true the Republicans got in and killed the fairness principle that said that broadcast media had to be fair and balanced as part of the agreement that they can license the 'publicly owned' airwaves, and presto, Fox "News". They lease part of the spectrum from us in exchange for obeying certain rules. The FCC used to be in a better postion to protect consumers but the Republicans have fought hard to have control of the message and with the net neutrality issues, get the more wealthy more priveledges as a way of generating more profits for them. The new departments that actually did news were an outgrowth of the priciple that the holders of those leases of the airwaves needed to provide value to the consumer. Now that is less the case and journalism, esp TV journalism is all but dead. The recent butchered video about racism is a good current example. They don't even check their stories anymore, just parrot what other outlets have come out with.
The FCC's censorship of dirty words is a case in point where they (I think mistakenly) are trying to protect the consumer. It would be hard to argue that that practice just favored entrenched incombents in the industry.
They do monitor transmission frequencies to make sure stations broadcasting stay on frequency which protects adjacent stations which in a sense protects consumers by making sure stations on the air can be heard without interference.
So the FCC is the organization that can protect the consumer if it has the laws and regulations to do so. It has done more in the past and with net neutrality and maybe recovering the fairness doctrine we can get back to a more friendly place in the airwaves that is part of the public trust.
Come on, 2250 times the actual damages for copying music. Here the court (and the law I might add) is out of balance. The law should treat each case on merits and what damages there actually were, having the punishment fit the crime. Our system of justice is not supose to treat people as examples, without regard to what the effect of the judgement is going to be on the individual, the punishment to the individual needs to fit the crime, Here it does not. Corporate profits have trumped our laws and our politics. We need a change.
"and the license does not permit building it, only reviewing it, so this only lets you find (but not fix) accidental flaws"
Right, the Russian former KGB is going to feel obligated to not build the code because they are not permitted to under license. The only way they wouldn't is if there was a bigger, more dastardly policeman out their to threaten to enforce that. Oh wait, the I.P. police, well I guess your right, they will abide by the licence.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes no sense.
This is an opportunity to let our elected representatives know that we are watching. /. their email boxes with your opinion on this matter. I have.
There are glaciers that have been receeding, that have not receeded as much in 10 of thousands of years, the ice shelfs are receeding in the artic and ant-arctic. Your graph shows sea ice which is just surface, the major underlying structures that represents the majority of the stored ice that has been around for a long time is going away. Again you look at the surface and not whats underneath.
Well stereotypes have survival value and when you consider that 99.99% of research and 100% of reputable research supports the conclusion that mans efforts at living the good life have effected the climate in such a way that polar ice caps are melting, storms are getting stronger and weather patterns changing. It will be funny to see Cuccinelli trying to get votes from those portions of Virginia like Hampton and Norfolk are as under sea level as New Orleans. Speaking of which they had better build those leevies higher down there.
There is no dispute certainly that there is global warming. The only dispute might be what percentage is due to man's activity. So arguing about who put the hole in the boat while your sinking seems to be counter productive. In this case it effects business, like who needs to add the cost to the planet for their business practices, or who might get sued over their business practices. So he might not be anti science, just pro-"Take the money and run"
We if the utopian veiw of the free market system ala Libertarians had any basis in fact or practical applicaiton it would be in practice today. What we do find is people tauting "Free Market" as a mantra to blind people to their real purpose with is a snatch and grab of as much money, power, wealth as they can. They sell that idea as a marketing ploy to get regulations dropped. We see the effect in the latest market crash and the sucking out of the vital life blood of our countries economy by oursouring critical and essential jobs to other countries. These "Free Marketeers" are not thinking of the world or the good of the people, they are thinking of themselves and pay the people that come up with the Ideologies that say, well yes thinking only of yourself is really thinking of others, let me show you the equations. And they laugh all the way to the bank.
What we as a people must do is find a way to be self protective, usually through government action. Unfortuneately business has found a way to get in the middle and take control of government, and secondly take control of the courts. Or shall we say get "favorable" people in those positions. Its a concerted, covert, power grab and its working so far. We need to just realize that the businesses, countries etc. that pollute need to factor in those costs. Business tries to minimize cost and will omit as many cost factors as they posibly can, because as it stands now the only purpose of business is profit.
Maybe that has to change because in the large that can go against the common good. The role of government is then to complete the package that allows that philosophy of business to continue. Kind of like in our world, the old style, your routine cleaned up its own garbage, In the new paradigm, there is a common garbage collector that picks up after you, making your code more efficient and simpiler.
What has happened is the greedy who have gotten that seperation of function and made tons of money from it (moderated by competition), have lost sight of that needed duality and think they can get along quite well without garbage collection. Because they don't want to pay for that overhead. But they are just spoiled and greedy. These are the same people that don't want to pay taxes, or minimize their tax burden, even though they use the services of the government and most likely benefit to a much greater percentage than the average worker from the services provided by the government.
The other problem we have is the growth of the size of companies in the dual model. Before a business could run for awhile and the garbage that needed to be collected or detected (in the case of pollution or other miss uses of resource, or bad product that is harming or killing or bad practice that is harming or stealing) could be caught in a resonable amount of time and damages limited and jail sentences given etc. But now the bigger corporations can leave much more garbage much more quickly and overshoot available resource and we have markets crash. Or as we have seen with the conservative free marketeers since Regan the dismantaling of the garbage detection/collection function of government with the consequences to us all and the incredible wealth taken from the system by others.
No there is a legitimate role for goverernment that closely follows models and patterns we are familiar with. We need to make sure the system is in balance and that our garbage detection/collection is alive and healthy , and running.
Well Somebody, your right, it does cause harm. Then why hasn't someone come up with a set of out of the distro defaults that are safe and secure? Think about it. If in the community you want Linux to be widespread and generally useful, you come up with a product that is that by default.
We work these problems as we see them, take the seat belt thing with cars. Were the people who drove cars up until the 80's (or whenever the law required seat belts) criminals because a car crash would have hurt their passengers or the people in the other car. I don't think so. But we recognized that this was a problem that could be mitigated by requiring that seat belts be put into cars, and car seats for children, now the regulations that you must have your seat belts on. Why? because even if you get hurt in an accident the cleanup from it medically, financially and other ways effects us all.
The OS community has an opportunity to lock out this problem by crafting distributions that start out secure and those that know can open up what they want. Tall order certainly, and those that know don't want to have to go through that exercize if they don't want to, and like a system that needs them around to lock things down. But the problem of viruses, bots, theft and spam are serious problems. Not only should we find and stop these people but we should remove the food that attracts the rats and roaches of the computer field.
I'm on the side of the Matrix, which pill are you going to take?
Seems that if you coorelated the changes with labs in the Southern Hemisphere you would rule out some of the temperature seasonal differences.
"Corporations can be trusted more when you don't do anything to try to regulate them"
Your fxxxxxx kidding me. We are in probably the worst depression since the great depression and the reason is that Corporations were trusted to do anything they wanted without regulation. Spin back to the Enron, World Com, Savings and Loan crises. This statement is false and has been shown to be false over and over and at the expense of most everyone's pocket.
Well not a dictator but a citizen agency working for the common good. We know the alternative is an escalating money grab until if you want the kind of service you enjoy now you will pay 3 or 4 times as much and the cheap alternatives will be back to dail up modem speeds. Like the "free market" which has been shown to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. They will give you options but all of them designed to squeeze as much money out of the system as possible while suppressing political and competitive information they don't want to see. A consistant playing field with the Internet seen as a common resource owned by all should be the way it is viewed. The internet companies should operate for the common good and a little profit.
More than likely an intern was getting the paperwork in, not trained, under paid, wanting to get out the to bar to meet the gang. Ah, government by the staff.
Your kidding of course, I think Democrats, as well as any sane person would see that banning a fully automatic weapon, designed to kill people (not deer or other game), has little or no place in a modern urban setting. Now in a rural setting, with crazy neighbors that want to trespass on your property and maybe hunt your game, sure, mow them down.
Or if you don't like the FBI or the ATF because they want you to register your Still and make hooch that won't kill people or make them blind, well they don't deserve to live.
Or if you find a person of another faith, not a Christian faith like Islam (wait they worship the same Jewish God too, so not them), that wants to not recognize your right to beat up Gays (most recently on Statten Island). Well you need a little extra fire power to keep the world safe for us gun totting Christian White folks.
So, sorry, what was your argument for the acceptibility of not banning Assualt Weapons in the U.S.?
The great problem is attribution. Here you attribute the varied Democratice voting records to the monolithic voting records to Party Loyalty vs fear of loss of seat, as if those are the only explanations or reasons.
I would counter that the Republican party is more Demogogic and Authoritative and they see that if they stick together and vote together they will keep their seats, and also service their financiers and feather their nests politically and privately with that behavior.
On the other hand the Democrats are more of the people and listen to the diveristy of their constituent and try to serve the people that elected them (not the ones that paid to have them elected) (yes, yes there are some counter examples, but I posit that that is the exception and not the rule). That would explain the less than monolithic voting record of the Democrats. They are not doing things out of fear but listening to and reponding to their constituents, which I claim is what the process should be like, not this opposing everything, even health care for 911 responders.
Speaking of which, what if a 911 responder was an illegal allien. Don't we owe him a deep gratitude and at least health care for the sacrifice he/she made for us at ground Zero. What is this Republican bullshit where they block a vote because they don't want any illegal allien to get health coverage, even if they were a 911 responder.
I don't think the punishment fits the crime here, and exposes some deep seeded and ugly views held by the Republicans.
Thats why they call it a War against Terror instead of a War againt Iraq or Afganistan. We have no declared war with any nation currently, nor did we ever have with Iraq or Afganistan. Bin Laden was the head figure organizer and fundraiser for much of the terroism against the west including 911 which gave Bush the cover to go into Iraq which had nothing to do with 911 or Bin Ladens organization. (the Bin Laden family was visiting the Bush's in Texas I believe when 911 happened and their plane to fly them out of the country was the only plane allowed to fly other than military planes, go figure).
So Bin Laden is the head of an organization that is at war with us, so I think you could say he "started" the war with the first salvo at the Trade Center.
Remeber that movie. The sticker "fatality proof" would only reference those inside the car, not the pedestians, bikers, or other cars that get killed outside the safety zone. Might not that removal of risk cause the drivers of those vehicle to take more risks with others lives. Look what happed to the stock markets when there was no risk to the speculator. We all died a little. Its another posible example of the law of unintended consequences
Seriously, carrying signs that have Obama with a bone in his nose, and Gay bashing, I think we are talking exactly talking about dehumanization. Like they have to live with the fall out of their treating others as second class citizens, walling themselves off with a we vs them mentality that puts something like a third of the population as the them (maybe more). Alliens I say, or less than fully human, you choose.
Just look around at the Tea Party movement. Alliens are among us.
Wrong, its called risk management. Something that was not used in the Gulf Drilling. There is good examples already of government abuse of priviledge going back to Hoover spying on Marting Luther King and other people that he did not like philosophically. The argument is one of, should we go in that direction, should we have controls and transparency or secrecy? if we have non-transparency and secrecy, how will we know that the spying will be responsible? We have seen that the rush to security has gone wrong, from torture to rendition, to unauthorized internet monitoring. By people I would not want to marry my daughter if I had a daughter. As we have seen with unregulated markets, markets without Citizen interest oversight, people take advantage up to and over the legal lines for personal advantage. So it gets down to risk managment. Are our privacy and freedom and free speech and other constitutional rights at risk? By our own government? can you say 1984 anyone. First push the government to take control of information, then take control of the government. Then you can lock in your control of the government and the people. It has happened before. Its not time to sit back and let someone else take control of things no one should have control over.
The price of Freedom if vigilance, not giving up control to an Uber Group.
Al Franken has a petition you can sign to support the idea of net neutrality.
http://www.alfranken.com/index.php/splash/netneutrality_vid/
Sometimes words are the actions that speech louder, esp when the internet is involved.
It only makes sense to slash dot the legislature and executive about your feelings on this issue. Then and only then will steps be taken to keep the internet like public highways and not privatized toll roads with different cost lanes. Or we will all end up on the frontage road. Can anyone remember Fido?
Right to Health Care?, hardly, more a mandate from the right to force people to pay private companies for health care insurance, one of the very profitable private industries in this country. That is because most of the other profitable industries have been outsourced to other countries. I often wonder how a country can survive on just a service industry. Seems like a clock that is going to run down.
It should have been a Nationalized health care system, like the nationalized War production system. One could take care of the fallout from the other.
The Internet is really an information highway and restrictions on it whether by blocking content or differential pricing restricts the free flow of information for the profit of companies. Not a good long term strategy if you want to maintain your freedoms
Well it take having some power to protect the consumer. At least when the government (our government, that we elected and can be voted out, and has the opportunity to represent us) is an outside not-for-profit regulatory body, It has been shown time and time again that when someone is allowed to gouge the public for money, someone will, we need laws and regulation to keep unbridled greed in check. The net neutrality issue is to not allow a company to discriminate and or make undue profits from a common public resource. The Republicans are trying to pry loose as much of the public commons as they can to own and make a profit from. They have gotten some of that during various Republican administrations where public lands, public mineral rights etc were sold for cheap so someone could make extreme profits from our lands. They keep trying with Social Security. They want to make money off peoples retirements, whether they loose all their money or not. They want a piece of the action. The health bill just passed is halfway that. We just have to stand up and respond with our voice and our votes that unbridled greed is not in our best interest because most of us certainly are not the ones on top skimming the profits, we are the ones being skimmed.
It's true the Republicans got in and killed the fairness principle that said that broadcast media had to be fair and balanced as part of the agreement that they can license the 'publicly owned' airwaves, and presto, Fox "News". They lease part of the spectrum from us in exchange for obeying certain rules. The FCC used to be in a better postion to protect consumers but the Republicans have fought hard to have control of the message and with the net neutrality issues, get the more wealthy more priveledges as a way of generating more profits for them. The new departments that actually did news were an outgrowth of the priciple that the holders of those leases of the airwaves needed to provide value to the consumer. Now that is less the case and journalism, esp TV journalism is all but dead. The recent butchered video about racism is a good current example. They don't even check their stories anymore, just parrot what other outlets have come out with.
The FCC's censorship of dirty words is a case in point where they (I think mistakenly) are trying to protect the consumer. It would be hard to argue that that practice just favored entrenched incombents in the industry.
They do monitor transmission frequencies to make sure stations broadcasting stay on frequency which protects adjacent stations which in a sense protects consumers by making sure stations on the air can be heard without interference.
So the FCC is the organization that can protect the consumer if it has the laws and regulations to do so. It has done more in the past and with net neutrality and maybe recovering the fairness doctrine we can get back to a more friendly place in the airwaves that is part of the public trust.
Come on, 2250 times the actual damages for copying music. Here the court (and the law I might add) is out of balance. The law should treat each case on merits and what damages there actually were, having the punishment fit the crime. Our system of justice is not supose to treat people as examples, without regard to what the effect of the judgement is going to be on the individual, the punishment to the individual needs to fit the crime, Here it does not. Corporate profits have trumped our laws and our politics. We need a change.
"and the license does not permit building it, only reviewing it, so this only lets you find (but not fix) accidental flaws"
Right, the Russian former KGB is going to feel obligated to not build the code because they are not permitted to under license. The only way they wouldn't is if there was a bigger, more dastardly policeman out their to threaten to enforce that. Oh wait, the I.P. police, well I guess your right, they will abide by the licence.