Regardless, the chilling effect is the same. This is just like a local gangster walking into a store and saying "Nice store here. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it." before offering their services to guarantee the building doesn't get burned down.
Did they burn down the storefront or actually threaten the store owner? No, but the effect is the same.
Absolutely. Not many people have any idea just how powerful relational databases are.
Say I have access to your phone records and your credit cards, and the ability to access the same info for other people.
Patterns crop up pretty quickly, so you can check how often two people call each other, then look for similarities in their credit card billing.
Once you've established a pattern you're interested in, you can just ripple on outwards and start grabbing more people of interest, comparing a few different variables to look for more matches.
It's infinitely more invasive than a camera and there's absolutely no way for the targets of any of this surveillance to know it's going on.
Good points, but I'm curious to know how much of those development costs are recouped by government subsidies and tax breaks.
A significant chunk of the research done takes place at state-funded universities using both government and private grants. Additionally, costs like extra staff used to administer test programs are usually written straight out as tax breaks at the end of the year, so the effective cost is often zero.
So yes, the taxpayers get it coming and going. We pay to subsidize those programs through our taxes then we pay extortionate health premiums to buy overpriced drugs sold through expensive advertising campaigns.
So to combat the stupidity of the State of Virginia, She goes on a tear of Stupidity of her own?
The next law the State of Virginia should pass in this vein is one that makes it a felony to post SSN's in public.
That's kind of the point: Ms. Ostergren got the numbers from publicly available, online state records in the first place, so the State of Virginia would, in fact, not be complying with its own law. She's doing this to... wait for it... attract enough attention to get a law passed so all SSNs would automatically be redacted at the document level so there would be no SSN information to reproduce downstream in the first place.
Pretty simple, actually. Iran has very limited capability to refine their own oil, so they need to pay to get it to a country with more refining capability, then pay to get it back.
I do not believe it is the role of government to ensure the health of a commercial entertainment industry through taxation. Why does this country dislike socialized programs for the protection of its citizens, yet encourages socializing the support of whole industries? I thought this was a capitalistic society.
Sorta. It's socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
A bunch of rich people take huge risks and end up crashing (see: Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Indy Mac, fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, etc.) and every American will spend the next forty years paying off tens of billions of dollars for the bailout.
Some poor bastard gets laid off because his job got shipped out of the country, them's the breaks. Maybe you'll get lucky and a job at Wal-Mart or Home Depot will pay for that sub-prime mortgage before they foreclose on your house.
The reason? They want to avoid liability for being sued over frivolous lawsuits. If Fair Use is inherently questionable, then they can sue anyone they want whenever they want without consequence while they stick ordinary people with huge legal fees and no chance of recovering them from the people who dragged them into court in the first place. The whole point, of course, is simple intimidation.
Scary precedent. Making something illegal because it's bad for big business isn't exactly a step in the right direction. Next thing you know, we'll have Microsoft trying to get injunctions against Open Office for modifying Windows in ways Microsoft never intended. Likewise, they could use the same argument to prevent Wine from making MS programs work under Linux.
There's nothing wrong with maximizing corporate profits, but there's something very seriously wrong with getting the courts to rule illegal anything that promotes competition.
Sounds like we're much more on the same page than I thought; Friedman quotes just tend to raise the hackles a bit. But as you said, it's all about the tensions between opposing forces and I think a lot of the free market fundamentalism has gotten way out of hand and industries are beginning to cannibalize each other, most particularly the oil industry making the cost of business unaffordable for pretty much everyone else.
You know things are a little nuts when airline CEOs are calling for regulation of oil speculation and mine owners are blaming too much regulation for the collapse of their own facilities after they ignored repeated MSHA warnings about the likelihood of collapse.
Definitely an interesting time to be following politics and economics, at least.
Exactly. Elected officials can be held accountable by voters who can boot them out of office when they lose sight of their constituents' interests.
When consumers are forced to deal with a series of regional monopolies, corporations and CEOs can only be held accountable by a government populated by officials with the political will to confront some very rich and powerful people. What gives them the political will to do that? Knowing it's their own asses on the line in November.
It's almost like a series of checks and balances...
So what's the difference between a government taking all your money and telling you what to do, and a handful of corporations taking all your money and telling you what to do?
Some of the recent "innovations" in eminent domain are especially ridiculous, and give the lie to the Chicago School idea of free markets. How free from government interference are the people when Nissan can urge a local government in Mississippi to level people's houses to build a factory, or Pfizer can do the same in Florida? They're not.
Corporations have entirely too much power over our everyday lives and most of the normal market systems that drive a free market and would give the consumer some element of control have completely broken down. When de-regulation means companies can sell mass amounts of food tainted with salmonella and suffer no repercussions, and the source of the contamination can't even be tracked down because they're not required to keep any records, we're all screwed. Corporations are capable of doing every bit as much damage as governments and need to be kept in check. Unfortunately (I'm a recovering libertarian myself), right now government regulation is the only tool we have.
Yep. By those standards, the new Mike Myers film was phenomenally successful: Love Guru comes out as the least pirated major studio release in a decade.
Support is implicit because you included it in your comment, though. You're volunteering information here, so without any further clues or context a reader can only assume the viewpoint you share is your own. To put it another way, I'll give a new sig a trial run right below:
---- Anyone flying a Condederate flag should be hanged as a traitor. ----
This could be some kind of ironic, double-backflip meta-commentary, but without any other clues, you could only assume that I said I meant: "Anyone flying a Condederate flag should be hanged as a traitor." Likewise with your sig.
The main point was to make people think. Not so much about the man and if you consider his actions good or bad, but how his actions are portrayed and how relative that portrayal really is. History is written by the victors, and if the south had won he would be considered a hero. The north had won, so he is considered an assassin. Either way, he was willing to give his life for his country, which qualifies him as a patriot.
Apologies for my own OT, but this worth teasing out, I think, and it does actually relate to the prison statistics and such. Anyway, Boothe would be considered an assassin whether the North had won or lost. He killed a political leader for a political purpose; that's one of the objective definitions of the word "assassin." Not to put too fine a point on it.
As to your larger point, it just seems a bit of a cop-out with the "the victor writes the history" angle. Lincoln freed the slaves. Boothe killed him for it. You're praising the murderer as a patriot, which would lead any reasonable person to assume that you support Boothe's views, none of which can be separated from the fact that the South went to war to defend its right to keep slaves. So, yes, it's perfectly understandable for anyone reading your sig, which is utterly devoid of context, to assume that you think Lincoln's assassination was just, and therefore that you think his ending of slavery was unjust.
I'll just go straight to Godwin here (though of course Boothe and Hitler have little to do with each other, but the larger point is equally relevant) and say that if Hitler had won WWII, modern European history would most likely be proclaiming his greatness for uniting and racially purifying Europe. Would you use this as an example of the same point?
I'll bite, given that we only have four words to go by. I'll assume John Wilkes Booth here, given no other information, so to the average non-mindreader it looks like you're celebrating the assassin of the U.S. President who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and brought the Confederacy back into the Union.
Maybe I'm a bit of a dullard, but it sure seems like you're praising the guy who killed the President who freed the slaves. Or are you going to argue he was a martyr for states' rights or killed the tyrant who suspended habeas corpus or something like that?
I'm honestly curious now, I've noticed your sig before and was wondering.
Absolutely. I'm at work so I can't actually check the link, but this should be a link to a great clip job. They took scenes from The Shining trailer and recut it to look like a romantic comedy. Really excellent job.
I don't think they're misunderstanding, they just disagree. I'll put it this way: I just switched to Linux this past January and I'm extremely happy with it. With the exception of the wireless in my laptop (Broadcom), it was incredibly easy to get Ubuntu (and a few other distros I was messing around with) up and running, and be able to play around with it.
I was completely illiterate with regard to command line stuff, but I've figured out a great deal along the way. Even when I first began, installing packages was probably the single easiest thing to do in the OS. Installing a package from Synaptic is ridiculously easy, and it grabs all the dependencies an application needs.
Anyone with so little knowledge of how computers work that they can't figure out a package manager is someone who wouldn't be doing anything like installing their own programs in Windows, so that's really not a fair comparison.
Sorry about that, got distracted (silly work!) and ended up not finishing my thoughts above. I was thinking more along the lines of the casual user picking Ubuntu up for the first time, though, and they won't be aware of those issues to begin with. I'm actually perfectly content with getting everything up and running now that I know what I'm doing.
You're right that the problem really has very little to do with Linux itself, and it's our responsibility as consumers to make sure that manufacturers know we want and expect more Linux support for our hardware than we've gotten up to now. May have to fire an email off to Broadcom today, come to think of it.
Use of Linux really is spreading among non-hardcore computers, though, as I've got a few people from my office dual-booting Ubuntu since I switched myself and there's another who decided to use it entirely on his own because of all the nice (and free) video and audio editing software. He's currently experimenting with Hardy Ubuntu Studio. This should definitely motivate more and more companies to increase their support for Linux, along with the fact that so many developing economies are going with Open Source because of the cost savings.
Yep. At this point, I think getting wireless working on an initial install is one of the last big hurdles. I'm a long time computer geek (read: gamer) but just converted to Linux in January. Overall, the laptop installation was incredibly easy - way faster than Windows - with the video drivers a minor hiccup. Getting the damn Broadcom card to work took a full week to figure out with all the conflicting info you can find on the web and the Ubuntu forums regarding bcm43xx-fwcutter and Ndiswrapper. I was compiling from source and doing all sorts of crazy, totally unnecessary stuff.
Of course now that I know what I'm doing it takes nearly three whole minutes on a fresh install, but that initial jump was a huge pain.
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Regardless, the chilling effect is the same. This is just like a local gangster walking into a store and saying "Nice store here. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it." before offering their services to guarantee the building doesn't get burned down.
Did they burn down the storefront or actually threaten the store owner? No, but the effect is the same.
Absolutely. Not many people have any idea just how powerful relational databases are. Say I have access to your phone records and your credit cards, and the ability to access the same info for other people.
Patterns crop up pretty quickly, so you can check how often two people call each other, then look for similarities in their credit card billing. Once you've established a pattern you're interested in, you can just ripple on outwards and start grabbing more people of interest, comparing a few different variables to look for more matches.
It's infinitely more invasive than a camera and there's absolutely no way for the targets of any of this surveillance to know it's going on.
Good points, but I'm curious to know how much of those development costs are recouped by government subsidies and tax breaks.
A significant chunk of the research done takes place at state-funded universities using both government and private grants. Additionally, costs like extra staff used to administer test programs are usually written straight out as tax breaks at the end of the year, so the effective cost is often zero.
So yes, the taxpayers get it coming and going. We pay to subsidize those programs through our taxes then we pay extortionate health premiums to buy overpriced drugs sold through expensive advertising campaigns.
So to combat the stupidity of the State of Virginia, She goes on a tear of Stupidity of her own?
The next law the State of Virginia should pass in this vein is one that makes it a felony to post SSN's in public.
That's kind of the point: Ms. Ostergren got the numbers from publicly available, online state records in the first place, so the State of Virginia would, in fact, not be complying with its own law. She's doing this to ... wait for it ... attract enough attention to get a law passed so all SSNs would automatically be redacted at the document level so there would be no SSN information to reproduce downstream in the first place.
Pretty simple, actually. Iran has very limited capability to refine their own oil, so they need to pay to get it to a country with more refining capability, then pay to get it back.
I do not believe it is the role of government to ensure the health of a commercial entertainment industry through taxation. Why does this country dislike socialized programs for the protection of its citizens, yet encourages socializing the support of whole industries? I thought this was a capitalistic society.
Sorta. It's socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
A bunch of rich people take huge risks and end up crashing (see: Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Indy Mac, fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, etc.) and every American will spend the next forty years paying off tens of billions of dollars for the bailout.
Some poor bastard gets laid off because his job got shipped out of the country, them's the breaks. Maybe you'll get lucky and a job at Wal-Mart or Home Depot will pay for that sub-prime mortgage before they foreclose on your house.
It's even trickier: Universal recently argued that there is effectively no such thing as Fair Use and that any use is potentially infringement.
The reason? They want to avoid liability for being sued over frivolous lawsuits. If Fair Use is inherently questionable, then they can sue anyone they want whenever they want without consequence while they stick ordinary people with huge legal fees and no chance of recovering them from the people who dragged them into court in the first place. The whole point, of course, is simple intimidation.
Scary precedent. Making something illegal because it's bad for big business isn't exactly a step in the right direction. Next thing you know, we'll have Microsoft trying to get injunctions against Open Office for modifying Windows in ways Microsoft never intended. Likewise, they could use the same argument to prevent Wine from making MS programs work under Linux.
There's nothing wrong with maximizing corporate profits, but there's something very seriously wrong with getting the courts to rule illegal anything that promotes competition.
Sounds like we're much more on the same page than I thought; Friedman quotes just tend to raise the hackles a bit. But as you said, it's all about the tensions between opposing forces and I think a lot of the free market fundamentalism has gotten way out of hand and industries are beginning to cannibalize each other, most particularly the oil industry making the cost of business unaffordable for pretty much everyone else.
You know things are a little nuts when airline CEOs are calling for regulation of oil speculation and mine owners are blaming too much regulation for the collapse of their own facilities after they ignored repeated MSHA warnings about the likelihood of collapse.
Definitely an interesting time to be following politics and economics, at least.
Exactly. Elected officials can be held accountable by voters who can boot them out of office when they lose sight of their constituents' interests.
...
When consumers are forced to deal with a series of regional monopolies, corporations and CEOs can only be held accountable by a government populated by officials with the political will to confront some very rich and powerful people. What gives them the political will to do that? Knowing it's their own asses on the line in November.
It's almost like a series of checks and balances
So what's the difference between a government taking all your money and telling you what to do, and a handful of corporations taking all your money and telling you what to do?
Some of the recent "innovations" in eminent domain are especially ridiculous, and give the lie to the Chicago School idea of free markets. How free from government interference are the people when Nissan can urge a local government in Mississippi to level people's houses to build a factory, or Pfizer can do the same in Florida? They're not.
Corporations have entirely too much power over our everyday lives and most of the normal market systems that drive a free market and would give the consumer some element of control have completely broken down. When de-regulation means companies can sell mass amounts of food tainted with salmonella and suffer no repercussions, and the source of the contamination can't even be tracked down because they're not required to keep any records, we're all screwed. Corporations are capable of doing every bit as much damage as governments and need to be kept in check. Unfortunately (I'm a recovering libertarian myself), right now government regulation is the only tool we have.
Yep. By those standards, the new Mike Myers film was phenomenally successful: Love Guru comes out as the least pirated major studio release in a decade.
Support is implicit because you included it in your comment, though. You're volunteering information here, so without any further clues or context a reader can only assume the viewpoint you share is your own. To put it another way, I'll give a new sig a trial run right below:
---- Anyone flying a Condederate flag should be hanged as a traitor. ----
This could be some kind of ironic, double-backflip meta-commentary, but without any other clues, you could only assume that I said I meant: "Anyone flying a Condederate flag should be hanged as a traitor." Likewise with your sig.
Since itâ(TM)s rather OT ill keep it short:
The main point was to make people think. Not so much about the man and if you consider his actions good or bad, but how his actions are portrayed and how relative that portrayal really is. History is written by the victors, and if the south had won he would be considered a hero. The north had won, so he is considered an assassin. Either way, he was willing to give his life for his country, which qualifies him as a patriot.
Apologies for my own OT, but this worth teasing out, I think, and it does actually relate to the prison statistics and such. Anyway, Boothe would be considered an assassin whether the North had won or lost. He killed a political leader for a political purpose; that's one of the objective definitions of the word "assassin." Not to put too fine a point on it.
As to your larger point, it just seems a bit of a cop-out with the "the victor writes the history" angle. Lincoln freed the slaves. Boothe killed him for it. You're praising the murderer as a patriot, which would lead any reasonable person to assume that you support Boothe's views, none of which can be separated from the fact that the South went to war to defend its right to keep slaves. So, yes, it's perfectly understandable for anyone reading your sig, which is utterly devoid of context, to assume that you think Lincoln's assassination was just, and therefore that you think his ending of slavery was unjust.
I'll just go straight to Godwin here (though of course Boothe and Hitler have little to do with each other, but the larger point is equally relevant) and say that if Hitler had won WWII, modern European history would most likely be proclaiming his greatness for uniting and racially purifying Europe. Would you use this as an example of the same point?
I'll bite, given that we only have four words to go by. I'll assume John Wilkes Booth here, given no other information, so to the average non-mindreader it looks like you're celebrating the assassin of the U.S. President who issued the Emancipation Proclamation and brought the Confederacy back into the Union.
Maybe I'm a bit of a dullard, but it sure seems like you're praising the guy who killed the President who freed the slaves. Or are you going to argue he was a martyr for states' rights or killed the tyrant who suspended habeas corpus or something like that?
I'm honestly curious now, I've noticed your sig before and was wondering.
I would never rick-roll you. Also, I would never give you up, let you down, never ever run around, or turn around and hurt you.
Absolutely. I'm at work so I can't actually check the link, but this should be a link to a great clip job. They took scenes from The Shining trailer and recut it to look like a romantic comedy. Really excellent job.
I don't think they're misunderstanding, they just disagree. I'll put it this way: I just switched to Linux this past January and I'm extremely happy with it. With the exception of the wireless in my laptop (Broadcom), it was incredibly easy to get Ubuntu (and a few other distros I was messing around with) up and running, and be able to play around with it.
I was completely illiterate with regard to command line stuff, but I've figured out a great deal along the way. Even when I first began, installing packages was probably the single easiest thing to do in the OS. Installing a package from Synaptic is ridiculously easy, and it grabs all the dependencies an application needs. Anyone with so little knowledge of how computers work that they can't figure out a package manager is someone who wouldn't be doing anything like installing their own programs in Windows, so that's really not a fair comparison.
Sorry about that, got distracted (silly work!) and ended up not finishing my thoughts above. I was thinking more along the lines of the casual user picking Ubuntu up for the first time, though, and they won't be aware of those issues to begin with. I'm actually perfectly content with getting everything up and running now that I know what I'm doing.
You're right that the problem really has very little to do with Linux itself, and it's our responsibility as consumers to make sure that manufacturers know we want and expect more Linux support for our hardware than we've gotten up to now. May have to fire an email off to Broadcom today, come to think of it.
Use of Linux really is spreading among non-hardcore computers, though, as I've got a few people from my office dual-booting Ubuntu since I switched myself and there's another who decided to use it entirely on his own because of all the nice (and free) video and audio editing software. He's currently experimenting with Hardy Ubuntu Studio. This should definitely motivate more and more companies to increase their support for Linux, along with the fact that so many developing economies are going with Open Source because of the cost savings.
Yep. At this point, I think getting wireless working on an initial install is one of the last big hurdles. I'm a long time computer geek (read: gamer) but just converted to Linux in January. Overall, the laptop installation was incredibly easy - way faster than Windows - with the video drivers a minor hiccup. Getting the damn Broadcom card to work took a full week to figure out with all the conflicting info you can find on the web and the Ubuntu forums regarding bcm43xx-fwcutter and Ndiswrapper. I was compiling from source and doing all sorts of crazy, totally unnecessary stuff. Of course now that I know what I'm doing it takes nearly three whole minutes on a fresh install, but that initial jump was a huge pain.