Don't forget Afghanistan too which is also a waste of funds.
I thought that I heard that Obama was increasing funding for NASA, just cutting manned space flight for awhile until we figure out how to do it right.
Increasing funding though doesn't mean much when there is so much to do. Myself, I'm not a huge fan of NASA, but unless private spaceflight increases dramatically in the next few years (which it won't until they get more research done which would be redundant to NASA's research).
Too little funding is worse than no funding. It leads to more taxpayer waste and unfinished programs.
But eventually we have to realize that Iran and North Korea are going to get rockets. We need to diplomatically (or, if it hits a point, forcefully) make sure that they don't aim the rockets at us or any other country. Both Iran and North Korea have made getting WMDs and the launch vehicles needed to use them a top priority. Even though both countries are rather poor economically, they are not above starving their citizens to achieve their goals.
We already use a lot of scattered contractors for NASA, if we can consolidate them into one efficient company in essence, we could do great things. The information is already out there, it is just scattered throughout various offices. If we make a few requirements needed to get the information, we would be running at about the same risk we already are running at. Such as if we make sure that they don't disclose the information under an NDA (corporations are great for this because with competition comes closely guarded secrets, look at Apple, and an iPhone is a lot harder to conceal than large amounts of blueprints and such).
As a nation, we need to face the facts, assuming that Iran, North Korea and all other dictatorships don't get WMDs and launch vehicles is unreasonable. They will get them eventually. What is needed is to prevent unstable rulers from controlling nations. If Kim-Jung-Il wasn't ruling North Korea, there would be very little reason for us to be worried if there was a sane person ruling, but instead we have a cult of personality mixed with lack of reasoning and total isolation.
Would it be worth it to us if we had never started our space program so the Soviets could not gain the information? No, of course not. But we are still shooting ourselves in the foot by looking to countries who are going to get rockets and such no matter what we do.
Because the Space Shuttles are old, decaying and really unfit. It takes a major disaster (Challenger, Columbia) before they fix basic design problems. I wouldn't trust an aging Commodore 64 as my primary computer, nor should we rely on the Shuttle. Really, Bush, Clinton and Obama should have all pressed for a new launch vehicle long ago. I find it quite funny that Obama apparently can trust the private sector with space flight which it hasn't really achieved, but can't trust it to run an organization without government support and can't trust it to run health care which businesses have had a proven track record of doing better than governments. In the end, we need to do one of two things
A) Sell NASA and give its research to taxpayers. Essentially everything owned by NASA would go to the highest bidder with the understanding of a few goals they must accomplish. The research would go to any American company wishing to deal in spaceflight.
or
B) Give NASA proper funding to do things.
We currently have a crippled private sector (taxpayer information being withheld) and crippled public sector (no funding) and it doesn't work.
Why is it that we can give tons of money to failing businesses that are going to fail eventually but can't give money to improve national defense and research (and yes, supremacy in space allows for supremacy in war as many of the technologies go hand in hand)?
We can afford most everything on earth. We just simply can't pay billions of dollars that we don't have to failing businesses, ruin health care and do a million other things.
I just hope we can keep the space program close down long enough (along with many other ineffective members of the government) so as to get our country back in the black.
The problem is, how are we going to get ahead in technology then?
If the US government released all taxpayer-funded studies to the public to jump-start private businesses, that is one thing. But in reality everything is so classified that private businesses are starting from 1950s-era technology with very little funding.
The US needs to take a clear stand and do one thing or another.
A) Let a private company buy-out NASA and release all information for free to any US business or individual with an interest in producing spacecraft.
or
B) Continue to spend money developing new spacecraft and using taxpayer money to do great things.
We can't continue to have an under-funded NASA. If Obama wants to waste taxpayer money on bailouts and such thats one thing, however then let the taxpayers have their money spent in research fulfilled, let a private company take over all of NASA and release information to the public. We can't move on with a crippled NASA and a crippled private sector. It just doesn't work.
No, because coal mines are temporary, short and have very little scientific value.
If we have a robot-operated moon base, it makes getting a constant human presence on the moon a lot easier. With a coal mine it might last 20-30 years before the coal runs out. The more efficient the workers, the more supply and the less value the mine has on earth. Robotic lunar workers could help build a moon-base for human occupants, create infrastructure using the natural resources of the moon, and allow for a lot of science to be carried out.
It would be a financially disastrous move for the coal mine owners, and adds nothing to scientific knowledge. On the other hand, a moon base can provide valuable minerals and vast scientific knowledge and eventually tourism.
In 4G areas, it might be a formidable option for anyone who hates their ISP *ehem* Comcast *ehem.*"
While paying for 4G might allow you to get rid of Comcast for "ordinary" browsing, mobile phone providers are going to be a lot more strict about caps and such than Comcast most likely because bandwidth is more limited.
Oh, quite often, actually. People write some real crap sometimes - there's an unfortunate trend toward trivia hoarding on the site. Everyone has their own pet interests and wants to build up a little repository of what they've found. What's more, they believe that their interest is important enough that it deserves to be on a site people have heard of. Personally, I really believe Wikipedia is not the right place for that.
Such as?
The reason why Wikipedia is popular is because you can find nearly everything on there. From the War of the Roses to the latest South Park episode to an obscure J-Pop album. I don't know about you but I don't think I'd use Wikipedia that much if it wasn't for the fact that it has a large variety of things.
What to you might be a "pet interest" might be important to someone else. Importance is very subjective, as such the sane thing to do is allow almost everything if it isn't "important" it won't be read. If it is, then it is read, edited and improved.
It's an imperfect analogy, though: if you're talking about a printed encyclopedia, or even a computer encyclopedia delivered on digital media, then you're talking about some kind of professional effort - quality control and editing have already taken place. If I bought an encyclopedia set and it included a list of all the TV shows and movies to feature a giant, Godzilla-like monster destroying a city, then I might be a bit annoyed that valuable print space in my encyclopedia had been wasted with that. (And yes, this is another way in which the analogy isn't perfect - even an encyclopedia delivered on DVD-ROM would be much more limited in the amount of information it could contain than Wikipedia is.)
Exactly, Wikipedia really isn't limited by space or bandwidth. It makes very little difference if there is an article on giant Godzilla-like monsters in a city or not when it comes to space. However, such a list would be helpful for some people, it makes little sense to delete it.
If no one is seeing it, there's no point in having the article at all, and it doesn't matter if it's deleted. If someone is seeing it, then you're back to needing quality control.
The entire point of having an editable article is that people can revise and expand on it. If something is obscure and someone looks it up, the chances of them having higher-quality knowledge to edit and expand and revise it increase. For example, I'm not going to look up episode 134 of The Simpsons because I'm not a huge fan of the Simpsons, someone who will look that up generally watches the Simpsons and would be more likely to edit and help out the article.
But what happens in the end? Either it is not notable and no one notices it thus eliminating any threat to "standards" or it is notable and therefore should have an article.
Seriously, how often do you go through obscure pages of Wikipedia and think "this encyclopedia would be better without this"? How often do you go through an encyclopedia and think that? The point is to have a reference for everything. If it is not notable, people won't search it therefore any complaint about "standards" is negated because no one is seeing it.
...And does it matter? You know, disk space and bandwidth is cheap. It would cost what? $.0001 to create an article about this? And the flamewars going on about it are costing more bandwidth and disk space than the article itself would have.
Honestly, Wikipedia editors are the worst, they take what should be an encyclopedia filled with -everything- and try to narrow it down to fit what they want.
Does Wikipedia -lose- anything if it accepts an article that is a word coined by xkcd? Of course not.
Um, what are you talking about. Look at the Nexus One http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One 1 Ghz ARM CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and storage up to 32 GB with SD cards.
The problem with Chrome is the lack of customization, not just plugins but customization. Chrome lacks decent controls for history, I don't -care- if I leave cookies, I just hate seeing viewed sites because mostly they are viewed and worthless. I never really have used any history 'features' and it annoys me to have all mistyped domain names and the like still in there. Also, the Linux version of chrome at least makes it impossible to click the middle mouse button and scroll, something that I use on a regular basis in Firefox. Also, it is impossible to use custom CSS and such to view sites with.
Any one of these things alone wouldn't be too bad, but with all of them, its just too annoying to use on a daily basis.
I don't understand all the hype about these distros, who wants to get less out of their hardware? Yeah, I enjoy using -some- web apps but some things are just pointless to not include such as an office suite. I don't know about you but the entire point of having a laptop is to take it places and I don't want to pay $30 a month to get slow internet everywhere. Desktop apps make sense. Hard disk space is cheap too, unless you have an SSD (and most devices don't) does 500 more megs matter?
That kind of tenuous reasoning could lead to people organizing and shutting down big corpulent wastes of money like HEW, the EPA, etc.
The HEW and EPA -are- large wastes of money for the most part. History has proven that the largest polluters aren't corporations but rather the government. Pollution is generally caused by inefficiency, when technology catches up pollution ends up resolving itself. The department of health ends up really only working because of economies of scale, and most health care problems are caused by the government (patents, etc). Private firms unencumbered by government-created problems usually end up producing more workable, safe solutions.
And if public money has gone to National Public Radio (a certain amount has and can be documented) where's my open mike?
Radio is no longer as big of a deal. You are much more likely to gain an audience through the internet or TV. You might not be able to get an open mic because it is limited, on the other hand if you and a lot of other members of the public opposed a certain section of NPR or wanted to add in something and NPR refused, you might have a case.
Plus, I don't think NPR is making billions of dollars at taxpayer expense like ISPs are (you don't have to pay to get NPR directly, you do to get internet access)
You are on/. , I don't think anyone of us has to worry about birth control. On the other hand, Microsoft having access to people's nuts... That could be worrying.
For far too long now, the GOP SOP has been "Corps good. Privatize the public commons, better!"
And that should be a reason for supporting net neutrality. We've given the telecoms tons of money, tons of land, etc. its a myth that all these ISPs got to be so large because of their own work and its the big evil government who is regulating them. That is completely false. It is the big evil government who said "here have a few million dollars, 'modernize' America, give it internet access" and then handed out public land left and right so its citizens could have internet access. However, now the internet access is no longer internet access but rather dumbed-down media portals in essence.
If it was privatized we sure wouldn't have these huge ISPs who can conspire to block net neutrality but instead smaller, regional companies competing for your business.
Really, if arguing from liberal, conservative, libertarian, green or just about any other political ideology, net neutrality in the US makes sense for the majority of ISPs.
Yes, but the entire point of giving them money is to provide internet access, so long as we define that the internet is by definition neutral, and has always been, it doesn't add any new restrictions.
Government cannot go around telling people what they must do with their property, that's central planning, and it makes it impossible for private owners to regulate how their property is used efficiently.
And I never said that they should go around telling people what they can do with their property. I'm absolutely opposed to government control, however, if they are going to take my money, I should have a say what it is used for. The internet implies neutrality by definition. When we paid these millions of dollars to telecoms we weren't wanting non-neutral internet connections because such things were nearly impossible with the technology level. However, with deep packet inspection and the like, its becoming a threat.
If a company wants to not use public land and public funding, fine, do whatever you want. However, the moment you use public land or public funding, you should be subjected to the will of the people. The will of the people is pro-net neutrality, and the lack of net neutrality has almost no positives and many negatives.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties of the US simply favor government to the highest bidder, they really -have- no consistent ideology other than to oppose the other side if it is politically convenient.
It isn't smaller government. The telecoms still use public land and got a -ton- of funding from the government.
All net neutrality should be, is the people who had their money taken from them by the government and given to the telecoms receiving what they paid for essentially.
I don't really see the growth factor for open source hardware. Yeah, its great if you are a geek, but if you aren't... why bother? Most open source hardware projects are designed for people to program. I see things like Android becoming popular, open enough to do most things you want, but still polished. Yeah, I like being able to program obscure assembly commands to a CPU to make it do odd things, but I like things to work without having to spend hours setting them up. So while I don't think things are going to shrink, I think that the number of geeks really aren't increasing enough to expand the market.
Would be more likely to prevent extremist parties or fringe parties from winning seats than entirely proportional systems. [No BNP!]
Yeah, because its so great in the USA where we have 2 parties and any 'fringe' parties are out cold. Look at all those great solutions that the republicans and democrats have given us! Nothing better than 2 sides of the same coin...
Everyone should have some representation in their government, no matter what they believe. If you don't you have this -wonderful- system in the US where everything is just grand! After all we have no unemployment, no taxes and world peace! Oh wait...
Just be glad your broken system is a lot less broken than the US system. At least you guys -have- minority parties. Good luck finding a single person in the US congress that isn't a republican or democrat (or an 'independent' who votes 99.999% with one of the 2 parties).
While the UK system may be broken, its a lot better than the system from across the ocean....
The way the British do it -is- a reasonable commonsense system and it lets -everyone- more or less have their voices heard. There are 650 seats in the house of commons there are 535 seats in the US congress. The UK has a population of 62,041,708, the US has a population of 309,230,000. That means that there is one representative for every 95,448 people in the UK, in the US there are 578,000 people for every one representative. In the UK, that leads to a lot more accountability. Similarly look in the US, there are only, what? 3 seats in congress not filled by a republican or democrat? There is not a single libertarian in congress which claims is the third largest party in the USA. On the other hand, there are -many- niche parties represented in the UK House of Commons that aren't Conservative, Labour or even Liberal Democrat. This means that more people have their political views represented in their government than the US. Mix this in with the fact that each country with the exception of England have their own parliament, means that each person has a lot more say in their government without compromising.
Shouldn't -everyone- have at least one MP/representative of their chosen political ideology in government? The UK system makes this possible, the US system does not.
I'm not really seeing the market for this. So I want a device that plays internet radio, but don't want to just get an iPod dock, use a laptop/netbook and uses Wi-Fi so it isn't like your getting always available portable internet. If you have a home theater system, why wouldn't you just have a HTPC and just use VLC and connect to the internet radio that way, if you don't have a home theater system, why not just use an iPod or laptop?
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I thought that I heard that Obama was increasing funding for NASA, just cutting manned space flight for awhile until we figure out how to do it right.
Increasing funding though doesn't mean much when there is so much to do. Myself, I'm not a huge fan of NASA, but unless private spaceflight increases dramatically in the next few years (which it won't until they get more research done which would be redundant to NASA's research).
Too little funding is worse than no funding. It leads to more taxpayer waste and unfinished programs.
But eventually we have to realize that Iran and North Korea are going to get rockets. We need to diplomatically (or, if it hits a point, forcefully) make sure that they don't aim the rockets at us or any other country. Both Iran and North Korea have made getting WMDs and the launch vehicles needed to use them a top priority. Even though both countries are rather poor economically, they are not above starving their citizens to achieve their goals.
We already use a lot of scattered contractors for NASA, if we can consolidate them into one efficient company in essence, we could do great things. The information is already out there, it is just scattered throughout various offices. If we make a few requirements needed to get the information, we would be running at about the same risk we already are running at. Such as if we make sure that they don't disclose the information under an NDA (corporations are great for this because with competition comes closely guarded secrets, look at Apple, and an iPhone is a lot harder to conceal than large amounts of blueprints and such).
As a nation, we need to face the facts, assuming that Iran, North Korea and all other dictatorships don't get WMDs and launch vehicles is unreasonable. They will get them eventually. What is needed is to prevent unstable rulers from controlling nations. If Kim-Jung-Il wasn't ruling North Korea, there would be very little reason for us to be worried if there was a sane person ruling, but instead we have a cult of personality mixed with lack of reasoning and total isolation.
Would it be worth it to us if we had never started our space program so the Soviets could not gain the information? No, of course not. But we are still shooting ourselves in the foot by looking to countries who are going to get rockets and such no matter what we do.
Because the Space Shuttles are old, decaying and really unfit. It takes a major disaster (Challenger, Columbia) before they fix basic design problems. I wouldn't trust an aging Commodore 64 as my primary computer, nor should we rely on the Shuttle. Really, Bush, Clinton and Obama should have all pressed for a new launch vehicle long ago. I find it quite funny that Obama apparently can trust the private sector with space flight which it hasn't really achieved, but can't trust it to run an organization without government support and can't trust it to run health care which businesses have had a proven track record of doing better than governments. In the end, we need to do one of two things
A) Sell NASA and give its research to taxpayers. Essentially everything owned by NASA would go to the highest bidder with the understanding of a few goals they must accomplish. The research would go to any American company wishing to deal in spaceflight.
or
B) Give NASA proper funding to do things.
We currently have a crippled private sector (taxpayer information being withheld) and crippled public sector (no funding) and it doesn't work.
Why is it that we can give tons of money to failing businesses that are going to fail eventually but can't give money to improve national defense and research (and yes, supremacy in space allows for supremacy in war as many of the technologies go hand in hand)?
when we cannot afford anything on Earth
We can afford most everything on earth. We just simply can't pay billions of dollars that we don't have to failing businesses, ruin health care and do a million other things.
I just hope we can keep the space program close down long enough (along with many other ineffective members of the government) so as to get our country back in the black.
The problem is, how are we going to get ahead in technology then?
If the US government released all taxpayer-funded studies to the public to jump-start private businesses, that is one thing. But in reality everything is so classified that private businesses are starting from 1950s-era technology with very little funding.
The US needs to take a clear stand and do one thing or another.
A) Let a private company buy-out NASA and release all information for free to any US business or individual with an interest in producing spacecraft.
or
B) Continue to spend money developing new spacecraft and using taxpayer money to do great things.
We can't continue to have an under-funded NASA. If Obama wants to waste taxpayer money on bailouts and such thats one thing, however then let the taxpayers have their money spent in research fulfilled, let a private company take over all of NASA and release information to the public. We can't move on with a crippled NASA and a crippled private sector. It just doesn't work.
No, because coal mines are temporary, short and have very little scientific value.
If we have a robot-operated moon base, it makes getting a constant human presence on the moon a lot easier. With a coal mine it might last 20-30 years before the coal runs out. The more efficient the workers, the more supply and the less value the mine has on earth. Robotic lunar workers could help build a moon-base for human occupants, create infrastructure using the natural resources of the moon, and allow for a lot of science to be carried out.
It would be a financially disastrous move for the coal mine owners, and adds nothing to scientific knowledge. On the other hand, a moon base can provide valuable minerals and vast scientific knowledge and eventually tourism.
In 4G areas, it might be a formidable option for anyone who hates their ISP *ehem* Comcast *ehem.*"
While paying for 4G might allow you to get rid of Comcast for "ordinary" browsing, mobile phone providers are going to be a lot more strict about caps and such than Comcast most likely because bandwidth is more limited.
Oh, quite often, actually. People write some real crap sometimes - there's an unfortunate trend toward trivia hoarding on the site. Everyone has their own pet interests and wants to build up a little repository of what they've found. What's more, they believe that their interest is important enough that it deserves to be on a site people have heard of. Personally, I really believe Wikipedia is not the right place for that.
Such as?
The reason why Wikipedia is popular is because you can find nearly everything on there. From the War of the Roses to the latest South Park episode to an obscure J-Pop album. I don't know about you but I don't think I'd use Wikipedia that much if it wasn't for the fact that it has a large variety of things.
What to you might be a "pet interest" might be important to someone else. Importance is very subjective, as such the sane thing to do is allow almost everything if it isn't "important" it won't be read. If it is, then it is read, edited and improved.
It's an imperfect analogy, though: if you're talking about a printed encyclopedia, or even a computer encyclopedia delivered on digital media, then you're talking about some kind of professional effort - quality control and editing have already taken place. If I bought an encyclopedia set and it included a list of all the TV shows and movies to feature a giant, Godzilla-like monster destroying a city, then I might be a bit annoyed that valuable print space in my encyclopedia had been wasted with that. (And yes, this is another way in which the analogy isn't perfect - even an encyclopedia delivered on DVD-ROM would be much more limited in the amount of information it could contain than Wikipedia is.)
Exactly, Wikipedia really isn't limited by space or bandwidth. It makes very little difference if there is an article on giant Godzilla-like monsters in a city or not when it comes to space. However, such a list would be helpful for some people, it makes little sense to delete it.
If no one is seeing it, there's no point in having the article at all, and it doesn't matter if it's deleted. If someone is seeing it, then you're back to needing quality control.
The entire point of having an editable article is that people can revise and expand on it. If something is obscure and someone looks it up, the chances of them having higher-quality knowledge to edit and expand and revise it increase. For example, I'm not going to look up episode 134 of The Simpsons because I'm not a huge fan of the Simpsons, someone who will look that up generally watches the Simpsons and would be more likely to edit and help out the article.
This is /. we do not read TFA, therefore it doesn't matter if it is Goatse or not, no one is going to see it.
But what happens in the end? Either it is not notable and no one notices it thus eliminating any threat to "standards" or it is notable and therefore should have an article.
Seriously, how often do you go through obscure pages of Wikipedia and think "this encyclopedia would be better without this"? How often do you go through an encyclopedia and think that? The point is to have a reference for everything. If it is not notable, people won't search it therefore any complaint about "standards" is negated because no one is seeing it.
...And does it matter? You know, disk space and bandwidth is cheap. It would cost what? $.0001 to create an article about this? And the flamewars going on about it are costing more bandwidth and disk space than the article itself would have.
Honestly, Wikipedia editors are the worst, they take what should be an encyclopedia filled with -everything- and try to narrow it down to fit what they want.
Does Wikipedia -lose- anything if it accepts an article that is a word coined by xkcd? Of course not.
Um, what are you talking about. Look at the Nexus One http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One 1 Ghz ARM CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and storage up to 32 GB with SD cards.
The problem with Chrome is the lack of customization, not just plugins but customization. Chrome lacks decent controls for history, I don't -care- if I leave cookies, I just hate seeing viewed sites because mostly they are viewed and worthless. I never really have used any history 'features' and it annoys me to have all mistyped domain names and the like still in there. Also, the Linux version of chrome at least makes it impossible to click the middle mouse button and scroll, something that I use on a regular basis in Firefox. Also, it is impossible to use custom CSS and such to view sites with.
Any one of these things alone wouldn't be too bad, but with all of them, its just too annoying to use on a daily basis.
I don't understand all the hype about these distros, who wants to get less out of their hardware? Yeah, I enjoy using -some- web apps but some things are just pointless to not include such as an office suite. I don't know about you but the entire point of having a laptop is to take it places and I don't want to pay $30 a month to get slow internet everywhere. Desktop apps make sense. Hard disk space is cheap too, unless you have an SSD (and most devices don't) does 500 more megs matter?
That kind of tenuous reasoning could lead to people organizing and shutting down big corpulent wastes of money like HEW, the EPA, etc.
The HEW and EPA -are- large wastes of money for the most part. History has proven that the largest polluters aren't corporations but rather the government. Pollution is generally caused by inefficiency, when technology catches up pollution ends up resolving itself. The department of health ends up really only working because of economies of scale, and most health care problems are caused by the government (patents, etc). Private firms unencumbered by government-created problems usually end up producing more workable, safe solutions.
And if public money has gone to National Public Radio (a certain amount has and can be documented) where's my open mike?
Radio is no longer as big of a deal. You are much more likely to gain an audience through the internet or TV. You might not be able to get an open mic because it is limited, on the other hand if you and a lot of other members of the public opposed a certain section of NPR or wanted to add in something and NPR refused, you might have a case.
Plus, I don't think NPR is making billions of dollars at taxpayer expense like ISPs are (you don't have to pay to get NPR directly, you do to get internet access)
You are on /. , I don't think anyone of us has to worry about birth control. On the other hand, Microsoft having access to people's nuts... That could be worrying.
For far too long now, the GOP SOP has been "Corps good. Privatize the public commons, better!"
And that should be a reason for supporting net neutrality. We've given the telecoms tons of money, tons of land, etc. its a myth that all these ISPs got to be so large because of their own work and its the big evil government who is regulating them. That is completely false. It is the big evil government who said "here have a few million dollars, 'modernize' America, give it internet access" and then handed out public land left and right so its citizens could have internet access. However, now the internet access is no longer internet access but rather dumbed-down media portals in essence.
If it was privatized we sure wouldn't have these huge ISPs who can conspire to block net neutrality but instead smaller, regional companies competing for your business.
Really, if arguing from liberal, conservative, libertarian, green or just about any other political ideology, net neutrality in the US makes sense for the majority of ISPs.
Government cannot go around telling people what they must do with their property, that's central planning, and it makes it impossible for private owners to regulate how their property is used efficiently.
And I never said that they should go around telling people what they can do with their property. I'm absolutely opposed to government control, however, if they are going to take my money, I should have a say what it is used for. The internet implies neutrality by definition. When we paid these millions of dollars to telecoms we weren't wanting non-neutral internet connections because such things were nearly impossible with the technology level. However, with deep packet inspection and the like, its becoming a threat.
If a company wants to not use public land and public funding, fine, do whatever you want. However, the moment you use public land or public funding, you should be subjected to the will of the people. The will of the people is pro-net neutrality, and the lack of net neutrality has almost no positives and many negatives.
Conservatives != Republicans today
Similar to how Liberal != Democrats.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties of the US simply favor government to the highest bidder, they really -have- no consistent ideology other than to oppose the other side if it is politically convenient.
It isn't smaller government. The telecoms still use public land and got a -ton- of funding from the government.
All net neutrality should be, is the people who had their money taken from them by the government and given to the telecoms receiving what they paid for essentially.
I don't really see the growth factor for open source hardware. Yeah, its great if you are a geek, but if you aren't... why bother? Most open source hardware projects are designed for people to program. I see things like Android becoming popular, open enough to do most things you want, but still polished. Yeah, I like being able to program obscure assembly commands to a CPU to make it do odd things, but I like things to work without having to spend hours setting them up. So while I don't think things are going to shrink, I think that the number of geeks really aren't increasing enough to expand the market.
Better than the US though, a party could easily have 25% of the popular votes and no representation.
While I agree that changing of boundaries to undermine the political system, its still better than the US.
Would be more likely to prevent extremist parties or fringe parties from winning seats than entirely proportional systems. [No BNP!]
Yeah, because its so great in the USA where we have 2 parties and any 'fringe' parties are out cold. Look at all those great solutions that the republicans and democrats have given us! Nothing better than 2 sides of the same coin...
Everyone should have some representation in their government, no matter what they believe. If you don't you have this -wonderful- system in the US where everything is just grand! After all we have no unemployment, no taxes and world peace! Oh wait...
Just be glad your broken system is a lot less broken than the US system. At least you guys -have- minority parties. Good luck finding a single person in the US congress that isn't a republican or democrat (or an 'independent' who votes 99.999% with one of the 2 parties).
While the UK system may be broken, its a lot better than the system from across the ocean....
The way the British do it -is- a reasonable commonsense system and it lets -everyone- more or less have their voices heard. There are 650 seats in the house of commons there are 535 seats in the US congress. The UK has a population of 62,041,708, the US has a population of 309,230,000. That means that there is one representative for every 95,448 people in the UK, in the US there are 578,000 people for every one representative. In the UK, that leads to a lot more accountability. Similarly look in the US, there are only, what? 3 seats in congress not filled by a republican or democrat? There is not a single libertarian in congress which claims is the third largest party in the USA. On the other hand, there are -many- niche parties represented in the UK House of Commons that aren't Conservative, Labour or even Liberal Democrat. This means that more people have their political views represented in their government than the US. Mix this in with the fact that each country with the exception of England have their own parliament, means that each person has a lot more say in their government without compromising.
Shouldn't -everyone- have at least one MP/representative of their chosen political ideology in government? The UK system makes this possible, the US system does not.
I'm not really seeing the market for this. So I want a device that plays internet radio, but don't want to just get an iPod dock, use a laptop/netbook and uses Wi-Fi so it isn't like your getting always available portable internet. If you have a home theater system, why wouldn't you just have a HTPC and just use VLC and connect to the internet radio that way, if you don't have a home theater system, why not just use an iPod or laptop?