There is a model-T that still runs in my area. I've seen the guy a few times in the grocery store parking lot, and cruising about the retail district. I'm pretty sure cybersecurity is not a problem for him.
In other words, the solution is: Duh! Cars don't need to be on any stinkin' network.
Let's say I invented a browser today. Where would I put it? Github. Who's on Github? Geeks. They're smarter.
If the browser were good, it would expand out through the social network with geeks at the root. The early adopters would continue to be smart people, until the circle started to expand to their dumb friends.
Who uses IE? A very broad spectrum of people.
I wager that regardless of the quality of the browser, the less popular it is the smarter the users are.
So. What kind of law do you want to draft that reduces corporate influence without also reducing the ability of citizens to organize and lobby? For that matter, how do you avoid having this very Slashdot discussion being regulated under campaign finance laws, and us having to file paperwork with the FEC because we're "electioneering" on Slashdot?
Note, I'm not disagreeing that corporate influence is a problem. No, far from it. I'd love to be able to walk into a grocery store without having to think about the politics of the people that run it.
We seemed to be able to muster the ability to reign in corporate influence during the first Progressive Era. The era was characterized by union organizing, muckraking journalism, and some politicians who actually had spines. I don't think CU would stand in the way of any of that happening again. Far from it. The problem with tinkering with free speech and association is that it's hard to separate the bad people you want to shut up from the good people you don't want to shut up. That's why it might be easier to just have a shouting contest, and keep letting the corporations shout until the people shout louder.
Also note I'm no fan of the justices you mention, or of corporate personhood. It's just that the devil's in the details. When you're working around the 1st ammendment, you need a scalpel not a butcher knife. While I'm not happy with the status quo, I'm not so sure a different ruling by the SCOTUS would have helped.
If we were to pass a constitutional ammendment stripping the rights of personhood from corporations, would that be all corporations or just for-profits? If it's just for-profits... say hello to the non-profit Corporation for telecoms. OK, all corporations. Say good-bye to AARP. Say hello to LLCs. OK, no rights for LLCs. Now we're stripping rights from millions of businesses. Ooops! You put a campaign sign in the window of your donut shop. You're in big trouble.
And it goes on and on from there... Only real solution I can see is for people to grow a pair and organize real opposition within the current framework. It might get ugly like it did circa 1900; but there may not be any real alternative.
Any company I've ever worked at has encrypted traffic outside the private network on a regular basis. It's just common sense. If you don't do it, you're potentially leaking all your plans to the competition. No encryption? That would be like businesses in previous generations sending all their interoffice memos on postcards.
The internet is designed for privacy, not security
I'm aware of the Internet being designed for robustness but I don't recall other design principles being too important. Remember, it started as a DARPA project during the Cold War. The ability to route packets around nodes that were damaged due to nuclear attacks was a consideration. Privacy was, AFAIK, not a consideration at all. Security was almost certainly a consideration for parts of the Internet and for some protocols; but when you start talking about the whole thing it becomes really hard to define what "security" is.
That's no moon. It's a pointless semantic debate. Pull out! PULL OUT! Too late! It's pulling us in. We'll be sucked into the maw of the almighty Sarlac or something, where we'll debate arbitrary criteria and the numerical values for cutoff points for 1000 years as we're slowly digested.
We'll have to see how the power-to-weight ratio works out for this vs. the quad copter. The ability to strike the wall without having bits of rotor fly everywhere is the obvious advantage. It's brilliant because you smack yourself on the head wondering why this design isn't already more prevalant at this stage in the game.
I'm going to issue my own Fiat currency, backed by Fiats (the automobile). I still haven't worked out how much the average Fiat should be worth. There's no real purpose in this, other than to confuse the hell out of people who think I'm issueing a fiat currency (illegal) rather than a Fiat currency (perfectly legal, AFAIK). BTW, I'm not even sure if Fiat is still making cars, and they have a repuation for being a real POS. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill a lot with rundown Fiats to back my currency.
In theory that sounds like a good idea. In practice, the means-testing beurocracy exceeds the cost recouped. A more efficient method is to tax social security benefits as ordinary income. Of course, this will never happen because "tax" is a 4-letter word in Washington. Instead, we'll probably waste money with means testing.
This is why you shouldn't generalize too much about software. For some fremium web app, a little glitch here and there is fine. Getting first to market is more important than perfection. For mission-critical software you want perfection. That would include medical devices, transit systems, and aerospace.
What's important is for people to recognize the difference between Twitter and Trains.
They held a massive expo. They're building huge skyscrapers, They've got crazy real estate prices, and now Americans are thinking of learning their language. They've got both bases covered if they want to emulate Japan, circa 1986. We all know where that went.
All we need now is for Time magazine to put China on the cover. Maybe they already did, perhaps more than once.
Despite all these contrary indicators, China rolls on... for now.
On the one hand, those people are producing goods and services that were previously unimagined, like MRI machines, mango-blueberry smoothies, cel phones and computers.
On the other hand, those people are producing goods and services that were previously unimagined, like TPS reports, TSA inspections, spam, popups, anti-virus software and medical billing codes.
I call the latter category "non-products". The market doesn't give us more free time. It doesn't know how to do that. It does know how to create beurocracy, scams and criminal enterprises, so that's what it does with the extra people. Then as an added bonus the government creates an apparatus to fight the things that the free market created--badly, because if it ever stamped out illegal actions completely, they'd have to figure out something else to do with their employees.
In the late 90s, when Napster first burst on the scene I sided with the rights holders. Now I'm mostly on the other side. Why? Because of the disproportionate punishments meted out, and the larger problem of corporations buying laws (e.g, Sonny Bono extension act).
I agree wholeheartedly. This is why Obama is such a disappointment. He was said to be a good orator and a Progressive. If he made half as good an effort as you just did in your post, then he might do for Progressivism what Reagan did for Conservatism. IMHO, both schools of thought have merit if not taken to extremes. The "middle path" is what we should be seeking. Free markets run amok lead to the concentration of power as you describe. The reaction to that is Progressivism (I alwas thought it was weird that Leftists hurl "reactionary" as an epithet, since both extremes react to the other). Progressivism run amok is Communism, or perhaps to be more precise, the *methods* of Progressivism run amok lead to Communism. To reiterate, both extremes suck.
Standard disclaimer: Yes, I'm pretty sure I've horribly abused these terms and am not stricly adhered to some "proper" definition of these terms that some pedant was taught in political science classes. For clarification, see my.sig, and bite my ass.
Actually, we exchanged one form of institutional racism for another.. IMHO, a true lack of institutional racism would be defined by no mention of race in law or policy, except to prohibit discrimination on that basis. A true lack of racism would be basing hiring decisions strictly on merit. The counter-argument is that you need to promote historicly oppressed peoples, and the counter-argument to that is that by promoting them on the basis of something other than merit you create a disincentive for them to advance as a class.
Ah, so it's possible that my memory is not so flawed. I could have sworn blue was opposite white. Come to think of it, I do seem to recall that the colors were not rigidly standardized, and having seen what I thought were knock-offs. Maybe some of the Japanese cubes got sent to the US to meet demand, or I had an early cube made before the "Western" color scheme was adopted.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a model-T that still runs in my area. I've seen the guy a few times in the grocery store parking lot, and cruising about the retail district. I'm pretty sure cybersecurity is not a problem for him.
In other words, the solution is: Duh! Cars don't need to be on any stinkin' network.
Let's say I invented a browser today. Where would I put it? Github. Who's on Github? Geeks. They're smarter.
If the browser were good, it would expand out through the social network with geeks at the root. The early adopters would continue to be smart people, until the circle started to expand to their dumb friends.
Who uses IE? A very broad spectrum of people.
I wager that regardless of the quality of the browser, the less popular it is the smarter the users are.
A trendy restaurant. 'nuff said.
That's not the entire purpose. That's how the purpose got hijacked.
--just take half the gold in Ft. Knox. Issue gold certificates backed by it at a value such that the debt is paid; but don't allow redemption.
Then there's the punster solution:
Get 14 $1 bills. Tear them in half. That's 14 terabucks.
So. What kind of law do you want to draft that reduces corporate influence without also reducing the ability of citizens to organize and lobby? For that matter, how do you avoid having this very Slashdot discussion being regulated under campaign finance laws, and us having to file paperwork with the FEC because we're "electioneering" on Slashdot?
Note, I'm not disagreeing that corporate influence is a problem. No, far from it. I'd love to be able to walk into a grocery store without having to think about the politics of the people that run it.
We seemed to be able to muster the ability to reign in corporate influence during the first Progressive Era. The era was characterized by union organizing, muckraking journalism, and some politicians who actually had spines. I don't think CU would stand in the way of any of that happening again. Far from it. The problem with tinkering with free speech and association is that it's hard to separate the bad people you want to shut up from the good people you don't want to shut up. That's why it might be easier to just have a shouting contest, and keep letting the corporations shout until the people shout louder.
Also note I'm no fan of the justices you mention, or of corporate personhood. It's just that the devil's in the details. When you're working around the 1st ammendment, you need a scalpel not a butcher knife. While I'm not happy with the status quo, I'm not so sure a different ruling by the SCOTUS would have helped.
If we were to pass a constitutional ammendment stripping the rights of personhood from corporations, would that be all corporations or just for-profits? If it's just for-profits... say hello to the non-profit Corporation for telecoms. OK, all corporations. Say good-bye to AARP. Say hello to LLCs. OK, no rights for LLCs. Now we're stripping rights from millions of businesses. Ooops! You put a campaign sign in the window of your donut shop. You're in big trouble.
And it goes on and on from there... Only real solution I can see is for people to grow a pair and organize real opposition within the current framework. It might get ugly like it did circa 1900; but there may not be any real alternative.
Any company I've ever worked at has encrypted traffic outside the private network on a regular basis. It's just common sense. If you don't do it, you're potentially leaking all your plans to the competition. No encryption? That would be like businesses in previous generations sending all their interoffice memos on postcards.
The internet is designed for privacy, not security
I'm aware of the Internet being designed for robustness but I don't recall other design principles being too important. Remember, it started as a DARPA project during the Cold War. The ability to route packets around nodes that were damaged due to nuclear attacks was a consideration. Privacy was, AFAIK, not a consideration at all. Security was almost certainly a consideration for parts of the Internet and for some protocols; but when you start talking about the whole thing it becomes really hard to define what "security" is.
At first glance, I read it as Aaron Burr and thought maybe they went out into the countryside and had a duel.
That's no moon. It's a pointless semantic debate. Pull out! PULL OUT! Too late! It's pulling us in. We'll be sucked into the maw of the almighty Sarlac or something, where we'll debate arbitrary criteria and the numerical values for cutoff points for 1000 years as we're slowly digested.
We'll have to see how the power-to-weight ratio works out for this vs. the quad copter. The ability to strike the wall without having bits of rotor fly everywhere is the obvious advantage. It's brilliant because you smack yourself on the head wondering why this design isn't already more prevalant at this stage in the game.
Almost everybody I know is a criminal, it's just that most of us never get caught.
I wonder if he had Revolution 9 in mind when he did that.
BTW, I seem to recall that it won "least popular Beatles song" in some survey although I don't have a citation.
Or as I like to say:
The good news is, you get health insurance. The bad news is, you're gonna need it.
Oh noes! I've been heckled on the Internet and caught totally flat-footed. I'm dyin' up here.
I'm going to issue my own Fiat currency, backed by Fiats (the automobile). I still haven't worked out how much the average Fiat should be worth. There's no real purpose in this, other than to confuse the hell out of people who think I'm issueing a fiat currency (illegal) rather than a Fiat currency (perfectly legal, AFAIK). BTW, I'm not even sure if Fiat is still making cars, and they have a repuation for being a real POS. Therefore, it shouldn't be too hard for me to fill a lot with rundown Fiats to back my currency.
programs should be means-tested
In theory that sounds like a good idea. In practice, the means-testing beurocracy exceeds the cost recouped. A more efficient method is to tax social security benefits as ordinary income. Of course, this will never happen because "tax" is a 4-letter word in Washington. Instead, we'll probably waste money with means testing.
This is why you shouldn't generalize too much about software. For some fremium web app, a little glitch here and there is fine. Getting first to market is more important than perfection. For mission-critical software you want perfection. That would include medical devices, transit systems, and aerospace.
What's important is for people to recognize the difference between Twitter and Trains.
They held a massive expo. They're building huge skyscrapers, They've got crazy real estate prices, and now Americans are thinking of learning their language. They've got both bases covered if they want to emulate Japan, circa 1986. We all know where that went.
All we need now is for Time magazine to put China on the cover. Maybe they already did, perhaps more than once.
Despite all these contrary indicators, China rolls on... for now.
On the one hand, those people are producing goods and services that were previously unimagined, like MRI machines, mango-blueberry smoothies, cel phones and computers.
On the other hand, those people are producing goods and services that were previously unimagined, like TPS reports, TSA inspections, spam, popups, anti-virus software and medical billing codes.
I call the latter category "non-products". The market doesn't give us more free time. It doesn't know how to do that. It does know how to create beurocracy, scams and criminal enterprises, so that's what it does with the extra people. Then as an added bonus the government creates an apparatus to fight the things that the free market created--badly, because if it ever stamped out illegal actions completely, they'd have to figure out something else to do with their employees.
In the late 90s, when Napster first burst on the scene I sided with the rights holders. Now I'm mostly on the other side. Why? Because of the disproportionate punishments meted out, and the larger problem of corporations buying laws (e.g, Sonny Bono extension act).
I agree wholeheartedly. This is why Obama is such a disappointment. He was said to be a good orator and a Progressive. If he made half as good an effort as you just did in your post, then he might do for Progressivism what Reagan did for Conservatism. IMHO, both schools of thought have merit if not taken to extremes. The "middle path" is what we should be seeking. Free markets run amok lead to the concentration of power as you describe. The reaction to that is Progressivism (I alwas thought it was weird that Leftists hurl "reactionary" as an epithet, since both extremes react to the other). Progressivism run amok is Communism, or perhaps to be more precise, the *methods* of Progressivism run amok lead to Communism. To reiterate, both extremes suck.
Standard disclaimer: Yes, I'm pretty sure I've horribly abused these terms and am not stricly adhered to some "proper" definition of these terms that some pedant was taught in political science classes. For clarification, see my .sig, and bite my ass.
Actually, we exchanged one form of institutional racism for another.. IMHO, a true lack of institutional racism would be defined by no mention of race in law or policy, except to prohibit discrimination on that basis. A true lack of racism would be basing hiring decisions strictly on merit. The counter-argument is that you need to promote historicly oppressed peoples, and the counter-argument to that is that by promoting them on the basis of something other than merit you create a disincentive for them to advance as a class.
Integral dimensions. Booooring. Solve me a fractal cube.
Ah, so it's possible that my memory is not so flawed. I could have sworn blue was opposite white. Come to think of it, I do seem to recall that the colors were not rigidly standardized, and having seen what I thought were knock-offs. Maybe some of the Japanese cubes got sent to the US to meet demand, or I had an early cube made before the "Western" color scheme was adopted.