Well why just wonder what they'd say when you can ask them directly? Just ask a conservatard if they like the idea of a local government supplying their population with municipal WIFI or broadband and see what reaction you get. Or just ask Mr Google what the conservatards thought of your little socialist plot.
Yeah too bad I wasn't "pathologically attacking my opponent's psychology", as anyone who read my post is fully aware . Actually, I presented quite a few detailed cogent arguments why the basis of libertarianism is fundamentally flawed and anti-social. Funny that you just *missed* all that huge part of the post. Oh that's right, you didn't miss it, you just lied about what I had written because you have to say SOMETHING and lying is what libertarians do as normally as they breathe. Oh well, I suppose to you it seems like I must something "unfair" about my post attack since any attack that is effective must be, by your feelings about it, unfair, and anyone who criticizes libertarians effectively must, of course be a psychopath , unless, of course, you look up the definition of psychopath in which case you'll discover that in fact, the meaning of the word has nothing to do with protecting innocent people from say, the ravages of libertarian/ conservative induced global warming but rather is more or less describing what crawls out of the said same people's mouths on a daily basis and is enshrined in their "philosophical" writings ("The Virtue Of Selfishness"..."Collectivism Taxes and Redistributionism is Bad" "Trickle down economics" etc etc etc) as fundamental principles.
See, protecting and fighting against the real, immediate and devastating impact a sociopath's actions have on innocent people is not a form of being a sociopath. The American government sending people to fight in the Civil War was not an act of "Northern Aggression" as libertarian / state's rights assholes framed it back then . People advocating for killing Hitler's were not plotting a murder. This is all called "moral calculus" and it is, in fact just exactly what libertarians are least capable of by their very nature.
The reason people despise libertarians so much is just because the "policies " they agitate for, if you can call the advancement of lawlessness a "policy", are completely despicable and in the case of global warming lead directly to the genocide against the world's poorest peoples who are least able to protect themselves. , a kind of econo-cide. As Ayn Rand would tell you, a trifling thing like the mass murder of "lesser men" is sure to just piss off the non-John-Galt cretins off every time and they'll start in with their collectivism and their laws to get ya, or as Ayn Rand said in We The Living
What are your masses...but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?
Yeah actually, all those libertarian's actions I cited pretty well speak form themselves and the reasons and motivations behind their criminal / amoral actions is actually a worthwhile thing to reflect on since it has animated just those actions and continues to animate the movement.
"The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people." -- Abraham Lincoln
and one of the big factors (maybe not the only one) is government regulations.
Yeah you said that because you've studied the financing behind Latvian broadband and know all about the effect of government regulation on broadband in this nation and have published a comparative study on the two which link you just forgot to publish
Oh wait, you just ejaculated the "government's the problem" meme all over slashdot readers because that's what you reflexively do in every situation and besides, it's always true, so no facts are needed before you assert it as true?
I cant speak to what happened in your suburb of Boston but your post inspired me to look a little deeper into the issue and this paper kept my interest -
Once the cable digital migration is accomplished, the cable companiesâ(TM) big pipes will be filled with virtual, highly-compressed digital âoechannels.â Three of those, or so, may be devoted to Internet access.
The real growth area for cable is âoebroadband,â but very little of âoebroadbandâ will be recognizable as Internet access.
The rest of the transmissions filling the pipe will use the Internet Protocol but will be thoroughly managed, monetized, prioritized, filtered, packaged, and non-executableâ"much like traditional cable television today.
When a monopoly cable provider can allocate just two or three of its hundreds of virtual âoechannelsâ to Internet connectivity, and when only that provider can sell you video-strength speeds, net neutrality becomes a subsidiary issueâ"a tiny white bird landing on the back of an enormous hippo. Net neutrality matters, but it is a sideshow. As one content executive told me, âoeComcast owns the Internet.â
II. What Happens Next
We are about to confront a well-coordinated cabal of local monopoly cable providers. When it comes to affordability, ubiquity, and nondiscrimination, we could decide to take a lesson from a host of other developed nationsâ"particularly Australia.
As a report from the Berkman Center made clear earlier this year, policies requiring line-sharing at regulated rates have played a central role in the spread of low-priced, nondiscriminatory, very-high-speed access in many other nations.[20]
Australia has recently cleared an important final hurdle towards rolling out a publicly-funded fiber network that will be open to all ISPs: By having its Senate pass a bill that will decommission old copper-wire (and hybrid coaxial fiber) infrastructure and separate its monopoly provider into wholesale and retail operations, Australia has ensured the construction of a new National Broadband Network that will connect 93% of Australian homes and business at speeds of 100 megabits per second.[21]
Another lesson: Leadership played a central role in this major Australian initiative. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has been leading the reform effort since 2005, and said recently that ââ[n]o other sector has been held hostage by a market structure that has been such an impediment to genuine competition and innovation
Thanks for the info. +1 informative. It's not the government's fault the cable companies wanted to be monopolies and extorted that as the price of doing business... it's what all companies want . Too bad they felt like they had to give it to them. Cities give Walmart, the biggest company in the world. financial concessions all the time. You have to look at the details to know why corporations are able to extort munis in this way.
In a perfectly free market we'd have what we have when the oil and gas companies obtain natural resource rights from individual land owners. They end up owning everything and shut out everyone else for all time, and anyone who does not sell at the going rate gets boxed in by those who do. If you saw the only mildly fictional There Will Be Blood, you know what the oil barons did to people who wouldn't 'sell- they ran a pipeline laterally underground into their land and sucked out the oil anyways.
If you've seen Gasland you know what they do to people who DO sell. It's not pretty.
Look, humans have an practically unlimited capacity to think up schemes and present them in ways so as to lure relatively naive people into deals that ultimately harm them, harm the environment and everyone who depends on it and are bad for a competitive market. Highly trained analysts possess asymmetrical knowledge of a huge number of variables present in any deal. To understand whether you should take the deal in a completely unregulated market where sellers are not constrained by any laws whatsoever, would effectively become a question it would take years of schooling to really analyze and something Joe Homeowner just doesn't have the capacity, resources or time to do.
The whole libertarian argument is aimed at preventing the government from accumulating and using knowledge about the world, to benefit taxpayers in the form of laws which limit the badness any determined aggregation of exploitative and well funded people can do to innocents.
It's so obviously a wet dream for sociopaths it's hard to see why people don't simply reject it out of hand the way I did as soon as I understood what it was they were saying. In fact, it's so hard to understand why libertarianism isn't laughed out of existence that the best reason I can think of is what I said- it's the political wing of people with sociopathic personality disorder.
They find it, understand in their bones what it's really all about and and immediately become determined enthusiasts, being careful to frame their argments in terms of "freedom" and "freedom from government" as though our government wasn't a thing for by and of the people, which it is.
It's just a fact about the relative complexity of the world, the relative capacity and resources of Joe Regular Citizen and the resources and capacity of what amounts to well funded nation-states , which is what corporations are now, that there's no contest between these two entities and corporations don't even need to use so called "force" to fuck everyone over.
Look at the personalities involved with libertarianism and it's near cousin objectivism. Ayn Rand was a virtual walking checklist of sociopathic . psychopathic personality disorder, as is her "philosophy".
In our own time , consider the person of Rand Paul. When faced with having to obtain continued certification for his eye doctor practice, he balked and instead invented his own ""certification" and then bestowed his that invented , fake certification on himself.
This is just the actions of a dirtbag scammer, the kind of person who shows up at your house and takes money to "fix your roof" then is never seen again. It's exactly the same level of anti-social behaviour towards the rest of society.
Presumably Dr Paul's patients think he's certified and that certification means something other than Dr Paul thinks he's above society's rules.
I think I was referring to the follow on geopolitical and ultimately economic costs we'd endure. Nukes are effectively unusable for those reasons, not to mention the unacceptably high loss of truly innocent life.
Nukes are big,. We need to go small. Very small. We need to make little flying insects that are released over here and find their quarry through DNA analysis and kill only them. Perfect.
Due true deregulation means monopolies and unlimited dumping of toxic shit into our environment. The reason the dust bowl happened was because farmers "maximized their profit" in the easiest way they could. Then it all blew up. Ditto the Great Depression . If your history isn't that sharp, then let me point you to the event around 2008 where banks fond a way to provide insurance, called "credit default swaps", but avoided the regulation that went along with selling insurance. Then when the deregulated housing market - a system that lenders hand out liar loans and NINJA like candy because no one was watching what THEY did, blew up, all those insurance contracts bills came due , and the banks couldn't ' pay them and couldn't on them.
I can sense when I'm talking to a libertarian , which is the political arm of the sociopathic personality type. Really, I'm not that interested in your "proofs" that everything is because of government interference. It's just in your genes to think the way you think, to exploit other people are greedily as you can, to hate any kind of communitarian impulse and to elevate your personal selfish greed into a an uber First Principle. It's how you were born, and the reasons and narratives you give are just your brian seeking out, repeating and generating just so sotries about how things could be if onoly you had no rules upon you. Libertarians attempt to associate their genetically mediated greed with everything from The Constitution (Taxes are theft!!!) to Jesus Christ (The prosperity gospel - Jesus wants you to be rich!!! ). They're materially and as a matter of course indifferent to the plight of other people around them excepting of course the vacuous and self serving rationalizations, usually presented as hypothetical scenarios about how government causes all bad things, which always end in how we'd all be better off if government just withdrew from our lives.
They think about everything in mercantile terms and do not care on whit about other people or the larger society they're a part of .
I understand. It's what your brain is screaming at you 24 / 7. I empathize, I really do. One day soon we'll have a cure for libertarianism, we'll fidn the gene that makes the part of your brain that's concerned with people other than yourself and your personal wants so dysfucntional and we'll make it work properly so you feel empathy and compassion and a sense of responsibility to others. One day soon, we''ll make sure no one is born with this defect. Until then, I fell sorry for ya buddy, I really do. Perhaps this would be a good time to go read The Fountainhead again.
It's so obviously collusion. In my neck of the woods, no two cable companies compete. You can get one if you live HERE and the other if you live THERE. This is not capitalism and they should be forced through legislation to compete.
It's called "regulation".. aka law and order for corporations. Sure, criminals don't like law and order.. so what's new in that? They'd much rather be left alone to play freely in a green field of their id's desires.
From financial deregulation, deregulation in other industries and a general lack of oversight and enforcement we have gotten the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl , the S&L melt down, the Long Term Capital Management melt down, the 2008 crash and global warming. The cumulative bill to the rest of us so some tiny minority can profit obscenely runs into the trillions, a bill the rest of us have to pay.. This is also known as a Grover Norquist Tax, the tax the rest of us pay for deregulatory policies and the destruction they cause. .
Well, I've been taxed enough. I'm sick of paying the bill for dereguation and I WANT MY MONEY BACK from the small set of libertarian and conservative personalities and lawmakers that took it away and gave it to the coke snorting class.
Sure we can kill them all if we want - with a nuke- but at what price? Drones are a cost benefit sweet spot.
BTW and FYI Pakistan is all about the drone program since the people they're killing also want to overthrow the Pakistani govt. They cry foul when they have to be seen crying foul and otherwise help us locate the bad guys.
I think we won in Iraq, last I asaw Saddam was hanging by a rope to the sounds of his countrymen jeering at him and his sons were piles of bullet ridden flesh being photographed for their contemporary's benefit.
Iraq is not the 51st state and neither is Afghanistan the 52nd . But something at some time had to change things up ion a really basic way in that neck of the woods. IT's not a popular insight but the Arab Spring which started in Tunisia had everything to do with the Tunisian population knowing that their near neighbors voted in an election. Sorry, but you've got to admit that that gets people to thinking "why not us? Why do I have to live like this ? ".
I am not the one to decide if it was "worth it". To the people who fought over there, I would say to them it was. I would say they changed the dynamics in that part of the world in a very positive way that effects hundreds of millions of people and the full extent of that change will p[lay out and be felt for centuries. I'm no lover of W or any of that (please read my other posts fro proof) , but reality is what reality is and you have to first and above all else call them as they really are. The Arab Spring owes a lot, perhaps everything, to the forced injection of democracy and change into the ME by the US-led coalition. It's exactly what the neo-cons were talking about when they said it would have a domino effect. For conspiracy theorists, let me ask you- do you really think the CIA had nothing to do with the recent bombing in Damascus or more broadly the Arab Uprising?
There was a disease in the world that was spreading an infection to the rest of us. That diseases name was "Middle Eastern dictatorship" and one of that disease's symptoms was 9-11. We decide to go full on and take out that disease rather than be put on an endless road of trying to combat its symptoms.
If the Taliban topple Pakistan you can pretty well say hello to about 1,000,000 times more of what you don't like about war, civilian deaths and the national security state. By that measure, drones that blow up cars carrying terrorists is going to look like a a very very good deal indeed.
You meet all kinds of people in online forums you would avoid or who would otherwise be excluded from your world through a variety of processes that act as effective gate-keepers. You're one of those people.
At some point in your life, you should hear someone tell you exactly what's wrong with you. So here it is. You've bought into crank ideas, bordering on the paranoid. Basically, you have poor reality testing, and instead of critical thinking, you look for conspiracies because they're just more exciting to a certain part of your brain than the messiness that reality is,. There's always a huge component of narcissism involved in paranoiac fantasies because it implies someone (other than yourself) is constantly thinking about you and planning fro you, albeit in a completely negative way. I have no idea where this kind of thinking comes from, perhaps from a childhood in which absolutely no one paid any attention to you. or lots of the wrong kind of attention to you.
There. Someone told you so now you can't say that you never knew, and that's why you never changed and wasted your life's energy on paranoid delusions.
HTH, no, really, HTH.
You're one for the John Birchers, or some left wing equivalent, a 9-11 truther or a Obama birth certificate lunatic.
Thaaaaat's right MKULTRA happened- 40 years ago when the CIA was run by people who were born in the 20s, nearly 100 years ago now. For THOSE people, the Civil War and slavery were closer to them than MKULTRA is to you.
Who doubts that sudden death from the sky "disrupts" terrorists and demoralizes them along with confounding their operations? Come on. Drones are as close to targeting specific, otherwise unreachable bad guys as we're able to get for now and as such they are a innocence-sparing, humane form of warfare. Anyone who seriously has an issue with the drone program needs to think through what alternatives there are to stopping very bad people very far away from doing very bad things.
There goes thin client user interfaces and thank god for that, quite frankly. And in related news, the cost of writing thin clients just went up 70%.....
What they're saying is what everyone else is saying which is Apple's patents are trivial , mere minor, lateral adjustments to well established,defacto standards of user interface techniques etc. , and in this they're exactly right.
A message which just goes to show that it's all about political affiliation and nothing about science.
Think about what a defective disgusting human being you are. You demand that the world take your fucking folk theories of science seriously while you deride , debase, pursue, accuse and slander actual hardworking, men and women who have done the real, hard work required to have an opinion worth listening to. People who have lived their lives with zero expectation of fame or power or even big money, but rather have courageously pursued the truth wherever it leads them , however unhappy that place may be.. You accuse them of lying, of power seeking of having ambitions to control the world and why? Because you don't like the message they're bringing you. Shoot the messenger much? You're the fucking lowest dirtiest kind of human on this planet, no different than the Nazis who chased the Jewish scientists out of their Third Reich. You're a low life nothing attempting to raise himself up into a position of authority over subjects you have zero knowledge of in order to achieve your preferred political ends and suppress inconvenient truths.
How's it feel to play the role of the most despicable character in every history from Roman times onwards? How's it feel to be a completely worthless, unaccomplished ignorant human being , noisily proclaiming your superiority over people whose authority they actually earned ?
The whole deregulation, Grover Norquist cocaine-driven me-generation Rush Limbaugh narcissistic draft dodging panty waist airy fairy FoxNews post-Modern fucking conservative movement is in a slow motion suicide mission that they're clearly going to succeed at. Thanks for killing yourselves to history for all time, thanks for making sure that "conservatism" is exposed as the disease it is.
You' and your kind will be dealt with as ruthlessly and we dealt with al Queda, that "other" threat to the United States of America with no holds barred whatsofuckingever.
We're going to survive as a species because in the end, we'll act to crush the death cult that is libertarianism / conservative Christianity into the fucking ground with great prejudice and whatever the fuck we decide justice, that's pronounced "just us" , is going to look like.
Successfully exaggerating the impact of AGW increases their power and influence and helps shape society into their desired form. I frankly think that in the developed world this group is considerably more powerful than Big Oil
at on Friday July 20, @10:42PM khallow said:
I don't recall saying scientists had this power. I do recall saying politicians had this power and they sure have agendas.
Liar? Or shortest memory in the world? We report, you decide.
There is no money in free except to sell it to advertisers who are effectively gamblers.
There' is money in low-cost if you keep your overhead low enough however. The established educational players have fought this for years b.c their overhead is non-negotiable and built into their business model. I know, I tried pre -year 2000 to get a university to offer its courses online and paid the price for my foolishness. They'll resist this to the death not because it's undoable or a bad idea, but because it's the end of everything they have.
The way all this is going to shake down is as follows: new players will create the courses and other new players will assemble an accreditation system that involves people's identities and establishing the veracity of their academic achievement. The universities seeing the writing on the wall will be late and very reluctant players to the game, offering up shit like a "Harvard Online Degree" say, representing some sort of lesser degree than the "real thing".. that sort of crap. Anything else forces them to cannibalize their base offering, which they can't do.
In the end , really good people will come out of the independent virtual university system and that will be when it all comes tumbling down for the universities. University ratings are effectively a battle for bright minds, since universities don't actually know how to create smart people, but rather succeed by culling smart people from the general population, then claiming them as their own, as their alumni.
When that's gone, when that starts to crack, they're fucked.
Tuition is a bubble, as is student loan debt. It's a price divorced from any kind of underlying reality of the buyer's ability to pay or even benefit bestowed . New entrants in education will mercilessly leverage the holy fuck out of this basic economic fact while the established universities sit on the sidelines diddling their clits and blaming all their woes on tenure..
Low cost , virtually free education combined with independent proof of student identity and achievement combined with the inability of universities to move in the same direction and remain solvent will, in the end, force universities to turn to the Feds for their continued existence. Their argument will be "our labs, our basic research is something our nation can't be without" , and they'll be right.
At that point a new deal will be struck- free universal education in exchange for higher taxes and continued existence of universities. That will lead to more culture war since conservatives see universities as the Great Satan of Liberalism and are sure as shit not going to pay taxes to keep them going.
Finally, just at this time, this issue will crash head on with global warming as the reality of what the universities foretold becomes indisputable
At this time, the country will have a choice to make- we can do what every other nation does and publicly fund the universities and their essential work or we can lose that function entirely. Either we consciously and publicly acknowledge that
1) supporting science and teaching reality based thinking is a basic necessity like food clothing and shelter and lifelong education a basic right and in fact duty of citizens and
2) continued technological and social progress are the primary and proper functions of society
or we cease to be able to pretend that we're world leaders, opting to devolve into a religio-based backwater , a fundamentalist Conservistan whose bright people have left or are leaving and whose best days are long behind it.
Science will inevitably be proved to have spoken the prophetic truth about what people will realize is the greatest threat to human civilization ever, global warming and the regressive, reality denying conservative movement will wither away faster than a river birch in a drought.
America will finally be of a mind to once and for all reject the dark s
The other major party is statists oriented to some degree with the environmental movement. It's worth remembering that the latter group has far more control and funding over climatology than the former. Successfully exaggerating the impact of AGW increases their power and influence and helps shape society into their desired form. I frankly think that in the developed world this group is considerably more powerful than Big Oil or the coal mining firms.
This is virtually the definition of paranoiac, so thanks for giving voice to it. It's not always easy to convince people that this is actually the thinking process of deniers.
Scientists have an agenda,. They're acting in concert to falsify their data and using that data to falsify their papers. They want power of the most comprehensive sort- to shape all of society and the world to their desired form. They're more powerful even than Big Oil and their plot to shape society to their desired form has been uncovered by the reader, who sagely sees through their studies and mathematics and presents for the reader's approval his own theory of climate.
Shoot yourself and save the rest of the world the trouble of having to do it.
Finally to go from this to making predictions about the Earth's future climate? This is where I go with a wait-and-see strategy. The supposed consequences just aren't that bad or that urgent. With a few more decades of solid satellite data, we'll be able to see more clearly what the real problems of climatology are.
Who cares what you think about satellites or time frames or anything else. You're not a climatologist the same way you're not a brain surgeon and on both topics your opinion is worthless.
What you're saying would make sense if bodily temperature regulation wasn't a hard wired feature of animals. People who are saying it's not hotter are 1) factually wrong and 2) overcoming their own body's internal signaling system that tells them "hey, it's freaking hot".
I think in other areas of scientific investigation this phenomena goes by the name "motivated cognition" and in political spheres it's known as "fanaticism".
One thing that could have been broken out is "how much time do you spend outdoors?". If you're going from your air conditioned garage to your air conditioned car to your air conditioned work place , then did you ever really know how hot it was in the first place and are you experiencing it now except for brief moments?
But that's giving them entirely too much credit. Everyone opens the door to put the dog out or get the mail and when you do it's like sticking your head in an oven It's hard to blink away that fact and moreover, you know you've never felt anything like it before.
If you read history, you'll seed that the impulse towards oppositional defiance to authority knows no limit, and will take a population straight into death itself without any of them really blinking, and even irrespective of what kind of death that is too.
Christians were well known to be only too glad to burn at the stake by the Romans and when the Romans tried to up the ante by making their children watch their parents being burned, the children cheered them on.
We are not going to convince deniers and neither is the weather or any weather related event or any assemblage of scientists or any predictions coming true or anything else. It's what Anthony Watts said when asked what evidence could possibly make him change his mind about global warming. His answer? Those who called him a denier would have to apologize first......
It's not about evidence, it's ego and a refusal to admit you're wrong which is only made stronger by the gravity of what it was you were wrong about. It's about political identification and the assumption of an oppositional- defiant mentality with respect to the legitimate, earned authority of scientists:
It's about a paranoid personality type that dates back to the 50s and the John Birchers and their fears that fluoride in the drinking water was a government plot to emasculate men :
It's about narcissistic personality disorder , which permits deniers to believe that their home-spun theories of climate and the rebuttals to scientific theories they can't even grasp should be given equal footing to the theories of legitimate scientists, because one of the traits of NPD is the belief that you're entitled to speak as an authority without first having earned that right by doing the required work.
This is just another name for terrorism. What are terrorists but a set of fanatics with an anti-scientific view of the world determined to inflict their erroneous view of reality on the rest of us irrespective of the consequences to the larger society or how many innocent people have to die. That's what the Nazis were, that's what al Queda is and that's what deniers are. We need to face the fact that none of those sets of people could or can be negotiated or reasoned with. Once you willfully place yourself outside the bounds of evidentiary based reasoning, the only thing left saving you from open warfare from the reality-based community is - "how much damage do you intend to do?". In the case of the above three, the answer is the same- total and permanent damage to everyone and everything.
It is when you ignore all the reasons to hold some reservation, when you put a company on a pedestal and then ignore or excuse past and current transgressions, and generally kiss their ass like an uncritical sycophant.
Slashdot Mirror
Well why just wonder what they'd say when you can ask them directly? Just ask a conservatard if they like the idea of a local government supplying their population with municipal WIFI or broadband and see what reaction you get. Or just ask Mr Google what the conservatards thought of your little socialist plot.
Yeah too bad I wasn't "pathologically attacking my opponent's psychology", as anyone who read my post is fully aware . Actually, I presented quite a few detailed cogent arguments why the basis of libertarianism is fundamentally flawed and anti-social. Funny that you just *missed* all that huge part of the post. Oh that's right, you didn't miss it, you just lied about what I had written because you have to say SOMETHING and lying is what libertarians do as normally as they breathe. Oh well, I suppose to you it seems like I must something "unfair" about my post attack since any attack that is effective must be, by your feelings about it, unfair, and anyone who criticizes libertarians effectively must, of course be a psychopath , unless, of course, you look up the definition of psychopath in which case you'll discover that in fact, the meaning of the word has nothing to do with protecting innocent people from say, the ravages of libertarian/ conservative induced global warming but rather is more or less describing what crawls out of the said same people's mouths on a daily basis and is enshrined in their "philosophical" writings ("The Virtue Of Selfishness" ..."Collectivism Taxes and Redistributionism is Bad" "Trickle down economics" etc etc etc) as fundamental principles.
See, protecting and fighting against the real, immediate and devastating impact a sociopath's actions have on innocent people is not a form of being a sociopath. The American government sending people to fight in the Civil War was not an act of "Northern Aggression" as libertarian / state's rights assholes framed it back then . People advocating for killing Hitler's were not plotting a murder. This is all called "moral calculus" and it is, in fact just exactly what libertarians are least capable of by their very nature.
The reason people despise libertarians so much is just because the "policies " they agitate for, if you can call the advancement of lawlessness a "policy", are completely despicable and in the case of global warming lead directly to the genocide against the world's poorest peoples who are least able to protect themselves. , a kind of econo-cide. As Ayn Rand would tell you, a trifling thing like the mass murder of "lesser men" is sure to just piss off the non-John-Galt cretins off every time and they'll start in with their collectivism and their laws to get ya, or as Ayn Rand said in We The Living
What are your masses...but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?
Indeed.
"The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people." -- Abraham Lincoln
and one of the big factors (maybe not the only one) is government regulations.
Yeah you said that because you've studied the financing behind Latvian broadband and know all about the effect of government regulation on broadband in this nation and have published a comparative study on the two which link you just forgot to publish
Oh wait, you just ejaculated the "government's the problem" meme all over slashdot readers because that's what you reflexively do in every situation and besides, it's always true, so no facts are needed before you assert it as true?
Oh. I see.
Yeah well if we could do that then we'd have single payer health care too like other civilized societies.
What I am saying is to conservatives what yo're describing is Socialism which is like Communism (in their minds) except it's still alive.
Conservatives have a shit fit if you try to have muni broadband , because that's government... Big government.
http://yalelawandpolicy.org/29/the-looming-cable-monopoly
Once the cable digital migration is accomplished, the cable companiesâ(TM) big pipes will be filled with virtual, highly-compressed digital âoechannels.â Three of those, or so, may be devoted to Internet access.
The real growth area for cable is âoebroadband,â but very little of âoebroadbandâ will be recognizable as Internet access.
The rest of the transmissions filling the pipe will use the Internet Protocol but will be thoroughly managed, monetized, prioritized, filtered, packaged, and non-executableâ"much like traditional cable television today.
When a monopoly cable provider can allocate just two or three of its hundreds of virtual âoechannelsâ to Internet connectivity, and when only that provider can sell you video-strength speeds, net neutrality becomes a subsidiary issueâ"a tiny white bird landing on the back of an enormous hippo. Net neutrality matters, but it is a sideshow. As one content executive told me, âoeComcast owns the Internet.â
II. What Happens Next
We are about to confront a well-coordinated cabal of local monopoly cable providers. When it comes to affordability, ubiquity, and nondiscrimination, we could decide to take a lesson from a host of other developed nationsâ"particularly Australia.
As a report from the Berkman Center made clear earlier this year, policies requiring line-sharing at regulated rates have played a central role in the spread of low-priced, nondiscriminatory, very-high-speed access in many other nations.[20]
Australia has recently cleared an important final hurdle towards rolling out a publicly-funded fiber network that will be open to all ISPs: By having its Senate pass a bill that will decommission old copper-wire (and hybrid coaxial fiber) infrastructure and separate its monopoly provider into wholesale and retail operations, Australia has ensured the construction of a new National Broadband Network that will connect 93% of Australian homes and business at speeds of 100 megabits per second.[21]
Another lesson: Leadership played a central role in this major Australian initiative. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has been leading the reform effort since 2005, and said recently that ââ[n]o other sector has been held hostage by a market structure that has been such an impediment to genuine competition and innovation
In a perfectly free market we'd have what we have when the oil and gas companies obtain natural resource rights from individual land owners. They end up owning everything and shut out everyone else for all time, and anyone who does not sell at the going rate gets boxed in by those who do. If you saw the only mildly fictional There Will Be Blood, you know what the oil barons did to people who wouldn't 'sell- they ran a pipeline laterally underground into their land and sucked out the oil anyways.
If you've seen Gasland you know what they do to people who DO sell. It's not pretty.
Look, humans have an practically unlimited capacity to think up schemes and present them in ways so as to lure relatively naive people into deals that ultimately harm them, harm the environment and everyone who depends on it and are bad for a competitive market. Highly trained analysts possess asymmetrical knowledge of a huge number of variables present in any deal. To understand whether you should take the deal in a completely unregulated market where sellers are not constrained by any laws whatsoever, would effectively become a question it would take years of schooling to really analyze and something Joe Homeowner just doesn't have the capacity, resources or time to do.
The whole libertarian argument is aimed at preventing the government from accumulating and using knowledge about the world, to benefit taxpayers in the form of laws which limit the badness any determined aggregation of exploitative and well funded people can do to innocents.
It's so obviously a wet dream for sociopaths it's hard to see why people don't simply reject it out of hand the way I did as soon as I understood what it was they were saying. In fact, it's so hard to understand why libertarianism isn't laughed out of existence that the best reason I can think of is what I said- it's the political wing of people with sociopathic personality disorder.
They find it, understand in their bones what it's really all about and and immediately become determined enthusiasts, being careful to frame their argments in terms of "freedom" and "freedom from government" as though our government wasn't a thing for by and of the people, which it is.
It's just a fact about the relative complexity of the world, the relative capacity and resources of Joe Regular Citizen and the resources and capacity of what amounts to well funded nation-states , which is what corporations are now, that there's no contest between these two entities and corporations don't even need to use so called "force" to fuck everyone over.
Look at the personalities involved with libertarianism and it's near cousin objectivism. Ayn Rand was a virtual walking checklist of sociopathic . psychopathic personality disorder, as is her "philosophy".
In our own time , consider the person of Rand Paul. When faced with having to obtain continued certification for his eye doctor practice, he balked and instead invented his own ""certification" and then bestowed his that invented , fake certification on himself.
This is just the actions of a dirtbag scammer, the kind of person who shows up at your house and takes money to "fix your roof" then is never seen again. It's exactly the same level of anti-social behaviour towards the rest of society.
Presumably Dr Paul's patients think he's certified and that certification means something other than Dr Paul thinks he's above society's rules.
I think I was referring to the follow on geopolitical and ultimately economic costs we'd endure. Nukes are effectively unusable for those reasons, not to mention the unacceptably high loss of truly innocent life.
Nukes are big,. We need to go small. Very small. We need to make little flying insects that are released over here and find their quarry through DNA analysis and kill only them. Perfect.
I can sense when I'm talking to a libertarian , which is the political arm of the sociopathic personality type. Really, I'm not that interested in your "proofs" that everything is because of government interference. It's just in your genes to think the way you think, to exploit other people are greedily as you can, to hate any kind of communitarian impulse and to elevate your personal selfish greed into a an uber First Principle. It's how you were born, and the reasons and narratives you give are just your brian seeking out, repeating and generating just so sotries about how things could be if onoly you had no rules upon you. Libertarians attempt to associate their genetically mediated greed with everything from The Constitution (Taxes are theft!!!) to Jesus Christ (The prosperity gospel - Jesus wants you to be rich!!! ). They're materially and as a matter of course indifferent to the plight of other people around them excepting of course the vacuous and self serving rationalizations, usually presented as hypothetical scenarios about how government causes all bad things, which always end in how we'd all be better off if government just withdrew from our lives.
They think about everything in mercantile terms and do not care on whit about other people or the larger society they're a part of .
I understand. It's what your brain is screaming at you 24 / 7. I empathize, I really do. One day soon we'll have a cure for libertarianism, we'll fidn the gene that makes the part of your brain that's concerned with people other than yourself and your personal wants so dysfucntional and we'll make it work properly so you feel empathy and compassion and a sense of responsibility to others. One day soon, we''ll make sure no one is born with this defect. Until then, I fell sorry for ya buddy, I really do. Perhaps this would be a good time to go read The Fountainhead again.
Cat and Mouse 2.0. Nothing new here.
It's so obviously collusion. In my neck of the woods, no two cable companies compete. You can get one if you live HERE and the other if you live THERE. This is not capitalism and they should be forced through legislation to compete.
It's called "regulation" .. aka law and order for corporations. Sure, criminals don't like law and order.. so what's new in that? They'd much rather be left alone to play freely in a green field of their id's desires.
From financial deregulation, deregulation in other industries and a general lack of oversight and enforcement we have gotten the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl , the S&L melt down, the Long Term Capital Management melt down, the 2008 crash and global warming. The cumulative bill to the rest of us so some tiny minority can profit obscenely runs into the trillions, a bill the rest of us have to pay.. This is also known as a Grover Norquist Tax, the tax the rest of us pay for deregulatory policies and the destruction they cause. .
Well, I've been taxed enough. I'm sick of paying the bill for dereguation and I WANT MY MONEY BACK from the small set of libertarian and conservative personalities and lawmakers that took it away and gave it to the coke snorting class.
Sure we can kill them all if we want - with a nuke- but at what price? Drones are a cost benefit sweet spot.
BTW and FYI Pakistan is all about the drone program since the people they're killing also want to overthrow the Pakistani govt. They cry foul when they have to be seen crying foul and otherwise help us locate the bad guys.
I think we won in Iraq, last I asaw Saddam was hanging by a rope to the sounds of his countrymen jeering at him and his sons were piles of bullet ridden flesh being photographed for their contemporary's benefit.
Iraq is not the 51st state and neither is Afghanistan the 52nd . But something at some time had to change things up ion a really basic way in that neck of the woods. IT's not a popular insight but the Arab Spring which started in Tunisia had everything to do with the Tunisian population knowing that their near neighbors voted in an election. Sorry, but you've got to admit that that gets people to thinking "why not us? Why do I have to live like this ? ".
I am not the one to decide if it was "worth it". To the people who fought over there, I would say to them it was. I would say they changed the dynamics in that part of the world in a very positive way that effects hundreds of millions of people and the full extent of that change will p[lay out and be felt for centuries. I'm no lover of W or any of that (please read my other posts fro proof) , but reality is what reality is and you have to first and above all else call them as they really are. The Arab Spring owes a lot, perhaps everything, to the forced injection of democracy and change into the ME by the US-led coalition. It's exactly what the neo-cons were talking about when they said it would have a domino effect. For conspiracy theorists, let me ask you- do you really think the CIA had nothing to do with the recent bombing in Damascus or more broadly the Arab Uprising?
There was a disease in the world that was spreading an infection to the rest of us. That diseases name was "Middle Eastern dictatorship" and one of that disease's symptoms was 9-11. We decide to go full on and take out that disease rather than be put on an endless road of trying to combat its symptoms.
If the Taliban topple Pakistan you can pretty well say hello to about 1,000,000 times more of what you don't like about war, civilian deaths and the national security state. By that measure, drones that blow up cars carrying terrorists is going to look like a a very very good deal indeed.
Drones ARE electronically spying on their targets and also launching missiles .
You meet all kinds of people in online forums you would avoid or who would otherwise be excluded from your world through a variety of processes that act as effective gate-keepers. You're one of those people.
At some point in your life, you should hear someone tell you exactly what's wrong with you. So here it is. You've bought into crank ideas, bordering on the paranoid. Basically, you have poor reality testing, and instead of critical thinking, you look for conspiracies because they're just more exciting to a certain part of your brain than the messiness that reality is ,. There's always a huge component of narcissism involved in paranoiac fantasies because it implies someone (other than yourself) is constantly thinking about you and planning fro you, albeit in a completely negative way. I have no idea where this kind of thinking comes from, perhaps from a childhood in which absolutely no one paid any attention to you. or lots of the wrong kind of attention to you.
There. Someone told you so now you can't say that you never knew, and that's why you never changed and wasted your life's energy on paranoid delusions .
HTH, no, really, HTH.
You're one for the John Birchers, or some left wing equivalent, a 9-11 truther or a Obama birth certificate lunatic.
Thaaaaat's right MKULTRA happened- 40 years ago when the CIA was run by people who were born in the 20s, nearly 100 years ago now. For THOSE people, the Civil War and slavery were closer to them than MKULTRA is to you.
Who doubts that sudden death from the sky "disrupts" terrorists and demoralizes them along with confounding their operations? Come on. Drones are as close to targeting specific, otherwise unreachable bad guys as we're able to get for now and as such they are a innocence-sparing, humane form of warfare. Anyone who seriously has an issue with the drone program needs to think through what alternatives there are to stopping very bad people very far away from doing very bad things.
There goes thin client user interfaces and thank god for that, quite frankly. And in related news, the cost of writing thin clients just went up 70%.....
What they're saying is what everyone else is saying which is Apple's patents are trivial , mere minor, lateral adjustments to well established ,defacto standards of user interface techniques etc. , and in this they're exactly right.
A message which just goes to show that it's all about political affiliation and nothing about science.
Think about what a defective disgusting human being you are. You demand that the world take your fucking folk theories of science seriously while you deride , debase, pursue, accuse and slander actual hardworking, men and women who have done the real, hard work required to have an opinion worth listening to. People who have lived their lives with zero expectation of fame or power or even big money, but rather have courageously pursued the truth wherever it leads them , however unhappy that place may be.. You accuse them of lying, of power seeking of having ambitions to control the world and why? Because you don't like the message they're bringing you. Shoot the messenger much? You're the fucking lowest dirtiest kind of human on this planet, no different than the Nazis who chased the Jewish scientists out of their Third Reich. You're a low life nothing attempting to raise himself up into a position of authority over subjects you have zero knowledge of in order to achieve your preferred political ends and suppress inconvenient truths.
How's it feel to play the role of the most despicable character in every history from Roman times onwards? How's it feel to be a completely worthless, unaccomplished ignorant human being , noisily proclaiming your superiority over people whose authority they actually earned ?
The whole deregulation, Grover Norquist cocaine-driven me-generation Rush Limbaugh narcissistic draft dodging panty waist airy fairy FoxNews post-Modern fucking conservative movement is in a slow motion suicide mission that they're clearly going to succeed at. Thanks for killing yourselves to history for all time, thanks for making sure that "conservatism" is exposed as the disease it is.
You' and your kind will be dealt with as ruthlessly and we dealt with al Queda, that "other" threat to the United States of America with no holds barred whatsofuckingever.
We're going to survive as a species because in the end, we'll act to crush the death cult that is libertarianism / conservative Christianity into the fucking ground with great prejudice and whatever the fuck we decide justice, that's pronounced "just us" , is going to look like.
Denier = terrorist.
Successfully exaggerating the impact of AGW increases their power and influence and helps shape society into their desired form. I frankly think that in the developed world this group is considerably more powerful than Big Oil
at on Friday July 20, @10:42PM khallow said:
I don't recall saying scientists had this power. I do recall saying politicians had this power and they sure have agendas.
Liar? Or shortest memory in the world? We report, you decide.
There is no money in free except to sell it to advertisers who are effectively gamblers.
There' is money in low-cost if you keep your overhead low enough however. The established educational players have fought this for years b.c their overhead is non-negotiable and built into their business model. I know, I tried pre -year 2000 to get a university to offer its courses online and paid the price for my foolishness. They'll resist this to the death not because it's undoable or a bad idea, but because it's the end of everything they have.
The way all this is going to shake down is as follows: new players will create the courses and other new players will assemble an accreditation system that involves people's identities and establishing the veracity of their academic achievement. The universities seeing the writing on the wall will be late and very reluctant players to the game, offering up shit like a "Harvard Online Degree" say, representing some sort of lesser degree than the "real thing" .. that sort of crap. Anything else forces them to cannibalize their base offering, which they can't do.
In the end , really good people will come out of the independent virtual university system and that will be when it all comes tumbling down for the universities. University ratings are effectively a battle for bright minds, since universities don't actually know how to create smart people, but rather succeed by culling smart people from the general population, then claiming them as their own, as their alumni.
When that's gone, when that starts to crack, they're fucked.
Tuition is a bubble, as is student loan debt. It's a price divorced from any kind of underlying reality of the buyer's ability to pay or even benefit bestowed . New entrants in education will mercilessly leverage the holy fuck out of this basic economic fact while the established universities sit on the sidelines diddling their clits and blaming all their woes on tenure. .
Low cost , virtually free education combined with independent proof of student identity and achievement combined with the inability of universities to move in the same direction and remain solvent will, in the end, force universities to turn to the Feds for their continued existence. Their argument will be "our labs, our basic research is something our nation can't be without" , and they'll be right.
At that point a new deal will be struck- free universal education in exchange for higher taxes and continued existence of universities. That will lead to more culture war since conservatives see universities as the Great Satan of Liberalism and are sure as shit not going to pay taxes to keep them going.
Finally, just at this time, this issue will crash head on with global warming as the reality of what the universities foretold becomes indisputable
At this time, the country will have a choice to make- we can do what every other nation does and publicly fund the universities and their essential work or we can lose that function entirely. Either we consciously and publicly acknowledge that
1) supporting science and teaching reality based thinking is a basic necessity like food clothing and shelter and lifelong education a basic right and in fact duty of citizens and
2) continued technological and social progress are the primary and proper functions of society
or we cease to be able to pretend that we're world leaders, opting to devolve into a religio-based backwater , a fundamentalist Conservistan whose bright people have left or are leaving and whose best days are long behind it.
Science will inevitably be proved to have spoken the prophetic truth about what people will realize is the greatest threat to human civilization ever, global warming and the regressive, reality denying conservative movement will wither away faster than a river birch in a drought.
America will finally be of a mind to once and for all reject the dark s
It's not whether I think your opinion is worthless, it's so that everyone reading your opinion gets reminded what a worthless thing it is.
The other major party is statists oriented to some degree with the environmental movement. It's worth remembering that the latter group has far more control and funding over climatology than the former. Successfully exaggerating the impact of AGW increases their power and influence and helps shape society into their desired form. I frankly think that in the developed world this group is considerably more powerful than Big Oil or the coal mining firms.
This is virtually the definition of paranoiac, so thanks for giving voice to it. It's not always easy to convince people that this is actually the thinking process of deniers.
Scientists have an agenda,. They're acting in concert to falsify their data and using that data to falsify their papers. They want power of the most comprehensive sort- to shape all of society and the world to their desired form. They're more powerful even than Big Oil and their plot to shape society to their desired form has been uncovered by the reader, who sagely sees through their studies and mathematics and presents for the reader's approval his own theory of climate.
Shoot yourself and save the rest of the world the trouble of having to do it.
Finally to go from this to making predictions about the Earth's future climate? This is where I go with a wait-and-see strategy. The supposed consequences just aren't that bad or that urgent. With a few more decades of solid satellite data, we'll be able to see more clearly what the real problems of climatology are.
Who cares what you think about satellites or time frames or anything else. You're not a climatologist the same way you're not a brain surgeon and on both topics your opinion is worthless.
What you're saying would make sense if bodily temperature regulation wasn't a hard wired feature of animals. People who are saying it's not hotter are 1) factually wrong and 2) overcoming their own body's internal signaling system that tells them "hey, it's freaking hot".
I think in other areas of scientific investigation this phenomena goes by the name "motivated cognition" and in political spheres it's known as "fanaticism".
One thing that could have been broken out is "how much time do you spend outdoors?". If you're going from your air conditioned garage to your air conditioned car to your air conditioned work place , then did you ever really know how hot it was in the first place and are you experiencing it now except for brief moments?
But that's giving them entirely too much credit. Everyone opens the door to put the dog out or get the mail and when you do it's like sticking your head in an oven It's hard to blink away that fact and moreover, you know you've never felt anything like it before.
If you read history, you'll seed that the impulse towards oppositional defiance to authority knows no limit, and will take a population straight into death itself without any of them really blinking, and even irrespective of what kind of death that is too.
Christians were well known to be only too glad to burn at the stake by the Romans and when the Romans tried to up the ante by making their children watch their parents being burned, the children cheered them on.
We are not going to convince deniers and neither is the weather or any weather related event or any assemblage of scientists or any predictions coming true or anything else. It's what Anthony Watts said when asked what evidence could possibly make him change his mind about global warming. His answer? Those who called him a denier would have to apologize first......
It's not about evidence, it's ego and a refusal to admit you're wrong which is only made stronger by the gravity of what it was you were wrong about. It's about political identification and the assumption of an oppositional- defiant mentality with respect to the legitimate, earned authority of scientists:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002504/,
It's about a paranoid personality type that dates back to the 50s and the John Birchers and their fears that fluoride in the drinking water was a government plot to emasculate men :
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/rachel-maddow-exposes-john-birch-society-c
It's about narcissistic personality disorder , which permits deniers to believe that their home-spun theories of climate and the rebuttals to scientific theories they can't even grasp should be given equal footing to the theories of legitimate scientists, because one of the traits of NPD is the belief that you're entitled to speak as an authority without first having earned that right by doing the required work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
This is just another name for terrorism. What are terrorists but a set of fanatics with an anti-scientific view of the world determined to inflict their erroneous view of reality on the rest of us irrespective of the consequences to the larger society or how many innocent people have to die. That's what the Nazis were, that's what al Queda is and that's what deniers are. We need to face the fact that none of those sets of people could or can be negotiated or reasoned with. Once you willfully place yourself outside the bounds of evidentiary based reasoning, the only thing left saving you from open warfare from the reality-based community is - "how much damage do you intend to do?". In the case of the above three, the answer is the same- total and permanent damage to everyone and everything.
We h
It is when you ignore all the reasons to hold some reservation, when you put a company on a pedestal and then ignore or excuse past and current transgressions, and generally kiss their ass like an uncritical sycophant.
Wow. Glad I don't do that.