What you can see from a lot of the posts, or at least the ones not modded down by libertarian nutjobs is the believe that it is the criminal against the system and our only concern should be for the criminal, not the system.
People who equate the accused with "criminals" are the nutjobs. Just sayin...
Reinstating Prohibition (War On Drugs) and then shoving 1/5 of the adult population through the penal system (with 1 percent of the adult population locked away at a time), not to mention tacitly and expressly encouraging for-profit incarceration and a culture of rape. No society past or present has come close to these trends in the American penal system.
"Fair and balanced" is the new fig leaf of scoundrels and you have been fooled by a veneer of professionalism masking a vast and persistent thirst for punishment.
I've often said that outside of Europe the Geneva Convention need not apply, because it doesn't. The cultures are much difference.[sic]
Let's take a look at some of the assumptions behind that position:
1. Non-Western nations' assent to world wide standards of conduct do not matter.
2. Non-Western cultures do not matter, as they certainly won't be judged/treated by their own standards, either. Therefore no standards whatsoever apply to them (or perhaps only selectively and at times that are advantageous to us).
3. Neither the Geneva Convention nor other aspects of international law have had an impact on Japanese or other cultures.
In effect, what your position does is to place most people from non-Western cultures into a kind of dehumanized "Eternal Jew" category -- too alien to acknowledge any common ground or hope for mutual respect.
with his anti-"soft on crime" doctrine and the War On Drugs (Prohibition reborn). The latter turned inner cities into war zones while largely turning a blind eye to drugs in the suburbs.
We already know how that turns out: Hoarded funds in the hands of a few, breadlines and starvation for many.
The problem with regulation and subsidy is that it obfuscates the costs of delivery
No. We just tried the Chicago School, trickle-down way and it didn't work. Its a return to Gilded Age economics which is empire driven, highly exploitative and leads to profound market crash when the wealthy overreact to conditions they're poorly equipped to understand. Its a path to a tiny and ignored middle class. Unregulated markets gloss over all hard data (like the effects of externalizing costs to the underclass, the biosphere, etc.) that aren't measured with currency, obfuscating existential crises and opportunities.
The only way forward is to foster a business and political culture with a sense of fairness and which answers the question of which classes benefit/lose whenever there is an opportunity to regulate/subsidize/deregulate. With our mass media dominated by a handful of multinational for-profit conglomerates, we are getting ever-increasing amounts of distraction and avoidance of these questions and so little opportunity to (constructively) get on the same page at the same time on most issues.
Government regulation of an industry increases the cost of entry for new competition.
Except when the cost of entry goes down to zero because no one dares to compete with UNregulated monopolies and cartels.
BTW, if you have a recipe for getting corporate influence out of government without regulation (in a sense restricting the corporations' FREEEEEDOM), please do the world a favor and let us know. Otherwise, most of us are beyond tired of hearing simplistic aphorisms from the planet Rand.
Bitcoin transactions are very traceable and there is no indirection or anonymization built into the software. The GP doesn't know what he is talking about.
RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older
You have a point, but I wouldn't lay (all or most of) the blame for militancy at RMS' feet. Its the commercial interests that have escalated the conflict. And not "only just"... they are doing it in spades.
You can say that GPL adoption is "going down the shitter" or can say equally that its emerging from a fad that led to a lot of abuse.
Life simply isn't black and white and when even Torvalds won't use GPL V3 because its too restrictive...
blah blah blah
Got your breath back yet? Torvalds is an example of why you are overreacting. The Linux kernel is still doing fine with GPL V2 and there is no harm by adding V3. In a black and white world, there would only be proprietary and BSD-like licenses.
By asserting that profit margins are thin (so the incentive to take risks is lower), that media companies are messy businesses (apparently, he believes organized media output is a myth), and that the corporations listed are so large that controlling all departments is a tall order, he doesn't seem to think the consolidation is anything to worry about.
These are arguments one could use to justify the business models of Soviet Russia. His thinking on this is really backwards, and I'd also like to point out that his topic of 'conspiracy' is a strawman since that was not in the original infographic.
I'm already using the Perspectives extension (and not sure what benefit I'm getting from that)... Why should I switch from Perspectives to Convergence?
so I have doubts about well your point applies to this situation. If it does apply, that may simply point out that Discovery Channel doesn't live up to its name on important subjects, and that they are a bad partner for science shows.
One important question is, with Discovery Channel being part of a large corporation, are they a member of the Chamber of Commerce and what do they think about the Chamber's behavior and position on the subject of AGW?
Have you been living under a rock? Or are you seeking a reputation as an astroturfer?
Corruption by moneyed interests is a recurring theme here on Slashdot and many other sites, and much of that posting references hard news. Then again Slashdot is hardly the epicenter of concern for corruption on the web. So I suggest you try your strangely abstract (to put it kindly) arguments on a site like propublica.org or groklaw.net instead (and see how long your arguments last).
Thank you for demonstrating my point so nicely. Whenever I ask this same question (and I have done so many times), I inevitably get this kind of response*, pointing out that it's obvious, that it's widely believed by many people. Note that this does not even address the question!
It addresses your question by pointing out how inane it is. Apart from the sites I kindly provided to you (which further addresses your question-in-a-vacuum) you could simply click on the 'corruption' tag here on Slashdot.
You're not interested in information. Your delicately-worded inquiry amounts to argument in bad faith.
They are acting like its because of everyday scheduling concerns, but notice that ALL of the networks which chose to remove an episode singled out THAT particular one. BBC refuses to name the other countries that won't be seeing the AGW episode, but we know that Discovery Channel (e.g. the USA) won't be broadcasting it... surely it would upset advertisers (e.g. US Chamber of Commerce, who have become active denialists) to show that episode.
This and the emails are part of an effort to keep AGW from becoming a major election issue at a time when it is tangibly starting to hurt Americans.
Let me answer your questions with some questions of my own...
Everyone knows that the government is simply eating out of Big Corporation's wallet, right? How do they know this?
Have you been living under a rock? Or are you seeking a reputation as an astroturfer?
Corruption by moneyed interests is a recurring theme here on Slashdot and many other sites, and much of that posting references hard news. Then again Slashdot is hardly the epicenter of concern for corruption on the web. So I suggest you try your strangely abstract (to put it kindly) arguments on a site like propublica.org or groklaw.net instead (and see how long your arguments last).
Thank you for lending your professional anti-anti-corruption input on this matter. It has reminded me that the atmosphere needs more CO2 to promote life and that second hand smoke is a figment of the imagination.
they have decided to embrace a particular business model: not doing it for free.
You are soft-pedaling a profit motive that prefers to monopolize markets. We have seen for-profit publishers associations attack people who create and use public domain, GPL and creative commons works - even attacking the very idea of the public domain in legislation and insisting that the tech sector is “mobilizing to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’”.
Bodies like MPAA, RIAA, Sound Exchange, ASCAP, GEMA have taken an increasingly hostile stance toward any author who is not under contract with established publishing corps even when the content is being offered for free. People who publish under CC and public domain are being DOS'ed with undeserved DMCA and 'three strikes' notices.
It is your mamby-pamby presentation of for-profit publishing that is idiotic.
They control the terms of debate, who can frame issues, who will be made to look heroic or heinous.
The "fourth estate" are now attached at the hip with the rest of the odious, money hoarding, war-mongering establishment. Their interests lie is making the wealthiest Wall St. investors ("risk takers") feel safe and secure and that means conning the general public out of our power and wealth and redirecting it all to aforementioned corporate plutocrats.
I wanted to play a list of finely normalized (volume-adjusted) tracks using both replaygain and crossfading.
Banshee and RB were very buggy with crashing, jumping to odd tracks w/o shuffle turned on, even playing multiple tracks at the same time. I consider them unusable for anything.
And then Amarok, my old regular from the KDE 3 days, had been lobotomized to the point of being unable to handle normalization. But I had switched to Gnome and didn't want to use 150+ MB extra ram to play some audio tracks anyway.
I had to resort to a very obscure program called Aqualung and forget replaygain data, using AL's special gain calibration system instead.
In iTunes, the exercise is extremely simple and reliable. The only player that comes close to matching it in features and reliability is Amarok 1.x, but the FOSS community decided to replace it with something "clean" and easy for new project members to figure out. Bad tradeoff.
With all the license fees MS are collecting for Android, MS was able to do directly what they were unable to do via SCO. This is about the SCO henchmen getting their cut after MS finally found an M.O. that worked.
+1 Insightful. While they're at it, make the filesystem case-insensitive. I have personally seen users having to migrate (away from Linux systems I set up for them) back to Windows or OS X because of that one issue.
I agree that Miguel was a negative factor, but the reasons for the desktop failure go much deeper than what you describe. Free systems do not have to be anywhere near wart-free to be successful (see Android). It was the old school hacker/distro culture that killed it.
Have a look over at the Linux Foundation where you will find a Mobile Linux SDK, but no SDK for the desktop because the politics made the latter impossible. Android also has an SDK (and I suspect its the reason why the Linux Foundation did one too, though I might be wrong on that) which more importantly defines a lot of high-level behavior.
Finally, what Android has over "Desktop Linux" are 1) vendors dedicated to mating the OS with actual consumer hardware (the OS and hardware are to some degree designed for each other); and 2) easily packaged apps; and 3) a genuine consumer-oriented identity that doesn't sell itself as "another Linux" (which is meaningless because "Linux" cannot be recognized as anything by an average consumer). Notice that Android does not use "Linux" in its public identity.
The above factors taken together mean that "Desktop Linux" feels hostile to most users and (crucially) to app developers. It mainly attracts systems-level tinkerers who, understandably, are hostile to the wearying practice of feature-locking (standardizing) the UI and programming interface. In polite company the culture tends to act in a color-blind way to the different types of programmers; behind the scenes it treats app developers as somehow second-rate or "less 1337" than the system tinkerers.
In order to rescue the current "Desktop Linux" movement, you would need at least: 1) an SDK that defines and versions the core OS functions from bottom to top (GUI); 2) including a standard package manager; 3) a comprehensive hardware database that the coders contribute to, but has a user-friendly way to search for compatible hardware. These three things could take the excessive guesswork out of writing/distributing software, using software, performing tech support, and buying hardware.
See this howto at Wendy Carlos' blog. She recovered the original Tron soundtrack this way.
Magnetic media like tapes and floppies use a binder (glue) that becomes corrupted with moisture over time, allowing the metal-oxide particles to flake off. Dehydrating the media can reverse the condition if you haven't already tried to access it.
Slashdot Mirror
What you can see from a lot of the posts, or at least the ones not modded down by libertarian nutjobs is the believe that it is the criminal against the system and our only concern should be for the criminal, not the system.
People who equate the accused with "criminals" are the nutjobs. Just sayin...
...just how balanced and fair our system is.
Reinstating Prohibition (War On Drugs) and then shoving 1/5 of the adult population through the penal system (with 1 percent of the adult population locked away at a time), not to mention tacitly and expressly encouraging for-profit incarceration and a culture of rape. No society past or present has come close to these trends in the American penal system.
"Fair and balanced" is the new fig leaf of scoundrels and you have been fooled by a veneer of professionalism masking a vast and persistent thirst for punishment.
I've often said that outside of Europe the Geneva Convention need not apply, because it doesn't. The cultures are much difference.[sic]
Let's take a look at some of the assumptions behind that position:
1. Non-Western nations' assent to world wide standards of conduct do not matter.
2. Non-Western cultures do not matter, as they certainly won't be judged/treated by their own standards, either. Therefore no standards whatsoever apply to them (or perhaps only selectively and at times that are advantageous to us).
3. Neither the Geneva Convention nor other aspects of international law have had an impact on Japanese or other cultures.
In effect, what your position does is to place most people from non-Western cultures into a kind of dehumanized "Eternal Jew" category -- too alien to acknowledge any common ground or hope for mutual respect.
with his anti-"soft on crime" doctrine and the War On Drugs (Prohibition reborn). The latter turned inner cities into war zones while largely turning a blind eye to drugs in the suburbs.
9/11 just accelerated the thirst for punishment.
We already know how that turns out: Hoarded funds in the hands of a few, breadlines and starvation for many.
The problem with regulation and subsidy is that it obfuscates the costs of delivery
No. We just tried the Chicago School, trickle-down way and it didn't work. Its a return to Gilded Age economics which is empire driven, highly exploitative and leads to profound market crash when the wealthy overreact to conditions they're poorly equipped to understand. Its a path to a tiny and ignored middle class. Unregulated markets gloss over all hard data (like the effects of externalizing costs to the underclass, the biosphere, etc.) that aren't measured with currency, obfuscating existential crises and opportunities.
The only way forward is to foster a business and political culture with a sense of fairness and which answers the question of which classes benefit/lose whenever there is an opportunity to regulate/subsidize/deregulate. With our mass media dominated by a handful of multinational for-profit conglomerates, we are getting ever-increasing amounts of distraction and avoidance of these questions and so little opportunity to (constructively) get on the same page at the same time on most issues.
Government regulation of an industry increases the cost of entry for new competition.
Except when the cost of entry goes down to zero because no one dares to compete with UNregulated monopolies and cartels.
BTW, if you have a recipe for getting corporate influence out of government without regulation (in a sense restricting the corporations' FREEEEEDOM), please do the world a favor and let us know. Otherwise, most of us are beyond tired of hearing simplistic aphorisms from the planet Rand.
Bitcoin transactions are very traceable and there is no indirection or anonymization built into the software. The GP doesn't know what he is talking about.
http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/
http://www.4tnetworks.com/
http://www.dailyrazor.com/
http://www.eapps.com/
http://www.eatj.com/index.jsp (FREE!)
That's wrong because the GPL only spells out the copyright terms of the work. It does not restrict usage of the work.
RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older
You have a point, but I wouldn't lay (all or most of) the blame for militancy at RMS' feet. Its the commercial interests that have escalated the conflict. And not "only just"... they are doing it in spades.
You can say that GPL adoption is "going down the shitter" or can say equally that its emerging from a fad that led to a lot of abuse.
Life simply isn't black and white and when even Torvalds won't use GPL V3 because its too restrictive...
blah blah blah
Got your breath back yet? Torvalds is an example of why you are overreacting. The Linux kernel is still doing fine with GPL V2 and there is no harm by adding V3. In a black and white world, there would only be proprietary and BSD-like licenses.
By asserting that profit margins are thin (so the incentive to take risks is lower), that media companies are messy businesses (apparently, he believes organized media output is a myth), and that the corporations listed are so large that controlling all departments is a tall order, he doesn't seem to think the consolidation is anything to worry about.
These are arguments one could use to justify the business models of Soviet Russia. His thinking on this is really backwards, and I'd also like to point out that his topic of 'conspiracy' is a strawman since that was not in the original infographic.
These web sites sound like they would be interesting.
Try setting them up within I2P. Then they won't be able to shut you down.
Hello Moxie,
I'm already using the Perspectives extension (and not sure what benefit I'm getting from that)... Why should I switch from Perspectives to Convergence?
so I have doubts about well your point applies to this situation. If it does apply, that may simply point out that Discovery Channel doesn't live up to its name on important subjects, and that they are a bad partner for science shows.
One important question is, with Discovery Channel being part of a large corporation, are they a member of the Chamber of Commerce and what do they think about the Chamber's behavior and position on the subject of AGW?
Have you been living under a rock? Or are you seeking a reputation as an astroturfer?
Corruption by moneyed interests is a recurring theme here on Slashdot and many other sites, and much of that posting references hard news. Then again Slashdot is hardly the epicenter of concern for corruption on the web. So I suggest you try your strangely abstract (to put it kindly) arguments on a site like propublica.org or groklaw.net instead (and see how long your arguments last).
Thank you for demonstrating my point so nicely. Whenever I ask this same question (and I have done so many times), I inevitably get this kind of response*, pointing out that it's obvious, that it's widely believed by many people. Note that this does not even address the question!
It addresses your question by pointing out how inane it is. Apart from the sites I kindly provided to you (which further addresses your question-in-a-vacuum) you could simply click on the 'corruption' tag here on Slashdot.
You're not interested in information. Your delicately-worded inquiry amounts to argument in bad faith.
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/frozen_planet_freezes_out_clim.php?page=all
They are acting like its because of everyday scheduling concerns, but notice that ALL of the networks which chose to remove an episode singled out THAT particular one. BBC refuses to name the other countries that won't be seeing the AGW episode, but we know that Discovery Channel (e.g. the USA) won't be broadcasting it... surely it would upset advertisers (e.g. US Chamber of Commerce, who have become active denialists) to show that episode.
This and the emails are part of an effort to keep AGW from becoming a major election issue at a time when it is tangibly starting to hurt Americans.
Let me answer your questions with some questions of my own...
Everyone knows that the government is simply eating out of Big Corporation's wallet, right? How do they know this?
Have you been living under a rock? Or are you seeking a reputation as an astroturfer?
Corruption by moneyed interests is a recurring theme here on Slashdot and many other sites, and much of that posting references hard news. Then again Slashdot is hardly the epicenter of concern for corruption on the web. So I suggest you try your strangely abstract (to put it kindly) arguments on a site like propublica.org or groklaw.net instead (and see how long your arguments last).
Thank you for lending your professional anti-anti-corruption input on this matter. It has reminded me that the atmosphere needs more CO2 to promote life and that second hand smoke is a figment of the imagination.
Have a nice day :)
they have decided to embrace a particular business model: not doing it for free.
You are soft-pedaling a profit motive that prefers to monopolize markets. We have seen for-profit publishers associations attack people who create and use public domain, GPL and creative commons works - even attacking the very idea of the public domain in legislation and insisting that the tech sector is “mobilizing to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’”.
Bodies like MPAA, RIAA, Sound Exchange, ASCAP, GEMA have taken an increasingly hostile stance toward any author who is not under contract with established publishing corps even when the content is being offered for free. People who publish under CC and public domain are being DOS'ed with undeserved DMCA and 'three strikes' notices.
It is your mamby-pamby presentation of for-profit publishing that is idiotic.
...set the tone and scope of a posting when the subject is laden with conflict of interest. In this case it's DRM.
IMO Penguin's smokescreen deserved that backhanded comment and I do not consider it out of place on Slashdot.
They control the terms of debate, who can frame issues, who will be made to look heroic or heinous.
The "fourth estate" are now attached at the hip with the rest of the odious, money hoarding, war-mongering establishment. Their interests lie is making the wealthiest Wall St. investors ("risk takers") feel safe and secure and that means conning the general public out of our power and wealth and redirecting it all to aforementioned corporate plutocrats.
I wanted to play a list of finely normalized (volume-adjusted) tracks using both replaygain and crossfading.
Banshee and RB were very buggy with crashing, jumping to odd tracks w/o shuffle turned on, even playing multiple tracks at the same time. I consider them unusable for anything.
And then Amarok, my old regular from the KDE 3 days, had been lobotomized to the point of being unable to handle normalization. But I had switched to Gnome and didn't want to use 150+ MB extra ram to play some audio tracks anyway.
I had to resort to a very obscure program called Aqualung and forget replaygain data, using AL's special gain calibration system instead.
In iTunes, the exercise is extremely simple and reliable. The only player that comes close to matching it in features and reliability is Amarok 1.x, but the FOSS community decided to replace it with something "clean" and easy for new project members to figure out. Bad tradeoff.
With all the license fees MS are collecting for Android, MS was able to do directly what they were unable to do via SCO. This is about the SCO henchmen getting their cut after MS finally found an M.O. that worked.
+1 Insightful. While they're at it, make the filesystem case-insensitive. I have personally seen users having to migrate (away from Linux systems I set up for them) back to Windows or OS X because of that one issue.
I agree that Miguel was a negative factor, but the reasons for the desktop failure go much deeper than what you describe. Free systems do not have to be anywhere near wart-free to be successful (see Android). It was the old school hacker/distro culture that killed it.
Have a look over at the Linux Foundation where you will find a Mobile Linux SDK, but no SDK for the desktop because the politics made the latter impossible. Android also has an SDK (and I suspect its the reason why the Linux Foundation did one too, though I might be wrong on that) which more importantly defines a lot of high-level behavior.
Finally, what Android has over "Desktop Linux" are 1) vendors dedicated to mating the OS with actual consumer hardware (the OS and hardware are to some degree designed for each other); and 2) easily packaged apps; and 3) a genuine consumer-oriented identity that doesn't sell itself as "another Linux" (which is meaningless because "Linux" cannot be recognized as anything by an average consumer). Notice that Android does not use "Linux" in its public identity.
The above factors taken together mean that "Desktop Linux" feels hostile to most users and (crucially) to app developers. It mainly attracts systems-level tinkerers who, understandably, are hostile to the wearying practice of feature-locking (standardizing) the UI and programming interface. In polite company the culture tends to act in a color-blind way to the different types of programmers; behind the scenes it treats app developers as somehow second-rate or "less 1337" than the system tinkerers.
In order to rescue the current "Desktop Linux" movement, you would need at least: 1) an SDK that defines and versions the core OS functions from bottom to top (GUI); 2) including a standard package manager; 3) a comprehensive hardware database that the coders contribute to, but has a user-friendly way to search for compatible hardware. These three things could take the excessive guesswork out of writing/distributing software, using software, performing tech support, and buying hardware.
See this howto at Wendy Carlos' blog. She recovered the original Tron soundtrack this way.
Magnetic media like tapes and floppies use a binder (glue) that becomes corrupted with moisture over time, allowing the metal-oxide particles to flake off. Dehydrating the media can reverse the condition if you haven't already tried to access it.