This idea is an example of failing to understand the problem.
The problem with security comes from several primary sources:
1. Complexity. Too many layers with poorly understood security implications. This lady might actually understand the monster she spawned but no admin trying to implement it will understand all of the corner cases. See SELinux.
2. Shoddy coding. So this gets tossed over the wall and will (assuming it is to matter) be completed by people who don't really understand it. Unless this one proves an exception it won't ever get a proper top to bottom security audit of the codebase. So it will have all the bugs in Linux, Xen and the hardware bugs in the virtualization layer and then it will add a whole new set of bugs to exploit.
And this one adds the fact it doesn't even try to secure the apps, it tries to stop misbehaving apps (like SELinux) from accessing things it shouldn't If history shows anything, giving an attacker any access to run code locally gives them all they need to leverage it into root eventually.
> It's not as if handing over the reigns to corporate interests ruined radio...
I'd really love the FCC to relax licensing on low power community radio stations. But the blue team fight it harder than the 'whores of corporate interest' on the red team. Wonder why.
Anyway, I'd like it to happen so idiots like yourself could build that perfect radio station you want, full of obscure indy acts you want people to listen to instead of 'pop tarts' like Ke$ha. And go broke when people kept right on listening to Kesha. If indy music on the radio were profitable Clear Channel would be doing it already. Face it, these days half the stations in a town are one rack of computers spitting out mp3 files from playlists out of a common music store on a NAS. Just how hard would it really be to upload a few more tracks and output em on one of the tranmitters if enough people would listen to the ads to make it profitable?
> I am sure someone will provide us an alternate source of water that has much less arsenic than the other company.
Which is what has happened. The government water has so much crap in it that many people stopped drinking the crap that comes out of the tap and either filter it or buy bottled water on the free market.
> There isn't a lot of choice for most people on what ISP they use.
Here is the real problem. You can choose government monopoly A (telco), government monopoly B (cable) or slightly less regulated near monopolies C (cell internet) or D (WiMax). Many people think this is just an unintended consequence, it isn't. Government creates a problem so it can then solve it.
> You folks need to wake up and understand that corporations do not and never will have your best interest in mind.
What a silly notion, of course they don't! Any corporation that isn't in it for the shareholders should have its leadership replaced. But in an open market they have to serve the customer if they want those yummy obscene profits. Of course we have rent seeking monopolists instead of market driven capitalism these days.
> Government regulations may not always be good, but in this case having a regulation that guaranteed net neutrality would benefit everyone.
Like the governenment isn't worse than the corprations in having an agenda of it's own that will hose us ordinary users. Wake up and smell the reality, government has become 'special interest' number one. Government does little anymore that isn't intended to benefit itself.
Do some research into the organizations agitating the loudest for 'network neutrality' and you will achieve enlightenment as to who the winners and losers will be.
> When I try to explain why the text flow is not exactly like they want it so that > it can be viewed on larger/smaller screens, they give me blank looks.
Duh. Don't EXPLAIN it to them, SHOW them. Take their layout and show it rendered on a 1920x1080 HiDef display, an iPhone, etc. Hand them the shots printed out with an estimated percentage of visitors who will be seeing it that way. Also show them the same sort of shots rendered with different browsers if it makes a difference in the particular case. Then show them similar screen caps formatted correctly to them. Suits don't respond to reason well, but a presentation with visuals usually does wonders. Ask them which one they want customers seeing. if they still pick the one that looks crappy take their money while you look for a new client because if they are that dumb they are probably doing lots of other dumb things that will probably get em weeded out during this recession.
> The thing is, liberals and conservatives have more in common than not.
Yup, another clueless person who hasn't bothered to read even read the stated positions of the two sides. And that idiocy in your.sig just confirms it. Ten year old children think like that, adults should not.
> Everyone favors free speech, even the ACLU.
Not even close. You won't find a more intolerant closed minded bigot than the typical Progressive type. Their notion of tolerance is every race, creed, color and sexual preference coming together to think exactly the same. The Progressives are the first in line to shout down, ban, slander, shun and otherwise silence any dissent. Dissent is only patrotic when THEY do it. And to be truthful there are elements in the fundie portion of my team who would get carried away with banning in the name or maintaining moral order. But in our philosophy it would be done at the local and state level.
> Everyone is terrified of the government taking over.
Here is where you prove beyond doubt your cluelessness and that your mental model is much closer to mine than to a Progressive even though you don't realize it. The Progressives are not terrified, they dream of it. You really have to understand those guys and realise they have a complete world view with a sense of right and wrong, what a good society should be and fervently believe they are doing the right thing; just like a normal American, but it is just so alien to us we think they are insane or deceitful. But without understanding they THINK DIFFERENTLY, coming at questions from a point of view almost 180 degrees out of phase with what we call normal you can't figure out why do what they do. Once you do understand them you can predict their actions with a high degree of reliability, because they DO have a consistent worldview even if they generally hide it from view since in a center right country an out of the closet Progressive couldn't get very far in most of the country.
> Most Americans agree to a certain amount of socialism, like roads, policemen, the army, schools...
Good grief, why do I bother?
Go read the US Constitution. See the parts about the Army, Navy, etc? And there is a bit about roads too. Personally I think the US govt is too involved with roads but that is something that reasonable people can debate. For example US 171 runs right through my town. It begins in Lake Charles, LA at I-10 and ends in Shreveport, LA at I-20. So this highway that begins and ends inside the same state needed to be a US Highway? Lousiana couldn't have managed to build it?
Which brings me to a fundamental idea you obviously haven't engaged with much. Federalism. Jobs the states can do, they should do. Interstate highways are an obvious place for Federal involvement, we can debate wither it should be writing the check or just co-ordinating the states.
And that leaves the schools. Government schools were a Progressive Era notion that has proven itself an Epic Fail. The country got along just fine for over a century without them and would be better off should we return to private schools. Universal education is a worthwhile goal, it can be persued by non-governmental means to a point and if the States decide they have to subsidize or regulate it we can have that argument. As for a Federal role, what part of the 10th Amendment are you having a reading comprehension problem with?
> On the side of the liberals, there is the idea that we should help each other out.
Again, you totally misunderstand BOTH sides.
The traditional American position is that we help each other out. WE do, not the government. We in the form of voluntary organizations and as individuals. When YOU help your neighbor, put $50 in the plate at your church (note how many hostitals, food banks, etc. are run by churches) or just donate $50 to the Red Cross you gain karma and the receptient does also and more importantly is likely to actually be helped back to a pos
> You couldn't be further from the truth with your simplistic lumping everybody into two groups, and your assertion that one is good and the other is evil.
I didn't assign good/evil labels. For the simple reason that they are relative. If you believe in the redistribution of wealth, and all the other Socialist dogma then you believe your side to be "Good" and the horrible reactionary nutters in the other camp believing in individual liberty even when it interferes with the needs of the State, clinging to their bibles and guns and such, well they must be "Evil". While for those who do believe that individual liberty and the rule of law even when it does interfere with the wheels of progress, Socialism is hopelessly wicked. My point was that with such divergent world views compromise isn't a reasonable expectation anymore and sooner or later things are going to get ugly.
> I can't believe you can equate social democrats, communists and fascists as one and the same.
They are in the sense they are all heading to the "sunny uplands of history" and all pretty much agree what they expect[1] to find there. They mostly differ in tactics as to how to get there. Social Democrats aren't in a particular hurry to get there and in fact the current examples are still early enough in their 'progress' that they lack a dictator. Progressives want to 'evolve' society into utopia while Communists want a revolution. Fascists are nationalists as compared to traditional Marxist Communists being internationalists but otherwise differ little in basic philosophy. When a group of them actually gain sufficient power there will be local differences mostly depending on the particular mental abberations of the individual monster who manages to get the top spot in the new pecking order.
[1] If history is any guide only mass graves lie on their path, but I'm just a reactionary nutter so what do I know.
> A conspiracy keeping real science out of journals?
Yes. It was simple actually, define 'climatoligist' to be 'someone who studies Global Warming' and presto, anyone who dissents on Global Warming isn't a climatologist. And while a bit of a simplification that is pretty much the current reality.
> Who would be paying for this conspiracy?
The people who stand to benefit economically or politically. International Socialism is the #1 group to benefit from the proposed solution so start there. Then look to the corporations who are lined up to reap insane profits for suspect #2.
> If this conspiracy is so powerful that it can overcome the billions of dollars that the corporate polluters have > poured into climate change denial, why hasn't this conspiracy of yours just taken over the world?
Lets try reason for a second. Who has the greater resources at it's disposal. Exxon Mobil and the other evil energy companies (without whom we would be practicing cannibalism since we couldn't possibly sustain our current population) supported by a rag tag band of 'deniers' or the unholy alliance on the other side. The Pro AGW forces include: the research granting machinery of every every industrialized country, to various extents the governmental regulating machinery of most of the modern world, the Parliment of Tyrants (UN) looking to suck resources from the wealthy nations, pretty much the entire legacy media complex, 90+% of academia... and so on.
> Stop f*cking ranting and cheering for your political party, open your f*cking eyes and vote > for the right person for the job, not because they are wearing red or blue this week.
Clueless twits can always be counted upon to spout this fallacy, that you should vote for the man and not the party. It is right up there with 'there is no real difference between the two parties' in being quick ways to spot someone who knows nothing of politics but has convinced themselves they not only know more but are morally superior to the people who actually invest the effort to get a clue.
In saner times there is a measure of wisdom in your advice but most times, especially since the start of the Progressive Era, there are stark differences between the two (or more) camps. In modern times there are two great philosophies contending in the public arena.
1. The name shifts every couple of years since the majority of Americans HATE the ideas so every time a critical mass realize the new name is just the same old dogfood the name changes again. And to be fair there are policy differences and some shades of grey. But essentially this camp is the Progressives, Fascists, Liberals, Social Democrats, Labor, Socialists, Communists, etc. They are all bound together by the common belief that the State, personified in a "Great Leader", should lead a dictatorship of the enlightened few over the clueless masses. Believes in the Rule of Men.
2. Conservatives and Libertarians in a grand alliance against the forces of Statism. Believes in classical liberal ideas like natural law, individual rights and the Rule of Law. More bluntly, American ideas.
These two philosophical systems are so divergent that little common ground exists for compromise. We basically have a Cold War going on with two hostile camps kept from violence only by both sides seeing the better chance at the ballot box. But this situation isn't stable, our government is growing ever more unstable and people are losing faith in it. Eventually one side must defeat the other, driving their foe from the field and (re)implementing their system of government. And since neither side is likely to simply retire from the field without a final appeal to the sword the future doesn't look good.
So no, I won't vote for the man instead of the party. To paraphrase RAH (since I don't have the book handy) it is better to vote for a dunderhead of your own party, so long as he is subject to party displine and lacks such moral flaws as to render him a menace to society, than a genius of the party opposing. For while the dunderhead won't accomplish much even a dunderhead can represent his voters wishes. Meanwhile the genius of the party opposing is likely to accomplish much, almost none of which I will like.
> There's actual volume. Who the hell is *buying* it?
It drops a little more and I might buy some. This fight isn't even close to over and the only risk factor is they might jetison the lawsuit to another corporate entity and let SCOX liquidate. They will keep suing and suing, appealing and pulling dirty tricks to keep the game going until Microsoft tells them to quit or the Sun goes out.
Then sometime in the next year or so Novell will get bought by what looks like a disinterested party but will actually be a Microsoft sock puppet and a things will blow up again. It is their only hope and if anyone expects Balmer to just gracefully wind down a corp the size of Microsoft ye be insane. So dirty fighting it will be.
> There seems to be a certain type of person who simply can not conceive that there are people who are not essentially humanitarian.
The reality is actually worse. It really wouldn't matter who you make absolute tyrant, they will either realize it is a no-win scenario and restore liberty, become a monster or get ousted by one. Put Jesus in charge, doesn't matter; He either abdicates or ends up spending all day smiting us (assuming He probably wouldn't need to worry about being ousted) and generally being a bastard because we humans just aren't wired to mindlessly obey like these Marxists academics seem to think we are.
> The criminal mind is entirely foreign to them.
Not really. It takes a criminal mind to want to be a tyrant. And anybody who says such things as this moron, in their secret heart, wants to BE the absolute tyrant because they believe they are so f*cking superior to us mere mortals that refuse to see their enlightened wisdom.
I'm pondering.... The document says it is "confidential" not "classified" so I'm sitting here reasoning that if the NY Times can publish classified (and weren't some marked Top Secret) war documents then I outta be able to get away with mirroring a copy of this here in the US of A. The fun part is I'd do it on my homepage hosted on a public library's site and equipment. Now the way I see it one of three results are possible.
1. I get shipped off a federal pen and buggered for the next ten years or more. This outcome would be bad but is it a realistic risk?
2. I get a take down notice. I comply.:) And then we find out if the EFF is done with insane BDS ravings and ready to actually defend the online world from a real out of control Justice Dept. After all, news of the takedown and the legal wrangling would create far more interest in the document than it would ever get on a crappy homepage that hasn't even been updated for a while. Imagine the public relations nightmare Holder would be walking into! After almost eight years of deranged ravings about Bushitler's Justice Dept wanting to violate all sorts of fundemental rights at libraries, or hell just shutting them down or something because he was such an unhoopy frood and all, to now have them forced to take on the Obama Justice Dept for a real attack on a library would be so much fun to watch. Always good when you can cause chaos in the camp of one's foes AND strike a blow for Freedom at the same time. This scenario has so much potential for an Epic Win I can't imagine it actually happening.
3. Which leads to the more probable option: Nothing happens. Oh well, try again.
I really can't see any risk of #1 but before I actually do it I figure it is worth tossing the idea out for comment first.
> 1. Like every country in the world, they're a Competitor for resources. The fact that they have > warheads would be enough to consider them a threat to any US interest.
So we should be doing arms reduction treaties with France? They compete with us and could probably muster as many WORKING warheads as the current Russians. Or how 'bout China? No, we aren't on the brink of world war with the French or the Chinese. And neither are we with the Russians.
> 2. Their financial situation is all the more reason to be wary of a Country. I'm not anti-Russian, > but they do have weapons of mass destruction. If the wrong people were in charge, and if desperate > they could threaten attacks to get resources. Similar to number one.
Yea, so? They have no ability to harm US other than the hope one of their nukes would actually go Foom! Most of their Navy couldn't leave port if the fate of the world depended upon it and their air power is almost as pathetic. I'm all for realizing the reason for NATO's existence is gone and leaving the defense of Europe to the Europeans. Having to fund a military of their own would level the competitive playing field a bit and might just force them to move back toward freedom instead of continuing to drift toward socialism/fascism.
> It just seems like a waste of air negotiating.
Beyond the reason I proposed in the first post there is the need among some people to prop up the reputation of Russia, to pretend they are still a great power. I'll leave the analysis of that as an exercise for the student.
We shouldn't be negotiating treaties with Russia anymore. Two equally good reasons:
1.We aren't enemies anymore. Right?
2.Russia wouldn't be a threat to us anyway. They are a third world country with some residual nukes from a day when they were a second world country with nukes. They haven't had the resources to maintain their conventional army, odds are they haven't had any better luck maintaining the nukes so they probably wouldn't even go foom!
We all understand what is going on here, The Won is on record saying the US should be nuke free (stupid!) and is using the Russians as an excuse to go in a direction he already wants to go.
Perhaps I can explain the difference. If Mono were merely intended to enable foreign content to run, as in Moonlight or even running foreign apps as in java, people wouldn't have much of a problem with it. This is where Wine is and thus nobody has a problem with it. It allows us to run apps we wouldn't otherwise have access to but nobody suggested the presence of Wine means we should adopt Win32 as our primary ABI. Mono on the otheer hand was promoted as a preferred development environment for the Free Software environment. Until a critical mass shouted "NO!" it was on the fast track to becoming a non-removable dependency for GNOME and there was serious discussion of rewriting the entire thing in C#.
If you still fail to see the difference I'm afraid I can't help you.
> Every time we tried to let it loose, it crashed hard and fast - we're still going through the consequences of such a crash at the moment..
I think I see your problem. The current mess was not a failure of Capitalism. This mess started with ACORN (The One was their lawyer for some of it) and the rest of the misfit army using legal and threats of physical violence to pressure the banks into making home loans to people who shouldn't have been given a payday loan. When that only produced limited success Freddie and Fannie were recruited by Congress into the deal, agreeing to take bad paper from the banks if they would make a certain percentage of their loans to the moocher population. The banking system still had the problem of what to do with all this toxic paper so the invented various complex financial instruments to pass the hot potatos around the world.
And just to spread the blame widely this problem begins with Carter the Idiot's Community Reinvestment Act and went all the way to Bush the Younger who was in up to his arse in this daft notion that home ownership should be 'universal.' Spread a little blame to Barney the Faggot who was pushing banks to loan to losers to while buggering a senior officer over at Fannie/Freddie. Doddering old Dodd was too busy being a Friend of Angelo to do his job as a member of the Banking Committee.
And of course another heaping helping of blame has to go to whoever allowed the old investment/banking houses of yore to become too big to be allowed to fail public corporations run by snot nosed marxist trained Harvard/Yale MBA types who didn't exactly need a lot of pressure to allow the shareholder assets entrusted to their care to be diverted to 'Social Justice.' The old school Jew bankers who built houses like Goldman and Lehman, with green eyeshades and no time for fools, who OWNED big hunks of the damned bank as partnerships (and would thus lose their ass instead of popping a golden parachute) would have never got goobered into making loans that couldn't possibly be repaid.
> Nowhere in the world (including the USA) you can accuse anybody of mass killing people without presenting any proof and come out clean.
Unless you a member of the US House that is. Congressman Murtha went to Hell never repenting his accusations of exactly that against the US Marine Corps even after they were proven false in court.
I will mostly pass on the ravings on MSNBC since you did add the qualifier of "major TV channel" and they don't meet that standard.:)
> The UN is primarily an organization for international cooperation and human rights.
Common misperception. The UN is nothing more and nothing less than a Parliament of Tyrants. It was designed to be such. Think. The central organizing principle that drove the design of the UN was One Country One Vote at a time when the vast majority of nation states was (and are) unfree tyrannies. I want to hear the counter argument to the proposition that any sane person couldn't help but realize the design of the UN was to enthone Evil but with the addition of the Security Council render it largely impotent. If the UN serves a positive purpose I'd certainly like to learn of it.
Who the hell cares where the video is hosted. Answer the original poster's question about what Lloyd SAID. Or proclaim the video a fake because that is probably the only real option for your team. If Lloyd did indeed SAY it then I dount there IS a possible rebuttal yet I also can't imagine any 'Progressive' disowning the remarks either. Because from you guys POV his only mistake was getting caught on video saying what you guys normally only say in private.
> Actually, for a lot of Venezuelans, Chavez was the solution.
If Communism is the answer somebody asked a really stupid question.
Seriously, compare the lot of the average person there to things pre Chavez and ask if it is better? More importantly, will it be better after another decade of this idiot's misrule?
So forget the more fuzzy question of whether they would have been better off just working towards establishing a better, more free government with the rule of law and some basic protections instead of falling for the tired socialist utopian siren song, because while difficult to 'prove' any sane person already knows the answer to it.
Personally I'd love to see, just once because a second wouldn't ever be needed, the US Govt ask the oil companies who got their assets nationalized by some commie thug if they are 'cool with that' and if they aren't (duh!) if they wouldn't mind if we denied the thug the fruits of his wickedness. Then we airlift out the foreign workers and after giving the locals an hour bomb the living sh*t out of the oil fields.
> At least Fedora does not have these delusions of grandeur.
Sadly they do. You can't install without a graphical desktop for example. What the heck is that all about? We used to laugh at NT for that. A SERVER wasting resources displaying a graphical login nobody will ever see! Of course with Fedora having a use by date shorter than some cheese you would have to be kinda daft to put Fedora on a server anyway.
One example: So after months and months of users bitching and moaning about the loss of the minimal install that would allow a text mode install they are going to put minimal back in for F13. But NetworkManager would drag in darned near everything so they left it out, which is sensible. What isn't sensible is they refuse to fix the original network subsystem to be enabled by default if NM isn't installed. So yes you can do a minimal install but you won't have a working[1] network. Not that you can really get rid of NM anyway, they are busy little beavers wiring NM into everything. No network manager, no Firefox, evolution or whatever IM client they are shipping now because all those and probably more refuse to go online unless NM is installed, running and says it is connected. Before they are done the clowns will probably have apache hardwired into NM. Network manager is just useless cruft unless you are on a laptop; why is there such an urge to make it indespensible?
[1] Yes once we realize what the problem is us old folks can figure out that "chkconfig network on ; service network start" will fix things but dangit in 2010 a working network shouldn't be something you need a wizard around to get working. Anything other than plug cable in, light goes on and the network 'just works' is horribly broken.
Just about the ONLY nice thing people say about Windows on a phone is that it is an open platform for all the corporate junk. Now it is a closed clone of the iPhone complete with app store. All the evil with none of the hipster kewl artsy metrosexual buzz.
Without a monopoly Microsoft couldn't sell icewater in hell.
> as processes get so small that it goes from being merely crap to wholly unreliable.
That hasn't stopped anyone from buying yet. Look at hard drives, the bigger they get the less reliable they are. Used to be if a drive survived the first couple of weeks it would probably end up on a shelf somewhere with a bunch of other tech that is useless but ya just can't bring yourself to trash because it still works.
> Seeing as how we've got 2TB in single disks now, and that capacity will likely continue to rise..
Or not. How long ago did the first 1TB drive appear? And we are still at 2 for the max? Methinks the hard drive industry has determined two very important things:
1. The demand for drives in the 1TB and larger size is fairly limited. But the relentless downward drive in prices is removing the profit from selling anything smaller.
2. SSD is increasing capacity per dollar purely on Moore's Law. SSD capacity increases leverage the general R&D investments in chip manufacturing processes. Creating a new generation of super hard drives would require the couple of surviving disc makers to expend Sagans of cash.
So we have a self fulfilling prophecy coming to pass where the drive makers have wound down R&D and are planning to reap profits while they still can. Existing drive tech can be squeezed to provide a couple more incremental capacity increases but eventually SSD will beat spinning platters in both capacity and price/GB.
So this was the best Slashdot could come up with for this weeks Green Energy Hype of the Week? Guess it was a slow week because this one is lamer than most.
Ok, ASSuming they can figure out a way to separate the H and O before they just combine again. ASSume this tech actually works outside the lab and can be scaled up. ASSume it performs as advertised when scaled up. 18% conversion efficiency on sound waves? Sound doesn't carry a lot of energy to begin with and they will harvest 18% of it before losses in compressing the H. Oh wow, if we ran this stuff down a mile of busy highway we MIGHT generate enough energy to push one crappy green gocart/car down that highway every day.
And that is the problem with most alternative energy schemes, they depend on ignorant people who don't know how the world works. There are LOTS of ways to extract energy from nature. The problem is that there aren't many that can compete with the existing sources because they are just so darned good, which was why we standardized on them in the first place. And if we actually do find a new good source, once scaled up it is a veritable certainty that we will discover that it too isn't a free lunch and that it also has a downside somewhere. And the second certainty is that the Greenies will be working to ban it because if it actually works it won't be alternative anymore. Kinda like music, when that great alternative/undergound band signs a contract and releases a hit most of their original fans declare them 'sellouts' and glom onto the newest unheard of band.
> You would be surprised how many actually use their PS3 to watch videos online.
So? Sony could add support in a week worst case; the PS3 certainly has enough CPU+SPU grunt to handle pretty much any codec you care to throw at it. Chicken and the egg here, Sony won't do it without demand and there won't be demand without must have content. Wikipedia is trying to crack that problem. If Google would help with YouTube we could bury h264 this year and never be troubled with those patent trolls again.
And I freely admit Theora is sub standard, but it is a desperate fight to keep the Internet free of the patent trolls and Theora happens to be 'the only ship in the sector' right now. If we can get it through certain people's thick skulls that a patent encumbered format isn't acceptable we will eventually get a good one that is free. A lot of people want to use video over the Internet and the providers have big enough bandwidth bills they will be motivated to find bandwidth efficiencies.
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This idea is an example of failing to understand the problem.
The problem with security comes from several primary sources:
1. Complexity. Too many layers with poorly understood security implications. This lady might actually understand the monster she spawned but no admin trying to implement it will understand all of the corner cases. See SELinux.
2. Shoddy coding. So this gets tossed over the wall and will (assuming it is to matter) be completed by people who don't really understand it. Unless this one proves an exception it won't ever get a proper top to bottom security audit of the codebase. So it will have all the bugs in Linux, Xen and the hardware bugs in the virtualization layer and then it will add a whole new set of bugs to exploit.
And this one adds the fact it doesn't even try to secure the apps, it tries to stop misbehaving apps (like SELinux) from accessing things it shouldn't If history shows anything, giving an attacker any access to run code locally gives them all they need to leverage it into root eventually.
> It's not as if handing over the reigns to corporate interests ruined radio...
I'd really love the FCC to relax licensing on low power community radio stations. But the blue team fight it harder than the 'whores of corporate interest' on the red team. Wonder why.
Anyway, I'd like it to happen so idiots like yourself could build that perfect radio station you want, full of obscure indy acts you want people to listen to instead of 'pop tarts' like Ke$ha. And go broke when people kept right on listening to Kesha. If indy music on the radio were profitable Clear Channel would be doing it already. Face it, these days half the stations in a town are one rack of computers spitting out mp3 files from playlists out of a common music store on a NAS. Just how hard would it really be to upload a few more tracks and output em on one of the tranmitters if enough people would listen to the ads to make it profitable?
> I am sure someone will provide us an alternate source of water that has much less arsenic than the other company.
Which is what has happened. The government water has so much crap in it that many people stopped drinking the crap that comes out of the tap and either filter it or buy bottled water on the free market.
> There isn't a lot of choice for most people on what ISP they use.
Here is the real problem. You can choose government monopoly A (telco), government monopoly B (cable) or slightly less regulated near monopolies C (cell internet) or D (WiMax). Many people think this is just an unintended consequence, it isn't. Government creates a problem so it can then solve it.
> You folks need to wake up and understand that corporations do not and never will have your best interest in mind.
What a silly notion, of course they don't! Any corporation that isn't in it for the shareholders should have its leadership replaced. But in an open market they have to serve the customer if they want those yummy obscene profits. Of course we have rent seeking monopolists instead of market driven capitalism these days.
> Government regulations may not always be good, but in this case having a regulation that guaranteed net neutrality would benefit everyone.
Like the governenment isn't worse than the corprations in having an agenda of it's own that will hose us ordinary users. Wake up and smell the reality, government has become 'special interest' number one. Government does little anymore that isn't intended to benefit itself.
Do some research into the organizations agitating the loudest for 'network neutrality' and you will achieve enlightenment as to who the winners and losers will be.
> When I try to explain why the text flow is not exactly like they want it so that
> it can be viewed on larger/smaller screens, they give me blank looks.
Duh. Don't EXPLAIN it to them, SHOW them. Take their layout and show it rendered on a 1920x1080 HiDef display, an iPhone, etc. Hand them the shots printed out with an estimated percentage of visitors who will be seeing it that way. Also show them the same sort of shots rendered with different browsers if it makes a difference in the particular case. Then show them similar screen caps formatted correctly to them. Suits don't respond to reason well, but a presentation with visuals usually does wonders. Ask them which one they want customers seeing. if they still pick the one that looks crappy take their money while you look for a new client because if they are that dumb they are probably doing lots of other dumb things that will probably get em weeded out during this recession.
> The thing is, liberals and conservatives have more in common than not.
Yup, another clueless person who hasn't bothered to read even read the stated positions of the two sides. And that idiocy in your .sig just confirms it. Ten year old children think like that, adults should not.
> Everyone favors free speech, even the ACLU.
Not even close. You won't find a more intolerant closed minded bigot than the typical Progressive type. Their notion of tolerance is every race, creed, color and sexual preference coming together to think exactly the same. The Progressives are the first in line to shout down, ban, slander, shun and otherwise silence any dissent. Dissent is only patrotic when THEY do it. And to be truthful there are elements in the fundie portion of my team who would get carried away with banning in the name or maintaining moral order. But in our philosophy it would be done at the local and state level.
> Everyone is terrified of the government taking over.
Here is where you prove beyond doubt your cluelessness and that your mental model is much closer to mine than to a Progressive even though you don't realize it. The Progressives are not terrified, they dream of it. You really have to understand those guys and realise they have a complete world view with a sense of right and wrong, what a good society should be and fervently believe they are doing the right thing; just like a normal American, but it is just so alien to us we think they are insane or deceitful. But without understanding they THINK DIFFERENTLY, coming at questions from a point of view almost 180 degrees out of phase with what we call normal you can't figure out why do what they do. Once you do understand them you can predict their actions with a high degree of reliability, because they DO have a consistent worldview even if they generally hide it from view since in a center right country an out of the closet Progressive couldn't get very far in most of the country.
> Most Americans agree to a certain amount of socialism, like roads, policemen, the army, schools...
Good grief, why do I bother?
Go read the US Constitution. See the parts about the Army, Navy, etc? And there is a bit about roads too. Personally I think the US govt is too involved with roads but that is something that reasonable people can debate. For example US 171 runs right through my town. It begins in Lake Charles, LA at I-10 and ends in Shreveport, LA at I-20. So this highway that begins and ends inside the same state needed to be a US Highway? Lousiana couldn't have managed to build it?
Which brings me to a fundamental idea you obviously haven't engaged with much. Federalism. Jobs the states can do, they should do. Interstate highways are an obvious place for Federal involvement, we can debate wither it should be writing the check or just co-ordinating the states.
And that leaves the schools. Government schools were a Progressive Era notion that has proven itself an Epic Fail. The country got along just fine for over a century without them and would be better off should we return to private schools. Universal education is a worthwhile goal, it can be persued by non-governmental means to a point and if the States decide they have to subsidize or regulate it we can have that argument. As for a Federal role, what part of the 10th Amendment are you having a reading comprehension problem with?
> On the side of the liberals, there is the idea that we should help each other out.
Again, you totally misunderstand BOTH sides.
The traditional American position is that we help each other out. WE do, not the government. We in the form of voluntary organizations and as individuals. When YOU help your neighbor, put $50 in the plate at your church (note how many hostitals, food banks, etc. are run by churches) or just donate $50 to the Red Cross you gain karma and the receptient does also and more importantly is likely to actually be helped back to a pos
> You couldn't be further from the truth with your simplistic lumping everybody into two groups, and your assertion that one is good and the other is evil.
I didn't assign good/evil labels. For the simple reason that they are relative. If you believe in the redistribution of wealth, and all the other Socialist dogma then you believe your side to be "Good" and the horrible reactionary nutters in the other camp believing in individual liberty even when it interferes with the needs of the State, clinging to their bibles and guns and such, well they must be "Evil". While for those who do believe that individual liberty and the rule of law even when it does interfere with the wheels of progress, Socialism is hopelessly wicked. My point was that with such divergent world views compromise isn't a reasonable expectation anymore and sooner or later things are going to get ugly.
> I can't believe you can equate social democrats, communists and fascists as one and the same.
They are in the sense they are all heading to the "sunny uplands of history" and all pretty much agree what they expect[1] to find there. They mostly differ in tactics as to how to get there. Social Democrats aren't in a particular hurry to get there and in fact the current examples are still early enough in their 'progress' that they lack a dictator. Progressives want to 'evolve' society into utopia while Communists want a revolution. Fascists are nationalists as compared to traditional Marxist Communists being internationalists but otherwise differ little in basic philosophy. When a group of them actually gain sufficient power there will be local differences mostly depending on the particular mental abberations of the individual monster who manages to get the top spot in the new pecking order.
[1] If history is any guide only mass graves lie on their path, but I'm just a reactionary nutter so what do I know.
> A conspiracy keeping real science out of journals?
Yes. It was simple actually, define 'climatoligist' to be 'someone who studies Global Warming' and presto, anyone who dissents on Global Warming isn't a climatologist. And while a bit of a simplification that is pretty much the current reality.
> Who would be paying for this conspiracy?
The people who stand to benefit economically or politically. International Socialism is the #1 group to benefit from the proposed solution so start there. Then look to the corporations who are lined up to reap insane profits for suspect #2.
> If this conspiracy is so powerful that it can overcome the billions of dollars that the corporate polluters have
> poured into climate change denial, why hasn't this conspiracy of yours just taken over the world?
Lets try reason for a second. Who has the greater resources at it's disposal. Exxon Mobil and the other evil energy companies (without whom we would be practicing cannibalism since we couldn't possibly sustain our current population) supported by a rag tag band of 'deniers' or the unholy alliance on the other side. The Pro AGW forces include: the research granting machinery of every every industrialized country, to various extents the governmental regulating machinery of most of the modern world, the Parliment of Tyrants (UN) looking to suck resources from the wealthy nations, pretty much the entire legacy media complex, 90+% of academia... and so on.
> Stop f*cking ranting and cheering for your political party, open your f*cking eyes and vote
> for the right person for the job, not because they are wearing red or blue this week.
Clueless twits can always be counted upon to spout this fallacy, that you should vote for the man and not the party. It is right up there with 'there is no real difference between the two parties' in being quick ways to spot someone who knows nothing of politics but has convinced themselves they not only know more but are morally superior to the people who actually invest the effort to get a clue.
In saner times there is a measure of wisdom in your advice but most times, especially since the start of the Progressive Era, there are stark differences between the two (or more) camps. In modern times there are two great philosophies contending in the public arena.
1. The name shifts every couple of years since the majority of Americans HATE the ideas so every time a critical mass realize the new name is just the same old dogfood the name changes again. And to be fair there are policy differences and some shades of grey. But essentially this camp is the Progressives, Fascists, Liberals, Social Democrats, Labor, Socialists, Communists, etc. They are all bound together by the common belief that the State, personified in a "Great Leader", should lead a dictatorship of the enlightened few over the clueless masses. Believes in the Rule of Men.
2. Conservatives and Libertarians in a grand alliance against the forces of Statism. Believes in classical liberal ideas like natural law, individual rights and the Rule of Law. More bluntly, American ideas.
These two philosophical systems are so divergent that little common ground exists for compromise. We basically have a Cold War going on with two hostile camps kept from violence only by both sides seeing the better chance at the ballot box. But this situation isn't stable, our government is growing ever more unstable and people are losing faith in it. Eventually one side must defeat the other, driving their foe from the field and (re)implementing their system of government. And since neither side is likely to simply retire from the field without a final appeal to the sword the future doesn't look good.
So no, I won't vote for the man instead of the party. To paraphrase RAH (since I don't have the book handy) it is better to vote for a dunderhead of your own party, so long as he is subject to party displine and lacks such moral flaws as to render him a menace to society, than a genius of the party opposing. For while the dunderhead won't accomplish much even a dunderhead can represent his voters wishes. Meanwhile the genius of the party opposing is likely to accomplish much, almost none of which I will like.
> There's actual volume. Who the hell is *buying* it?
It drops a little more and I might buy some. This fight isn't even close to over and the only risk factor is they might jetison the lawsuit to another corporate entity and let SCOX liquidate. They will keep suing and suing, appealing and pulling dirty tricks to keep the game going until Microsoft tells them to quit or the Sun goes out.
Then sometime in the next year or so Novell will get bought by what looks like a disinterested party but will actually be a Microsoft sock puppet and a things will blow up again. It is their only hope and if anyone expects Balmer to just gracefully wind down a corp the size of Microsoft ye be insane. So dirty fighting it will be.
> There seems to be a certain type of person who simply can not conceive that there are people who are not essentially humanitarian.
The reality is actually worse. It really wouldn't matter who you make absolute tyrant, they will either realize it is a no-win scenario and restore liberty, become a monster or get ousted by one. Put Jesus in charge, doesn't matter; He either abdicates or ends up spending all day smiting us (assuming He probably wouldn't need to worry about being ousted) and generally being a bastard because we humans just aren't wired to mindlessly obey like these Marxists academics seem to think we are.
> The criminal mind is entirely foreign to them.
Not really. It takes a criminal mind to want to be a tyrant. And anybody who says such things as this moron, in their secret heart, wants to BE the absolute tyrant because they believe they are so f*cking superior to us mere mortals that refuse to see their enlightened wisdom.
I'm pondering.... The document says it is "confidential" not "classified" so I'm sitting here reasoning that if the NY Times can publish classified (and weren't some marked Top Secret) war documents then I outta be able to get away with mirroring a copy of this here in the US of A. The fun part is I'd do it on my homepage hosted on a public library's site and equipment. Now the way I see it one of three results are possible.
1. I get shipped off a federal pen and buggered for the next ten years or more. This outcome would be bad but is it a realistic risk?
2. I get a take down notice. I comply. :) And then we find out if the EFF is done with insane BDS ravings and ready to actually defend the online world from a real out of control Justice Dept. After all, news of the takedown and the legal wrangling would create far more interest in the document than it would ever get on a crappy homepage that hasn't even been updated for a while. Imagine the public relations nightmare Holder would be walking into! After almost eight years of deranged ravings about Bushitler's Justice Dept wanting to violate all sorts of fundemental rights at libraries, or hell just shutting them down or something because he was such an unhoopy frood and all, to now have them forced to take on the Obama Justice Dept for a real attack on a library would be so much fun to watch. Always good when you can cause chaos in the camp of one's foes AND strike a blow for Freedom at the same time. This scenario has so much potential for an Epic Win I can't imagine it actually happening.
3. Which leads to the more probable option: Nothing happens. Oh well, try again.
I really can't see any risk of #1 but before I actually do it I figure it is worth tossing the idea out for comment first.
> 1. Like every country in the world, they're a Competitor for resources. The fact that they have
> warheads would be enough to consider them a threat to any US interest.
So we should be doing arms reduction treaties with France? They compete with us and could probably muster as many WORKING warheads as the current Russians. Or how 'bout China? No, we aren't on the brink of world war with the French or the Chinese. And neither are we with the Russians.
> 2. Their financial situation is all the more reason to be wary of a Country. I'm not anti-Russian,
> but they do have weapons of mass destruction. If the wrong people were in charge, and if desperate
> they could threaten attacks to get resources. Similar to number one.
Yea, so? They have no ability to harm US other than the hope one of their nukes would actually go Foom! Most of their Navy couldn't leave port if the fate of the world depended upon it and their air power is almost as pathetic. I'm all for realizing the reason for NATO's existence is gone and leaving the defense of Europe to the Europeans. Having to fund a military of their own would level the competitive playing field a bit and might just force them to move back toward freedom instead of continuing to drift toward socialism/fascism.
> It just seems like a waste of air negotiating.
Beyond the reason I proposed in the first post there is the need among some people to prop up the reputation of Russia, to pretend they are still a great power. I'll leave the analysis of that as an exercise for the student.
Sorry, I have to speak an unspeakable Truth here.
We shouldn't be negotiating treaties with Russia anymore. Two equally good reasons:
1.We aren't enemies anymore. Right?
2.Russia wouldn't be a threat to us anyway. They are a third world country with some residual nukes from a day when they were a second world country with nukes. They haven't had the resources to maintain their conventional army, odds are they haven't had any better luck maintaining the nukes so they probably wouldn't even go foom!
We all understand what is going on here, The Won is on record saying the US should be nuke free (stupid!) and is using the Russians as an excuse to go in a direction he already wants to go.
> Nobody does this to the Wine developers.
Perhaps I can explain the difference. If Mono were merely intended to enable foreign content to run, as in Moonlight or even running foreign apps as in java, people wouldn't have much of a problem with it. This is where Wine is and thus nobody has a problem with it. It allows us to run apps we wouldn't otherwise have access to but nobody suggested the presence of Wine means we should adopt Win32 as our primary ABI. Mono on the otheer hand was promoted as a preferred development environment for the Free Software environment. Until a critical mass shouted "NO!" it was on the fast track to becoming a non-removable dependency for GNOME and there was serious discussion of rewriting the entire thing in C#.
If you still fail to see the difference I'm afraid I can't help you.
> Every time we tried to let it loose, it crashed hard and fast - we're still going through the consequences of such a crash at the moment..
I think I see your problem. The current mess was not a failure of Capitalism. This mess started with ACORN (The One was their lawyer for some of it) and the rest of the misfit army using legal and threats of physical violence to pressure the banks into making home loans to people who shouldn't have been given a payday loan. When that only produced limited success Freddie and Fannie were recruited by Congress into the deal, agreeing to take bad paper from the banks if they would make a certain percentage of their loans to the moocher population. The banking system still had the problem of what to do with all this toxic paper so the invented various complex financial instruments to pass the hot potatos around the world.
And just to spread the blame widely this problem begins with Carter the Idiot's Community Reinvestment Act and went all the way to Bush the Younger who was in up to his arse in this daft notion that home ownership should be 'universal.' Spread a little blame to Barney the Faggot who was pushing banks to loan to losers to while buggering a senior officer over at Fannie/Freddie. Doddering old Dodd was too busy being a Friend of Angelo to do his job as a member of the Banking Committee.
And of course another heaping helping of blame has to go to whoever allowed the old investment/banking houses of yore to become too big to be allowed to fail public corporations run by snot nosed marxist trained Harvard/Yale MBA types who didn't exactly need a lot of pressure to allow the shareholder assets entrusted to their care to be diverted to 'Social Justice.' The old school Jew bankers who built houses like Goldman and Lehman, with green eyeshades and no time for fools, who OWNED big hunks of the damned bank as partnerships (and would thus lose their ass instead of popping a golden parachute) would have never got goobered into making loans that couldn't possibly be repaid.
> Nowhere in the world (including the USA) you can accuse anybody of mass killing people without presenting any proof and come out clean.
Unless you a member of the US House that is. Congressman Murtha went to Hell never repenting his accusations of exactly that against the US Marine Corps even after they were proven false in court.
I will mostly pass on the ravings on MSNBC since you did add the qualifier of "major TV channel" and they don't meet that standard. :)
> The UN is primarily an organization for international cooperation and human rights.
Common misperception. The UN is nothing more and nothing less than a Parliament of Tyrants. It was designed to be such. Think. The central organizing principle that drove the design of the UN was One Country One Vote at a time when the vast majority of nation states was (and are) unfree tyrannies. I want to hear the counter argument to the proposition that any sane person couldn't help but realize the design of the UN was to enthone Evil but with the addition of the Security Council render it largely impotent. If the UN serves a positive purpose I'd certainly like to learn of it.
> Unregulated free market inevitably breeds monopolies,
Actually it is the opposite. Point to a monopoly that existed for more than a decade or so without the power of the State behind it.
Rent seeking Corporatism shouldn't be confused with Capitalism.
> Seriously, you link to World Net Daily?
Who the hell cares where the video is hosted. Answer the original poster's question about what Lloyd SAID. Or proclaim the video a fake because that is probably the only real option for your team. If Lloyd did indeed SAY it then I dount there IS a possible rebuttal yet I also can't imagine any 'Progressive' disowning the remarks either. Because from you guys POV his only mistake was getting caught on video saying what you guys normally only say in private.
> Actually, for a lot of Venezuelans, Chavez was the solution.
If Communism is the answer somebody asked a really stupid question.
Seriously, compare the lot of the average person there to things pre Chavez and ask if it is better? More importantly, will it be better after another decade of this idiot's misrule?
So forget the more fuzzy question of whether they would have been better off just working towards establishing a better, more free government with the rule of law and some basic protections instead of falling for the tired socialist utopian siren song, because while difficult to 'prove' any sane person already knows the answer to it.
Personally I'd love to see, just once because a second wouldn't ever be needed, the US Govt ask the oil companies who got their assets nationalized by some commie thug if they are 'cool with that' and if they aren't (duh!) if they wouldn't mind if we denied the thug the fruits of his wickedness. Then we airlift out the foreign workers and after giving the locals an hour bomb the living sh*t out of the oil fields.
> At least Fedora does not have these delusions of grandeur.
Sadly they do. You can't install without a graphical desktop for example. What the heck is that all about? We used to laugh at NT for that. A SERVER wasting resources displaying a graphical login nobody will ever see! Of course with Fedora having a use by date shorter than some cheese you would have to be kinda daft to put Fedora on a server anyway.
One example: So after months and months of users bitching and moaning about the loss of the minimal install that would allow a text mode install they are going to put minimal back in for F13. But NetworkManager would drag in darned near everything so they left it out, which is sensible. What isn't sensible is they refuse to fix the original network subsystem to be enabled by default if NM isn't installed. So yes you can do a minimal install but you won't have a working[1] network. Not that you can really get rid of NM anyway, they are busy little beavers wiring NM into everything. No network manager, no Firefox, evolution or whatever IM client they are shipping now because all those and probably more refuse to go online unless NM is installed, running and says it is connected. Before they are done the clowns will probably have apache hardwired into NM. Network manager is just useless cruft unless you are on a laptop; why is there such an urge to make it indespensible?
[1] Yes once we realize what the problem is us old folks can figure out that "chkconfig network on ; service network start" will fix things but dangit in 2010 a working network shouldn't be something you need a wizard around to get working. Anything other than plug cable in, light goes on and the network 'just works' is horribly broken.
Good grief, just how stupid can these guys get!
Just about the ONLY nice thing people say about Windows on a phone is that it is an open platform for all the corporate junk. Now it is a closed clone of the iPhone complete with app store. All the evil with none of the hipster kewl artsy metrosexual buzz.
Without a monopoly Microsoft couldn't sell icewater in hell.
> as processes get so small that it goes from being merely crap to wholly unreliable.
That hasn't stopped anyone from buying yet. Look at hard drives, the bigger they get the less reliable they are. Used to be if a drive survived the first couple of weeks it would probably end up on a shelf somewhere with a bunch of other tech that is useless but ya just can't bring yourself to trash because it still works.
> Seeing as how we've got 2TB in single disks now, and that capacity will likely continue to rise..
Or not. How long ago did the first 1TB drive appear? And we are still at 2 for the max? Methinks the hard drive industry has determined two very important things:
1. The demand for drives in the 1TB and larger size is fairly limited. But the relentless downward drive in prices is removing the profit from selling anything smaller.
2. SSD is increasing capacity per dollar purely on Moore's Law. SSD capacity increases leverage the general R&D investments in chip manufacturing processes. Creating a new generation of super hard drives would require the couple of surviving disc makers to expend Sagans of cash.
So we have a self fulfilling prophecy coming to pass where the drive makers have wound down R&D and are planning to reap profits while they still can. Existing drive tech can be squeezed to provide a couple more incremental capacity increases but eventually SSD will beat spinning platters in both capacity and price/GB.
So this was the best Slashdot could come up with for this weeks Green Energy Hype of the Week? Guess it was a slow week because this one is lamer than most.
Ok, ASSuming they can figure out a way to separate the H and O before they just combine again. ASSume this tech actually works outside the lab and can be scaled up. ASSume it performs as advertised when scaled up. 18% conversion efficiency on sound waves? Sound doesn't carry a lot of energy to begin with and they will harvest 18% of it before losses in compressing the H. Oh wow, if we ran this stuff down a mile of busy highway we MIGHT generate enough energy to push one crappy green gocart/car down that highway every day.
And that is the problem with most alternative energy schemes, they depend on ignorant people who don't know how the world works. There are LOTS of ways to extract energy from nature. The problem is that there aren't many that can compete with the existing sources because they are just so darned good, which was why we standardized on them in the first place. And if we actually do find a new good source, once scaled up it is a veritable certainty that we will discover that it too isn't a free lunch and that it also has a downside somewhere. And the second certainty is that the Greenies will be working to ban it because if it actually works it won't be alternative anymore. Kinda like music, when that great alternative/undergound band signs a contract and releases a hit most of their original fans declare them 'sellouts' and glom onto the newest unheard of band.
> You would be surprised how many actually use their PS3 to watch videos online.
So? Sony could add support in a week worst case; the PS3 certainly has enough CPU+SPU grunt to handle pretty much any codec you care to throw at it. Chicken and the egg here, Sony won't do it without demand and there won't be demand without must have content. Wikipedia is trying to crack that problem. If Google would help with YouTube we could bury h264 this year and never be troubled with those patent trolls again.
And I freely admit Theora is sub standard, but it is a desperate fight to keep the Internet free of the patent trolls and Theora happens to be 'the only ship in the sector' right now. If we can get it through certain people's thick skulls that a patent encumbered format isn't acceptable we will eventually get a good one that is free. A lot of people want to use video over the Internet and the providers have big enough bandwidth bills they will be motivated to find bandwidth efficiencies.