Well, the point I was aiming at there was that near as I can tell Apple was the first to make use of commodity consumer 3D accelerated graphics cards as general GPUs for basic operations. But outside that yes, you are very much right.
Making use of the available graphics power just makes sense, and Apple was smart to be the first to realize this. After all, window compositing is something you're going to have to do at some point anyway; why not offload that task onto that part of the hardware that's actually designed to composit things?
But when you step into the realm of "hey, we've got this power-- let's waste it on something!". Then you're doing something really bad. Using pixel shaders to draw drop shadows on semitransparent textured menus or somesuch begins to fall into this territory.
In the first case you're taking the present advantages offered by the hardware and leveraging them to improve the consumer experience. In the second case you're taking advantages offered by your hardware and eliminating them-- removing the power of your 3D hardware (which technically is there for the applications, not the OS, to use) by making sure that the 3D hardware is continually tied up running the particle engine floating around the talking paper clip or Enlightenment logo or whatever. This degrades the potential consumer experience because it means the consumers don't get to use the hardware they paid for, the OS is too busy using it.
The difference between these two situations may be a little bit subtle and a larger bit subjective, but do you see the distinction here? Because given the curve of resource usage their OSes have followed in the past, I kind of doubt Microsoft does...
Slashdot will continue posting Cringely articles two to three times a month whether or not he has anything worthwhile, interesting or surprising to say, just because it's Cringely.
The PSP will win, unfortunately. It is the better machine. There really is no contest. The screen rocks.
The Game Gear was also clearly the better machine. Its screen rocked too. It didn't help. The problem is that what is "better" for a video game console may not be better for handhelds, since "better" comes with portability costs. So far Nintendo's been the only company to ever realize this, and this is the reason they've owned the market for so long.
The movie playing rocks.
I'm not so sure this is really going to help it though. Since UMD movies appear to not be happening anymore, the movie playing is limited to what you can stuff on a memory stick. It seems kind of hard to find a memory stick big enough to comfortably hold a movie for less than the $100 range. This might help the PSP into a super-high-end gadget-addict niche, but probably won't help in the general market-- and on the offchance the general market decides they like this feature, it doesn't mean the PSP will be able to benefit from it. Nintendo has an aftermarket movie and mp3 player they'll be releasing in Japan soon, and they can release it in America if it's to their benefit. It fits into a GBASP or the GBA slot of a DS, and it uses SD cards instead of memory sticks, which seem to run at about half the price.
The only thing you say I really object to though is this:
Super Nintendo 64 DS has graphics slightly worse than the N64 version.
In particular I don't really think I'd call the end of Acclaim a low. They were one of the worst publishers out there, they didn't seem to be good for anything except creating gaming "low points", and they were pretty much just dead weight on the industry. Red Star may be suffering as a result but overall I think I'd say the industry is better off without them; in particular I'd say that what happened to Acclaim isn't nearly as bad of a thing for gaming as the things Acclaim did this year before they died (for example what happened to Black Isle, which is at #17 on this list...)
But, I think the point of this list wasn't so much "bad things in gaming" as "embarrasing news items in gaming". And Acclaim's Infinium-like final flameout was nothing if not embarrasing.
What I'd be more interested in conceptually is "Write letters to your cable company and demand they stop carrying G4".
This wouldn't really work though unless something could be recommended to said cable companies to replace it, something that would have wider appeal than G4 and hopefully appeal to the people who used to watch TechTV. Is there any suitable such thing at this point in time?
I don't know if I'd say that
on
Inside TechTV/G4
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Fused" implied some aspects of TechTV survived.
I'd say a more accurate description of things would be:
Comcast was having trouble with their G4 network, which was not popular (especially not in their target market, where they were generally reviled) and was only available in a small number of areas due to a widespread lack of demand. So they bought TechTV-- which was available on far, far, far more cable networks than G4 due to the many years spent building up a reputation-- with the intent of simply replacing TechTV with G4 and thus getting all of TechTV's market penetration without having to work for it. So they bought TechTV, announced G4 and TechTV were "merging", gave TechTV's former screen personalities token jobs for a short period before firing them or driving them all off, and are currently settling into a situation where G4, in pretty much the exact form it was in before the merger, is now showing on those channels where TechTV was previously available.
G4's name does still have that vestigial "TechTV" appended to the end, but one recent G4 press release I saw referred to the network simply as "G4"; either this was a typo or that final superficial "TechTV" will be disappearing from the name before long.
That Microsoft's public comments actually reflect their internal views?
All that Microsoft publicly stating they aren't worried about Firefox means is that Microsoft wishes to externally project the appearance they are not worried about Firefox. We can't really infer anything more meaningful than that.
So my first reaction was that I'm not so sure about this one. There exist worms which use buffer overflows to propigate themselves. NX could potentially protect against such worms. Referring to a worm as a "virus" may not be strictly accurate but it isn't unreasonable, unless there's some quirk of the Dutch language at play I'm unaware of. If infection by Code Red, or any other buffer overflow based worm of the last few years which targeted end-users, could have been prevented by running a chip with NX functionality, then referring to this as "virus protection" may be a tiny bit silly, but not unreasonable. Certainly not deception on the same scale as the Pentium 4 "IT WILL MAKE THE INTERNETS MORE FUN" ads.
...then I actually RTFA.
Reclame Code Commissie of the Netherlands, an organization that regulates advertising in the country, recently said some or all AMD EVP radio ads were "too absolute and as a result misleading", according to Tweakers.net web-site. The regulators pointed out the fact that the technology needed Service Pack 2 to be installed on a PC running Microsoft Windows XP operating system and was able to protect only against a number of malicious programs.
So it appears that the complaint wasn't against the claim NX "protects against viruses", the complaint was that the advertisements did not make necessary disclaimers like "requires special operating system support". This seems definitely reasonable on the regulators' part.
This said, I have heard it claimed that NX technology is rediculously easy to circumvent. Specifically, I saw a long post by Linus Tourvalds somewhere in which he noted that NX provided protection against some classes of buffer overflow attacks, but not all, and then outlined various ways in which someone attempting a buffer overflow under Linux could potentially simply structure their buffer overflow so as to circumvent the protections NX offers. The post was very technical and I could not tell if the statements were general or just byproducts of the way Linux handles stack and such. Does WinXP suffer from these same problems with regard to the efficacy of an NX bit?
While lasers in general can be harmful, the one this guy is selling should really be considered a weapon.
It would make things easier for him if they were. Then he'd have constitutional protection, plus the vehement support of a vitriolic organization with a budget of $100 million a year.
Let us ignore for a moment that Slashdot is a community of thousands upon thousands of people, so you're being rather silly if you're expecting a consistent opinion to be held between the comments all these different people. The presence of multiple conflicting opinions on a discussion site is what's supposed to happen, not a flaw.
If we for some reason assume there to be some kind of "patents are bad" party line on slashdot, it's certainly not out of place here. After all:
Situation A: A company is not responsible for a concept, but obtains a patent on it anyway. It then waits for others, who discovered the concept independently-- possibly before the patent owner did-- to put the patented conept into widespread use, and then begins to bully them with the patent. Public benefit from the concept is lessened, and the company gains a great deal of money from the patent that they have done nothing to deserve.
Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.
Situation B: A person comes up with a nontrivial and useful invention. Using this person's work, others make billions of dollars from the invention, and an incalculable number of people benefit directly or indirectly. The person responsible for the invention does not recieve monetary recompension through the patent system for any of this.
Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.
I use the terms "Free" and "Open Source" software pretty much interchangeably and assume anyone who complains about this is apparently so much more wrapped up in semantics than results that their opinion is unlikely to be of much importance.
ESR and RMS might be of the opinion "Free" and "Open Source" mean something substantially different. Guess what? It isn't their decision anymore. The community has grown larger than them.
Any idea gets a "Darwinism" tacked to it. It's virulent.
This implies then that ideas which can be superficially linked to darwinian theory are more fit for the current academic environment, thus more likely to survive, and thus more likely to propigate their superficially darwinian aspects to the successive research projects which cite them. In the darwinian theory of grants and the origins of research projects, this is a key observation.
As for "the first part" of what I said: What I said above does not in any way require there to be a separate concept of "societal wealth". It just requires a willingness to admit it might in some way be possible to look at an aggregate of the wealth of some number of individual people.
The rest of what you say has nothing to do with anything. Contrived hypothetical anecdotes do not prove generalities.
His example is false, in that the government in and of itself can not pay for an investment; rather it has to take money from the citizens to pay for the investment. So the government owes a debt to the citizens to pay for Velcro. If indeed Velcro turns out to be worth more than was invested, unless the government has returned the money it took from the citizens, and given them extra, no wealth has been created.
This is nothing more than playing games with the definition of "wealth"; your argument is effectively tautological. You are not making a statement here about the government's ability to influence the degree of affluence within an economic system, which is what I would say people usually mean when they discuss "wealth" as if it were some sort of discrete quantifiable thing. Instead you are just redefining "wealth" in such a way that it magically disappears when taxation is in some way involved.
This doesn't really work. No one outside the circle of those that have already bought into the libertarian premises is likely to share this definition of wealth. Therefore using this definition of wealth you are attempting to construct is worthless if you wish to justify the libertarian premises to others-- which, in theory, is the point of this entire discussion.
If the original statement had been "government doesn't increase the wealth of individuals", your argument might at least be ontopic, since somewhere in there you have correctly observed that in the Velcro example way back near the top of this thread the direct beneficiaries of the hypothetical government Velcro development are not necessarily the same people as those who provided the capital for the Velcro development; this would mean the wealth of many of these individual providers of capital can be said to have not increased. However, there's still a catch there; somewhere there's an individual that did benefit, and his wealth certainly increased. You would probably say that this is just "redistribution". Here's the thing though: Let's say the government, in its supreme arbitrariness, takes wealth away from individual A, then does something with it, then "redistributes" it to individual B. What if the amount of wealth given to individual B at the end of all this is greater than the amount of wealth taken from individual A-- as it would have been in the Velcro example? If no wealth is created by the government in this transaction, then where exactly did it come from? Elves?
> > > Money that's taken by government inevitably has a sizable portion skimmed off the top to support bureaucracy. > > How is this different from in a corporation? > It is different from a corporation in that a corporation has an incentive to skim as little as possible off the top to support its "bureacracy" - the government has no incentive to keep its costs low.
But corporations are not autonomous entities. They are run by people.
Specifically they are run by the very "bureacracy" that we are discussing.
So an "incentive" given to the corporation may or may not translate to actual actions-- since the "bureacracy" makes the decisions, not the corporation, the bureaucracy has the capacity to make decisions which serve the interests of the bureaucracy, not the corporation.
In theory this might lead to the corporation not surviving, freeing up resources for other, more efficient corporations. In practice the corporation can probably survive this and continue bogging down its sector of the market, especially if all the other corporations in the same market space-- since they are all also run by people-- are behaving in the same manner. And since the bureaucracies running all these companies have no personal incentive to put the interests of the company over that of their own-- the corporation is who will suffer if they do so, not them-- chances are good that in practice they will all behave in that manner, all the time.
The remainder of your post is merely situationals. They may combine to increase the probability that private enterprise will efficiently perform a task but if we're talking about actual real life and not models they aren't going to hold all the time. There may be government-sector programs which do have incentives to watch their costs, though this likely doesn't happen often. There may be Corporations A which have no corresponding Corporations B, and this does happen often. In fact, it happens to at least a small extent the majority of the time, since there are many different ways to compete and it is not hard to carve out a market niche; almost no businesses compete purely on price except in those markets that are truly commodities, and these markets are probably not interesting enough to justify discussion. Innovation and top performance are one way to get customers but they are not the only, and possibly not even the best way. Your statements do work as a model, but so many assumptions must be met for the model to hold I would question their utility for decisionmaking except in those cases that are so clear-cut and unambiguous that it would be obvious what to do even without the model. And even in those cases, this just means that the market can do a better job than the government could. It doesn't mean the market does or is going to do a good job.
The reason why the government can "get money regardless" isn't systemic. It comes into play becuase the government, like corporations are, is run by people, and these people have the capability to act on their own interests rather than those of the government. And while the systemic advantages to capitalism work great in a vacuum, they don't provide much more protection from this once you start allowing in people than those advantages that government posesses do. Corporations at heart have the same flaw as government-- that the people making the decisions are eternally spending other people's money. In one case they're spending the incorporated entity's money and in the other they're spending the public's money, but the only really important difference is that the public has a lot more money.
The checks and "incentives" in capitalism do provide some protection against the kinds of bureaucratic complacency that plague the efficiency of government programs. But bureaucracies are self-sustaining, and most often they can find ways to brush these "incentives" aside when it suits them, the same way that bureaucracies in government brush aside th
That in the U.S. the burden of proof in a libel case falls on the person claiming libel to prove the claim unraesonable or untrue, whereas in the U.K. the burden of proof is on the accused to prove the claim true.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the point I was aiming at there was that near as I can tell Apple was the first to make use of commodity consumer 3D accelerated graphics cards as general GPUs for basic operations. But outside that yes, you are very much right.
Making use of the available graphics power just makes sense, and Apple was smart to be the first to realize this. After all, window compositing is something you're going to have to do at some point anyway; why not offload that task onto that part of the hardware that's actually designed to composit things?
But when you step into the realm of "hey, we've got this power-- let's waste it on something!". Then you're doing something really bad. Using pixel shaders to draw drop shadows on semitransparent textured menus or somesuch begins to fall into this territory.
In the first case you're taking the present advantages offered by the hardware and leveraging them to improve the consumer experience. In the second case you're taking advantages offered by your hardware and eliminating them-- removing the power of your 3D hardware (which technically is there for the applications, not the OS, to use) by making sure that the 3D hardware is continually tied up running the particle engine floating around the talking paper clip or Enlightenment logo or whatever. This degrades the potential consumer experience because it means the consumers don't get to use the hardware they paid for, the OS is too busy using it.
The difference between these two situations may be a little bit subtle and a larger bit subjective, but do you see the distinction here? Because given the curve of resource usage their OSes have followed in the past, I kind of doubt Microsoft does...
"You have a right to privacy online as long as you aren't doing anything illegal"?
That's... reassuring... I guess?
This may be a sign that Apple has decided to start moving away from the "i" naming scheme.
Either that or it's a sign the Mac Mini is specifically aimed at a set of people who Apple expects would be embarrassed buying an "i" product.
Slashdot will continue posting Cringely articles two to three times a month whether or not he has anything worthwhile, interesting or surprising to say, just because it's Cringely.
is the second coming of Jesus Christ.
1,900 years behind the original schedule, man.
What the fuck?
I'm not really so sure..
The PSP will win, unfortunately. It is the better machine. There really is no contest. The screen rocks.
The Game Gear was also clearly the better machine. Its screen rocked too. It didn't help. The problem is that what is "better" for a video game console may not be better for handhelds, since "better" comes with portability costs. So far Nintendo's been the only company to ever realize this, and this is the reason they've owned the market for so long.
The movie playing rocks.
I'm not so sure this is really going to help it though. Since UMD movies appear to not be happening anymore, the movie playing is limited to what you can stuff on a memory stick. It seems kind of hard to find a memory stick big enough to comfortably hold a movie for less than the $100 range. This might help the PSP into a super-high-end gadget-addict niche, but probably won't help in the general market-- and on the offchance the general market decides they like this feature, it doesn't mean the PSP will be able to benefit from it. Nintendo has an aftermarket movie and mp3 player they'll be releasing in Japan soon, and they can release it in America if it's to their benefit. It fits into a GBASP or the GBA slot of a DS, and it uses SD cards instead of memory sticks, which seem to run at about half the price.
The only thing you say I really object to though is this:
Super Nintendo 64 DS has graphics slightly worse than the N64 version.
This is just plain wrong. The DS doesn't have the graphics of the PSP, but the N64 just isn't any comparison to the DS at all. Mario 64x4 far outdoes the 64 version, plus the framerate is much better, and this is just a touched-up port-- the DS has much more to offer...
Huh. No, I actually was under the apprehension Acclaim was responsible for Black Isle's demise. It appears I'm wrong.
Acclaim was the publisher in Europe for at least one of Black Isle's games while Interplay owned them, which could be how I got them confused?
wondering what Rod Stewart had to do with gaming
Well... "Young Turks" is one of the songs in the in-game soundtrack of GTA: San Andreas..
In particular I don't really think I'd call the end of Acclaim a low. They were one of the worst publishers out there, they didn't seem to be good for anything except creating gaming "low points", and they were pretty much just dead weight on the industry. Red Star may be suffering as a result but overall I think I'd say the industry is better off without them; in particular I'd say that what happened to Acclaim isn't nearly as bad of a thing for gaming as the things Acclaim did this year before they died (for example what happened to Black Isle, which is at #17 on this list...)
But, I think the point of this list wasn't so much "bad things in gaming" as "embarrasing news items in gaming". And Acclaim's Infinium-like final flameout was nothing if not embarrasing.
Write letters to the sponsers
What I'd be more interested in conceptually is "Write letters to your cable company and demand they stop carrying G4".
This wouldn't really work though unless something could be recommended to said cable companies to replace it, something that would have wider appeal than G4 and hopefully appeal to the people who used to watch TechTV. Is there any suitable such thing at this point in time?
"Fused" implied some aspects of TechTV survived.
I'd say a more accurate description of things would be:
Comcast was having trouble with their G4 network, which was not popular (especially not in their target market, where they were generally reviled) and was only available in a small number of areas due to a widespread lack of demand. So they bought TechTV-- which was available on far, far, far more cable networks than G4 due to the many years spent building up a reputation-- with the intent of simply replacing TechTV with G4 and thus getting all of TechTV's market penetration without having to work for it. So they bought TechTV, announced G4 and TechTV were "merging", gave TechTV's former screen personalities token jobs for a short period before firing them or driving them all off, and are currently settling into a situation where G4, in pretty much the exact form it was in before the merger, is now showing on those channels where TechTV was previously available.
G4's name does still have that vestigial "TechTV" appended to the end, but one recent G4 press release I saw referred to the network simply as "G4"; either this was a typo or that final superficial "TechTV" will be disappearing from the name before long.
That Microsoft's public comments actually reflect their internal views?
All that Microsoft publicly stating they aren't worried about Firefox means is that Microsoft wishes to externally project the appearance they are not worried about Firefox. We can't really infer anything more meaningful than that.
That makes sense, thank you for your response.
...then I actually RTFA.So it appears that the complaint wasn't against the claim NX "protects against viruses", the complaint was that the advertisements did not make necessary disclaimers like "requires special operating system support". This seems definitely reasonable on the regulators' part.
This said, I have heard it claimed that NX technology is rediculously easy to circumvent. Specifically, I saw a long post by Linus Tourvalds somewhere in which he noted that NX provided protection against some classes of buffer overflow attacks, but not all, and then outlined various ways in which someone attempting a buffer overflow under Linux could potentially simply structure their buffer overflow so as to circumvent the protections NX offers. The post was very technical and I could not tell if the statements were general or just byproducts of the way Linux handles stack and such. Does WinXP suffer from these same problems with regard to the efficacy of an NX bit?
This is Migraine.mp3
While lasers in general can be harmful, the one this guy is selling should really be considered a weapon.
It would make things easier for him if they were. Then he'd have constitutional protection, plus the vehement support of a vitriolic organization with a budget of $100 million a year.
Let us ignore for a moment that Slashdot is a community of thousands upon thousands of people, so you're being rather silly if you're expecting a consistent opinion to be held between the comments all these different people. The presence of multiple conflicting opinions on a discussion site is what's supposed to happen, not a flaw.
If we for some reason assume there to be some kind of "patents are bad" party line on slashdot, it's certainly not out of place here. After all:
Situation A: A company is not responsible for a concept, but obtains a patent on it anyway. It then waits for others, who discovered the concept independently-- possibly before the patent owner did-- to put the patented conept into widespread use, and then begins to bully them with the patent. Public benefit from the concept is lessened, and the company gains a great deal of money from the patent that they have done nothing to deserve.
Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.
Situation B: A person comes up with a nontrivial and useful invention. Using this person's work, others make billions of dollars from the invention, and an incalculable number of people benefit directly or indirectly. The person responsible for the invention does not recieve monetary recompension through the patent system for any of this.
Conclusion: The patent system is not serving the purpose it should be serving.
I use the terms "Free" and "Open Source" software pretty much interchangeably and assume anyone who complains about this is apparently so much more wrapped up in semantics than results that their opinion is unlikely to be of much importance.
ESR and RMS might be of the opinion "Free" and "Open Source" mean something substantially different. Guess what? It isn't their decision anymore. The community has grown larger than them.
Any idea gets a "Darwinism" tacked to it. It's virulent.
This implies then that ideas which can be superficially linked to darwinian theory are more fit for the current academic environment, thus more likely to survive, and thus more likely to propigate their superficially darwinian aspects to the successive research projects which cite them. In the darwinian theory of grants and the origins of research projects, this is a key observation.
As for "the first part" of what I said: What I said above does not in any way require there to be a separate concept of "societal wealth". It just requires a willingness to admit it might in some way be possible to look at an aggregate of the wealth of some number of individual people.
The rest of what you say has nothing to do with anything. Contrived hypothetical anecdotes do not prove generalities.
His example is false, in that the government in and of itself can not pay for an investment; rather it has to take money from the citizens to pay for the investment. So the government owes a debt to the citizens to pay for Velcro. If indeed Velcro turns out to be worth more than was invested, unless the government has returned the money it took from the citizens, and given them extra, no wealth has been created.
This is nothing more than playing games with the definition of "wealth"; your argument is effectively tautological. You are not making a statement here about the government's ability to influence the degree of affluence within an economic system, which is what I would say people usually mean when they discuss "wealth" as if it were some sort of discrete quantifiable thing. Instead you are just redefining "wealth" in such a way that it magically disappears when taxation is in some way involved.
This doesn't really work. No one outside the circle of those that have already bought into the libertarian premises is likely to share this definition of wealth. Therefore using this definition of wealth you are attempting to construct is worthless if you wish to justify the libertarian premises to others-- which, in theory, is the point of this entire discussion.
If the original statement had been "government doesn't increase the wealth of individuals", your argument might at least be ontopic, since somewhere in there you have correctly observed that in the Velcro example way back near the top of this thread the direct beneficiaries of the hypothetical government Velcro development are not necessarily the same people as those who provided the capital for the Velcro development; this would mean the wealth of many of these individual providers of capital can be said to have not increased. However, there's still a catch there; somewhere there's an individual that did benefit, and his wealth certainly increased. You would probably say that this is just "redistribution". Here's the thing though: Let's say the government, in its supreme arbitrariness, takes wealth away from individual A, then does something with it, then "redistributes" it to individual B. What if the amount of wealth given to individual B at the end of all this is greater than the amount of wealth taken from individual A-- as it would have been in the Velcro example? If no wealth is created by the government in this transaction, then where exactly did it come from? Elves?
> > > Money that's taken by government inevitably has a sizable portion skimmed off the top to support bureaucracy.
> > How is this different from in a corporation?
> It is different from a corporation in that a corporation has an incentive to skim as little as possible off the top to support its "bureacracy" - the government has no incentive to keep its costs low.
But corporations are not autonomous entities. They are run by people.
Specifically they are run by the very "bureacracy" that we are discussing.
So an "incentive" given to the corporation may or may not translate to actual actions-- since the "bureacracy" makes the decisions, not the corporation, the bureaucracy has the capacity to make decisions which serve the interests of the bureaucracy, not the corporation.
In theory this might lead to the corporation not surviving, freeing up resources for other, more efficient corporations. In practice the corporation can probably survive this and continue bogging down its sector of the market, especially if all the other corporations in the same market space-- since they are all also run by people-- are behaving in the same manner. And since the bureaucracies running all these companies have no personal incentive to put the interests of the company over that of their own-- the corporation is who will suffer if they do so, not them-- chances are good that in practice they will all behave in that manner, all the time.
The remainder of your post is merely situationals. They may combine to increase the probability that private enterprise will efficiently perform a task but if we're talking about actual real life and not models they aren't going to hold all the time. There may be government-sector programs which do have incentives to watch their costs, though this likely doesn't happen often. There may be Corporations A which have no corresponding Corporations B, and this does happen often. In fact, it happens to at least a small extent the majority of the time, since there are many different ways to compete and it is not hard to carve out a market niche; almost no businesses compete purely on price except in those markets that are truly commodities, and these markets are probably not interesting enough to justify discussion. Innovation and top performance are one way to get customers but they are not the only, and possibly not even the best way. Your statements do work as a model, but so many assumptions must be met for the model to hold I would question their utility for decisionmaking except in those cases that are so clear-cut and unambiguous that it would be obvious what to do even without the model. And even in those cases, this just means that the market can do a better job than the government could. It doesn't mean the market does or is going to do a good job.
The reason why the government can "get money regardless" isn't systemic. It comes into play becuase the government, like corporations are, is run by people, and these people have the capability to act on their own interests rather than those of the government. And while the systemic advantages to capitalism work great in a vacuum, they don't provide much more protection from this once you start allowing in people than those advantages that government posesses do. Corporations at heart have the same flaw as government-- that the people making the decisions are eternally spending other people's money. In one case they're spending the incorporated entity's money and in the other they're spending the public's money, but the only really important difference is that the public has a lot more money.
The checks and "incentives" in capitalism do provide some protection against the kinds of bureaucratic complacency that plague the efficiency of government programs. But bureaucracies are self-sustaining, and most often they can find ways to brush these "incentives" aside when it suits them, the same way that bureaucracies in government brush aside th
Um... libel refers to inaccurate and damaging printed statements. In the context of that quote "the publisher" is the one accused of libel.
That in the U.S. the burden of proof in a libel case falls on the person claiming libel to prove the claim unraesonable or untrue, whereas in the U.K. the burden of proof is on the accused to prove the claim true.