Is it really so hard to envision? On one side of the scale you have email. On the other side you have Twitter. Make a social networking site more like email in terms off privacy. Sure, emails can still get out but they require a beach of trust from a friend, and even then they are unlikely to get into the hands of someone damning like your boss.
People don't want privacy in the strictest sense of the word on a social networking site. They want control, and they want to trust that they can keep control easily. This is where Facebook fails. Facebook while their recent pull backs have given you the ability to keep control over most data, they relentlessly are trying to pry you open. Most people who worry about such things just don't trust them anymore.
If the only things it is safe to share on a social networking site are things safe to share in a meeting at work, most people are not going to be sharing much. There needs to be a way to share with friends without exercising the same kind I'd self censorship that you impose during a meeting with your boss.
Democracy implies absolutely nothing about rights of the minority. Democracy is purely 50% + 1 = right and might. We screw around the formula to prevent exactly that. There is a reason why the US is called a Republic and NOT a democracy. The US is a republic because the US has a lot of anti-democratic things in that spell out pretty clearly when the 50% + 1 can go take their majority and shove it. The Bill of Rights in particular spell out clearly when Democracy can go fuck off. The unelected Supreme Court with its ability to override the legislative and executive branches is also a completely anti-democratic institution.
Democratic institutions are not a bad thing. Stuff that engages the citizenry in political decisions is not all evil. While democratic principles make a pretty decent structure for making decisions, you need more. You need protection for minorities. You need limits on what a majority can do. You probably need a few completely anti-democratic institutions (like a Supreme Court or Bill of Rights) that can whack the government when its democratic excess become too much.
Frankly, I think the rah-rah for "democracy" has resulted in laziness in terms of our political thinking. I want to see some non-democratic forms of government tried on occasion. How about a system where random citizens are simply drafted by lottery for government positions instead of having elections? What about a system where you don't vote, but simply let a proxy work as your representative. In other words, if 10,000 people say that John Doe is their representative, John Doe has 10,000 votes in the senate. No elections, just convince people to give you their vote.
I'm just tossing out ideas, and like what we have now, I am sure all of those ideas have weaknesses. The point is that we have stopped trying. How many more developing nations need to have failed corrupt democracies before we try something new?
A lot of the "phone" one that you see is "phone status". Phone status just lets an app properly pause when a call comes in. Even dancing bunnies is going to have a hard time doing something evil because it knows you are now on the phone and it is in the background. Frankly, I think they shouldn't even have that one listed with the scary ones like GPS location. Almost all apps need some way of dealing with a phone call besides having the OS shove the app aside.
The danger is much less than that. If you have a fart noise app and it asks for your GPS location, it will be rated down into dust. The Android Market could use more than a little work (but so could the iPhone market... which also sucks), but the users do do a good job of rating into oblivion apps that asks for more than they need. A great example is the Last.FM app... which for the record is freaking wonderful. It was getting pummeled in the ratings because it asked permission for your GPS. The author of it had to frantically update the description stating that it was only a functionality that let it locate nearby concerts of bands you like.
All of that said, I do wish that the market is a little more organized and that it gave developers a chance to explain under each notification why they need the access. Both of the phone markets right now, frankly suck. I use third party review sites almost exclusively to find new apps.
In this instant-on, give-me-satisfaction-now, zero-patience age, there is not enough appreciation for quality. Stock images are usually boring, uninspired snapshots used to occupy otherwise empty space. Using a photograph of high artistic quality can inspire people to imagine beyond the text; I don't think enough people take the time to understand and respect that.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
The amateurization of many professions has been a good thing. More people thrown at a problem, even if most are useless, results in creative and better solutions. Wikipedia is an excellent example of this. Tossing the collective minds of a few million people at the problem has produced the worlds most comprehensive, well researched, and up to date encyclopedia in all of human history. It sucks if you were an expert that used to make a few bucks each year writing encyclopedia articles, but for the rest of humanity it was a net gain.
I feel the same way about photography. Having everyone and their dog wielding a camera has improved humanity. The range of artistic expression has exploded and finding what you want has become easier. The fact that the gains from this are now diffusing into the commercial sphere isn't up setting. It certainly makes life harder if you want to make a living of photography, but for the rest of humanity the world has become a better place.
People are not "losing their shit" because the article is flame bait troll crap. Yes, your phone will store a screen capture images of your bookmarks on your SD card. No, your SD card that holds all of your photos, contacts, and other user data will not be destroyed when you wipe the OS. HFS. In other news, all if you run your Apple browser off a flash drive IT ALSO WILL SAVE SCREEN CAPS THAT WONT DELETE WHEN YOU WIPE THE OS!!!!111!!! The story is dumb. The proper title should read, "phone stores book mark information on the SD card, so like your photos you will not lose them during a factory reset." Call the fucking press.
You know you are scrapping the bottom of the barrel when this is the best you can find on Android. Excuse me while I go browse the intertubes and listen to Pandora... AT THE SAME TIME!!!11!!!! Ha ha.
Hey, at least Apple folks can copy and paste these days.
Your OMFG IT IS THE FOREIGNERS!!!1111! whining is crap.
1) The US doesn't offshore research more than it sends offshore anything else. It happens, but you stand a much better chance of winning a job from an Indian or Chinese competitor in R&D than basically anything else that isn't completely location specific. You are NOT going to beat India and China on cheap labor. You can win in brain power and the infrastructure that supports it. A few billion people means fuck-all if 90% of them grew up without power. The actual number of viable developing nation candidates you are dealing with is actually very small.
2) H1-B visas are not the devils work. If you lose to an H1-B, there is something wrong with you. H1-B's are expensive and unreliable. Even if a company breaks the law and uses H1-B's to save themselves 10% on how much they shell out in salary, that paltry gain doesn't make up for the fact that an H1-B might leave at any moment, probably has reduced English skills, is always under the threat of running home to get a decent job there, and you are on the hook for dealing with any immigration problems (which are hardly rare).
There is a problem in US science. Part of it might be cultural. I am sure part of it for PhD folks is pay, the slave like conditions you have to suffer, and the tenure system. You might even be able to point a finger at Wall Street... though I Imagine that bubble has gone boom. Blaming it on 'dem evil for-en-ers sounds a whole lot more like the whining of an enemy of science than a friend. Bush, Palin, and the other nut jobs that try and point outside of the nation for its internal problems are no friend of science.
No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products.
It is actually a whole lot less meaningful than that. I used to pirate... when I was 12. Did I cost someone riches whenever I did this? Hell no! A game not pirated was simply a game never owned. I just didn't have any money. No one lost anything when I pirated because I had no money for the video game (or any industry) to lose. When someone with no money to spend pirates, the economy loses exactly zero.
Contrast this with today. I make money. I am a single engineer who living like a monk who makes more money than he can spend each month. When I want a video game, I just buy it. The few thousand dollars worth of games on my Steam account is testament to this. I don't ever pirate anything. Stuff is cheap compared to my income, my time is too valuable to waste pirating, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling giving money to people who make good games. That said, unlike when I was 12, video game companies ARE losing money to piracy from me. How? I DIDN'T buy Assassin's Creed 2. Why? I enjoyed Assassins Creed. I had more than enough money laying around... and yet I didn't buy it because in their zealot like efforts to prevent piracy, they managed to DRM the shit out of their game so badly that I didn't want to pay for it. The 12 year old kids that were never going to pay didn't pay, and the late 20 something engineer who thinks nothing of dropping $60 for a game on a whim didn't pay up either. Good job.
So you have a government consisting of people who have no skill nor possibly even will to rule. What will they do? Why, what humans who have to do something always do - half-ass it.
Are you trying to imply that our current politicians are an extraordinary class of citizens? Are they an elite few with the intelligence to make wise decisions and lead? Haha... right.
The political system would be vastly improved if a few economist, engineers, and scientist got dragged into political service occasionally. The unending horde of lawyer/politicians is a good way to make sure your society has lots of laws, not that it will be just or effective.
And if some well-meaning member of the public offers his help in guiding these unwilling rulers - perhaps several of them, one after another, just to build up the experience mind you - why I think they'd be grateful to take the assistance!
Versus what? Career politicians who need to come crawling on their hands and knees begging for money every couple of years? I don't know about you, but my chances of telling a would be corrupting influence to make like a tree and fuck off is pretty dramatically improved by my not needing them to stay in power.
Simply staggering people moving in and out of the political system can offer the chance to mentor and learn from experience. Will some people half ass it? Eh, sure. That is probably another good reason to build a system that isn't dragged down by the failure of a few individuals.
No, it wouldn't. Selecting many people pretty much guarantees that some of them are power-hungry assholes. Since the rest are just trying to coast through their enforced service, those few will have no trouble concentrating power into their hands.
Unlike now where you MUST be a power hungry asshole to even think of running for office, much less actually accumulating the money and power to win? The only difference is that even if by some magic you manage to enthrall the other drafted suckers who care fuck all for your dreams of glory, lap up power in a system built to withstand individual fuck heads by giving no one power and doesn't even give you a chance to decide when you are going to get randomly selected for service (if ever), your service time is still over once it is over.
So you promise them a lucrative position in your company instead.
Um. You mean exactly like the way it is now? The only difference is that in the current system being in congress for a few years means you have built of connections. In the draft system your "connections" to politics vanish almost as soon as you are forced to leave it. This seems like an argument against the current system where a connected political is an asset to a corporation. Under the draft system, if you are buying up former politicians you are just a sucker buying up connectionless Joe-blow-citizens. I don't know about you, but as a corporation I would take a well connected former senator in the current system over some random engineer or plumber who has been booted by the system once his time is up.
Don't they usually fail because democracy fails - because a single dictator manages to get enough power to force through his half-cooked ideas which end up ruining the country? That's evidence for democracy, not against it.
Democracies tend to fail because democracies suck at preventing the accumulation of power in to the executive branch. Democracies also fail because winners of democratic elections tend to be far more likely to be sociopaths than the average citizen. The very sort of person who thinks that it is a good idea that they be the highest ruler in the land and is willing to trade the favors, make the promises, and say the things it takes to win that slot in a democracy is almost EXACTLY the WORST person you could ever select for such a slot! It is better than under a military dictatorship wher
OMFG! Mobile video conferencing! You mean that crap that has been around for years and no one wants! OMFGHS!
Seriously, I can't wait for mobile video conferencing. Think people look stupid when they are babbling to themselves via blue tooth? Well you just wait! Apple is taking jackassery to a NEXT level. Now, people are going to walk around holding their phone out at arms length in front of their face as they walk. It is going to be awesome!
There is a reason why video never caught on. It wasn't a lack of technology. We could have done video phone calls decades ago. It just never worked because no one wanted it. Video adds nothing to the conversation other than the fact that now your eyes have to be used during the conversation, you can't move around easily, and you have to be dressed and decent. It is even more stupid on a mobile phone because you instantly lose the whole "mobility" piece if you have to be looking at a screen or holding a phone in front of your face.
There is exactly one use for mobile video conferencing... phone sex. If you want better phone sex, then I guess you can get excited that Apple has now made available a feature you can already get on any new Android phone and has been around for computers for decades. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
I totally agree. The government of a nation declaring that they have found the exile of life is pretty much exactly the same thing as a private company making vague promises and adding that the claims are not FDA tested. Yup. Exactly the same thing.
I agree with almost everything you have said and that has been more or less my position for a while. The only point where I take issue is on alternatives to democracy. I personally don't think that we have ever given them a fair shake. We have tried a few variants on the structure of democracy (parliamentarian, congressional, constitutional monarchy, even a little direct democracy) , and we have tried a few variants on authoritarian forms of government (military dictatorship, communism, monarchy, theocracy, plutocracy, etc). I contended that there is a vast region of unexplored government types that we have never given a real shot.
Consider for a moment a draft republic. Instead of deciding which politicians represent the people, you simply pull names out of a hat. If you get selected, you have to serve for a period of time. Once your time is up, you leave. Any attempt to stay in office or create a law to let you stay in office is considered treason and results in immediate banishment.
In such a system you would NEVER give one politician any real power. You would have no president. You would want as many hands on power as possible because anyone, from a genius to a retarded idiot, could be one of those hands. Only by diffusing power could you safely operate such a system. Unlike literally all other forms of government (democracy included), you would see the government try and spread out decision and making instead of concentrate it into the hands of a few.
As an added bonus, you could probably do away with political parties. With no way to influence who serves as a representative, the only way left corrupt a politician is direct bribery. There can be no promises to help them get re-elected or any of that silliness.
I'm not saying the idea is without flaws, but it is a non-democratic and non-authoritarian form of government that doesn't rely on utopian ideals. I am pretty sure that there are other forms of possible government that could fit the bill. It isn't going to happen in the US, but I would love to see other countries give it a try. How many failed developing nation democracies do we have to have before we realize that maybe democracy isn't the end all be all?
I don't claim to have the solution and I am not proposing one. Seriously. That said, it is a lot more complex than simply limiting the money flow and "leveling" the playing field.
There are two very large problems with mucking around in campaign financing law.
1) People with an interest should be able to present a perspective. If a private individual or a group is going to be harmed by a law, it is pretty well enshrined that they have a right to express themselves. When you start trying to cut off money, especially money that is not handed directly to a candidate, you start to interfere with the ability of interested parties to spread their message. Maybe limits on speech are good, but realize that you are indeed limiting speech, and some of that speech might be speech you want. Is it really just to say for instance that groups should have limits to how much they can express for or against a law that is going to be enforced at gun point? This is serious stuff, you have to be weary about trying to limit discourse.
2) It shouldn't matter. An idiot with a lot of money is still an idiot. What does it say about the quality of a democracy when all it takes to win is to advertise more? If victory goes to whoever spends the most, there is a deeper and far more fundamental flaw in democracy than just too much money. You are not having citizens select good leaders any more. What you really have is just a game where the person who can raise the most money wins. I'm not saying it isn't true, but I am saying that it shines a big old spotlight on the weakness of a democracy when you need to perfectly balance the sides in terms of resources or else the idiot masses will vote for the one with more bling. Even if you balance out the candidates, it is a pretty safe assumption that your citizenry is being swayed on something inane rather than the quality of the leader.
I'm not saying I am not for laws regulating how much people can spend on speech. I am saying the fact that anyone thinks they are a good idea is a pretty good sign something is rotten in terms of our governing system.
Facebook's position is not actually all that secure. It wouldn't take much to topple them. It just takes a few geeks in Austin or Silicon Valley to adopt something else in addition to Facebook for Facebook to decline. Hell, I bet that there are popular enough geeks in this world where if they adopted something new, they could drag enough to send Facebook to its slow death. It only takes someone like Leo Laporte to declare to the nerds that he also likes product XX to start the process. Enough nerds use the new thing that it is functional within their social circle. The second round of tech savvy but not bleeding edge folks then show up. Not too long later, mom, dad, and grandma have followed the crowd to the new in place and don't even know why they are there. They were just following the crowd.
The thing about Facebook is that its competitor just needs to be compelling. It doesn't need to fight Facebook directly. I can only easily use one OS, but finding a few minutes a day for another social networking site is a pretty low bar. Hell, we have already seen how it works. Facebook came into existence during the reign of MySpace. Facebook didn't fight MySpace. They just offered up something compelling and people just added Facebook to their daily rotation on top of MySpace. Next thing you know it, MySpace is an Internet wasteland the likes of which we have not seen since the fall of AOL, and Facebook is king.
Facebook is king now, but it is a pretty easy get knocked off the throne when alls a competitor needs to do is catch a few key users attention for a few minutes each day to begin Facebooks fall. Facebook might still be around in 5 years, but I would be utterly shocked if most Slashdotters use it for anything more than a glorified address book and are already on to something new. Users don't need to delete their profile to dethrone Facebook. They just need to show up less and less.
Um, the top TWO of three spots on Google news is about the Israeli shooting. Is it even remotely possible to be more popular than that?
As to the news worthiness of the Facebook issue, it is news worthy. It is in fact far more important that a few people dying in the fill-in-the-blank scary thing of week (please tell me shark panic season is almost upon us...). There are almost 7 billion people in the world and hundreds of thousands die each day. Any death is a tragedy, but when we are stripped of our ability to communicate, especially in the political realm, a crime is committed against millions. The repercussion has the ability to make miserable or kill untold numbers. Free speech is the top defense against most forms of oppression and persecution. Hell, oppression and persecution is ALWAYS preceded by a reduction in the freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is the primary defense against injustice in this world. When it gets reduced, you should care. Hell, if nothing else, count in your head the number of times that a reduction in the freedom of expression was followed by something terrible. Okay, now count how many times an increase in the freedom of speech was followed by something terrible. It is pretty easy math.
I think there is an even more important point than how gas millage rating has changed. Notably, we pretty heavily regulate safety and the environment. A modern car has to have a lot of 'stuff' jammed into it before you can legally drive it on the road. Add on top of that it all needs to be done on a budget, and my opinion of the government super car is more or less 'meh'. If you have a large enough budget you can make almost any car that tickles your fancy. Hell, just look at the Tesla. If you throw 100K+ at a problem you can build a perfectly safe high performance electric car with great range. The problem is that you need to dump 100K+ to build it.
I am pretty sure that if they wanted to blow the money on a car no one can or will buy, even GM could make an ultra safe high gas millage car to put all others to shame. That isn't the challenge. The challenge is doing it on the cheap. Hell, that is the problem with most technology. What we can technically do outstrips what we can afford to do by years or even decades. If you are willing to spend enough money you can put a man on the moon. That doesn't mean that you personally are going to go vacation on the moon any time soon.
Everything you describe also more or less perfectly describes Stalinist Russia as well. Both Stalin and Hitler merrily killed leftist and intellectuals, broke unions, funneled work, funds, and slaves to corporations controlled by his buddies, and used corporations as an apparatus of the state. The only differences is that Hitler at least kept up the vague pretense that corporations were not state property (they were) while Stalin didn't. It isn't worth getting into a pissing match between who was more evil, but the difference between the two in terms of policy was almost nil and generally cosmetic.
A totalitarian dictator is a totalitarian dictator. Assigning them some sort of left/right allegiance is pointless. They are all the same. They just vary slightly in rhetoric (and even then, not that much).
I agree that I don't really have much desire to see Shepard running around killing things. I mean, the ME plot takes three 40+ hour video games to tell... it probably isn't going to translate in any friendly way. That said, the ME universe is awesome and interesting. I would LOVE to see a movie set in that world. Frankly, I think a lot of video games would make horrible movies, but the universe that they are set in would be completely worthy of a standalone movie. From a financial perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The fans of the game still show up to the party because they probably love the universe, and the writers are thrown a bone and are allowed to tell a story made for movies.
First, the idea of using this in fire fighting is silly. It can't carry squat. It has a paltry carrying capacity of 2000 lbs. My shitty 1998 Honda Accord could tow more water to a fire. On top of that, it is slow and I am betting isn't going to be such an awesome platform to fly over a fire with. This is worse than a normal fire fighting airplane in exactly every single way, which is faster, caries more water, and can quickly fill up in a lake and hit the fire again.
Second, 20k feet up is more or less useless for "beaming" energy around. You are better off to just use a mountain at that point. As a bonus, the mountain isn't going to move and can carry a lot more than 2000 lbs of equipment.
The only use this thing has is as surveillance or maybe as a transmitter for something boring like a cell phone signal. Even then, it is only good for temporary measures. At 20k feet it is going to be kicked around by the wind and need to constantly be expending energy to maintain its position. I would be shocked to learn it can maintain its position for even a week.
I think everyone agrees that it is okay for some spaces to be public. No one moans about Twitter basically being a free for all. We, on the other hand, would be pissed if our personal instant messaging, e-mail, or private conversations were shoved out into the world. The issue with Facebook is that as it was originally presented, it was an in club for you and your friends. It was a way of posting to a limited circle of people that YOU chose. What has made the changes in Facebook so utterly distressing is that it has rapidly switched to something more "twitter" like in that by default it spews info on you to anyone who looks.
I didn't join Facebook to meet people or advertise myself. Facebook was a centralized place to post pictures of funneling a beer while dressed as a chick for Halloween. Now, due to its utterly arcane and cryptic privacy settings and tendency to opt you in to sharing more, you need to treat it like any other public information on yourself. That is to say that instead of behaving as you do around friends, you need to be as private as you might be at a meeting in work. That, at least for me, is the truly upsetting thing about the changes to Facebook.
I can live with it. I have no trust in Facebook's ability to keep my information confined to my friends. So, I have more or less nuked my profile and made Facebook a glorified address book. If that is how they want to run their business, more power to them, but I have little desire to participate. That said, it is a shame. A unique company that offered a truly innovative way to keep in contact with friends has turned themselves into a glorified address book. Hell, my LinkIn profile is more exciting than my Facebook these days. Eh, no loss. I am sure something else is one the Horizon. Giants falls. Facebook is going to go the way of AOL and MySpace. The tech elite will find the "new" thing and jump to that. They might keep their Facebook profile in the same way I theoretically have a MySpace page rotting on the Internet, but it will fall into disuse. The early adopters of Silicon Valley and Austin will jump first. The second wave of tech savvy will follow and let their Facebook pages rot. By the time mom, dad, and grandma show up I am sure the new thing will be dooming itself and the search will be on.
If there is one wonderful thing about the Internet, it is that creative destruction happens at lightening pace. Facebook is at or has nearly reached its full AOL/MySpace bloat. Time to let that part of the Internet begin its inevitable rot and find something new.
Energy cost is its own pain already. If your company is blasting the AC, they are already losing money for no good reason. Being a person who is much poorer than the company I work for I sure as hell don't blast my AC... which is kind of the point. Normal folks are already very price sensitive and make efforts to reduce energy consumption. The poorer you are, the more you try and reduce your energy consumption. On the other hand, if you are rich, what is a few more dollars? It isn't like you are going to convince someone with money to burn to be uncomfortable just because it will cost a trivial amount more. Hence, why energy taxes are always regressive. The poor get hit the hardest and reduce further, while the rich can maintain their levels.
I personally think that the solution is simple. Instead of world wide regressive taxing, you start taking the much cheaper option of tweaking the environment intentionally. We already do it unintentionally, it is certainly worth tossing a few billion at the problem to do it intentionally. The cost of real carbon reduction is in the trillions of dollars. If you buy the climate models, we are already fucked even if we stop all CO2 emissions tomorrow. The truth is that real CO2 reduction is a political impossibility and that the wise course of action is to start looking for alternatives. Cut CO2 where you can, we are going to have to do it eventually, but the REAL focus should be reversing the destruction rather than trying to stop something that is already unpreventable.
You do realize that you expel CO2 every time you breath, right? The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are very much well within the non-toxic range. If at any point you get an average exposure of 5000ppm, toxicity will be last of your concerns. Our atmosphere would be completely nuked, both poles would be clear of ice, and our atmosphere would be closer to Venus than Earth. The levels emitted are nowhere even close to toxic, hence why CO2 emissions are not and should not be regulated as if their emission is toxic. The danger CO2 provides is global warming and only global warming.
You shouldn't be sending anyone to China because neither the US nor the UK have an extradition treaty with China. That is pretty much the end of it. You also probably shouldn't be sending folks to the US over bittorrent downloads seeing as how that is a civil crime and I am pretty damn sure not subject to extradition treaties.
It is pretty simple. The dude broke a US law on a US computer system. The UK has an extradition treaty. If the crime meets the criteria for extradition, he should be extradited. If the crime doesn't meet the criteria based upon a technically as to where he was sitting when he committed his act (versus where the system in question was located), then he should be prosecuted domestically. Seeing as how no UK court has taken up the case, I am guessing that the UK courts agree with the American courts in that he committed a crime in the US. The only thing left is to determine if this particular crime meets the criteria for extradition.
I personally don't see what is so fucking magical about this case. The UK has treaties and a legal system sort this shit out. There is no need to involve politicians. The only thing politicians should be doing is changing the law if the UK people don't like it, with the understanding that backing out of an extradition treaty provoke the same response from the US. Take it or leave it.
The point of patent law is to "promote the useful arts". In other words, better humankind. The way this is done is by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor for the singular purpose of encouraging more inventions. This bullshit has nothing to do with that. Apple has an utterly bullshit patent that any idiot who has watched any sci-fi in the past half century has seen before. "Multi touch" is not some breath taking innovation. It is a "not shit" next step for touch based devices (which are also "no shit" inventions). Frankly, this just brings to the forefront the glaring flaws in our patent system. The idea that you could patent a broadly defined (and obvious) method of interacting with a device is absurd. Idea should actually have to be novel and non-obvious. When large companies are slinging patents at each other not to protect sunk R&D costs, but just to trip up their competitors in court, you know that this entire system is fucked.
I am pretty sure if double digit percentages of the US population was dead of starvation and everyone else was on the verge of starvation, even Fox News would report it.
Please take off the moral relativism glasses. It is okay to look at the certainly shitty US media and declare it better than the vastly shittier North Korean news media. You can air a report on what an asshole Obama or Bush is without government agents kicking in your door, killing you, and sending your entire freaking extended family to a slave labor camp.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really so hard to envision? On one side of the scale you have email. On the other side you have Twitter. Make a social networking site more like email in terms off privacy. Sure, emails can still get out but they require a beach of trust from a friend, and even then they are unlikely to get into the hands of someone damning like your boss.
People don't want privacy in the strictest sense of the word on a social networking site. They want control, and they want to trust that they can keep control easily. This is where Facebook fails. Facebook while their recent pull backs have given you the ability to keep control over most data, they relentlessly are trying to pry you open. Most people who worry about such things just don't trust them anymore.
If the only things it is safe to share on a social networking site are things safe to share in a meeting at work, most people are not going to be sharing much. There needs to be a way to share with friends without exercising the same kind I'd self censorship that you impose during a meeting with your boss.
Democracy implies absolutely nothing about rights of the minority. Democracy is purely 50% + 1 = right and might. We screw around the formula to prevent exactly that. There is a reason why the US is called a Republic and NOT a democracy. The US is a republic because the US has a lot of anti-democratic things in that spell out pretty clearly when the 50% + 1 can go take their majority and shove it. The Bill of Rights in particular spell out clearly when Democracy can go fuck off. The unelected Supreme Court with its ability to override the legislative and executive branches is also a completely anti-democratic institution.
Democratic institutions are not a bad thing. Stuff that engages the citizenry in political decisions is not all evil. While democratic principles make a pretty decent structure for making decisions, you need more. You need protection for minorities. You need limits on what a majority can do. You probably need a few completely anti-democratic institutions (like a Supreme Court or Bill of Rights) that can whack the government when its democratic excess become too much.
Frankly, I think the rah-rah for "democracy" has resulted in laziness in terms of our political thinking. I want to see some non-democratic forms of government tried on occasion. How about a system where random citizens are simply drafted by lottery for government positions instead of having elections? What about a system where you don't vote, but simply let a proxy work as your representative. In other words, if 10,000 people say that John Doe is their representative, John Doe has 10,000 votes in the senate. No elections, just convince people to give you their vote.
I'm just tossing out ideas, and like what we have now, I am sure all of those ideas have weaknesses. The point is that we have stopped trying. How many more developing nations need to have failed corrupt democracies before we try something new?
A lot of the "phone" one that you see is "phone status". Phone status just lets an app properly pause when a call comes in. Even dancing bunnies is going to have a hard time doing something evil because it knows you are now on the phone and it is in the background. Frankly, I think they shouldn't even have that one listed with the scary ones like GPS location. Almost all apps need some way of dealing with a phone call besides having the OS shove the app aside.
The danger is much less than that. If you have a fart noise app and it asks for your GPS location, it will be rated down into dust. The Android Market could use more than a little work (but so could the iPhone market... which also sucks), but the users do do a good job of rating into oblivion apps that asks for more than they need. A great example is the Last.FM app... which for the record is freaking wonderful. It was getting pummeled in the ratings because it asked permission for your GPS. The author of it had to frantically update the description stating that it was only a functionality that let it locate nearby concerts of bands you like.
All of that said, I do wish that the market is a little more organized and that it gave developers a chance to explain under each notification why they need the access. Both of the phone markets right now, frankly suck. I use third party review sites almost exclusively to find new apps.
In this instant-on, give-me-satisfaction-now, zero-patience age, there is not enough appreciation for quality. Stock images are usually boring, uninspired snapshots used to occupy otherwise empty space. Using a photograph of high artistic quality can inspire people to imagine beyond the text; I don't think enough people take the time to understand and respect that.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
The amateurization of many professions has been a good thing. More people thrown at a problem, even if most are useless, results in creative and better solutions. Wikipedia is an excellent example of this. Tossing the collective minds of a few million people at the problem has produced the worlds most comprehensive, well researched, and up to date encyclopedia in all of human history. It sucks if you were an expert that used to make a few bucks each year writing encyclopedia articles, but for the rest of humanity it was a net gain.
I feel the same way about photography. Having everyone and their dog wielding a camera has improved humanity. The range of artistic expression has exploded and finding what you want has become easier. The fact that the gains from this are now diffusing into the commercial sphere isn't up setting. It certainly makes life harder if you want to make a living of photography, but for the rest of humanity the world has become a better place.
People are not "losing their shit" because the article is flame bait troll crap. Yes, your phone will store a screen capture images of your bookmarks on your SD card. No, your SD card that holds all of your photos, contacts, and other user data will not be destroyed when you wipe the OS. HFS. In other news, all if you run your Apple browser off a flash drive IT ALSO WILL SAVE SCREEN CAPS THAT WONT DELETE WHEN YOU WIPE THE OS!!!!111!!! The story is dumb. The proper title should read, "phone stores book mark information on the SD card, so like your photos you will not lose them during a factory reset." Call the fucking press.
You know you are scrapping the bottom of the barrel when this is the best you can find on Android. Excuse me while I go browse the intertubes and listen to Pandora... AT THE SAME TIME!!!11!!!! Ha ha.
Hey, at least Apple folks can copy and paste these days.
Your OMFG IT IS THE FOREIGNERS!!!1111! whining is crap.
1) The US doesn't offshore research more than it sends offshore anything else. It happens, but you stand a much better chance of winning a job from an Indian or Chinese competitor in R&D than basically anything else that isn't completely location specific. You are NOT going to beat India and China on cheap labor. You can win in brain power and the infrastructure that supports it. A few billion people means fuck-all if 90% of them grew up without power. The actual number of viable developing nation candidates you are dealing with is actually very small.
2) H1-B visas are not the devils work. If you lose to an H1-B, there is something wrong with you. H1-B's are expensive and unreliable. Even if a company breaks the law and uses H1-B's to save themselves 10% on how much they shell out in salary, that paltry gain doesn't make up for the fact that an H1-B might leave at any moment, probably has reduced English skills, is always under the threat of running home to get a decent job there, and you are on the hook for dealing with any immigration problems (which are hardly rare).
There is a problem in US science. Part of it might be cultural. I am sure part of it for PhD folks is pay, the slave like conditions you have to suffer, and the tenure system. You might even be able to point a finger at Wall Street... though I Imagine that bubble has gone boom. Blaming it on 'dem evil for-en-ers sounds a whole lot more like the whining of an enemy of science than a friend. Bush, Palin, and the other nut jobs that try and point outside of the nation for its internal problems are no friend of science.
No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products.
It is actually a whole lot less meaningful than that. I used to pirate... when I was 12. Did I cost someone riches whenever I did this? Hell no! A game not pirated was simply a game never owned. I just didn't have any money. No one lost anything when I pirated because I had no money for the video game (or any industry) to lose. When someone with no money to spend pirates, the economy loses exactly zero.
Contrast this with today. I make money. I am a single engineer who living like a monk who makes more money than he can spend each month. When I want a video game, I just buy it. The few thousand dollars worth of games on my Steam account is testament to this. I don't ever pirate anything. Stuff is cheap compared to my income, my time is too valuable to waste pirating, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling giving money to people who make good games. That said, unlike when I was 12, video game companies ARE losing money to piracy from me. How? I DIDN'T buy Assassin's Creed 2. Why? I enjoyed Assassins Creed. I had more than enough money laying around... and yet I didn't buy it because in their zealot like efforts to prevent piracy, they managed to DRM the shit out of their game so badly that I didn't want to pay for it. The 12 year old kids that were never going to pay didn't pay, and the late 20 something engineer who thinks nothing of dropping $60 for a game on a whim didn't pay up either. Good job.
So you have a government consisting of people who have no skill nor possibly even will to rule. What will they do? Why, what humans who have to do something always do - half-ass it.
Are you trying to imply that our current politicians are an extraordinary class of citizens? Are they an elite few with the intelligence to make wise decisions and lead? Haha... right.
The political system would be vastly improved if a few economist, engineers, and scientist got dragged into political service occasionally. The unending horde of lawyer/politicians is a good way to make sure your society has lots of laws, not that it will be just or effective.
And if some well-meaning member of the public offers his help in guiding these unwilling rulers - perhaps several of them, one after another, just to build up the experience mind you - why I think they'd be grateful to take the assistance!
Versus what? Career politicians who need to come crawling on their hands and knees begging for money every couple of years? I don't know about you, but my chances of telling a would be corrupting influence to make like a tree and fuck off is pretty dramatically improved by my not needing them to stay in power.
Simply staggering people moving in and out of the political system can offer the chance to mentor and learn from experience. Will some people half ass it? Eh, sure. That is probably another good reason to build a system that isn't dragged down by the failure of a few individuals.
No, it wouldn't. Selecting many people pretty much guarantees that some of them are power-hungry assholes. Since the rest are just trying to coast through their enforced service, those few will have no trouble concentrating power into their hands.
Unlike now where you MUST be a power hungry asshole to even think of running for office, much less actually accumulating the money and power to win? The only difference is that even if by some magic you manage to enthrall the other drafted suckers who care fuck all for your dreams of glory, lap up power in a system built to withstand individual fuck heads by giving no one power and doesn't even give you a chance to decide when you are going to get randomly selected for service (if ever), your service time is still over once it is over.
So you promise them a lucrative position in your company instead.
Um. You mean exactly like the way it is now? The only difference is that in the current system being in congress for a few years means you have built of connections. In the draft system your "connections" to politics vanish almost as soon as you are forced to leave it. This seems like an argument against the current system where a connected political is an asset to a corporation. Under the draft system, if you are buying up former politicians you are just a sucker buying up connectionless Joe-blow-citizens. I don't know about you, but as a corporation I would take a well connected former senator in the current system over some random engineer or plumber who has been booted by the system once his time is up.
Don't they usually fail because democracy fails - because a single dictator manages to get enough power to force through his half-cooked ideas which end up ruining the country? That's evidence for democracy, not against it.
Democracies tend to fail because democracies suck at preventing the accumulation of power in to the executive branch. Democracies also fail because winners of democratic elections tend to be far more likely to be sociopaths than the average citizen. The very sort of person who thinks that it is a good idea that they be the highest ruler in the land and is willing to trade the favors, make the promises, and say the things it takes to win that slot in a democracy is almost EXACTLY the WORST person you could ever select for such a slot! It is better than under a military dictatorship wher
OMFG! Mobile video conferencing! You mean that crap that has been around for years and no one wants! OMFGHS!
Seriously, I can't wait for mobile video conferencing. Think people look stupid when they are babbling to themselves via blue tooth? Well you just wait! Apple is taking jackassery to a NEXT level. Now, people are going to walk around holding their phone out at arms length in front of their face as they walk. It is going to be awesome!
There is a reason why video never caught on. It wasn't a lack of technology. We could have done video phone calls decades ago. It just never worked because no one wanted it. Video adds nothing to the conversation other than the fact that now your eyes have to be used during the conversation, you can't move around easily, and you have to be dressed and decent. It is even more stupid on a mobile phone because you instantly lose the whole "mobility" piece if you have to be looking at a screen or holding a phone in front of your face.
There is exactly one use for mobile video conferencing... phone sex. If you want better phone sex, then I guess you can get excited that Apple has now made available a feature you can already get on any new Android phone and has been around for computers for decades. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
I totally agree. The government of a nation declaring that they have found the exile of life is pretty much exactly the same thing as a private company making vague promises and adding that the claims are not FDA tested. Yup. Exactly the same thing.
I agree with almost everything you have said and that has been more or less my position for a while. The only point where I take issue is on alternatives to democracy. I personally don't think that we have ever given them a fair shake. We have tried a few variants on the structure of democracy (parliamentarian, congressional, constitutional monarchy, even a little direct democracy) , and we have tried a few variants on authoritarian forms of government (military dictatorship, communism, monarchy, theocracy, plutocracy, etc). I contended that there is a vast region of unexplored government types that we have never given a real shot.
Consider for a moment a draft republic. Instead of deciding which politicians represent the people, you simply pull names out of a hat. If you get selected, you have to serve for a period of time. Once your time is up, you leave. Any attempt to stay in office or create a law to let you stay in office is considered treason and results in immediate banishment.
In such a system you would NEVER give one politician any real power. You would have no president. You would want as many hands on power as possible because anyone, from a genius to a retarded idiot, could be one of those hands. Only by diffusing power could you safely operate such a system. Unlike literally all other forms of government (democracy included), you would see the government try and spread out decision and making instead of concentrate it into the hands of a few.
As an added bonus, you could probably do away with political parties. With no way to influence who serves as a representative, the only way left corrupt a politician is direct bribery. There can be no promises to help them get re-elected or any of that silliness.
I'm not saying the idea is without flaws, but it is a non-democratic and non-authoritarian form of government that doesn't rely on utopian ideals. I am pretty sure that there are other forms of possible government that could fit the bill. It isn't going to happen in the US, but I would love to see other countries give it a try. How many failed developing nation democracies do we have to have before we realize that maybe democracy isn't the end all be all?
I don't claim to have the solution and I am not proposing one. Seriously. That said, it is a lot more complex than simply limiting the money flow and "leveling" the playing field.
There are two very large problems with mucking around in campaign financing law.
1) People with an interest should be able to present a perspective. If a private individual or a group is going to be harmed by a law, it is pretty well enshrined that they have a right to express themselves. When you start trying to cut off money, especially money that is not handed directly to a candidate, you start to interfere with the ability of interested parties to spread their message. Maybe limits on speech are good, but realize that you are indeed limiting speech, and some of that speech might be speech you want. Is it really just to say for instance that groups should have limits to how much they can express for or against a law that is going to be enforced at gun point? This is serious stuff, you have to be weary about trying to limit discourse.
2) It shouldn't matter. An idiot with a lot of money is still an idiot. What does it say about the quality of a democracy when all it takes to win is to advertise more? If victory goes to whoever spends the most, there is a deeper and far more fundamental flaw in democracy than just too much money. You are not having citizens select good leaders any more. What you really have is just a game where the person who can raise the most money wins. I'm not saying it isn't true, but I am saying that it shines a big old spotlight on the weakness of a democracy when you need to perfectly balance the sides in terms of resources or else the idiot masses will vote for the one with more bling. Even if you balance out the candidates, it is a pretty safe assumption that your citizenry is being swayed on something inane rather than the quality of the leader.
I'm not saying I am not for laws regulating how much people can spend on speech. I am saying the fact that anyone thinks they are a good idea is a pretty good sign something is rotten in terms of our governing system.
Facebook's position is not actually all that secure. It wouldn't take much to topple them. It just takes a few geeks in Austin or Silicon Valley to adopt something else in addition to Facebook for Facebook to decline. Hell, I bet that there are popular enough geeks in this world where if they adopted something new, they could drag enough to send Facebook to its slow death. It only takes someone like Leo Laporte to declare to the nerds that he also likes product XX to start the process. Enough nerds use the new thing that it is functional within their social circle. The second round of tech savvy but not bleeding edge folks then show up. Not too long later, mom, dad, and grandma have followed the crowd to the new in place and don't even know why they are there. They were just following the crowd.
The thing about Facebook is that its competitor just needs to be compelling. It doesn't need to fight Facebook directly. I can only easily use one OS, but finding a few minutes a day for another social networking site is a pretty low bar. Hell, we have already seen how it works. Facebook came into existence during the reign of MySpace. Facebook didn't fight MySpace. They just offered up something compelling and people just added Facebook to their daily rotation on top of MySpace. Next thing you know it, MySpace is an Internet wasteland the likes of which we have not seen since the fall of AOL, and Facebook is king.
Facebook is king now, but it is a pretty easy get knocked off the throne when alls a competitor needs to do is catch a few key users attention for a few minutes each day to begin Facebooks fall. Facebook might still be around in 5 years, but I would be utterly shocked if most Slashdotters use it for anything more than a glorified address book and are already on to something new. Users don't need to delete their profile to dethrone Facebook. They just need to show up less and less.
Um, the top TWO of three spots on Google news is about the Israeli shooting. Is it even remotely possible to be more popular than that?
As to the news worthiness of the Facebook issue, it is news worthy. It is in fact far more important that a few people dying in the fill-in-the-blank scary thing of week (please tell me shark panic season is almost upon us...). There are almost 7 billion people in the world and hundreds of thousands die each day. Any death is a tragedy, but when we are stripped of our ability to communicate, especially in the political realm, a crime is committed against millions. The repercussion has the ability to make miserable or kill untold numbers. Free speech is the top defense against most forms of oppression and persecution. Hell, oppression and persecution is ALWAYS preceded by a reduction in the freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech is the primary defense against injustice in this world. When it gets reduced, you should care. Hell, if nothing else, count in your head the number of times that a reduction in the freedom of expression was followed by something terrible. Okay, now count how many times an increase in the freedom of speech was followed by something terrible. It is pretty easy math.
I think there is an even more important point than how gas millage rating has changed. Notably, we pretty heavily regulate safety and the environment. A modern car has to have a lot of 'stuff' jammed into it before you can legally drive it on the road. Add on top of that it all needs to be done on a budget, and my opinion of the government super car is more or less 'meh'. If you have a large enough budget you can make almost any car that tickles your fancy. Hell, just look at the Tesla. If you throw 100K+ at a problem you can build a perfectly safe high performance electric car with great range. The problem is that you need to dump 100K+ to build it.
I am pretty sure that if they wanted to blow the money on a car no one can or will buy, even GM could make an ultra safe high gas millage car to put all others to shame. That isn't the challenge. The challenge is doing it on the cheap. Hell, that is the problem with most technology. What we can technically do outstrips what we can afford to do by years or even decades. If you are willing to spend enough money you can put a man on the moon. That doesn't mean that you personally are going to go vacation on the moon any time soon.
Everything you describe also more or less perfectly describes Stalinist Russia as well. Both Stalin and Hitler merrily killed leftist and intellectuals, broke unions, funneled work, funds, and slaves to corporations controlled by his buddies, and used corporations as an apparatus of the state. The only differences is that Hitler at least kept up the vague pretense that corporations were not state property (they were) while Stalin didn't. It isn't worth getting into a pissing match between who was more evil, but the difference between the two in terms of policy was almost nil and generally cosmetic.
A totalitarian dictator is a totalitarian dictator. Assigning them some sort of left/right allegiance is pointless. They are all the same. They just vary slightly in rhetoric (and even then, not that much).
I agree that I don't really have much desire to see Shepard running around killing things. I mean, the ME plot takes three 40+ hour video games to tell... it probably isn't going to translate in any friendly way. That said, the ME universe is awesome and interesting. I would LOVE to see a movie set in that world. Frankly, I think a lot of video games would make horrible movies, but the universe that they are set in would be completely worthy of a standalone movie. From a financial perspective, it makes a lot of sense. The fans of the game still show up to the party because they probably love the universe, and the writers are thrown a bone and are allowed to tell a story made for movies.
First, the idea of using this in fire fighting is silly. It can't carry squat. It has a paltry carrying capacity of 2000 lbs. My shitty 1998 Honda Accord could tow more water to a fire. On top of that, it is slow and I am betting isn't going to be such an awesome platform to fly over a fire with. This is worse than a normal fire fighting airplane in exactly every single way, which is faster, caries more water, and can quickly fill up in a lake and hit the fire again.
Second, 20k feet up is more or less useless for "beaming" energy around. You are better off to just use a mountain at that point. As a bonus, the mountain isn't going to move and can carry a lot more than 2000 lbs of equipment.
The only use this thing has is as surveillance or maybe as a transmitter for something boring like a cell phone signal. Even then, it is only good for temporary measures. At 20k feet it is going to be kicked around by the wind and need to constantly be expending energy to maintain its position. I would be shocked to learn it can maintain its position for even a week.
I think everyone agrees that it is okay for some spaces to be public. No one moans about Twitter basically being a free for all. We, on the other hand, would be pissed if our personal instant messaging, e-mail, or private conversations were shoved out into the world. The issue with Facebook is that as it was originally presented, it was an in club for you and your friends. It was a way of posting to a limited circle of people that YOU chose. What has made the changes in Facebook so utterly distressing is that it has rapidly switched to something more "twitter" like in that by default it spews info on you to anyone who looks.
I didn't join Facebook to meet people or advertise myself. Facebook was a centralized place to post pictures of funneling a beer while dressed as a chick for Halloween. Now, due to its utterly arcane and cryptic privacy settings and tendency to opt you in to sharing more, you need to treat it like any other public information on yourself. That is to say that instead of behaving as you do around friends, you need to be as private as you might be at a meeting in work. That, at least for me, is the truly upsetting thing about the changes to Facebook.
I can live with it. I have no trust in Facebook's ability to keep my information confined to my friends. So, I have more or less nuked my profile and made Facebook a glorified address book. If that is how they want to run their business, more power to them, but I have little desire to participate. That said, it is a shame. A unique company that offered a truly innovative way to keep in contact with friends has turned themselves into a glorified address book. Hell, my LinkIn profile is more exciting than my Facebook these days. Eh, no loss. I am sure something else is one the Horizon. Giants falls. Facebook is going to go the way of AOL and MySpace. The tech elite will find the "new" thing and jump to that. They might keep their Facebook profile in the same way I theoretically have a MySpace page rotting on the Internet, but it will fall into disuse. The early adopters of Silicon Valley and Austin will jump first. The second wave of tech savvy will follow and let their Facebook pages rot. By the time mom, dad, and grandma show up I am sure the new thing will be dooming itself and the search will be on.
If there is one wonderful thing about the Internet, it is that creative destruction happens at lightening pace. Facebook is at or has nearly reached its full AOL/MySpace bloat. Time to let that part of the Internet begin its inevitable rot and find something new.
Energy cost is its own pain already. If your company is blasting the AC, they are already losing money for no good reason. Being a person who is much poorer than the company I work for I sure as hell don't blast my AC... which is kind of the point. Normal folks are already very price sensitive and make efforts to reduce energy consumption. The poorer you are, the more you try and reduce your energy consumption. On the other hand, if you are rich, what is a few more dollars? It isn't like you are going to convince someone with money to burn to be uncomfortable just because it will cost a trivial amount more. Hence, why energy taxes are always regressive. The poor get hit the hardest and reduce further, while the rich can maintain their levels.
I personally think that the solution is simple. Instead of world wide regressive taxing, you start taking the much cheaper option of tweaking the environment intentionally. We already do it unintentionally, it is certainly worth tossing a few billion at the problem to do it intentionally. The cost of real carbon reduction is in the trillions of dollars. If you buy the climate models, we are already fucked even if we stop all CO2 emissions tomorrow. The truth is that real CO2 reduction is a political impossibility and that the wise course of action is to start looking for alternatives. Cut CO2 where you can, we are going to have to do it eventually, but the REAL focus should be reversing the destruction rather than trying to stop something that is already unpreventable.
You do realize that you expel CO2 every time you breath, right? The levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are very much well within the non-toxic range. If at any point you get an average exposure of 5000ppm, toxicity will be last of your concerns. Our atmosphere would be completely nuked, both poles would be clear of ice, and our atmosphere would be closer to Venus than Earth. The levels emitted are nowhere even close to toxic, hence why CO2 emissions are not and should not be regulated as if their emission is toxic. The danger CO2 provides is global warming and only global warming.
You shouldn't be sending anyone to China because neither the US nor the UK have an extradition treaty with China. That is pretty much the end of it. You also probably shouldn't be sending folks to the US over bittorrent downloads seeing as how that is a civil crime and I am pretty damn sure not subject to extradition treaties.
It is pretty simple. The dude broke a US law on a US computer system. The UK has an extradition treaty. If the crime meets the criteria for extradition, he should be extradited. If the crime doesn't meet the criteria based upon a technically as to where he was sitting when he committed his act (versus where the system in question was located), then he should be prosecuted domestically. Seeing as how no UK court has taken up the case, I am guessing that the UK courts agree with the American courts in that he committed a crime in the US. The only thing left is to determine if this particular crime meets the criteria for extradition.
I personally don't see what is so fucking magical about this case. The UK has treaties and a legal system sort this shit out. There is no need to involve politicians. The only thing politicians should be doing is changing the law if the UK people don't like it, with the understanding that backing out of an extradition treaty provoke the same response from the US. Take it or leave it.
The point of patent law is to "promote the useful arts". In other words, better humankind. The way this is done is by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor for the singular purpose of encouraging more inventions. This bullshit has nothing to do with that. Apple has an utterly bullshit patent that any idiot who has watched any sci-fi in the past half century has seen before. "Multi touch" is not some breath taking innovation. It is a "not shit" next step for touch based devices (which are also "no shit" inventions). Frankly, this just brings to the forefront the glaring flaws in our patent system. The idea that you could patent a broadly defined (and obvious) method of interacting with a device is absurd. Idea should actually have to be novel and non-obvious. When large companies are slinging patents at each other not to protect sunk R&D costs, but just to trip up their competitors in court, you know that this entire system is fucked.
I am pretty sure if double digit percentages of the US population was dead of starvation and everyone else was on the verge of starvation, even Fox News would report it.
Please take off the moral relativism glasses. It is okay to look at the certainly shitty US media and declare it better than the vastly shittier North Korean news media. You can air a report on what an asshole Obama or Bush is without government agents kicking in your door, killing you, and sending your entire freaking extended family to a slave labor camp.
Please get some mother-fucking-perspective.