I wasn't aware that Fox News was available OTA anywhere. OTA channels transmitting above a certain power level get to have what's called "must carry" status, which means, in a nutshell, that cable and satellite providers "must carry" them on basic cable. That's a little different than Fox "pressuring the cable companies to put Fox on cable and CNN and MSNBC on upgrade packages."
Also, I'm in the New York area. Fox News's studio shows are broadcast FROM here, but they're not OTA here.What market are they OTA in?
Admittedly with no data to hand, the demographic who watches FOX as a source of news likely anti-intellectual, science-denying, god-fearing, economically disenfranchised, and socially regressive.
It looks like you missed at least three words in this sentence. But that's the problem with calling people dumb over the Internet, isn't it?
Anyway, in this chain we're addressing the lie that Fox lies about being the most watched cable news network and that they juice the number through underhanded pressure on the cable companies. (I'm pointing out that Fox's claim, that they are the most watched cable news network, is both true and measured in a meaningful way.
None of that has anything to do with your irrational and ill-informed hatred for Fox's audience.
Fun fact: Just because I draft Tom Brady in my fantasy league doesn't mean I'm a Patriots fan.
OK, fine. But if you thought that Aaron Rodgers* was making football worse because he's only good because his team gets marginal calls in their favor because they're a "good team" and the only evidence of that that doesn't involve marginal calls is due to a massive conspiracy, you'd probably not put him on your fantasy team. Tom Brady was the beneficiary of Spygate, and now gets the benefit of shitty calls because he was good in the Spygate era. That's why, as a Jets fan, I refuse to put any Patriots player on my fantasy team, ever. It's a strategy that's worked out pretty well for me, to the tune of two league titles and a third place finish in the past three years.
By the way, I sympathize with you about the Bears having a terrible front office. The people you talk to in Chicago are right, they do need to clean house. Everybody I talk to in New York thinks their team needs to clean house. The Giants fans hedge a bit because some of the people who need to be fired have won them two Super Bowls. Us Jets fans, of course, don't have that problem.
But this is all a red herring. None of this football talk have anything to do with racist comments by Sony Pictures executives. Another topic that has nothing to do with racist comments by Sony Pictures executives is "Republicans." Rat, this woman is a Democrat, not a Republican. Democrats say racist things sometimes, and they shouldn't do it, but it shouldn't necessarily reflect badly on the Democratic Party as a whole when they do it. However, it's ridiculous to hear this story about a prominent Democrat saying something racist and think "EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."
It's ridiculous. And so here you are, right on cue.
*You mentioned elsewhere in the topic that you're from Chicago and you know a lot of Bears fans. I'm writing with the assumption that you are also a Bears fan. If not, replace the Aaron Rodgers reference with the quarterback of your team's rival.
I've never heard of a cable package with CNN not on basic cable. You usually get CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Dish network, the company who we're allegedly talking about, has all 3 on their basic service.
Also, the bonus for doctor's offices and car dealerships doesn't account for the success of Fox's prime time shows. Fox News routinely blows out its competitors in prime time, a time at which most of those businesses are closed and viewers are watching at home.
You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.
It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.
(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)
Title II very obviously DID NOT impose a free market, because the company it regulated for most of its existence HAD TO BE BROKEN UP BECAUSE IT WAS A MONOPOLY.
Title II would also not impose actual competition. Unless there are multiple providers capable of serving an address, it's not really a free market. Land line telephone service (currently regulated under Title II) pretty much has one option per area. (Two if you count phone service from the cable company, which is really VoIP rather than an actual land line.)
takeover of resources of a sovereign [Iraq] based on (obvious, at the time, and proven later) lies.
This is categorically false. American troops in Iraq were exposed to chemical weapons during the second Iraq war. At least six American troops were wounded in incidents between 2004 and 2011. When Bush said that Saddam's government retained caches of pre-1991 chemical weapons that he was supposed to destroy under the UN mandate that ended the first Gulf War, this is what he was talking about.
Here's a story from the arch-conservatives at the New York Times story from October of this year on the issue.
AFAIK there is nothing in physics that for a practical purpose puts a limit on information density in space.
Please educate yourself more. This is categorically false.
There's no reason we couldn't use these long range phone frequencies so that every device could form an ipv6 semi non centrailzed meshed network that costs next to nothing to run. Why are we still doing it the old fashioned way? Let's open up the spectrum. It's not finite like the FCC says it is.
Damn, if you had used the word "synergy" it would have been BINGO.
Comcast is in favor of the FCC's Net Neutrality regulations. The FCC's rules were struck down by the courts because Net Neutrality is outside the jurisdiction of the FCC. However, Comcast agreed to follow the FCC's rules anyway (as a condition of their merger with NBC.) Comcast wants to make everyone else hindered by the same rule that they are, so they support Net Neutrality.
But saying the school has "iPads" sounds better than saying it has "tablets" on advertisements.
The LAUSD is a series of public schools. They don't have to advertise. If you live in their geographic footprint and you have kids, you are required by law to send your kids there unless you pay for both the LAUSD AND a private school.
Now, I cannot suggest a good solution yet but I do see the problem.
Microsoft makes a maps tool, an online documents thing, and an e-mail client, all prominently displayed in their search program. Are they violating this "law" too? How are their actions any different than Google's?
Here in the free world, the government is not allowed to enact a law that it is impossible to comply with. EU regulators are just shaking down another American company. Google will probably pay their bribe, and the cycle will continue. Europeans should be embarrassed. Vote against this crap or something.
Hey asshat, you left out half of the sentence. "to get the same results from Microsoft's search engine" is part of a sentence about how Microsoft's search engine is "stack agnostic" in that you can use Google and Mozilla products to reach Bing, but Bing will give you the same results either way because it's still Bing. (Google works the same way.) If Microsoft or Google was illegally tying its other products to search, YOU WOULDN'T GET THIS.
The EU shouldn't be mandating the browser choice screen, let alone the "search choice" screen. The only reason they're being imposed is because the EU is trying to implement a tax on companies operating outside their jurisdiction.
yet - unless google starts "integrating" the services into each other (integrate - not just share a home page as a starting point). The stack example, indeed, seems misleading here. On the other hand - while you defend google here...
Huh? Google DOES have a stack, however, search works the same whether you're using Google's stack or not. Also, "defending Google" is a dumb way to characterize my post. I mentioned Bing working the same despite a non-MS stack and that Firefox works on Windows. Except for Apple not having a search product of their own, every player in the OS market has a browser and a web search tool. Everyone in the search industry does EXACTLY what Google does here.
- think back to some of the issues in the MS anti-trust case: MS used proceeds from other areas to funnel huge amounts of money into IE development - much more, than any start-up could hope to match.
More work on IE makes a better product for customers. More money spent on software development to make new software means more jobs and more personal income, which is then spread through the economy. This one was good all the way around. (Also, this wasn't an issue at MS's trial.)
By including IE into Windows, for many people (normal users, not people working in IT) they eliminated the need to even look for other browsers - no matter, whether other browsers might have been better.
The inclusion of IE also meant the end for commercial browser makers - as they wouldn't have an alternative source of income. "Netscape" failed, their browser ultimately only growing because it was completely freed and open-sourced
Not quite. Netscape failed because it was buggy and slow, and it tried to be too many things. The Firebird project, later renamed Firefox, "rose from the ashes" of Netscape's open source Mozilla suite. There wasn't too much of the closed source Netscape left in the codebase by the time Firefox got to 1.0 release.
But to address your point, if bundling is so bad, find me a graphical operating system today that DOESN'T come with a web browser made by the company that made the majority of the OS's software. (On a desktop Linux derivative, this will be the Desktop environment.) The EU order against MS with the browser choice screen is a backdoor tax that the EU is laying on an American company because Americans can't vote against the EU.
In google's case, there is no full integration of services - but:
income from the advertising (which the search engine generates / facilitates) supports an ecosystem of other software - a free calendar or documents - services that _depend_ on their ad business generating the income for them. Same as MS Office paying the bills for IE.
I'm pretty sure Google documents is paid for because there's an advanced version of Google documents that's suitable for business use that you have to pay for. In any case, a company reinvesting its profits to make a new product is a good thing.
the same landing page (www.google.com) being a straight entry point to not just the search, but other free offerings unrelated to search (like the news, play,...) gives those extra services a big head-start over their competition - and one they can't hope to match (no ad space sold on the landing page).
Who the hell uses the landing page? When I want to do a google search, I type the search terms into my web browser's address bar. I have the apps I use bookmarked. I don't think I've seen anyone at straight up Google.com in years.
These things make it more difficult for new enterprises to form - and it's reasonable to expect that any new area popping up on the web, google will not just also try to profit from (which would be fair enough), but they can (easily ab)use their position to help their apps further by giving them
This is very obvious in software where they want you to buy into the Microsoft stack or the Apple stack or the Google stack. If the bits and pieces were compatible and interchangeable you'd see a lot more competition and many smaller third parties providing a few parts.
We're talking about search here. What's the Google Stack here? They have a desktop operating system (Chromebook) a browser (Chrome) and a search engine (Google Search). Google doesn't give me meaningfully different results if I use Microsoft's OS and Mozilla's web browser. I haven't tried this myself, but I hear you can use Google's browser and/or Google's OS to get the same results from Microsoft's search engine that you'd get if you were using the "Microsoft stack."
There is absolutely NO switching cost involved in changing search engines. The European regulators are looking for a bribe here, and I hope Google tells them to crawl the web themselves.
Candidates that are actually supported by actual people will find supporters that voluntarily support them. I'd imagine that candidates that are supported primarily by non-natural "persons" would inherently have a harder time finding such voluntary support, and I feel that would be a good thing.
Candidates aren't supported by non-natural persons. PACs get their money from people earning it and giving it to PACs, with the understanding that the PAC will support candidates and issues that the person who gave the money supports. Lessig feels that he feels that some people give too much money to PACs, and thus that PACs can do too much speaking on behalf of some people. (It just so happens that the people Lessig is referring to also give to PACs that oppose his preferred candidates.) I'm against the very idea of "too much speaking." Allowing people to speak is always preferable to silencing them.
Which candidates were railroaded by the media during the last presidential election? Was it Romney or Obama? Or was it Johnson, Stein, Goode, and Anderson? Did this unlimited money-as-speech approach help Johnson, Stein, Goode, and Anderson overcome this media bias? Or did it help Romney and Obama dominate the conversation, further silencing everyone else?
You're talking about two different issues. The third party candidates you're talking about were unpopular with the electorate, which is why they never had a shot at winning and the media never covered them. There were a few individuals who supported each of them though. Maybe if their supporters weren't limited to the ridiculously low campaign spending limits, they could have put an ad on TV.
Look at Joni Earnst. She will be sworn in as a Senator representing Iowa in January. She's a Republican who ran on the idea of cutting government spending. She first hit it on the map through a TV ad in the primaries where she referred to her childhood job of castrating hogs on an Iowa farm and how it gave her "a lot of experience cutting pork." That ad was clever, it convinced the party establishment that she could win, and it convinced the party base that she'd do what they wanted their Senator to do. The donors got behind her, the voters got behind her, and now she's going to be a Senator.
Any of the third party guys in your statement could theoretically have tried something like that if their bigger donors had given them more money. Maybe it would have worked. If not, their ideas might be too unpopular to get a US President elected, which kind of means that they're not the right people for the job.
Those red herrings dealt with, Romney and Obama didn't dominate the conversation. Except for a few short periods of dumb horserace stuff ("Romney won the first debate! Could he actually be President?) the coverage was all Obama's points. How else do you explain all the coverage of the possibility of banning birth control? No Republican wanted that. Not Todd Akin. Not Romney. Nobody. There was (and there always is) a fundamental non-curiosity about the Republican candidates ideas and points, except to the extent it takes to bury them.
For example, it was obvious at the time that the Benghazi attacks were not the result of a spontaneous protest that got out of hand. Al Qaeda attacked that consulate, and they did it after Obama spent six months claiming that "bin Laden is dead and GM is alive." But God forbid anyone in the media start asking questions about why that didn't add up until after the election. Everyone admits it was a terrorist attack NOW, but the media covered for Obama until after the election.
If you trust politicians to the extent that you actually believe giving them more money increases the amount of truth they broadcast, we have a fundamentally different view of human nature. Can you say with a straight face that a publicly financed campaign of publishing verified information about all the candidates (f
Under current law, groups of individuals who feel a candidate isn't being treated fairly by the media (positively OR negatively) have other options to get their message out. Lessig's restrictions on free speech would take that away.
Would it, though? As far as I understand the restrictions being proposed, it would only impact those groups of individuals' spending. It would have no impact on non-spending speech.
I'm not sure how you expect a group to get their message out without paying people to do so. Banners and flyers cost money too. It's not just TV ads. Your campaign staff needs to put food on the table and a roof over their head. In order to find out that your opponent is lying in their book, you need to come up with a copy of the book, which probably means buying one. That all requires spending money.
In addition, Lessig intends to set up a two tiered system, where candidates that the media supports are allowed to have an outside group (the media) spend money on their behalf, in addition to their "non-spending speech." Candidates not supported by the media only have the "non-spending speech," which is of course unworkable in practice. Also of note, Lessig's bet, and he's talked about this, is that the candidates he personally supports are the ones that get support from the traditional media.
Personally, the spending of vast sums of money on campaigns makes me uneasy. I don't like the idea of elections being bought. That's my personal stance regardless of whether or not money is the primary determining factor in who is elected
This argument is just "money is bad because I say so." It's not "money is bad because it has an outsized effect" or "money is bad because it makes people do things they wouldn't otherwise do" or "This system is bad because some people are/would be treated unfairly under it." It's just "money is bad because it makes me uneasy."
To say that the side with more money wins is an oversimplification. All other things being equal, the side with more money wins. That being said, all other things are seldom equal. In any case, I still thing the influence of money in politics, however large or small, is clearly nonzero. Any nonzero influence of money on politics, I believe, corrupts the nature of democracy.
I'm not sure what your idea of the "nature of democracy" is. I prefer one correlated with an idea from free market theory. One of the conditions that makes a market free is that all actors have perfect knowledge of the available products. In this case, that's voters having perfect knowledge of the candidates. Clearly, 100% perfect knowledge is unattainable, but in order to make an informed choice, voters need to know what candidates stand for. There's only three ways a candidate can do that. They can either do it themselves personally, which doesn't scale, pay their supporters to help them, which costs money, or have outside groups (including the media) help them, which also costs money.
Lessig would prevent all the outside groups from informing people about candidates except for a group that supports the same candidates that he supports. You don't think that corrupts the nature of democracy?
My argument, which I've bolded for this time, groups of people can buy ads. If you can't find a group of people who agree with you, maybe your position is unpopular with voters.
actually its not. Your position is that if you can't find someone *with money* that agrees with you, then your views are not worthwhile. Which of course is the entire premise. Or mabey you concept of voting, is that you beleive that votes should count as much as your willing to pay for them?
You spend a lot of time accusing me of using strawman fallacies, but then literally tell me that my position isn't my position. Come the hell on. You're supposed to wait a little bit before you try to rewrite history.
It's incredibly hard to understand what you write when you don't consistently capitalize the first words in sentences, spell words wrong, and refuse to use the Slashdot quote function.
I could ask you to confront my message, but that seems to be your weak point.
My weak point is responding to trolls who HAVE TO BE not using the quote function or the spell checker built into their browser correctly to piss me off. Also, I confronted your message IN THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE, which you must know, because you ALREADY "QUOTED" IT.
My thesis, as I'm arging elsewhere, is that Lessig's effect was small and his candidates were unpopular for FAR more important reasons.
the reason you gave is that citizens united is popular ruling. I provided evidence to the contrary, you provided nothing.
Your evidence didn't really show what you think it did, and in any case, it isn't valid any more. I'll tell you what. If your next post is grammatically correct, you use the Slashdot quote function correctly at least once, and all the words are spelled correctly, I'll find you an opinion poll of the 2014 electorate that says that nobody is in favor of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. That's if you win the bet. If you fail to complete those three tasks, then I win the bet and I get to stop wasting my time figuring out what the hell you meant.
A Billionare shouldn't have any more voice than anyone else. One man, one vote, one voice.
Right, but a group of people shouldn't lose their voice because the group contains someone who you don't like. A bunch of men with a bunch of votes saying the same thing are going to be louder than one man with his one ridiculous, misspelled opinion.
because one has to do with facts, and the other has to do with wild conjecture. If you want to talk about modern restrictions on freedom of speech their are whole tomes of evidence of the FBI suppressing dissent under Hoover...
Modern restrictions... under Hoover. OK.
...or even what happened to some occupy protestors.
Again, you're the one in favor of letting the government harass people for saying things the government dislikes.
That's not how speech works. If you want to speak, you speak. If I want to speak, I speak. If a bunch of people agree with your ideas, you can collect money and run an ad too. If nobody agrees with your position or the ad you want to run, maybe you should rethink your position.
but thats not my argument. My argument is that speech is de-facto limited via money, because TV ads are expensive and cost prohibtive for most inviduals. People with more money to spend on TV ads have a distinct advantage because they have more money to spend, so hence my argument.
Right. My argument, which I've bolded for this time, is that groups of people can buy ads. If you can't find a group of people who agree with you, maybe your position is unpopular with voters.
If I understand what you mean correctly, you're saying that in the post-Citizens United world, only billionaire Republicans are able to start PACs and run ads. This is incredibly dishonest.Plenty of liberal billionaires are out there supporting liberal candidates and liberal causes
and thats a strawman. I didn't specify liberals, conservatives, democrats or republicans. Mabey if we improved public schooling, you'd understand critical thinking some more, to understand what that means.
I'm proud of the zing about school choice, but I was serious too. Whether this is your argument or not, this is in fact the argument Lessig is making.
The difference between what liberal groups spend and what conservative groups spend is ultimately a rounding error.
and thats somewhat my point, the political narrative is run soley by billionares. its unreasonable for anyone, either liberal or conservative to bring up issues that effect them in real life.
I didn't understand what you meant the first time through. It's incredibly hard to understand what you write when you don't consistently capitalize the first words in sentences, spell words wrong, and refuse to use the Slashdot quote function. But regardless, a political mainstream exists. There's billionaires that agree with Lessig. George Soros probably agrees with you. There's billionaires that agree with me. Someone's opinions don't suddenly become invalid because they have a lot of money, do they?
;My thesis is that Lessig's candidates lost in part because the freedom of speech restrictions he wants to enact are unpopular with voters
your thesis doesn't include a multitude of other options, and mine is that the issue had no bearing on the elections whatsoever
My thesis, as I'm arging elsewhere, is that Lessig's effect was small and his candidates were unpopular for FAR more important reasons.
but like the rest of your thinking, its based soley on politically convienct conjecture, and like the rest of my thinking, its based soley on research. But fucking commies and their damn research. In bed with devil-worshiping scientists I tell you. (76 percent of republicans tend to disagree with you as well as 81 percent of dems).
You're quoting a story from four years ago. Since then, one of our nation's political parties has used the IRS to target its political enemies at the national level, abused the legal system to attack donors to a popular state governor and reached into churches on multiple occasions to try to intimidate religious leaders to restrict their preaching to government approved topics. First Amendment restrictions are more unpopular now than they were in 2010 because Obama and the Democrats have been showing that if you give the government half a chance, the government will attack people who criticize it.
That is an argument why the news should have additional regulations about political coverage, especially with regards to libel and slander laws.
That's a terrible idea. It's a horrible idea to criminalize saying things the guy in power doesn't like. That's why the news, as terrible as it is right now, shouldn't be restricted and it's why people should be allowed to organize and run ads criticizing the government , or the news, or a candidate, or whoever.
Like 100 dollars per person per year. Warren Buffet, Koch Brothers, anyone. 100 dollars per year directly to a candidate or political party.
Under your scheme, Warren Buffet gets to give $100 to Democrats. The Koch brothers get to give $100 to Republicans. There's two Koch brothers, so they'll probably split it $50 a piece. Warren Buffet gets to give twice as much as either Charles or David Koch.
This is only marginally less thought out than Lessig's plan. The Democrats and Republicans spent pretty much the same amount on the election campaign that just ended, yet one side had a decisive victory. If money was the biggest mover, the Democrats would have been a lot closed.
I'm interpreting Lessig's ideas as charitably as possible. I've only heard him propose bad ideas for restricting PACs. I don't want to accuse him of trying to muzzle individuals unless I know it's true.
Generally speaking, an election is won by the candidate with the largest purse. There are occasionally exceptions, and sometimes a political platform plays a bigger role than campaign funding. However, those are exceptions, not the norm. Any impartial observer of the political process in this country acknowledge this reality.
The pro campaign finance restriction group Center for Responsive Politics points out that both parties spent roughly the same amount on the elections. (This includes if you compare direct expenditures by a Democrat campaign to direct expenditures by a Republican campaign, expenditures by the campaigns plus by the party apparatuses, and campaigns, parties, and PACs combined.) They spent about the same, but one side was elected at a far greater rate. I don't think the problem is as big as you're making it sound.
Do you believe that if Lessig were successful, there would be some harmful impact on free speech?
Lessig's restrictions only apply to individuals, groups, and some companies. Notably, they don't apply to media companies, who, due to freedom of the press, are allowed to cover the campaigns however they want. Under current law, groups of individuals who feel a candidate isn't being treated fairly by the media (positively OR negatively) have other options to get their message out. Lessig's restrictions on free speech would take that away.
And now, just to bring it full circle, remember that Lessig's PAC itself doesn't exist to convince people to support campaign finance restrictions. It exists to convince legislators to enact restrictions Lessig supports.
But if they aren't in office, what's he going to do? IIRC six of his candidates weren't *that* likely to win, rather he just funded them in the hopes that it pushes them into office, and THEN they work towards his goal.
Yes. Exactly that. Some of the commentary relating to the loss of anti-gun incumbents in the Colorado recalls that you referenced earlier related to the fact that part of the reason that people hadn't supported gun restrictions before is that the NRA's PACs would mobilize voters against them. Bloomberg promised the Colorado incumbents that his anti-gun PACs would be able to protect candidates from the NRA.
It didn't work, and one of the lessons of the Colorado recall is that in large parts of the country, voters will reject an overtly anti-gun message. But a second lesson is that pro-gun groups can mobilize supporters better than anti-gun groups in most of the country. Thus, elected officials are less likely to join Bloomberg's anti-gun groups or enact Bloomberg's legislation.
On the other hand, according to exit polling, campaign finance reform wasn't really on the minds of most Americans, no matter how much the Lessig or the media wish it was. By and large, the losers in Lessig's group lost because they were either Democrats who were tied to closely to Obama or Republicans challenging incredibly safe Democratic seats. I'm not sure that any actual candidate or PAC gave a speech or ran an ad opposing Lessig's guys because they wanted to limit free speech.
Unlike Bloomberg's group, I don't think Lessig made a difference in the campaign either way.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I'm in the New York area. Fox News's studio shows are broadcast FROM here, but they're not OTA here.What market are they OTA in?
Admittedly with no data to hand, the demographic who watches FOX as a source of news likely anti-intellectual, science-denying, god-fearing, economically disenfranchised, and socially regressive.
It looks like you missed at least three words in this sentence. But that's the problem with calling people dumb over the Internet, isn't it?
Anyway, in this chain we're addressing the lie that Fox lies about being the most watched cable news network and that they juice the number through underhanded pressure on the cable companies. (I'm pointing out that Fox's claim, that they are the most watched cable news network, is both true and measured in a meaningful way.
None of that has anything to do with your irrational and ill-informed hatred for Fox's audience.
Fun fact: Just because I draft Tom Brady in my fantasy league doesn't mean I'm a Patriots fan.
OK, fine. But if you thought that Aaron Rodgers* was making football worse because he's only good because his team gets marginal calls in their favor because they're a "good team" and the only evidence of that that doesn't involve marginal calls is due to a massive conspiracy, you'd probably not put him on your fantasy team. Tom Brady was the beneficiary of Spygate, and now gets the benefit of shitty calls because he was good in the Spygate era. That's why, as a Jets fan, I refuse to put any Patriots player on my fantasy team, ever. It's a strategy that's worked out pretty well for me, to the tune of two league titles and a third place finish in the past three years.
By the way, I sympathize with you about the Bears having a terrible front office. The people you talk to in Chicago are right, they do need to clean house. Everybody I talk to in New York thinks their team needs to clean house. The Giants fans hedge a bit because some of the people who need to be fired have won them two Super Bowls. Us Jets fans, of course, don't have that problem.
But this is all a red herring. None of this football talk have anything to do with racist comments by Sony Pictures executives. Another topic that has nothing to do with racist comments by Sony Pictures executives is "Republicans." Rat, this woman is a Democrat, not a Republican. Democrats say racist things sometimes, and they shouldn't do it, but it shouldn't necessarily reflect badly on the Democratic Party as a whole when they do it. However, it's ridiculous to hear this story about a prominent Democrat saying something racist and think "EVERYONE WHO SAYS ANYTHING RACIST IS A REPUBLICAN."
It's ridiculous. And so here you are, right on cue.
*You mentioned elsewhere in the topic that you're from Chicago and you know a lot of Bears fans. I'm writing with the assumption that you are also a Bears fan. If not, replace the Aaron Rodgers reference with the quarterback of your team's rival.
if you still have to ask what is proper etiquette in dealing with a highly educated and well-traveled black man
Rat, once again, you're a colossal moron. She wasn't asking "how to deal with" the president, she was making a shitty and tasteless joke.
you are either ...a Republican
Fun fact: There's no Republicans involved in this story. Like most Hollywood types, the Sony exec here GAVE A SHITLOAD OF MONEY TO OBAMA'S CAMPAIGN.
Believe it or not, you'll never go wrong by just treating American people as people, regardless of their skin color.
But if they vote for someone who Rat doesn't approve of, watch out.
Also, the bonus for doctor's offices and car dealerships doesn't account for the success of Fox's prime time shows. Fox News routinely blows out its competitors in prime time, a time at which most of those businesses are closed and viewers are watching at home.
NAS means "network attached storage." It's a short a, like in the word "attached."
The proper pronunciation of NAS, and thus FreeNAS, rhymes with "ass."
You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.
It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.
(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)
Title II very obviously DID NOT impose a free market, because the company it regulated for most of its existence HAD TO BE BROKEN UP BECAUSE IT WAS A MONOPOLY.
Title II would also not impose actual competition. Unless there are multiple providers capable of serving an address, it's not really a free market. Land line telephone service (currently regulated under Title II) pretty much has one option per area. (Two if you count phone service from the cable company, which is really VoIP rather than an actual land line.)
takeover of resources of a sovereign [Iraq] based on (obvious, at the time, and proven later) lies.
This is categorically false. American troops in Iraq were exposed to chemical weapons during the second Iraq war. At least six American troops were wounded in incidents between 2004 and 2011. When Bush said that Saddam's government retained caches of pre-1991 chemical weapons that he was supposed to destroy under the UN mandate that ended the first Gulf War, this is what he was talking about.
Here's a story from the arch-conservatives at the New York Times story from October of this year on the issue.
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
Every news outlet has programming for conservative viewers.
I'm a conservative. What MSNBC show should I be watching.
AFAIK there is nothing in physics that for a practical purpose puts a limit on information density in space.
Please educate yourself more. This is categorically false.
There's no reason we couldn't use these long range phone frequencies so that every device could form an ipv6 semi non centrailzed meshed network that costs next to nothing to run. Why are we still doing it the old fashioned way? Let's open up the spectrum. It's not finite like the FCC says it is.
Damn, if you had used the word "synergy" it would have been BINGO.
Comcast is in favor of the FCC's Net Neutrality regulations. The FCC's rules were struck down by the courts because Net Neutrality is outside the jurisdiction of the FCC. However, Comcast agreed to follow the FCC's rules anyway (as a condition of their merger with NBC.) Comcast wants to make everyone else hindered by the same rule that they are, so they support Net Neutrality.
I'm not sure the term of the lease, but this is a fixed term lease. The price for the lease is just determined at auction.
But saying the school has "iPads" sounds better than saying it has "tablets" on advertisements.
The LAUSD is a series of public schools. They don't have to advertise. If you live in their geographic footprint and you have kids, you are required by law to send your kids there unless you pay for both the LAUSD AND a private school.
Now, I cannot suggest a good solution yet but I do see the problem.
Microsoft makes a maps tool, an online documents thing, and an e-mail client, all prominently displayed in their search program. Are they violating this "law" too? How are their actions any different than Google's?
Here in the free world, the government is not allowed to enact a law that it is impossible to comply with. EU regulators are just shaking down another American company. Google will probably pay their bribe, and the cycle will continue. Europeans should be embarrassed. Vote against this crap or something.
The EU shouldn't be mandating the browser choice screen, let alone the "search choice" screen. The only reason they're being imposed is because the EU is trying to implement a tax on companies operating outside their jurisdiction.
Indeed - no "stack"...
yet - unless google starts "integrating" the services into each other (integrate - not just share a home page as a starting point). The stack example, indeed, seems misleading here. On the other hand - while you defend google here...
Huh? Google DOES have a stack, however, search works the same whether you're using Google's stack or not. Also, "defending Google" is a dumb way to characterize my post. I mentioned Bing working the same despite a non-MS stack and that Firefox works on Windows. Except for Apple not having a search product of their own, every player in the OS market has a browser and a web search tool. Everyone in the search industry does EXACTLY what Google does here.
- think back to some of the issues in the MS anti-trust case: MS used proceeds from other areas to funnel huge amounts of money into IE development - much more, than any start-up could hope to match.
More work on IE makes a better product for customers. More money spent on software development to make new software means more jobs and more personal income, which is then spread through the economy. This one was good all the way around. (Also, this wasn't an issue at MS's trial.)
By including IE into Windows, for many people (normal users, not people working in IT) they eliminated the need to even look for other browsers - no matter, whether other browsers might have been better.
The inclusion of IE also meant the end for commercial browser makers - as they wouldn't have an alternative source of income. "Netscape" failed, their browser ultimately only growing because it was completely freed and open-sourced
Not quite. Netscape failed because it was buggy and slow, and it tried to be too many things. The Firebird project, later renamed Firefox, "rose from the ashes" of Netscape's open source Mozilla suite. There wasn't too much of the closed source Netscape left in the codebase by the time Firefox got to 1.0 release.
But to address your point, if bundling is so bad, find me a graphical operating system today that DOESN'T come with a web browser made by the company that made the majority of the OS's software. (On a desktop Linux derivative, this will be the Desktop environment.) The EU order against MS with the browser choice screen is a backdoor tax that the EU is laying on an American company because Americans can't vote against the EU.
In google's case, there is no full integration of services - but:
income from the advertising (which the search engine generates / facilitates) supports an ecosystem of other software - a free calendar or documents - services that _depend_ on their ad business generating the income for them. Same as MS Office paying the bills for IE.
I'm pretty sure Google documents is paid for because there's an advanced version of Google documents that's suitable for business use that you have to pay for. In any case, a company reinvesting its profits to make a new product is a good thing.
the same landing page (www.google.com) being a straight entry point to not just the search, but other free offerings unrelated to search (like the news, play, ...) gives those extra services a big head-start over their competition - and one they can't hope to match (no ad space sold on the landing page).
Who the hell uses the landing page? When I want to do a google search, I type the search terms into my web browser's address bar. I have the apps I use bookmarked. I don't think I've seen anyone at straight up Google.com in years.
These things make it more difficult for new enterprises to form - and it's reasonable to expect that any new area popping up on the web, google will not just also try to profit from (which would be fair enough), but they can (easily ab)use their position to help their apps further by giving them
This is very obvious in software where they want you to buy into the Microsoft stack or the Apple stack or the Google stack. If the bits and pieces were compatible and interchangeable you'd see a lot more competition and many smaller third parties providing a few parts.
We're talking about search here. What's the Google Stack here? They have a desktop operating system (Chromebook) a browser (Chrome) and a search engine (Google Search). Google doesn't give me meaningfully different results if I use Microsoft's OS and Mozilla's web browser. I haven't tried this myself, but I hear you can use Google's browser and/or Google's OS to get the same results from Microsoft's search engine that you'd get if you were using the "Microsoft stack."
There is absolutely NO switching cost involved in changing search engines. The European regulators are looking for a bribe here, and I hope Google tells them to crawl the web themselves.
Candidates that are actually supported by actual people will find supporters that voluntarily support them. I'd imagine that candidates that are supported primarily by non-natural "persons" would inherently have a harder time finding such voluntary support, and I feel that would be a good thing.
Candidates aren't supported by non-natural persons. PACs get their money from people earning it and giving it to PACs, with the understanding that the PAC will support candidates and issues that the person who gave the money supports. Lessig feels that he feels that some people give too much money to PACs, and thus that PACs can do too much speaking on behalf of some people. (It just so happens that the people Lessig is referring to also give to PACs that oppose his preferred candidates.) I'm against the very idea of "too much speaking." Allowing people to speak is always preferable to silencing them.
Which candidates were railroaded by the media during the last presidential election? Was it Romney or Obama? Or was it Johnson, Stein, Goode, and Anderson? Did this unlimited money-as-speech approach help Johnson, Stein, Goode, and Anderson overcome this media bias? Or did it help Romney and Obama dominate the conversation, further silencing everyone else?
You're talking about two different issues. The third party candidates you're talking about were unpopular with the electorate, which is why they never had a shot at winning and the media never covered them. There were a few individuals who supported each of them though. Maybe if their supporters weren't limited to the ridiculously low campaign spending limits, they could have put an ad on TV.
Look at Joni Earnst. She will be sworn in as a Senator representing Iowa in January. She's a Republican who ran on the idea of cutting government spending. She first hit it on the map through a TV ad in the primaries where she referred to her childhood job of castrating hogs on an Iowa farm and how it gave her "a lot of experience cutting pork." That ad was clever, it convinced the party establishment that she could win, and it convinced the party base that she'd do what they wanted their Senator to do. The donors got behind her, the voters got behind her, and now she's going to be a Senator.
Any of the third party guys in your statement could theoretically have tried something like that if their bigger donors had given them more money. Maybe it would have worked. If not, their ideas might be too unpopular to get a US President elected, which kind of means that they're not the right people for the job.
Those red herrings dealt with, Romney and Obama didn't dominate the conversation. Except for a few short periods of dumb horserace stuff ("Romney won the first debate! Could he actually be President?) the coverage was all Obama's points. How else do you explain all the coverage of the possibility of banning birth control? No Republican wanted that. Not Todd Akin. Not Romney. Nobody. There was (and there always is) a fundamental non-curiosity about the Republican candidates ideas and points, except to the extent it takes to bury them.
For example, it was obvious at the time that the Benghazi attacks were not the result of a spontaneous protest that got out of hand. Al Qaeda attacked that consulate, and they did it after Obama spent six months claiming that "bin Laden is dead and GM is alive." But God forbid anyone in the media start asking questions about why that didn't add up until after the election. Everyone admits it was a terrorist attack NOW, but the media covered for Obama until after the election.
If you trust politicians to the extent that you actually believe giving them more money increases the amount of truth they broadcast, we have a fundamentally different view of human nature. Can you say with a straight face that a publicly financed campaign of publishing verified information about all the candidates (f
Under current law, groups of individuals who feel a candidate isn't being treated fairly by the media (positively OR negatively) have other options to get their message out. Lessig's restrictions on free speech would take that away.
Would it, though? As far as I understand the restrictions being proposed, it would only impact those groups of individuals' spending. It would have no impact on non-spending speech.
I'm not sure how you expect a group to get their message out without paying people to do so. Banners and flyers cost money too. It's not just TV ads. Your campaign staff needs to put food on the table and a roof over their head. In order to find out that your opponent is lying in their book, you need to come up with a copy of the book, which probably means buying one. That all requires spending money.
In addition, Lessig intends to set up a two tiered system, where candidates that the media supports are allowed to have an outside group (the media) spend money on their behalf, in addition to their "non-spending speech." Candidates not supported by the media only have the "non-spending speech," which is of course unworkable in practice. Also of note, Lessig's bet, and he's talked about this, is that the candidates he personally supports are the ones that get support from the traditional media.
Personally, the spending of vast sums of money on campaigns makes me uneasy. I don't like the idea of elections being bought. That's my personal stance regardless of whether or not money is the primary determining factor in who is elected
This argument is just "money is bad because I say so." It's not "money is bad because it has an outsized effect" or "money is bad because it makes people do things they wouldn't otherwise do" or "This system is bad because some people are/would be treated unfairly under it." It's just "money is bad because it makes me uneasy."
To say that the side with more money wins is an oversimplification. All other things being equal, the side with more money wins. That being said, all other things are seldom equal. In any case, I still thing the influence of money in politics, however large or small, is clearly nonzero. Any nonzero influence of money on politics, I believe, corrupts the nature of democracy.
I'm not sure what your idea of the "nature of democracy" is. I prefer one correlated with an idea from free market theory. One of the conditions that makes a market free is that all actors have perfect knowledge of the available products. In this case, that's voters having perfect knowledge of the candidates. Clearly, 100% perfect knowledge is unattainable, but in order to make an informed choice, voters need to know what candidates stand for. There's only three ways a candidate can do that. They can either do it themselves personally, which doesn't scale, pay their supporters to help them, which costs money, or have outside groups (including the media) help them, which also costs money.
Lessig would prevent all the outside groups from informing people about candidates except for a group that supports the same candidates that he supports. You don't think that corrupts the nature of democracy?
My argument, which I've bolded for this time, groups of people can buy ads. If you can't find a group of people who agree with you, maybe your position is unpopular with voters.
actually its not. Your position is that if you can't find someone *with money* that agrees with you, then your views are not worthwhile. Which of course is the entire premise. Or mabey you concept of voting, is that you beleive that votes should count as much as your willing to pay for them?
You spend a lot of time accusing me of using strawman fallacies, but then literally tell me that my position isn't my position. Come the hell on. You're supposed to wait a little bit before you try to rewrite history.
It's incredibly hard to understand what you write when you don't consistently capitalize the first words in sentences, spell words wrong, and refuse to use the Slashdot quote function.
I could ask you to confront my message, but that seems to be your weak point.
My weak point is responding to trolls who HAVE TO BE not using the quote function or the spell checker built into their browser correctly to piss me off. Also, I confronted your message IN THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE, which you must know, because you ALREADY "QUOTED" IT.
My thesis, as I'm arging elsewhere, is that Lessig's effect was small and his candidates were unpopular for FAR more important reasons.
the reason you gave is that citizens united is popular ruling. I provided evidence to the contrary, you provided nothing.
Your evidence didn't really show what you think it did, and in any case, it isn't valid any more. I'll tell you what. If your next post is grammatically correct, you use the Slashdot quote function correctly at least once, and all the words are spelled correctly, I'll find you an opinion poll of the 2014 electorate that says that nobody is in favor of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. That's if you win the bet. If you fail to complete those three tasks, then I win the bet and I get to stop wasting my time figuring out what the hell you meant.
A Billionare shouldn't have any more voice than anyone else. One man, one vote, one voice.
Right, but a group of people shouldn't lose their voice because the group contains someone who you don't like. A bunch of men with a bunch of votes saying the same thing are going to be louder than one man with his one ridiculous, misspelled opinion.
because one has to do with facts, and the other has to do with wild conjecture. If you want to talk about modern restrictions on freedom of speech their are whole tomes of evidence of the FBI suppressing dissent under Hoover...
Modern restrictions... under Hoover. OK.
...or even what happened to some occupy protestors.
Again, you're the one in favor of letting the government harass people for saying things the government dislikes.
That's not how speech works. If you want to speak, you speak. If I want to speak, I speak. If a bunch of people agree with your ideas, you can collect money and run an ad too. If nobody agrees with your position or the ad you want to run, maybe you should rethink your position.
but thats not my argument. My argument is that speech is de-facto limited via money, because TV ads are expensive and cost prohibtive for most inviduals. People with more money to spend on TV ads have a distinct advantage because they have more money to spend, so hence my argument.
Right. My argument, which I've bolded for this time, is that groups of people can buy ads. If you can't find a group of people who agree with you, maybe your position is unpopular with voters.
If I understand what you mean correctly, you're saying that in the post-Citizens United world, only billionaire Republicans are able to start PACs and run ads. This is incredibly dishonest.Plenty of liberal billionaires are out there supporting liberal candidates and liberal causes
and thats a strawman. I didn't specify liberals, conservatives, democrats or republicans. Mabey if we improved public schooling, you'd understand critical thinking some more, to understand what that means.
I'm proud of the zing about school choice, but I was serious too. Whether this is your argument or not, this is in fact the argument Lessig is making.
The difference between what liberal groups spend and what conservative groups spend is ultimately a rounding error.
and thats somewhat my point, the political narrative is run soley by billionares. its unreasonable for anyone, either liberal or conservative to bring up issues that effect them in real life.
I didn't understand what you meant the first time through. It's incredibly hard to understand what you write when you don't consistently capitalize the first words in sentences, spell words wrong, and refuse to use the Slashdot quote function. But regardless, a political mainstream exists. There's billionaires that agree with Lessig. George Soros probably agrees with you. There's billionaires that agree with me. Someone's opinions don't suddenly become invalid because they have a lot of money, do they?
;My thesis is that Lessig's candidates lost in part because the freedom of speech restrictions he wants to enact are unpopular with voters
your thesis doesn't include a multitude of other options, and mine is that the issue had no bearing on the elections whatsoever
My thesis, as I'm arging elsewhere, is that Lessig's effect was small and his candidates were unpopular for FAR more important reasons.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021701151.html
but like the rest of your thinking, its based soley on politically convienct conjecture, and like the rest of my thinking, its based soley on research. But fucking commies and their damn research. In bed with devil-worshiping scientists I tell you. (76 percent of republicans tend to disagree with you as well as 81 percent of dems).
You're quoting a story from four years ago. Since then, one of our nation's political parties has used the IRS to target its political enemies at the national level, abused the legal system to attack donors to a popular state governor and reached into churches on multiple occasions to try to intimidate religious leaders to restrict their preaching to government approved topics. First Amendment restrictions are more unpopular now than they were in 2010 because Obama and the Democrats have been showing that if you give the government half a chance, the government will attack people who criticize it.
What isn't conjecture is the gov
That is an argument why the news should have additional regulations about political coverage, especially with regards to libel and slander laws.
That's a terrible idea. It's a horrible idea to criminalize saying things the guy in power doesn't like. That's why the news, as terrible as it is right now, shouldn't be restricted and it's why people should be allowed to organize and run ads criticizing the government , or the news, or a candidate, or whoever.
Like 100 dollars per person per year. Warren Buffet, Koch Brothers, anyone. 100 dollars per year directly to a candidate or political party.
Under your scheme, Warren Buffet gets to give $100 to Democrats. The Koch brothers get to give $100 to Republicans. There's two Koch brothers, so they'll probably split it $50 a piece. Warren Buffet gets to give twice as much as either Charles or David Koch.
This is only marginally less thought out than Lessig's plan. The Democrats and Republicans spent pretty much the same amount on the election campaign that just ended, yet one side had a decisive victory. If money was the biggest mover, the Democrats would have been a lot closed.
I'm interpreting Lessig's ideas as charitably as possible. I've only heard him propose bad ideas for restricting PACs. I don't want to accuse him of trying to muzzle individuals unless I know it's true.
Generally speaking, an election is won by the candidate with the largest purse. There are occasionally exceptions, and sometimes a political platform plays a bigger role than campaign funding. However, those are exceptions, not the norm. Any impartial observer of the political process in this country acknowledge this reality.
The pro campaign finance restriction group Center for Responsive Politics points out that both parties spent roughly the same amount on the elections. (This includes if you compare direct expenditures by a Democrat campaign to direct expenditures by a Republican campaign, expenditures by the campaigns plus by the party apparatuses, and campaigns, parties, and PACs combined.) They spent about the same, but one side was elected at a far greater rate. I don't think the problem is as big as you're making it sound.
Do you believe that if Lessig were successful, there would be some harmful impact on free speech?
Lessig's restrictions only apply to individuals, groups, and some companies. Notably, they don't apply to media companies, who, due to freedom of the press, are allowed to cover the campaigns however they want. Under current law, groups of individuals who feel a candidate isn't being treated fairly by the media (positively OR negatively) have other options to get their message out. Lessig's restrictions on free speech would take that away.
And now, just to bring it full circle, remember that Lessig's PAC itself doesn't exist to convince people to support campaign finance restrictions. It exists to convince legislators to enact restrictions Lessig supports.
But if they aren't in office, what's he going to do? IIRC six of his candidates weren't *that* likely to win, rather he just funded them in the hopes that it pushes them into office, and THEN they work towards his goal.
Yes. Exactly that. Some of the commentary relating to the loss of anti-gun incumbents in the Colorado recalls that you referenced earlier related to the fact that part of the reason that people hadn't supported gun restrictions before is that the NRA's PACs would mobilize voters against them. Bloomberg promised the Colorado incumbents that his anti-gun PACs would be able to protect candidates from the NRA.
It didn't work, and one of the lessons of the Colorado recall is that in large parts of the country, voters will reject an overtly anti-gun message. But a second lesson is that pro-gun groups can mobilize supporters better than anti-gun groups in most of the country. Thus, elected officials are less likely to join Bloomberg's anti-gun groups or enact Bloomberg's legislation.
On the other hand, according to exit polling, campaign finance reform wasn't really on the minds of most Americans, no matter how much the Lessig or the media wish it was. By and large, the losers in Lessig's group lost because they were either Democrats who were tied to closely to Obama or Republicans challenging incredibly safe Democratic seats. I'm not sure that any actual candidate or PAC gave a speech or ran an ad opposing Lessig's guys because they wanted to limit free speech.
Unlike Bloomberg's group, I don't think Lessig made a difference in the campaign either way.