Dell has also launched a series of TV ads boasting of their Linux support, cheek to jowl with other ads for consumer mainstays like cars and drugs. It's exciting knowing that we've got a computer product that works the way we want (however that is, by changing it ourselves), that is just about to leap into the growth that the mass market fires up.
I don't know where they get this "urban" sprawl factor. Actual cities discourage cars, in favor of mass transit and just redundantly available places to go that encourage walking, not driving. Cities like NYC are defined primarily by the unusual word "propinquity", "mutual proximity among things". Near enough that cars aren't practical, indeed squeezing out cars, but not so near that you don't burn a few calories walking to them.
Of course, NYC's bustling delivery services take propinquity even further to fatten the lazy. But as a delivery connoisseur who travels, I can tell you that it's only MEGAurban centers that suffer from this convenience surplus. Even in sprawling "megurbs", the outer reaches of the sprawl don't deliver.
As usual, it's the suburbs, and the cities which act like suburbs, which are throwing out the balances. By which I mean tipping the scales towards laziness and fatness.
This valuation scheme is yet another example of how bankers pretend money is simpler than it really is to protect rich people and screw poor people.
If you've got only enough money to eat and get shelter, that iPod is worth nothing to you. You won't trade any of your 2000 calories of diet for it, even if it cost only the equivalent of a few dozen calories.
If you've got $BILLIONS, you'll pay $200 or $300 for the iPod just as fast. In fact, many billionaires will pay $300 or $500 (maybe more, I don't have $BILLIONS) for an iPod if fewer people have one, to be among the few with the new toy at its highest price. Which also defies the "network effect" of media products, which are generally more valuable the more people have them, for their increased value in communicating among the network.
So the iPod as "neutral" currency would be worth replacing quite a lot of cheese sandwiches to rich people, but none to poor people. If the poor person had to get an iPod from the rich person to exchange for the cheese sandwich, they'd never do enough to get one, and starve.
Money, despite its apparent simplicity, is nonlinear in many ways (ask stockmarket manipulators). The very simplest model of actual economics has to separate the subsistence essentials from the rest. Money spent on food, shelter (including utilities), children's education, medicine/hygiene is much more valuable per "dollar" than money spent on caviar. It's one reason why taxes are so complicated (and why simple sales tax on everything but the essentials is so fair and powerful).
This latest scam, by an Australian bank, is just another way to take more money from the poor, by minimizing their access to buying power. It will work, like most scams, primarily because the poor are less likely to even hear about this new influence on their money, or to understand it if they do. Though many will recognize its effect: another voodoo spell cast by the rich on the poor for more riches, using a fetish object they can recognize but never get for themselves.
I recognized the name "Richard Viguerie" immediately as the "Direct Mail" godfather of "Conservative" media manipulation. He's the main sponsor of Karl Rove, since the Nixon era Direct Marketing Association pioneered junk mail/fax/calls/stalking. Viguerie of late has led the "Bush isn't Conservative enough" lurch deeper into fascism. His agenda is to monopolize media for use by his personal political network, regardless of whether they still call themselves "Conservative", "Republican" or even "American".
So I looked more closely when his direct mail call to arms called out only Republicans. It wasn't hard to see that Viguerie's own organization was what he was protecting with his action - which is all he's ever done, and very successfully. But it's also true that Section 220 does require bloggers with over 500 readers to register, despite the Register's gloss over that fact. And the Section 220 that we were discusing does include employers as "funders over $25K". We could debate an infinity of "fixed" versions, but we were debating the actual Section 220, which was unacceptable, even if Viguerie agreed.
The main point on which you and I disagreed was the extreme difference between public advocacy and private lobbying. We have the right to publish anything we want (that is true and doesn't instigate a riot - though that last bit seems more like a privilege of the crowd). But the privileged access to officials that lobbyists get is a privilege. Which trumps the right of everyone to petition the government for redress of grievances, when lobbyists fill the limited schedule first. While anyone can publish, especially these days of the Web. Registering lobbyists is essential to track their privileged activities, until we abolish them. Registering publishers is just intimidation and across the line into censorship.
But what I'm really looking for is some better discussion of the deeply partisan spin favoring Republicans in "We just want to see zee papers", the post to which we've all been nominally replying since I posted my own debunk of its partisan accuastion. Framing Democrats as the exclusive sponsors of the registration section is quite wrong - even though many Democrats were involved. And the kind of thing at which Richard Viguerie and his Republican subsidiary excels. Despite all our long discussion of this bill, no one has dealt with that first complaint.
Penn is a punk, like Sid Vicious. Or like Pete Townshend: he's got talent, and uses it to pose as a "magician", "skeptic", or whatever form he's jumping into. Once in the suit, he uses it to attack the instruments and performances of the pros. He's fun, but he's a poser, most dangerous to anyone who takes him too seriously.
I watched one of those _Bullshit_ episodes once, because I was a fan of Penn & Teller in the 1980s, when they were funny and punks (in the late 1990s I had the dubious honor to easily heckle them performing in a backroom at an NYC computer convention, showing how low they'll go). It was loaded with badly sourced, self-serving, cherry picked bullshit: "rebunking" some conventional wisdom.
So I wasn't surprised when it took me only a minute to google up plenty of debunks to their claims that PETA's exec exploits animals unethically. Namely, the fact that insulin hasn't been derived from bovine sources for a long time, and the animal testing of insulin was only in 1921.
Besides, yeast isn't animals, so AFAIK PETA has nothing against exploiting it. And I don't think that even exploiting animals to make insulin or other lifesaving drugs is necessarily unethical. Hell, I don't think that raising animals for fur is unethical, as long as they're not tortured while they're alive. But without an actual citation of Penn & Teller's actual source on their questionable accusation, it's hard to find whether their accusation is warranted.
FWIW, Penn & Teller pose as "skeptics" on their show, when they're just doubters. Real skeptics would check Penn & Teller's _Bullshit_ sources, as I just did, before citing them publicly. And realize that outrageous claims require extraordinary evidence.
Can you imagine what "mulling" is like at the executive level of these big music publishers?
A roomful of people unfit to work in any industry not underwritten by a century-old monopoly. Whose added value lies in conning artists into working for a tiny fraction of the value they create, or their weight in drugs, whichever is less. Or in conning consumers to pay over and again for either some good products produced as "pop" generations ago, or some awful products produced more recently that they sell to children as soundtracks to free music videos and the lives of talentless celebrity models.
These people don't "mull". All they can do is whine and fail when their crooked old tricks don't work so good any more. Years of lying about DRM and piracy hasn't reversed the drop in their profits, as the least-dumb people have all fled their business. Their decisions are made mainly by listening to tech vendors tricking them into broken tech protection of a broken business model, instead of changing the model. If they do drop DRM before they go permanently broke, it'll be because they can't afford it themselves, or just because they screw up their stupid strategy by making irrecoverable mistakes implementing it.
Information might not want to be free, but nature abhors a vacuum. The empty space at the top of the music content pyramid is sucking control of all that content inevitably out to unimpeded access by any consumer who wants it.
Good - the world needs more competition fueling peaceful space industries. And more stakeholders across national borders in space property, so there's more complex consequences to blowing stuff up out there.
Now, where will the quality ratings come from? A "Consumer Reports" or "JD Power" testing report for these services of varying cost and quality?
Yeah, except that everyone I know is asking me whether the iPhone is going to change their world the way the iPod changed everyone else's. More than ever wanted to know about the iPod when it was announced, though the iPod took over the world.
Besides, who's to say that Jobs isn't underpromising? When the iPhone is even cooler than Jobs promised, will these doomsayers eat their words? Buy me an iPhone?
I wish I could subscribe to an online DB populated by people I trust (selectable) who identify spam meta/data patterns themselves. When a dozen of my trustees agree that a pattern is spam, it's default spam unless proven otherwise. This defense uses spam's enabling characteristic against itself: lots of copies of the same BS email posing as personal communications.
My favorite spams are the ones with "news" headlines as subjects. They started out late last year echoing some of the more popular news stories. A better cross-section of all news on the Net than any newsreader, with less than no effort by me to compile them. So my New Year's resolution was to read all my spam. But since midmonth, the headlines have turned more speculative. The same stuff, but apparently from slightly in the future. Controversial global figures are now reported to be dead, imminent wars/invasions now reported as underway.
I wonder if maybe some Russian spammer gang has grabbed a disaffected physicist, repurposing their time machine to the more profitable spam that's perhaps legally compliant or just evasive through exploiting some temporal loophole.
My resolution has already paid off. Enough of the stock pumps have delivered "ahead of schedule" that I'm paying someone to read my spams for me. Though I've been getting a higher percentage reporting my own kidnapping by an unnamed employee...
Nice post! Sorry some douche with mod-points buried your thoughtful efforts.
Thanks. I tack on those trollMod critiques partly for the benefit of metamodders, but I don't believe in them, either. Call it Pascal's Metamod Wager - it's metamodphysics!
PS: Ease up on the atheism a little! Most so-called Christians have an enormous amount to learn from their savior.
Why? Those "Christians" can learn from Jesus' literary legacy, or about it from me. I'm not just an "atheist", I care enough about truth and metaphysics that I'm a deicider. In fact, I'm the antithesis to Bush, an antichrist, who's been misquoted (or quoted while misunderesteeming) saying he's "The Decider", when he's trying to monopolize all the fun by running Jesus into the ground (and deeper) as "The DEICIDER". I have nothing to gain, and much to lose, easing up on the atheism. If Christians don't like it, that's their problem - it turns them out when they react with Inquisition and other antichristian crusades.
All the more reason to keep your personal data encrypted on a server (or two) that you control, and log everyone to whom you give a copy of any of it.
And all the more reason to pressure your state/local/Federal governments towards a Privacy Amendment to the (respective) Constitution. Which would reiterate the 4th Amendment (and implicit) rights to privacy in your "papers and effects". By requiring the government to protect your privacy by restricting copying/transmitting your personal data to only within the scope of the transaction into which you sent it, or authorized it's sending, unless explicitly authorized by you.
We can slow down the data invaders with tech. But we will never stop the cat & mouse game unless we outlaw their advantage in attacking us, protecting us from their unwarranted invasions of our essential privacy. Otherwise we've surrendered.
Countering a message pretending that Bush's warrantless NSA spying wasn't illegal with a link to the Federal court decision that it was is "Flamebait"? Or maybe pointing out that such a crime is impeachable is "Flamebait"? Or maybe pointing out yet another impeachable crime already underway, an Iran War, that can be stopped before it kills thousands, maybe millions, is "Flamebait"? Maybe pointing out that the 109th (Republican) Congress was under Karl Rove's political control is "Flamebait".
No, that's all just simple reality, directly contradicting the claim that Bush's crimes are legal, and ontopic to the story we're discussing. Just because fascist Bushbabies are pisspants crybabies doesn't make that message a flame, it makes them hairtrigger partisan zombie trollMods.
If they replaced millions of electronic photodetectors (photodiodes, CCDs, whatever) with a single cheaper, more consistently colored mirror, that they micropositioned millions of times to scan an image extremely quickly, without suffering the skew distortion from vibrations while scanning, then this could be a much cheaper, more consistent imaging device, Maybe much much smaller, and maybe getting much higher yields than large photodetector arrays which lose parts to defects per mm^2. But is an array of MEMs mirrors really cheaper than electronics?
I've watching S.1 being debated in the Senate right now. The "Grassroots Lobbying" amendment is being voted right now, live, as I post this message.
There is a tremendous difference between direct physical access to the lawmaker and their staff, and publishing to the public. Of course I'm against Section 220, because it would criminalize mere publishers and advocates, who don't have direct physical access to the lawmaker and their staff, who don't register. That's different from what I am for, which is requiring publishers who take money for their advocacy to disclose publicly, eg as they publish, their sponsors.
I work with the NY City Council (NYC legislature), advising the staff of the Technology committee. I know the value of real lobbying, the direct access to the officials, in influencing legislation, even among noncorrupt officials who need info, opinions, and are human, subject to "social engineering. And I know how much more influential, and unaccountable is actual lobbying, than publishing advocacy, or encouraging it. Because I see it - and I even do it, as I work directly to develop policies and frame hearings which inform policies. I'm not a lobbyist, I'm not paid or even asked by any interested parties outside the government to advocate any position. But many committees use people in my role who are actual lobbyists. That role is very different, much more influential than published advocacy. And more influential than most individual constituents. While also much more exclusive: only a few people get the access that I do, that lobbyists get. That's unfair to (most, except "special friends" even more unfairly better connected) constituents, but it's how they run it. Until government prioritizes all constituents for access in officials' calendars before any lobbyist, which I'd prefer, other rules (which are actually possible to pass) must serve. But controlling mere publishers, whose work is done in public, doesn't really improve the governance of the influence of legislation. In fact, by hampering just anyone who publishes, which is open to practically anyone with the Internet, such a rule would impede the equitable influence of the general public. But paid published advocacy does interfere with equitable access to influence of legislation. There is a case to be made that only corporations should have to disclose their payments, not private individuals, but that's unworkable, and a weak case, anyway.
You are trying to say that lobbying, paid journalism and just journalism are all the same. I know from experience, and have shown with definitions, that they are very different in their effects on legislation/administration, and qualitatively different in degree of insidiousness. This bill, in Section 220, also throws bloggers into the restrictions appropriate to lobbyists, though it does appropriately require paid journalists to disclose. That's where I stand, and I haven't seen any convincing arguments to the contrary.
The point you and I are circling each other on is the difference between lobbying and journalism. They both can fall under advocacy.
But lobbying, as I keep saying, is not merely "political speech". Lobbying is defined by various specific criteria, none of which are merely speech. Mostly, it's privileged access to officials, more than the general public. Transactions, some exchanging value, are allowed, and regulated, that otherwise would be "bribes" and "graft". It's clear to me that they're still bribes and graft, but not under lobbying law, which regulates them rather than eliminate them. Lobbying is private, personal access to officials by specific individuals.
Journalism is different. There's no personal access. It's not a private meeting. Journalists don't write laws that politicians introduce, sponsor and vote on. Journalists speak to the public.
That is hugely different. As I said, there clearly need to be laws requiring payments for political advocacy to be disclosed. But not registration with the government of mere political speech. Two separate issues. One legit, another tyrannical.
What is the problem with private people paying nonjournalists, mere celebrities, to advocate their politics in person? What's unfair about that? Other political advocates can raise money and argue - I prefer a celebrity deathmatch.
If you're pointing out that rich people can pay for more advertisements of their interests, including political, that is unfair. That's capitalism. I'd like to change it, especially campaign finance. But that's got nothing to do with the registration of journalists. The required disclosure of paid journalism goes towards that, by letting the "marketplace of ideas" decide, with sufficient info about sponsorship to filter the propaganda. If "lobbyists" sponsor journalism, then they are very regulated: they are registered as lobbyists, including their party affiliation. And their appearances in officials' calendars is published, while various activities are restricted - including new restrictions in the original, unamended S.1. Their sponsored journalists would disclose the lobbyists who'd paid them - if lobbyists actually did so, which I have not ever heard they have. Lobbyists lobby officials directly, not in paid journalism. But they would still be highly regulated, especially after passage of S.1. Mere advocates, like you or I, if we wanted, have no special advantage in influencing officials. If we were paid, we'd have to disclose that advantage. If we were merely rich, we wouldn't have to explain so, though that might be an improvement: disclosure of any income by any publisher - but we're far from that, instead relying on the public to decide for themselves what are the interests of the journalists, despite their mythical "objectivity".
So the problem we're having in this discussion is conflation of "journalist" and "lobbyist" into simply "lobbyist". They're different in the essential advantage of private access.
Gee, my detailed debunking of theocon propaganda triggers the trollMods. I wonder what they'll say when I tell them that god is a figment of your imagination?
Slashdot Mirror
Dell has also launched a series of TV ads boasting of their Linux support, cheek to jowl with other ads for consumer mainstays like cars and drugs. It's exciting knowing that we've got a computer product that works the way we want (however that is, by changing it ourselves), that is just about to leap into the growth that the mass market fires up.
I don't know where they get this "urban" sprawl factor. Actual cities discourage cars, in favor of mass transit and just redundantly available places to go that encourage walking, not driving. Cities like NYC are defined primarily by the unusual word "propinquity", "mutual proximity among things". Near enough that cars aren't practical, indeed squeezing out cars, but not so near that you don't burn a few calories walking to them.
Of course, NYC's bustling delivery services take propinquity even further to fatten the lazy. But as a delivery connoisseur who travels, I can tell you that it's only MEGAurban centers that suffer from this convenience surplus. Even in sprawling "megurbs", the outer reaches of the sprawl don't deliver.
As usual, it's the suburbs, and the cities which act like suburbs, which are throwing out the balances. By which I mean tipping the scales towards laziness and fatness.
This valuation scheme is yet another example of how bankers pretend money is simpler than it really is to protect rich people and screw poor people.
If you've got only enough money to eat and get shelter, that iPod is worth nothing to you. You won't trade any of your 2000 calories of diet for it, even if it cost only the equivalent of a few dozen calories.
If you've got $BILLIONS, you'll pay $200 or $300 for the iPod just as fast. In fact, many billionaires will pay $300 or $500 (maybe more, I don't have $BILLIONS) for an iPod if fewer people have one, to be among the few with the new toy at its highest price. Which also defies the "network effect" of media products, which are generally more valuable the more people have them, for their increased value in communicating among the network.
So the iPod as "neutral" currency would be worth replacing quite a lot of cheese sandwiches to rich people, but none to poor people. If the poor person had to get an iPod from the rich person to exchange for the cheese sandwich, they'd never do enough to get one, and starve.
Money, despite its apparent simplicity, is nonlinear in many ways (ask stockmarket manipulators). The very simplest model of actual economics has to separate the subsistence essentials from the rest. Money spent on food, shelter (including utilities), children's education, medicine/hygiene is much more valuable per "dollar" than money spent on caviar. It's one reason why taxes are so complicated (and why simple sales tax on everything but the essentials is so fair and powerful).
This latest scam, by an Australian bank, is just another way to take more money from the poor, by minimizing their access to buying power. It will work, like most scams, primarily because the poor are less likely to even hear about this new influence on their money, or to understand it if they do. Though many will recognize its effect: another voodoo spell cast by the rich on the poor for more riches, using a fetish object they can recognize but never get for themselves.
I recognized the name "Richard Viguerie" immediately as the "Direct Mail" godfather of "Conservative" media manipulation. He's the main sponsor of Karl Rove, since the Nixon era Direct Marketing Association pioneered junk mail/fax/calls/stalking. Viguerie of late has led the "Bush isn't Conservative enough" lurch deeper into fascism. His agenda is to monopolize media for use by his personal political network, regardless of whether they still call themselves "Conservative", "Republican" or even "American".
So I looked more closely when his direct mail call to arms called out only Republicans. It wasn't hard to see that Viguerie's own organization was what he was protecting with his action - which is all he's ever done, and very successfully. But it's also true that Section 220 does require bloggers with over 500 readers to register, despite the Register's gloss over that fact. And the Section 220 that we were discusing does include employers as "funders over $25K". We could debate an infinity of "fixed" versions, but we were debating the actual Section 220, which was unacceptable, even if Viguerie agreed.
The main point on which you and I disagreed was the extreme difference between public advocacy and private lobbying. We have the right to publish anything we want (that is true and doesn't instigate a riot - though that last bit seems more like a privilege of the crowd). But the privileged access to officials that lobbyists get is a privilege. Which trumps the right of everyone to petition the government for redress of grievances, when lobbyists fill the limited schedule first. While anyone can publish, especially these days of the Web. Registering lobbyists is essential to track their privileged activities, until we abolish them. Registering publishers is just intimidation and across the line into censorship.
But what I'm really looking for is some better discussion of the deeply partisan spin favoring Republicans in "We just want to see zee papers", the post to which we've all been nominally replying since I posted my own debunk of its partisan accuastion. Framing Democrats as the exclusive sponsors of the registration section is quite wrong - even though many Democrats were involved. And the kind of thing at which Richard Viguerie and his Republican subsidiary excels. Despite all our long discussion of this bill, no one has dealt with that first complaint.
Penn is a punk, like Sid Vicious. Or like Pete Townshend: he's got talent, and uses it to pose as a "magician", "skeptic", or whatever form he's jumping into. Once in the suit, he uses it to attack the instruments and performances of the pros. He's fun, but he's a poser, most dangerous to anyone who takes him too seriously.
I watched one of those _Bullshit_ episodes once, because I was a fan of Penn & Teller in the 1980s, when they were funny and punks (in the late 1990s I had the dubious honor to easily heckle them performing in a backroom at an NYC computer convention, showing how low they'll go). It was loaded with badly sourced, self-serving, cherry picked bullshit: "rebunking" some conventional wisdom.
So I wasn't surprised when it took me only a minute to google up plenty of debunks to their claims that PETA's exec exploits animals unethically. Namely, the fact that insulin hasn't been derived from bovine sources for a long time, and the animal testing of insulin was only in 1921.
Besides, yeast isn't animals, so AFAIK PETA has nothing against exploiting it. And I don't think that even exploiting animals to make insulin or other lifesaving drugs is necessarily unethical. Hell, I don't think that raising animals for fur is unethical, as long as they're not tortured while they're alive. But without an actual citation of Penn & Teller's actual source on their questionable accusation, it's hard to find whether their accusation is warranted.
FWIW, Penn & Teller pose as "skeptics" on their show, when they're just doubters. Real skeptics would check Penn & Teller's _Bullshit_ sources, as I just did, before citing them publicly. And realize that outrageous claims require extraordinary evidence.
The people who run PETA are kinda crazy. But do you have any evidence that they're the kind of hypocrites you call them?
How the hell do they do that? Self-powering a bioimplant sounds even more exciting than the holy grail of "eyesight to the blind".
Can you imagine what "mulling" is like at the executive level of these big music publishers?
A roomful of people unfit to work in any industry not underwritten by a century-old monopoly. Whose added value lies in conning artists into working for a tiny fraction of the value they create, or their weight in drugs, whichever is less. Or in conning consumers to pay over and again for either some good products produced as "pop" generations ago, or some awful products produced more recently that they sell to children as soundtracks to free music videos and the lives of talentless celebrity models.
These people don't "mull". All they can do is whine and fail when their crooked old tricks don't work so good any more. Years of lying about DRM and piracy hasn't reversed the drop in their profits, as the least-dumb people have all fled their business. Their decisions are made mainly by listening to tech vendors tricking them into broken tech protection of a broken business model, instead of changing the model. If they do drop DRM before they go permanently broke, it'll be because they can't afford it themselves, or just because they screw up their stupid strategy by making irrecoverable mistakes implementing it.
Information might not want to be free, but nature abhors a vacuum. The empty space at the top of the music content pyramid is sucking control of all that content inevitably out to unimpeded access by any consumer who wants it.
Good - the world needs more competition fueling peaceful space industries. And more stakeholders across national borders in space property, so there's more complex consequences to blowing stuff up out there.
Now, where will the quality ratings come from? A "Consumer Reports" or "JD Power" testing report for these services of varying cost and quality?
Yeah, except that everyone I know is asking me whether the iPhone is going to change their world the way the iPod changed everyone else's. More than ever wanted to know about the iPod when it was announced, though the iPod took over the world.
Besides, who's to say that Jobs isn't underpromising? When the iPhone is even cooler than Jobs promised, will these doomsayers eat their words? Buy me an iPhone?
I wish I could subscribe to an online DB populated by people I trust (selectable) who identify spam meta/data patterns themselves. When a dozen of my trustees agree that a pattern is spam, it's default spam unless proven otherwise. This defense uses spam's enabling characteristic against itself: lots of copies of the same BS email posing as personal communications.
My favorite spams are the ones with "news" headlines as subjects. They started out late last year echoing some of the more popular news stories. A better cross-section of all news on the Net than any newsreader, with less than no effort by me to compile them. So my New Year's resolution was to read all my spam. But since midmonth, the headlines have turned more speculative. The same stuff, but apparently from slightly in the future. Controversial global figures are now reported to be dead, imminent wars/invasions now reported as underway.
I wonder if maybe some Russian spammer gang has grabbed a disaffected physicist, repurposing their time machine to the more profitable spam that's perhaps legally compliant or just evasive through exploiting some temporal loophole.
My resolution has already paid off. Enough of the stock pumps have delivered "ahead of schedule" that I'm paying someone to read my spams for me. Though I've been getting a higher percentage reporting my own kidnapping by an unnamed employee...
Thanks. I tack on those trollMod critiques partly for the benefit of metamodders, but I don't believe in them, either. Call it Pascal's Metamod Wager - it's metamodphysics!
Why? Those "Christians" can learn from Jesus' literary legacy, or about it from me. I'm not just an "atheist", I care enough about truth and metaphysics that I'm a deicider . In fact, I'm the antithesis to Bush, an antichrist, who's been misquoted (or quoted while misunderesteeming) saying he's "The Decider", when he's trying to monopolize all the fun by running Jesus into the ground (and deeper) as "The DEICIDER". I have nothing to gain, and much to lose, easing up on the atheism. If Christians don't like it, that's their problem - it turns them out when they react with Inquisition and other antichristian crusades.
All the more reason to keep your personal data encrypted on a server (or two) that you control, and log everyone to whom you give a copy of any of it.
And all the more reason to pressure your state/local/Federal governments towards a Privacy Amendment to the (respective) Constitution. Which would reiterate the 4th Amendment (and implicit) rights to privacy in your "papers and effects". By requiring the government to protect your privacy by restricting copying/transmitting your personal data to only within the scope of the transaction into which you sent it, or authorized it's sending, unless explicitly authorized by you.
We can slow down the data invaders with tech. But we will never stop the cat & mouse game unless we outlaw their advantage in attacking us, protecting us from their unwarranted invasions of our essential privacy. Otherwise we've surrendered.
Moderation -1
100% Flamebait
NSA trollModBot is wedged on "Flamebait". Can't the latest version sometimes trollMod as "Offtopic" or "Troll"?
Can't watermarks in lossy format media data just be wiped out by shuffling the low bits in which the watermark is encoded?
I bet they RFID tattoo all the "detainees" in Children of Men.
Moderation -2
100% Flamebait
Countering a message pretending that Bush's warrantless NSA spying wasn't illegal with a link to the Federal court decision that it was is "Flamebait"? Or maybe pointing out that such a crime is impeachable is "Flamebait"? Or maybe pointing out yet another impeachable crime already underway, an Iran War, that can be stopped before it kills thousands, maybe millions, is "Flamebait"? Maybe pointing out that the 109th (Republican) Congress was under Karl Rove's political control is "Flamebait".
No, that's all just simple reality, directly contradicting the claim that Bush's crimes are legal, and ontopic to the story we're discussing. Just because fascist Bushbabies are pisspants crybabies doesn't make that message a flame, it makes them hairtrigger partisan zombie trollMods.
The Senate decided that "grassroots" lobbying isn't the same as direct lobbying, and that bloggers don't have to register.
If they replaced millions of electronic photodetectors (photodiodes, CCDs, whatever) with a single cheaper, more consistently colored mirror, that they micropositioned millions of times to scan an image extremely quickly, without suffering the skew distortion from vibrations while scanning, then this could be a much cheaper, more consistent imaging device, Maybe much much smaller, and maybe getting much higher yields than large photodetector arrays which lose parts to defects per mm^2. But is an array of MEMs mirrors really cheaper than electronics?
The offline casinos, not just in the US, must love this action. I wonder how much they paid for it?
I've watching S.1 being debated in the Senate right now. The "Grassroots Lobbying" amendment is being voted right now, live, as I post this message.
There is a tremendous difference between direct physical access to the lawmaker and their staff, and publishing to the public. Of course I'm against Section 220, because it would criminalize mere publishers and advocates, who don't have direct physical access to the lawmaker and their staff, who don't register. That's different from what I am for, which is requiring publishers who take money for their advocacy to disclose publicly, eg as they publish, their sponsors.
I work with the NY City Council (NYC legislature), advising the staff of the Technology committee. I know the value of real lobbying, the direct access to the officials, in influencing legislation, even among noncorrupt officials who need info, opinions, and are human, subject to "social engineering. And I know how much more influential, and unaccountable is actual lobbying, than publishing advocacy, or encouraging it. Because I see it - and I even do it, as I work directly to develop policies and frame hearings which inform policies. I'm not a lobbyist, I'm not paid or even asked by any interested parties outside the government to advocate any position. But many committees use people in my role who are actual lobbyists. That role is very different, much more influential than published advocacy. And more influential than most individual constituents. While also much more exclusive: only a few people get the access that I do, that lobbyists get. That's unfair to (most, except "special friends" even more unfairly better connected) constituents, but it's how they run it. Until government prioritizes all constituents for access in officials' calendars before any lobbyist, which I'd prefer, other rules (which are actually possible to pass) must serve. But controlling mere publishers, whose work is done in public, doesn't really improve the governance of the influence of legislation. In fact, by hampering just anyone who publishes, which is open to practically anyone with the Internet, such a rule would impede the equitable influence of the general public. But paid published advocacy does interfere with equitable access to influence of legislation. There is a case to be made that only corporations should have to disclose their payments, not private individuals, but that's unworkable, and a weak case, anyway.
You are trying to say that lobbying, paid journalism and just journalism are all the same. I know from experience, and have shown with definitions, that they are very different in their effects on legislation/administration, and qualitatively different in degree of insidiousness. This bill, in Section 220, also throws bloggers into the restrictions appropriate to lobbyists, though it does appropriately require paid journalists to disclose. That's where I stand, and I haven't seen any convincing arguments to the contrary.
The point you and I are circling each other on is the difference between lobbying and journalism. They both can fall under advocacy.
But lobbying, as I keep saying, is not merely "political speech". Lobbying is defined by various specific criteria, none of which are merely speech. Mostly, it's privileged access to officials, more than the general public. Transactions, some exchanging value, are allowed, and regulated, that otherwise would be "bribes" and "graft". It's clear to me that they're still bribes and graft, but not under lobbying law, which regulates them rather than eliminate them. Lobbying is private, personal access to officials by specific individuals.
Journalism is different. There's no personal access. It's not a private meeting. Journalists don't write laws that politicians introduce, sponsor and vote on. Journalists speak to the public.
That is hugely different. As I said, there clearly need to be laws requiring payments for political advocacy to be disclosed. But not registration with the government of mere political speech. Two separate issues. One legit, another tyrannical.
What is the problem with private people paying nonjournalists, mere celebrities, to advocate their politics in person? What's unfair about that? Other political advocates can raise money and argue - I prefer a celebrity deathmatch.
If you're pointing out that rich people can pay for more advertisements of their interests, including political, that is unfair. That's capitalism. I'd like to change it, especially campaign finance. But that's got nothing to do with the registration of journalists. The required disclosure of paid journalism goes towards that, by letting the "marketplace of ideas" decide, with sufficient info about sponsorship to filter the propaganda. If "lobbyists" sponsor journalism, then they are very regulated: they are registered as lobbyists, including their party affiliation. And their appearances in officials' calendars is published, while various activities are restricted - including new restrictions in the original, unamended S.1. Their sponsored journalists would disclose the lobbyists who'd paid them - if lobbyists actually did so, which I have not ever heard they have. Lobbyists lobby officials directly, not in paid journalism. But they would still be highly regulated, especially after passage of S.1. Mere advocates, like you or I, if we wanted, have no special advantage in influencing officials. If we were paid, we'd have to disclose that advantage. If we were merely rich, we wouldn't have to explain so, though that might be an improvement: disclosure of any income by any publisher - but we're far from that, instead relying on the public to decide for themselves what are the interests of the journalists, despite their mythical "objectivity".
So the problem we're having in this discussion is conflation of "journalist" and "lobbyist" into simply "lobbyist". They're different in the essential advantage of private access.
Moderation -1
100% Troll
Gee, my detailed debunking of theocon propaganda triggers the trollMods. I wonder what they'll say when I tell them that god is a figment of your imagination?