Then use the GDAL API, but not hardwired to the GE data. Google can't stop Gaia from using the GDAL API, and probably can't/won't stop Gaia from pointing their GDAL calls at GE data by default (or no default), if there are other sources. Then it's the Gaia users who are choosing to use GE data, which strengthens the point that Gaia isn't actually using the GE data, but rather enabling Gaia users to do so. Gaia users could be subject to Google C&D, but there's really very little way for Google to stop Gaia from just using an independent API and allowing Gaia to use GE data at the user's discretion.
So properly coding the data access to use the standard meta-API, with selectable choices of data sources, eliminates the dependency on GE data, and probably also Google's ability to make even arguments with Gaia.
This scenario is a compelling case for open dependencies. Depending on a proprietary data source, like Google's GIS data, is a risk that can destroy a project when that source on which the project depends changes its terms of use, or turns out too limited to use by the project's actual scope or use cases. If Gaia were coded to use an open standard for data, then its developers could probably use Google data as one source during its development. The release could then use whichever data source the user specified. The most Google could do would be to insist the project stop specifying Google as a default source, and maybe stop users from connecting to the Google API.
Though that would encourage a good project (if Gaia is one) to grow the popularity of other data sources that compete with Google. So Google would probably go along with it.
Including tiered architectures with choices for alternative components and data in standard formats is a powerful way to force even a powerful force like Google to go with the flow.
Well, let's see about your denial fantasy, Anonymous bizarro Coward.
Patents certainly represent a lot more than "shiny beads", or MS wouldn't pay so much money to buy them. Ask one of the MS lawyers losing the Eolas suit how shiny are the patents you don't have, but need.
In the real world, IBM as an OS business other than OS2 - that OS was crushed by MS the last time they tricked IBM, but not the first (DOS), using licensing. You know, that Linux OS that we're discussing in this thread, that IBM is using to replace OS/400 wherever it can, in which it has invested hundreds of millions, and much strategy, as well as the business of thousands of its customers.
So let's hear about this fantasy 100K+ patents which exclude Microsoft from doing Windows. Let's hear more about this "interesting story on the Web" (ie, "Nerd Myth"), and how we can be so sure that it would apply to the arbitrarily different MS patents they could use against Linux. And how its huge IT services biz would survive the impact of Novell getting all the legit Linux biz, before being crushed itself.
Oh, and though IBM might be "the largest corporation that manufactures HW", it does not manufacture the most HW - that would probably be HP, since merging with Compaq, especially since IBM sold it's notebook and HD divisions to Far Eastern corporations.
So you've got some pretty bizarre idea of "facts" there yourself, Anonymous fantasist Coward. I'm sorry that I frightened you, child, but that doesn't excuse your made-up history, and especially your snide attitude based on it. Now wake up and stop fooling yourself.
If SCO sued IBM with actual patent infringement (instead of pure endless bullshit about copyrighted, but nonexistent, code), that would have cripped IBM, or at least IBM's Linux business. Microsoft could step in and do the same, but with real patents, really crippling IBM.
IBM would pay a huge fine, without necessarily getting a license from Microsoft to continue using the patents. IBM is knocked out of the Linux biz. Not just selling the OS (or services to sell/install/upgrade), but its whole biz unit, as its market is crippled from losing its vendors. MS goes after RedHat, Oracle (to prevent it entering the biz). The Debian project evaporates in a millisecond without budget or corporation, under Microsoft's fiery patent gaze. Only Novell's SuSE is left, under the MS agreement. Most businesses drop Linux, and the open source model, because it doesn't come with a corporation prioritizing clearance of IP through the Patent Office. Then MS competes hard against Novell with its own new, improved MS Linux, which is just a flipside of WINE to run Linux apps under Vista. POOF! Novell is finally dead, too.
Linux the hobby OS can survive. After all its infringing IP from the big corporations that made it so broadly popular (and a threat to MS) has been removed, hobbyists could figure out a way to code it differently, not violating those patents. Lots of developers will drop Linux because its market is dried up. And MS will go after some developers, and probably some big remaining users (if any), RIAA/MPAA style. Possibly MS won't bother to sue every hobbyist with an email address or anonymous code contribution. But Torvalds will probably go to jail, or at least some kind of neutralizing status, at least as an example of an inventor who dared to succeed in crossing Microsoft.
Linux will look like Carthage after Rome razed it to the ground, sowed its fields with salt, and slaughtered its kings and warriors. Hail Microsoft.
OT: while I've got a German with whom I seem to be able to communicate fairly well, would you mind commenting on a discussion I'm watching in a totally different discussion site?
Are you familiar with the term "jerry-rigged", an americanism meaning "poor quality, complicated, hasty construction without sensible design from inappropriate materials"? Do you think it insults Germans? I'm sorry if it does and if repeating it might have insulted you, but I think it is an insult, and I'd like a German's opinion before considering it really insulting. I'd like to tell people not to be insulting that way, but if actual Germans, perhaps represented by yourself, don't take insult, then I probably won't bother.
If Republicans had kept control of Congress this month, so Cheney was still Bush's main babysitter (instead of the return of James Baker), we'd surely have been sending more "troops" to Iraq, if only to give McCain something to run on. But we'd still have too few military to do so, and not even Rangel's symbolic draft bill to kick around. So we'd be spending even more money we don't have (deficit spending is possible where troop shortages aren't) on more mercenaries, outfitted by Halliburton. Enforcing what passes for official order in Iraq.
So yeah, like Halliburton. Or like that other Republican paradise, Abramoff's Saipan.
Re:Your PD uses a lot more than just MS products.
on
The Long Arm of Microsoft
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
US cops aren't underfunded - not their operating budgets, anyway. Their salary budget varies, but I don't know of any that are anything but overfunded. That's not including pensions, the real benefits for cops who survive (practically all) to collect them. To be clear, I'm not comparing the salaries to the value of cops putting their wellbeing on the line when facing violent criminals every day to protect us. I'm comparing their budgets to the costs of their operations.
I'm talking about cops outside the US, the subject of this story. Those cops are usually underfunded. Especially places where MS can fill various political vacuums, including augmenting police budgets. I can't vote to fund those cops. And MS knows how to get the political leverage not justified by their execs' mere voting power.
And I'm not talking about just selling cops SW. We're talking about joint operations with cops, along the model to which the summary refers where the RIAA/MPAA jointly raid with the cops, even "helping" confiscate computers and other evidence. That's the problem. And where fascism really gets rooted, as corporations operate government interdiction directly, rather than merely petition the government through a justice system. That's where voting and other government reform of democracy has power. In the US, we should get the FBI to use all its intelligence and investigation power to support local police in specific jurisdictions.
Again, the fact is that those different structures were built in representation of different constellations. Constellations which are arbitrary groupings of stars available to everyone, but which are shared around the world. The different places they stand are unconnected by the official history, but are connected by the star culture that is basic to folklore. Their connections despite their separation in time and space is the evidence for a global culture. Their apparent common reference to a single ancient timeframe, including specific info about that timeframe (the state of the sky), indicates either a longlived culture eventually distributed to the structures' widespread sites, or somehow even a long perpetuation by that culture from that time. Or perhaps some other way to get the old info that is totally inexplicable by our anthropology or history.
So you're rejecting them as "inconsistent" because they represent different constellations in different styles. But their basic "function" of representing constellations in a consistent "zodiac" is much more consistency than we'd expect from parallel development without cultural consistency among them.
I'm now repeating myself several times. You've got the same evidence to look at that I do, and the same Web (and international flights). You can explore further for yourself, or drop it if you prefer.
I'm not sure how well you understand the UK "constitution", because I don't understand it too well myself.
But you don't understand the US Constitution. Specifically when you say "whereas there is no US right to privacy enshrined in the Constitution". The 4th Amendment says
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That protection of Americans' rights to privacy was made explicit in that Amendment. The rights were already implicit in the original signed Constitution, because that document created only powers which don't include invading privacy, except in certain due processes. The Amendments, including the 4th, were mostly rooted in specific abuses the British government had perpetrated on American colonists, sparking the Revolution. So they underscored the requirement of the government to protect those rights, rather than leave them to any doubt - doubts which the American citizens of their new government probably had on their mind.
The 4th Amendment has not been sufficient to protect our privacy from Congress, especially for the past 35 years. Especially as Americans have generated so much more in the way of "papers and effects", as comms tech and bureaucracy have grown. Especially as Nixon and Bush Jr have abused their power, seeing themselves as all-powerful "unitary executives", supporting their paranoia and powermongery with spying on citizens. So we need a new Amendment, in the spirit of the old, explicitly requiring the government to protect our privacy. Including its new forms, in our personal info data, and its new threats, private organizations which would threaten our privacy by abusing our data.
Constitutional protection, rather than statutory or policy, is much stronger. It's more difficult to obtain, and thereby more difficult to discard. Amendments are short and clear, as well as uncontestable by any other authority, nationwide. Even, in principle, universally to all humans, even foreigners (though of course Bush's administration would reject that limit to its power). And an Amendment would make such a clear, direct statement well-known to everyone it governs, rather than yet another law in the huge canon of laws.
I think the US Constitution would be good for any country whose people understood and embraced it. At least, the rights it protects are universal, though the government structure to execute those protections and detailed rules are culturally/geographically/historically local. The UK, and any other country, could do just as well with another framework to protect those rights, if the people consent and stay interactive with that government. And I think the US would do well to execute much more interaction here, like mandatory polls by each representative on each question prior to their official vote, even though the polls are nonbinding. And a host of others methods I've posted on Slashdot and elsewhere. But they're all just local ways to implement constitutional republican democracy. Which, in Churchill's paraphrased words, is the least bad government form we've ever seen.
Anonymous killer Coward says it all on Thanksgiving:
So what if 12% of Americans are starving?
And likewise thinks that spending that extra spaceplane money (on top of the existing $TRILLION a year) on something not the Pentagon would destroy national security.
This is the "Compassionate Conservatism" running the US government for the past 6-12 years.
Pure silver is not toxic to humans, but some chemicals containing silver can be very harmful. Nanoscopic particles might have different lifecycles in the complex univers of human biochemistry, producing those dangerous chemicals, or others not previously seen. These new delivery methods must be tested before being assumed safe.
Suing people is one thing. Direct operational work with the police, like the RIAA/MPAA raids to which the summary referred, is quite another thing. A bad thing. It starts to put some of the government's power to arrest into the hands of corporations. Which governments have already done with the RIAA/MPAA.
It's not Microsoft's job to "fight crime", not in person. It can fight crime by suing, by offering technical support to police investigations, expert witnesses. Most importantly, by closing security holes (before widespread releases), which Microsoft is not doing enough.
That's not "sci-fi". Those are the facts. The facts about fascism. I shouldn't have to warn a Spaniard about fascism, as your country was officially fascist until only 30 years ago. But this is the warning. I'm just the messenger.
When Microsoft has made itself "indispensible" to the world's (mostly underfunded) police the way it's made itself "indispensible" to the world's businesses, Microsoft will have more power to get the world's police "see things it's way". That means prioritizing, say, software piracy over, say, security holes. The cops in the street won't have much to say about the priorities, but their bosses at the top of their national law enforcement will "rebalance" their priorities to accommodate Microsoft's roles in their budgets and operations.
It's like bottom-up lobbying. Where our rights meet the people who protect them. Brought to you by Microsoft.
However, those countries involve state-based content blocking, with no transparency or legal recourse.
Government by corporations is fascism. The primary interest of fascism is control of the media, by which it rules a population usually by fear and intimidation.
Total control of what content a nation consumes is government of its media. Media corporations. Fascism.
Not to mention Stonehenge, and certainly many others, either undiscovered, known only locally, or mistaken for something else, like the world's biggest pyramid, the Visoko Pyramid discovered only this year. Some might turn out to be illusions, once they get the study that mainstream science has mostly denied them so far. But there are enough of them, across vast distances, to signify an ancient global medium.
I'm not going to anaylze their "meaning". But their global distribution and consistent demonstration indicate an ancient medium now practically lost to reading.
The reactions by mods and repliers to my documented points about hunger and military spending show just how the status quo of inverted values is enforced in America. The people replying in this thread will not go hungry, probably, as they can pay for Net connections and computers. They read Slashdot to brag about the toys they have, had, and want, indulging a technofetish that is the main male consumerism. Hungry Americans are mostly out of sight, in ghettoes (urban and otherwise), never put on the TV that passes for American consensus reality, and hiding in shame.
Meanwhile, how many of these people angrily denying their neighbors are hungry, that the fed shouldn't help the hungry to eat, are propped up by New York City in their Welfare States. Residents of these mainly rural/Western/Southern states pretend to a culture of "self-reliance", "independence" from the coastal "Blue" states they usually call "Communist" or worse. Yet Blue states like mine (NY) prop them up. Without our Federal corporate subsidies to them, they'd be starving, too. Their neighbors cut out of the Federal Welfare loop often are starving. And they suck money out of places like NYC, which clearly supports giving away money in socialistic "wealth redistribution", which we could instead reinvest locally. To help our neighbors, and improve our local economies.
Those Welfare States are the product of the post-WWII political economics. We needed to pour money into the "flyover states" to keep the country together in the Cold War. Someplace to keep our missiles. And then the Republicans taking over Congress immediately after the Cold War cranked up the subsidies cranked up the subsidies. Pork to their home states. And bait to attract immigration and population growth, even unsustainably. For the greater bribes from local "developers" that don't need local economic support when there's Federal subsidy. And because switching population growth from Blue to Red states means more Republican Representatives in the House, which also means more Red Electoral College ballots.
Compassionate Conservatism. Murdering turkeys and ignoring the poor.
Look at the moderation of the posts in this subthread. People denying hungry Americans get applause. I get booed for pointing out that we're feeding the military contractors, but not our neighbors.
No wonder the military gets the money, and our neighbors go hungry. In our rich, "Christian" nation.
Happy Thanksgiving, trollMods. God might forgive you, as you force down another slice of turkey and gravy, but I don't.
I know what the definition of "starving" is, believe me.
Why don't you click on the link I helpfully provided, or google for yourself? The effort you just took to look up the definition to deny the facts could have been spent reading the actual reports of the facts. And learning something.
And maybe learning how to do something to feed Americans. A pretty good way to observe Thanksgiving, instead of just eating ourselves unconscious while our neighbors go to be hungry.
Where do you get your certainty that the starving people are just lying to get more money? I get mine that they're starving from various government studies which are trying to deny that Americans are starving, to save money (to send it to Iraq, instead), but which can't hide the fact that Americans are starving.
Yeah, that does sound pretty cool. But not when we're spending a $TRILLION on the rest of the Pentagon every year, and something like 12% of Americans are starving.
I'm all for space exploration/colonization/exploitation (though not unnecessarily weaponizing space, which this program does). I'm even more for investing in Americans on Earth, to use our people power to do things that space drones cannot. Like feed each other.
All that isn't really a constitution. It's a body of laws and legal rules that "constitute" the legal system of the country. And it might even be a better system than the US Constitutional system. But we have a body of laws and the rest. And a Constitution which is the trump card, from which all the government's power is derived.
That's a fundamental difference. The US government starts from nothing, inserts a Constitution specifying government powers, and leaves anything not denied to the individual states to the people. While the states each have their own constitution, which creates state powers, leaving the rest to the people. While Britain starts with the government having all power, then assigning freedoms to the people.
Just summarizing British law in a constitution doesn't make it the same as the US system. Unless the new constitution wer to specify the "only explicitly created powers exist". Which would probably conflict with a lot of existing British laws. Not as easy as it looks.
Slashdot Mirror
Then use the GDAL API, but not hardwired to the GE data. Google can't stop Gaia from using the GDAL API, and probably can't/won't stop Gaia from pointing their GDAL calls at GE data by default (or no default), if there are other sources. Then it's the Gaia users who are choosing to use GE data, which strengthens the point that Gaia isn't actually using the GE data, but rather enabling Gaia users to do so. Gaia users could be subject to Google C&D, but there's really very little way for Google to stop Gaia from just using an independent API and allowing Gaia to use GE data at the user's discretion.
So properly coding the data access to use the standard meta-API, with selectable choices of data sources, eliminates the dependency on GE data, and probably also Google's ability to make even arguments with Gaia.
This scenario is a compelling case for open dependencies. Depending on a proprietary data source, like Google's GIS data, is a risk that can destroy a project when that source on which the project depends changes its terms of use, or turns out too limited to use by the project's actual scope or use cases. If Gaia were coded to use an open standard for data, then its developers could probably use Google data as one source during its development. The release could then use whichever data source the user specified. The most Google could do would be to insist the project stop specifying Google as a default source, and maybe stop users from connecting to the Google API.
Though that would encourage a good project (if Gaia is one) to grow the popularity of other data sources that compete with Google. So Google would probably go along with it.
Including tiered architectures with choices for alternative components and data in standard formats is a powerful way to force even a powerful force like Google to go with the flow.
Which IBM patents would those be? A large portfolio isn't enough if they're not the right ones.
Well, let's see about your denial fantasy, Anonymous bizarro Coward.
Patents certainly represent a lot more than "shiny beads", or MS wouldn't pay so much money to buy them. Ask one of the MS lawyers losing the Eolas suit how shiny are the patents you don't have, but need.
In the real world, IBM as an OS business other than OS2 - that OS was crushed by MS the last time they tricked IBM, but not the first (DOS), using licensing. You know, that Linux OS that we're discussing in this thread, that IBM is using to replace OS/400 wherever it can, in which it has invested hundreds of millions, and much strategy, as well as the business of thousands of its customers.
So let's hear about this fantasy 100K+ patents which exclude Microsoft from doing Windows. Let's hear more about this "interesting story on the Web" (ie, "Nerd Myth"), and how we can be so sure that it would apply to the arbitrarily different MS patents they could use against Linux. And how its huge IT services biz would survive the impact of Novell getting all the legit Linux biz, before being crushed itself.
Oh, and though IBM might be "the largest corporation that manufactures HW", it does not manufacture the most HW - that would probably be HP, since merging with Compaq, especially since IBM sold it's notebook and HD divisions to Far Eastern corporations.
So you've got some pretty bizarre idea of "facts" there yourself, Anonymous fantasist Coward. I'm sorry that I frightened you, child, but that doesn't excuse your made-up history, and especially your snide attitude based on it. Now wake up and stop fooling yourself.
If SCO sued IBM with actual patent infringement (instead of pure endless bullshit about copyrighted, but nonexistent, code), that would have cripped IBM, or at least IBM's Linux business. Microsoft could step in and do the same, but with real patents, really crippling IBM.
IBM would pay a huge fine, without necessarily getting a license from Microsoft to continue using the patents. IBM is knocked out of the Linux biz. Not just selling the OS (or services to sell/install/upgrade), but its whole biz unit, as its market is crippled from losing its vendors. MS goes after RedHat, Oracle (to prevent it entering the biz). The Debian project evaporates in a millisecond without budget or corporation, under Microsoft's fiery patent gaze. Only Novell's SuSE is left, under the MS agreement. Most businesses drop Linux, and the open source model, because it doesn't come with a corporation prioritizing clearance of IP through the Patent Office. Then MS competes hard against Novell with its own new, improved MS Linux, which is just a flipside of WINE to run Linux apps under Vista. POOF! Novell is finally dead, too.
Linux the hobby OS can survive. After all its infringing IP from the big corporations that made it so broadly popular (and a threat to MS) has been removed, hobbyists could figure out a way to code it differently, not violating those patents. Lots of developers will drop Linux because its market is dried up. And MS will go after some developers, and probably some big remaining users (if any), RIAA/MPAA style. Possibly MS won't bother to sue every hobbyist with an email address or anonymous code contribution. But Torvalds will probably go to jail, or at least some kind of neutralizing status, at least as an example of an inventor who dared to succeed in crossing Microsoft.
Linux will look like Carthage after Rome razed it to the ground, sowed its fields with salt, and slaughtered its kings and warriors. Hail Microsoft.
I agree, and I'm glad to.
OT: while I've got a German with whom I seem to be able to communicate fairly well, would you mind commenting on a discussion I'm watching in a totally different discussion site?
Are you familiar with the term "jerry-rigged", an americanism meaning "poor quality, complicated, hasty construction without sensible design from inappropriate materials"? Do you think it insults Germans? I'm sorry if it does and if repeating it might have insulted you, but I think it is an insult, and I'd like a German's opinion before considering it really insulting. I'd like to tell people not to be insulting that way, but if actual Germans, perhaps represented by yourself, don't take insult, then I probably won't bother.
If Republicans had kept control of Congress this month, so Cheney was still Bush's main babysitter (instead of the return of James Baker), we'd surely have been sending more "troops" to Iraq, if only to give McCain something to run on. But we'd still have too few military to do so, and not even Rangel's symbolic draft bill to kick around. So we'd be spending even more money we don't have (deficit spending is possible where troop shortages aren't) on more mercenaries, outfitted by Halliburton. Enforcing what passes for official order in Iraq.
So yeah, like Halliburton. Or like that other Republican paradise, Abramoff's Saipan.
US cops aren't underfunded - not their operating budgets, anyway. Their salary budget varies, but I don't know of any that are anything but overfunded. That's not including pensions, the real benefits for cops who survive (practically all) to collect them. To be clear, I'm not comparing the salaries to the value of cops putting their wellbeing on the line when facing violent criminals every day to protect us. I'm comparing their budgets to the costs of their operations.
I'm talking about cops outside the US, the subject of this story. Those cops are usually underfunded. Especially places where MS can fill various political vacuums, including augmenting police budgets. I can't vote to fund those cops. And MS knows how to get the political leverage not justified by their execs' mere voting power.
And I'm not talking about just selling cops SW. We're talking about joint operations with cops, along the model to which the summary refers where the RIAA/MPAA jointly raid with the cops, even "helping" confiscate computers and other evidence. That's the problem. And where fascism really gets rooted, as corporations operate government interdiction directly, rather than merely petition the government through a justice system. That's where voting and other government reform of democracy has power. In the US, we should get the FBI to use all its intelligence and investigation power to support local police in specific jurisdictions.
In my days, we call corporate operations of goverment offices "fascism".
Again, the fact is that those different structures were built in representation of different constellations. Constellations which are arbitrary groupings of stars available to everyone, but which are shared around the world. The different places they stand are unconnected by the official history, but are connected by the star culture that is basic to folklore. Their connections despite their separation in time and space is the evidence for a global culture. Their apparent common reference to a single ancient timeframe, including specific info about that timeframe (the state of the sky), indicates either a longlived culture eventually distributed to the structures' widespread sites, or somehow even a long perpetuation by that culture from that time. Or perhaps some other way to get the old info that is totally inexplicable by our anthropology or history.
So you're rejecting them as "inconsistent" because they represent different constellations in different styles. But their basic "function" of representing constellations in a consistent "zodiac" is much more consistency than we'd expect from parallel development without cultural consistency among them.
I'm now repeating myself several times. You've got the same evidence to look at that I do, and the same Web (and international flights). You can explore further for yourself, or drop it if you prefer.
But you don't understand the US Constitution. Specifically when you say "whereas there is no US right to privacy enshrined in the Constitution". The 4th Amendment says
That protection of Americans' rights to privacy was made explicit in that Amendment. The rights were already implicit in the original signed Constitution, because that document created only powers which don't include invading privacy, except in certain due processes. The Amendments, including the 4th, were mostly rooted in specific abuses the British government had perpetrated on American colonists, sparking the Revolution. So they underscored the requirement of the government to protect those rights, rather than leave them to any doubt - doubts which the American citizens of their new government probably had on their mind.
The 4th Amendment has not been sufficient to protect our privacy from Congress, especially for the past 35 years. Especially as Americans have generated so much more in the way of "papers and effects", as comms tech and bureaucracy have grown. Especially as Nixon and Bush Jr have abused their power, seeing themselves as all-powerful "unitary executives", supporting their paranoia and powermongery with spying on citizens. So we need a new Amendment, in the spirit of the old, explicitly requiring the government to protect our privacy. Including its new forms, in our personal info data, and its new threats, private organizations which would threaten our privacy by abusing our data.
Constitutional protection, rather than statutory or policy, is much stronger. It's more difficult to obtain, and thereby more difficult to discard. Amendments are short and clear, as well as uncontestable by any other authority, nationwide. Even, in principle, universally to all humans, even foreigners (though of course Bush's administration would reject that limit to its power). And an Amendment would make such a clear, direct statement well-known to everyone it governs, rather than yet another law in the huge canon of laws.
I think the US Constitution would be good for any country whose people understood and embraced it. At least, the rights it protects are universal, though the government structure to execute those protections and detailed rules are culturally/geographically/historically local. The UK, and any other country, could do just as well with another framework to protect those rights, if the people consent and stay interactive with that government. And I think the US would do well to execute much more interaction here, like mandatory polls by each representative on each question prior to their official vote, even though the polls are nonbinding. And a host of others methods I've posted on Slashdot and elsewhere. But they're all just local ways to implement constitutional republican democracy. Which, in Churchill's paraphrased words, is the least bad government form we've ever seen.
And likewise thinks that spending that extra spaceplane money (on top of the existing $TRILLION a year) on something not the Pentagon would destroy national security.
This is the "Compassionate Conservatism" running the US government for the past 6-12 years.
Feel safer?
Pure silver is not toxic to humans, but some chemicals containing silver can be very harmful. Nanoscopic particles might have different lifecycles in the complex univers of human biochemistry, producing those dangerous chemicals, or others not previously seen. These new delivery methods must be tested before being assumed safe.
Suing people is one thing. Direct operational work with the police, like the RIAA/MPAA raids to which the summary referred, is quite another thing. A bad thing. It starts to put some of the government's power to arrest into the hands of corporations. Which governments have already done with the RIAA/MPAA.
It's not Microsoft's job to "fight crime", not in person. It can fight crime by suing, by offering technical support to police investigations, expert witnesses. Most importantly, by closing security holes (before widespread releases), which Microsoft is not doing enough.
That's not "sci-fi". Those are the facts. The facts about fascism. I shouldn't have to warn a Spaniard about fascism, as your country was officially fascist until only 30 years ago. But this is the warning. I'm just the messenger.
When Microsoft has made itself "indispensible" to the world's (mostly underfunded) police the way it's made itself "indispensible" to the world's businesses, Microsoft will have more power to get the world's police "see things it's way". That means prioritizing, say, software piracy over, say, security holes. The cops in the street won't have much to say about the priorities, but their bosses at the top of their national law enforcement will "rebalance" their priorities to accommodate Microsoft's roles in their budgets and operations.
It's like bottom-up lobbying. Where our rights meet the people who protect them. Brought to you by Microsoft.
Government by corporations is fascism. The primary interest of fascism is control of the media, by which it rules a population usually by fear and intimidation.
Total control of what content a nation consumes is government of its media. Media corporations. Fascism.
The Egyptian Giza Pyramids picture Orion, the Mayan Pyramids several constellations, the Uffington Horse Sagittarius and Taurus (and their link), Angkor Wat diagrams Draco.
Not to mention Stonehenge, and certainly many others, either undiscovered, known only locally, or mistaken for something else, like the world's biggest pyramid, the Visoko Pyramid discovered only this year. Some might turn out to be illusions, once they get the study that mainstream science has mostly denied them so far. But there are enough of them, across vast distances, to signify an ancient global medium.
I'm not going to anaylze their "meaning". But their global distribution and consistent demonstration indicate an ancient medium now practically lost to reading.
The reactions by mods and repliers to my documented points about hunger and military spending show just how the status quo of inverted values is enforced in America. The people replying in this thread will not go hungry, probably, as they can pay for Net connections and computers. They read Slashdot to brag about the toys they have, had, and want, indulging a technofetish that is the main male consumerism. Hungry Americans are mostly out of sight, in ghettoes (urban and otherwise), never put on the TV that passes for American consensus reality, and hiding in shame.
Meanwhile, how many of these people angrily denying their neighbors are hungry, that the fed shouldn't help the hungry to eat, are propped up by New York City in their Welfare States. Residents of these mainly rural/Western/Southern states pretend to a culture of "self-reliance", "independence" from the coastal "Blue" states they usually call "Communist" or worse. Yet Blue states like mine (NY) prop them up. Without our Federal corporate subsidies to them, they'd be starving, too. Their neighbors cut out of the Federal Welfare loop often are starving. And they suck money out of places like NYC, which clearly supports giving away money in socialistic "wealth redistribution", which we could instead reinvest locally. To help our neighbors, and improve our local economies.
Those Welfare States are the product of the post-WWII political economics. We needed to pour money into the "flyover states" to keep the country together in the Cold War. Someplace to keep our missiles. And then the Republicans taking over Congress immediately after the Cold War cranked up the subsidies cranked up the subsidies. Pork to their home states. And bait to attract immigration and population growth, even unsustainably. For the greater bribes from local "developers" that don't need local economic support when there's Federal subsidy. And because switching population growth from Blue to Red states means more Republican Representatives in the House, which also means more Red Electoral College ballots.
Compassionate Conservatism. Murdering turkeys and ignoring the poor.
Moderation -1
100% Overrated
TrollMods work to deny that hungry New Yorkers even exist.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Moderation -2
50% Offtopic
50% Flamebait
Look at the moderation of the posts in this subthread. People denying hungry Americans get applause. I get booed for pointing out that we're feeding the military contractors, but not our neighbors.
No wonder the military gets the money, and our neighbors go hungry. In our rich, "Christian" nation.
Happy Thanksgiving, trollMods. God might forgive you, as you force down another slice of turkey and gravy, but I don't.
Oh, yeah, then there's no problem then. Ready for your third helping of stuffing?
I know what the definition of "starving" is, believe me.
Why don't you click on the link I helpfully provided, or google for yourself? The effort you just took to look up the definition to deny the facts could have been spent reading the actual reports of the facts. And learning something.
And maybe learning how to do something to feed Americans. A pretty good way to observe Thanksgiving, instead of just eating ourselves unconscious while our neighbors go to be hungry.
Tell that to the people living in the 15% of households here in NYC who spent time starving 2003-5.
Where do you get your certainty that the starving people are just lying to get more money? I get mine that they're starving from various government studies which are trying to deny that Americans are starving, to save money (to send it to Iraq, instead), but which can't hide the fact that Americans are starving.
Yeah, that does sound pretty cool. But not when we're spending a $TRILLION on the rest of the Pentagon every year, and something like 12% of Americans are starving.
I'm all for space exploration/colonization/exploitation (though not unnecessarily weaponizing space, which this program does). I'm even more for investing in Americans on Earth, to use our people power to do things that space drones cannot. Like feed each other.
All that isn't really a constitution. It's a body of laws and legal rules that "constitute" the legal system of the country. And it might even be a better system than the US Constitutional system. But we have a body of laws and the rest. And a Constitution which is the trump card, from which all the government's power is derived.
That's a fundamental difference. The US government starts from nothing, inserts a Constitution specifying government powers, and leaves anything not denied to the individual states to the people. While the states each have their own constitution, which creates state powers, leaving the rest to the people. While Britain starts with the government having all power, then assigning freedoms to the people.
Just summarizing British law in a constitution doesn't make it the same as the US system. Unless the new constitution wer to specify the "only explicitly created powers exist". Which would probably conflict with a lot of existing British laws. Not as easy as it looks.