If Afghanistan were turned into a smoking crater in the Earth do you really think anyone would miss them? The only thing that country exports is terrorists and refugees.
I'm sure their families would miss them just as much as American families devastated by last Tuesday's attacks miss their loved ones. Why would it be any different? The idea that you would kill innocents out of indifference or due to the notion that they simply don't matter is even sicker and more fucked up than killing because you feel strongly that you have some grievance that can't be addressed any other way, which is pretty fucked up to start with.
Exports: A lot of their terrorist exports were originally imported from elsewhere, trained, then left. Other MidEast nations saw Afghanistan as a great dumping ground for their local nutcases, and happily sent them on their way. Refugees tend to think leaving a hellhole is better than sticking around to get killed or beaten up for shaving. Would you stay in a place like that if you could leave?
If it were a stable nation, Afghanistan could be exporting things the world wants and needs. The CIA World Factbook for 2000 lists Afghanistan's natural resources, namely "natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and
semiprecious stones". Even if you don't give a flying fuck about the ordinary people there, maybe you can see the potential value in stabilizing and improving Afghanistan for economic reasons and maybe even find it in that big heart of yours to hope that to do so would raise the standard of living there, which would tend to make the locals less tolerant of violent extremists (remember, the Taliban do not have the hearts and minds there,) which would tend to make us safer. That is a daunting goal, and a very long-range one as well (it obviously would need to come after nailing everyone responsible for last week's massacres,) but I don't think it's undoable. And it would make us safer.
Or we could nuke them all , feel great for a week or month, then live in fear for generations. We don't need to martyr the innocent. If we do that, we will have dug ourselves a hole we can never climb out of. We need to be thinking about the effects of our actions in a very long-term way. Right now, most of the world is behind us. We shouldn't squander such a rare and precious advantage by killing innocent people. The rest of the world won't stand for it, and some here will not as well. What happened is not a license for barbarism on our part. Please stop and think about this.
While they can make "under-the-hood" changes legally with Linux, they are limited to suggestions on how to configure Microsoft products. More flexibility.
Besides, every software solution Uncle Sam doesn't have to pay for saves taxpayer dollars, and no Congressman can be against that. Even NASA takes lowest bidder, and they do do rocket science!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a certain amount of pro bono work mandated somehow or another (ABA bylaw or whatever,) or is it all volunteer? If any of it is required, it might affect how this analogy is digested by lawyers and legislators. I know the mandatory nature of community service performed by frats and sororities on many campuses colors my opinion of them when it is pointed to as a rationale for their continued existence.
This is so silly. If you want an unfiltered internet connection, pay for it yourself and use it with your own
computer. When one lets the state own something, the state has a right to control it- just as you have a right to
control your own connection.
Try this. The state doesn't run that. Do those users have control over their connections just because they pay a monthly fee to a private entity? If you point to the DMCA as gov't interference in the marketplace, I refer you to the private bodies that bought and paid for that piece of legislation. Appeals to the "free market" will be referred back to the geographic monopolies many broadband providers enjoy because they won't open their pipes to competition. Besides, the filtering software and associated maintenance and administration is an added burden on taxpayer funds. Unfiltered access is cheaper, so why not let the filtering advocates pay monthly fees to ISPs, buy their own filtering software, and spare the rest of us the added cost?
Letting government run things is always an inferior alternative to private
ownership 99% of the time. I wish leftists were mentally capable of digesting this fact.
always != 99% of the time. I wish right-wingers were mentally capable of simple logic.
I am very much a libertarian when it comes to these issues. It is not the right, role, or responsibility of
government to permit or restrict your personal internet access within their institutions.
There are BETTER DESERVING issues that need public funding instead of damned internet access within
the libraries. Dump the internet access within the libraries. Take that money and pay down the national debt, feed some
hungry people... do SOMETHING constructive.
God forbid that someone too poor to own a computer and pay an ISP could use the internet to read non-corporate news sites or coordinate via indymedia. Gotta keep 'em down, right?
Seriously, the problem with jumping on the Libertarian bandwagon is that, when you get down to it, the only roles they see for governments are contract enforcement and national defence. Thus, ALL the tax money goes to lawyers and defense contractors. No feeding the hungry, no "faith-based" destruction of the wall between church and state. If you want to do that, start a company and find a way to make a buck at it. If you can't make money off of it, fuck 'em. They'll starve.
The real problem here isn't that we have filtering in public libraries. The problem is that we don't have enough
private organizations operating libraries for the public. Let them charge a monthly fee for the library card and go
from there. These baboons who demand filtering in the libraries probably don't use the libraries anyway, and
therefore they'd have no influence on whether or not a privately run library would have filtering.
Of course, there are certain problems that a privately run library would have that public libraries wouldn't. And
that's why we need both. Go to the private library for almost everything, but go to the public library when you need
to read something that's critical of the corporation running the private library.
This is plain wrong. I've already paid for my public library in the form of sales taxes, other taxes, late fees, etc. Why in the hell should I pay a second time? You're right about the baboons not using the library themselves. I think it would be better to post signs outside to the effect that while public libraries are not the dens of iniquity some make them out to be, they are public spaces, where you may be exposed to things you disagree with or object to. If they don't like it, there's always the mall...IOW, filtering in public libraries IS the problem here. If these people want better control over what their kids get up to on the internet, THEY can sign up with an ISP, pay a monthly fee, and buy their own goddamned filtering software. Rather than imposing their own impoverished version of learning on the rest of us and forcing us to pay extra for the filtering software, they should leave the public libraries alone and eat the costs themselves. They're the ones with the problem, not the rest of us.
BTW, if I want something critical of public libraries, I can get it from *gasp* a public library.;)
Re:Yeah, but they use proprietary protocols...
on
Pizza Without Wires
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· Score: 1
DHCP: Deliveryperson Had Car Problem (30 minutes late and stone cold)
Delivery guy Helps Choose Pizza (change your phone number every 30 minutes)
Big publishers like Elesvier are very profitable (Elesvier's pre-tax proft margin last year was 25%) and are hardly crying for money. Somehow non-profit publishers manage to put out their journals for substantially less- even when they contract with one of the bigger journals to do the actual physical publishing. There's a reason that the big, for-profit publishers are
starting new journals very rapidly; they wouldn't be doing so if they didn't think they'd be profitable.
Elsevier's bad, and getting worse. They're also huge; almost 1,200 English-lang. science journals.
My understanding is that in the past, they used to point to some increase in the cost of paper, or ink, or whatever, to justify their annual subscription rate hikes. A while back, they gobbled up some of the for-profit competition. After that, the next increase was announced without even attempting to make up some excuse. Anyone who knows more about this, please post.
I see. why haven't market forces driven the price down? It would seem to me I could start a scientific journal, charge half and still make money(assuming I spell better there then in my posts;) ). It might take 5 years to prove I'm a serious journal, but most business don't make money for 3-5 years anyhow.
Scientists publish in order to gain tenure. Only articles they can get published in peer-reviewed journals are considered in most places when it comes to putting a CV together. If you could get tenured scientists to act as reviewers, your journal might stand a chance. Without that, it wouldn't even be worth trying.
I'm not the person you're responding to, so I can't answer your question, but I wanted to respond to something you wrote:
You don't leave your loved ones while a kevlar vest is waiting in your car. You don't leave your loved ones knowing someone is out there who wants to kill you only because of your job. You don't leave your loved ones knowing that in all likelihood, you will have to make a critical decision between your life and someone else's at some point.
Unless you have served in the military or work as a firefighter, you have no basis to compare your job to that of a police officer.
That's because my employer doesn't issue a vest to me. Thus, I stand a better chance of dying of a gunshot wound than a cop does. Granted, my chances of being shot to/from/at work are less, but then so are my odds of surviving a gunshot.
As for people wanting to kill you for what you do, you left a few careers out: abortion providers (doctors, nurses, receptionists) come to mind*. Unlike cops, the people who want to kill them over how they earn a living post their addresses, phone numbers, and movements on the internet for every bible-thumping lunatic with a hunting rifle or pipebomb to see. I have yet to see a web site offering similar details on cops in my area. Add international relief workers and reporters to the list, too.
As for dangerous jobs, taxi drivers take enormous risks. In some towns, they're required to go into areas they think unsafe at night. Same for delivery people. Sure, there's not so much nobility in getting a pizza to your door within 30 minutes of your order, but the delivery boy has no idea who or what is behind the door every time they make a run. Ever pulled an all-nighter alone at a convenience store w/o a weapon?
Some people want to kill people just because they work for the federal government in a non-military capacity. Plenty of jobs that have nothing to do with being feted by John Walsh or charging into burning buildings or carrying a backpack and an assault rifle involve a hell of a lot of risk, sometimes for the most mundane of reasons and sometimes for much less pay. As for making life-and-death decisions, you have to be ready to do that every time you drive a car. You may not be the cop that chases a stolen car, but you may be the innocent who is killed by the fleeing criminal (or pursuing peace officer--accidents happen.) I acknowledge that cops take more risks than people in many other professions. What I think is missing here is an acknowledgement that they are better equipped, better trained, and backed up by others so much more than people in some of the jobs I've mentioned. Moreover, military service is voluntary, as is being a peace officer. Eating is compulsory--you have to do something to live. The only difference with police service I see here is that cops have the power of the State behind them, and are armed by the State, as are soldiers.
Peace Corps members are volunteers too, but somehow being part of an armored, armed, trained team seems more heroic than going into a malaria-infected backwater where you don't speak the language to help set up sanitation facilities so babies don't die of waterborne infections.
That's just bizarre and incredibly damaging to capitalism.
Yes, we can't have that, now can we? The mere thought of some aerospace executive not having enough caviar to make it to the edge of his cracker gives me the galloping shits!
What I find bizarre and damaging to the American taxpayer is the way aerospace companies screw the gov't out of millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars with the connivance of their lackeys in the Pentagon and in Congress.
You are right about companies taking their ball and going home when they don't like the rules. They've gotten pretty good at pitting cities and counties against one another in a contest to see who will give up the most. From a consumer's point of view, they're trying to keep costs down. From a citizen's point of view, they're trying to see just how much of their civic duty they can shirk.
While this may be true, one would be
hard-pressed to name another public health issue that is as well
understood and controlled. Surely it would not be air pollution
from burning coal, which is a million times more serious a
problem. Surely it is not food additives or insecticides or such
[the dangers from these have also been greatly exaggerated] that
may well be doing real harm to our health. Pu hazards are far
better understood than any of these, and the one fatality per 300
years they may someday cause is truly trivial by comparison.
While I can't completely absolve whatever "enviro-lefty" ideology you refer to, you'd have to be blind to believe that the purveyors of coal-burning plants have no interest whatsoever in denigrating plutonium as an energy source. Please keep the standard of debate somewhere above the Limbaugh Level.®
And the 59 cents a second claim is utter, utter CRAP.
Yep. If they're in Georgia, they probably have to buy their bandwidth through these folks. Given the price of a T1 from them, It comes out to under $3/hr, which includes 1/12 of their annual charge. That comes out to about five cents per second.
Explain then why it is illegal to listen in on analog cellphone conversations with a scanner. You can't really even buy scanners capable of tuning that range.
My understanding is that it's not illegal to listen, but it is illegal to use anything you hear to gain anything, whether it be by blackmail or that hot stock tip you overheard.
Instead of going to Netcraft, I've been going directly to the porn sites and trying to determine if the server "feels" like Apache or IIS. I've had limited success so far, but I have been able to recycle several empty Kleenex boxes.
If you achieved "penetration" I can assure you that the server was IIS. Bonus points if you were using a "trojan" at the time!
Given the history of governments, why anyone wants them to have more power is beyond me. I guess it's because it's easy to have dreams of grandeur that one's philosophy on how everyone else should behave, implemented at the point of a gun, will result in a better world. You are behind the gun, after all.
You put the gun in my rhetorical hands, not me. Don't think I'll let that slide for a second. Nothing I said in the parent post said anything about using force to achieve anything. If you want to spout Mao, you'd better attribute it as such. BTW, that's a perfect description of the current US attitude towards the world economy. Think about it.
And the unstated solution is to have an even larger and more intrusive government into the lives of people. Non-coericive monopoly (business) bad, coercive monopoly (government) good.
What's coercive? I can only use USPS if I want to mail a letter from my mailbox, but if I want to go to Mailboxes Plus, I have a choice of shippers. Is USPS "coercing" you into buying stamps for your bills, or can you pay them online instead? What's coercive? I want to buy a PC from a brand-name house, but I intend to put a *NIX on it, so I don't want to pay for the MS license. No license, no PC. Resell the license on e-bay? You must be a criminal! De-listed. Sound coercive to me. Hell, they make the mouse and keyboard too! How's that for vertical integration?
As for intrusive, it's not the government who's charging more for my groceries in exchange for not selling my eating and drinking habits, it's your pal the private sector.
Please note that WalMart, GM, Exxon, whoever, aren't even close to having wild dreams of being a
non-coercive monopoly.
N.B. Microsoft as an aspiring non-coercive (you don't NEED computers to live) monopoly. Then there's these guys. Turns out you do have to eat, after all. How much more coercive can you get?
Look, this country has an egalitarian patina over an economic model that guarantees winners and losers while we talk about equality. The contradiction is getting close to the breaking point, and I think we're going to have to make some sort of a choice. One model bases enfranchisement in society on citizenship and the right to vote. The other model bases enfranchisement on the possesion of shares and the right to proxy votes (no citizenship required.) Only under one of these models is it guaranteed that you are enfranchised simply by being born. Under the other, its's purely random, not equal (nor is it guaranteed--you can still squander the inheritance if you wish.) The "equality of opportunity" crowd can have their day when they demonstrate equality of healthcare and education. After all, it's hard to concentrate on those ABC's when your belly's grumbling and you're running a fever.
the State assuming ownership of the means of production, (which is the hallmark of Communism.)
actually this is a hallmark of Socalism, but Americans have a skewed view of communism because of that damned cold war. (which really got messed up when they were suddenly our friends, go figure)
Yeah. If it's Tuesday, the enemy is Eurasia, not Eastasia.
OK, if it's socialism (as you say) how is it that some advanced industrial economies (take Germany, for example) have giants like Daimler-Benz, Siemens, BASF, Deutsche Bank, etc, and still manage to provide for more of the basic needs of their populace than we do, with better education to boot? I bet their executives have enough caviar to make it to the edge of the cracker under the current arrangement. Do ours not?
Anywho, in a real communist state, the people figure it out that both coporations and governement are bad and break up both accordingly. Communist states attempt to force this change on the populace with varying results(china's doing pretty well, North Korea is in the toliet, again, go figure)
NK is in the toilet because NK is a toilet. So is Burma/Myanmar, but they're a military dictatorship, so we'll ignore them, eh? China is accepting some foreign investment, and is about to join the WTO. The PLA actually runs a number of joint ventures with startup tech/aerospace type firms, but they retain firm control. Additionally there is a good deal of entrepreneurship going on. What China wants is a one-party quasi-free market economy without all the mess of multi-party politics and activist causes. Does this sound anything like where the US is headed? Aside from hotbutton emotionally-charged issues like abortion, the Reps and Dems are looking more and more like each other on economic policy every day. Instead of locking activists up, we'll just deny them access to media and generally ignore them. Not as bloody, but the end result is the same: maximum profit, minimum dissent.
And I believe (and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one) that people ARE GREEDY . People follow the path of least resistance, and following the path of resistance is what makes a river crooked. blah blah blah get over yourselves,
Everyone knows greed is a powerful motivator. If the US Army Corps of Engineers can straighten a real river, why can't we even try to straighten a socioeconomic river? The one we have now is the best place to go if you want to see money flow uphill.
Why should we temper people's drive to excellence?
Who are you to "temper" my achievement levels?
In the name of what? Please answer these very basic questions.
If your drive to "excellence" or your level of achievement is going to contribute to the next Great Depression, do you really think others are going to sit still while your slurp the last bit of stew in the pot? If you're interested in it, go find some Depression-era photography by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans. It's...depressing. Or, you can go back to your Ayn Rand novels.
The point here is that due to fallible human nature larger government will always result in larger corruption and pressure from corporate entities.
The point here is that due to fallible human nature larger corporations will always result in larger corruption and pressure from government entities.
Besides, corporations want government rules to hide behind when liability comes knocking. Only thing is, they also insist on writing those rules. Take Chapter 11 of the NAFTA agreement, for example.
Businesses are only interesting in influencing government because government is interested in controlling businesses. If we didn't let governments interfere with the marketplace, businesses wouldn't be able to make more money by buying legislators.
Unless businesses decided to buy off govenment officials in order to get favorable market conditions so as to make more money? What's missing here is the unstated assumption that
not a single soul in the business world is dishonest. Your statement really makes no sense without that. Do you really think that's the case, then? Dishonest govenment employees corrupting honest businessmen and never the other way around?
By keeping this sort of capital out of the hands of the government it keeps more power in the hands of people.. be they the CEO's of multinational corporations or in my savings account in Seattle.
The people...riiiiight. Here's a shocking idea: why not let the government have just a little bit of that and use it to, oh, I don't know, make sure every American citizen has access to affordable healthcare? Is an endeavor somehow immoral if someone (not "the people") can't line their pockets while doing it? Do these CEOs' not revolve in and out of govenment? Do they surrender (not transfer) their holdings when they become a legislator, lobbyist, or trade advisor? As for the compulsory "communism" crack, no one's talking about the State assuming ownership of the means of production, (which is the hallmark of Communism.) What they might be thinking of is a society that allows private companies to own the means of production, but tempers their natural proclivity towards greed by making sure that the effects of their profit-taking are mollified.
The part that scared me, was that the top 200 had more money then the world's govt. combined. Makes the notion of big business influencing govt. much more pleusable.
Actually, I think that's a very understated way of putting it. It's not a plausible notion, it's a simple fact. If anything, I'd worry about whether governments are in the process of losing their ability to influence big business. Sure there's OSHA and EPA, but if you cap damages in suits, they know exactly how much a violation can cost them, and if it's cheaper than following a regulation, they'll break it without compunction. Too expensive to break a rule here? Hola, Mexico.
Govt's give (tax) money to corps all the time, but they don't seem to get much in return other than the hope that companies won't find ways to dodge their taxes.
One thing comes to mind: the Feds often keep states in check by offering money for programs in the individual states, but they put strings on it. Won't raise the drinking age? Lose x% of your federal highway funds. Why can't they do that with defense contracts, trade assistance, etc? I know they do, to a modest extent, but I think even that will fall by the wayside. If the federal government can do that to the states, why can't it attach effective worker- and enviromentally-friendly strings to their contracts? The keyword here is effective. Whatever requirements are currently in place don't seem to be getting through. Hell, just getting them to pay fair market value for the resources they strip from public lands would be a nice start.
So you must ask yourself, "why is he still there?" We knocked out Slobo because there was a viable political opposition in Serbia. OTOH, their were insurgents in Iraq who got only lip service. Why? If we wanted Saddam gone, he'd be gone. Period. Yet there he is. Maybe the US is playing a waiting game, hoping for an internal coup or something of the sort. Move in from Turkey and Saudi, set up a "democratic" gov't that sells oil to us at bargain-basement prices, and wave to our buddies across the border in Iran. If something like this weren't waiting in the wings, why would we not foment revolt ourselves? A significant amount of oil is kept off the world market because of what's going on in and around Iraq. Could it be that throttling an OPEC nation's ability to sell is skyrocketing oil profits (scarcity = $) and that is more preferable to some than ousting Saddam? These are only two possibilities.
And as for Iraq being sixty years behind us wrt WMD, consider this: We weren't lopping Scuds (or V1s) anywhere in 1941.
What's so great about a card being able to encode my entire DNA sequence? Doesn't every cell in my body already do that without any trouble?
That's true, but what if you get bitten by a radioactive spider? Then you'd know which genes had been altered. If you ever got tired of crawling on the ceiling, you could take your original DNA information off the card, then look for a way to reverse the changes. OTOH, you might want to keep your super powers. But at least you'd have the choice.
Slashdot Mirror
If Afghanistan were turned into a smoking crater in the Earth do you really think anyone would miss them? The only thing that country exports is terrorists and refugees.
I'm sure their families would miss them just as much as American families devastated by last Tuesday's attacks miss their loved ones. Why would it be any different? The idea that you would kill innocents out of indifference or due to the notion that they simply don't matter is even sicker and more fucked up than killing because you feel strongly that you have some grievance that can't be addressed any other way, which is pretty fucked up to start with.
Exports: A lot of their terrorist exports were originally imported from elsewhere, trained, then left. Other MidEast nations saw Afghanistan as a great dumping ground for their local nutcases, and happily sent them on their way. Refugees tend to think leaving a hellhole is better than sticking around to get killed or beaten up for shaving. Would you stay in a place like that if you could leave?
If it were a stable nation, Afghanistan could be exporting things the world wants and needs. The CIA World Factbook for 2000 lists Afghanistan's natural resources, namely "natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semiprecious stones". Even if you don't give a flying fuck about the ordinary people there, maybe you can see the potential value in stabilizing and improving Afghanistan for economic reasons and maybe even find it in that big heart of yours to hope that to do so would raise the standard of living there, which would tend to make the locals less tolerant of violent extremists (remember, the Taliban do not have the hearts and minds there,) which would tend to make us safer. That is a daunting goal, and a very long-range one as well (it obviously would need to come after nailing everyone responsible for last week's massacres,) but I don't think it's undoable. And it would make us safer.
Or we could nuke them all , feel great for a week or month, then live in fear for generations. We don't need to martyr the innocent. If we do that, we will have dug ourselves a hole we can never climb out of. We need to be thinking about the effects of our actions in a very long-term way. Right now, most of the world is behind us. We shouldn't squander such a rare and precious advantage by killing innocent people. The rest of the world won't stand for it, and some here will not as well. What happened is not a license for barbarism on our part. Please stop and think about this.
While they can make "under-the-hood" changes legally with Linux, they are limited to suggestions on how to configure Microsoft products. More flexibility.
Besides, every software solution Uncle Sam doesn't have to pay for saves taxpayer dollars, and no Congressman can be against that. Even NASA takes lowest bidder, and they do do rocket science!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a certain amount of pro bono work mandated somehow or another (ABA bylaw or whatever,) or is it all volunteer? If any of it is required, it might affect how this analogy is digested by lawyers and legislators. I know the mandatory nature of community service performed by frats and sororities on many campuses colors my opinion of them when it is pointed to as a rationale for their continued existence.
This is so silly. If you want an unfiltered internet connection, pay for it yourself and use it with your own computer. When one lets the state own something, the state has a right to control it- just as you have a right to control your own connection.
Try this. The state doesn't run that. Do those users have control over their connections just because they pay a monthly fee to a private entity? If you point to the DMCA as gov't interference in the marketplace, I refer you to the private bodies that bought and paid for that piece of legislation. Appeals to the "free market" will be referred back to the geographic monopolies many broadband providers enjoy because they won't open their pipes to competition. Besides, the filtering software and associated maintenance and administration is an added burden on taxpayer funds. Unfiltered access is cheaper, so why not let the filtering advocates pay monthly fees to ISPs, buy their own filtering software, and spare the rest of us the added cost?
Letting government run things is always an inferior alternative to private ownership 99% of the time. I wish leftists were mentally capable of digesting this fact.
always != 99% of the time. I wish right-wingers were mentally capable of simple logic.
I am very much a libertarian when it comes to these issues. It is not the right, role, or responsibility of government to permit or restrict your personal internet access within their institutions. There are BETTER DESERVING issues that need public funding instead of damned internet access within the libraries. Dump the internet access within the libraries. Take that money and pay down the national debt, feed some hungry people... do SOMETHING constructive.
God forbid that someone too poor to own a computer and pay an ISP could use the internet to read non-corporate news sites or coordinate via indymedia. Gotta keep 'em down, right?
Seriously, the problem with jumping on the Libertarian bandwagon is that, when you get down to it, the only roles they see for governments are contract enforcement and national defence. Thus, ALL the tax money goes to lawyers and defense contractors. No feeding the hungry, no "faith-based" destruction of the wall between church and state. If you want to do that, start a company and find a way to make a buck at it. If you can't make money off of it, fuck 'em. They'll starve.
The real problem here isn't that we have filtering in public libraries. The problem is that we don't have enough private organizations operating libraries for the public. Let them charge a monthly fee for the library card and go from there. These baboons who demand filtering in the libraries probably don't use the libraries anyway, and therefore they'd have no influence on whether or not a privately run library would have filtering. Of course, there are certain problems that a privately run library would have that public libraries wouldn't. And that's why we need both. Go to the private library for almost everything, but go to the public library when you need to read something that's critical of the corporation running the private library.
;)
This is plain wrong. I've already paid for my public library in the form of sales taxes, other taxes, late fees, etc. Why in the hell should I pay a second time? You're right about the baboons not using the library themselves. I think it would be better to post signs outside to the effect that while public libraries are not the dens of iniquity some make them out to be, they are public spaces, where you may be exposed to things you disagree with or object to. If they don't like it, there's always the mall...IOW, filtering in public libraries IS the problem here. If these people want better control over what their kids get up to on the internet, THEY can sign up with an ISP, pay a monthly fee, and buy their own goddamned filtering software. Rather than imposing their own impoverished version of learning on the rest of us and forcing us to pay extra for the filtering software, they should leave the public libraries alone and eat the costs themselves. They're the ones with the problem, not the rest of us.
BTW, if I want something critical of public libraries, I can get it from *gasp* a public library.
DHCP: Deliveryperson Had Car Problem (30 minutes late and stone cold)
Delivery guy Helps Choose Pizza (change your phone number every 30 minutes)
DNS: Did Not Slice (got a knife?)
Deliver to No Slum (everybody got a knife.)
We as a society are forgetting how to raise children and worse, we are forgetting how to approach network issues like security.
I'd prioritize that differently, myself. I do agree with you WRT the twin outcomes, though (destruction of kids/schools.)
Big publishers like Elesvier are very profitable (Elesvier's pre-tax proft margin last year was 25%) and are hardly crying for money. Somehow non-profit publishers manage to put out their journals for substantially less- even when they contract with one of the bigger journals to do the actual physical publishing. There's a reason that the big, for-profit publishers are starting new journals very rapidly; they wouldn't be doing so if they didn't think they'd be profitable.
Elsevier's bad, and getting worse. They're also huge; almost 1,200 English-lang. science journals.
My understanding is that in the past, they used to point to some increase in the cost of paper, or ink, or whatever, to justify their annual subscription rate hikes. A while back, they gobbled up some of the for-profit competition. After that, the next increase was announced without even attempting to make up some excuse. Anyone who knows more about this, please post.
I see. why haven't market forces driven the price down? It would seem to me I could start a scientific journal, charge half and still make money(assuming I spell better there then in my posts ;) ). It might take 5 years to prove I'm a serious journal, but most business don't make money for 3-5 years anyhow.
Why haven't prices gone down? Ask these guys.
Scientists publish in order to gain tenure. Only articles they can get published in peer-reviewed journals are considered in most places when it comes to putting a CV together. If you could get tenured scientists to act as reviewers, your journal might stand a chance. Without that, it wouldn't even be worth trying.
I'm not the person you're responding to, so I can't answer your question, but I wanted to respond to something you wrote:
You don't leave your loved ones while a kevlar vest is waiting in your car. You don't leave your loved ones knowing someone is out there who wants to kill you only because of your job. You don't leave your loved ones knowing that in all likelihood, you will have to make a critical decision between your life and someone else's at some point.
Unless you have served in the military or work as a firefighter, you have no basis to compare your job to that of a police officer.
That's because my employer doesn't issue a vest to me. Thus, I stand a better chance of dying of a gunshot wound than a cop does. Granted, my chances of being shot to/from/at work are less, but then so are my odds of surviving a gunshot.
As for people wanting to kill you for what you do, you left a few careers out: abortion providers (doctors, nurses, receptionists) come to mind*. Unlike cops, the people who want to kill them over how they earn a living post their addresses, phone numbers, and movements on the internet for every bible-thumping lunatic with a hunting rifle or pipebomb to see. I have yet to see a web site offering similar details on cops in my area. Add international relief workers and reporters to the list, too.
As for dangerous jobs, taxi drivers take enormous risks. In some towns, they're required to go into areas they think unsafe at night. Same for delivery people. Sure, there's not so much nobility in getting a pizza to your door within 30 minutes of your order, but the delivery boy has no idea who or what is behind the door every time they make a run. Ever pulled an all-nighter alone at a convenience store w/o a weapon?
Some people want to kill people just because they work for the federal government in a non-military capacity. Plenty of jobs that have nothing to do with being feted by John Walsh or charging into burning buildings or carrying a backpack and an assault rifle involve a hell of a lot of risk, sometimes for the most mundane of reasons and sometimes for much less pay. As for making life-and-death decisions, you have to be ready to do that every time you drive a car. You may not be the cop that chases a stolen car, but you may be the innocent who is killed by the fleeing criminal (or pursuing peace officer--accidents happen.) I acknowledge that cops take more risks than people in many other professions. What I think is missing here is an acknowledgement that they are better equipped, better trained, and backed up by others so much more than people in some of the jobs I've mentioned. Moreover, military service is voluntary, as is being a peace officer. Eating is compulsory--you have to do something to live. The only difference with police service I see here is that cops have the power of the State behind them, and are armed by the State, as are soldiers.
Peace Corps members are volunteers too, but somehow being part of an armored, armed, trained team seems more heroic than going into a malaria-infected backwater where you don't speak the language to help set up sanitation facilities so babies don't die of waterborne infections.
That's just bizarre and incredibly damaging to capitalism.
Yes, we can't have that, now can we? The mere thought of some aerospace executive not having enough caviar to make it to the edge of his cracker gives me the galloping shits!
What I find bizarre and damaging to the American taxpayer is the way aerospace companies screw the gov't out of millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars with the connivance of their lackeys in the Pentagon and in Congress.
You are right about companies taking their ball and going home when they don't like the rules. They've gotten pretty good at pitting cities and counties against one another in a contest to see who will give up the most. From a consumer's point of view, they're trying to keep costs down. From a citizen's point of view, they're trying to see just how much of their civic duty they can shirk.
From the source cited:
While this may be true, one would be hard-pressed to name another public health issue that is as well understood and controlled. Surely it would not be air pollution from burning coal, which is a million times more serious a problem. Surely it is not food additives or insecticides or such [the dangers from these have also been greatly exaggerated] that may well be doing real harm to our health. Pu hazards are far better understood than any of these, and the one fatality per 300 years they may someday cause is truly trivial by comparison.
While I can't completely absolve whatever "enviro-lefty" ideology you refer to, you'd have to be blind to believe that the purveyors of coal-burning plants have no interest whatsoever in denigrating plutonium as an energy source. Please keep the standard of debate somewhere above the Limbaugh Level.®
And the 59 cents a second claim is utter, utter CRAP.
Yep. If they're in Georgia, they probably have to buy their bandwidth through these folks. Given the price of a T1 from them, It comes out to under $3/hr, which includes 1/12 of their annual charge. That comes out to about five cents per second.
Explain then why it is illegal to listen in on analog cellphone conversations with a scanner. You can't really even buy scanners capable of tuning that range.
My understanding is that it's not illegal to listen, but it is illegal to use anything you hear to gain anything, whether it be by blackmail or that hot stock tip you overheard.
Instead of going to Netcraft, I've been going directly to the porn sites and trying to determine if the server "feels" like Apache or IIS. I've had limited success so far, but I have been able to recycle several empty Kleenex boxes.
If you achieved "penetration" I can assure you that the server was IIS. Bonus points if you were using a "trojan" at the time!
I have to address the last "point" first:
Given the history of governments, why anyone wants them to have more power is beyond me. I guess it's because it's easy to have dreams of grandeur that one's philosophy on how everyone else should behave, implemented at the point of a gun, will result in a better world. You are behind the gun, after all.
You put the gun in my rhetorical hands, not me. Don't think I'll let that slide for a second. Nothing I said in the parent post said anything about using force to achieve anything. If you want to spout Mao, you'd better attribute it as such. BTW, that's a perfect description of the current US attitude towards the world economy. Think about it.
And the unstated solution is to have an even larger and more intrusive government into the lives of people. Non-coericive monopoly (business) bad, coercive monopoly (government) good.
What's coercive? I can only use USPS if I want to mail a letter from my mailbox, but if I want to go to Mailboxes Plus, I have a choice of shippers. Is USPS "coercing" you into buying stamps for your bills, or can you pay them online instead? What's coercive? I want to buy a PC from a brand-name house, but I intend to put a *NIX on it, so I don't want to pay for the MS license. No license, no PC. Resell the license on e-bay? You must be a criminal! De-listed. Sound coercive to me. Hell, they make the mouse and keyboard too! How's that for vertical integration?
As for intrusive, it's not the government who's charging more for my groceries in exchange for not selling my eating and drinking habits, it's your pal the private sector.
Please note that WalMart, GM, Exxon, whoever, aren't even close to having wild dreams of being a non-coercive monopoly.
N.B. Microsoft as an aspiring non-coercive (you don't NEED computers to live) monopoly. Then there's these guys. Turns out you do have to eat, after all. How much more coercive can you get?
Look, this country has an egalitarian patina over an economic model that guarantees winners and losers while we talk about equality. The contradiction is getting close to the breaking point, and I think we're going to have to make some sort of a choice. One model bases enfranchisement in society on citizenship and the right to vote. The other model bases enfranchisement on the possesion of shares and the right to proxy votes (no citizenship required.) Only under one of these models is it guaranteed that you are enfranchised simply by being born. Under the other, its's purely random, not equal (nor is it guaranteed--you can still squander the inheritance if you wish.) The "equality of opportunity" crowd can have their day when they demonstrate equality of healthcare and education. After all, it's hard to concentrate on those ABC's when your belly's grumbling and you're running a fever.
the State assuming ownership of the means of production, (which is the hallmark of Communism.)
actually this is a hallmark of Socalism, but Americans have a skewed view of communism because of that damned cold war. (which really got messed up when they were suddenly our friends, go figure)
Yeah. If it's Tuesday, the enemy is Eurasia, not Eastasia.
OK, if it's socialism (as you say) how is it that some advanced industrial economies (take Germany, for example) have giants like Daimler-Benz, Siemens, BASF, Deutsche Bank, etc, and still manage to provide for more of the basic needs of their populace than we do, with better education to boot? I bet their executives have enough caviar to make it to the edge of the cracker under the current arrangement. Do ours not?
Anywho, in a real communist state, the people figure it out that both coporations and governement are bad and break up both accordingly. Communist states attempt to force this change on the populace with varying results(china's doing pretty well, North Korea is in the toliet, again, go figure)
NK is in the toilet because NK is a toilet. So is Burma/Myanmar, but they're a military dictatorship, so we'll ignore them, eh? China is accepting some foreign investment, and is about to join the WTO. The PLA actually runs a number of joint ventures with startup tech/aerospace type firms, but they retain firm control. Additionally there is a good deal of entrepreneurship going on. What China wants is a one-party quasi-free market economy without all the mess of multi-party politics and activist causes. Does this sound anything like where the US is headed? Aside from hotbutton emotionally-charged issues like abortion, the Reps and Dems are looking more and more like each other on economic policy every day. Instead of locking activists up, we'll just deny them access to media and generally ignore them. Not as bloody, but the end result is the same: maximum profit, minimum dissent.
And I believe (and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one) that people ARE GREEDY . People follow the path of least resistance, and following the path of resistance is what makes a river crooked. blah blah blah get over yourselves,
Everyone knows greed is a powerful motivator. If the US Army Corps of Engineers can straighten a real river, why can't we even try to straighten a socioeconomic river? The one we have now is the best place to go if you want to see money flow uphill.
Why should we temper people's drive to excellence?
Who are you to "temper" my achievement levels?
In the name of what? Please answer these very basic questions.
If your drive to "excellence" or your level of achievement is going to contribute to the next Great Depression, do you really think others are going to sit still while your slurp the last bit of stew in the pot? If you're interested in it, go find some Depression-era photography by Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans. It's...depressing. Or, you can go back to your Ayn Rand novels.
The point here is that due to fallible human nature larger government will always result in larger corruption and pressure from corporate entities.
The point here is that due to fallible human nature larger corporations will always result in larger corruption and pressure from government entities.
Besides, corporations want government rules to hide behind when liability comes knocking. Only thing is, they also insist on writing those rules. Take Chapter 11 of the NAFTA agreement, for example.
Businesses are only interesting in influencing government because government is interested in controlling businesses. If we didn't let governments interfere with the marketplace, businesses wouldn't be able to make more money by buying legislators.
Unless businesses decided to buy off govenment officials in order to get favorable market conditions so as to make more money? What's missing here is the unstated assumption that not a single soul in the business world is dishonest. Your statement really makes no sense without that. Do you really think that's the case, then? Dishonest govenment employees corrupting honest businessmen and never the other way around?
By keeping this sort of capital out of the hands of the government it keeps more power in the hands of people.. be they the CEO's of multinational corporations or in my savings account in Seattle.
The people...riiiiight. Here's a shocking idea: why not let the government have just a little bit of that and use it to, oh, I don't know, make sure every American citizen has access to affordable healthcare? Is an endeavor somehow immoral if someone (not "the people") can't line their pockets while doing it? Do these CEOs' not revolve in and out of govenment? Do they surrender (not transfer) their holdings when they become a legislator, lobbyist, or trade advisor? As for the compulsory "communism" crack, no one's talking about the State assuming ownership of the means of production, (which is the hallmark of Communism.) What they might be thinking of is a society that allows private companies to own the means of production, but tempers their natural proclivity towards greed by making sure that the effects of their profit-taking are mollified.
The part that scared me, was that the top 200 had more money then the world's govt. combined. Makes the notion of big business influencing govt. much more pleusable.
Actually, I think that's a very understated way of putting it. It's not a plausible notion, it's a simple fact. If anything, I'd worry about whether governments are in the process of losing their ability to influence big business. Sure there's OSHA and EPA, but if you cap damages in suits, they know exactly how much a violation can cost them, and if it's cheaper than following a regulation, they'll break it without compunction. Too expensive to break a rule here? Hola, Mexico.
Govt's give (tax) money to corps all the time, but they don't seem to get much in return other than the hope that companies won't find ways to dodge their taxes.
One thing comes to mind: the Feds often keep states in check by offering money for programs in the individual states, but they put strings on it. Won't raise the drinking age? Lose x% of your federal highway funds. Why can't they do that with defense contracts, trade assistance, etc? I know they do, to a modest extent, but I think even that will fall by the wayside. If the federal government can do that to the states, why can't it attach effective worker- and enviromentally-friendly strings to their contracts? The keyword here is effective. Whatever requirements are currently in place don't seem to be getting through. Hell, just getting them to pay fair market value for the resources they strip from public lands would be a nice start.
So you must ask yourself, "why is he still there?" We knocked out Slobo because there was a viable political opposition in Serbia. OTOH, their were insurgents in Iraq who got only lip service. Why? If we wanted Saddam gone, he'd be gone. Period. Yet there he is. Maybe the US is playing a waiting game, hoping for an internal coup or something of the sort. Move in from Turkey and Saudi, set up a "democratic" gov't that sells oil to us at bargain-basement prices, and wave to our buddies across the border in Iran. If something like this weren't waiting in the wings, why would we not foment revolt ourselves? A significant amount of oil is kept off the world market because of what's going on in and around Iraq. Could it be that throttling an OPEC nation's ability to sell is skyrocketing oil profits (scarcity = $) and that is more preferable to some than ousting Saddam? These are only two possibilities.
And as for Iraq being sixty years behind us wrt WMD, consider this: We weren't lopping Scuds (or V1s) anywhere in 1941.
What's so great about a card being able to encode my entire DNA sequence? Doesn't every cell in my body already do that without any trouble?
That's true, but what if you get bitten by a radioactive spider? Then you'd know which genes had been altered. If you ever got tired of crawling on the ceiling, you could take your original DNA information off the card, then look for a way to reverse the changes. OTOH, you might want to keep your super powers. But at least you'd have the choice.