Find a person with their human rights being taken away and ask them about their standard of living. Id say it certainly could be a factor. Also, he never said Asia was a country and conveniently picked out the middle east and china and others without getting specific, its easy to find instances across Asia of poor human rights and i think you got his point.
He was saying the disadvatage was inherent, not the standard of living. There are certainly plenty of examples of countries that dont value human rights on the continent of Asia, the problem with his statement is that he is implying that the east does care about human rights - if human rights are dollars then the east cares about it.
If found the biggest problems that cause crashes are memory management, lack of testing and object state issues.
Doing things like ensuring that an object allocates its own memory and deallocates that memory in a well managed fashion in every possible instance is a good step. Also people developing object oriented code in C++ often dont think about the state of their objects and instead assume proper usage, this is a *big* mistake. You should ensure that your objects are always in a valid state no matter what happens or throw an exception, every constructor and method; and expose as little member data to unmonitored changes as possible.
Finally, ive found unit testing to really be useful. Every class, or if needed group of classes, that i develop gets a unit test module that fully exercises its functionality, focusing on boundary conditions. No program is crash proof but if you write your software well and test each piece and then the pieces together, you can have some reasonable assurance that things will work as expected. A well defined test suite for after you put it together doesnt hurt either.
Good point, doesn't mean I don't think 80% of people aren't nuts.
(I'll assume that by "mean" you meant "meant". You're comment was about a statement made in the past while "mean" relates to something occuring presently. Also, the proper usage would have been "The problem is..", otherwise your redefining the word problem. Heh, jerk.)
Indeed. And that's why the world is full of languages with lots of features and poor usability. Like (X)HTML. My point exactly.
This excuse is something that i expect to hear from someone with a tenuous grasp on programming who thinks the industry owes it to them to make things so simple that even they can do it. Efficiency and innovation are not rationally obvious and they never will be, otherwise everyone would invent something great; a language designed under your precepts would just suck and if i wasnt so lazy i bet i could go find a handful of failed examples as well. Oh, and im still looking for you real-world usability metrics for programming languages - ill go ahead and call 'bullshit' now.
Any formal language can be "validated at edit time", including HTML and SGML. As for extensibility, it often harms usability.
Not just validated, but easily. If it was so easy to validate HTML, the syntax was complete and browers were so compliant than why would we be wanting to replace it? I see you think extensibility in programming languages is bad too; that may be the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to me on here and makes me wonder if you have ever programmed before at all - its the basis of a successful programming language, first and foremost. Also, you still havent named anything specifically wrong with XHTML and i think at this point you just dont know what your talking about.
C, C++, UNIX/Linux, VMS/NT --- all brilliant pieces of software responsible for nothing short of changing the world. Your clueless if you think that any of these were a bad move or a failure. Building on that software was entering the dark ages? They used it because there was nothing else that worked as well. Go ahead and explain where they should have gone instead when you get the chance.
IM and P2P are good innovations period, the fact that you cant see the technology despite the greedy companies shows a lack of vision. Saying their primary function is propreitary networks is clearly misleading, there are plenty of open and free versions of both. Talking about trying to tie the user to proprietary standards, did you use any of that 70s an 80s software? That was their primary goal and nothing cross-company really interoperated very well and the software had a gigantic price tag - id say new stuff is big inprovement over that crap.
The facts in this case are that people are having a lot of problems writing good HTML; hence the book review, hence the reviewer's comments. But if you seriously think all is fine and dandy in HTML markup land, run some HTML validators over some real web sites some time.
Well the web and this site itself shows that there are plenty that are getting by just fine. Also, my argument was for XHTML not HTML, even though for its time HTML served its purpose well. I know plenty of people who have trouble writing good C, C++, Java, and i dont take that as my que to look down my nose at those languages.
The latter matters a great deal, because if it's difficult for content creators to produce correct markup, there will be less correct markup on the web and the web will be less useful for people.
In this case i would figure that you would support XHTML due to its extensibility and its ability to be validated at edit time easily (features your blowing off in earlier posts) - and here you seem to confirm you agree. Still you argue this is a negative move. Seems your arguing both sides of the point and Im still not clear what exactly you think XHTML doesnt do properly.
..according to formal usability tests and real-world metrics.
Although people do put thought into ease of use in their languages; functionality, portability and performance are the factors that really make a language gain ground - and the programmers make that choice, not the language authors. How do you expect people to innovate in language design if you expect them to meet some artificial requirements for usability. In my experience there are many non-intuitive paradigms in modern programming languages that represent more efficient ways to manipulate information and improve the state of the art. Look at college programming courses like data structures, are you saying that lists, trees and graphs are usable? I looked around for some of these metrics, but i cant find one web site that names any of them...strange.
A, yes, throngs of 20-somethings busily reinventing the wheel "the hard way", in complete ignorance of the previous half century of computer science. You aren't seriously asserting that there has been a lot of innovation in software over the last decade, are you?
Every application on your computer. Even if they werent invented in the past 10 years, like MP3s, instant messenging and P2P apps, you wouldnt trade them for their 1995 counterparts. Obviously plenty of innovation going on. Why not take the software less than ten years old off your computer and find out, put the 95 versions back on - im sure youll find it a robust usable experience. Plus computer scientists use math, communications and electronics theory, etc. - so i guess computer science at heart is just 'reinventing the wheel' by your standards.
XHTML and CSS simply aren't very good for entering manually
If that statement and 'use a wysiwig editor' doesnt translate in some form to imply that they are too much to type then id like to hear what you really were trying to say. I think entering them manually is perfectly efficient if you know what your doing and in some caes is actually required if you want to be truly creative as far as design is concerned.
The issue is that XHTML is an even worse markup language than HTML was..
Why not give one supporting fact for this nonsensical statement? Please. Id love to hear you define a 'good' markup language in the first place. Perhaps you and others dont like some of the syntantical elements in the XHTML schema (again, id love to hear which ones if you have specifics) but i think a well formed HTML that doesnt make every web developer completely relearn every element was a perfectly intelligent next step and if you have better ideas im sure everyone would love to hear them.
And I think you yourself illustrate why: you have no taste and you do not think about usability, and there are so many people like you around in this industry that we are saddled with disasters like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as "industry standards".
Heres a thought on usability, go get an old browser that only supports HTML (no XHTML, CSS or JavaScript) and come back and give me a report on usability. By the way, usability is a term relating to viewing a page, not coding it, and that statement really had nothing to do with the topic. If being used for years by millions and millions of people with the effect of developing the underlying techonologies to unprecedented levels and establishing new forms of commmunication for people around the world is rated a disaster, so be it.
These people didnt have hindsight and blogs on why XHTML and CSS sucks to develop their ideas from - they did it the hard way, they broke new ground. Were they perfect? Obviously not, thats why there are versions to HTML, CSS and JavaScript - to improve them. Did it make sense just to throw them out when people had so much invested in them both in web pages and in developing the technology itself? The fact is that there is more to inventing something than you let on, there is more to being backwards compatible than advertising and if you had any development background you would have some insight into these issues. Save your insults for someone who doesnt know your clueless.
We all enjoy watching you argue just to argue, but really, toss a couple of facts in there somewhere - just to keep 'em guessing. You know shock our systems. Hint: A is worse than B isnt an argument.
If you think CSS is more typing than plain HTML formatting and attributes, you obviously havent done much CSS. It can save you tons of repetive code by allowing you to define classes and formatting globally for whole groups of elements in your pages. XHTML doesnt add much code and allows you much more functionality such as searching your tags and translating pages from your site into other formats using XLST or some other transform (i.e. deliver your web pages in PDF format on the fly). Also, you would have to have limited knowledge of HTML in the first place to think that it was complete.
I guess if the measure of "winning" or "losing" is decided by you every time, the other person will always lose. Unfortunately in reality when in a community or social situation the community will is the only will that matters; i didnt make it up - try turning the computer off and read a book (Rousseau - The Social Contract) once and awhile. This doesnt mean you cant have a point but it does mean that you cant define right and wrong by your own metrics and that the posts youd like to ignore actually do matter, unless of course your comfortable with being defined by antisocial behavior.
Breaking pro-posters into normal posters and everyone else into "the threatened sacred cow of slashdot", "ACs hopping in for pot shots" or "junveniles and rednecks" makes it perfectly clear that your not capable or mature enough to post comments and have a discussion with adults. In closing, I find it entertaining that your argument is based on logical fallacies but in every post you insult, name-call, demonize, bandwagon and cross-associate until you work out your little tantrums.
Dude, your a joke - but then again, all of this mis-directed anger your expressing shows me that you know that already.
Maybe if kids paid for their own college educations this trend would recede. Many of these kids are going to college because their parents strapped a pile of cash and a rocket to their ass and fired them off to the local university. Combine the concept that not everyone is "college material" with the idea that children in the US are perhaps some of the most spoiled in the universe and finally multiply that by the way parents live through their children and want to *make* them successful - these research results are a no-brainer. (and before the obligatory responses come, i have a kid who will be in college in 8 years and im not sure id eat my own dog food)
Actually his explanation was perfect, exactly how i felt, and you insult him here for no reason and should be modded flamebait. You reek of insecurity.
Changing the subject completely to logical fallicies is worse than a logical fallacy.
Your personalizing things too much.
The question about capitalism wanting "nice" companies was a completely new point in the converstaion.
Trite remarks like "Thanks for playing..." and "...is like scientology.." are condescending, add no value to the conversation and practice the same logical fallacies you are poorly trying to explain.
Sounds to me like you dont believe a company can be good under any circumstances if they make money. I think the real question is does capitalism really want "nice" companies. I guess our reactions when we see one, (i.e. supporting them when the government makes ridiculous requests of them), will answer that question wont it? Im waiting to see what we will do, not google.
Did you read the article or the post? The article was completely about viruses and malware - the post you replied too was mostly about viruses and he mentioned patching which i guess could be construed as an opening to a local security debate - but its a stretch. I know what local security is, i just think your off topic.
Since the article was about remote exploits and viruses i guess thats irrelevant. Physical security is a major problem for any platform when unmonitored users can sit at the actual system, which is the case for most home situations.
Isnt this really just an argument about the mission of this web site? Is it to disseminate news to the masses or is it a device to facilitate community communication and to encourage debate? IMHO we have plenty of sites disseminating information, even a moron like me can hit refresh on news.google.com, but what Slashdot adds in value is unparallelled discussion after the topic is introduced. The debate is the real value and if you miss a couple of stories to inspire the debate - i'd say 1) your earning your title as editor and 2) the site will prosper for it.
Now about these posters. I dont know anyone who hasnt been in a college class or a meeting at work or a social event and hasnt met someone who has to dominate the conversation. Someone who just has to control the topic, make every joke, basically be an unsocial asshole. These people exists. As it pertains to this story, the editors need to remember that if they let these people dominate the conversation, some people will not want to participate and others will complain, loudly, as they should in a heathy debate atmosphere. Perhaps the editors should make a Slashdot comment area and then it would be sensible to mod these complaints off-topic but until that area is created - moding them down is censorship IMHO.
But again, if you could just send every decent story through will no bumps why would we need editors? Without some emotional/social aspect to the editing process we might as well start writing the Slashdot editor Perl scripts right now.
Might want to ask yourself who Spitzer works for, new yorkers or the record companies. Have you noticed a pricing change in CDs since his initial win? I havent - they still cost way too much. A few million bucks is nothing to these people, i say they are getting off way too cheap and then can hide behind these weak settlements if the questions ever come up again. If i was a record company i would be overjoyed to see this guy coming. So what benefit does attention to online music pricing give to record companies; Steve Jobs doesnt want to change itunes prices - be funny if he was ordered to in court wouldnt it...
Perhaps its just the social scheme at play here. The children see the adults as superiors and therefore trust them to make the right decisions, therefore making them less likely to skip steps. The chimps, very plausibly, have their own social order. This doesn't seem to me to prove as much about learning ability as they let on.
Maybe we should spend less time worrying about which category we fall under and instead find the right combination of capitalism and socialism and whateverism that meets the needs of the society it represents and protects our ability to compete with the rest of the world. The only thing wrong with capitalism is that sometimes it doesnt represent the states members but in the united states thats a problem with the organization and systems in place in the government and not the philosphical underpinnings that the system is based on. Theres no reason why a capitalist government has to operate for money and by money alone - only the people getting rich of the situation will try to convince you it will.
There is more of a debate here than people would like to admit unfortunately. These businesses are acting on issues other than their own self interest here - they employee millions, millions who without jobs could seriously harm the economy, and each member of the state as well. So the debate ends up, what do we do when technology/tech companies make whole business sectors(which really translates to lots of people) irrelevant(or at least hand them their hat)? The idea of emminent domain and the governments ability to override the rights of the individuals is what is at the base of this argument, and that idea is not based in capitalist ideals - but socialist ones. The companies are asking government to take choice away, but the government agrees on the basis that it will protect or help the people since the believe the existance of the companies have become important to the well being of the people/economy.
Slashdot Mirror
What does that have to do with the discussion of workers/human rights?
Find a person with their human rights being taken away and ask them about their standard of living. Id say it certainly could be a factor. Also, he never said Asia was a country and conveniently picked out the middle east and china and others without getting specific, its easy to find instances across Asia of poor human rights and i think you got his point.
He was saying the disadvatage was inherent, not the standard of living. There are certainly plenty of examples of countries that dont value human rights on the continent of Asia, the problem with his statement is that he is implying that the east does care about human rights - if human rights are dollars then the east cares about it.
Nonsense.
If found the biggest problems that cause crashes are memory management, lack of testing and object state issues.
Doing things like ensuring that an object allocates its own memory and deallocates that memory in a well managed fashion in every possible instance is a good step. Also people developing object oriented code in C++ often dont think about the state of their objects and instead assume proper usage, this is a *big* mistake. You should ensure that your objects are always in a valid state no matter what happens or throw an exception, every constructor and method; and expose as little member data to unmonitored changes as possible.
Finally, ive found unit testing to really be useful. Every class, or if needed group of classes, that i develop gets a unit test module that fully exercises its functionality, focusing on boundary conditions. No program is crash proof but if you write your software well and test each piece and then the pieces together, you can have some reasonable assurance that things will work as expected. A well defined test suite for after you put it together doesnt hurt either.
Good point, doesn't mean I don't think 80% of people aren't nuts.
(I'll assume that by "mean" you meant "meant". You're comment was about a statement made in the past while "mean" relates to something occuring presently. Also, the proper usage would have been "The problem is..", otherwise your redefining the word problem. Heh, jerk.)
Indeed. And that's why the world is full of languages with lots of features and poor usability. Like (X)HTML. My point exactly.
This excuse is something that i expect to hear from someone with a tenuous grasp on programming who thinks the industry owes it to them to make things so simple that even they can do it. Efficiency and innovation are not rationally obvious and they never will be, otherwise everyone would invent something great; a language designed under your precepts would just suck and if i wasnt so lazy i bet i could go find a handful of failed examples as well. Oh, and im still looking for you real-world usability metrics for programming languages - ill go ahead and call 'bullshit' now.
Any formal language can be "validated at edit time", including HTML and SGML. As for extensibility, it often harms usability.
Not just validated, but easily. If it was so easy to validate HTML, the syntax was complete and browers were so compliant than why would we be wanting to replace it? I see you think extensibility in programming languages is bad too; that may be the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to me on here and makes me wonder if you have ever programmed before at all - its the basis of a successful programming language, first and foremost. Also, you still havent named anything specifically wrong with XHTML and i think at this point you just dont know what your talking about.
C, C++, UNIX/Linux, VMS/NT --- all brilliant pieces of software responsible for nothing short of changing the world. Your clueless if you think that any of these were a bad move or a failure. Building on that software was entering the dark ages? They used it because there was nothing else that worked as well. Go ahead and explain where they should have gone instead when you get the chance.
IM and P2P are good innovations period, the fact that you cant see the technology despite the greedy companies shows a lack of vision. Saying their primary function is propreitary networks is clearly misleading, there are plenty of open and free versions of both. Talking about trying to tie the user to proprietary standards, did you use any of that 70s an 80s software? That was their primary goal and nothing cross-company really interoperated very well and the software had a gigantic price tag - id say new stuff is big inprovement over that crap.
Well i feel sorry for them, im still gonna upgrade my software etc. I think if your using IE6, even pre-XP, your nuts.
Which browsers support what is a whole other conversation. Ill reclarify, XHTML doesnt add much code to browsers that support it and HTML.
The facts in this case are that people are having a lot of problems writing good HTML; hence the book review, hence the reviewer's comments. But if you seriously think all is fine and dandy in HTML markup land, run some HTML validators over some real web sites some time.
Well the web and this site itself shows that there are plenty that are getting by just fine. Also, my argument was for XHTML not HTML, even though for its time HTML served its purpose well. I know plenty of people who have trouble writing good C, C++, Java, and i dont take that as my que to look down my nose at those languages.
The latter matters a great deal, because if it's difficult for content creators to produce correct markup, there will be less correct markup on the web and the web will be less useful for people.
In this case i would figure that you would support XHTML due to its extensibility and its ability to be validated at edit time easily (features your blowing off in earlier posts) - and here you seem to confirm you agree. Still you argue this is a negative move. Seems your arguing both sides of the point and Im still not clear what exactly you think XHTML doesnt do properly.
Although people do put thought into ease of use in their languages; functionality, portability and performance are the factors that really make a language gain ground - and the programmers make that choice, not the language authors. How do you expect people to innovate in language design if you expect them to meet some artificial requirements for usability. In my experience there are many non-intuitive paradigms in modern programming languages that represent more efficient ways to manipulate information and improve the state of the art. Look at college programming courses like data structures, are you saying that lists, trees and graphs are usable? I looked around for some of these metrics, but i cant find one web site that names any of them...strange.
A, yes, throngs of 20-somethings busily reinventing the wheel "the hard way", in complete ignorance of the previous half century of computer science. You aren't seriously asserting that there has been a lot of innovation in software over the last decade, are you?
Every application on your computer. Even if they werent invented in the past 10 years, like MP3s, instant messenging and P2P apps, you wouldnt trade them for their 1995 counterparts. Obviously plenty of innovation going on. Why not take the software less than ten years old off your computer and find out, put the 95 versions back on - im sure youll find it a robust usable experience. Plus computer scientists use math, communications and electronics theory, etc. - so i guess computer science at heart is just 'reinventing the wheel' by your standards.
XHTML and CSS simply aren't very good for entering manually
If that statement and 'use a wysiwig editor' doesnt translate in some form to imply that they are too much to type then id like to hear what you really were trying to say. I think entering them manually is perfectly efficient if you know what your doing and in some caes is actually required if you want to be truly creative as far as design is concerned.
The issue is that XHTML is an even worse markup language than HTML was..
Why not give one supporting fact for this nonsensical statement? Please. Id love to hear you define a 'good' markup language in the first place. Perhaps you and others dont like some of the syntantical elements in the XHTML schema (again, id love to hear which ones if you have specifics) but i think a well formed HTML that doesnt make every web developer completely relearn every element was a perfectly intelligent next step and if you have better ideas im sure everyone would love to hear them.
And I think you yourself illustrate why: you have no taste and you do not think about usability, and there are so many people like you around in this industry that we are saddled with disasters like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as "industry standards".
Heres a thought on usability, go get an old browser that only supports HTML (no XHTML, CSS or JavaScript) and come back and give me a report on usability. By the way, usability is a term relating to viewing a page, not coding it, and that statement really had nothing to do with the topic. If being used for years by millions and millions of people with the effect of developing the underlying techonologies to unprecedented levels and establishing new forms of commmunication for people around the world is rated a disaster, so be it.
These people didnt have hindsight and blogs on why XHTML and CSS sucks to develop their ideas from - they did it the hard way, they broke new ground. Were they perfect? Obviously not, thats why there are versions to HTML, CSS and JavaScript - to improve them. Did it make sense just to throw them out when people had so much invested in them both in web pages and in developing the technology itself? The fact is that there is more to inventing something than you let on, there is more to being backwards compatible than advertising and if you had any development background you would have some insight into these issues. Save your insults for someone who doesnt know your clueless.
We all enjoy watching you argue just to argue, but really, toss a couple of facts in there somewhere - just to keep 'em guessing. You know shock our systems. Hint: A is worse than B isnt an argument.
If you think CSS is more typing than plain HTML formatting and attributes, you obviously havent done much CSS. It can save you tons of repetive code by allowing you to define classes and formatting globally for whole groups of elements in your pages. XHTML doesnt add much code and allows you much more functionality such as searching your tags and translating pages from your site into other formats using XLST or some other transform (i.e. deliver your web pages in PDF format on the fly). Also, you would have to have limited knowledge of HTML in the first place to think that it was complete.
Rather than believing it has been statistically shown, you should post a link to some information or quote a resource so we can all believe it.
If they were going to fight dental health, i think they would have made their move at the toothbrush.
I guess if the measure of "winning" or "losing" is decided by you every time, the other person will always lose. Unfortunately in reality when in a community or social situation the community will is the only will that matters; i didnt make it up - try turning the computer off and read a book (Rousseau - The Social Contract) once and awhile. This doesnt mean you cant have a point but it does mean that you cant define right and wrong by your own metrics and that the posts youd like to ignore actually do matter, unless of course your comfortable with being defined by antisocial behavior.
Breaking pro-posters into normal posters and everyone else into "the threatened sacred cow of slashdot", "ACs hopping in for pot shots" or "junveniles and rednecks" makes it perfectly clear that your not capable or mature enough to post comments and have a discussion with adults. In closing, I find it entertaining that your argument is based on logical fallacies but in every post you insult, name-call, demonize, bandwagon and cross-associate until you work out your little tantrums.
Dude, your a joke - but then again, all of this mis-directed anger your expressing shows me that you know that already.
Maybe if kids paid for their own college educations this trend would recede. Many of these kids are going to college because their parents strapped a pile of cash and a rocket to their ass and fired them off to the local university. Combine the concept that not everyone is "college material" with the idea that children in the US are perhaps some of the most spoiled in the universe and finally multiply that by the way parents live through their children and want to *make* them successful - these research results are a no-brainer. (and before the obligatory responses come, i have a kid who will be in college in 8 years and im not sure id eat my own dog food)
Actually his explanation was perfect, exactly how i felt, and you insult him here for no reason and should be modded flamebait. You reek of insecurity.
Sounds to me like you dont believe a company can be good under any circumstances if they make money. I think the real question is does capitalism really want "nice" companies. I guess our reactions when we see one, (i.e. supporting them when the government makes ridiculous requests of them), will answer that question wont it? Im waiting to see what we will do, not google.
Did you read the article or the post? The article was completely about viruses and malware - the post you replied too was mostly about viruses and he mentioned patching which i guess could be construed as an opening to a local security debate - but its a stretch. I know what local security is, i just think your off topic.
Since the article was about remote exploits and viruses i guess thats irrelevant. Physical security is a major problem for any platform when unmonitored users can sit at the actual system, which is the case for most home situations.
Isnt this really just an argument about the mission of this web site? Is it to disseminate news to the masses or is it a device to facilitate community communication and to encourage debate? IMHO we have plenty of sites disseminating information, even a moron like me can hit refresh on news.google.com, but what Slashdot adds in value is unparallelled discussion after the topic is introduced. The debate is the real value and if you miss a couple of stories to inspire the debate - i'd say 1) your earning your title as editor and 2) the site will prosper for it.
Now about these posters. I dont know anyone who hasnt been in a college class or a meeting at work or a social event and hasnt met someone who has to dominate the conversation. Someone who just has to control the topic, make every joke, basically be an unsocial asshole. These people exists. As it pertains to this story, the editors need to remember that if they let these people dominate the conversation, some people will not want to participate and others will complain, loudly, as they should in a heathy debate atmosphere. Perhaps the editors should make a Slashdot comment area and then it would be sensible to mod these complaints off-topic but until that area is created - moding them down is censorship IMHO.
But again, if you could just send every decent story through will no bumps why would we need editors? Without some emotional/social aspect to the editing process we might as well start writing the Slashdot editor Perl scripts right now.
Might want to ask yourself who Spitzer works for, new yorkers or the record companies. Have you noticed a pricing change in CDs since his initial win? I havent - they still cost way too much. A few million bucks is nothing to these people, i say they are getting off way too cheap and then can hide behind these weak settlements if the questions ever come up again. If i was a record company i would be overjoyed to see this guy coming. So what benefit does attention to online music pricing give to record companies; Steve Jobs doesnt want to change itunes prices - be funny if he was ordered to in court wouldnt it...
Perhaps its just the social scheme at play here. The children see the adults as superiors and therefore trust them to make the right decisions, therefore making them less likely to skip steps. The chimps, very plausibly, have their own social order. This doesn't seem to me to prove as much about learning ability as they let on.
Maybe we should spend less time worrying about which category we fall under and instead find the right combination of capitalism and socialism and whateverism that meets the needs of the society it represents and protects our ability to compete with the rest of the world. The only thing wrong with capitalism is that sometimes it doesnt represent the states members but in the united states thats a problem with the organization and systems in place in the government and not the philosphical underpinnings that the system is based on. Theres no reason why a capitalist government has to operate for money and by money alone - only the people getting rich of the situation will try to convince you it will.
There is more of a debate here than people would like to admit unfortunately. These businesses are acting on issues other than their own self interest here - they employee millions, millions who without jobs could seriously harm the economy, and each member of the state as well. So the debate ends up, what do we do when technology/tech companies make whole business sectors(which really translates to lots of people) irrelevant(or at least hand them their hat)? The idea of emminent domain and the governments ability to override the rights of the individuals is what is at the base of this argument, and that idea is not based in capitalist ideals - but socialist ones. The companies are asking government to take choice away, but the government agrees on the basis that it will protect or help the people since the believe the existance of the companies have become important to the well being of the people/economy.