Personal freedom, sound economic policy, measured intervention in things that won't look after themselves - isn't this what we used to call 'Liberalism'?
Ha-ha... Those are universal values. The political distinction depends on what you call "personal freedom", what is sound economic policy, how you measure the intervention, and which things you identify as incapable of "looking after themselves".
"Liberalism" in America tends to consider free health care (at someone else's expense) an inalienable right, for example, while denying the right to carry weapons. You must send your children to school (home-schooling is fought tooth-and-nail), but if you want to choose a non-government school, you'll have to pay for it yourself.
American "Liberalism" also insists, the government is better at securing citizens' retirement than the citizens are themselves; and is very much in favor of government regulation of businesses. Their deep suspicions of the businesses trying to collude into a "trust" to keep/push their prices higher do not — quite mysteriously — apply to the exact same collusion of the workers (what are trade unions, but "trusts" aiming to keep/push labor prices high?).
"Liberalism" in Europe, on the contrary, argues for the free enterprise — and is viewed with serious suspicion by trade-unions and other Socialists. Evidently the understanding of those universally-sounding values is quite different...
Now Libertarians tend to think, that the enormous overhead of the clumsy government doing things — even the worthwhile things — does not sufficiently compensate for alleviating whatever shortcomings the purely Libertarian society would have.
For example, yes, universal education is nice, but if that means government schools with government-set curriculum and an untouchable body of teachers, then no thanks. Let's allow anyone to go/send their children to competing private schools. Yes, this would mean somebody may not get a good education, but the existing alternative is a laughing stock of the civilized countries too. That was just one sample of when the wrench of tax-oppression was turned a few notches to solve a problem, failed to solve it, but would not relax anyway — that's a universal trend of government's "measured interference", and is why Libertarians reject it, even where it might seem promising.
Helping the unfortunate? A noble idea, except Americans were and remain the biggest charity-sponsoring people in the world. So, why am I forced (at gun point, of course) to fund USAID, but still find myself having to donate to IRC, because nobody else seems interested in what's happening to Darfuris?
All the Libertarians I have encountered labour under the delusion that they are universal experts and that nobody but them (least of all people with actual domain-specific training!) should be doing any resource allocation.
Whose resource, dear? Yours? Theirs? Or that of those "actual domain-specific" experts? Because I suspect, somehow, that you are talking about something either entirely or mostly theirs, and you better show some respect to the people, whose money you are "allocating".
They don't want to fund street repairs - in case someone else uses tarmac they helped pay for
Oh, but they do. They just don't want to be forced to do it (at gun-point). When Benjamin Franklin ran his publishing business in Philadelphia, he convinced fellow businessmen/neighbors, that a cleanly-swept sidewalk was better for business and more pleasant for life.
Certainly a total failure to grasp the notions of insurance and natural monopoly is de rigeur.
Insurance is very much compatible with the Libertarian philosophy
Firefox is a cross platform browser, and non windows systems typically don't have a facility to send auth data over the network without prompting, that would be a ridiculous idea.
Windows uses Kerberos — the Microsoft's version thereof. It is not incompatible with the Unix implementations — I once got my FreeBSD box to work with the corporate Active Directory server (/etc/krb5.conf). It just requires changing a number of defaults in the Unix-implementations — and a cooperating AD-admin.
There would be nothing "ridiculous" about Firefox using/passing the Kerberos credentials, but it is a major pain to set up an out-of-the-box Linux distro or a FreeBSD machine to do all that "seamlessly"...
In addition to the ActiveX nonsense, the major hindrance to Firefox acceptance is the lack of support for certain Windows-only authentication method(s). Somehow IE is able to pass the Windows-user's credentials securely to an intranet server, while firefox can't...
My understanding is, the method(s) aren't entirely secret, and it may even be possible to patch/rebuild your own firefox binary to support the method. But of the quoted 17% of the business users, how many would even be willing to (much less — capable of) pulling it off?
Let's face it: the number of people who need 80 inbound and are competent enough to manage their own web server consists of a vanishingly small number of people compared to the general Internet using populace.
If this is the reason, then no incoming port should be allowed, because it takes nothing for spammers to specify an alternative port in the spamvertized URLs: http://cheapv1agra.org:81/...
And, as I said before, I do think the block should be lifted IF the user is willing to testify that they're one of the competent people.
That may be fine, as long as the testifying can be done 24x7 via an automated web-site and take effect immediately...
What's the benefit of 100mbps plasti-fiber over gigabit cat-6?
Latency... AFAIK, optical connections have inherently lower latency than the electrical ones. The gain may be lost/reduced by the end-processing, of course...
It may also be harder to intercept them undetectably, whatever that's worth for you.
Playing the recording in public would be "performance" and thus
subject to a different set of rules from simple playback. It has
nothing to do with "licensing".
Of course, it does. The reason somebody else can prescribe, what you can do with the recording you just purchased, is that you don't really buy the recording. You merely buy a license to listen to it (or watch it). The license outlines, what you can and can not do.
Playing it in public is against most licenses. Sharing it over the Internet is too.
For some reason, people accept the former limitation, but the latter one arouses so much protest...
where the studios cannot get laws passed to do what they want they can go after anyone who both provides the underlying service as well as the content.
Makes perfect sense — it is their content. Don't like it — don't buy it.
Somehow the ages-old prohibition against using the tapes/CDs/DVDs in public ("private enjoyment only") never aroused much protest — everybody seemed content, that you can not set up a movie theater playing retail-priced tapes...
The courts need to be reminded for whom they are employed. Too often, people believe that they work for "The Government" when they hold offices of public interest. They are part of the government, but are not employed by them. They are employed by the people, and as such, we are ALL their masters. They are our subordinates, and not the other way around.
All branches of government work for us — not just the Judicial Branch, but also the Executive (typically referred to as just "The Government"), and the Legislative.
No, but my RCN is... I don't suppose, the cablecos will be very different from each other, until they can compete in the same markets. Then they may look carefully into what will let them win a few customers from the other guy(s)...
The House of Lords was called the Senate (wealthy provincialism is no barrier to having a fine library of Latin works) and the commons was called the House of Representatives.
I'm pretty sure, a single-chamber Congress was seriously considered. The two-chamber result was a compromise between large States, who did not want their larger taxes to be controlled by smaller States equally, and the small States, who did not want to be marginalized on important issues.
The two-chamber approach solved it by representing in Senate equally and in Congress proportionally. Which is why there are more Senators from Rod Island, than there are Congressmen:-)
I don't think, this was a result of trying to emulate the British arrangement...
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable [emphasis mine -mi] searches and seizures
Kinda vague, is not it? What's reasonable? Up to the courts, really...
And the courts have determined, that such "administrative searches" are Ok "as long as they are "conducted as part of a scheme that has as its purpose something "other than the gathering of evidence for criminal prosecutions."
Possible — it is their network, after all... The only thing you can complain about is false advertising.
The right way to address this problem (should it really appear) is to stop creating artificial mono- and duopolies and allow multiple companies to compete in all markets.
For years and decades the government was violating the freedom of the Market in order to avoid things like multiple cables running along each other to each house, etc. I'm afraid, the loss of competition outweighed the gains from the reduction of effort-duplication.
RTFA. The description of Cisco's
DOCSIS 3.0 "modem", linked to from the summary, says:
Cisco Systems Inc. is demonstrating a DOCSIS 3.0 modem that would let operators support downlink speeds of 160mbps and uplinks of 120mbps [emphasis mine -mi].
Whether Cable companies will allow you to use all this is another story — probably not, because that's the simplest way for them to combat file-sharing without affecting downloads from "legitimate" servers... And I'm pretty sure, they'll continue blocking port 80, etc.
But you'll continue buying it, because the awesome download speed will trump all other concerns...
This series of blogs has generated a fair amount of discussion on several photography forums, and I would like for the Slashdot community to clarify matters.
People, who actually produce content (like those silly photographers) are, of course, clueless. The place to come for clarification is Slashdot — the home of "information wants to be free", "Copyrights are imaginary", and "copying is not stealing".
No. But there is a major economic difference: If a car stereo costs [...]
You are counting other people's money...
And I would happily buy a car stereo (or GPS device) that retails new for $200 for $50 at a pawn shop - assuming that I'm fairly certain the owner of the pawn shop was not knowingly in receipt of stolen goods.
Right. What you don't know, will not harm you and all that. How many winks and don't-ask-don't-tells are you willing to ignore for a good deal?
An illegal copy basically is a COMPETING PRODUCT, with no limitations, for a better price.
Although Sony should study the rest of your and GP's comment to end the stupidity, your last sentence reveals an alarming lack of either scruples or thought.
I mean, would you accept the availability of low-cost stolen car stereos and GPS-devices as a valid argument for why the electronics manufacturers should lower their prices?
Every once in a while Congress get's [sic] something right.
Prediction markets are pretty terrible at predicting.
Well, this may or may not be true (although Google appears to disagree), but that was not the Congress' reasoning. At all.
The Democratic demagogues insisted, the thing would be somehow immoral and must be scrapped for that reason. Whether it will actually work or not was never discussed in the Senate...
Pentagon tried just this in 2003 — use the method to predict terror attacks. The Congressional outcry about "trading in blood" was such, that the program was scrapped shortly after being announced...
The Pentagon Tuesday agreed to abandon the plan, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman said, after Senate Democrats Monday blasted the plan as nothing more than state-sponsored "gambling on terrorism."
Slashdot Mirror
Ha-ha... Those are universal values. The political distinction depends on what you call "personal freedom", what is sound economic policy, how you measure the intervention, and which things you identify as incapable of "looking after themselves".
"Liberalism" in America tends to consider free health care (at someone else's expense) an inalienable right, for example, while denying the right to carry weapons. You must send your children to school (home-schooling is fought tooth-and-nail), but if you want to choose a non-government school, you'll have to pay for it yourself.
American "Liberalism" also insists, the government is better at securing citizens' retirement than the citizens are themselves; and is very much in favor of government regulation of businesses. Their deep suspicions of the businesses trying to collude into a "trust" to keep/push their prices higher do not — quite mysteriously — apply to the exact same collusion of the workers (what are trade unions, but "trusts" aiming to keep/push labor prices high?).
"Liberalism" in Europe, on the contrary, argues for the free enterprise — and is viewed with serious suspicion by trade-unions and other Socialists. Evidently the understanding of those universally-sounding values is quite different...
Now Libertarians tend to think, that the enormous overhead of the clumsy government doing things — even the worthwhile things — does not sufficiently compensate for alleviating whatever shortcomings the purely Libertarian society would have.
For example, yes, universal education is nice, but if that means government schools with government-set curriculum and an untouchable body of teachers, then no thanks. Let's allow anyone to go/send their children to competing private schools. Yes, this would mean somebody may not get a good education, but the existing alternative is a laughing stock of the civilized countries too. That was just one sample of when the wrench of tax-oppression was turned a few notches to solve a problem, failed to solve it, but would not relax anyway — that's a universal trend of government's "measured interference", and is why Libertarians reject it, even where it might seem promising.
Helping the unfortunate? A noble idea, except Americans were and remain the biggest charity-sponsoring people in the world. So, why am I forced (at gun point, of course) to fund USAID, but still find myself having to donate to IRC, because nobody else seems interested in what's happening to Darfuris?
Whose resource, dear? Yours? Theirs? Or that of those "actual domain-specific" experts? Because I suspect, somehow, that you are talking about something either entirely or mostly theirs, and you better show some respect to the people, whose money you are "allocating".
Oh, but they do. They just don't want to be forced to do it (at gun-point). When Benjamin Franklin ran his publishing business in Philadelphia, he convinced fellow businessmen/neighbors, that a cleanly-swept sidewalk was better for business and more pleasant for life.
Insurance is very much compatible with the Libertarian philosophy
Windows uses Kerberos — the Microsoft's version thereof. It is not incompatible with the Unix implementations — I once got my FreeBSD box to work with the corporate Active Directory server (/etc/krb5.conf). It just requires changing a number of defaults in the Unix-implementations — and a cooperating AD-admin.
There would be nothing "ridiculous" about Firefox using/passing the Kerberos credentials, but it is a major pain to set up an out-of-the-box Linux distro or a FreeBSD machine to do all that "seamlessly"...
In addition to the ActiveX nonsense, the major hindrance to Firefox acceptance is the lack of support for certain Windows-only authentication method(s). Somehow IE is able to pass the Windows-user's credentials securely to an intranet server, while firefox can't...
My understanding is, the method(s) aren't entirely secret, and it may even be possible to patch/rebuild your own firefox binary to support the method. But of the quoted 17% of the business users, how many would even be willing to (much less — capable of) pulling it off?
If this is the reason, then no incoming port should be allowed, because it takes nothing for spammers to specify an alternative port in the spamvertized URLs: http://cheapv1agra.org:81/...
That may be fine, as long as the testifying can be done 24x7 via an automated web-site and take effect immediately...
Latency... AFAIK, optical connections have inherently lower latency than the electrical ones. The gain may be lost/reduced by the end-processing, of course...
It may also be harder to intercept them undetectably, whatever that's worth for you.
How about simply:
There, fixed that for you...
Cue in angry responses on how the laws are so incredibly repressive, there is no way for school children not to break them...
Not sure... But if one can refuse to be searched and fly back, there is hardly anything new here.
The "other purpose" can be: "not allow any child pornography to enter the US". Or terrorism manuals...
Sorry, no. You are putting forth an argument, you do the presentation...
Of course, it does. The reason somebody else can prescribe, what you can do with the recording you just purchased, is that you don't really buy the recording. You merely buy a license to listen to it (or watch it). The license outlines, what you can and can not do.
Playing it in public is against most licenses. Sharing it over the Internet is too.
For some reason, people accept the former limitation, but the latter one arouses so much protest...
Blocking the outgoing 25 (other than to the ISP's SMTP-server) may be a good idea — to neutralize the bots. RCN does this.
Blocking the incoming 80 is a terrible idea, which has not justification. Unfortunately, RCN does this too...
No other incoming ports should be blocked either...
Makes perfect sense — it is their content. Don't like it — don't buy it.
Somehow the ages-old prohibition against using the tapes/CDs/DVDs in public ("private enjoyment only") never aroused much protest — everybody seemed content, that you can not set up a movie theater playing retail-priced tapes...
All branches of government work for us — not just the Judicial Branch, but also the Executive (typically referred to as just "The Government"), and the Legislative.
Rarely feels that way, though...
You, insensitive clod!
No, but my RCN is... I don't suppose, the cablecos will be very different from each other, until they can compete in the same markets. Then they may look carefully into what will let them win a few customers from the other guy(s)...
I'm pretty sure, a single-chamber Congress was seriously considered. The two-chamber result was a compromise between large States, who did not want their larger taxes to be controlled by smaller States equally, and the small States, who did not want to be marginalized on important issues.
The two-chamber approach solved it by representing in Senate equally and in Congress proportionally. Which is why there are more Senators from Rod Island, than there are Congressmen :-)
I don't think, this was a result of trying to emulate the British arrangement...
Kinda vague, is not it? What's reasonable? Up to the courts, really...
And the courts have determined, that such "administrative searches" are Ok "as long as they are "conducted as part of a scheme that has as its purpose something "other than the gathering of evidence for criminal prosecutions."
Possible — it is their network, after all... The only thing you can complain about is false advertising.
The right way to address this problem (should it really appear) is to stop creating artificial mono- and duopolies and allow multiple companies to compete in all markets.
For years and decades the government was violating the freedom of the Market in order to avoid things like multiple cables running along each other to each house, etc. I'm afraid, the loss of competition outweighed the gains from the reduction of effort-duplication.
RTFA. The description of Cisco's DOCSIS 3.0 "modem", linked to from the summary, says:
Whether Cable companies will allow you to use all this is another story — probably not, because that's the simplest way for them to combat file-sharing without affecting downloads from "legitimate" servers... And I'm pretty sure, they'll continue blocking port 80, etc.
But you'll continue buying it, because the awesome download speed will trump all other concerns...
People, who actually produce content (like those silly photographers) are, of course, clueless. The place to come for clarification is Slashdot — the home of "information wants to be free", "Copyrights are imaginary", and "copying is not stealing".
Oh, and everyone INAL anyway...
You are counting other people's money...
Right. What you don't know, will not harm you and all that. How many winks and don't-ask-don't-tells are you willing to ignore for a good deal?
Although Sony should study the rest of your and GP's comment to end the stupidity, your last sentence reveals an alarming lack of either scruples or thought.
I mean, would you accept the availability of low-cost stolen car stereos and GPS-devices as a valid argument for why the electronics manufacturers should lower their prices?
An attempt to change the subject noted and duly ridiculed.
Well, this may or may not be true (although Google appears to disagree), but that was not the Congress' reasoning. At all.
The Democratic demagogues insisted, the thing would be somehow immoral and must be scrapped for that reason. Whether it will actually work or not was never discussed in the Senate...
Alright, teacher of the people. Could you define, what "trading in blood" means?
Or did you simply fall for somebody else's demagoguery?
This market may or may not be efficient in predicting terrorist attacks, but there is nothing morally wrong with it.
Pentagon tried just this in 2003 — use the method to predict terror attacks. The Congressional outcry about "trading in blood" was such, that the program was scrapped shortly after being announced...
Quoting from MSNBC report: