Yes, exactly. If some site wants to bar me from using their site because I block their ads, or only allow session cookies, or lobotomize JavaScript -- or whatever -- they're free to do that. I have no problem with that.
For example, I refuse to read NYT articles that require me to create an account. I feel not only is the NYT overrated, but the overzealous way they track users means I'd rather not use their "service". Ditto for Facebook, once aptly described as a surveillance service disguised as a "fun" social network.
More and more people are going to have to decide whether they're sheep being led to the slaughter, sacrificing their privacy, attention (in the case of ads), and forced to do this or that because some "service" wants this, or whether they're actual customers or consumers with real rights and the ability to make decisions. IMO since the Internet was privatized/corporatized after the 1990s telecomm act, the pendulum has swung way too far towards users being considered sheep for exploitation.
As Andrew Lewis bluntly put it: "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
There are several reasons I block ads: I don't want to be tracked. And I don't want to be conned, gamed, decieved and/or lied to (and for most ads, this is their goal). But most of all, to me it goes back to a fundamental concept of computing: This is my computer, I'm paying for the network link, and I get to choose what enters my computer and how I use/display that data/info.
Sadly, advertising permeates our society and is forced down people's throats everywhere. Back in college when they had ideals, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google said, "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." They were right. The same concept applies to other advertising.
Does this mean that Destructoid or other sites might disappear because people like me don't want advertising? Yup, it might. But that's not my problem -- it's an "adapt or die" mindset. If they choose a less deceptive way of funding themselves -- straight subscription, crowd sourcing, whatever -- I'll decide whether their value is worth me paying what they ask.
Then I'll decide whether to allow their text, data, pics and videos, etc., into my computer, and I then I'll decide how I want to use/display that content.
There's an old saying in business: The customer is always right. If the customer doesn't like your advertising or business model, the business has a problem, not the customer.
But considering the fact of global warming/climate change and the topic of greenhouse gases, isn't our core problem that we are simply burning too much stuff? With that in mind, is this really going to help?
Shouldn't our focus be on creating forms of energy that produce energy without burning things?
Airplanes today have basically the same controls on them -- joystick, foot pedals, etc -- that they did when the Wright Brothers invented the airplane early in the 20th century -- they haven't changed the UI in that amount of time.
Cars haven't basically changed since they removed the manual lever throttle and went with the gas pedal -- many decades of a standard UI.
Why can't we do that with computers? Stop reinventing the wheel!
Do normal people really care about KDE versus GNOME? Don't they just want a UI that works and isn't constantly changing things?
Look at Windows. What are the UI changes between Win95, Win2K, XP, etc. etc. Aren't they just cosmetic BS to make people say, "Gee whiz, they changed X, Y and Z -- isn't that cool?!" Were people really demanding that Microsoft keep rearranging the Control Panel?
What was wrong with the UI standard that every program will have a pull down menu, and on that menu will be a File menu, and in that File menu will be a Close/Exit option, and on every pull down menu will have a Help menu, etc, etc.
The problem with our UIs isn't the UI, it's a lack of standards and a bunch of clueless coders that keep reinventing the wheel and confusing the hell out of 90% of people for no good reason.
I'm not sure how busting people for making counterfeit hardcopy and selling them for money qualifies as a "corrupt scheme/racket".
The corrupt scheme is the inflating of the value of the so-called piracy by counting every blank disc as a pirated copy and lying like this for political purposes. This is the same immoral/sleazy tactic used by police to inflate the "street value" of seized marijuana plants. The corrupt cops count seeds, seedlings, leaves, stems, root balls, etc. when they know that only the bud of the pot plant gets sold and has real value. They lie this way to make the "crime" seem bigger.
This is the same reason the corrupt PI lies about the value of pirated material. But in this case, they're also doing it to influence corrupt, corporate-funded politicians to pass harsher laws.
We have no right of privacy when registering a domain. Big brother wants to know all.
This reminds me of the Mexican immigration debate. Rather than to crack down on the companies employing the immigrants, the police arrest individual workers who came here to work. The companies creating the incentive for workers to come to the US generally get off scott-free.
In this case, it's rather than cracking down on the spammers and the companies benefiting from the spam -- and an increasing amount of my spam is "mainstream"/large corporate spam -- the gov't will crack down, killing my privacy, and hinder me from hiding from the spammers.
Actually nail the spam companies and the companies making spammers rich? Naww, that ain't the way it's done in the land where corporations run the gov't.
Every phone company customer cannot pick up their phones at the same time and make a call. But the phone company does not limit people that make a lot of phone calls.
At some time if people routinely cannot make a phone call because the infrastructure is not robust enough, people will scream loud enough that the gov't will be forced to prod the telco into building more infrastructure.
It should be no different for ISPs.
But here that is not the case. As explained above, Comcast has ulterior motives and does not want people using their 'net connections to the max -- it's a financial conflict of interest with their primary business which is selling cable TV.
Does it really matter if you ISP is worse? Comcast is doing this for control.
Comcast makes most of its money from cable TV. They do not want people watching TV or buying movies and downloading them over the Internet. That cuts into Comcast's main profit center. It's no different than the RIAA trying to force customers to buy CDs.
Comcast does not want you using the full bandwidth of your pipe 24/7 -- no matter what you're doing.
If Comcast can weaken the 'Net Neutrality concept -- and a bandwidth cap is a first step in that direction -- then Comcast gains more control. Comcast knows that they can turn that control into additional revenue at some time.
Your argument seems to be a "race to the bottom" one. i.e., "My ISP in another country is worse so what are you griping about."
Let's instead work to force ISPs to be honest. If you say I have 6mbps (or whatever) of bandwidth and a 24/7 connection to the Internet, then I should be able to use that 6mbps * 24 * 7. The fact that this may cause Comcast's network some add'l work or problems is not the customer's concern.
Why would anyone concerned about privacy use GMail at all???
When Google was nailed cold for driving past a No Tresspassing sign to take "Street View" photos of a family's private residence, Google responded in court by saying, "complete privacy does not exist".
Google's kow-towing to the Chinese gov't to help them censor Chinese dissidents are profusely documented.
Why would you want anything to do with such a heinous company?
Do you really think that Google Incorporated gives a rat's ass about your privacy? While Google's founding may have had some idealistic and good-hearted mindsets behind it, currently Google is just another for-profit corporation out to make as much money as possible. Your privacy matters only if it impacts the bottom line.
Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country.
*looks at CNN* Uhm...
Caraig, the problem is you're watching CNN -- seriously. Let's just say you're misinformed. But don't worry, like the millions of Americans who believed Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Queda, you're not the only American that is misinformed.:-(
Let me give you a quote from an article written by Paul Craig Roberts. Dr. Roberts is a Republican, and can boast that his resume includes such things as being the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, an Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Contributing Editor of National Review. Those are not anti-American or left-wing positions, as I'm sure you recognize.
His quote (and the whole article is worth reading): "Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them." (And FWIW, despite the Israeli comment, Dr. Roberts is no anti-semite.)
Would you prefer only Russia, Venesuela, Iran, and China to have Drone Air Wings?
I'd feel safer with those countries having such weapons as compared to the US.
Venesuela, Iran, and China each have not launched an attack on another country in well over a century. Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country. But the US claims the "right" under the so-called "Bush Doctrine" to attack any country it wants.
The US is presently fighting multiple wars of aggression, has a long history of fighting wars of aggression, and has a gov't of literal war criminals running the country. The world would be a much safer place if the US was disarmed.
I personally trust the US with this technology a lot more since the goverment is personally accountable to the people
I know this won't score me any karma points, but please look at the facts objectively.
* The vast majority of the American people did not want an attack on Iraq without UN authorization; but the US gov't lied through its teeth and launched the war -- how is that being accountable?
* In 2000 more people in the US voted for Al Gore compared to George Bush -- but the people's choice was not allowed to take office. How is that "democratic" or "accountable to the people"?
* Amnesty Int'l says the US is the largest human rights violator in the world.
* The US has established a worldwide system of torture prisons and Bush himself has admitted the US does water torture on prisoners (after WWII, the US executed some Japanese for "waterboarding" a single American).
* The US spies on its own citizens in violation of both the Constitution and its own laws.
Yet the gov't is still in power! And you have the gall to claim that the US gov't is somehow "responsible" to its own people?!
Com'on, that sort of rhetoric may make nationalists feel good, but the reality of objective facts screams otherwise.
Security guru Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram newsletter has a good blurb on this issue and the topic of whether this was some disgruntled Estonian youths or was the "evil Russian gov't" that was responsible for the attacks.
What if we lived in a fascist country and nobody knew it?
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- attributed to Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism.
Fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." -- The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary.
"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." -- Vice President Henry Wallace, April 9, 1944.
We don't control the "justice" system -- it is run, like the entire gov't, primarily for the benefit of corporations and their wealthy owners.
We shouldn't be surprised at Taser's actions, they're little different than what the RIAA does. The real question is, what are you doing to stop this creeping fascism?
This really offends me and IMHO is yet another example of the broken nature of the US "justice" system.
Let's recap: Some company lies to me. They screw me out of bits and bytes by playing the base-10 game. In short, I am ripped off.
But what is our "justice" system's remedy?
They give me a discount coupon that forces me to go back and to do business with the company that just lied to me and screwed me!
That isn't justice, that's a marketing gimmick to increase sales. Companies should use these tactics deliberately (if they're not already!), since their upside of new sales far outweighs their risk from the justice[sic] system.
How about instead if the courts pulled some of these sleazy companies' corporate charters (in effect giving them the corporate death penalty)? I bet this behavior would stop real quickly then!
But wait -- our gov't doesn't give corporations the death penalty. The death penalty is only reserved for selective human beings...
Oh boy! That $1 per gallon gasoline would do wonders to advance global warming.:-(
I dislike high gas prices as much as the next guy.
But considering that we're burning up the planet with fossil fuels and our internal combustion engine, fighting wars for oil in the age of Peak Oil, when is it going to dawn on us that our lifestyle is unsustainable and that we're going to have to change our ways?
(Hint: $1/gal gas won't do a damn thing to help us change no matter how much we like the cheap gas.)
What's obvious is that this issue is not about censorship per se -- it's about the move to fascism. Corporations rule. Here in the US, corporations often literally write the bills that the corporate-funded Congress then pass into law. This UK innovation just has the courts directly acting on the corporations' behalf.
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism.
"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country." -- Thomas Jefferson
I don't know about the "news value" of this article, but big kudos for tying together names, links and references to a bunch of interesting-sounding projects.
If you want to impeach Bush for having a 30% approval rating,
That wasn't said. People want to impeach Bush because he has shat on the Constitution, and is an acknowledged torturer and war criminal.
you'll need to impeach the democratic legislature as well.
Great! Where do I sign up? I think they ought to try every single Congressperson who voted for our most recent war of aggression -- every Congressperson who voted for Bush's insane war against Iraq ought to get a fair trial in front of the world at The Hague.
And cite a serious poll from a legitimate source indicating that the majority of Americans think that Bush has committed impeachable offenses.
Good point. But the American people are way out in front of the corporate mass media and the political classes on this one.
In a leap of logic, this article notes that a majority of Americans want Bush impeached if he wiretapped Americans illegally -- well, like his recent lying about Iran, Bush admitted to illegally wiretapping American citizens.
Any search of news engines will turn up many articles. Here is one American Research Group poll results, which states, "70% of American voters believe Dick Cheney has abused his powers as Vice President, and 43% definitely want him impeached. 64% say George Bush has abused his powers as President, and 34% definitely want him impeached." Or this article which summarizes: As far back at October, 2005, an Ipsos Public Affairs poll found 50% of the public agreed with the statement, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reaons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."
Abuse of power; lying to the American people -- these are impeachable offenses and much more of the public want Bush impeached as compared to Clinton or even Nixon.
Lets' summarize: Russia shouldn't cheat at elections -- if they are.
But the US shouldn't cheat at elections either. And given the sad state of our present so-called democracy, we are not a country with the moral right to point fingers and scold anyone else.
Given the obvious propaganda value of the US bashing Russian elections, I think we in the US ought to shut our mouths until we get our own act cleaned up. By any polling measure, Putin enjoys 60-70% approval by Russians; here in the US Bush is not even at a 30% approval rating while publicly admitting to torture and with a majority of Americans thinking he has committed impeachable offenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, exactly. If some site wants to bar me from using their site because I block their ads, or only allow session cookies, or lobotomize JavaScript -- or whatever -- they're free to do that. I have no problem with that.
For example, I refuse to read NYT articles that require me to create an account. I feel not only is the NYT overrated, but the overzealous way they track users means I'd rather not use their "service". Ditto for Facebook, once aptly described as a surveillance service disguised as a "fun" social network.
More and more people are going to have to decide whether they're sheep being led to the slaughter, sacrificing their privacy, attention (in the case of ads), and forced to do this or that because some "service" wants this, or whether they're actual customers or consumers with real rights and the ability to make decisions. IMO since the Internet was privatized/corporatized after the 1990s telecomm act, the pendulum has swung way too far towards users being considered sheep for exploitation.
As Andrew Lewis bluntly put it: "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
There are several reasons I block ads: I don't want to be tracked. And I don't want to be conned, gamed, decieved and/or lied to (and for most ads, this is their goal). But most of all, to me it goes back to a fundamental concept of computing: This is my computer, I'm paying for the network link, and I get to choose what enters my computer and how I use/display that data/info.
Sadly, advertising permeates our society and is forced down people's throats everywhere. Back in college when they had ideals, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google said, "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." They were right. The same concept applies to other advertising.
Does this mean that Destructoid or other sites might disappear because people like me don't want advertising? Yup, it might. But that's not my problem -- it's an "adapt or die" mindset. If they choose a less deceptive way of funding themselves -- straight subscription, crowd sourcing, whatever -- I'll decide whether their value is worth me paying what they ask.
Then I'll decide whether to allow their text, data, pics and videos, etc., into my computer, and I then I'll decide how I want to use/display that content.
There's an old saying in business: The customer is always right. If the customer doesn't like your advertising or business model, the business has a problem, not the customer.
But considering the fact of global warming/climate change and the topic of greenhouse gases, isn't our core problem that we are simply burning too much stuff? With that in mind, is this really going to help?
Shouldn't our focus be on creating forms of energy that produce energy without burning things?
"... less than a week after a United Nations agency warned that Iran was secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon..."
That is not what the UN warned or reported. The headline is repeating western propaganda. Read this, this, this, or this.
As a beekeeper I have to say that this is the most ridiculous thing I've seen. There are so many issues wrong with this that it's absurd.
I've had observation hives (here's one example) in my home. Some work pretty well, others not so well. Take my word for it, this one won't.
Airplanes today have basically the same controls on them -- joystick, foot pedals, etc -- that they did when the Wright Brothers invented the airplane early in the 20th century -- they haven't changed the UI in that amount of time.
Cars haven't basically changed since they removed the manual lever throttle and went with the gas pedal -- many decades of a standard UI.
Why can't we do that with computers? Stop reinventing the wheel!
Do normal people really care about KDE versus GNOME? Don't they just want a UI that works and isn't constantly changing things?
Look at Windows. What are the UI changes between Win95, Win2K, XP, etc. etc. Aren't they just cosmetic BS to make people say, "Gee whiz, they changed X, Y and Z -- isn't that cool?!" Were people really demanding that Microsoft keep rearranging the Control Panel?
What was wrong with the UI standard that every program will have a pull down menu, and on that menu will be a File menu, and in that File menu will be a Close/Exit option, and on every pull down menu will have a Help menu, etc, etc.
The problem with our UIs isn't the UI, it's a lack of standards and a bunch of clueless coders that keep reinventing the wheel and confusing the hell out of 90% of people for no good reason.
First, piracy is a copyright violation; piracy is NOT theft.
But to a address your point:
I'm not sure how busting people for making counterfeit hardcopy and selling them for money qualifies as a "corrupt scheme/racket".
The corrupt scheme is the inflating of the value of the so-called piracy by counting every blank disc as a pirated copy and lying like this for political purposes. This is the same immoral/sleazy tactic used by police to inflate the "street value" of seized marijuana plants. The corrupt cops count seeds, seedlings, leaves, stems, root balls, etc. when they know that only the bud of the pot plant gets sold and has real value. They lie this way to make the "crime" seem bigger.
This is the same reason the corrupt PI lies about the value of pirated material. But in this case, they're also doing it to influence corrupt, corporate-funded politicians to pass harsher laws.
What a low-life pond scum, willing participating in such a corrupt scheme/racket. Some people will do anything for money.
May the worms eat his dead body from its casket and vomit his remains.
Shhh!
phorm, that doesn't go along with the story that's being created.
How are we supposed to believe in newspeak if people like you are contradicting it?!
We have no right of privacy when registering a domain. Big brother wants to know all.
This reminds me of the Mexican immigration debate. Rather than to crack down on the companies employing the immigrants, the police arrest individual workers who came here to work. The companies creating the incentive for workers to come to the US generally get off scott-free.
In this case, it's rather than cracking down on the spammers and the companies benefiting from the spam -- and an increasing amount of my spam is "mainstream"/large corporate spam -- the gov't will crack down, killing my privacy, and hinder me from hiding from the spammers.
Actually nail the spam companies and the companies making spammers rich? Naww, that ain't the way it's done in the land where corporations run the gov't.
I see it as largely irrelevant.
Every phone company customer cannot pick up their phones at the same time and make a call. But the phone company does not limit people that make a lot of phone calls.
At some time if people routinely cannot make a phone call because the infrastructure is not robust enough, people will scream loud enough that the gov't will be forced to prod the telco into building more infrastructure.
It should be no different for ISPs.
But here that is not the case. As explained above, Comcast has ulterior motives and does not want people using their 'net connections to the max -- it's a financial conflict of interest with their primary business which is selling cable TV.
Does it really matter if you ISP is worse? Comcast is doing this for control.
Comcast makes most of its money from cable TV. They do not want people watching TV or buying movies and downloading them over the Internet. That cuts into Comcast's main profit center. It's no different than the RIAA trying to force customers to buy CDs.
Comcast does not want you using the full bandwidth of your pipe 24/7 -- no matter what you're doing.
If Comcast can weaken the 'Net Neutrality concept -- and a bandwidth cap is a first step in that direction -- then Comcast gains more control. Comcast knows that they can turn that control into additional revenue at some time.
Your argument seems to be a "race to the bottom" one. i.e., "My ISP in another country is worse so what are you griping about."
Let's instead work to force ISPs to be honest. If you say I have 6mbps (or whatever) of bandwidth and a 24/7 connection to the Internet, then I should be able to use that 6mbps * 24 * 7. The fact that this may cause Comcast's network some add'l work or problems is not the customer's concern.
Why would anyone concerned about privacy use GMail at all???
When Google was nailed cold for driving past a No Tresspassing sign to take "Street View" photos of a family's private residence, Google responded in court by saying, "complete privacy does not exist".
Google's kow-towing to the Chinese gov't to help them censor Chinese dissidents are profusely documented.
Why would you want anything to do with such a heinous company?
Do you really think that Google Incorporated gives a rat's ass about your privacy? While Google's founding may have had some idealistic and good-hearted mindsets behind it, currently Google is just another for-profit corporation out to make as much money as possible. Your privacy matters only if it impacts the bottom line.
Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country.
*looks at CNN* Uhm...
Caraig, the problem is you're watching CNN -- seriously. Let's just say you're misinformed. But don't worry, like the millions of Americans who believed Saddam Hussein was in league with Al Queda, you're not the only American that is misinformed. :-(
Let me give you a quote from an article written by Paul Craig Roberts. Dr. Roberts is a Republican, and can boast that his resume includes such things as being the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, an Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Contributing Editor of National Review. Those are not anti-American or left-wing positions, as I'm sure you recognize.
His quote (and the whole article is worth reading): "Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them." (And FWIW, despite the Israeli comment, Dr. Roberts is no anti-semite.)
Would you prefer only Russia, Venesuela, Iran, and China to have Drone Air Wings?
I'd feel safer with those countries having such weapons as compared to the US.
Venesuela, Iran, and China each have not launched an attack on another country in well over a century. Russia, in its short history since the breakup of the USSR, has not launched an attack on another country. But the US claims the "right" under the so-called "Bush Doctrine" to attack any country it wants.
The US is presently fighting multiple wars of aggression, has a long history of fighting wars of aggression, and has a gov't of literal war criminals running the country. The world would be a much safer place if the US was disarmed.
I personally trust the US with this technology a lot more since the goverment is personally accountable to the people
I know this won't score me any karma points, but please look at the facts objectively.
* The vast majority of the American people did not want an attack on Iraq without UN authorization; but the US gov't lied through its teeth and launched the war -- how is that being accountable?
* In 2000 more people in the US voted for Al Gore compared to George Bush -- but the people's choice was not allowed to take office. How is that "democratic" or "accountable to the people"?
* Amnesty Int'l says the US is the largest human rights violator in the world.
* The US has established a worldwide system of torture prisons and Bush himself has admitted the US does water torture on prisoners (after WWII, the US executed some Japanese for "waterboarding" a single American).
* The US spies on its own citizens in violation of both the Constitution and its own laws.
Yet the gov't is still in power! And you have the gall to claim that the US gov't is somehow "responsible" to its own people?!
Com'on, that sort of rhetoric may make nationalists feel good, but the reality of objective facts screams otherwise.
It's a sad day for the world.
Drone air wings will make it more likely that the US will launch more attacks and wars of aggression.
But don't worry -- "our" corporate mass media will make sure we know the "rationalizations" and "justifications" for each attack. :-(
Security guru Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram newsletter has a good blurb on this issue and the topic of whether this was some disgruntled Estonian youths or was the "evil Russian gov't" that was responsible for the attacks.
What if we lived in a fascist country and nobody knew it?
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- attributed to Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism.
Fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." -- The 1983 American Heritage Dictionary.
"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." -- Vice President Henry Wallace, April 9, 1944.
We don't control the "justice" system -- it is run, like the entire gov't, primarily for the benefit of corporations and their wealthy owners.
We shouldn't be surprised at Taser's actions, they're little different than what the RIAA does. The real question is, what are you doing to stop this creeping fascism?
This really offends me and IMHO is yet another example of the broken nature of the US "justice" system.
Let's recap: Some company lies to me. They screw me out of bits and bytes by playing the base-10 game. In short, I am ripped off.
But what is our "justice" system's remedy?
They give me a discount coupon that forces me to go back and to do business with the company that just lied to me and screwed me!
That isn't justice, that's a marketing gimmick to increase sales. Companies should use these tactics deliberately (if they're not already!), since their upside of new sales far outweighs their risk from the justice[sic] system.
How about instead if the courts pulled some of these sleazy companies' corporate charters (in effect giving them the corporate death penalty)? I bet this behavior would stop real quickly then!
But wait -- our gov't doesn't give corporations the death penalty. The death penalty is only reserved for selective human beings...
Oh boy! That $1 per gallon gasoline would do wonders to advance global warming. :-(
I dislike high gas prices as much as the next guy.
But considering that we're burning up the planet with fossil fuels and our internal combustion engine, fighting wars for oil in the age of Peak Oil, when is it going to dawn on us that our lifestyle is unsustainable and that we're going to have to change our ways?
(Hint: $1/gal gas won't do a damn thing to help us change no matter how much we like the cheap gas.)
What's obvious is that this issue is not about censorship per se -- it's about the move to fascism. Corporations rule. Here in the US, corporations often literally write the bills that the corporate-funded Congress then pass into law. This UK innovation just has the courts directly acting on the corporations' behalf.
"Fascism could better be called 'corporatism', for it is merely the merging of state power with corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who "invented" fascism.
"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country." -- Thomas Jefferson
Sadly, others have noted similar concerns in the way we teach programmers.
One classic piece is this series of articles on Salon about "The dumbing-down of programming".
I don't know about the "news value" of this article, but big kudos for tying together names, links and references to a bunch of interesting-sounding projects.
If you want to impeach Bush for having a 30% approval rating,
That wasn't said. People want to impeach Bush because he has shat on the Constitution, and is an acknowledged torturer and war criminal.
you'll need to impeach the democratic legislature as well.
Great! Where do I sign up? I think they ought to try every single Congressperson who voted for our most recent war of aggression -- every Congressperson who voted for Bush's insane war against Iraq ought to get a fair trial in front of the world at The Hague.
And cite a serious poll from a legitimate source indicating that the majority of Americans think that Bush has committed impeachable offenses.
Good point. But the American people are way out in front of the corporate mass media and the political classes on this one.
Even back in 2001, Zogby Int'l -- as mainstream of a polling company as you'll get -- found that half of Americans think the US gov't was somehow involved in 9/11 and 1/3 wanted impeachment. But the corporate news shows instead feed us stories of Brittany Spears and mall gunmen.
In a leap of logic, this article notes that a majority of Americans want Bush impeached if he wiretapped Americans illegally -- well, like his recent lying about Iran, Bush admitted to illegally wiretapping American citizens.
Any search of news engines will turn up many articles. Here is one American Research Group poll results, which states, "70% of American voters believe Dick Cheney has abused his powers as Vice President, and 43% definitely want him impeached. 64% say George Bush has abused his powers as President, and 34% definitely want him impeached." Or this article which summarizes: As far back at October, 2005, an Ipsos Public Affairs poll found 50% of the public agreed with the statement, "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reaons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."
Abuse of power; lying to the American people -- these are impeachable offenses and much more of the public want Bush impeached as compared to Clinton or even Nixon.
Lets' summarize: Russia shouldn't cheat at elections -- if they are.
But the US shouldn't cheat at elections either. And given the sad state of our present so-called democracy, we are not a country with the moral right to point fingers and scold anyone else.
... their elections are about as fair and honest as the last two US presidential elections.
Given the obvious propaganda value of the US bashing Russian elections, I think we in the US ought to shut our mouths until we get our own act cleaned up. By any polling measure, Putin enjoys 60-70% approval by Russians; here in the US Bush is not even at a 30% approval rating while publicly admitting to torture and with a majority of Americans thinking he has committed impeachable offenses.