This has nothing to do with poles, government owned or not. This is taxes on private cellphone towers. Most local governments impose taxes on privately owned (but public benefit, from cellular to railroads) infrastructure. They shouldn't, it's absurd public policy because it discourages businesses from improving their services, but they do because few local governments want to force the citizens and businesses that benefit from their services fair taxes.
(This has been going on for a long time and was one of the factors behind the collapse of passenger rail in the US. One local government in NJ managed to force a railroad to pay almost its entire education budget, simply from taxes on the rail lines. Meanwhile the same local governments spent tax revenues on roads and airports, because of course they would.)
What costs? This is for the most part a money grab by local governments. The telcos are building out infrastructure, they're not imposing any costs of significance to the local governments per-tower.
Infrastructure in general should not be taxed. Profits? Sure. But taxing infrastructure serves no benefit, it discourages businesses from improving their services for no good reason.
Judging from the anger at Linus Torvalds for saying "Wouldn't it be great if people were nice to each other for a change?", I'd say that the reason is the readership of Slashdot has changed from the people who get abuse, to the people to dish it out, and want to continue dishing it out with impunity.
You know, I thought my Amiga 500+ was pretty snappy even in 1995.
While we complain about bloat and poor programming, the reality is that most of the performance improvements we've seen over the history of microcomputing has been directed at creating entirely new applications that weren't feasible with the older technology. That 500+ could never run a modern web browser no matter how efficiently it was built. As for video games...
Yet almost every country that has high taxes is democratic and has enormous personal freedom. Dictatorships? Usually taxes aren't what people are complaining about.
If I may, I'd like to suggest that the problem here is you're looking for reasons to denigrate something you feel wrong on some level but can't put your finger on it. You know that governments collect taxes (which you don't like, because you're a libertarian), and you know that taxes are, with the exception of the military and the police, mostly used for social programs, be it public libraries, or saving people from death. And ideologically you feel the latter isn't what government should be doing, so you're trying to break it by breaking the argument for taxes.
But in reality, Sweden is by all accounts a really, really, awesome place to live.
And Sierra Leone, or Pincochet's Chili, or Galtieri's Argentina, or... well, you can think of the other places with low taxes... they all sucked.
Perhaps the problem here is not "governments doing stuff", but with the ideology that forces you to blinker yourself to the notion that governments can, and do, do stuff that makes the vast majority of its citizens more free, and happier over all.
While this is true, this case revolves around someone who told Linux contributors he disagreed with (from the first paragraph of the article) "Please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place' and "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
None of that is self confidence, that's just being a jerk.
Look, there are a lot of us here that act like that occasionally, though I'd hope that few would descend to that level in the workplace. Either way, I'm glad Torvalds has the introspection right now that a lot of people on Slashdot do not. It's one thing to call an AC, Russian Troll, Gamergater, or pudge, various insulting names on a BBS we can all walk away from with no consequences for it or us. It's quite another to manage a big project that careers are dependent upon and tell them to go kill themselves.
Torvalds gets it. I don't really understand why the rest of Slashdot doesn't. But I do look forward to the mass firings we're going to hear about soon as Slashdot readers, furious that anyone would dare suggest they be respectful in the workplace, decide to do the exact opposite and start calling their bosses n-words.
I'd say the fact it's a software company makes it tech news, but...
Still, this is a website where something along the lines of "This amazing hacker built a working 6502 CPU out of Lego" will get numerous responses of the "What's the point?" variety, so your comment and its associated high moderation (at 10.50am EDT) doesn't exactly surprise me.
He was fired for writing a horribly divisive memo, which, to add insult to injury was poorly researched (about the only way I can think of in which he was "right" was as in "right wing", but he wasn't fired for being right wing either, just for making Google look like a hotbed of Gamergate type morons.)
He wasn't fired for being a white person criticizing a non-white person, as you were asked. So he's a terrible example to use.
The argument isn't whether or not a state can preempt federal authority, it's whether a federal agency that has claimed they specifically DO NOT HAVE AUTHORITY can somehow also enjoin a State from exercising that authority. Completely opposite issue.
That would be nice, but in reality the fact the FCC has declared it doesn't have authority does not mean it doesn't have authority.
The bottom line is:
1. The FCC does have authority.
2. You can't force it to say it does, or act, or do its fucking job. No lawsuit or court ruling can make the FCC do anything.
3. The fact that it has authority means California doesn't.
and so 4. We're fucked.
Hold your nose and vote for the Democrats this November.
An LLVM contributor left the project in part because he would have been required to sign documents to attend an LLVM conference
...and?
What were the documents? Because it's not uncommon for people to have to sign documents in order to do something. The link you take it to hints that it might have been a code of conduct... which is bad... how?
The primary reason he left was because the LLVM group had signed on to a program to encourage women and minorities to join in LLVM development.
Between refusing to sign a document saying "Be respectful", while getting pissed that you might have to work with more black people and/or women doesn't strike me as a sympathetic cause.
You know, it's bad enough that people on Slashdot are seriously arguing that Torvalds should be an asshole, and that all project managers should be assholes, but it's showing this website's regular clientele has lost the plot that apparently they think being misogynist and xenophobic should also be required qualifications for being a software developer.
States Rights are the "rights" of states to treat black people like shit, and maybe women too. It has nothing to do with letting states do whatever they want, otherwise Republicans would be top of the list to try to ensure the various state level laws and constitutional amendments legalizing cannabis would be respected, and would support gun control on a state level.
Republicans are no more in favor of states rights than Democrats. They're in favor of power, and like all parties they'll seek to increase the authority of those institutions they have control over, and decrease the authority of those they don't. "States Rights" isn't a thing, it's just something spouted by Republicans occasionally, and usually only by, or to appeal to, two groups: somewhat dumb libertarians who think it's better if you get to wear shackles stamped "Property of the Florida Corrections System" than "Property of the Federal Government", and racists who can hear dogwhistles.
No it isn't, his summarized version of your comment is exactly how it read. If you didn't mean it to be interpreted that way, perhaps you should reword it rather than get into a pissing match.
Also you're a shitbag.
I'm saying that because, as I understand it, you're not going to accept that I'm constructively criticizing you unless I'm an asshole to you too.
It's a technical term that the GP used because it's something they heard was a word "SJWs" use without any understanding. All it generally means is constant subtle or unsubtle reminders that you're out of place and don't belong in the group because of your skin color/genitalia/some other thing that has nothing to do with your ability. It wears people down, which is why groups concerned with sexism and racism, etc, bring it up occasionally.
It has no relevance (to the best of my knowledge) to this discussion, as Torvalds isn't being accused of "microaggressions", he's admitting that he can be an asshole from time to time. Whether you're a conservative, a liberal, a jackass with a KKK robe in the closet, or you've (gasp) publicly expressed disappointment at Kevin Spacey's behavior (the horror!), simple "being an ass" is usually frowned upon. If I went into a Republican meeting and started calling every idea I disagreed with "Fucking stupid" and "Retarded bullshit", I'd be kicked out, just as I would if I went to a meeting of Feminists Against Racist Transphobia.
But this is Slashdot, so people feel the need to bring "S(traw)JWs" into it. Why? I don't know. I think some people want to be assholes, and so they point at "SJWs" as the anti-assholes because they're the convenient "enemy" they think everyone on Slashdot hates, and hope that by saying "Yeah, but $PEOPLE_YOU_HATE hate assholes therefore assholedom is good."
It isn't. It really isn't. I'm ashamed when I act like an ass to anyone in RL (Slashdot doesn't count), and everyone else should be too.
I hope Torvalds can make things work, for his sake as much as anyone else's. I lost a lot of respect for him during the BitKeeper fiasco, but everyone can change, and everyone deserves a chance to change.
I'm wondering how popular Safari is, the stats here suggest desktop Safari has between 3.67% and 13% (!) of the desktop market, which... surprises me (13% is higher than the Mac's marketshare, 3.67% is high.) I never liked it when I used Macs, and it seemed to be half way between IE and Chrome/Firefox in functionality.
It'd make a guess though that in any case most people probably won't notice that much, except being irritated when the URL bar is completely misleading.
The entire point of a Chromebook is to provide a managed environment in which users don't have to implement complex subsystems with severe security ramifications themselves. It means that a Chromebook is (as of now, though not for much longer) much more limited than a GNU/Linux box, but it also makes it a device end users can have some trust in, knowing nobody else is screwing with it (insert usual crap about trusting Google here, but reminder: any OS vendor has that control. Canonical, Red Hat, and even Patrick Volkerding have the ability to take over your computer if you choose the operating system they're responsible for.)
Use Windows, and Microsoft will know exactly what you got on your computer. Use Apple, and everyone will know exactly what you have in your bank account.
If you advertise something, you deliver it. If you're advertising being able to "buy" something, but when someone goes to buy it you change it to a "rental", and do so in a way they're unlikely to notice, you're engaging in fraud.
If Apple wants to sell $25 indefinite rentals to movies in its library, it needs avoid usage of terms like "purchase", "buy", etc from the store pages offering that service.
It's dubious, and it's also unfinished and as a result inferior to the browsers its trying to replace. I'm surprised Microsoft is doing this, people who use Edge, in my experience, don't use it for very long because they recognize it quickly as the latest version of IE.
The ingredient is there because many people are using eCigs as a way to get off cigarettes.
e-Cigs are safer than cigarettes, albeit not "safe" (to expand on that, because I don't want anyone left with the impression they're safe: Flavored eCigs are almost certainly carcinogenic. They're not pure water, there's carbon based flavoring added, which when burnt creates carcinogenic compounds. Are they as bad as cigarettes? No! Obviously not! Cigarettes have more carbon-based material to burn, and nicotine weakens the body's natural defenses against cancer. But they're not "safe" either. What about unflavored eCigs? Well, if they contain nicotine then they're still weakening your body's defenses against cancer, so you're more likely to get cancer than if you didn't smoke or vape at all, just not from the eCig itself.)
Given the choice between kicking the habit, which is hard, or taking something that's much, much, less likely to give you cancer than the regular way to smoke, it's rather obvious why there's a market for eCigs with nicotine in them.
Hilldog was a bad candidate who few outside the far left liked.
What on Earth are you talking about? Clinton was loved by Centrists and the Establishment Right. It was everyone to the left of that, moderate to "far" (is there such a thing in the US?) left, that wanted a better candidate.
If there was a reasonably accessible way to do this more efficiently, plants would use that instead of photosynthesis.
I don't think that logically follows. After a while it's unnecessary for evolution to optimize a process, it works, and the mutations required to improve things are improbable.
It's not like human legs are likely to evolve into wheels any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
This has nothing to do with poles, government owned or not. This is taxes on private cellphone towers. Most local governments impose taxes on privately owned (but public benefit, from cellular to railroads) infrastructure. They shouldn't, it's absurd public policy because it discourages businesses from improving their services, but they do because few local governments want to force the citizens and businesses that benefit from their services fair taxes.
(This has been going on for a long time and was one of the factors behind the collapse of passenger rail in the US. One local government in NJ managed to force a railroad to pay almost its entire education budget, simply from taxes on the rail lines. Meanwhile the same local governments spent tax revenues on roads and airports, because of course they would.)
What costs? This is for the most part a money grab by local governments. The telcos are building out infrastructure, they're not imposing any costs of significance to the local governments per-tower.
Infrastructure in general should not be taxed. Profits? Sure. But taxing infrastructure serves no benefit, it discourages businesses from improving their services for no good reason.
Judging from the anger at Linus Torvalds for saying "Wouldn't it be great if people were nice to each other for a change?", I'd say that the reason is the readership of Slashdot has changed from the people who get abuse, to the people to dish it out, and want to continue dishing it out with impunity.
You know, I thought my Amiga 500+ was pretty snappy even in 1995.
While we complain about bloat and poor programming, the reality is that most of the performance improvements we've seen over the history of microcomputing has been directed at creating entirely new applications that weren't feasible with the older technology. That 500+ could never run a modern web browser no matter how efficiently it was built. As for video games...
That's (mostly) a distinction without a difference. People also talk about a doubling of power, or halving the cost. They're all correct.
Yet almost every country that has high taxes is democratic and has enormous personal freedom. Dictatorships? Usually taxes aren't what people are complaining about.
If I may, I'd like to suggest that the problem here is you're looking for reasons to denigrate something you feel wrong on some level but can't put your finger on it. You know that governments collect taxes (which you don't like, because you're a libertarian), and you know that taxes are, with the exception of the military and the police, mostly used for social programs, be it public libraries, or saving people from death. And ideologically you feel the latter isn't what government should be doing, so you're trying to break it by breaking the argument for taxes.
But in reality, Sweden is by all accounts a really, really, awesome place to live.
And Sierra Leone, or Pincochet's Chili, or Galtieri's Argentina, or... well, you can think of the other places with low taxes... they all sucked.
Perhaps the problem here is not "governments doing stuff", but with the ideology that forces you to blinker yourself to the notion that governments can, and do, do stuff that makes the vast majority of its citizens more free, and happier over all.
While this is true, this case revolves around someone who told Linux contributors he disagreed with (from the first paragraph of the article) "Please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place' and "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
None of that is self confidence, that's just being a jerk.
Look, there are a lot of us here that act like that occasionally, though I'd hope that few would descend to that level in the workplace. Either way, I'm glad Torvalds has the introspection right now that a lot of people on Slashdot do not. It's one thing to call an AC, Russian Troll, Gamergater, or pudge, various insulting names on a BBS we can all walk away from with no consequences for it or us. It's quite another to manage a big project that careers are dependent upon and tell them to go kill themselves.
Torvalds gets it. I don't really understand why the rest of Slashdot doesn't. But I do look forward to the mass firings we're going to hear about soon as Slashdot readers, furious that anyone would dare suggest they be respectful in the workplace, decide to do the exact opposite and start calling their bosses n-words.
I'd say the fact it's a software company makes it tech news, but...
Still, this is a website where something along the lines of "This amazing hacker built a working 6502 CPU out of Lego" will get numerous responses of the "What's the point?" variety, so your comment and its associated high moderation (at 10.50am EDT) doesn't exactly surprise me.
It's roughly half way between Leftville and Righting.
He was fired for writing a horribly divisive memo, which, to add insult to injury was poorly researched (about the only way I can think of in which he was "right" was as in "right wing", but he wasn't fired for being right wing either, just for making Google look like a hotbed of Gamergate type morons.)
He wasn't fired for being a white person criticizing a non-white person, as you were asked. So he's a terrible example to use.
That would be nice, but in reality the fact the FCC has declared it doesn't have authority does not mean it doesn't have authority.
The bottom line is:
1. The FCC does have authority.
2. You can't force it to say it does, or act, or do its fucking job. No lawsuit or court ruling can make the FCC do anything.
3. The fact that it has authority means California doesn't.
and so 4. We're fucked.
Hold your nose and vote for the Democrats this November.
What were the documents? Because it's not uncommon for people to have to sign documents in order to do something. The link you take it to hints that it might have been a code of conduct... which is bad... how?
The primary reason he left was because the LLVM group had signed on to a program to encourage women and minorities to join in LLVM development.
Between refusing to sign a document saying "Be respectful", while getting pissed that you might have to work with more black people and/or women doesn't strike me as a sympathetic cause.
You know, it's bad enough that people on Slashdot are seriously arguing that Torvalds should be an asshole, and that all project managers should be assholes, but it's showing this website's regular clientele has lost the plot that apparently they think being misogynist and xenophobic should also be required qualifications for being a software developer.
States Rights are the "rights" of states to treat black people like shit, and maybe women too. It has nothing to do with letting states do whatever they want, otherwise Republicans would be top of the list to try to ensure the various state level laws and constitutional amendments legalizing cannabis would be respected, and would support gun control on a state level.
Republicans are no more in favor of states rights than Democrats. They're in favor of power, and like all parties they'll seek to increase the authority of those institutions they have control over, and decrease the authority of those they don't. "States Rights" isn't a thing, it's just something spouted by Republicans occasionally, and usually only by, or to appeal to, two groups: somewhat dumb libertarians who think it's better if you get to wear shackles stamped "Property of the Florida Corrections System" than "Property of the Federal Government", and racists who can hear dogwhistles.
No it isn't, his summarized version of your comment is exactly how it read. If you didn't mean it to be interpreted that way, perhaps you should reword it rather than get into a pissing match.
Also you're a shitbag.
I'm saying that because, as I understand it, you're not going to accept that I'm constructively criticizing you unless I'm an asshole to you too.
It's a technical term that the GP used because it's something they heard was a word "SJWs" use without any understanding. All it generally means is constant subtle or unsubtle reminders that you're out of place and don't belong in the group because of your skin color/genitalia/some other thing that has nothing to do with your ability. It wears people down, which is why groups concerned with sexism and racism, etc, bring it up occasionally.
It has no relevance (to the best of my knowledge) to this discussion, as Torvalds isn't being accused of "microaggressions", he's admitting that he can be an asshole from time to time. Whether you're a conservative, a liberal, a jackass with a KKK robe in the closet, or you've (gasp) publicly expressed disappointment at Kevin Spacey's behavior (the horror!), simple "being an ass" is usually frowned upon. If I went into a Republican meeting and started calling every idea I disagreed with "Fucking stupid" and "Retarded bullshit", I'd be kicked out, just as I would if I went to a meeting of Feminists Against Racist Transphobia.
But this is Slashdot, so people feel the need to bring "S(traw)JWs" into it. Why? I don't know. I think some people want to be assholes, and so they point at "SJWs" as the anti-assholes because they're the convenient "enemy" they think everyone on Slashdot hates, and hope that by saying "Yeah, but $PEOPLE_YOU_HATE hate assholes therefore assholedom is good."
It isn't. It really isn't. I'm ashamed when I act like an ass to anyone in RL (Slashdot doesn't count), and everyone else should be too.
I hope Torvalds can make things work, for his sake as much as anyone else's. I lost a lot of respect for him during the BitKeeper fiasco, but everyone can change, and everyone deserves a chance to change.
I'm wondering how popular Safari is, the stats here suggest desktop Safari has between 3.67% and 13% (!) of the desktop market, which... surprises me (13% is higher than the Mac's marketshare, 3.67% is high.) I never liked it when I used Macs, and it seemed to be half way between IE and Chrome/Firefox in functionality.
It'd make a guess though that in any case most people probably won't notice that much, except being irritated when the URL bar is completely misleading.
The entire point of a Chromebook is to provide a managed environment in which users don't have to implement complex subsystems with severe security ramifications themselves. It means that a Chromebook is (as of now, though not for much longer) much more limited than a GNU/Linux box, but it also makes it a device end users can have some trust in, knowing nobody else is screwing with it (insert usual crap about trusting Google here, but reminder: any OS vendor has that control. Canonical, Red Hat, and even Patrick Volkerding have the ability to take over your computer if you choose the operating system they're responsible for.)
You'd have thought they'd have learned this lesson when half the browsers decided to hide the "http://" portion.
Use Windows, and Microsoft will know exactly what you got on your computer. Use Apple, and everyone will know exactly what you have in your bank account.
If you advertise something, you deliver it. If you're advertising being able to "buy" something, but when someone goes to buy it you change it to a "rental", and do so in a way they're unlikely to notice, you're engaging in fraud.
If Apple wants to sell $25 indefinite rentals to movies in its library, it needs avoid usage of terms like "purchase", "buy", etc from the store pages offering that service.
It's dubious, and it's also unfinished and as a result inferior to the browsers its trying to replace. I'm surprised Microsoft is doing this, people who use Edge, in my experience, don't use it for very long because they recognize it quickly as the latest version of IE.
The ingredient is there because many people are using eCigs as a way to get off cigarettes.
e-Cigs are safer than cigarettes, albeit not "safe" (to expand on that, because I don't want anyone left with the impression they're safe: Flavored eCigs are almost certainly carcinogenic. They're not pure water, there's carbon based flavoring added, which when burnt creates carcinogenic compounds. Are they as bad as cigarettes? No! Obviously not! Cigarettes have more carbon-based material to burn, and nicotine weakens the body's natural defenses against cancer. But they're not "safe" either. What about unflavored eCigs? Well, if they contain nicotine then they're still weakening your body's defenses against cancer, so you're more likely to get cancer than if you didn't smoke or vape at all, just not from the eCig itself.)
Given the choice between kicking the habit, which is hard, or taking something that's much, much, less likely to give you cancer than the regular way to smoke, it's rather obvious why there's a market for eCigs with nicotine in them.
There is absolutely no connection between QNX and BeOS.
What on Earth are you talking about? Clinton was loved by Centrists and the Establishment Right. It was everyone to the left of that, moderate to "far" (is there such a thing in the US?) left, that wanted a better candidate.
I don't think that logically follows. After a while it's unnecessary for evolution to optimize a process, it works, and the mutations required to improve things are improbable.
It's not like human legs are likely to evolve into wheels any time soon.