You were all right until this bit: "Currently, local governments outlaw competition." No local government outlaws competition. Deals can be made for several reasons, but they usually involve enticing companies to offer services where they wouldn't otherwise, or granting privileged build-out rights in exchange for promises of cheaper service or better service or service to less profitable areas. Nowhere do they ever outlaw competition, that would be ridiculous, but granting the privileged rights companies demand (and, to be fair, sometimes genuinely require) implies by their privilege that a competitor would at a minimum be at a disadvantage.
You are doubtless right that the Tea Party way would be towards greater anarchy. I've heard quite a few people lately just blanketly denouncing all regulation, apparently in the hope that the absence of laws will somehow lead to better treatment.
He didn't blame either party for this bill, neither party is to blame - both support and opposition were bipartisan. He did say that one party has made a mission of having no bipartisan bills pass until Obama is out of office, and that this fact might have been a factor in some of the opposition. This is entirely possible. He did not blame the bills withdrawal for this, or claim that this was the only factor.
The bill was withdrawn when its sponsor (D) decided that it wouldn't get enough votes to pass after hearing from an opposition senator (also D).
If we have too many laws then repealing the outdated ones, or revising them, or consolidating them into some kind of code that the average person can interpret, these things would be useful and the right thing to do for a congress which has nothing else on its plate. This congress is not in that situation. Going to work and not just doing nothing productive but actually preventing others from doing anything useful, that is inexcusable.
There is a reason that "the right" is doing better financially, and its not because they are holding you down. You are holding yourself down by not giving a fuck about things like facts.
It's sad to see someone criticizing another for bias and then throwing something like this out. No one said anything about "the right," and if you're going to throw out a claim like that you should back it up with something.
If "the right" means Republicans, as it usually does in the US, I've seen nothing but poor financial decisions out of them in the few decades that I've been paying attention. I would not say that they're doing better financially. (better than who? "the left"? the middle class, as the grandparent was discussing?)
"Failure" is past-tense. No one considers it to be a failure, many people think that it will be a failure. Though the bulk of these are internet fanboys...
It's too bad since it's easily the best of the current generation, in my opinion. No ads, no upselling, no spy camera, etc. Just a good, small, quiet, game console that I can play without a TV.
You're being a little too vague here. What is "this sort of thing"? Lobbying? Who is "us"? Supporters of fusion research?
It's true that the Slashdot crowd trends towards opposing lobbyists (unless they're the NRA), but there's also generally pretty strong support for science funding. It's not surprising to me that comments would largely take the attitude that this is positive.
You might question why it's the army doing this and not some branch of the government dedicated to the purpose. I'm not sure that it's a problem, exactly, but it does seem a little odd. I expect it's that way simply for historic reasons.
This has nothing to do with Snowden or spying - the person who revealed this was the person to whom he, knowingly, said it - there is no third party here, no wiretap, no snooping. He also wasn't tricked into saying something racist, he made it very clear that he genuinely is racist.
You seem to be trying to take this even further than "the right to be forgotten," apparently you want a world where people have a right to suppress someone else from ever revealing anything negative at all. You are the thought police. You.
No... a 50 km commute could easily be handled by your lithium battery. So you would need zero of these per year of that's all that you were doing. This is a range extender - a way to shut up all those people who keep complaining that the 300 mile range of the Model S is just unacceptable. You don't even need a Model S though, you'd do just fine in a Leaf.
Oh fine, I guess he did use the word right at the end there. Maybe I should direct some of my criticism at him then: calling them trolls is just a way to sweep them under the rug. A troll is someone you ignore, it isn't someone with a valid opinion who should be listened too. I think the summary mischaracterized what he was saying by focusing on that one word that he threw in at the end.
He said nothing about trolls and the people trying to leave comments on the FCC website are not trolling - they're genuinely upset about what the FCC is trying to do to the Internet.
He made a joke about the low quality of the discourse found on the Internet, but did not call for trolls or advocate trolling.
no employer will take a risk on them at that wage level.
This is such a silly concept. If the employer needs someone in order to make its business work, then it will hire someone. It's not a matter of choice, no employer likes having extra people just sitting around - that's wasteful at any price. A need for employees creates new jobs. This is the only thing that creates new jobs.
You say that this will reduce job opportunities for those who are less educated, but the reality is that the employer is going to get the best / most appropriate employee that it can no matter what the job is and no matter what the salary. The only point at which salary actually factors into this is when the business is just barely scraping by and may not be able to afford the employees that it needs. So this may be bad news for some already failing businesses, but that's it - everyone else benefits. Whether it's the employees who are now making more money, or the non-failed businesses who are selling more product because the people who buy their products now have more money.
If you think there's a better way to measure corruption than I'd be happy to hear it. Comparing numbers of prosecutions / reported incidents of bribery is ultimately just a way of evaluating the vigilance of the country's legal system. Surveying journalists and public policy experts, as they do, certainly seems to me to be the most effective approach.
The financial crash was in 2008, before they started taking money for preorders in October of that year. The real problem though was the endless barrage of broken promises - playing down every bit of news and claiming again and again and again that they were only two weeks away from shipping. Canceling my preorder (after sitting through more than a year of that BS) felt amazingly good. The only positive thing that I can say about them is that getting my money back was fairly quick and painless.
I'm familiar with the history, but while the historical context is interesting it has nothing to do with whether the current president is or is not corrupt. Paper industry protectionism is not the reason why Obama has not overseen the nationwide legalization of marijuana.
Uruguay is actually tied with the United States for 19th least corrupt. This makes them the least corrupt country in South America, but unremarkable globally. Unsurprisingly, the least corrupt countries are in northern Europe (plus New Zealand). In other words, the socialist countries.
This comment: "He has also overseen the legalization of marijuana, which Obama is too corrupt to do." is ridiculous. Marijuana legislation isn't about bribes, it's about catering to a certain hysterical group of voters. Likewise, this comment: "Not the armored rolling palace of an Obama" seems to indicate that you have a very poor perception of what corruption is, exactly. It certainly can be expending public resources on creature comforts for yourself, but the fact that Obama continues to use the same bulletproof limo that every president prior to himself has used is not an indication of corruption. The referenced article, where a congressman has accepted campaign contributions in exchange for legislation that is clearly contrary to the public interest - that is an indication of corruption.
No... humans damage the environment already. Anything that increases energy demand ultimately helps the environment by raising energy prices and creating incentives for the development of more efficient ways of supplying power.
Is this something that you actually believe, or are you making a joke? It's a little hard to tell. I'll contribute: Patent trolls are good because they create incentive for patent reform. Littering is good because it creates incentive for companies to release products with reduced packaging. Copyrights that never expire are good because they create incentive for people to live longer. Air pollution is good because it creates incentive for people to find alternatives to breathing so damn much.
Asus believes it has one-upped Samsung by setting a $50-lower list price and providing a more upscale physical configuration. I'm inclined to agree. The Samsung monitor offers only a tilt adjustment, while the PB287Q can swivel, tilt, change height, and... [pivot] into portrait mode
Internet Essentials is 5 Mb down / 1 Mb up. If they were forced to offer this to all of their customers, and there were restrictions in place ensuring no caps and actual neutrality, no fast lanes, no throttling, and further restrictions ensuring that non-Internet Essentials customers didn't get preferential treatment AND (most important) a minimum bandwidth requirement - i.e.: it's currently "up to" 5 Mb / 1Mb, but as with all service in the US there's no bottom cap. I'd want a guaranteed minimum of something like 512 Kb / 128 Kb.
And finally some assurance that the price would never increase beyond inflation. In other words, what I want is Internet Essentials for everyone along with some assurances that Comcast wouldn't be able to use it to screw people. But with all of that as a condition for the merger, I would not oppose it. If 30% of the country (Comcast's post-merger coverage area) had real access to "good enough" affordable broadband, I think that would be sufficiently transformative to justify allowing the monopoly.
Of course, with all of that in place what I'm really talking about is internet service as a regulated utility rather than the crap that we have now. So an alternative would be to just do it proper and turn internet service into a regulated utility...::sigh:: But that would be "socialism" and people would flip out. So this seems like an alternative that might actually stand a chance of going through (but probably not).
... I've been hearing "Google fiber" every time Comcast comes up. It's getting a little tiresome, frankly. There is no one on this earth not connected to Comcast who wouldn't prefer Google fiber, but it's available to very few people. Another post saying that it's better just isn't useful.
Possibly a better comparison is Zediva - a company that tried to do exactly what the article is describing, with DVDs not CDs, and was shut down: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
As silly as it is, the law seems to be settled on this.
There are also ceilings, objects sitting on tables, etc. The implication that I was making was that we haven't seen something not fall without explanation, i.e.: a violation of the law.
A law, to my knowledge, is simply an observed phenomenon. We have a law of gravity because things fall, and no one has ever seen something not fall. We can quantify this behavior, and turn it into an equation, but that's the extent of the law. Any attempt to explain the phenomenon is a theory or hypothesis.
I fail to see the advantage between your friend's relationship with Amazon and Stross's publisher. Amazon seems to just be acting as a really crappy publisher for your friend - offering no editing, no promotion, just taking a cut of the money because they're the gatekeeper and they can. You can call Stross's model "outdated," but I can certainly see why he'd try to defend it.
"But we've already had this conversation for music. Didn't we collectively decide that getting away from traditional publishing models was progress?" - Apple doesn't have a monopoly on music distribution (anymore). iPods play DRM-free mp3s. There's a big difference there. If your friend could self-publish on multiple platforms, so it was your friend controlling distribution and controlling (via competition) how much of a cut the distributors could take and how much influence they had, this would be a very different situation.
Slashdot Mirror
You were all right until this bit: "Currently, local governments outlaw competition." No local government outlaws competition. Deals can be made for several reasons, but they usually involve enticing companies to offer services where they wouldn't otherwise, or granting privileged build-out rights in exchange for promises of cheaper service or better service or service to less profitable areas. Nowhere do they ever outlaw competition, that would be ridiculous, but granting the privileged rights companies demand (and, to be fair, sometimes genuinely require) implies by their privilege that a competitor would at a minimum be at a disadvantage.
You are doubtless right that the Tea Party way would be towards greater anarchy. I've heard quite a few people lately just blanketly denouncing all regulation, apparently in the hope that the absence of laws will somehow lead to better treatment.
He didn't blame either party for this bill, neither party is to blame - both support and opposition were bipartisan. He did say that one party has made a mission of having no bipartisan bills pass until Obama is out of office, and that this fact might have been a factor in some of the opposition. This is entirely possible. He did not blame the bills withdrawal for this, or claim that this was the only factor.
The bill was withdrawn when its sponsor (D) decided that it wouldn't get enough votes to pass after hearing from an opposition senator (also D).
If we have too many laws then repealing the outdated ones, or revising them, or consolidating them into some kind of code that the average person can interpret, these things would be useful and the right thing to do for a congress which has nothing else on its plate. This congress is not in that situation. Going to work and not just doing nothing productive but actually preventing others from doing anything useful, that is inexcusable.
It's nice to see that even the Russian conspiracy theorists take a "blame Obama" approach to politics. It's a small world.
There is a reason that "the right" is doing better financially, and its not because they are holding you down. You are holding yourself down by not giving a fuck about things like facts.
It's sad to see someone criticizing another for bias and then throwing something like this out. No one said anything about "the right," and if you're going to throw out a claim like that you should back it up with something.
If "the right" means Republicans, as it usually does in the US, I've seen nothing but poor financial decisions out of them in the few decades that I've been paying attention. I would not say that they're doing better financially. (better than who? "the left"? the middle class, as the grandparent was discussing?)
"Failure" is past-tense. No one considers it to be a failure, many people think that it will be a failure. Though the bulk of these are internet fanboys...
It's too bad since it's easily the best of the current generation, in my opinion. No ads, no upselling, no spy camera, etc. Just a good, small, quiet, game console that I can play without a TV.
You're being a little too vague here. What is "this sort of thing"? Lobbying? Who is "us"? Supporters of fusion research?
It's true that the Slashdot crowd trends towards opposing lobbyists (unless they're the NRA), but there's also generally pretty strong support for science funding. It's not surprising to me that comments would largely take the attitude that this is positive.
You might question why it's the army doing this and not some branch of the government dedicated to the purpose. I'm not sure that it's a problem, exactly, but it does seem a little odd. I expect it's that way simply for historic reasons.
This has nothing to do with Snowden or spying - the person who revealed this was the person to whom he, knowingly, said it - there is no third party here, no wiretap, no snooping. He also wasn't tricked into saying something racist, he made it very clear that he genuinely is racist.
You seem to be trying to take this even further than "the right to be forgotten," apparently you want a world where people have a right to suppress someone else from ever revealing anything negative at all. You are the thought police. You.
No... a 50 km commute could easily be handled by your lithium battery. So you would need zero of these per year of that's all that you were doing. This is a range extender - a way to shut up all those people who keep complaining that the 300 mile range of the Model S is just unacceptable. You don't even need a Model S though, you'd do just fine in a Leaf.
Oh fine, I guess he did use the word right at the end there. Maybe I should direct some of my criticism at him then: calling them trolls is just a way to sweep them under the rug. A troll is someone you ignore, it isn't someone with a valid opinion who should be listened too. I think the summary mischaracterized what he was saying by focusing on that one word that he threw in at the end.
He said nothing about trolls and the people trying to leave comments on the FCC website are not trolling - they're genuinely upset about what the FCC is trying to do to the Internet.
He made a joke about the low quality of the discourse found on the Internet, but did not call for trolls or advocate trolling.
no employer will take a risk on them at that wage level.
This is such a silly concept. If the employer needs someone in order to make its business work, then it will hire someone. It's not a matter of choice, no employer likes having extra people just sitting around - that's wasteful at any price. A need for employees creates new jobs. This is the only thing that creates new jobs.
You say that this will reduce job opportunities for those who are less educated, but the reality is that the employer is going to get the best / most appropriate employee that it can no matter what the job is and no matter what the salary. The only point at which salary actually factors into this is when the business is just barely scraping by and may not be able to afford the employees that it needs. So this may be bad news for some already failing businesses, but that's it - everyone else benefits. Whether it's the employees who are now making more money, or the non-failed businesses who are selling more product because the people who buy their products now have more money.
If you think there's a better way to measure corruption than I'd be happy to hear it. Comparing numbers of prosecutions / reported incidents of bribery is ultimately just a way of evaluating the vigilance of the country's legal system. Surveying journalists and public policy experts, as they do, certainly seems to me to be the most effective approach.
The financial crash was in 2008, before they started taking money for preorders in October of that year. The real problem though was the endless barrage of broken promises - playing down every bit of news and claiming again and again and again that they were only two weeks away from shipping. Canceling my preorder (after sitting through more than a year of that BS) felt amazingly good. The only positive thing that I can say about them is that getting my money back was fairly quick and painless.
I'm familiar with the history, but while the historical context is interesting it has nothing to do with whether the current president is or is not corrupt. Paper industry protectionism is not the reason why Obama has not overseen the nationwide legalization of marijuana.
Uruguay is actually tied with the United States for 19th least corrupt. This makes them the least corrupt country in South America, but unremarkable globally. Unsurprisingly, the least corrupt countries are in northern Europe (plus New Zealand). In other words, the socialist countries.
This comment: "He has also overseen the legalization of marijuana, which Obama is too corrupt to do." is ridiculous. Marijuana legislation isn't about bribes, it's about catering to a certain hysterical group of voters. Likewise, this comment: "Not the armored rolling palace of an Obama" seems to indicate that you have a very poor perception of what corruption is, exactly. It certainly can be expending public resources on creature comforts for yourself, but the fact that Obama continues to use the same bulletproof limo that every president prior to himself has used is not an indication of corruption. The referenced article, where a congressman has accepted campaign contributions in exchange for legislation that is clearly contrary to the public interest - that is an indication of corruption.
No... humans damage the environment already. Anything that increases energy demand ultimately helps the environment by raising energy prices and creating incentives for the development of more efficient ways of supplying power.
Is this something that you actually believe, or are you making a joke? It's a little hard to tell. I'll contribute: Patent trolls are good because they create incentive for patent reform. Littering is good because it creates incentive for companies to release products with reduced packaging. Copyrights that never expire are good because they create incentive for people to live longer. Air pollution is good because it creates incentive for people to find alternatives to breathing so damn much.
Asus believes it has one-upped Samsung by setting a $50-lower list price and providing a more upscale physical configuration. I'm inclined to agree. The Samsung monitor offers only a tilt adjustment, while the PB287Q can swivel, tilt, change height, and ... [pivot] into portrait mode
Internet Essentials is 5 Mb down / 1 Mb up. If they were forced to offer this to all of their customers, and there were restrictions in place ensuring no caps and actual neutrality, no fast lanes, no throttling, and further restrictions ensuring that non-Internet Essentials customers didn't get preferential treatment AND (most important) a minimum bandwidth requirement - i.e.: it's currently "up to" 5 Mb / 1Mb, but as with all service in the US there's no bottom cap. I'd want a guaranteed minimum of something like 512 Kb / 128 Kb.
::sigh:: But that would be "socialism" and people would flip out. So this seems like an alternative that might actually stand a chance of going through (but probably not).
And finally some assurance that the price would never increase beyond inflation. In other words, what I want is Internet Essentials for everyone along with some assurances that Comcast wouldn't be able to use it to screw people. But with all of that as a condition for the merger, I would not oppose it. If 30% of the country (Comcast's post-merger coverage area) had real access to "good enough" affordable broadband, I think that would be sufficiently transformative to justify allowing the monopoly.
Of course, with all of that in place what I'm really talking about is internet service as a regulated utility rather than the crap that we have now. So an alternative would be to just do it proper and turn internet service into a regulated utility...
... I've been hearing "Google fiber" every time Comcast comes up. It's getting a little tiresome, frankly. There is no one on this earth not connected to Comcast who wouldn't prefer Google fiber, but it's available to very few people. Another post saying that it's better just isn't useful.
Possibly a better comparison is Zediva - a company that tried to do exactly what the article is describing, with DVDs not CDs, and was shut down: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
As silly as it is, the law seems to be settled on this.
There are also ceilings, objects sitting on tables, etc. The implication that I was making was that we haven't seen something not fall without explanation, i.e.: a violation of the law.
A law, to my knowledge, is simply an observed phenomenon. We have a law of gravity because things fall, and no one has ever seen something not fall. We can quantify this behavior, and turn it into an equation, but that's the extent of the law. Any attempt to explain the phenomenon is a theory or hypothesis.
I fail to see the advantage between your friend's relationship with Amazon and Stross's publisher. Amazon seems to just be acting as a really crappy publisher for your friend - offering no editing, no promotion, just taking a cut of the money because they're the gatekeeper and they can. You can call Stross's model "outdated," but I can certainly see why he'd try to defend it.
"But we've already had this conversation for music. Didn't we collectively decide that getting away from traditional publishing models was progress?" - Apple doesn't have a monopoly on music distribution (anymore). iPods play DRM-free mp3s. There's a big difference there. If your friend could self-publish on multiple platforms, so it was your friend controlling distribution and controlling (via competition) how much of a cut the distributors could take and how much influence they had, this would be a very different situation.