This sounds suspiciously like an attempt to get rid of net neutrality laws. "Remove government regulation" indeed!
Exactly. Remove network neutrality, prevent any government snooping (yay!), and regulate what "the cloud" does with your data.
But, considering that this is from the party that revoked due process during Bush II, and is saying nothing about Obama's continuation of it, despite their hatred of everything he does, I am still dubious of any anti-authoritarian stance they may take. Let them end warrant-less wiretapping, demand that everyone imprisoned by the US government be given a fair trial, and end torture. Then you can tell me you care about our civil liberties.
The poster I responded to was blaming the bad economy on the Republicans blocking Obama's attempts to fix the economy and I asked why he did not take steps to fix it when the Dems had control of both Houses of Congress. Your defense of him is that he did and they failed, but we should hold the Republicans responsible because they did not go along with doing more of what didn't work in the first place?
Actually the stimulus package helped, but it was not enough to fix everything in two years.
Obama didn't wait two years. In 2008, Bush passed tarp. In 2009, Obama passed his own stimulus package consisting of tax cuts and infrastructure programs. By then, the GOP was crapping their pants in fear of the newly discovered national debt. So, should he have passed another stimulus in 2010? If he had, it would have been nothing more than a massive tax cut, which would have exacerbated the debt ceiling debate.
Perhaps this could be called parody. Lots of times people take a famous logo and tweak it for a joke or comment. eg the Coke logo that says "Cocaine". Generally that's called fair use.
Exactly. Jack Daniels is being nice to this guy because they don't have a leg to stand on. They can either threaten to sue and hope that the legal costs intimidate the publisher into submission, or try to work with the other guy.
While we can go to great lengths to guard against some types of security threat, we are reminded once again that the greatest risk is often from somebody who decides to take something lethal to a crowded place and do his worst with it.
But that isn't the greatest risk. You're still more likely to be killed by a lifetime of movie theater popcorn, or by a car wreck on the way home. (I am staying out of the gun-control argument. This is notable because it is flashy. Had it been common, we would have either stopped going to movies, found a way to make it uncommon, or learned to accept it by now)
So why don't you vote for yourself every election? By your logic, the only question you should be asking yourself is "is there anybody I'd rather see in office". There is a difference between voting systems. Our current system was not designed to work well with third party candidates. Others are.
I have to say that with all the emphasis on "voter suppression" or "voter fraud prevention" this election, and the partisan BS that comes with the past few years, I don't know if I trust the current batch to change the system. We would need every provision and every aspect of the system to be monitored by at least one non-partisan non-profit third party with no political agenda.
I think we would have an easier time finding a flock of benevolent mind-readers to remotely sense the majority of public opinion while riding through town on a pack of domesticated unicorns.
I wish I had the mod points for you. I just wish that we had a system that didn't center around false dichotomies. One where the voter has the freedom to vote for the guy he really wants without wasting his vote.
(As an example), I am still cursing mozilla and other new web browsers for the way they are keeping their UIs in a constant state of flux. Things like moving the home icon, making the status bar something that only appears if you hover over a link for 2 seconds, and just making everything look different from what it was 2 years ago. That sucks when you have to provide tech support for idiots who don't know if they're using netscape navigator or Internet Explorer 9.
And in Linux, I have found that there are plenty of GUI tools that I never bothered to learn, specifically because the Redhat version is different from the Debian version, and possibly the newer Redhat version is different from the older Redhat version.
So, yes, keep the G-d damned command-line in every version of every operating system, because I want to spend my study time learning new things, not just learning how to do the same old things in different versions of Windows/Linux.
And, no, I'm not going to make the argument for CLI reliability (that it never mangles your settings in such a way that you have to try again), or flexibility (that it's the only decent way to do scripting). Others have done a much better job than I could, in that area.
would it be cheaper to simply compensate the affected people
It doesn't matter. Nobody has any intention of doing that. When a company pollutes an area, often its' biggest supporters are the people living in that area. They're just happy to have jobs. And if this ever get to disastrous levels, what are the odds that reparations will be paid to those who lost everything? What are the odds that this will be paid for by taxes/fines on the people who benefited most from causing the problem?
and secondly would it crimp the economy so badly that no future development (e.g. electric cars, new power generation sources like solar etc.) could occur because all resources would be spent in prevention* and maintenance.
Or would it make such development worthwhile? Alternate energies and new technologies have an uphill climb because they are having to fight against a well-established system with infrastructure and political clout on their side. If we had a reasonable system in place to require people to reduce emissions, then people would adopt newer technologies, the businesses that supply those technologies would grow, and they would have more money to research cheaper, more efficient production.
Also not discussed by "advocates" is the fact that the CO2 we generate is at this point probably insignificant due to the developing world, and their increased output.
That is a problem. It's hard for us to tell some third world country "now that we got ours, the rules are changing"
Scientists: A global disaster may be looming. We can stop it, but we'll need to reduce our CO2 emissions. If we start now, it may mean driving smaller cars, planting more trees, and finding small ways to reduce our carbon footprint.
Exxon: bullshit! There's no global warming.
GMC: Introducing the new GMC ShitKicker! It's 2 megatons of bad ass! Just imagine yourself driving this thing down the freeway, confederate flags flapping in the wind...That'll show those hippies.
The people: I like shiny big trucks. Can you add three DVD players and a built-in vibrator?
===== 40 years later ===== Scientists: We need to reduce our CO2 emissions.
Exxon: It'll need sacrifices. Higher fuel prices. Higher cost of manufactured goods, and fewer cheap imports. You'll need to travel less, buy a smaller car. A lot of you'll be laid off because industry thrives on cheap energy. You'll have to stop eating so much meat. But it's the only way to prevent disaster...Er... Lets just do nothing and chance it.
The People: We're going to go with the second guy.
What ever happened to the public option? You know, cutting the profit motive out of funding health care, so that people do not have to fight with their insurance companies or with hospitals just to get the treatment they paid for?
I pay for my health insurance. I choose a high deductible plan.My costs are low.
Now, they will probably triple because I'll have to pay for coverage for things I don't use such as OBGYN.
So, thanks for raising my costs with no benefit to me.
How do you know? Did it ever cross your mind that more people in the pool will lower your premiums? Why don't you wait for them to actually triple before griping about it?
Why wait? even if they don't triple, I'm pretty sure the GOP will spend the next ten years blaming every rate increase, no matter the size or cause, on ObamaCare.
And most importantly, you also need a way to clean up the system so that any one of us can prove at any time that we can pay our bills. If I get carried into a hospital, right now, it could be a heart attack that will cost someone $50,000, or it could be something incredibly small that will cost a few hundred. Even if my bank statement says I have the money, right now, I can't prove any checks will clear. Maybe I just bought a total stranger a new Tesla roadster and the check hasn't cleared yet. If I don't have $50,000 in on-hand, then what are the odds of a banking institution approving a quickie loan initiated by a stranger, knowing that many of these loans are from people at risk of dying or losing their jobs? How much interest would such an institution have to charge to make that model profitable?
And, if I have insurance, I still don't know if I can pay my bill. I may be unconscious and unable to tell what my policy is. Or maybe I know exactly what my policy is, but they'll weasel their way out of paying, leaving me back at square one.
The medical industry hasn't been "free market" for a long time, and for good reason.
This is a practice called "bundling". To use a car analogy, let's say you have a monopoly on cars. One day, you realize the people are having car radios installed, and you decide to enter that market. So, you build the cheapest, crappiest car radio you can, and you say "it now comes standard in every car! Also, we're raising our prices.". This is illegal. It is a use of one monopoly to try to harm competition in another market. It's what Microsoft got sued for with Internet Explorer*, and it's exactly what Comcast is doing (except that they are trying to force a preexisting product on their customers). They're not giving anything away for free. They just added the two bills together.
* The IE case being dismissed because MS said that their new web browser was a part of the operating system that couldn't be removed. Going back to the car analogy, they placed a landmine under the radio and said "I'm sorry, we can't remove this, or the whole thing will blow up"
I think AC's point is that you can patent the technology that makes the device work, but you can't patent the user interface. If the "owners" of Star Trek decide to patent the "look and feel" of the LCARS user interface, then that's their right. They just can't patent the Warp drive.
Voyager? The show where Tom Paris is the resident bad boy? The show with a space Indian who is one stereotype short of starting a casino? The show that devoted an entire season to answering trekkie questions? (What happens if the Enterprise goes above warp 9? Well, let's see! People de-evolve into lizards! That's what happens). The show where the captain dresses like someone's grandma, but is lusted after by half the galaxy? The only thing good about Janeway is that she looks like someone who is respected her for her mind.
The show had the most brilliant premise, one that guaranteed conflict between the Maquis and Federation crew. They didn't even have a real doctor. Imagine how gritty that show could have been. They could have made Battlestar Galactica look like, well Voyager, by comparison.
DS9 seemed like Trek's attempt to copy Babylon 5. Many Trek fans hated DS9, because it was so different from the other shows. I consider it my favorite series, but, if you don't like it, you may want to give TNG or TOS a try.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this company run by the kid who would steal anything that wasn't nailed down and then say "you didn't say I COULDN'T have it"?
This sounds suspiciously like an attempt to get rid of net neutrality laws. "Remove government regulation" indeed!
Exactly. Remove network neutrality, prevent any government snooping (yay!), and regulate what "the cloud" does with your data.
But, considering that this is from the party that revoked due process during Bush II, and is saying nothing about Obama's continuation of it, despite their hatred of everything he does, I am still dubious of any anti-authoritarian stance they may take. Let them end warrant-less wiretapping, demand that everyone imprisoned by the US government be given a fair trial, and end torture. Then you can tell me you care about our civil liberties.
I beg to differ.
Permission granted. You may now differ.
You saw a request and made it happen. If you worked for Google, we might be using G+ by now.
Really? That would explain why all of the "benefit" from the stimulus stopped as soon as the federal money stopped.
Many economists disagree with you on that.
The poster I responded to was blaming the bad economy on the Republicans blocking Obama's attempts to fix the economy and I asked why he did not take steps to fix it when the Dems had control of both Houses of Congress. Your defense of him is that he did and they failed, but we should hold the Republicans responsible because they did not go along with doing more of what didn't work in the first place?
Actually the stimulus package helped, but it was not enough to fix everything in two years.
Obama didn't wait two years. In 2008, Bush passed tarp. In 2009, Obama passed his own stimulus package consisting of tax cuts and infrastructure programs. By then, the GOP was crapping their pants in fear of the newly discovered national debt. So, should he have passed another stimulus in 2010? If he had, it would have been nothing more than a massive tax cut, which would have exacerbated the debt ceiling debate.
And a (D) Congress to go with him
But never enough to break the constant stream of kneejerk filibusters.
Perhaps this could be called parody. Lots of times people take a famous logo and tweak it for a joke or comment. eg the Coke logo that says "Cocaine".
Generally that's called fair use.
Exactly. Jack Daniels is being nice to this guy because they don't have a leg to stand on. They can either threaten to sue and hope that the legal costs intimidate the publisher into submission, or try to work with the other guy.
While we can go to great lengths to guard against some types of security threat, we are reminded once again that the greatest risk is often from somebody who decides to take something lethal to a crowded place and do his worst with it.
But that isn't the greatest risk. You're still more likely to be killed by a lifetime of movie theater popcorn, or by a car wreck on the way home. (I am staying out of the gun-control argument. This is notable because it is flashy. Had it been common, we would have either stopped going to movies, found a way to make it uncommon, or learned to accept it by now)
</pedant>
You make a convincing argument. I can agree with you in the case of non-swing states.
So why don't you vote for yourself every election? By your logic, the only question you should be asking yourself is "is there anybody I'd rather see in office". There is a difference between voting systems. Our current system was not designed to work well with third party candidates. Others are.
I have to say that with all the emphasis on "voter suppression" or "voter fraud prevention" this election, and the partisan BS that comes with the past few years, I don't know if I trust the current batch to change the system. We would need every provision and every aspect of the system to be monitored by at least one non-partisan non-profit third party with no political agenda.
I think we would have an easier time finding a flock of benevolent mind-readers to remotely sense the majority of public opinion while riding through town on a pack of domesticated unicorns.
I wish I had the mod points for you. I just wish that we had a system that didn't center around false dichotomies. One where the voter has the freedom to vote for the guy he really wants without wasting his vote.
(As an example), I am still cursing mozilla and other new web browsers for the way they are keeping their UIs in a constant state of flux. Things like moving the home icon, making the status bar something that only appears if you hover over a link for 2 seconds, and just making everything look different from what it was 2 years ago. That sucks when you have to provide tech support for idiots who don't know if they're using netscape navigator or Internet Explorer 9.
And in Linux, I have found that there are plenty of GUI tools that I never bothered to learn, specifically because the Redhat version is different from the Debian version, and possibly the newer Redhat version is different from the older Redhat version.
So, yes, keep the G-d damned command-line in every version of every operating system, because I want to spend my study time learning new things, not just learning how to do the same old things in different versions of Windows/Linux.
And, no, I'm not going to make the argument for CLI reliability (that it never mangles your settings in such a way that you have to try again), or flexibility (that it's the only decent way to do scripting). Others have done a much better job than I could, in that area.
would it be cheaper to simply compensate the affected people
It doesn't matter. Nobody has any intention of doing that. When a company pollutes an area, often its' biggest supporters are the people living in that area. They're just happy to have jobs. And if this ever get to disastrous levels, what are the odds that reparations will be paid to those who lost everything? What are the odds that this will be paid for by taxes/fines on the people who benefited most from causing the problem?
and secondly would it crimp the economy so badly that no future development (e.g. electric cars, new power generation sources like solar etc.) could occur because all resources would be spent in prevention* and maintenance.
Or would it make such development worthwhile? Alternate energies and new technologies have an uphill climb because they are having to fight against a well-established system with infrastructure and political clout on their side. If we had a reasonable system in place to require people to reduce emissions, then people would adopt newer technologies, the businesses that supply those technologies would grow, and they would have more money to research cheaper, more efficient production.
Also not discussed by "advocates" is the fact that the CO2 we generate is at this point probably insignificant due to the developing world, and their increased output.
That is a problem. It's hard for us to tell some third world country "now that we got ours, the rules are changing"
Funny, but a better analogy would be:
Scientists: A global disaster may be looming. We can stop it, but we'll need to reduce our CO2 emissions. If we start now, it may mean driving smaller cars, planting more trees, and finding small ways to reduce our carbon footprint.
Exxon: bullshit! There's no global warming.
GMC: Introducing the new GMC ShitKicker! It's 2 megatons of bad ass! Just imagine yourself driving this thing down the freeway, confederate flags flapping in the wind...That'll show those hippies.
The people: I like shiny big trucks. Can you add three DVD players and a built-in vibrator?
=====
40 years later
=====
Scientists: We need to reduce our CO2 emissions.
Exxon: It'll need sacrifices. Higher fuel prices. Higher cost of manufactured goods, and fewer cheap imports. You'll need to travel less, buy a smaller car. A lot of you'll be laid off because industry thrives on cheap energy. You'll have to stop eating so much meat. But it's the only way to prevent disaster...Er... Lets just do nothing and chance it.
The People: We're going to go with the second guy.
What ever happened to the public option? You know, cutting the profit motive out of funding health care, so that people do not have to fight with their insurance companies or with hospitals just to get the treatment they paid for?
FTFY.
I pay for my health insurance. I choose a high deductible plan.My costs are low.
Now, they will probably triple because I'll have to pay for coverage for things I don't use such as OBGYN.
So, thanks for raising my costs with no benefit to me.
How do you know? Did it ever cross your mind that more people in the pool will lower your premiums? Why don't you wait for them to actually triple before griping about it?
Why wait? even if they don't triple, I'm pretty sure the GOP will spend the next ten years blaming every rate increase, no matter the size or cause, on ObamaCare.
From http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8168.pdf. (Note that FPL is "federal poverty level").
138% FPL - Medicaid
* No premiums
* Cost sharing limited to nominal amounts for most services
139%250% FPL - Exchange
* Sliding scale tax credits limit premium costs to 38.05% of income.
* Sliding scale costsharing credits
251%400% FPL - Exchange
* Sliding scale tax credits limit premium costs to 8.059.5% of income.
* No cost sharing credits
And most importantly, you also need a way to clean up the system so that any one of us can prove at any time that we can pay our bills. If I get carried into a hospital, right now, it could be a heart attack that will cost someone $50,000, or it could be something incredibly small that will cost a few hundred. Even if my bank statement says I have the money, right now, I can't prove any checks will clear. Maybe I just bought a total stranger a new Tesla roadster and the check hasn't cleared yet. If I don't have $50,000 in on-hand, then what are the odds of a banking institution approving a quickie loan initiated by a stranger, knowing that many of these loans are from people at risk of dying or losing their jobs? How much interest would such an institution have to charge to make that model profitable?
And, if I have insurance, I still don't know if I can pay my bill. I may be unconscious and unable to tell what my policy is. Or maybe I know exactly what my policy is, but they'll weasel their way out of paying, leaving me back at square one.
The medical industry hasn't been "free market" for a long time, and for good reason.
Insightful comment from the FA. They are surveying the novice users not power users, hence they produced a Win8 interface for novices, not us:
Windows: Made for people who don't know what the hell they're doing, by people who don't know what the hell they're doing.
This is a practice called "bundling". To use a car analogy, let's say you have a monopoly on cars. One day, you realize the people are having car radios installed, and you decide to enter that market. So, you build the cheapest, crappiest car radio you can, and you say "it now comes standard in every car! Also, we're raising our prices.". This is illegal. It is a use of one monopoly to try to harm competition in another market. It's what Microsoft got sued for with Internet Explorer*, and it's exactly what Comcast is doing (except that they are trying to force a preexisting product on their customers). They're not giving anything away for free. They just added the two bills together.
* The IE case being dismissed because MS said that their new web browser was a part of the operating system that couldn't be removed. Going back to the car analogy, they placed a landmine under the radio and said "I'm sorry, we can't remove this, or the whole thing will blow up"
I think AC's point is that you can patent the technology that makes the device work, but you can't patent the user interface. If the "owners" of Star Trek decide to patent the "look and feel" of the LCARS user interface, then that's their right. They just can't patent the Warp drive.
Voyager? The show where Tom Paris is the resident bad boy? The show with a space Indian who is one stereotype short of starting a casino? The show that devoted an entire season to answering trekkie questions? (What happens if the Enterprise goes above warp 9? Well, let's see! People de-evolve into lizards! That's what happens). The show where the captain dresses like someone's grandma, but is lusted after by half the galaxy? The only thing good about Janeway is that she looks like someone who is respected her for her mind.
The show had the most brilliant premise, one that guaranteed conflict between the Maquis and Federation crew. They didn't even have a real doctor. Imagine how gritty that show could have been. They could have made Battlestar Galactica look like, well Voyager, by comparison.
So, yeah, Enterprise is slightly better.
DS9 seemed like Trek's attempt to copy Babylon 5. Many Trek fans hated DS9, because it was so different from the other shows. I consider it my favorite series, but, if you don't like it, you may want to give TNG or TOS a try.