Not everyone here hate paywalls. But those who do will be much more vocal than those who don't.
A lot of it isn't so much paywalls as it is fear that the Internet will end up sliced and diced with toll booths every other site. Like "net neutrality", that would convert a lot of free association into having to strategise your use based on financial considerations. We've already demonstrated that people self-limit themselves to their own detriment without forcing more limits on them. And, of course, it puts an additional chill on one of the www's greatest strengths: hyperlinking into a truly world-wide web.
Then again, some people are either:
* cheap
* broke
* selfish bastards who think that paying for anything that they absolutely cannot avoid paying for is being robbed
I do not run an ad blocker, and I am fairly tolerant of adverts alongside my news. I will continue reading a site even if the entire sidebar is flashing animated gifs at me.
That is my payment.
I do block flash content, because ads with sound step over the line, and I will stop visiting a site that loads keyword ads in the text of an article, but almost anything else I consider to be a fair condition for free access to content.
It is not really a news site, but I would pay for wikipedia if paywalled. I did voluntary pay a bit, twice. It is in general very useful for me. Otherwise perhaps occasionaly for an in depth article by a repute dpublisher (even then, max. $2), but not a subscription.
I, too have coughed up cash for Wikipedia. I'd actually pay google, but if they billed me per-search, I'd go bankrupt quickly. Happily, they're selling me to all and sundry so I don't have to.
I'm inclined to the communistic approach to pay-for-content. Wikipedia got a lot more than $2 from me (more than once). But my ability to pay for stuff goes up and down with the economy and, if anything, my need for some of that same stuff goes up when the economy goes down. I figure it averages out.
Subscription models I generally don't buy into. As I said, when I need stuff most it may be when I can least afford it, and I don't have the patience to fight "retention consultants" to get off the financial hook.
seriously. how could you, with a clear conscience, be against fairness in network access?
I can't understand why people support the republican agenda. they are always (the last 20 or so years) on the wrong side. they are anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant (unless its cheap h1b labor), and anti-choice. and like racial segregation from the 50's, history will show the republicans to be on the wrong side of history, too.
a thorn in our side in progress. this is the part of my country I really hate; the fact that we have idiots keeping us back from making progress the rest of the world already enjoys.
Republicans don't believe in fairness.
They believe that you should pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Whether you were born in a multi-million-dollar mansion or a rat-infested slum.
Unless this effects the Kindle or Nook, how many books could this even be? I wasn't even aware that Adobe HAD an ebook format. Realistically, how many books does this expiring DRM even effect, a few thousand, maybe?
Adobe's ebook DRM is used by OverDrive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverDrive,_Inc. to let more than 27,000 public libraries and schools lend ebooks to citizens and students. They make than 1.8 million different ebooks from over 1000 publishers available to libraries and schools using this scheme.
Adobe's termination of the existing DRM mechanism means that those thousands of schools and libraries will have to buy new ereader hardware and the students and citizens who borrow ebooks from them will have to buy new ereader hardware. So Adobe's termination of the existing DRM mechanism is going to cost American tax payers hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions).
Just as an observation, I was reading a book via Overdrive just now and wanted to search it for something I'd missed.
My Overdrive client has no search function.
Since this is a DRM book locked in a hidden space, I cannot use any other, more capable, program to do the search for me either. I'm limited to strictly what few feeble capabilities Overdrive itself has.
Before you get too comfortable with that assertion, recall that Linux Torvalds wasn't being paid to develop Linux in the beginning nor for long after. Nor were his earliest assistants.
I'm still mostly comfortable with my assertion.:) I am talking about modern software, which is significantly more complex than early Linux. Indeed, it is the complexity and lines of code which makes it day by day harder to make meaningful software without it being a full-time paid commitment.
I'm pretty sure that if software had gained some sort of magical properties in the last 30 years I'd have noticed it.
Yes, the codebase contains more components than it used to - although having smarter and more standardized hardware has reduced the number of unique drivers. But Torvalds is still "Penguin-in-Chief". He just delegates a lot now since there are more components to ride herd on. And now it's his primary job.
The fact that a lot of the components have full-time professional teams working on them is generally an indication that they can see a benefit from having control over an item on their personal agenda and on their own schedule instead of waiting for someone to come along on their own time and in their own way. Which is natural, since the essential systems were worked out 2 decades ago. Since then, we've seen the addition of virtualization support (in large part created by academic, rather than commercial developers), abstractions in block I/O, new network features and filesystems, clustering and other things that are typically of commercial interest.
Along the way, a lot of these items were originally developed by unpaid developers who then leveraged what they had done into careers for themselves. Even Red Hat itself wasn't a major commercial endeavor at first.
Not to say that IBM and Oracle haven't been major contributors, but Linux has many roots and many parts and they each have their own characteristics.
While volunteer contributors still represent a plurality among developers, over 80 percent of code is contributed by people who are paid for their work.
This. I've said it before and will say it again. The open source projects with most bugs and slowest development time are the ones without proper sponsors. That's why I also use a lot of commercial closed-source software myself, but do not have any particular grudge against OSS either. Just pay the developers properly, because complex, properly quality-assured modern software is impossible without that.
Before you get too comfortable with that assertion, recall that Linux Torvalds wasn't being paid to develop Linux in the beginning nor for long after. Nor were his earliest assistants.
It's certainly easier to develop good-quality software if you aren't distracted by the need to earn a living doing something else, but it's not essential.
Would someone knowledgeable about this—someone who can refrain from jumping on one finger-wagging bandwagon or another long enough to compose a sober paragraph—please jump in and sort out whether this is primarily a problem of older hardware not being able to handle newer publications, or of newer hardware becoming unable/unwilling to render older content?
These are totally different things.
This circus of layered tread marks is not shedding much light.
It really depends on 2 things.
1. Whether the device in question is amenable to having alternative DRM code jacked in. In theory, just about all of them are, but for whatever ones aren't, newer books - or re-encryted books - are going to be unreadable.
The re-encrypted part is the nasty part, since for a lot of ebooks, the book's true "home" is on the vendor's server. You may have purged your local copy, the device might have deleted it to save space, or the vendor may even "update" your local copy the way Amazon has been known to do.
2. Whether or not the vendor is committed to retro-fitting ancient devices with the new DRM code. I have an original paperwhite Nook and I still use it. In many ways it's not as nice as the Nook Tablet, but it's still an excellent reader and with a longer battery life. There are already things I've bought that cannot be read on it, however. Chances are that B&N won't be offering DRM upgrades for it, either.
This is strictly a change in DRM we're talking about. Obviously, if an ebook was renderable once upon a time, it should be renderable after the DRM change, since the DRM is a modification to the encoding of the book, not its format or contents. But if you aren't provided with a DRM decoder update, your content becomes essentially trash.
It would be useful if there was a list of retailers that sell these DRM books, so they can go on my boycott list.
There isn't one because it's usually the publisher who mandates it, not the retailer.
Barnes and Noble sells ebooks from many publishers. Some, like HarperCollins-we-want-ebooks-to-wear-out are real jerks. Some, like Baen, have been DRM-free from the get-go.
B&N generally notes on the purchase information when a publisher has requested DRM-free format. So far, however, they've not felt obliged to list whose/what DRM format the other books are in.
Mostly I agree, but I'd add that many public companies also need to concentrate on their dividend - so it isn't quite so black and white.
Dividends are more popular these days than formerly, but not as much, I think as back before about 1980. A lot of companies are focussed more on growth than on dividends.
Not in Dell’s case. Private does not mean personal property. Dell has other owners then Mr. Dell and owes other people fiduciary duty – such as the bond holders. So not frogs, and there is less of a difference between short term and long term profits.
Risk is one thing that Mr. Dell has better control, as in “let’s dump or PC business and strike out for new grounds.” Dell could squeeze a lot of profits out of a declining PC business at low risk. Warren Buffett was able to do so with Berkshire Hathaway – you know – the company that made broadcloth.
And how do you know that the other major investors in Dell aren't frog-lovers?
How much of a market share does Adobe DRM have in the eBook world? I didn't get a clear picture from any of TFA's (yep I read them) as to how prevalent this DRM is.
But yeah, if I had an affected system I would be pissed, and rightly so.
It's a stealth thing. They provide DRM under the covers for a lot of ebooks and e-magazines, in addition to the more obvious lock on PDFs. The common ebook formats have places to plug in DRM, and thank goodness, publishers such as Baen, Tor and O'Reilly don't use them. Anybody can create and inject a DRM scheme into an eBook, but Adobe pretty much owns that market.
Overdrive, the ebook lending service does use their DRM, and their DRM reader. The particular schem that they use not only has the text encrypted, but time-sensitive so that the book "returns" to the lender after a set interval. I don't especially mind this, since library lending isn't supposed to guarantee me a permanent copy, but the only readers available that can handle this format are provided by Adobe. And they don't provide one for the Linux desktop.
Non-DRM'ed ePub-format books, on the other hand, can not only be read on the Linux desktop, there's even a Firefox plugin that can read and manage them.
I buy DRM-infested titles, but that's because the current DRM scheme can be decrypted if the provider goes belly-up or does an Amazon-style "1984" on them. I'm not interested in piracy, but I AM interested in protecting my investment.
I don't but into the "rental" concept of book "purchases". If my bookseller starts using a DRM scheme that does not meet the criteria I just listed, they can expect me to stop buying ebooks.
IE is - so Microsoft alleged in the anti-trust trials - "An Integral Part of Microsoft Windows".
There is absolutely no (technical) reason why this should be, based on the success of competing browsers, but the mere act of close-coupling it with the OS means that there are more ways that exploits to the browser can be converted into exploits for the OS.
And, since it does come bundled directly with Windows, you can depend on people who either aren't technically-savvy enough or are simply too lazy to take the extra effort needed to secure their systems as IE users.
I'm sorry but I don't subscribe to the right to be anonymous in public. If you live in a small town, everybody will know you anyway and I cannot see why it would be a problem to be recognized in larger cities too. I know this is a cliché but if you behave normally and have nothing to hide, why fear being recognized?
A. Because "Innocent people" and "Nothing to hide" are decided by other people, not you. You may discover that you don't like what they decide.
B. Because there are a lot of people who'd prefer not to be singled out for one reason or another. Dodging ex-"friends", Witness Protection Programs, off-duty civil servants, and so forth.
I think/. probably lost closely identifies with Libertarian ideals, with progressive social policy. Personally I can't stand half the libertarians I meet because they are just conservatives that are just a little less stupid than the average neocon troll.
In my neighborhood, "Libertarian" seems to be what people who object to having to pay taxes for the roads they drive their BMWs on call themselves.
I'm a passionate programmer. I got a lot of static because I passionately wanted my code to be as reliable, performant, and secure as possible. Management just wanted me to "Git 'R Dun!"
I have yet to see a major project that required 100% top talent 100% of the time. Which is why I'm always grateful on the rare occasions that I'm given a supply of grunts that I can pass off the grunt work to. It allows me to be more productive at the stuff that I can do that few others can.
But passionate doesn't mean exploitable. I'm passionate about my kitchen and garden, too. I want to get home at a reasonable hour so I can indulge those passions as well. It often happens that inspiration can occur while I'm weeding out the rutabagas that wouldn't if I was parked in a chair drearily staring at cubicle walls after putting in 11 hours in the office, so I figure it's a net win all the way around.
"yet another bit of evidence that markets work better than regulated rent seeking"
I don't agree. You are assuming that all regulation is the same. If however regulation was say, I don't know, made for say consumer protection, and for the citizens rather than bought and paid for by corporations, I think you would see regulation that works for the most part. It just happens that regulation is bent one way or another depending upon which corporate lobby paid for it (or took perfectly good regulation, to amend it to include loopholes for them and their buddies).
Unless you can totally separate the state from the commercial interests their will always be political interference. Having totally independent regulation without corporate bias would enable the markets rather than detract from them. The market becomes skewed when one commercial interest gains leverage via regulation which is exactly what is happening in this story. Then you get several lobbies in a political bidding war, which is exactly what the politician wants to help win his/her next election.
The market also gets skewed when everybody buys Microsoft because EVERYBODY buys Microsoft!
Not to discount the warping effects that regulation can have on a market, but most markets contain positive feedback mechanisms that make them self-destroying, replaced by monopolies, cartels, and other anti-competitive agencies.
FTFS:"...in tune with circadian cycle of the human body. [...] each chemically-supplemented scent aims to induce action appropriate to the time of day"
Having the tax system (or any part of the legal system that every citizen has to deal with) be so complex that one needs (or can benefit from) a consultant is unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals responsible for creating and upholding the laws. The only tax system consistent with ethical practice of law is a simple tax system.
I won't say you're wrong, but given what we've got...
In theory, all the really gnarly stuff only affects people with lots of income or specialized endeavors. Considering the pain and suffering I have to go through every year, I must be in the "lots of income" crowd, since I'm definitely not affected by most of the specialty concerns.
Having a good tax consultant has multiple purposes. You'd think that they help you reduce your taxes, and to a degree, you'd be right.
But if you're in the 1% - or maybe even in the top 10%, there's also other reasons. You can get around a lot of the "taxes are theft" issues by making deductible contributions to concerns that you support, offsetting the taxes otherwise paid to the general coffers and thus "wasting your money" on stuff you oppose. Done artfully, you can pick up some good perks - both tangible and intangible - in the process. You can shift tax liabilities to other people or other times where they are less onerous or more convenient. A good tax advisor can help do legally.
The Greatest Generation was immensely proud that only the Bad Guys spied on their citizens. Communists, Nazis, and their filthy ilk.
All nations with police or intelligence agencies conduct surveillance on some part of their population. The thing that made the Communists, Nazis, and Fascists bad was that it wasn't for ordinary crime but for political control and to destroy the opposition to their one party rule. Both the Communists (in many nations) and the Nazis engaged in mass slaughter of innocent people. The US isn't doing that.
The main reason that the surviving members of that group haven't risen up and championed Snowden is that they cannot really believe that their shining ideal has become so tarnished.
Or maybe they have a better understanding of what genuine oppression looks like, having seen the concentration camps themselves.
Yes, interesting, isn't it? How countries that spy on their populations also like to run special internment facilities where undesirables can be sent without the tedious formality of a trial?
The Greatest Generation was immensely proud that only the Bad Guys spied on their citizens. Communists, Nazis, and their filthy ilk.
The main reason that the surviving members of that group haven't risen up and championed Snowden is that they cannot really believe that their shining ideal has become so tarnished.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone here hate paywalls. But those who do will be much more vocal than those who don't.
A lot of it isn't so much paywalls as it is fear that the Internet will end up sliced and diced with toll booths every other site. Like "net neutrality", that would convert a lot of free association into having to strategise your use based on financial considerations. We've already demonstrated that people self-limit themselves to their own detriment without forcing more limits on them. And, of course, it puts an additional chill on one of the www's greatest strengths: hyperlinking into a truly world-wide web.
Then again, some people are either:
* cheap
* broke
* selfish bastards who think that paying for anything that they absolutely cannot avoid paying for is being robbed
I do not run an ad blocker, and I am fairly tolerant of adverts alongside my news. I will continue reading a site even if the entire sidebar is flashing animated gifs at me.
That is my payment.
I do block flash content, because ads with sound step over the line, and I will stop visiting a site that loads keyword ads in the text of an article, but almost anything else I consider to be a fair condition for free access to content.
Welcome to the club!
It is not really a news site, but I would pay for wikipedia if paywalled. I did voluntary pay a bit, twice. It is in general very useful for me.
Otherwise perhaps occasionaly for an in depth article by a repute dpublisher (even then, max. $2), but not a subscription.
I, too have coughed up cash for Wikipedia. I'd actually pay google, but if they billed me per-search, I'd go bankrupt quickly. Happily, they're selling me to all and sundry so I don't have to.
I'm inclined to the communistic approach to pay-for-content. Wikipedia got a lot more than $2 from me (more than once). But my ability to pay for stuff goes up and down with the economy and, if anything, my need for some of that same stuff goes up when the economy goes down. I figure it averages out.
Subscription models I generally don't buy into. As I said, when I need stuff most it may be when I can least afford it, and I don't have the patience to fight "retention consultants" to get off the financial hook.
Likewise I don't care for micro-transactions.
republicans. is there anything you DON'T fuck up?
seriously. how could you, with a clear conscience, be against fairness in network access?
I can't understand why people support the republican agenda. they are always (the last 20 or so years) on the wrong side. they are anti-women, anti-gay, anti-immigrant (unless its cheap h1b labor), and anti-choice. and like racial segregation from the 50's, history will show the republicans to be on the wrong side of history, too.
a thorn in our side in progress. this is the part of my country I really hate; the fact that we have idiots keeping us back from making progress the rest of the world already enjoys.
Republicans don't believe in fairness.
They believe that you should pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Whether you were born in a multi-million-dollar mansion or a rat-infested slum.
Unless this effects the Kindle or Nook, how many books could this even be? I wasn't even aware that Adobe HAD an ebook format. Realistically, how many books does this expiring DRM even effect, a few thousand, maybe?
Adobe's ebook DRM is used by OverDrive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverDrive,_Inc. to let more than 27,000 public libraries and schools lend ebooks to citizens and students. They make than 1.8 million different ebooks from over 1000 publishers available to libraries and schools using this scheme.
Adobe's termination of the existing DRM mechanism means that those thousands of schools and libraries will have to buy new ereader hardware and the students and citizens who borrow ebooks from them will have to buy new ereader hardware. So Adobe's termination of the existing DRM mechanism is going to cost American tax payers hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not millions).
Just as an observation, I was reading a book via Overdrive just now and wanted to search it for something I'd missed.
My Overdrive client has no search function.
Since this is a DRM book locked in a hidden space, I cannot use any other, more capable, program to do the search for me either. I'm limited to strictly what few feeble capabilities Overdrive itself has.
Before you get too comfortable with that assertion, recall that Linux Torvalds wasn't being paid to develop Linux in the beginning nor for long after. Nor were his earliest assistants.
I'm still mostly comfortable with my assertion. :) I am talking about modern software, which is significantly more complex than early Linux. Indeed, it is the complexity and lines of code which makes it day by day harder to make meaningful software without it being a full-time paid commitment.
I'm pretty sure that if software had gained some sort of magical properties in the last 30 years I'd have noticed it.
Yes, the codebase contains more components than it used to - although having smarter and more standardized hardware has reduced the number of unique drivers. But Torvalds is still "Penguin-in-Chief". He just delegates a lot now since there are more components to ride herd on. And now it's his primary job.
The fact that a lot of the components have full-time professional teams working on them is generally an indication that they can see a benefit from having control over an item on their personal agenda and on their own schedule instead of waiting for someone to come along on their own time and in their own way. Which is natural, since the essential systems were worked out 2 decades ago. Since then, we've seen the addition of virtualization support (in large part created by academic, rather than commercial developers), abstractions in block I/O, new network features and filesystems, clustering and other things that are typically of commercial interest.
Along the way, a lot of these items were originally developed by unpaid developers who then leveraged what they had done into careers for themselves. Even Red Hat itself wasn't a major commercial endeavor at first.
Not to say that IBM and Oracle haven't been major contributors, but Linux has many roots and many parts and they each have their own characteristics.
While volunteer contributors still represent a plurality among developers, over 80 percent of code is contributed by people who are paid for their work.
This. I've said it before and will say it again. The open source projects with most bugs and slowest development time are the ones without proper sponsors. That's why I also use a lot of commercial closed-source software myself, but do not have any particular grudge against OSS either. Just pay the developers properly, because complex, properly quality-assured modern software is impossible without that.
Before you get too comfortable with that assertion, recall that Linux Torvalds wasn't being paid to develop Linux in the beginning nor for long after. Nor were his earliest assistants.
It's certainly easier to develop good-quality software if you aren't distracted by the need to earn a living doing something else, but it's not essential.
Would someone knowledgeable about this—someone who can refrain from jumping on one finger-wagging bandwagon or another long enough to compose a sober paragraph—please jump in and sort out whether this is primarily a problem of older hardware not being able to handle newer publications, or of newer hardware becoming unable/unwilling to render older content?
These are totally different things.
This circus of layered tread marks is not shedding much light.
It really depends on 2 things.
1. Whether the device in question is amenable to having alternative DRM code jacked in. In theory, just about all of them are, but for whatever ones aren't, newer books - or re-encryted books - are going to be unreadable.
The re-encrypted part is the nasty part, since for a lot of ebooks, the book's true "home" is on the vendor's server. You may have purged your local copy, the device might have deleted it to save space, or the vendor may even "update" your local copy the way Amazon has been known to do.
2. Whether or not the vendor is committed to retro-fitting ancient devices with the new DRM code. I have an original paperwhite Nook and I still use it. In many ways it's not as nice as the Nook Tablet, but it's still an excellent reader and with a longer battery life. There are already things I've bought that cannot be read on it, however. Chances are that B&N won't be offering DRM upgrades for it, either.
This is strictly a change in DRM we're talking about. Obviously, if an ebook was renderable once upon a time, it should be renderable after the DRM change, since the DRM is a modification to the encoding of the book, not its format or contents. But if you aren't provided with a DRM decoder update, your content becomes essentially trash.
It would be useful if there was a list of retailers that sell these DRM books, so they can go on my boycott list.
There isn't one because it's usually the publisher who mandates it, not the retailer.
Barnes and Noble sells ebooks from many publishers. Some, like HarperCollins-we-want-ebooks-to-wear-out are real jerks. Some, like Baen, have been DRM-free from the get-go.
B&N generally notes on the purchase information when a publisher has requested DRM-free format. So far, however, they've not felt obliged to list whose/what DRM format the other books are in.
Our employees are our greatest assets.
And we think we'll liquidate some assets today.
Mostly I agree, but I'd add that many public companies also need to concentrate on their dividend - so it isn't quite so black and white.
Dividends are more popular these days than formerly, but not as much, I think as back before about 1980. A lot of companies are focussed more on growth than on dividends.
Not in Dell’s case. Private does not mean personal property. Dell has other owners then Mr. Dell and owes other people fiduciary duty – such as the bond holders. So not frogs, and there is less of a difference between short term and long term profits.
Risk is one thing that Mr. Dell has better control, as in “let’s dump or PC business and strike out for new grounds.” Dell could squeeze a lot of profits out of a declining PC business at low risk. Warren Buffett was able to do so with Berkshire Hathaway – you know – the company that made broadcloth.
And how do you know that the other major investors in Dell aren't frog-lovers?
How much of a market share does Adobe DRM have in the eBook world? I didn't get a clear picture from any of TFA's (yep I read them) as to how prevalent this DRM is.
But yeah, if I had an affected system I would be pissed, and rightly so.
It's a stealth thing. They provide DRM under the covers for a lot of ebooks and e-magazines, in addition to the more obvious lock on PDFs. The common ebook formats have places to plug in DRM, and thank goodness, publishers such as Baen, Tor and O'Reilly don't use them. Anybody can create and inject a DRM scheme into an eBook, but Adobe pretty much owns that market.
Overdrive, the ebook lending service does use their DRM, and their DRM reader. The particular schem that they use not only has the text encrypted, but time-sensitive so that the book "returns" to the lender after a set interval. I don't especially mind this, since library lending isn't supposed to guarantee me a permanent copy, but the only readers available that can handle this format are provided by Adobe. And they don't provide one for the Linux desktop.
Non-DRM'ed ePub-format books, on the other hand, can not only be read on the Linux desktop, there's even a Firefox plugin that can read and manage them.
I buy DRM-infested titles, but that's because the current DRM scheme can be decrypted if the provider goes belly-up or does an Amazon-style "1984" on them. I'm not interested in piracy, but I AM interested in protecting my investment.
I don't but into the "rental" concept of book "purchases". If my bookseller starts using a DRM scheme that does not meet the criteria I just listed, they can expect me to stop buying ebooks.
IE is - so Microsoft alleged in the anti-trust trials - "An Integral Part of Microsoft Windows".
There is absolutely no (technical) reason why this should be, based on the success of competing browsers, but the mere act of close-coupling it with the OS means that there are more ways that exploits to the browser can be converted into exploits for the OS.
And, since it does come bundled directly with Windows, you can depend on people who either aren't technically-savvy enough or are simply too lazy to take the extra effort needed to secure their systems as IE users.
So in many ways, IE is the ideal target.
I'm sorry but I don't subscribe to the right to be anonymous in public. If you live in a small town, everybody will know you anyway and I cannot see why it would be a problem to be recognized in larger cities too. I know this is a cliché but if you behave normally and have nothing to hide, why fear being recognized?
A. Because "Innocent people" and "Nothing to hide" are decided by other people, not you. You may discover that you don't like what they decide.
B. Because there are a lot of people who'd prefer not to be singled out for one reason or another. Dodging ex-"friends", Witness Protection Programs, off-duty civil servants, and so forth.
I think /. probably lost closely identifies with Libertarian ideals, with progressive social policy. Personally I can't stand half the libertarians I meet because they are just conservatives that are just a little less stupid than the average neocon troll.
In my neighborhood, "Libertarian" seems to be what people who object to having to pay taxes for the roads they drive their BMWs on call themselves.
I'm a passionate programmer. I got a lot of static because I passionately wanted my code to be as reliable, performant, and secure as possible. Management just wanted me to "Git 'R Dun!"
I have yet to see a major project that required 100% top talent 100% of the time. Which is why I'm always grateful on the rare occasions that I'm given a supply of grunts that I can pass off the grunt work to. It allows me to be more productive at the stuff that I can do that few others can.
But passionate doesn't mean exploitable. I'm passionate about my kitchen and garden, too. I want to get home at a reasonable hour so I can indulge those passions as well. It often happens that inspiration can occur while I'm weeding out the rutabagas that wouldn't if I was parked in a chair drearily staring at cubicle walls after putting in 11 hours in the office, so I figure it's a net win all the way around.
"yet another bit of evidence that markets work better than regulated rent seeking"
I don't agree. You are assuming that all regulation is the same. If however regulation was say, I don't know, made for say consumer protection, and for the citizens rather than bought and paid for by corporations, I think you would see regulation that works for the most part. It just happens that regulation is bent one way or another depending upon which corporate lobby paid for it (or took perfectly good regulation, to amend it to include loopholes for them and their buddies).
Unless you can totally separate the state from the commercial interests their will always be political interference. Having totally independent regulation without corporate bias would enable the markets rather than detract from them. The market becomes skewed when one commercial interest gains leverage via regulation which is exactly what is happening in this story. Then you get several lobbies in a political bidding war, which is exactly what the politician wants to help win his/her next election.
The market also gets skewed when everybody buys Microsoft because EVERYBODY buys Microsoft!
Not to discount the warping effects that regulation can have on a market, but most markets contain positive feedback mechanisms that make them self-destroying, replaced by monopolies, cartels, and other anti-competitive agencies.
FTFS:"...in tune with circadian cycle of the human body. [...] each chemically-supplemented scent aims to induce action appropriate to the time of day"
Jack Vance?
Somewhere out beyond the Gaean Reach...
Having the tax system (or any part of the legal system that every citizen has to deal with) be so complex that one needs (or can benefit from) a consultant is unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals responsible for creating and upholding the laws. The only tax system consistent with ethical practice of law is a simple tax system.
I won't say you're wrong, but given what we've got...
In theory, all the really gnarly stuff only affects people with lots of income or specialized endeavors. Considering the pain and suffering I have to go through every year, I must be in the "lots of income" crowd, since I'm definitely not affected by most of the specialty concerns.
Having a good tax consultant has multiple purposes. You'd think that they help you reduce your taxes, and to a degree, you'd be right.
But if you're in the 1% - or maybe even in the top 10%, there's also other reasons. You can get around a lot of the "taxes are theft" issues by making deductible contributions to concerns that you support, offsetting the taxes otherwise paid to the general coffers and thus "wasting your money" on stuff you oppose. Done artfully, you can pick up some good perks - both tangible and intangible - in the process. You can shift tax liabilities to other people or other times where they are less onerous or more convenient. A good tax advisor can help do legally.
The Greatest Generation was immensely proud that only the Bad Guys spied on their citizens. Communists, Nazis, and their filthy ilk.
All nations with police or intelligence agencies conduct surveillance on some part of their population. The thing that made the Communists, Nazis, and Fascists bad was that it wasn't for ordinary crime but for political control and to destroy the opposition to their one party rule. Both the Communists (in many nations) and the Nazis engaged in mass slaughter of innocent people. The US isn't doing that.
The main reason that the surviving members of that group haven't risen up and championed Snowden is that they cannot really believe that their shining ideal has become so tarnished.
Or maybe they have a better understanding of what genuine oppression looks like, having seen the concentration camps themselves.
Yes, interesting, isn't it? How countries that spy on their populations also like to run special internment facilities where undesirables can be sent without the tedious formality of a trial?
We are Good.
We are Pure.
We are Holy.
They are Evil.
They are Satan.
They are LIARS!
Yeah, I hate these binary people, the truth is that the world is ternary.
Simple viewpoints for simple people.
Reality has shades of gray, colors, musical notes, smells and temperature ranges, just barely getting started.
Unfortunately, that's just too much for most people, it seems. So they invent a shadow projection of it all and live in the shadows.
The Greatest Generation was immensely proud that only the Bad Guys spied on their citizens. Communists, Nazis, and their filthy ilk.
The main reason that the surviving members of that group haven't risen up and championed Snowden is that they cannot really believe that their shining ideal has become so tarnished.