Did you ever stop to consider, even for a moment, that the reason Aaron Swartz was going to continue this pattern of behavior might just possibly be that he was right?
He was right on open access. But his means for fighting for it were dumb.
Of course, the prosecution was motivated by his views on copyright, just like the prosecution of a pot grower is motivated by their views on growing pot. What people still don't seem to get is that the DOJ position represents the majority view of the elected representatives, both on copyright and on computer fraud.
And those who believe that science cannot do that can sit over there and die from pneumonia when the bloodletting doesn't work.
Science can make excellent predictions about the future. Your problem is that you simply don't understand science and present pseudo-scientific speculation and extrapolation as scientific truth.
This is, of course, assuming that quantum theory
Quantum mechanics is based on repeatable and falsifiable experiments. The formulas of quantum theory follow from simple first principles and can be derived on a sheet of paper, and you can solve them numerically on your PC using one of hundreds of numerical packages. I know quantum mechanics works because, in my college physics program, I did most of the key experiments myself, derived the formulas, and solved them numerically.
In contrast, climate predictions are based to a large extent on experimentally unverifiable assumptions, one-shot observations, a hodge-podge of heuristic formulas, and large one-off numerical packages. Anybody who makes analogies between quantum mechanics and climate predictions really has to be totally ignorant of both.
Brand perception matters a great deal, both for profits and for stock prices. Apple's brand perception has suffered significantly already. "Appleites" are going to care if they are seen as losers for using expensive and limited products. And Grandma is going to hear about MSFT lawsuits from her grandson who picks out her next compute device.
Microsoft in particular is in deep trouble; with Windows 8, they have caved in to the Android/iPad user interface style, but Windows 8 delivers a lousy user experience both to traditional Windows users and tablet users.
And so what? Your ability to spend less than $1,000 a month now may have been predicated on some entirely exotic arrangements you were able to make with other people out of sheer luck/privilege.
That's the typical reaction from progressives: anybody who actually makes ends meet according to you is privileged, and should be obligated to support those who are incapable of doing so. No, I'm not privileged. But apparently you are so privileged and pampered that you think that spending $1000/month amounts to poverty.
You were perhaps not understanding my larger point regarding education. Those who live in poverty simply do not get a good education
Everybody gets a free high school education, and if you have even a minimal aptitude, you can attend college. In addition, the Internet provides a vast library and a huge number of online courses. How is anybody denied the ability to get a good education?
food insecurity makes learning harder
Almost anybody with low income has SNAP and a variety of additional state programs available to them.
You again have failed to do your work here in trying to explain how your situation represents a series of choices that are universally available to everyone.
No, it is you who has failed to show that there is a problem at all, or that the problem you postulate exists can be fixed by throwing more money and government regulation at it. We have been doing that for decades, and the problems have (according to progressives themselves) been getting worse. More and more Americans are dependent on the Federal Government.
It's not that people are lazy; it's that they're too busy trying to solve problems the rest of society doesn't ever deal with. This is why they seem to be so un-motivated or uninvolved, because they're living in a very different,
People aren't lazy, they are rational. They look at their available options and see two things: first, they are pretty much provided for no matter what choices they make (so they don't worry about the choices), and second, that if they actually invest a lot of effort in trying to improve their lot, they end up not much better than if they hadn't bothered. The way to fix that is to reduce government services and government mandates, because only through forcing people to take responsibility for their own lives (and live with the consequences) will they do so.
Learned helplessness is exactly the right way to describe it. And you want to increase that learned helplessness by providing even more crutches to people. And it is also evident why you want to do that: you yourself are suffering from "learned helplessness": you lack even minimal financial skills yourself, as your ludicrous financial analyses show.
I suggest you give the Android tablet away and get yourself an iPad. Why? A $89 Android tablet is low-end, and unless you bought it knowing its limitations, it is never going to satisfy you and you'll just keep whining about how lousy Android is. And given your silly dig at "Android security nightmare", it is pretty clear that you are prejudiced anyway. Really, just do yourself and the rest of us a favor and don't use Android.
Everything will be cross-licensed, all the stupid calendar and scrolling and FAT patents, all of it will go into the pool. The lawsuits are just the negotiation phase. Eventually everyone will pay.
The consequence of that will be to create a cozy cartel of big corporations and make it nearly impossible for startups and innovators to enter the market. You may be naive enough to think that that is a desirable outcome, but fortunately there are smarter people than you who realize that that would be disastrous for the high tech industry.
yep, no doubt, but if we focus on that instead of the conditions that have ALLOWED them to behave shitty all we will be doing is playing whack a mole until the end of time
Reforming the patent system would certainly be a good thing to do. But criticizing companies over patent trolling is useful: companies like Microsoft and Apple live and die by their brand names. If these companies are starting to be perceived widely as non-innovative patent trolls, it will hurt their brands, and hence their sales, big time, and that will cause both them and other companies to tread more carefully in the future.
First you need to give some examples of people who can survive admirably on low wages with dignity. You can't just insinuate that people are able to live like that well without even the slightest shred of proof that is, in fact, the case.
I spend less than $1000/month, crushing poverty according to people like you. The rest I save.
LOL, your critical mistake is assuming these people have sufficient starting capital to make investments. Not all investments are created equal and you yourself should know that access to top funds with high returns is only available to the major players who have a considerable pot to invest.
I gave you market average returns; anybody can realize those returns. It requires neither "starting capital" nor "top funds" nor any experience. It does require foregoing some consumption every month and having a basic understanding of personal finance.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of your drivel. You really need to get yourself a basic financial education. But you demonstrated again what the problem is we're having in this country: many people have become so helpless that they would starve if someone didn't show them where their mouth is. People need to worry about retirement, health care, housing, savings, etc. themselves; there simply is no workable alternative. If you tell people "oh, don't worry about ending up on the street, government programs will take care of you no matter what", more and more people will fall into poverty and experience ill health.
Assuming you CAN save 10-20% per month. Tell me, how are wal-mart workers trying to support a family on minimum wage going to do that?
The same way someone making 10-20% less supports their family.
Really? I can save $40,000 to cover an emergency hospitalization because a drunk driver just performed a hit and run on me?
What does auto insurance have to do with health care and retirement benefits? Uninsured driver insurance is something you can choose to buy if you choose to drive. But saving $40000 is fairly easy: invest about $250/month, and after 10 years, you'll have about that much money.
LMAO! Here's an example (From a tax calculator [paycheckcity.com]) of what your average 40 hour minimum wage job paycheck is going to look like after withholding. Now if you add up all the payroll taxes and multiply by 26 to get your yearly payroll tax cost? That's $1,581.06
Although your numbers are ludicrously wrong, let's just stick with that example. Average annualized return on stocks is about 9.5%. Let's use 8% to account for inflation. Investing $125/month for 45 years, he would have about $580000 at retirement age in current dollars, investing just $40/month (social security only), he'd have about $185000. Given current life expectancies, that means even a minimum wage worker only breaks about even on social security compared to the situation where he invested it himself.
Where do you think the money comes from? The tooth fairy? How is the federal government supposed to be able to give you a better return on your monthly contributions than the market? All they can do is borrow (meaning, future generations will have to pay it back) or invest in the market.
More cost-effective compared to what? Letting poor people slowly starve to death on the streets until their rotting corpses choke our gutters? Oh certainly not! It's much cheaper to let the masses deal with the huge variety of public health and sanitation problems caused by creating a massive underclass who cannot even afford to eat or get treated for diseases and to refuse to pay to even haul the bodies off somewhere they don't regularly expose massive numbers of people to any number of contagious diseases! No, far cheaper to force everyone to deal with every problem ON THEIR OWN! and if they die? It was all THEIR FAULT for being stupid, the BEGGARS!
Neither the retirement programs nor medical insurance have anything to with "public health and sanitation", or helping the indigent or extremely poor. You're engaging in the typical progressive lies, mixing up reasonable programs related to public health and welfare with individual retirement and health care.
You sound like a kid who doesn't even know what the hell he's whining about. You have no numbers, no sources and I just managed to without even having to dig that deep refute about everything you just had to say on the matter.
No, all you did was demonstrate your complete financial illiteracy. It's no wonder that people like you have trouble making ends meet and retiring on their own. You still haven't made a compelling argument why people like me should pay for your stupidity and your unwillingness to learn basic economics, and let's face it, these discussions are not about those fictitious "poor people in the street", they are about you, your lack of retirement savings, and your angst.
I don't think you know what 'statistically' means. A good prediction is, by the definition of 'good prediction', statistically likely to tell you things about stuff you do not know. The entire premise of prediction is that they are statistical representations of things, and 'good' ones are accurate.
I'm sorry, but you seem to simply not understand. You're saying that IPCC predictions so far have been good, implying that these people have shown that they can predict the climate well. I'm telling you: the accuracy of their current predictions tells you nothing about the accuracy of their future predictions.
We are actually living in a world with problems. We now have droughts and massive hurricanes and weather problems that, statistically speaking, are crazy and due to climate change.
That's a blatant lie, and there is no point in trying to have a scientific discussion with a liar.
Meanwhile, yes, Liberals want a safety net, but it's harder to say that these fears are entirely irrational.
But these fears are entirely irrational.
In fact nowadays everyone's getting very good at messaging to show how easy it can be for just about anyone to fall through the cracks; all it takes these days is often a medical emergency.
Nonsense. If you save 10-20% of your income every month, you quickly have more than enough of a safety net to cover just about every emergency, medical or otherwise, and everybody can save 10-20%. If you are one step away from financial disaster, you only have yourself to blame.
Furthermore saving 10-20% would be even easier if government would force you to waste your money on costly and overpriced insurance programs: unemployment insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, etc. Those programs are a gigantic rip-off; people are forced to pay into them not because they are "cost effective", but because most people are too stupid to save on their own. But as a result of the stupidity of some, we all end up much worse off.
Interestingly enough, you didn't once consider concern for the plight of others in your post, but managed to make it all about the trust in your own abilities. Is it not possible that some may feel perfectly safe in their own position, but believe even the bum down the street has a right to medical care if he gets sick?
Look at Cuba. They pay a few hundred dollars a year a person and have better health outcomes than we do in the US. I think everybody should have that kind of healthcare available for free.
But Obama's health care plan basically gives everybody 2000% that kind of coverage, a complete waste.
It has nothing to do with fear, it is just practicality.
It has everything to do with fear. I don't want expensive health care, not now, not ever. Why? Because I know it's ineffective. But you have some irrational (and demonstrably false) belief in the effectiveness of expensive medical interventions, and you fear dying. So you want expensive coverage for yourself and everybody else. That is why our medical costs are spiraling out of control.
Sometimes social programs are just the cheapest way to solve a given problem
Social programs are useful to help people experiencing extreme, temporary hardship. Beyond that, I have yet to see a case where they are "the cheapest way" of solving any social problem. In fact, usually, they cause more problems than they solve.
In the US, the labels are wrong and everything is forced into a false dichotomy. In fact, there are a number of identifiable groups of voters: Christian conservatives, nationalists/fascists, progressives/socialists, liberals/libertarians, and a few smaller ones like environmentalists. A different way of looking at it is the four combinations of fiscal/social conservatives/liberals.
Fiscal liberals and social conservatives are both motivated by fear, the former by fear of economic disaster, and the latter by fear of social change. The only group reasonably free of fear is those who are fiscal conservatives and social liberals.
"Liberals" (in the modern US sense of progressives / left wing) are enormously fearful and risk averse: they want governmental protection against unemployment, against medical expenses, against global warming, against guns, and lots of other things. Granted, the nature of these fears are seemingly more rational and plausible than those of conservatives (who seem to fear anything from the wrath of God to being tempted into homosexuality by gay marriage), but they are still driven by fear.
The only group who isn't driven by fear is libertarians, people who actually have trust in their ability to make a living somehow and survive in an uncertain and changing world, independent of God or government help. Libertarians are often linked with "conservatives", but they are more accurately described as classical liberals.
The thing about crony capitalism is that it's capitalism.
No, it is not. The term "crony capitalism" is merely a propagandistic attempt by progressives to blame capitalism and free markets for what are essentially problems with government. The technical term "rent seeking". Left and right wing governments are prone to it.
Ultra right wingers who think that our system is not capitalist enough should have the intellectual honesty to point out to people what they really want, namely a return to the days
Why don't you have the "intellectual honesty" to refrain from telling other people what they really want or what their political beliefs are?
The IPCC's predictions have been remarkable accurate.
The IPCC collects other people's predictions, and it contains so many that it would be amazing if some of them weren't "remarkably accurate". But mathematically and statistically, good prediction over the exponential part of a sigmoidal growth curve tells you nothing about the future. In addition, none of those predictions so far involve the mechanisms that are actually supposed to cause problems, namely tipping points and positive feedback.
But the biggest problem with IPCC and AGW activists is the actions they propose. Personally, I actually think bringing carbon emissions under control is important, but I also believe that the best way of doing that is by doing nothing. The policies proposed by the IPCC and progressives make the problem worse by hindering economic development, prolonging poverty, and interfering with the development of low-emission energy technologies.
You can lie in many other ways, also.
Well, you are certainly lying with statistics (or, more likely, repeat other people's lies out of ignorance).
So if it's not the prosecutor, which part of the system do you think is broken? Are you saying it should be legal (or merely a misdemeanor) for people to walk onto someone's private property, connect to their network, and commit copyright violations using their for-pay services?
Slashdot Mirror
He was right on open access. But his means for fighting for it were dumb.
Of course, the prosecution was motivated by his views on copyright, just like the prosecution of a pot grower is motivated by their views on growing pot. What people still don't seem to get is that the DOJ position represents the majority view of the elected representatives, both on copyright and on computer fraud.
Pretty much all of that works fine on ChromeOS, and a lot better than Apple's imitation-MS-Office-apps.
Naming some really cold moons of a planetoid after a widely-known fictional hot inhabited planet seems like a recipe for confusion.
Science can make excellent predictions about the future. Your problem is that you simply don't understand science and present pseudo-scientific speculation and extrapolation as scientific truth.
Quantum mechanics is based on repeatable and falsifiable experiments. The formulas of quantum theory follow from simple first principles and can be derived on a sheet of paper, and you can solve them numerically on your PC using one of hundreds of numerical packages. I know quantum mechanics works because, in my college physics program, I did most of the key experiments myself, derived the formulas, and solved them numerically.
In contrast, climate predictions are based to a large extent on experimentally unverifiable assumptions, one-shot observations, a hodge-podge of heuristic formulas, and large one-off numerical packages. Anybody who makes analogies between quantum mechanics and climate predictions really has to be totally ignorant of both.
Brand perception matters a great deal, both for profits and for stock prices. Apple's brand perception has suffered significantly already. "Appleites" are going to care if they are seen as losers for using expensive and limited products. And Grandma is going to hear about MSFT lawsuits from her grandson who picks out her next compute device.
Microsoft in particular is in deep trouble; with Windows 8, they have caved in to the Android/iPad user interface style, but Windows 8 delivers a lousy user experience both to traditional Windows users and tablet users.
I think one should frame that statement. It pretty much sums up the idiocy and scientific illiteracy of AGW activists.
That's the typical reaction from progressives: anybody who actually makes ends meet according to you is privileged, and should be obligated to support those who are incapable of doing so. No, I'm not privileged. But apparently you are so privileged and pampered that you think that spending $1000/month amounts to poverty.
Everybody gets a free high school education, and if you have even a minimal aptitude, you can attend college. In addition, the Internet provides a vast library and a huge number of online courses. How is anybody denied the ability to get a good education?
Almost anybody with low income has SNAP and a variety of additional state programs available to them.
No, it is you who has failed to show that there is a problem at all, or that the problem you postulate exists can be fixed by throwing more money and government regulation at it. We have been doing that for decades, and the problems have (according to progressives themselves) been getting worse. More and more Americans are dependent on the Federal Government.
People aren't lazy, they are rational. They look at their available options and see two things: first, they are pretty much provided for no matter what choices they make (so they don't worry about the choices), and second, that if they actually invest a lot of effort in trying to improve their lot, they end up not much better than if they hadn't bothered. The way to fix that is to reduce government services and government mandates, because only through forcing people to take responsibility for their own lives (and live with the consequences) will they do so.
Learned helplessness is exactly the right way to describe it. And you want to increase that learned helplessness by providing even more crutches to people. And it is also evident why you want to do that: you yourself are suffering from "learned helplessness": you lack even minimal financial skills yourself, as your ludicrous financial analyses show.
I suggest you give the Android tablet away and get yourself an iPad. Why? A $89 Android tablet is low-end, and unless you bought it knowing its limitations, it is never going to satisfy you and you'll just keep whining about how lousy Android is. And given your silly dig at "Android security nightmare", it is pretty clear that you are prejudiced anyway. Really, just do yourself and the rest of us a favor and don't use Android.
The consequence of that will be to create a cozy cartel of big corporations and make it nearly impossible for startups and innovators to enter the market. You may be naive enough to think that that is a desirable outcome, but fortunately there are smarter people than you who realize that that would be disastrous for the high tech industry.
Reforming the patent system would certainly be a good thing to do. But criticizing companies over patent trolling is useful: companies like Microsoft and Apple live and die by their brand names. If these companies are starting to be perceived widely as non-innovative patent trolls, it will hurt their brands, and hence their sales, big time, and that will cause both them and other companies to tread more carefully in the future.
I spend less than $1000/month, crushing poverty according to people like you. The rest I save.
I gave you market average returns; anybody can realize those returns. It requires neither "starting capital" nor "top funds" nor any experience. It does require foregoing some consumption every month and having a basic understanding of personal finance.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of your drivel. You really need to get yourself a basic financial education. But you demonstrated again what the problem is we're having in this country: many people have become so helpless that they would starve if someone didn't show them where their mouth is. People need to worry about retirement, health care, housing, savings, etc. themselves; there simply is no workable alternative. If you tell people "oh, don't worry about ending up on the street, government programs will take care of you no matter what", more and more people will fall into poverty and experience ill health.
The same way someone making 10-20% less supports their family.
What does auto insurance have to do with health care and retirement benefits? Uninsured driver insurance is something you can choose to buy if you choose to drive. But saving $40000 is fairly easy: invest about $250/month, and after 10 years, you'll have about that much money.
Although your numbers are ludicrously wrong, let's just stick with that example. Average annualized return on stocks is about 9.5%. Let's use 8% to account for inflation. Investing $125/month for 45 years, he would have about $580000 at retirement age in current dollars, investing just $40/month (social security only), he'd have about $185000. Given current life expectancies, that means even a minimum wage worker only breaks about even on social security compared to the situation where he invested it himself.
Where do you think the money comes from? The tooth fairy? How is the federal government supposed to be able to give you a better return on your monthly contributions than the market? All they can do is borrow (meaning, future generations will have to pay it back) or invest in the market.
Neither the retirement programs nor medical insurance have anything to with "public health and sanitation", or helping the indigent or extremely poor. You're engaging in the typical progressive lies, mixing up reasonable programs related to public health and welfare with individual retirement and health care.
No, all you did was demonstrate your complete financial illiteracy. It's no wonder that people like you have trouble making ends meet and retiring on their own. You still haven't made a compelling argument why people like me should pay for your stupidity and your unwillingness to learn basic economics, and let's face it, these discussions are not about those fictitious "poor people in the street", they are about you, your lack of retirement savings, and your angst.
I note you still exhaust yourself in ad hominems and content-less drivel. That's pretty typical of AGW activists, I suppose.
I'm sorry, but you seem to simply not understand. You're saying that IPCC predictions so far have been good, implying that these people have shown that they can predict the climate well. I'm telling you: the accuracy of their current predictions tells you nothing about the accuracy of their future predictions.
That's a blatant lie, and there is no point in trying to have a scientific discussion with a liar.
But these fears are entirely irrational.
Nonsense. If you save 10-20% of your income every month, you quickly have more than enough of a safety net to cover just about every emergency, medical or otherwise, and everybody can save 10-20%. If you are one step away from financial disaster, you only have yourself to blame.
Furthermore saving 10-20% would be even easier if government would force you to waste your money on costly and overpriced insurance programs: unemployment insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, etc. Those programs are a gigantic rip-off; people are forced to pay into them not because they are "cost effective", but because most people are too stupid to save on their own. But as a result of the stupidity of some, we all end up much worse off.
Look at Cuba. They pay a few hundred dollars a year a person and have better health outcomes than we do in the US. I think everybody should have that kind of healthcare available for free.
But Obama's health care plan basically gives everybody 2000% that kind of coverage, a complete waste.
It has everything to do with fear. I don't want expensive health care, not now, not ever. Why? Because I know it's ineffective. But you have some irrational (and demonstrably false) belief in the effectiveness of expensive medical interventions, and you fear dying. So you want expensive coverage for yourself and everybody else. That is why our medical costs are spiraling out of control.
Social programs are useful to help people experiencing extreme, temporary hardship. Beyond that, I have yet to see a case where they are "the cheapest way" of solving any social problem. In fact, usually, they cause more problems than they solve.
In the US, the labels are wrong and everything is forced into a false dichotomy. In fact, there are a number of identifiable groups of voters: Christian conservatives, nationalists/fascists, progressives/socialists, liberals/libertarians, and a few smaller ones like environmentalists. A different way of looking at it is the four combinations of fiscal/social conservatives/liberals.
Fiscal liberals and social conservatives are both motivated by fear, the former by fear of economic disaster, and the latter by fear of social change. The only group reasonably free of fear is those who are fiscal conservatives and social liberals.
"Liberals" (in the modern US sense of progressives / left wing) are enormously fearful and risk averse: they want governmental protection against unemployment, against medical expenses, against global warming, against guns, and lots of other things. Granted, the nature of these fears are seemingly more rational and plausible than those of conservatives (who seem to fear anything from the wrath of God to being tempted into homosexuality by gay marriage), but they are still driven by fear.
The only group who isn't driven by fear is libertarians, people who actually have trust in their ability to make a living somehow and survive in an uncertain and changing world, independent of God or government help. Libertarians are often linked with "conservatives", but they are more accurately described as classical liberals.
No, it is not. The term "crony capitalism" is merely a propagandistic attempt by progressives to blame capitalism and free markets for what are essentially problems with government. The technical term "rent seeking". Left and right wing governments are prone to it.
Why don't you have the "intellectual honesty" to refrain from telling other people what they really want or what their political beliefs are?
Instead of asking me to support my claim, you restated it deliberately incorrectly. Another common strategy for dishonest AGW activists.
If you want to have a reasonable, rational debate, start behaving acceptably.
The IPCC collects other people's predictions, and it contains so many that it would be amazing if some of them weren't "remarkably accurate". But mathematically and statistically, good prediction over the exponential part of a sigmoidal growth curve tells you nothing about the future. In addition, none of those predictions so far involve the mechanisms that are actually supposed to cause problems, namely tipping points and positive feedback.
But the biggest problem with IPCC and AGW activists is the actions they propose. Personally, I actually think bringing carbon emissions under control is important, but I also believe that the best way of doing that is by doing nothing. The policies proposed by the IPCC and progressives make the problem worse by hindering economic development, prolonging poverty, and interfering with the development of low-emission energy technologies.
Well, you are certainly lying with statistics (or, more likely, repeat other people's lies out of ignorance).
So if it's not the prosecutor, which part of the system do you think is broken? Are you saying it should be legal (or merely a misdemeanor) for people to walk onto someone's private property, connect to their network, and commit copyright violations using their for-pay services?
I'm sure you "always say that", and it tells us just what kind of rotten person you are.