This is precisely WHY I went from being a conservative Republican to a "liberal" Democrat. For decades now, I've seen us (that being America) become more and more dependent on sources of energy that tend to come either from declared enemies, or from states where the populations hates us and the only reason they are not on the enemies list is the dictator/king at the top.
But I digress... making ourselves more vulnerable was patriotic and advocating renewables and thriftiness as a short term measure was marxist.
Both have had skyrocketing demand in the past decade. World supply is inflexible. It is pretty much obvious that if demand goes through the roof and supply is inflexible, then prices go up. If demand for a good is 110% of supply, then there is not a 10% increase in price. There is an increase in price until that extra demand is priced out of the market. This is nothing new and the process has been going on for the past five years. It is also not likely to reverse itself any time soon.
The Economist has been saying this every other week for the past five years. I'm sure a lot of commodities traders have gotten rich on it.
You sir deserve a +1 informative mod. Every time I have flown recently and had to ditch a bottle of water because of the fluids ban, I have been annoyed at the "stupid security theater". Perhaps it is not as stupid as I have presumed.
Very true! I associate the color magenta, the upper case T and small squares with incomprehensible documentation and poor customer service... err... Deutsche Telekom.
> It's possible to lock it all down instead of live in fear.
That is the default position here on/.; that of a sysadmin. My perspective is that of a user. IT is often too insular and unresponsive to the needs of its users. It tends to be bureaucratic and sees everything through the prism of security risks and administration. User workflows are not often adequately addressed. The popularity of Microsoft's sharepoint server is often attributed to departments circumventing central IT. Why would people do this?
For example, it is important in my job to keep abreast of news and blogs in my field. Now I can spend a couple of hours per day manually checking various sources, or I can set up RSS feeds, scan headlines, read deeper where needed and take care of this in 15 minutes. IT had disabled the RSS feed reader in Outlook, so I have to circumvent the way that IT apparently wants me to work. I use an offsite feed aggregator to avoid having to install unauthorized software. My having to circumvent IT to work means that there is dissonance between how IT sees my role and I (and my boss) see my role.
I tend to view new security measures as productivity killers because they are not accompanied by contextual interviews to see how I work.
Would you prefer to have people in the US on H1B visas, or would you prefer them to be working for the same company in Bangalore? Either way, you already are competing with them in the global job market.
Those people have to spend their money somewhere and that reverberates through the economy. I'm sure the state of California prefers they spend it at Target, just as Baden Wurttemberg prefers they spend it at Familia and Karnataka prefers they spend it in Big Bazaar.
Indeed. I am from the US and have worked in Europe for many years. I loved living in Europe, I loved having 6 weeks of vacation per year and being paid in Euros is a nice perk these days.
There is a downside to all that nicety however. Unemployment tends to be high. Try finding a job in southern Germany, even with the qualifications. Be prepared for a long and painful job search. I saw a friend - an engineer - search for a job for two years so that the could live in the same city as his wife. Why? Companies are reluctant to hire people because they can't fire them so easily. Try starting a company in Europe. Try getting VC. Better yet, start a company and fail at the first go. In the US, that would be shrugged off as a learning experience. In Europe, it makes you a lepper.
I'm in India right now and I see something different. I see a place where new tech parks are rising like crabgrass and replacing shacks. I see people equally as intelligent as their counterparts in Europe and the US willing to work much harder (already in school).
More likely it might be related to the data plan that T-Mobile has for iPhone users in Germany. I have an older RAZR from T-Mobile Germany and I actually disabled the data access because the per kb data cost was so sickeningly high. T-Mobile "helpfully" put the browser on the hotkeys and I found myself accidentally starting the browser and just coming to the google search screen a couple of times a week was visible in my bill.
With the iPhone, you can get 500MB of data volume for 29 Euros a month. At that price, I'd actually use their data services.
"Whenever there's a discussion of average health/weight that involves BMI, idiots invariaby come out of the woodwork Who cares about your individual level of fitness? We're talking about the fitness of an entire population, whch is exactly what BMI is useful for."
Thank you for that personal attack. Did it make you feel better? You could toss something in about my ancestry or my dog while you are at it.
By the same token, the internet brings the idiots out of the woodwork who can't seem to comprehend the concept of discussing and debating with people outside their monkey sphere WITHOUT throwing about gratuitous insults.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that the military personell who tend to simplify tend to be rank and rile enlisted men. Officers tend to be sophisticated and nuanced in their views, so I'd not agree with your generalization. It is important to DO something. It is equally important to be circumspect in what you do. Thrashing out blindly may give a feeling of doing something, but it is not accomplishing much. Don't let emotions rule over your brain.
Prior to the Iraq war, there were some people hiding in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan calling themselves Al Queada. You might have heard of them. They had actually killed Americans; a lot of them. They had some buddies called the Taliban.
Did we concentrate on them? No. Instead, we went after some people that look kind of like them and probably sympathized as a part of some "We're going to settle all of our scores now" effort. The problem is that America's pool of hard power is not infinite and this line of thinking tends to forget that. It also tends not only to forget the value of soft power, but to actively disdain it. While our military has been straining for five years in Iraq, those people who actually committed 9/11 have been able to make a comeback. I'm not sure I'm cynical enough to call that security theater, but it is certainly emotion coming before the brain.
On a side note, many of those same people who advocated invading Iraq instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan are advocating attacking Iran. Iran's intelligence services actively helped topple the Taliban in the first place. Not long after helping us in Afghanistan, the Iranians were stunned to be named in the "Axis of Evil". Concluding that working with the US carries no benefits for them and that they would be next after Iraq, they began actively undermining efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure their own security. This is another example of emotions (we hate Iran because of 1979) undermining the brain.
BMI is a silly measurement for health. A few years ago, I ran a marathon at a BMI of 24. That is just shy of being classified as obese. At the time, you would have been hard pressed to find excess fat on me. I'm one of those "heavily muscled" people that fall under the disclaimer that BMI does not work for eveyone.
On the flip side, BMI IS an excellent predicter of marathon times. (and I've never been anything other than a ploddingly slow runner)
"It's obvious that you have never tried to use Blender"
I've actually used it quite a bit as I dabbled in 3D modeling for a while - nothing fancy, just unanimated objects for modding games - and no, those cntrl commands did not work for me. I eventually gave up trying to learn Blender when I grew disgusted with the video tutorials constantly telling me to just use the blender specific keyboard shortcuts "because they were better". wtf???
The problem I see in Blender is that whereas I often hear artists complaining about its UI, I also hear its advocates essentially say that once you spend enough time learning it and drinking the kool-aid, you will understand. You can make the same argument about CLI, or even better hand editing your Collada files. Nothing gives you the precise control of writing the file yourself.
The product I work on in my day job has a similar problem. Our users (financial analysts) are only using a fraction of the capability the program offers. It is deeply complex and requires extensive training to make full use of it. This flies in the face of the fact that people - our analysts included - sastisfice when using software and usually won't bother to do the training. We have a serious problem in the fact that our tools are more powerful than our competitors, but theirs are easier to use. You can bumble along using theirs, but you can't with ours. In a contextual interview the other day, I had someone flat out tell me that you had to be a "math genius" to do calculations on our platform.
"You're asking for everyone else to subsidize YOUR usage ya filthy hippie."
Wow! So many blind assumptions about the GP in just that line. But I'll bite anyway. The problem is not filthy hippies trying to get everyone else to subsidize their usage. The problem is as the GP pointed out, a business model that relies on oversubscription to advertise a service that they don't actually have the capacity to provide.
Until the early 70's, cars sold in the US had gross horsepower ratings. This was measured using a blueprinted engines, no mufflers, headers instead of a stock exhaust manifold, etc. Each of these things was good for a few horsepower that went into the theoretical rating that was never actually seen on the street. Blueprinting is time consuming and prohibitively expensive in mass production. Headers are loud, not very durable and unsuited to a production vehicle and mufflers are mandatory on the street. From the 1972-1973 model year, you see a 50hp drop in the power output of the typical Detroit muscle car. This has little to do with the (minimal) increase in emission standards and everything to do with the fact that HP had to be rated as installed in the vehicle. This means that since 1973, you were actually getting the HP the car was advertised with, while prior to that you got a theoretical maximum.
"Up to" is the ISP industry's gross HP. The problem is that it is sold as being faster than it really is. And yes, consumers are stupid. They see the XXXX and think that is what they are getting. They do not dwell on what the "up to" part means. This also means that when I go shopping for an ISP, I can't get an answer to the question of "how much sustained bandwidth am I actually paying for".
So I have a proposal; let's get Adam Smith involved and make it into a proper market driven industry. This requires buyers that can make informed decisions. If you don't have relevant information, you can't make an informed decision. Rather than getting into a raise rates or cut peak bandwidth, how about requiring ISPs to sell guaranteed bandwidth as they already do to business users? They could still advertise peak bandwidth as well, but they should say "this is how much you get when we are at full capacity".
"The steep initial learning curve for Blender comes from getting in the right mindset for using a 3d modeling tool.""You're construing "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as MS Paint".
I don't know about the GP, but I construe "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as every other app on my OS" so that I don't have to learn things unrelated to my application. Every app and every OS has its collection of learned skills. For example, on Windows a user can expect that any application will respond to cntrl-z with a "revert last edit", cntrl-y with a "redo what you just undid", cntrl-c with copy, cntrl-x with cut and cntrl-v with paste. Those get tossed out the window with Blender, so you have to learn EVERYTHING the blender way. Forcing people to jump through hoops to learn how to copy/paste or undo in Blender makes the interface cognitively heavier than it should be because you are not only learning the mindset of a 3D tool, but you are learning the mindset of behaviors that are normally related to the OS.
This "everything works in its own way" and not following the OS interface guidelines is something from the stone age of computing. If I sit down to MS Office on a Mac, I expect it to follow the Mac UI paradigms. If I then go to Windows, I expect it to follow the windows paradigms. Now to be fair, I can load Blender up on Ubuntu and it will work exactly the same as on Windows (where I tried to learn it), but I consider that a mis-prioritization on the Blender devs' part.
Hmmm... this is a good idea. It would be defeated by wiping the drive and re-installing, but then again the woman from TFA would never have found her mac had the thief done that; so I guess we can rely on the fact that not all thieves are smart enough to wipe the drive and reinstall before going online.
Okay, lay it out for me because no matter how hard I try to wrap my mind around it, I can't seem to see how in the world this should be a racial issue. Nor do I see why it should affect my opinion of net neutrality even if he were conflates corporatism with white skin.
I don't care if he want's net neutrality because a puppet named banjo told him so. Net Neutrality is a good thing.
Relax. This is the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Their constituency pretty much consists of Hollywood.
The real issue that we face is that IP issues are simply boring to the average voter. Most people don't own patents and don't feel that copyright law affects them in any way. They are much more interested in what J. Wright blabbers on about than about issues that have an effect on the economy; such as IP laws.
(And yes, I think voters are morons. disclaimer - I've lived in Germany for a few years and have developed the same opinion of the average German voter. It seems that people are just stupid.)
Your best bet is an advertising campaign to raise awareness of the issues. Until that happens, we are in the wilderness dude.
There is a wide range of issues involved and anonymity is not a clear black and white affair.
Someone may want to remain anonymous to prevent retribution about their opinions from an employer or from those they know. Someone may fear that they will end up on a government watch list. Someone may be blogging from inside a truly repressive country (e.g. Burma) and may fear being locked up or worse. There is merit in the ability to be anonymous.
There is a flip side to the anonymity begets freedom argument; that is that anyone who truly believed in their opinions and was willing to stand up for them would not remain anonymous. More crudely said, the opinions of the spineless don't matter.
I do not publicly display my email addy here on/. Why? As I stated in my GP post, I sometimes post from the hip and simply don't want to be bothered by repercussions of any posts I make. Now this may make me a hypocrite, but I'm not inclined to reveal my true identity in an environment that is as simultaneously poisonous and pointless as Slashdot can sometimes get. In other contexts, I do use my real identity. If someone running a discussion forum wants to keep the discussion civil requiring a real identity is not a bad bet. If/. Had required real identities to post, I'd not change the opinions I post as I am willing to stand up for them; but I would weigh my words more carefully. My posts would be more thoughtful and less inflammatory.... and I'd be more inclined to proofread them more carefully for typos.:P
On the internet, everyone is an anonymous coward, and people behave differently when they have perfect anonymity. (It breeds asshats - check my posting history, I assure you that I have more kneejerk rants on this site than anyplace in the oxygenated world.)
Just because you are a moron who can't tie his own shoes, does not mean I have a problem!
Seriously, you are spot on and more or less said what I wanted to say. Anonymity begets asshattery (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/) and I have my own history of Slashdot flamewars. People have a general tendency to behave badly when dealing with people outside their monkey sphere (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html) When combined with anonymity - and the lack of accountability that comes with it - people become seriously nasty. Debates that in meatspace would go like "I disagree because..." turn into "listen you fucktard...".
I'm not for eradicating anonymity as it can be needed in some cases, but throwing anonymity into generic, mundane interaction is simply bad for the state of human interaction.
People without mobile phones are few and far between these days. It is probably even safe to argue that worldwide, more people use mobile phones than the internet. It is actually not a bad idea. It can knock 10% off your user base and can be expensive, but it might ensure a higher "quality" user base than might otherwise happen.
It would be an interesting experiment if someone actually did it.
If you want REAL privacy, dig that old phone out of the drawer and pay cash for a pre-pay sim.
I'm no fan of nannying government or warrantless searches or secret warrants, but I find your position too fundamentalist for my taste; especially when your solution is so easy.
Considering how difficult is is to even prove who initiated an attack without playing your own hand and the considering that general public does not worry to much about cybercrime or cyberwar and considering - so probably won't care anyway; I think we can expect a wild west scenario... if it is not already happening.
Well, it seems that the american bourgeois are just as stupid, by buying stuff from communist, the very political class that's dedicaced to eradicate them...
The Chinese stopped being communists in everything but name twenty years ago. Heck, they don't even have a social saftey net worth talking about. That is why everyone in china puts so much pressure on their kids to succeed. In China, your kid's job is your pension. America is more "communist" than China.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez Man, get a grip!
This is precisely WHY I went from being a conservative Republican to a "liberal" Democrat. For decades now, I've seen us (that being America) become more and more dependent on sources of energy that tend to come either from declared enemies, or from states where the populations hates us and the only reason they are not on the enemies list is the dictator/king at the top.
But I digress... making ourselves more vulnerable was patriotic and advocating renewables and thriftiness as a short term measure was marxist.
Two words: China, India
Both have had skyrocketing demand in the past decade. World supply is inflexible. It is pretty much obvious that if demand goes through the roof and supply is inflexible, then prices go up. If demand for a good is 110% of supply, then there is not a 10% increase in price. There is an increase in price until that extra demand is priced out of the market. This is nothing new and the process has been going on for the past five years. It is also not likely to reverse itself any time soon.
The Economist has been saying this every other week for the past five years. I'm sure a lot of commodities traders have gotten rich on it.
You sir deserve a +1 informative mod. Every time I have flown recently and had to ditch a bottle of water because of the fluids ban, I have been annoyed at the "stupid security theater". Perhaps it is not as stupid as I have presumed.
Very true! I associate the color magenta, the upper case T and small squares with incomprehensible documentation and poor customer service ... err... Deutsche Telekom.
> It's possible to lock it all down instead of live in fear.
/.; that of a sysadmin. My perspective is that of a user. IT is often too insular and unresponsive to the needs of its users. It tends to be bureaucratic and sees everything through the prism of security risks and administration. User workflows are not often adequately addressed. The popularity of Microsoft's sharepoint server is often attributed to departments circumventing central IT. Why would people do this?
That is the default position here on
For example, it is important in my job to keep abreast of news and blogs in my field. Now I can spend a couple of hours per day manually checking various sources, or I can set up RSS feeds, scan headlines, read deeper where needed and take care of this in 15 minutes. IT had disabled the RSS feed reader in Outlook, so I have to circumvent the way that IT apparently wants me to work. I use an offsite feed aggregator to avoid having to install unauthorized software. My having to circumvent IT to work means that there is dissonance between how IT sees my role and I (and my boss) see my role.
I tend to view new security measures as productivity killers because they are not accompanied by contextual interviews to see how I work.
Give them time to acquire experience. I worked with them in scientific research and they are as good as anyone in the west.
Would you prefer to have people in the US on H1B visas, or would you prefer them to be working for the same company in Bangalore? Either way, you already are competing with them in the global job market.
Those people have to spend their money somewhere and that reverberates through the economy. I'm sure the state of California prefers they spend it at Target, just as Baden Wurttemberg prefers they spend it at Familia and Karnataka prefers they spend it in Big Bazaar.
Indeed. I am from the US and have worked in Europe for many years. I loved living in Europe, I loved having 6 weeks of vacation per year and being paid in Euros is a nice perk these days.
There is a downside to all that nicety however. Unemployment tends to be high. Try finding a job in southern Germany, even with the qualifications. Be prepared for a long and painful job search. I saw a friend - an engineer - search for a job for two years so that the could live in the same city as his wife. Why? Companies are reluctant to hire people because they can't fire them so easily. Try starting a company in Europe. Try getting VC. Better yet, start a company and fail at the first go. In the US, that would be shrugged off as a learning experience. In Europe, it makes you a lepper.
I'm in India right now and I see something different. I see a place where new tech parks are rising like crabgrass and replacing shacks. I see people equally as intelligent as their counterparts in Europe and the US willing to work much harder (already in school).
More likely it might be related to the data plan that T-Mobile has for iPhone users in Germany. I have an older RAZR from T-Mobile Germany and I actually disabled the data access because the per kb data cost was so sickeningly high. T-Mobile "helpfully" put the browser on the hotkeys and I found myself accidentally starting the browser and just coming to the google search screen a couple of times a week was visible in my bill.
With the iPhone, you can get 500MB of data volume for 29 Euros a month. At that price, I'd actually use their data services.
"Whenever there's a discussion of average health/weight that involves BMI, idiots invariaby come out of the woodwork Who cares about your individual level of fitness? We're talking about the fitness of an entire population, whch is exactly what BMI is useful for."
Thank you for that personal attack. Did it make you feel better? You could toss something in about my ancestry or my dog while you are at it.
By the same token, the internet brings the idiots out of the woodwork who can't seem to comprehend the concept of discussing and debating with people outside their monkey sphere WITHOUT throwing about gratuitous insults.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that the military personell who tend to simplify tend to be rank and rile enlisted men. Officers tend to be sophisticated and nuanced in their views, so I'd not agree with your generalization. It is important to DO something. It is equally important to be circumspect in what you do. Thrashing out blindly may give a feeling of doing something, but it is not accomplishing much. Don't let emotions rule over your brain.
Prior to the Iraq war, there were some people hiding in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan calling themselves Al Queada. You might have heard of them. They had actually killed Americans; a lot of them. They had some buddies called the Taliban.
Did we concentrate on them? No. Instead, we went after some people that look kind of like them and probably sympathized as a part of some "We're going to settle all of our scores now" effort. The problem is that America's pool of hard power is not infinite and this line of thinking tends to forget that. It also tends not only to forget the value of soft power, but to actively disdain it. While our military has been straining for five years in Iraq, those people who actually committed 9/11 have been able to make a comeback. I'm not sure I'm cynical enough to call that security theater, but it is certainly emotion coming before the brain.
On a side note, many of those same people who advocated invading Iraq instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan are advocating attacking Iran. Iran's intelligence services actively helped topple the Taliban in the first place. Not long after helping us in Afghanistan, the Iranians were stunned to be named in the "Axis of Evil". Concluding that working with the US carries no benefits for them and that they would be next after Iraq, they began actively undermining efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure their own security. This is another example of emotions (we hate Iran because of 1979) undermining the brain.
BMI is a silly measurement for health. A few years ago, I ran a marathon at a BMI of 24. That is just shy of being classified as obese. At the time, you would have been hard pressed to find excess fat on me. I'm one of those "heavily muscled" people that fall under the disclaimer that BMI does not work for eveyone.
On the flip side, BMI IS an excellent predicter of marathon times. (and I've never been anything other than a ploddingly slow runner)
"It's obvious that you have never tried to use Blender"
I've actually used it quite a bit as I dabbled in 3D modeling for a while - nothing fancy, just unanimated objects for modding games - and no, those cntrl commands did not work for me. I eventually gave up trying to learn Blender when I grew disgusted with the video tutorials constantly telling me to just use the blender specific keyboard shortcuts "because they were better". wtf???
The problem I see in Blender is that whereas I often hear artists complaining about its UI, I also hear its advocates essentially say that once you spend enough time learning it and drinking the kool-aid, you will understand. You can make the same argument about CLI, or even better hand editing your Collada files. Nothing gives you the precise control of writing the file yourself.
The product I work on in my day job has a similar problem. Our users (financial analysts) are only using a fraction of the capability the program offers. It is deeply complex and requires extensive training to make full use of it. This flies in the face of the fact that people - our analysts included - sastisfice when using software and usually won't bother to do the training. We have a serious problem in the fact that our tools are more powerful than our competitors, but theirs are easier to use. You can bumble along using theirs, but you can't with ours. In a contextual interview the other day, I had someone flat out tell me that you had to be a "math genius" to do calculations on our platform.
"You're asking for everyone else to subsidize YOUR usage ya filthy hippie."
Wow! So many blind assumptions about the GP in just that line. But I'll bite anyway. The problem is not filthy hippies trying to get everyone else to subsidize their usage. The problem is as the GP pointed out, a business model that relies on oversubscription to advertise a service that they don't actually have the capacity to provide.
Until the early 70's, cars sold in the US had gross horsepower ratings. This was measured using a blueprinted engines, no mufflers, headers instead of a stock exhaust manifold, etc. Each of these things was good for a few horsepower that went into the theoretical rating that was never actually seen on the street. Blueprinting is time consuming and prohibitively expensive in mass production. Headers are loud, not very durable and unsuited to a production vehicle and mufflers are mandatory on the street. From the 1972-1973 model year, you see a 50hp drop in the power output of the typical Detroit muscle car. This has little to do with the (minimal) increase in emission standards and everything to do with the fact that HP had to be rated as installed in the vehicle. This means that since 1973, you were actually getting the HP the car was advertised with, while prior to that you got a theoretical maximum.
"Up to" is the ISP industry's gross HP. The problem is that it is sold as being faster than it really is. And yes, consumers are stupid. They see the XXXX and think that is what they are getting. They do not dwell on what the "up to" part means. This also means that when I go shopping for an ISP, I can't get an answer to the question of "how much sustained bandwidth am I actually paying for".
So I have a proposal; let's get Adam Smith involved and make it into a proper market driven industry. This requires buyers that can make informed decisions. If you don't have relevant information, you can't make an informed decision. Rather than getting into a raise rates or cut peak bandwidth, how about requiring ISPs to sell guaranteed bandwidth as they already do to business users? They could still advertise peak bandwidth as well, but they should say "this is how much you get when we are at full capacity".
"The steep initial learning curve for Blender comes from getting in the right mindset for using a 3d modeling tool.""You're construing "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as MS Paint".
I don't know about the GP, but I construe "intuitive" to mean "uses the same paradigm as every other app on my OS" so that I don't have to learn things unrelated to my application. Every app and every OS has its collection of learned skills. For example, on Windows a user can expect that any application will respond to cntrl-z with a "revert last edit", cntrl-y with a "redo what you just undid", cntrl-c with copy, cntrl-x with cut and cntrl-v with paste. Those get tossed out the window with Blender, so you have to learn EVERYTHING the blender way. Forcing people to jump through hoops to learn how to copy/paste or undo in Blender makes the interface cognitively heavier than it should be because you are not only learning the mindset of a 3D tool, but you are learning the mindset of behaviors that are normally related to the OS.
This "everything works in its own way" and not following the OS interface guidelines is something from the stone age of computing. If I sit down to MS Office on a Mac, I expect it to follow the Mac UI paradigms. If I then go to Windows, I expect it to follow the windows paradigms. Now to be fair, I can load Blender up on Ubuntu and it will work exactly the same as on Windows (where I tried to learn it), but I consider that a mis-prioritization on the Blender devs' part.
Hmmm... this is a good idea. It would be defeated by wiping the drive and re-installing, but then again the woman from TFA would never have found her mac had the thief done that; so I guess we can rely on the fact that not all thieves are smart enough to wipe the drive and reinstall before going online.
Okay, lay it out for me because no matter how hard I try to wrap my mind around it, I can't seem to see how in the world this should be a racial issue. Nor do I see why it should affect my opinion of net neutrality even if he were conflates corporatism with white skin.
I don't care if he want's net neutrality because a puppet named banjo told him so. Net Neutrality is a good thing.
Relax. This is the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Their constituency pretty much consists of Hollywood.
The real issue that we face is that IP issues are simply boring to the average voter. Most people don't own patents and don't feel that copyright law affects them in any way. They are much more interested in what J. Wright blabbers on about than about issues that have an effect on the economy; such as IP laws.
(And yes, I think voters are morons. disclaimer - I've lived in Germany for a few years and have developed the same opinion of the average German voter. It seems that people are just stupid.)
Your best bet is an advertising campaign to raise awareness of the issues. Until that happens, we are in the wilderness dude.
Anonymity begets freedom.
/. Why? As I stated in my GP post, I sometimes post from the hip and simply don't want to be bothered by repercussions of any posts I make. Now this may make me a hypocrite, but I'm not inclined to reveal my true identity in an environment that is as simultaneously poisonous and pointless as Slashdot can sometimes get. In other contexts, I do use my real identity. If someone running a discussion forum wants to keep the discussion civil requiring a real identity is not a bad bet. If /. Had required real identities to post, I'd not change the opinions I post as I am willing to stand up for them; but I would weigh my words more carefully. My posts would be more thoughtful and less inflammatory. ... and I'd be more inclined to proofread them more carefully for typos. :P
There is a wide range of issues involved and anonymity is not a clear black and white affair.
Someone may want to remain anonymous to prevent retribution about their opinions from an employer or from those they know. Someone may fear that they will end up on a government watch list. Someone may be blogging from inside a truly repressive country (e.g. Burma) and may fear being locked up or worse. There is merit in the ability to be anonymous.
There is a flip side to the anonymity begets freedom argument; that is that anyone who truly believed in their opinions and was willing to stand up for them would not remain anonymous. More crudely said, the opinions of the spineless don't matter.
I do not publicly display my email addy here on
On the internet, everyone is an anonymous coward, and people behave differently when they have perfect anonymity. (It breeds asshats - check my posting history, I assure you that I have more kneejerk rants on this site than anyplace in the oxygenated world.)
Just because you are a moron who can't tie his own shoes, does not mean I have a problem!
Seriously, you are spot on and more or less said what I wanted to say. Anonymity begets asshattery (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/) and I have my own history of Slashdot flamewars. People have a general tendency to behave badly when dealing with people outside their monkey sphere (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html) When combined with anonymity - and the lack of accountability that comes with it - people become seriously nasty. Debates that in meatspace would go like "I disagree because..." turn into "listen you fucktard...".
I'm not for eradicating anonymity as it can be needed in some cases, but throwing anonymity into generic, mundane interaction is simply bad for the state of human interaction.
People without mobile phones are few and far between these days. It is probably even safe to argue that worldwide, more people use mobile phones than the internet. It is actually not a bad idea. It can knock 10% off your user base and can be expensive, but it might ensure a higher "quality" user base than might otherwise happen.
It would be an interesting experiment if someone actually did it.
If you want REAL privacy, dig that old phone out of the drawer and pay cash for a pre-pay sim.
I'm no fan of nannying government or warrantless searches or secret warrants, but I find your position too fundamentalist for my taste; especially when your solution is so easy.
Considering how difficult is is to even prove who initiated an attack without playing your own hand and the considering that general public does not worry to much about cybercrime or cyberwar and considering - so probably won't care anyway; I think we can expect a wild west scenario... if it is not already happening.
The Chinese stopped being communists in everything but name twenty years ago. Heck, they don't even have a social saftey net worth talking about. That is why everyone in china puts so much pressure on their kids to succeed. In China, your kid's job is your pension. America is more "communist" than China.Well, it seems that the american bourgeois are just as stupid, by buying stuff from communist, the very political class that's dedicaced to eradicate them...
1 - Make a slashdot sub plugging your own blog with a bit of flaimbait.
2 - Get slashdotted.
3 - Profit!