Target terrorists, repair infrastructure, build schools and plant Democracy.
If by "target terrorists" you mean kill the people who resist our illegal occupation plus some others who happened to get in the way, and by "repair infrastructure" you mean fail to repair infrastructure, and by "build schools" you mean stage photo-ops, and by "plant democracy" you mean pave the way for an Iranian-allied theocracy and civil war,
then you're absolutely right.
What are you doing posting on Slashdot? Go over there and plant democracy! The Marines need you!
I almost gave up on Ubuntu (actually, Kubuntu) over annoyance at having to find and install the module. How could a card possibly be more mainstream? It should just work. Dselect still keeps trying to overwrite my installation, even though I installed using dpkg. Haven't figured out how to install it with Kynaptic.
I have been using off-and-on since 1998, and I'm beyond the point where I want to spend time futzing around with this stuff. I have things I want to do within Linux other than figure out how to get my hardware to work.
HBO spends 10 million dollars, and everybody steals their content without reimbursing HBO for any of their costs. 10,000 people lose their jobs because HBO declares bankruptcy.
Oh, boo hoo. More realistically, HBO spends $100 million, 5 percent of viewers who would otherwise subscribe to HBO steal their content, HBO makes $1 billion, and 10,000 people lose their jobs anyway because they aren't needed once the show is no longer in production, even though HBO continues to profit from the show for the decades their copyright remains in effect.
Am I supposed to weep for the cable company? Wah, wah, wah. I don't see their executives coming to work dressed in rags, forced to send their kids to inner city schools because the cable industry isn't profitable enough. I fucking *hate* the cable company. Their installers don't show up when they're supposed to, and if you want to watch Rome, you have to subscribe to digital cable, order a bunch of channels you don't want, and then pay an additional fee for HBO on top of it.
So is it stealing to bittorrent an HBO program? Of course it is. Is it wrong? It's wrong in the same way that stealing from Satan is wrong.
Also, you seem to subscribe to the notion that creating something--a tv show, a song, software, whatever--gives you the right to control how it is used and distributed. I disagree. I know that copyright law is not on my side. But the US government has demonstrated that it is corrupt--willing and eager to pass laws that are not in the public interest, provided they get theirs. That's a shame, because I'd really prefer our government were not corrupt. But since it is, I don't view it as morally wrong to break certain laws that they pass. And copyright law in the US has clearly been sold off to the highest bidder.
I understand that some people like things black-and-white, and may not find themselves in tune with my situational-ethics-based worldview. But let's take a different tack: Does any good come from people bittorrenting shows? I think so, yeah. More good than ill. It forces the cable company and HBO to adapt a business model that many of their customers wouldn't put up with if the companies didn't have close to a monopoly on the way people get their programs. If it weren't for Bittorrent, the cable company would say: "Don't like it? Screw you! We're the cable company!"
Hopefully, HBO will some day allow purchasing of individual episodes at the same time they are broadcast. Why not? What reason does not-on-demand television have to exist, in this day and age? It's a business model tied to obsolete technology, and hopefully bittorrent will nudge them towards a transition to something better.
So to summarize:
1) Stealing is wrong 2) But I fucking hate the cable company 3) Boo hoo 4) Besides, it's only stealing by a legal definition that is the product of entertainment moguls bribing legislators 5) Bittorrenting programs does more good than ill 6) So it's completely defensible on moral grounds, if not legal
Why would anyone want to watch videos on an Ipod-sized screen? You can already watch videos on a laptop, and a sizeable percentage of Ipod owners already have one. And while you obviously don't want to lug around your laptop around so you can listen to music, you probably don't mind lugging it to watch videos--because the screen is about as small as is comfortable for that purpose.
The thing that doesn't exist is an iTunes-like service for purchasing videos. That, I'm sure, is inevitable.
I wouldn't have been so snarky if I'd noticed you had a 5-digit slashdot ID. The caltrain site must have been upgraded since you last checked, old-timer.:-)
have you, superdude72, actually been to burning man?
Nope. Just some related events in SF, and some unoffical parties to raise funds for friends' camps. See response here.
Perhaps this is just a narrow slice of the burning man community and I shouldn't overgeneralize. But nothing at these parties made me want to go to the main thing. I'm not criticizing them; their tastes just happen to differ from mine in this regard. In other ways, they're still my friends and I like to do non-burning-man-related things with them.
Anyone, including you, who try to describe it with such a broad brush end up only describing a small slice of it. It is a little bit of what everyone tells you it is...really, only a little bit.
I've never gone, but I have friends who go every year. I used to support them by going to various performances and fundraisers (my friends are fire dancers), but it's gotten to the point where I'm just like... meh. Fire. Devil horns. OK, you look cute with the devil horns, and the fire... ok, maybe not fire because you can't get a permit, but glow sticks, hula hoops... Meh.
I support Burning Man in principle, as long as they stick to principles, but I've just never felt an overwhelming desire to attend, given the tastes of it I've had.
So if you're the sort of person who see tech and wonders "that's really cool, how'd they do that", or "I should of thought of that", or "I'd love to make something like that"... then you'll probably really like burning man. But if you're one of those people, who I personally wouldn't call true geeks but saddly inhabit slashdot, who sees tech and thinks "I can get that cheaper at walmart", then burning man is defintely not for you.
Holy false dichotomies, batman!
Might there be *other* reasons people don't like Burning Man, besides being brain-dead, TV-besotted oafs who've lost the ability to think for themselves?
The community of people who don't like rock concerts sponsored by Bud Lite is significantly larger than the Burning Man community, I would venture. As is the community of people who enjoy art. As is the anticorporate community. And the tech community.
But some people just aren't into dressing up in dayglo cowboy BDSM outfits while camping in the desert for a week, and paying thousands of dollars (ticket + travel) to do so. Some people are put off by the number of "art" installations that involve getting naked in a hot tub with a 50-year-old tech entrepreneur, while there's some kind of light show and House music playing in the background.
I'm not saying that that's all Burning Man is. Oh, no. But there are certain aesthetic guidelines that not everyone wants to follow. For instance, it helps if you like electronic music. And dressing up in costumes with a BDSM theme. Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you like. But don't pretend that Burning Man involves any more openness to new ideas than any other festival of tens of thousands of people. There is a pretty established aesthetic, and it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Let's see: Countless Linux distros = good, as it gives you the liberty to choose between many distros. But different versions* of Windows Vista = bad, as it's confusing???
The difference is that the splintering of Windows XP is primarily to keep sales of the cheaper editions from cannibalizing sales of the more expensive editions.
There is no practical reason why the Starter Edition (only for sale in developing countries) needs to prevent more than 3 applications from being opened at a time, for instance. They have actually gone into the operating system and removed functionality so that customers will still have a reason to buy a more expensive version. This is generally not what drives the development of new Linux distributions.
This is the local governments (State and NO) fuck up. They were not ready for this, they could not cope with this, and they did not know what to do. New Orleans always knew this would happen, and they did not spend the money to fix the levees first (The fed were ready to do it, but New Orleans did not do the paperwork).
State and local governments do not have the resources to deal with a disaster of this magnitude without federal leadership. Why should they? Think about it. You're proposing that every city in the country should have the resources to cope with a once-in-300-years disaster on its own. Think of how incredibly redundant and expensive that would be. It would be like requiring banks to keep all of their depositors' money in the vault, rather than requiring them to keep some minimum amount on hand, and insuring the rest.
Very rare, but extremely catastrophic, disasters like these are the reason we have a federal government--so that we can pool our resources to efficiently cope with these extraordinary circumstances that are too expensive for every city in the country to manage on its own.
New Orleans did have a plan for this disaster. It was for the federal government to do its job, and lead the response to this crisis. And the Feds dithered. Do you really believe this nonsense that New Orleans "didn't file its paperwork" for the levee repairs? Bullshit! We can find $200 million for a bridge in a Republican district in Alaska, but nothing for a district that votes democratic. This has been the case for as long as the GOP has held Congress. Wyoming gets more per capita for Homeland Security than they even know how to spend; New York, LA, and New Orleans get the shaft. New Orleans got no help because they didn't vote for Bush. That's it. They didn't lose their paperwork, you maroon.
New Orleans' plan, one would assume, would also involve having Louisiana National Guard stationed nearby enough to get to the disaster area in time. And this was doubtless affected by the war in Iraq, for which Bush has pressed the Guard into a role which is far from their usual mission. They are overseas so that the rest of us don't have to pay the real price of this war. And now, New Orleans is paying.
I owned a PMP300 for one day. Then it got very hot--I think it was short-circuiting. Besides being useful for starting fires, the PMP300 I purchased featured a battery compartment that could only use Duracell batteries. Really. It said this in the manual. The quality control with these early models? Not so hot.
I never had any problems with the Rio Cali I purchased years later, though. That was after several management upheavals--they were literally a different company by then.
The problem was Rio just didn't offer any compelling "stand-out" features and the pricing was on-par with Apple's Ipod selection (which gave buyers very little reason to migrate to a Rio player).
The flash-based Rio Cali I bought years ago has a screen and an FM radio and costs just a little bit more than the iPod Shuffle. (And besides, when I bought it there was no Shuffle and the iPods available cost at least twice as much.) Plus, it runs on a AAA battery, which is more convenient for me. What are you supposed to do with an iPod on a long road trip? Bring along a charging station? I'd rather just stop at the 7/11 and buy enough batteries to last the month, with zero downtime needed for recharging.
From the article: Sketch show Titty Bang Bang, sitcom Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Johnny Vegas' show Ideal will be made available on the internet first.
Are these real BBC programs, or is the BBC just having some fun with the gullible Americans?
These titles remind me of parody PBS titles I saw in the National Lampoon years ago. The joke was that basically everything on PBS was warmed-over BBC content. Titles were "Masterrace Theatre," and "Ain't Had No Fun Since I Been 'Po."
Redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor through financing of things like dams, highways, universities, and electrical grids is good capitalist business sense. Perhaps the United States' greatest strength is that it is a *huge* market, because of its large middle class, which owes its existence to federal investment in infrastructure.
Imagine if wealth distribution were different. 95 percent of the money belongs to Bill Gates. The rest of us fight it out for the other 5 percent. Bill Gates wouldn't be wealthy for long, because no one could afford his products. As wealthy as he is, he's still just one guy. He doesn't need 1 billion shirts, even if he could afford that many. Even if he buys really fancy shirts, he probably wouldn't spend as much as 1,000 people would if they were given 1/1,000th of his shirt budget. And that would be bad news for people who make and sell shirts. And on and on for anyone who sells anything.
At this point, it's obligatory to bring up the anecdote about Henry Ford paying his workers enough so they could afford to buy a Ford automobile. Great idea! America's prosperity was built on this principle.
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OK, so I just realized it would be a little hard for them to charge extra for hot water, since the water is heated at your home. But what if the water company owned your water heater, and it was illegal to have one that wasn't controlled by the water company? Then the phone / cable company analogy still applies, I guess. (We *have* to own the water heater, their lobbyists say. To prevent explosions from improperly maintained water heaters.)
I have no problem with local governments or organizations providing water services but not the state or federal governments.
If the federal government didn't finance dam, electrical, telephone, university, and highway infrastructure, the United States would be a third-world country. There is simply no way people in Appalachia or the Mountain West could have financed all these projects themselves. But the US as a whole is better off for the fact that people in the middle of the country aren't as poor as the peasants in India or China. It makes us all more productive. Yay, no more cholera outbreaks! Ma and Pa Kettle can refrigerate their food and call an ambulance if needed! They couldn't afford to pay for these services on their share-cropping income, so the federal government redistributes wealth from the cities to the country. This isn't always a good thing, but sometimes it is. It keeps our cities from developing shantytowns full of desperately poor, uneducated, diseased, half-starved peasants willing to work for a crust of bread a day.
As for the market failure you described (low price of water doesn't reflect its scarcity), that would certainly happen as well if the water system were privatized. The difference is, a private company would waste the water and we'd pay far too much for it. You say that maybe we should pay more for water. Maybe so. But why do we have to pay more to line shareholders' pockets? Why not pay more and have the revenue go to something that benefits the public? Better water conservation technology, for example. Or a Springfield monorail. Whatever. As a survivor of the California energy crisis of a couple of years ago, let me say that just about anything is better than being gouged by the likes of Enron. You would be extremely hard-pressed to find any government program that wastes money like that energy crisis did. (Except, maybe, the Pentagon...)
Yes there are certain things government should do like protect life and property but that's about it.
Why do you think so?
This is an article of faith amongst conservatives (Milton Friedman conservatives--not the crooks who run the modern GOP). However, if the government can provide a service more cheaply, and with good enough quality, then why not have it do so? I have no complaints about my government-provided tap water, for instance. It meets a higher standard of quality than some of the stuff you buy bottled in stores, is delivered with absolute reliability, and is so cheap my landlord doesn't even bill me for it.
I shudder to think what water service would be like if it were provided by the equivalent of SBC.
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1) Takes forever to load (Probably Slashdotted, but all that SQL to post static content doesn't help either...)
2) Takes forever to scroll down the page because of that @#$#%& molecule image
3) No gallery. Just a bunch of page numbers with nothing to guide the user to what he or she is interested in. Hey, I just wanted to see the finished product. I'm not interested in a picture of some cables. I've seen cables before, you know? They don't get any more interesting.
4) Spell check? Definately not encorperated into the web design process
The thing is, police departments aren't even short on funds to fight child pornography. They don't need the money. He just wants to tax porn because he doesn't like it. (Or something. I find it hard to believe that anyone really doesn't like porn. I think this guy might have... issues.)
Let's just rundown the list of sources the NY Times thinks are worth quoting:
VP of salesforce.com
Director of a Washington-based think tank
A senior director at Symantec
Yale computer science professor
Microsoft executives
MD
Stockbroker
Regional bank manager
Really the vox populi, isn't it? I doubt if anyone on this list makes less than $200,000 a year, and most are in upper management and supervisorial roles. The home computer is now disposable! For people who administer a departmental budget and who have incomes in the mid-six-figures. That is, everyone who matters to the NY Times.
These people remind me of my old CEO. His computer was way nicer than anyone else's, even those of the PhD software engineers, even though he only needed it for spreadsheets and Powerpoint and couldn't make use of 50 percent of its capabilities. But he was the boss and had to have the nicest computer! Really childish. He would have tried to justify its expense, but it's dead obvious that he had it because he was closest to the company purse strings.
What obnoxious, self-congratulatory crap. It was *not* a good value to spend $400 on a new computer rather than remove the Spyware. OK? It just wasn't. He did it because he's lazy and can afford to waste money. He wouldn't have lost anything by taking the half hour he would have spent visiting porn sites (how else would he get so infested with Spyware?) and installing Adaware.
The whole point of this article is "Ooh. Look how busy and important I am. I'm a doofus who visits porn sites and gets his computer infested with Spyware, but look how busy and important I am!"
It seems that the chief value of such a system is that after a disaster, they can put out a press release letting people know they have it, so everything is under control, no need to panic.
They might as well get a box, put some flashing lights on it, and broadcast a press release about their TerrorDetect advanced terrorist early warning system (tm). Stops terror in its tracks!
Slashdot Mirror
Target terrorists, repair infrastructure, build schools and plant Democracy.
If by "target terrorists" you mean kill the people who resist our illegal occupation plus some others who happened to get in the way, and by "repair infrastructure" you mean fail to repair infrastructure, and by "build schools" you mean stage photo-ops, and by "plant democracy" you mean pave the way for an Iranian-allied theocracy and civil war,
then you're absolutely right.
What are you doing posting on Slashdot? Go over there and plant democracy! The Marines need you!
Does it autodetect Soundblaster Live 24-bit yet?
I almost gave up on Ubuntu (actually, Kubuntu) over annoyance at having to find and install the module. How could a card possibly be more mainstream? It should just work. Dselect still keeps trying to overwrite my installation, even though I installed using dpkg. Haven't figured out how to install it with Kynaptic.
I have been using off-and-on since 1998, and I'm beyond the point where I want to spend time futzing around with this stuff. I have things I want to do within Linux other than figure out how to get my hardware to work.
HBO spends 10 million dollars, and everybody steals their content without reimbursing HBO for any of their costs. 10,000 people lose their jobs because HBO declares bankruptcy.
Oh, boo hoo. More realistically, HBO spends $100 million, 5 percent of viewers who would otherwise subscribe to HBO steal their content, HBO makes $1 billion, and 10,000 people lose their jobs anyway because they aren't needed once the show is no longer in production, even though HBO continues to profit from the show for the decades their copyright remains in effect.
Am I supposed to weep for the cable company? Wah, wah, wah. I don't see their executives coming to work dressed in rags, forced to send their kids to inner city schools because the cable industry isn't profitable enough. I fucking *hate* the cable company. Their installers don't show up when they're supposed to, and if you want to watch Rome, you have to subscribe to digital cable, order a bunch of channels you don't want, and then pay an additional fee for HBO on top of it.
So is it stealing to bittorrent an HBO program? Of course it is. Is it wrong? It's wrong in the same way that stealing from Satan is wrong.
Also, you seem to subscribe to the notion that creating something--a tv show, a song, software, whatever--gives you the right to control how it is used and distributed. I disagree. I know that copyright law is not on my side. But the US government has demonstrated that it is corrupt--willing and eager to pass laws that are not in the public interest, provided they get theirs. That's a shame, because I'd really prefer our government were not corrupt. But since it is, I don't view it as morally wrong to break certain laws that they pass. And copyright law in the US has clearly been sold off to the highest bidder.
I understand that some people like things black-and-white, and may not find themselves in tune with my situational-ethics-based worldview. But let's take a different tack: Does any good come from people bittorrenting shows? I think so, yeah. More good than ill. It forces the cable company and HBO to adapt a business model that many of their customers wouldn't put up with if the companies didn't have close to a monopoly on the way people get their programs. If it weren't for Bittorrent, the cable company would say: "Don't like it? Screw you! We're the cable company!"
Hopefully, HBO will some day allow purchasing of individual episodes at the same time they are broadcast. Why not? What reason does not-on-demand television have to exist, in this day and age? It's a business model tied to obsolete technology, and hopefully bittorrent will nudge them towards a transition to something better.
So to summarize:
1) Stealing is wrong
2) But I fucking hate the cable company
3) Boo hoo
4) Besides, it's only stealing by a legal definition that is the product of entertainment moguls bribing legislators
5) Bittorrenting programs does more good than ill
6) So it's completely defensible on moral grounds, if not legal
Why would anyone want to watch videos on an Ipod-sized screen? You can already watch videos on a laptop, and a sizeable percentage of Ipod owners already have one. And while you obviously don't want to lug around your laptop around so you can listen to music, you probably don't mind lugging it to watch videos--because the screen is about as small as is comfortable for that purpose.
The thing that doesn't exist is an iTunes-like service for purchasing videos. That, I'm sure, is inevitable.
That was kind of snarky too, wasn't it. Sorry.
I wouldn't have been so snarky if I'd noticed you had a 5-digit slashdot ID. The caltrain site must have been upgraded since you last checked, old-timer. :-)
have you, superdude72, actually been to burning man?
Nope. Just some related events in SF, and some unoffical parties to raise funds for friends' camps. See response here.
Perhaps this is just a narrow slice of the burning man community and I shouldn't overgeneralize. But nothing at these parties made me want to go to the main thing. I'm not criticizing them; their tastes just happen to differ from mine in this regard. In other ways, they're still my friends and I like to do non-burning-man-related things with them.
I wear shorts and a t-shirt, as do most all my camp mates.
c ial_events/decompression/decom2005.html
If you go to Burning Man Decompression in that outfit, you'll have to pay twice as much. Your outfit is Not Approved.
http://burningman.com/blackrockcity_yearround/spe
Anyone, including you, who try to describe it with such a broad brush end up only describing a small slice of it. It is a little bit of what everyone tells you it is...really, only a little bit.
I've never gone, but I have friends who go every year. I used to support them by going to various performances and fundraisers (my friends are fire dancers), but it's gotten to the point where I'm just like... meh. Fire. Devil horns. OK, you look cute with the devil horns, and the fire... ok, maybe not fire because you can't get a permit, but glow sticks, hula hoops... Meh.
I support Burning Man in principle, as long as they stick to principles, but I've just never felt an overwhelming desire to attend, given the tastes of it I've had.
So if you're the sort of person who see tech and wonders "that's really cool, how'd they do that", or "I should of thought of that", or "I'd love to make something like that"... then you'll probably really like burning man. But if you're one of those people, who I personally wouldn't call true geeks but saddly inhabit slashdot, who sees tech and thinks "I can get that cheaper at walmart", then burning man is defintely not for you.
Holy false dichotomies, batman!
Might there be *other* reasons people don't like Burning Man, besides being brain-dead, TV-besotted oafs who've lost the ability to think for themselves?
The community of people who don't like rock concerts sponsored by Bud Lite is significantly larger than the Burning Man community, I would venture. As is the community of people who enjoy art. As is the anticorporate community. And the tech community.
But some people just aren't into dressing up in dayglo cowboy BDSM outfits while camping in the desert for a week, and paying thousands of dollars (ticket + travel) to do so. Some people are put off by the number of "art" installations that involve getting naked in a hot tub with a 50-year-old tech entrepreneur, while there's some kind of light show and House music playing in the background.
I'm not saying that that's all Burning Man is. Oh, no. But there are certain aesthetic guidelines that not everyone wants to follow. For instance, it helps if you like electronic music. And dressing up in costumes with a BDSM theme. Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you like. But don't pretend that Burning Man involves any more openness to new ideas than any other festival of tens of thousands of people. There is a pretty established aesthetic, and it's not everyone's cup of tea.
and the Caltrains web pages don't see fit to give you a street address suitable for looking up an on-line map.
Huh?
http://caltrain.org/caltrain_stations.html
Found it in 2 clicks. Click on the station links for location on an online map.
Let's see: Countless Linux distros = good, as it gives you the liberty to choose between many distros. But different versions* of Windows Vista = bad, as it's confusing???
The difference is that the splintering of Windows XP is primarily to keep sales of the cheaper editions from cannibalizing sales of the more expensive editions.
There is no practical reason why the Starter Edition (only for sale in developing countries) needs to prevent more than 3 applications from being opened at a time, for instance. They have actually gone into the operating system and removed functionality so that customers will still have a reason to buy a more expensive version. This is generally not what drives the development of new Linux distributions.
Resign. You're obviously in way over your head if you have to resort to asking Slashdot readers for advice like this
Is the Bush administration hiring Heritage Foundation interns to run FEMA's IT Dept., or something?
This is the local governments (State and NO) fuck up. They were not ready for this, they could not cope with this, and they did not know what to do. New Orleans always knew this would happen, and they did not spend the money to fix the levees first (The fed were ready to do it, but New Orleans did not do the paperwork).
State and local governments do not have the resources to deal with a disaster of this magnitude without federal leadership. Why should they? Think about it. You're proposing that every city in the country should have the resources to cope with a once-in-300-years disaster on its own. Think of how incredibly redundant and expensive that would be. It would be like requiring banks to keep all of their depositors' money in the vault, rather than requiring them to keep some minimum amount on hand, and insuring the rest.
Very rare, but extremely catastrophic, disasters like these are the reason we have a federal government--so that we can pool our resources to efficiently cope with these extraordinary circumstances that are too expensive for every city in the country to manage on its own.
New Orleans did have a plan for this disaster. It was for the federal government to do its job, and lead the response to this crisis. And the Feds dithered. Do you really believe this nonsense that New Orleans "didn't file its paperwork" for the levee repairs? Bullshit! We can find $200 million for a bridge in a Republican district in Alaska, but nothing for a district that votes democratic. This has been the case for as long as the GOP has held Congress. Wyoming gets more per capita for Homeland Security than they even know how to spend; New York, LA, and New Orleans get the shaft. New Orleans got no help because they didn't vote for Bush. That's it. They didn't lose their paperwork, you maroon.
New Orleans' plan, one would assume, would also involve having Louisiana National Guard stationed nearby enough to get to the disaster area in time. And this was doubtless affected by the war in Iraq, for which Bush has pressed the Guard into a role which is far from their usual mission. They are overseas so that the rest of us don't have to pay the real price of this war. And now, New Orleans is paying.
I owned a PMP300 for one day. Then it got very hot--I think it was short-circuiting. Besides being useful for starting fires, the PMP300 I purchased featured a battery compartment that could only use Duracell batteries. Really. It said this in the manual. The quality control with these early models? Not so hot.
I never had any problems with the Rio Cali I purchased years later, though. That was after several management upheavals--they were literally a different company by then.
The problem was Rio just didn't offer any compelling "stand-out" features and the pricing was on-par with Apple's Ipod selection (which gave buyers very little reason to migrate to a Rio player).
The flash-based Rio Cali I bought years ago has a screen and an FM radio and costs just a little bit more than the iPod Shuffle. (And besides, when I bought it there was no Shuffle and the iPods available cost at least twice as much.) Plus, it runs on a AAA battery, which is more convenient for me. What are you supposed to do with an iPod on a long road trip? Bring along a charging station? I'd rather just stop at the 7/11 and buy enough batteries to last the month, with zero downtime needed for recharging.
From the article:
Sketch show Titty Bang Bang, sitcom Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Johnny Vegas' show Ideal will be made available on the internet first.
Are these real BBC programs, or is the BBC just having some fun with the gullible Americans?
These titles remind me of parody PBS titles I saw in the National Lampoon years ago. The joke was that basically everything on PBS was warmed-over BBC content. Titles were "Masterrace Theatre," and "Ain't Had No Fun Since I Been 'Po."
I would like to add...
Redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor through financing of things like dams, highways, universities, and electrical grids is good capitalist business sense. Perhaps the United States' greatest strength is that it is a *huge* market, because of its large middle class, which owes its existence to federal investment in infrastructure.
Imagine if wealth distribution were different. 95 percent of the money belongs to Bill Gates. The rest of us fight it out for the other 5 percent. Bill Gates wouldn't be wealthy for long, because no one could afford his products. As wealthy as he is, he's still just one guy. He doesn't need 1 billion shirts, even if he could afford that many. Even if he buys really fancy shirts, he probably wouldn't spend as much as 1,000 people would if they were given 1/1,000th of his shirt budget. And that would be bad news for people who make and sell shirts. And on and on for anyone who sells anything.
At this point, it's obligatory to bring up the anecdote about Henry Ford paying his workers enough so they could afford to buy a Ford automobile. Great idea! America's prosperity was built on this principle.
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OK, so I just realized it would be a little hard for them to charge extra for hot water, since the water is heated at your home. But what if the water company owned your water heater, and it was illegal to have one that wasn't controlled by the water company? Then the phone / cable company analogy still applies, I guess. (We *have* to own the water heater, their lobbyists say. To prevent explosions from improperly maintained water heaters.)
I have no problem with local governments or organizations providing water services but not the state or federal governments.
If the federal government didn't finance dam, electrical, telephone, university, and highway infrastructure, the United States would be a third-world country. There is simply no way people in Appalachia or the Mountain West could have financed all these projects themselves. But the US as a whole is better off for the fact that people in the middle of the country aren't as poor as the peasants in India or China. It makes us all more productive. Yay, no more cholera outbreaks! Ma and Pa Kettle can refrigerate their food and call an ambulance if needed! They couldn't afford to pay for these services on their share-cropping income, so the federal government redistributes wealth from the cities to the country. This isn't always a good thing, but sometimes it is. It keeps our cities from developing shantytowns full of desperately poor, uneducated, diseased, half-starved peasants willing to work for a crust of bread a day.
As for the market failure you described (low price of water doesn't reflect its scarcity), that would certainly happen as well if the water system were privatized. The difference is, a private company would waste the water and we'd pay far too much for it. You say that maybe we should pay more for water. Maybe so. But why do we have to pay more to line shareholders' pockets? Why not pay more and have the revenue go to something that benefits the public? Better water conservation technology, for example. Or a Springfield monorail. Whatever. As a survivor of the California energy crisis of a couple of years ago, let me say that just about anything is better than being gouged by the likes of Enron. You would be extremely hard-pressed to find any government program that wastes money like that energy crisis did. (Except, maybe, the Pentagon...)
Yes there are certain things government should do like protect life and property but that's about it.
Why do you think so?
This is an article of faith amongst conservatives (Milton Friedman conservatives--not the crooks who run the modern GOP). However, if the government can provide a service more cheaply, and with good enough quality, then why not have it do so? I have no complaints about my government-provided tap water, for instance. It meets a higher standard of quality than some of the stuff you buy bottled in stores, is delivered with absolute reliability, and is so cheap my landlord doesn't even bill me for it.
I shudder to think what water service would be like if it were provided by the equivalent of SBC.
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Get a $50 gift certificate if you turn over the names, telephone numbers, and addresses of 5 friends or relatives
Etc, etc. You get the idea.
1) Takes forever to load (Probably Slashdotted, but all that SQL to post static content doesn't help either...)
2) Takes forever to scroll down the page because of that @#$#%& molecule image
3) No gallery. Just a bunch of page numbers with nothing to guide the user to what he or she is interested in. Hey, I just wanted to see the finished product. I'm not interested in a picture of some cables. I've seen cables before, you know? They don't get any more interesting.
4) Spell check? Definately not encorperated into the web design process
The thing is, police departments aren't even short on funds to fight child pornography. They don't need the money. He just wants to tax porn because he doesn't like it. (Or something. I find it hard to believe that anyone really doesn't like porn. I think this guy might have... issues.)
Really the vox populi, isn't it? I doubt if anyone on this list makes less than $200,000 a year, and most are in upper management and supervisorial roles. The home computer is now disposable! For people who administer a departmental budget and who have incomes in the mid-six-figures. That is, everyone who matters to the NY Times.
These people remind me of my old CEO. His computer was way nicer than anyone else's, even those of the PhD software engineers, even though he only needed it for spreadsheets and Powerpoint and couldn't make use of 50 percent of its capabilities. But he was the boss and had to have the nicest computer! Really childish. He would have tried to justify its expense, but it's dead obvious that he had it because he was closest to the company purse strings.
What obnoxious, self-congratulatory crap. It was *not* a good value to spend $400 on a new computer rather than remove the Spyware. OK? It just wasn't. He did it because he's lazy and can afford to waste money. He wouldn't have lost anything by taking the half hour he would have spent visiting porn sites (how else would he get so infested with Spyware?) and installing Adaware.
The whole point of this article is "Ooh. Look how busy and important I am. I'm a doofus who visits porn sites and gets his computer infested with Spyware, but look how busy and important I am!"
It seems that the chief value of such a system is that after a disaster, they can put out a press release letting people know they have it, so everything is under control, no need to panic.
They might as well get a box, put some flashing lights on it, and broadcast a press release about their TerrorDetect advanced terrorist early warning system (tm). Stops terror in its tracks!