I've believed ever since Samuel Alito was nominated that the single worst legacy of the Bush administration will be nomination of Judges Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court, and that those nominations will go down as the worst failures of the Democratic Party to display a spine and stand against Bush's radical ideology.
Roberts is a pretty traditional conservative in most (but not all) ways, which can be bad enough, but Alito is just an out and out fascist who believes strongly in no restraints on executive or corporate power. We're going to be feeling the aftershocks of this administration for decades thanks to the both of them.
That's all well and good if there are a lot of products on the market that meet your demands, but if your demands are enough that you already know which product you want, this seriously undercuts your ability to save money.
For example, a few years ago, I decided on a specific LCD HDTV (an extravagant purchase that I still regret to this day). At the time, MSRP for the set was $8999. All retail outlets sold it for that price. However, I was able to go online and buy it for only $5499. Had the price floor been set at MSRP or something else favorable to the big retailers, I could've lost thousands of dollars in the purchase.
As an internet shopper, I am pleased by this decision because this will also mean the end of the stupid bargain/rebate/shoparound/missed discount remorse routine.
Yeah, well to nuts to that, my friend. I'd rather know that I missed out on the best deal possible than to know that I never had the opportunity to avoid getting gouged because of legalized price fixing. Besides, price comparison search engines will let you easily get pretty close to the best possible prices out there if you look right. Froogle exists for a reason.
Also, if you're going to argue that the existence of alternate products makes this irrelevant, then you should consider that having to compare alternate products negates the advantage of not having to look around for the best discount. I seriously can't believe, though, that you'd rather everyone be gouged than you feel the remorse of missing out on a sale.
Keep in mind, 90% of politicians are ex-lawyers. There are a large number of law firms today that are mired in a world of paper who use computers basically as glorified typewriters. Access to legal research databases is changing a lot of that, but lawyers from the 80s almost certainly had next to no computer experience.
One problem with being a politician is that you have to constantly deal with subject matters beyond your expertise -- farming policy, trade policy, labor policy, tax codes, etc. There are just way too many fields to expertly know and understand. A lot of people in office don't really see any reason to prioritize learning about how computers are commonly used compared to all the other things they've got on their plate to deal with.
Personally, the two biggest modernizations of the way laws are made that I'd like to see are:
Voting over video conference. There's no reason that politicians should have to make a choice between being readily available to their constituents (usually only for campaigning) and being able to vote in Washington. Ideally, I'd like to see Congress entirely decentralized, with people only in DC for formal events.
Version control and change tracking for laws. Ever try to read the PATRIOT Act, or really any large law? The majority of most bills are essentially "diffs" to existing law. An easy way of seeing the before and after effects would be nice as well as ways of tracking who made what changes to laws and why.
Anyone else find it ironic that these rulers enslaved entire races of people for generations to build gigantic pyramids so that they would never be forgotten only to have grave robbers steal everything and Western archaeologists show up thousands of years later asking, "Who the fuck were you?"
People have noted the irony before.
Ozymandius by: Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Politics used to be about advocacy and effective expression. Now it means - and I guess you mean - packaging up your corporate supporters' agendas into something people can swallow without choking.
Not really. Patronage and looking after the needs of the elites has been a part of our nation since before its founding. I recommend reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." It's a bit cynical and has some openly admitted bias to it, but the events it chooses to highlight are fascinating for understanding many of the social and cultural dynamics of US history that most history books either gloss over or entirely omit such as slave rebellions, populist riots against the rich, deliberate attempts to foster a racial divide between slaves and indentured servants, and the financial interests of colonial leaders in independence after the French and Indian War.
The golden age when politicians were pure and acted only voted based on philosophical principle is a myth.
And I don't know much about Hillary, but is it "socialized medicine" she wants, or is she like most politicos completely ignoring the "single-payer" option (which when most common people understand it, seems to be what they'd most want) in favor of other models that favor private insurance companies?
Geez. If you want to know that, just go back to when she was driving the effort to make a government healthcare system when her husband was president. The bill was exactly the sort of mixed-model monstrosity that you're talking about. It would've been huge, complex, and would've likely saved taxpayers very little in administrative overhead costs.
The newly elected Republican congress eviscerated it. The Clinton's made the mistake of proposing a compromise bill (between single-provider social medicine and fully private systems) in a climate when compromise was to be wrung out through hard battle. In other words, she set the goal posts too far to the right, and the Republicans had a field day portraying it as a hard left measure, setting back healthcare reform for over a decade.
I was surprised that Obama and Clinton had actually started putting videos on youtube [...]
I'm not. This is because 90+% of all staffers in most political campaigns are either current students or recent college graduates. When I volunteered in the 2006 election for a gubernatorial candidate that had been in office in the legislature for 20 years, we had a pretty solid YouTube presence. This is because every single staffer was internet savvy. I was the only volunteer for the campaign that didn't have a Facebook or Myspace account as far as I'm aware.
Social networking was primarily tapped by Democrats in 2004 thanks to the Dean campaign, but 2006 and on has shown that both sides are about equally savvy in this respect.
As long as politicians are mired in old thinking and do not understand current technology we will continue to have problems with the way technology is regulated and how it is being incentivised (or not).
Side note: This will ALWAYS be a problem because politicians don't really start getting into senior positions to affect things until they're in their 40's or later. Most of the cutting edge of technology is driven by people in their 20's. This generation gap does not look like it's going to change any time in the future.
However, grad schools DO care about GPA. If you're ever planning to go back, it might be worth it to retake the classes.
This is something that a lot of people (including myself in the past) don't think about. If you ever want to go to grad school of any sort, GPA is IMPORTANT. Trust me -- applying to grad school with a GRE/LSAT/MCAT score in the upper 95% and a GPA way below the lower 25% for that school will not get you into a good grad school. (Having good relationships with your profs to get references is also vitally important and may be something else you're not thinking about as an undergrad.)
If you're sure that you're just going to enter the workforce and stay, then to heck with it -- GPA only matters for the first job. I've never even put GPA on my resume after getting my second job during while I was still in college. Afterwards, it's skills they want. However, make sure that's what you want. Things could change in ten years, and you might be regretting slacking off.
Not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything...
Maybe they're afraid of VOIP on future 3G iPhones, but not on this one. Have you ever tried a VOIP app on GPRS? The latency is so bad it's unusable. It's not even usable on my Sprint EVDO phone tethered to a laptop, but much moreso than a GPRS data connection.
You've got some good points there. VoIP on EDGE would be unusable, but there are two reasons this could still be a concern. 1) As you note, future 3G iPhones: Open up the SDK now and have to deal with it in the future. 2) WiFi connections: Isn't the current iPhone able to use local WiFi connections?
Be confounded by yourselves, then. My reply was to pete.com's assertion that unlimited data costs $50 from AT&T. That's why I even explicitly noted that $50+ data plans were usually either corporate or data-only in the next line.
I'm not asserting that the iPhone deal isn't better than what I'm getting; I'm asserting that unlimited data isn't normally as expensive as he thinks it is.
I pay $20 for unlimited data on top of my $40 300 minute plan. Unlimited data only costs $50 and up when its either a corporate plan or a data-only plan.
If the phone calls will be running on voIP, which is *data*, then technically there should be no monthly limit on minutes. Who wants to be the first to try this out?
I think you may have just hit on the very reason why Apple isn't supporting 3rd party apps. I'll bet the deal with AT&T had some sort of language to prevent this very thing since many of the iPhone's coolest features require a lot of data access. Since non-unlimited data plans are nightmarishly expensive if you're a heavy web user (like I am), it seems almost a prerequisite that iPhone plans come with unlimited data.
Naturally, this opens up the very possibility you just mentioned, so both AT&T and Apple are probably very keen on making sure that it doesn't happen. Hence, no iPhone SDK for 3rd parties. All the bluster about controlling the experience is probably just that -- bluster meant to distract from the real issue.
Why else would Apple cripple a brand new platform that could fuel a rush of developers for them except to appease AT&T?
Presentation should not be an impediment to getting the content. Bad grammar that makes an article hard to read is an impediment to understanding.
Also, whether we like to admit it or not, our minds are tuned to have certain biases for and against styles of speaking and writing. If her way of writing makes her seem vacuous, it makes her arguments far less persuasive then if she had written it in a more scholarly style. You may decry that as unfair, but it's human nature, and she needs to adjust her style of presentation to accommodate that. Failure to do so is just ignorant or stubborn.
Sarcasm is hard enough to detect on the internet, but it's completely impossible when someone's pretending to be a reactionary, anti-science redneck. There are WAY too many people who genuinely espouse such beliefs. There is literally NO amount of clownishness you could put into such a post and not sound believably like someone innately skeptical of any science news.
In my defense, though, I live in the South; I have to deal with people like this all the time, so it pricks a sore spot for me.
I think you're reading way too much into this (and seemingly taking it personally -- not a first-born, I'm guessing). Furthermore, you seem to be displaying a strong confirmation bias against unpleasant news that's leading you to discard a paper that's essentially nothing more than statistical analysis of a large population group -- hardly a thing subject to bias or number-fudging.
All this says is that on average a firstborn son will be 2-3 IQ points higher. The natural variance within a family is more than sufficient for later-born sons to be significantly smarter than the first-born. Actually, what this study says is that previous studies (which focused only on birth order) missed out on the effects of losing the first-born children on the later-born children. Essentially, they show that the difference is not biological but instead social.
If you don't get that much, and are willing to cast aspersions on the character of the researchers involved because you don't like what their research suggests, something tells me that their line of work wouldn't be a very good fit for you either.
They probably do -- in Japan. At least in drawn form. I don't know; it was really just the worst combination of words describing sex crimes that I could come up with at the time. I'm sure someone can find something even more offensive.
There are imageboard sites out there with essentially a full-time troll culture -- often dedicated to invading other sites -- that will do their dead-level best to make this impractical. I don't think The Pirate Bay has really considered just how much effort monitoring a self-touting, "censorship free" site that allows porn is going to be.
They're pretty much doomed. It'll be an interested self-implosion to watch.
Publish the date, time and ip address of every upload. No censorship.
Post it via TOR or some anonymizer. Unless they ban all IP associated with such tools (which even sites under dedicated troll assault like 4chan can't do), that's no guarantee for the hardcore.
Still, it's an idea that I find amusing for deterring the casual bad actor.
I can't think of a country that doesn't have some law SOME where that will be broken in the commission of running a completely censorship-free site. Even if it wasn't hosted in Sweden, Swedish law was going to apply to them since the company is based out of Sweden.
I think this will be an interested exercise in which happens faster. 1) The Pirate Bay compromises their morals. 2) Law enforcement shuts down The Pirate Bay on charges that will stick.
Honestly, I really expect Swedish law enforcement -- which has tried raiding them once before -- to just be salivating at the chance to shut this down and arrest the owners as soon as some child porn gets posted. I wouldn't be surprised if they had someone outside of legal liability for entrapment post it for them. I'm sure the FBI would be willing to spare some for the cause.
I can't see this thing both: 1) Holding true to the principles of no censorship whatsoever. 2) Not being immediately shut down when some troll posts necro-pedo-beastility images as part of some SA vs. Fark vs. 4chan contest to find the most simultaneously illegal and offense image to post.
How about the actual EU Directive on Data Retention? (Directive 95/46/EC)
Read a nice summary of it here. It prevents a lot of the data mining and reselling that goes on in this country. If you don't feel that it's been good for anything but providing corporate welfare (...as a largely unfunded mandate), please let me know where it's failed and stripped citizens' rights.
Assuming then that you're the original poster, what else could be construed to be the point of your statement:
There is no problem with self-regulation in the industry. The problem is that the industry is not allowed to self-regulate due to special interest groups and politicians' own greed and egos affecting the funding and legislative favoritism.
I mean, other than to say that the industry would self-regulate privacy better than the government would, what other meaning can be ascribed to this?
While I agree in principle with what you've said, could you tell me where to go to find a bank account that beats inflation? As far as I know, the only banks that provide that sort of interest rate are online-only establishments. My big national bank (Wachovia) only gives 0.55% on its savings accounts and only 3.43% on money market accounts... with nearly half a million dollars in them. All of my assets put together couldn't top 3% on their money market account scale, and CPI inflation was 3.8% last year.
So far, I'm beating inflation only because of my mutual fund investments. I could transfer them all into a money market account but I'd lose a HUGE return on investment, so a bank account is just a way to lose money more slowly than by keeping it all in cash as far as I'm concerned.
Care to tell me when? The federal government has been in the business of granting subsidies since the early 19th century when we adopted Henry Clay's American System, which built on Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufacturers.
The IT industry and all modern privacy concerns are significantly younger than this. There has been no time at which the IT industry has not existed in a climate of bought and sold influence and corporate welfare. After all, the modern IT industry was born from the likes of IBM and university labs that had long enjoyed the benefits of government funding. Your assertion that the industry has ever been free from a cozy relationship with the government is farcical.
However, your main point is that you seem to think that if the government just got their grabby little hands out of the tech industry, the industry would just do the right thing and protect customers' privacy, right? That's pretty deluded, in my opinion.
Privacy is an expensive impediment to business. It forces companies to incur costs they'd rather not bear, and it impedes market research they've love to do. Privacy in inimical to the interests of industry because it lowers profits. It's not in the best interests of business to support privacy except so far as to make sure that sellable data only ends up in the hands of those who pay them for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've believed ever since Samuel Alito was nominated that the single worst legacy of the Bush administration will be nomination of Judges Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court, and that those nominations will go down as the worst failures of the Democratic Party to display a spine and stand against Bush's radical ideology.
Roberts is a pretty traditional conservative in most (but not all) ways, which can be bad enough, but Alito is just an out and out fascist who believes strongly in no restraints on executive or corporate power. We're going to be feeling the aftershocks of this administration for decades thanks to the both of them.
That's all well and good if there are a lot of products on the market that meet your demands, but if your demands are enough that you already know which product you want, this seriously undercuts your ability to save money.
For example, a few years ago, I decided on a specific LCD HDTV (an extravagant purchase that I still regret to this day). At the time, MSRP for the set was $8999. All retail outlets sold it for that price. However, I was able to go online and buy it for only $5499. Had the price floor been set at MSRP or something else favorable to the big retailers, I could've lost thousands of dollars in the purchase.
As an internet shopper, I am pleased by this decision because this will also mean the end of the stupid bargain/rebate/shoparound/missed discount remorse routine.
Yeah, well to nuts to that, my friend. I'd rather know that I missed out on the best deal possible than to know that I never had the opportunity to avoid getting gouged because of legalized price fixing. Besides, price comparison search engines will let you easily get pretty close to the best possible prices out there if you look right. Froogle exists for a reason.
Also, if you're going to argue that the existence of alternate products makes this irrelevant, then you should consider that having to compare alternate products negates the advantage of not having to look around for the best discount. I seriously can't believe, though, that you'd rather everyone be gouged than you feel the remorse of missing out on a sale.
One problem with being a politician is that you have to constantly deal with subject matters beyond your expertise -- farming policy, trade policy, labor policy, tax codes, etc. There are just way too many fields to expertly know and understand. A lot of people in office don't really see any reason to prioritize learning about how computers are commonly used compared to all the other things they've got on their plate to deal with.
Personally, the two biggest modernizations of the way laws are made that I'd like to see are:
People have noted the irony before.
Politics used to be about advocacy and effective expression. Now it means - and I guess you mean - packaging up your corporate supporters' agendas into something people can swallow without choking.
Not really. Patronage and looking after the needs of the elites has been a part of our nation since before its founding. I recommend reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." It's a bit cynical and has some openly admitted bias to it, but the events it chooses to highlight are fascinating for understanding many of the social and cultural dynamics of US history that most history books either gloss over or entirely omit such as slave rebellions, populist riots against the rich, deliberate attempts to foster a racial divide between slaves and indentured servants, and the financial interests of colonial leaders in independence after the French and Indian War.
The golden age when politicians were pure and acted only voted based on philosophical principle is a myth.
And I don't know much about Hillary, but is it "socialized medicine" she wants, or is she like most politicos completely ignoring the "single-payer" option (which when most common people understand it, seems to be what they'd most want) in favor of other models that favor private insurance companies?
Geez. If you want to know that, just go back to when she was driving the effort to make a government healthcare system when her husband was president. The bill was exactly the sort of mixed-model monstrosity that you're talking about. It would've been huge, complex, and would've likely saved taxpayers very little in administrative overhead costs.
The newly elected Republican congress eviscerated it. The Clinton's made the mistake of proposing a compromise bill (between single-provider social medicine and fully private systems) in a climate when compromise was to be wrung out through hard battle. In other words, she set the goal posts too far to the right, and the Republicans had a field day portraying it as a hard left measure, setting back healthcare reform for over a decade.
I was surprised that Obama and Clinton had actually started putting videos on youtube [...]
I'm not. This is because 90+% of all staffers in most political campaigns are either current students or recent college graduates. When I volunteered in the 2006 election for a gubernatorial candidate that had been in office in the legislature for 20 years, we had a pretty solid YouTube presence. This is because every single staffer was internet savvy. I was the only volunteer for the campaign that didn't have a Facebook or Myspace account as far as I'm aware.
Social networking was primarily tapped by Democrats in 2004 thanks to the Dean campaign, but 2006 and on has shown that both sides are about equally savvy in this respect.
As long as politicians are mired in old thinking and do not understand current technology we will continue to have problems with the way technology is regulated and how it is being incentivised (or not).
Side note: This will ALWAYS be a problem because politicians don't really start getting into senior positions to affect things until they're in their 40's or later. Most of the cutting edge of technology is driven by people in their 20's. This generation gap does not look like it's going to change any time in the future.
However, grad schools DO care about GPA. If you're ever planning to go back, it might be worth it to retake the classes.
This is something that a lot of people (including myself in the past) don't think about. If you ever want to go to grad school of any sort, GPA is IMPORTANT. Trust me -- applying to grad school with a GRE/LSAT/MCAT score in the upper 95% and a GPA way below the lower 25% for that school will not get you into a good grad school. (Having good relationships with your profs to get references is also vitally important and may be something else you're not thinking about as an undergrad.)
If you're sure that you're just going to enter the workforce and stay, then to heck with it -- GPA only matters for the first job. I've never even put GPA on my resume after getting my second job during while I was still in college. Afterwards, it's skills they want. However, make sure that's what you want. Things could change in ten years, and you might be regretting slacking off.
Not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything...
Maybe they're afraid of VOIP on future 3G iPhones, but not on this one. Have you ever tried a VOIP app on GPRS? The latency is so bad it's unusable. It's not even usable on my Sprint EVDO phone tethered to a laptop, but much moreso than a GPRS data connection.
You've got some good points there. VoIP on EDGE would be unusable, but there are two reasons this could still be a concern.
1) As you note, future 3G iPhones: Open up the SDK now and have to deal with it in the future.
2) WiFi connections: Isn't the current iPhone able to use local WiFi connections?
Be confounded by yourselves, then. My reply was to pete.com's assertion that unlimited data costs $50 from AT&T. That's why I even explicitly noted that $50+ data plans were usually either corporate or data-only in the next line.
I'm not asserting that the iPhone deal isn't better than what I'm getting; I'm asserting that unlimited data isn't normally as expensive as he thinks it is.
Sheesh... context clues, people.
I pay $20 for unlimited data on top of my $40 300 minute plan.
Unlimited data only costs $50 and up when its either a corporate plan or a data-only plan.
If the phone calls will be running on voIP, which is *data*, then technically there should be no monthly limit on minutes. Who wants to be the first to try this out?
I think you may have just hit on the very reason why Apple isn't supporting 3rd party apps. I'll bet the deal with AT&T had some sort of language to prevent this very thing since many of the iPhone's coolest features require a lot of data access. Since non-unlimited data plans are nightmarishly expensive if you're a heavy web user (like I am), it seems almost a prerequisite that iPhone plans come with unlimited data.
Naturally, this opens up the very possibility you just mentioned, so both AT&T and Apple are probably very keen on making sure that it doesn't happen. Hence, no iPhone SDK for 3rd parties. All the bluster about controlling the experience is probably just that -- bluster meant to distract from the real issue.
Why else would Apple cripple a brand new platform that could fuel a rush of developers for them except to appease AT&T?
So presentation matters to you more than content?
Presentation should not be an impediment to getting the content. Bad grammar that makes an article hard to read is an impediment to understanding.
Also, whether we like to admit it or not, our minds are tuned to have certain biases for and against styles of speaking and writing. If her way of writing makes her seem vacuous, it makes her arguments far less persuasive then if she had written it in a more scholarly style. You may decry that as unfair, but it's human nature, and she needs to adjust her style of presentation to accommodate that. Failure to do so is just ignorant or stubborn.
When we have strong AI teachers will be outdated because they won't be able to give students the one-on-one time the computer can.
When we have strong AI, the students will be outdated too.
Sarcasm is hard enough to detect on the internet, but it's completely impossible when someone's pretending to be a reactionary, anti-science redneck. There are WAY too many people who genuinely espouse such beliefs. There is literally NO amount of clownishness you could put into such a post and not sound believably like someone innately skeptical of any science news.
In my defense, though, I live in the South; I have to deal with people like this all the time, so it pricks a sore spot for me.
I thought one of Linux's advantages was that you didn't really need to Rebuntu so often.
Also -- obligatory xkcd.
I think you're reading way too much into this (and seemingly taking it personally -- not a first-born, I'm guessing). Furthermore, you seem to be displaying a strong confirmation bias against unpleasant news that's leading you to discard a paper that's essentially nothing more than statistical analysis of a large population group -- hardly a thing subject to bias or number-fudging.
All this says is that on average a firstborn son will be 2-3 IQ points higher. The natural variance within a family is more than sufficient for later-born sons to be significantly smarter than the first-born. Actually, what this study says is that previous studies (which focused only on birth order) missed out on the effects of losing the first-born children on the later-born children. Essentially, they show that the difference is not biological but instead social.
If you don't get that much, and are willing to cast aspersions on the character of the researchers involved because you don't like what their research suggests, something tells me that their line of work wouldn't be a very good fit for you either.
They probably do -- in Japan. At least in drawn form.
I don't know; it was really just the worst combination of words describing sex crimes that I could come up with at the time. I'm sure someone can find something even more offensive.
There are imageboard sites out there with essentially a full-time troll culture -- often dedicated to invading other sites -- that will do their dead-level best to make this impractical. I don't think The Pirate Bay has really considered just how much effort monitoring a self-touting, "censorship free" site that allows porn is going to be.
They're pretty much doomed. It'll be an interested self-implosion to watch.
Publish the date, time and ip address of every upload. No censorship.
Post it via TOR or some anonymizer. Unless they ban all IP associated with such tools (which even sites under dedicated troll assault like 4chan can't do), that's no guarantee for the hardcore.
Still, it's an idea that I find amusing for deterring the casual bad actor.
I can't think of a country that doesn't have some law SOME where that will be broken in the commission of running a completely censorship-free site. Even if it wasn't hosted in Sweden, Swedish law was going to apply to them since the company is based out of Sweden.
I think this will be an interested exercise in which happens faster.
1) The Pirate Bay compromises their morals.
2) Law enforcement shuts down The Pirate Bay on charges that will stick.
Honestly, I really expect Swedish law enforcement -- which has tried raiding them once before -- to just be salivating at the chance to shut this down and arrest the owners as soon as some child porn gets posted. I wouldn't be surprised if they had someone outside of legal liability for entrapment post it for them. I'm sure the FBI would be willing to spare some for the cause.
I can't see this thing both:
1) Holding true to the principles of no censorship whatsoever.
2) Not being immediately shut down when some troll posts necro-pedo-beastility images as part of some SA vs. Fark vs. 4chan contest to find the most simultaneously illegal and offense image to post.
How about the actual EU Directive on Data Retention? (Directive 95/46/EC)
Read a nice summary of it here. It prevents a lot of the data mining and reselling that goes on in this country. If you don't feel that it's been good for anything but providing corporate welfare (...as a largely unfunded mandate), please let me know where it's failed and stripped citizens' rights.
I mean, other than to say that the industry would self-regulate privacy better than the government would, what other meaning can be ascribed to this?
While I agree in principle with what you've said, could you tell me where to go to find a bank account that beats inflation? As far as I know, the only banks that provide that sort of interest rate are online-only establishments. My big national bank (Wachovia) only gives 0.55% on its savings accounts and only 3.43% on money market accounts... with nearly half a million dollars in them. All of my assets put together couldn't top 3% on their money market account scale, and CPI inflation was 3.8% last year.
So far, I'm beating inflation only because of my mutual fund investments. I could transfer them all into a money market account but I'd lose a HUGE return on investment, so a bank account is just a way to lose money more slowly than by keeping it all in cash as far as I'm concerned.
Care to tell me when? The federal government has been in the business of granting subsidies since the early 19th century when we adopted Henry Clay's American System, which built on Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufacturers.
The IT industry and all modern privacy concerns are significantly younger than this. There has been no time at which the IT industry has not existed in a climate of bought and sold influence and corporate welfare. After all, the modern IT industry was born from the likes of IBM and university labs that had long enjoyed the benefits of government funding. Your assertion that the industry has ever been free from a cozy relationship with the government is farcical.
However, your main point is that you seem to think that if the government just got their grabby little hands out of the tech industry, the industry would just do the right thing and protect customers' privacy, right? That's pretty deluded, in my opinion.
Privacy is an expensive impediment to business. It forces companies to incur costs they'd rather not bear, and it impedes market research they've love to do. Privacy in inimical to the interests of industry because it lowers profits. It's not in the best interests of business to support privacy except so far as to make sure that sellable data only ends up in the hands of those who pay them for it.