I agree that in a strictly linear tax system there would have to be a subsidy for the poor to offset the discriminatory effect of the taxation. And anyway I find nonlinear taxation to be fair as long as it increases for the rich rather than the opposite. But taxation with thousands of exceptions doesn't seem fair to anyone.
I think there's a direct causal link between good information and good voting. And I place this at a higher priority than technical net neutrality, which doesn't by itself achieve good information, it just achieves a lot of little media yapping at the big media but unable to change their behavior.
But this is all assuming that the voter is willing to change the channel and explore new opinions, rather than stay on the channel that causes the least anxiety because it is closest to the voter's current opinions.
I submit that this is not fulfilling the responsibility of the voter to be sufficiently informed, and if that's all they are willing to do I am not sanguine about their having the right to vote at all. But I don't see how we get to having responsible voters by cultivating irresponsible media.
It's
Plaid Cymru
as represented for English-language writers:-)
I am sorry that the Beeb did that, but I bet it's nothing next to what happens on Fox every day. What we are discussing here is that ISPs are about to get the right to act like Fox.
A) It is fraud to offer 'internet' access and cut off or slow down access to the internet you are paying for.
Only for your private definition of internet service. Now, I might actually like that definition, but there isn't a similar definition in U.S. law where it counts, or this would not be nearly so much of an issue.
B) Taxpayers have a fundamental right to be able to control what happens on public land. If it is your own private land you should have the freedom to do whatever the heck you want so long as it doesn't violate the rights of others, but on public land it is every taxpayer's land.
So, you're talking about the pole plant, and the radio airwaves. But this applies to 1) how the right to build a pole plant or operate on a radio frequency is granted and 2) what right you have to operate a channel on a partially publicly supported pole plant before we get to 3) how a particular private network - and if there's more than one of them they will tend to be treated as private - is operated. I think you might better direct your efforts to 1 and 2.
C) Most ISPs have received large tax payer 'donations' to 'modernize' America. And taxpayers have a fundamental right to use their tax dollars, net neutrality allows taxpayers to receive the services they pay for.
I can't imagine how many trillions of dollars GM has had in subsidies through the construction of the interstate highway system, etc. (Although one of you might be able to come up with an estimate.) And we get to say precious little about GM's operation, even now that we own it temporarily. Although it would be very desirable to see fairness in many things that you spend tax dollars on - private patents driven by public research dollars is another case worthy of reform - you are not going to win any of these arguments while using a plutocratic channel to communicate with the electorate.
As for your point, whenever you confuse it with the 'fairness' doctrine you lose people because many people are smart enough to realize that the fairness doctrine is damaging. Net neutrality is an issue because the ISPs have been messing with public land and public funds and the public has the right to use those funds/land the way they choose.
I just happen to think that how you get information that you will vote upon is a lot more important than your right to distribute an illegitimate copy of American Idiot.
tell me that the current way the news is reported is good for the political health of the United States
Of course it's not. But that does not mean that for the government to decide what news can be reported, and how it will be reported, is better.
I think we've established that lassez-faire capitalism isn't the answer. But you seem to be saying that the long tail is the answer, and yet the long tail is mostly disproven.
Flat taxation is just one of very many things that you'll have a hard time selling politically while the channels of communication to the electorate are controlled by giant corporations that take advantage of special taxation.
One problem with technical net neutrality is that it is decoupled from the very reasons that make neutrality politically desirable. Not that you have the freedom to run high bandwidth peer-to-peer applications on a connection that isn't really right for them, but that you are presented with a wealth of differing political views, and you should not have to change the channel to hear them.
Technical net neutrality is a desirable goal in itself, but not a sufficient one. Just look at the current polarization in congress, which follows the polarization of the electorate, which follows the polarization of news reporting, and tell me that the current way the news is reported is good for the political health of the United States.
Good legislation for fair news reporting has suffered so far because it's confused with freedom of the press. But the constitution doesn't give you the freedom to deliberately lie to the electorate about news they will vote upon - whether you're a news medium or an elected official. We're not going to have a healthy democracy if we can't come up with any way to prosecute that.
People vote based on what they read, see, or hear on the news. The FCC has already abdicated its responsibility regarding broadcast media, no more fairness doctrine and nothing to replace it. Now they want to do the same with the internet. What this means is that the United States will move very solidly toward being even more of a plutocracy than it is today.
Malin used to work at Pixar. He's the absolute right person to do this. He doesn't really need Cameron, just give him the assignment.
What bothers me about this, though, is that this science project has to pander to the public with eye-candy. Because we can't sell them on the science. I think this says something about our national lack of education, and something about the public having become a massively parallel knee-jerk driven by the lies fed to them daily on Fox TV and the trash TV that is more important to them than mankind's future.
Can you construct a compelling reason that this vehicle, rather than its payload, should loiter in space on a military mission? IMO the X-37 should put up something that's not designed to work in atmosphere, but which has delta-V to change orbit, etc., and then the X-37 should warp orbit to something that's ready to be returned and de-orbit with it. Ultimately, this is a launch and re-entry vehicle, not a space vehicle.
I don't see the logic in this. Existing missles have a delta-V that could reach orbital velocity. That's why their boosters get re-used for civilian missions. If anyone wanted to loiter a missle in orbit, in contravention of the treaty about that, I would imagine that some of the existing MERV systems have that capability. But sitting one in orbit doesn't make it harder to shoot down when it re-enters, because regardless of how well it is stealthed it can be seen - if by no other means, when it occludes a star. Having it in orbit just makes destroying its launch pad irrelevant.
Submarines can go anywhere, and sit there for months, and launch a missle that arrives in 20 minutes rather than 2 hours. If you want to worry about US nuclear capability, worry about that.
I am dubious that this scales if you are trying to clean up orbital garbage. There's a lot. If you are trying to deorbit hostile satellites, they are likely to blow themselves up. Probably all you can do successfully is shoot them. This only makes the debris problem worse.
X-37 is, like the shuttle, meant to soft-land and be re-used. Nuclear missles are meant to get somewhere really fast and avoid anti-ballistic missles, and blow themselves up. Not really the X-37 mission.
It's for spy satellites, among other things. Nuclear missles can get anywhere in two hours already.
Buran flew in 1988. Maybe it was autonomous. And then sat in a warehouse until the building collapsed from lack of maintenance, destroying Buran. I guess this is no worse than spacecraft rusting out in museum parking lots in the U.S.
When I joined the computer graphics lab, I was a self-taught programmer and a communication arts major at the adjoining college. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to skip some of the crap they were teaching computer students back then.
Well, going back to why Larry Wall created Perl, it was about programmers being lazy. I think the observation was really about the fact that sysadmins did the same thing over and over. Thus, the tool maker would be more effective than the mechanic.
Well, Busybox has other problems, mostly to do with license non-compliance by the embedded industry and the resulting lawsuits. A replacement for it has to satisfy some non-technical requirements, such as having only one company to pay a reasonable amount if you absolutely can't or won't deal with the GPL.
I have written some pretty sophisticated shell programs, including one thing for Debian that took a set of executables and a set of shared libraries and made versions of the libraries containing only the functions called for in the executables. It got the system to fit on a floppy when it otherwise would not have. It did a lot of list-processing in shell. Fortunately, someone eventually replaced that with a non-sh program.
At this point I would not write another large shell script of any kind, and am mostly doing the three-liners in Ruby as well.
The reason you would learn the shell would be to pass a certification test. You would be a better sysadmin or programmer if your main scripting language was Python or Ruby.
Slashdot Mirror
At least this convinced the Governator that offshore drilling was not a good way to shore up California's state budget deficit.
I agree that in a strictly linear tax system there would have to be a subsidy for the poor to offset the discriminatory effect of the taxation. And anyway I find nonlinear taxation to be fair as long as it increases for the rich rather than the opposite. But taxation with thousands of exceptions doesn't seem fair to anyone.
I think there's a direct causal link between good information and good voting. And I place this at a higher priority than technical net neutrality, which doesn't by itself achieve good information, it just achieves a lot of little media yapping at the big media but unable to change their behavior.
But this is all assuming that the voter is willing to change the channel and explore new opinions, rather than stay on the channel that causes the least anxiety because it is closest to the voter's current opinions.
I submit that this is not fulfilling the responsibility of the voter to be sufficiently informed, and if that's all they are willing to do I am not sanguine about their having the right to vote at all. But I don't see how we get to having responsible voters by cultivating irresponsible media.
It's Plaid Cymru as represented for English-language writers :-)
I am sorry that the Beeb did that, but I bet it's nothing next to what happens on Fox every day. What we are discussing here is that ISPs are about to get the right to act like Fox.
Only for your private definition of internet service. Now, I might actually like that definition, but there isn't a similar definition in U.S. law where it counts, or this would not be nearly so much of an issue.
So, you're talking about the pole plant, and the radio airwaves. But this applies to 1) how the right to build a pole plant or operate on a radio frequency is granted and 2) what right you have to operate a channel on a partially publicly supported pole plant before we get to 3) how a particular private network - and if there's more than one of them they will tend to be treated as private - is operated. I think you might better direct your efforts to 1 and 2.
I can't imagine how many trillions of dollars GM has had in subsidies through the construction of the interstate highway system, etc. (Although one of you might be able to come up with an estimate.) And we get to say precious little about GM's operation, even now that we own it temporarily. Although it would be very desirable to see fairness in many things that you spend tax dollars on - private patents driven by public research dollars is another case worthy of reform - you are not going to win any of these arguments while using a plutocratic channel to communicate with the electorate.
I just happen to think that how you get information that you will vote upon is a lot more important than your right to distribute an illegitimate copy of American Idiot.
I think we've established that lassez-faire capitalism isn't the answer. But you seem to be saying that the long tail is the answer, and yet the long tail is mostly disproven.
Flat taxation is just one of very many things that you'll have a hard time selling politically while the channels of communication to the electorate are controlled by giant corporations that take advantage of special taxation.
One problem with technical net neutrality is that it is decoupled from the very reasons that make neutrality politically desirable. Not that you have the freedom to run high bandwidth peer-to-peer applications on a connection that isn't really right for them, but that you are presented with a wealth of differing political views, and you should not have to change the channel to hear them.
Technical net neutrality is a desirable goal in itself, but not a sufficient one. Just look at the current polarization in congress, which follows the polarization of the electorate, which follows the polarization of news reporting, and tell me that the current way the news is reported is good for the political health of the United States.
Good legislation for fair news reporting has suffered so far because it's confused with freedom of the press. But the constitution doesn't give you the freedom to deliberately lie to the electorate about news they will vote upon - whether you're a news medium or an elected official. We're not going to have a healthy democracy if we can't come up with any way to prosecute that.
People vote based on what they read, see, or hear on the news. The FCC has already abdicated its responsibility regarding broadcast media, no more fairness doctrine and nothing to replace it. Now they want to do the same with the internet. What this means is that the United States will move very solidly toward being even more of a plutocracy than it is today.
I can't say what bad news this is for democracy.
Malin used to work at Pixar. He's the absolute right person to do this. He doesn't really need Cameron, just give him the assignment.
What bothers me about this, though, is that this science project has to pander to the public with eye-candy. Because we can't sell them on the science. I think this says something about our national lack of education, and something about the public having become a massively parallel knee-jerk driven by the lies fed to them daily on Fox TV and the trash TV that is more important to them than mankind's future.
Bruce
I already advise some other countries.
He was only ever an Open Source evangelist when it was opportunistic to be one. I spent enough time fighting him when he was in anti-open-source mode.
I spent a good deal of time fighting him when he was in his anti-open-source mode and didn't believe in his conversion either.
Can you construct a compelling reason that this vehicle, rather than its payload, should loiter in space on a military mission? IMO the X-37 should put up something that's not designed to work in atmosphere, but which has delta-V to change orbit, etc., and then the X-37 should warp orbit to something that's ready to be returned and de-orbit with it. Ultimately, this is a launch and re-entry vehicle, not a space vehicle.
I don't see the logic in this. Existing missles have a delta-V that could reach orbital velocity. That's why their boosters get re-used for civilian missions. If anyone wanted to loiter a missle in orbit, in contravention of the treaty about that, I would imagine that some of the existing MERV systems have that capability. But sitting one in orbit doesn't make it harder to shoot down when it re-enters, because regardless of how well it is stealthed it can be seen - if by no other means, when it occludes a star. Having it in orbit just makes destroying its launch pad irrelevant.
Submarines can go anywhere, and sit there for months, and launch a missle that arrives in 20 minutes rather than 2 hours. If you want to worry about US nuclear capability, worry about that.
I am dubious that this scales if you are trying to clean up orbital garbage. There's a lot. If you are trying to deorbit hostile satellites, they are likely to blow themselves up. Probably all you can do successfully is shoot them. This only makes the debris problem worse.
The first re-usable nuclear missle :-)
X-37 is, like the shuttle, meant to soft-land and be re-used. Nuclear missles are meant to get somewhere really fast and avoid anti-ballistic missles, and blow themselves up. Not really the X-37 mission.
It's for spy satellites, among other things. Nuclear missles can get anywhere in two hours already.
Here's the space shuttle we lost, OK at 1/4 scale, but without the triple redundancy because it doesn't have to carry people. It can do the missions.
The future of space, at least in the near term, doesn't look so great for astronauts.
I wonder if it would scale up to shuttle size?
Buran flew in 1988. Maybe it was autonomous. And then sat in a warehouse until the building collapsed from lack of maintenance, destroying Buran. I guess this is no worse than spacecraft rusting out in museum parking lots in the U.S.
Oh dear. You're right.
When I joined the computer graphics lab, I was a self-taught programmer and a communication arts major at the adjoining college. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to skip some of the crap they were teaching computer students back then.
Well, going back to why Larry Wall created Perl, it was about programmers being lazy. I think the observation was really about the fact that sysadmins did the same thing over and over. Thus, the tool maker would be more effective than the mechanic.
Well, Busybox has other problems, mostly to do with license non-compliance by the embedded industry and the resulting lawsuits. A replacement for it has to satisfy some non-technical requirements, such as having only one company to pay a reasonable amount if you absolutely can't or won't deal with the GPL.
I have written some pretty sophisticated shell programs, including one thing for Debian that took a set of executables and a set of shared libraries and made versions of the libraries containing only the functions called for in the executables. It got the system to fit on a floppy when it otherwise would not have. It did a lot of list-processing in shell. Fortunately, someone eventually replaced that with a non-sh program.
At this point I would not write another large shell script of any kind, and am mostly doing the three-liners in Ruby as well.
The reason you would learn the shell would be to pass a certification test. You would be a better sysadmin or programmer if your main scripting language was Python or Ruby.