On the contrary, I'm only swayed by facts and logic. If you have some, I'd be happy to consider them, independent of what I think of you.
Two suggestions: First, don't shut down a debate once you peg someone as progressive. It makes you appear afraid to debate them. Second, try to be consistent. You claimed that you're for free speech, but then argued that corporations should be allowed to control speech on the Internet. Unless I misunderstood you.
1. crooksandliars.com and mediamatters.org are sites whose main purpose is to document the outrageous behavior of the right so we don't have to rely on hearsay and wacky conspiracy theories. They actually do what you claim Glenn Beck does.
2. Glenn Beck is one seriously troubled and paranoid man. Or else he's morally bankrupt and just acting nuts so he can make truckloads of money by whipping people into a frenzy.
3. You've got the "hands over control of the internet" idea exactly backwards. Net neutrality is about preventing any entity from having control of the Internet - whether that is the government or corporations. It's the opposite of shutting down dissent - it makes it illegal to shut down dissent. And that's a good idea under any administration.
Where's the contradiction? The percentage of total income taxes collected that came from the top 1% of earners is going up because the rich are getting richer, not because they've been hit with a higher tax rate. Check the history of the top marginal tax rate here:
If you want to disagree about this being tied to the rise of a strong middle class, we can discuss that. But perhaps you could start by agreeing that increasing tax rates can lead to increasing revenue.
Why do you think that's "pretty high"? I'll assume your $100k is accurate and figure a neurosurgeon does just a couple surgeries a week. So maybe we're talking about $1k per surgery, which is likely a very low percentage of the overall cost, to cover legitimate and frivolous lawsuits combined.
There is still a vote. The "self-executing rule" combines what would have been the vote for the Senate bill with a vote for amendments to that bill. When the Republican party is the majority, they use this rule too. And more often than the Democrats do.
No. We don't know how many of those 467K exemptions were done during the Bush administration. We also don't know how many of the exemptions were executed by Bush appointees.
- paragraph 2: Obama told agencies specifically not to use the "deliberate process" exemption so frequently - paragraph 4: Obama was only president for 9 months of the period in question, with no breakout by quarter. I assume a bit of lag as the new administration asserts itself - paragraph 6: refers to non-FOIA transparency - release of full White House visitor logs and more federal data online than before - paragraphs 7 & 8: Obama, Emanuel and Bauer all claim to be trying to improve transparency - paragraph 9: "nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions"? is that 7? 8? which ones were reduced? - paragraph 10: more exemptions are being cited, but there are no numbers of how many or what percentage of requests were rejected in part or in full - paragraph 11: the "Open Government Directive" (a good thing) mentioned in a negative context - that they're still waiting after 3 months. much further down we find out they've cut the backlog of requests down by nearly half so far (paragraph 22). how long were requests taking circa 2008? - paragraph 21: some fuzzy numbers suggesting there's more transparency, but they're no more convincing as the figures suggesting the opposite (how many agencies increased full and partial requests?)
In short, the article's a mess of numbers that don't mean much. Perhaps the next directive could be to report all the real statistics for each agency monthly.
Do you want to abolish / ban Scientology or just expose it and let it die off? I'm an atheist and would like that fate for all faiths but wouldn't want to ban any ideas. None of the atheists I know want to ban your faith either, so you've probably got nothing to worry about there. Of course some of us would like to end the special rights theists get (e.g. churches not paying taxes). Not sure if that would affect you. Also, you mentioned that your faith should be permissable as long as you're not committing crimes. Same goes for our lack of faith, I assume. But also consider that many theists push to make things we do illegal (e.g. abortion and gay marriage). So I don't think anyone's infringing your freedom of religion, but theists do infringe the freedoms of non-believers. Not necessarily you, of course.
Also, note that atheism is not groupthink. If anything, it's the opposite - the absence of groupthink.
Not a bad idea from a theoretical standpoint, but I see a couple problems with it.
First is that a lot of this likely needs to be done in hardware to scale for a large service provider. I'm not sure it's much tougher to write software with many shallow queues (or a variable number of queues) than it is to write it with a few deep queues, but it might pose a problem doing it in hardware. Just about any core router is going to have a few queues to work with. Some dedicated traffic shaping box may or may not be able to do what you want.
Second is the where to do the queuing. In a simple network topology with a natural choke point, maybe that might be workable. But when you have many sites, a backbone and multiple Internet peering points, congestion could happen in lots of places and each of those places would need to be able to discern which customer a packet is for to put it in the correct queue. Could get very complicated and more trouble than it's worth.
The same technology may give them the capability to do all sorts of mischief, but I don't see a problem with prioritization based on application. If they prioritize their own VoIP but somehow keep dropping or delaying Vonage packets, that's a problem. That's just an example, of course.
Democratic is the adjective, as in the Democratic party. Some Republican did a study and found that dropping the -ic sounded worse, so they adopted it. Now if you're a Republican, fine. But I don't want anyone being mistakenly taken as a Republican in this day and age.
Though "pointless" $500 billion expenditure sounds too neutral. The effect of the expenditure is disastrous. Better to have just lit that money on fire.
If you don't see enormous, substantive difference between Obama and Bush or McCain, then you're not paying attention. So he represents huge change on policy.
As for the tone of the campaign, he was remarkably positive during the primary. It's an open question how positive he'll be through the general. He is trying to shut down independent 527 organizations that were expected to go negative. MoveOn already agreed to shut their 527 down.
I find that people that think Obama is an empty suit without substance haven't looked very hard. The substance doesn't make it into the 30 second commercials, the 5 second news soundbites or even the (mostly awful) televised debates. Pick an issue you care about and read up on the details. There'll certainly be things to criticize, but at least he won't seem substanceless.
Note that he used to be criticized for being a dry, policy-heavy candidate. Sometime by 2004 he figured out how to connect with an audience.
Obama's campaign isn't doing this. In fact he's trying to rein in independent groups to keep a positive message. For example, he got MoveOn to agree to shut down its 527 organization last week.
As for how you know a candidate cares nothing for the issues he espouses, I have a theory. You don't.
Is voting for your own race necessarily racist? No. But I don't think you used the best analogy. Agreement on an issue is not the same as having similar skin color.
I think the best way to knock down the "black people are racist for voting for Obama" idea is to point out that black people have been voting for white Presidential candidates for a long time. And in fact, Hillary had the most black support until the South Carolina primary.
So I'm hearing a few arguments. Let me rebut them one at a time.
- Time to download too great. Compare that with going to a video store, and even today in the relative bandwidth backwater of the U.S. it's not such a big difference. And speeds will of course increase over the next few years that Blu-ray is trying to build its distribution monopoly.
- Bandwidth costs. I contend that online distribution is already *much* cheaper than by disc. My back of the envelope calculation gives a bandwidth cost of $.10-.20 for that 27GB file.
- Compression. Obviously, content providers don't have to compress their content, but I can certainly it happening at first. It could be a differentiator for a while. But again, more bandwidth would likely change that.
- Freedom of discs. You need a Blu-ray player in the other room to play that disc. Or you can move your player around. But the same goes for your digital media player - have two or move it around.
- DRM. I hope the anti-DRM trend we're seeing in music repeats in video. I don't think it necessarily has to be a big problem in the shorter term either.
Anyone else remember the ornithopters dragging a big loop of shigawire in an assassination attempt? Probably around the Children of Dune / God Emperor time period.
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The funny thing about that "any more of my time" comment was that he didn't spend "any" time debating me - he bailed out as soon as he was challenged.
Dad? I didn't know you had a Slashdot account.
On the contrary, I'm only swayed by facts and logic. If you have some, I'd be happy to consider them, independent of what I think of you.
Two suggestions: First, don't shut down a debate once you peg someone as progressive. It makes you appear afraid to debate them. Second, try to be consistent. You claimed that you're for free speech, but then argued that corporations should be allowed to control speech on the Internet. Unless I misunderstood you.
1. crooksandliars.com and mediamatters.org are sites whose main purpose is to document the outrageous behavior of the right so we don't have to rely on hearsay and wacky conspiracy theories. They actually do what you claim Glenn Beck does.
2. Glenn Beck is one seriously troubled and paranoid man. Or else he's morally bankrupt and just acting nuts so he can make truckloads of money by whipping people into a frenzy.
3. You've got the "hands over control of the internet" idea exactly backwards. Net neutrality is about preventing any entity from having control of the Internet - whether that is the government or corporations. It's the opposite of shutting down dissent - it makes it illegal to shut down dissent. And that's a good idea under any administration.
Where's the contradiction? The percentage of total income taxes collected that came from the top 1% of earners is going up because the rich are getting richer, not because they've been hit with a higher tax rate. Check the history of the top marginal tax rate here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_progressivity_in_federal_income_tax
If you want to disagree about this being tied to the rise of a strong middle class, we can discuss that. But perhaps you could start by agreeing that increasing tax rates can lead to increasing revenue.
Why do you think that's "pretty high"? I'll assume your $100k is accurate and figure a neurosurgeon does just a couple surgeries a week. So maybe we're talking about $1k per surgery, which is likely a very low percentage of the overall cost, to cover legitimate and frivolous lawsuits combined.
There is still a vote. The "self-executing rule" combines what would have been the vote for the Senate bill with a vote for amendments to that bill. When the Republican party is the majority, they use this rule too. And more often than the Democrats do.
Obama (in 2009) ... issued 467K exemptions
No. We don't know how many of those 467K exemptions were done during the Bush administration. We also don't know how many of the exemptions were executed by Bush appointees.
You're (probably) not rich enough to *have* to pay for actual liberal policies.
Like the middle class? It was built with 90+% top marginal tax rates. Now Warren Buffett pays a smaller % than his secretary.
That's pretty thin evidence of non-transparency. They concentrate on FOIA requests, and they don't do a good job of that.
From the Google Version: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hI24fNqhDbP2mY1wZyUBRJRa_UqAD9EG54N80
- paragraph 2: Obama told agencies specifically not to use the "deliberate process" exemption so frequently
- paragraph 4: Obama was only president for 9 months of the period in question, with no breakout by quarter. I assume a bit of lag as the new administration asserts itself
- paragraph 6: refers to non-FOIA transparency - release of full White House visitor logs and more federal data online than before
- paragraphs 7 & 8: Obama, Emanuel and Bauer all claim to be trying to improve transparency
- paragraph 9: "nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions"? is that 7? 8? which ones were reduced?
- paragraph 10: more exemptions are being cited, but there are no numbers of how many or what percentage of requests were rejected in part or in full
- paragraph 11: the "Open Government Directive" (a good thing) mentioned in a negative context - that they're still waiting after 3 months. much further down we find out they've cut the backlog of requests down by nearly half so far (paragraph 22). how long were requests taking circa 2008?
- paragraph 21: some fuzzy numbers suggesting there's more transparency, but they're no more convincing as the figures suggesting the opposite (how many agencies increased full and partial requests?)
In short, the article's a mess of numbers that don't mean much. Perhaps the next directive could be to report all the real statistics for each agency monthly.
Here are a few tools:
GNS3 - http://www.gns3.net/ - free network simulator, based on Dynamips Cisco emulator
Opnet - http://www.opnet.com/ - detailed planning of networks, from scratch
Traffic Explorer - http://packetdesign.com/ - plan changes to an existing network
Do you want to abolish / ban Scientology or just expose it and let it die off? I'm an atheist and would like that fate for all faiths but wouldn't want to ban any ideas. None of the atheists I know want to ban your faith either, so you've probably got nothing to worry about there. Of course some of us would like to end the special rights theists get (e.g. churches not paying taxes). Not sure if that would affect you. Also, you mentioned that your faith should be permissable as long as you're not committing crimes. Same goes for our lack of faith, I assume. But also consider that many theists push to make things we do illegal (e.g. abortion and gay marriage). So I don't think anyone's infringing your freedom of religion, but theists do infringe the freedoms of non-believers. Not necessarily you, of course.
Also, note that atheism is not groupthink. If anything, it's the opposite - the absence of groupthink.
Not a bad idea from a theoretical standpoint, but I see a couple problems with it.
First is that a lot of this likely needs to be done in hardware to scale for a large service provider. I'm not sure it's much tougher to write software with many shallow queues (or a variable number of queues) than it is to write it with a few deep queues, but it might pose a problem doing it in hardware. Just about any core router is going to have a few queues to work with. Some dedicated traffic shaping box may or may not be able to do what you want.
Second is the where to do the queuing. In a simple network topology with a natural choke point, maybe that might be workable. But when you have many sites, a backbone and multiple Internet peering points, congestion could happen in lots of places and each of those places would need to be able to discern which customer a packet is for to put it in the correct queue. Could get very complicated and more trouble than it's worth.
The same technology may give them the capability to do all sorts of mischief, but I don't see a problem with prioritization based on application. If they prioritize their own VoIP but somehow keep dropping or delaying Vonage packets, that's a problem. That's just an example, of course.
Look at the voting by party. In the House, weren't the Republicans nearly unanimously for the bill and Democrats split nearly evenly?
Democratic is the adjective, as in the Democratic party. Some Republican did a study and found that dropping the -ic sounded worse, so they adopted it. Now if you're a Republican, fine. But I don't want anyone being mistakenly taken as a Republican in this day and age.
Though "pointless" $500 billion expenditure sounds too neutral. The effect of the expenditure is disastrous. Better to have just lit that money on fire.
If you don't see enormous, substantive difference between Obama and Bush or McCain, then you're not paying attention. So he represents huge change on policy.
As for the tone of the campaign, he was remarkably positive during the primary. It's an open question how positive he'll be through the general. He is trying to shut down independent 527 organizations that were expected to go negative. MoveOn already agreed to shut their 527 down.
I find that people that think Obama is an empty suit without substance haven't looked very hard. The substance doesn't make it into the 30 second commercials, the 5 second news soundbites or even the (mostly awful) televised debates. Pick an issue you care about and read up on the details. There'll certainly be things to criticize, but at least he won't seem substanceless.
Note that he used to be criticized for being a dry, policy-heavy candidate. Sometime by 2004 he figured out how to connect with an audience.
Obama's campaign isn't doing this. In fact he's trying to rein in independent groups to keep a positive message. For example, he got MoveOn to agree to shut down its 527 organization last week.
As for how you know a candidate cares nothing for the issues he espouses, I have a theory. You don't.
I think the best way to knock down the "black people are racist for voting for Obama" idea is to point out that black people have been voting for white Presidential candidates for a long time. And in fact, Hillary had the most black support until the South Carolina primary.
Oh, and I voted for Kodos too!
If there's network neutrality, will it matter? Just encrypt everything.
So I'm hearing a few arguments. Let me rebut them one at a time.
- Time to download too great. Compare that with going to a video store, and even today in the relative bandwidth backwater of the U.S. it's not such a big difference. And speeds will of course increase over the next few years that Blu-ray is trying to build its distribution monopoly.
- Bandwidth costs. I contend that online distribution is already *much* cheaper than by disc. My back of the envelope calculation gives a bandwidth cost of $.10-.20 for that 27GB file.
- Compression. Obviously, content providers don't have to compress their content, but I can certainly it happening at first. It could be a differentiator for a while. But again, more bandwidth would likely change that.
- Freedom of discs. You need a Blu-ray player in the other room to play that disc. Or you can move your player around. But the same goes for your digital media player - have two or move it around.
- DRM. I hope the anti-DRM trend we're seeing in music repeats in video. I don't think it necessarily has to be a big problem in the shorter term either.
Or will online distribution overtake it? I don't buy physical CDs anymore and would like to buy video content online as well.
No one can get at it except for me!
Yeah. Must have been all the melange.
Anyone else remember the ornithopters dragging a big loop of shigawire in an assassination attempt? Probably around the Children of Dune / God Emperor time period.