Meanwhile, other countries offer free (as in beer) University / College tuition to all students who qualify academically.
Free tuition doesn't help with living expenses; students still have to pay for that. Median public four year college tuition in the us is about $10000, probably less than your living expenses.
Two thirds of college students graduate with no debt whatsoever. Only about 11% have debt larger than $36000 (the average cost of a new car).
If you choose to go into debt under these conditions by choosing to take out loans to get an overpriced degree that doesn't lead to a good career, it's your own fault; it's clearly not necessary for succeeding in life.
Conservatives who control oil, natural gas and coal seem to wield power and money; are they not elite?
Whatever gave you that ridiculous idea?
Oil, natural gas, and coal are controlled by government: they are usually mined from government lands under government license.
The companies doing the mining are usually publicly traded, which means that they are predominantly institutionally owned, mainly to pay for things like retirement.
Well, it means that if you want to use it as a desktop or for IoT applications, your small $5 computer turns into a $50 computer with a big mess of wires and boxes hanging off it. If you don't mind that, no, it's not a problem. I do mind.
Because it can EASILY be integrated into a project that needs very thin and small space used.
The problem with the Pi is that it has few USB ports and no wireless. The CHIP has WiFi and Bluetooth built in, which is very useful for a lot of IoT applications and HID peripherals.
So if the government pays a private firm to execute some action, it suddenly isn't government action anymore.
Of course the act of government paying a private firm is a government action, just like shooting people, imprisoning people, regulating people, and putting propaganda on TV are "government action". And the government involved can be autocratic, totalitarian, democratic, progressive, fascist, or one of many other forms. And government action can have many motivations and consequences.
Tyson's error is not that he referred to Queen Isabelle's investment as "government action", it is generalize from one government action to another. A monarchical ruler investing a few million dollars (in modern terms) one time with the expectation of making a positive return is a kind of government action, but it is a very different government action from US Congress creating agencies and subsidizing private companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year with the stated expectation of making no return at all. You can't justify the latter with the former.
That is more or less your thesis, stripped from its verbiage
You didn't "strip verbiage", you added meaningless abstractions in order to hide invalid generalizations.
I'm not going to argue, like arguing with flat-earthers and Young Earth creationists
That is exactly what you are: an economic flat-earther and a Young Earth creationist. I've pointed that out to you before, although unlike your parroting of the term, in your case, I justified those terms by relating them to the nature of the errors in your arguments. If you want to criticize my views concisely, come up with something that actually fits.
If it's a foreign company then how it it beholden to laws in a jurisdiction in which it doesn't operate? And why should it care?
Because they may have both their Internet connections and their payments blocked from your country if they don't comply. Without such enforcement, mandates to retain personal data within a country would be meaningless. You don't see much of that happening with international Internet services, but there is ample precedent for such obstacles already when importing and exporting physical goods.
If they provide the tin but you install the software and add the data, how is it their responsibility irrespective of jurisdiction? Why do you think you have to rent a server anyway?
First of all, the way I read those laws, all that matters is whether they hold personal data, not who provides the software. Second, what you are saying seems to amount to the notion that only people capable of setting up their own servers should be able to keep their data abroad.
I think your beliefs about these laws stem from the fundamental misconception that they are intended to help you. Such laws are intended to ensure that all your private data is within reach of your own national police and intelligence agencies.
And I can pretty much guarantee you that once major providers like Google and Facebook have been forced to move your data within the reach of your police and intelligence agencies, any attempt by you to set up foreign servers to keep private data will rouse suspicion by your own police and intelligence agencies, and will likely be held against you should you run into trouble when it comes to tax issues or any computer-related legal disputes (say, with an employer). Stop being so naive and gullible.
But feel free to put your own data anywhere you like. Nobody's stopping you posting your private information onto a server in every continent.
Really? How is that supposed to work? If you rent a server from a foreign company and put your personal information on there, then that foreign company holds your personal information and is therefore subject to these laws.
You might not like it as it might sound too constrained, but at the very least it is a definition, not an empty phrase.
As I was trying to explain to you: the First Amendment doesn't need to define "free speech" because it isn't the source of free speech rights in the US in the first place. The extent and meaning of free speech rights has been defined by the enumerated powers in the original Constitution. That is, Americans have the right to free speech at the federal level for the simple reason that the US Constitution does not give the federal government the power to limit it. The First Amendment was put in as an additional safeguard in case the enumerated powers were interpreted too expansively by courts (which they have been since the early 20th century).
Most of the debates about "free speech" you see in the US are not at the federal level (where the US Constitution is quite clear) but in the extension of Constitutional guarantees to the local and state level, something that is inherently difficult.
The German definition of "free speech" provides no meaningful protection at all, since under it, German parliament can restrict speech pretty much arbitrarily, and they do. For example, anything you say that might make other people angry or attack their dignity is illegal under German law.
I should also add that one of the strengths of the US legal system is that much of the legal doctrine is developed through case law, instead of through legislatures. You can no more write a bug free legal code from scratch with the kind of minimal understanding legislators have than you can write a bug free large piece of software from scratch; good legal codes, like good software, requires extensive testing and bug fixing.
So did Kennedy or congress take any extraordinary risks in authorizing the Apollo program?
Yes, that is the core of Tyson's argument: space exploration is so risky and has such a low return that only "government" can undertake it. And as far as the Apollo program is concerned, he is right: the Apollo program had no private investors and the US tax payer bore pretty much all of the risk. Private investors would never have wasted their money on the Apollo program.
Where Tyson is wrong is in assuming that the same was true for Columbus's voyage. In fact, Columbus's voyage was half financed by private investors and insured by private insurance companies. It also simply wasn't very expensive; Leif Eriksson made the trip by accident 500 years before Columbus simply by drifting off course, and then sailed back and forth a few more times.
She was the queen, authorized by Spain and more importantly, the Catholic church, which was critical, and about as much a definition of Government as you can get.
Yes, she was the head of government. What I'm pointing out is that if we apply what we learned from Columbus's voyage to NASA financing, as Tyson suggests, NASA would be a private corporation with publicly traded shares, and the US government would be a minority shareholder. Also, NASA's value would be a few million dollars.
You have the causal relationship all wrong: Columbus deliberately sought out the support of Fernando and Isabella, without their support he would have no product to sell to his investors; one part of the deal was that he would gain authority over whatever resources he could claim in name of the crown.
In fact, Columbus got the private investments before going to Queen Isabella. You're confabulating facts ("without their support", "part of the deal") to support your erroneous ideas.
And the Internet was developed by State action. To claim it was a private venture before Al Gore took the initiative to bring it to the market is historical revisionism of the highest sort. Anyone claiming that is a libertard indeed.
What I said is correct: Almost the entire Internet as it exists today is privately built and owned. The original ARPANET and NSFNET were also privately invented and built (albeit with government financing). That's just a fact. Your claim that private parties "didn't build the Internet" is clearly wrong.
Since your original statement was untenable, you now try to obfuscate and put up another straw man by talking vaguely about it being "developed by State action". In fact, the Internet was developed by software and hardware developers, most of them in private employ. Al Gore's 1991 bill just handed out money, mostly to universities and telecoms. Its crowning achievement was that it allowed Andreesen to clone Berners-Lee's browser with government funds, then make a shitload of money on it by taking it proprietary. The results were "brought to market" by Netscape and Microsoft. The original inventors of the technology were left hanging out to dry. Crony capitalism Al Gore style.
Actually originally it only defined the powers of the Federal government, in a time when the States were much more sovereign.
Yes, and now it also enumerates and limits the powers of states.
As any fool can see, the American Federal Government barely pays lip service to those 30 enumerated powers and Americans seem very good at rationalizing away the expansions of power outside the 30 enumerated powers.
True, the US is far from implementing the ideals of the Constitution, but it is actually making progress. As someone who actually immigrated to the US from Europe, I can assure you from personal experience: the situation is a lot better in the US than in Europe.
and the DJ was talking about the problems he had due to his show also being broadcast in America where there were these restrictions on speech
Those are not restrictions on speech, they are restrictions that are part of the licensing of spectrum for broadcast. He can talk about the "Fuckups" on cable or the Internet all he wants.
When you look at certain countries, rights are well defined but ignored. I think the Soviets took this to the extreme with a very good but ignored constitution.
Correct. So do most European constitutions. The US Constitution, however, does not define any rights for the people at all, it does something much better: it defines powers of the government (thirty enumerated powers).
America, isn't that the country that has as part of its Constitution that Congress shall make no law restricting speech and yet has executed people for speech?
Interesting. What case would that be?
Oh right, it is only some speech that is protected and there are tons of exceptions such as publishing the blue prints for nuclear weapons and giving them to the enemy.
The US Constitution authorizes the federal government to do certain things; adjudicating treason is one of those. Whether you consider that an infringement on "free speech" is immaterial.
You 'Could' check each council's offices for information
Newspaper archives can retain the information, as can commercial, for-pay search services and government archives. So, politicians, journalists, corporations, and anybody with enough money can still get the information; it's just that regular folks can't.
Google made it 'too easy' to dig up old shit that doesn't matter any more.
A lot of this "shit" does matter.
In any case, while Google, as a multi-national, has to comply, rest assured that Americans will not comply with these laws.
So explain to everyone why exactly you want to keep your [...] abroad?
Under current law, I have a choice. Under European or Russian law, I don't.
I like to have the choice.
I side with those who support the idea, that any data about me created in my country, stays in my country and that it be regularly audited by the government for invasions of privacy and excessive data retention
Sarcastic comment or not, I'd like to see every country do the same. As a Canadian, I think too much of my personal information is on American servers.
What's keeping you? You can do business with only Canadian companies if you want to.
You are asking for something entirely different, namely that all Canadians are forced to keep their data within easy reach of Canadian police and spy agencies. That means that you yourself can't keep your data abroad anymore, anywhere, even if you choose to. You either have to be confused or you have to be in bed with spy agencies to think that that's a good idea.
I wonder how that would work out for your Bitcoins; arguably, all your Bitcoin transactions could then only be recorded within Canadian ledgers, right?
It's incredible how many people confuse the universal principle of freedom of speech with the 1st amendment.
That's because only the First Amendment provides a clear and consistent articulation of what "free speech" actually means:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The US Constitution doesn't grant you a right, it places a clear limit on government: it can't pass laws limiting the freedom of speech or the press, period. Note that the First Amendment doesn't actually create this limit; the limit was already implicitly present in the original US Constitution. The First Amendment only reminds everybody of specific consequences of general Constitutional provisions.
When you look at the constitutions and laws of other countries, they are ill-defined rights with massive exemptions.
Here is the drivel that passes for a "freedom of speech" guarantee in the German constitution (basic law, Artikel 5):
(1) Everybody has the right to state and distribute his opinion verbally, in written form, and as images, and to obtain information from generally accessible sources. News media, radio, and film may report freely and without censorship.
(2) These rights may be limited by other laws, by the need to protect youth, and/or by the need to protect human dignity.
(3) Art, science, research, and education are free. Freedom of education does not absolve individuals from a requirement to be faithful to the constitution.
Well, no. The government can force businesses not to discriminate against customers in certain protected cases (age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.)
Governments can do anything in principle. The question is what a particular government can do, and what that means for the kind of society it creates. European governments can interfere with freedom of speech and freedom of association with near impunity; while European constitutions pay lip service to these principles, they are so riddled with exceptions that pretty much any restrictions can be justified even on constitutional grounds. In the US, both freedom of speech and freedom of association are protected by the US Constitution, although that still doesn't always stop the US government from interfering with them; viz, non-discrimination laws.
He told the Guardian: “My immediate response was to tweet that it was a violation of freedom of speech. But I deleted it when respondents convinced me that it was a matter of commercial judgment on the part of the cinemas, not so much a free speech issue. I still strongly object to suppressing the ads on the grounds that they might ‘offend’ people. If anybody is ‘offended’ by something so trivial as a prayer, they deserve to be offended.”
Slashdot Mirror
Free tuition doesn't help with living expenses; students still have to pay for that. Median public four year college tuition in the us is about $10000, probably less than your living expenses.
Two thirds of college students graduate with no debt whatsoever. Only about 11% have debt larger than $36000 (the average cost of a new car).
If you choose to go into debt under these conditions by choosing to take out loans to get an overpriced degree that doesn't lead to a good career, it's your own fault; it's clearly not necessary for succeeding in life.
Whatever gave you that ridiculous idea?
Oil, natural gas, and coal are controlled by government: they are usually mined from government lands under government license.
The companies doing the mining are usually publicly traded, which means that they are predominantly institutionally owned, mainly to pay for things like retirement.
Sorry, that's not a principle people generally accept.
Well, it means that if you want to use it as a desktop or for IoT applications, your small $5 computer turns into a $50 computer with a big mess of wires and boxes hanging off it. If you don't mind that, no, it's not a problem. I do mind.
The built-in Bluetooth is also very useful, since you can use it for keyboards, remote controls, mice, and even some sensors and power controllers.
The CHIP has HDMI, Bluetooth and WiFi. That means that you can have a complete computer without using any of the USB ports.
The problem with the Pi is that it has few USB ports and no wireless. The CHIP has WiFi and Bluetooth built in, which is very useful for a lot of IoT applications and HID peripherals.
Of course the act of government paying a private firm is a government action, just like shooting people, imprisoning people, regulating people, and putting propaganda on TV are "government action". And the government involved can be autocratic, totalitarian, democratic, progressive, fascist, or one of many other forms. And government action can have many motivations and consequences.
Tyson's error is not that he referred to Queen Isabelle's investment as "government action", it is generalize from one government action to another. A monarchical ruler investing a few million dollars (in modern terms) one time with the expectation of making a positive return is a kind of government action, but it is a very different government action from US Congress creating agencies and subsidizing private companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year with the stated expectation of making no return at all. You can't justify the latter with the former.
You didn't "strip verbiage", you added meaningless abstractions in order to hide invalid generalizations.
That is exactly what you are: an economic flat-earther and a Young Earth creationist. I've pointed that out to you before, although unlike your parroting of the term, in your case, I justified those terms by relating them to the nature of the errors in your arguments. If you want to criticize my views concisely, come up with something that actually fits.
You're bumbling from one straw man to another. Great going.
Because they may have both their Internet connections and their payments blocked from your country if they don't comply. Without such enforcement, mandates to retain personal data within a country would be meaningless. You don't see much of that happening with international Internet services, but there is ample precedent for such obstacles already when importing and exporting physical goods.
First of all, the way I read those laws, all that matters is whether they hold personal data, not who provides the software. Second, what you are saying seems to amount to the notion that only people capable of setting up their own servers should be able to keep their data abroad.
I think your beliefs about these laws stem from the fundamental misconception that they are intended to help you. Such laws are intended to ensure that all your private data is within reach of your own national police and intelligence agencies.
And I can pretty much guarantee you that once major providers like Google and Facebook have been forced to move your data within the reach of your police and intelligence agencies, any attempt by you to set up foreign servers to keep private data will rouse suspicion by your own police and intelligence agencies, and will likely be held against you should you run into trouble when it comes to tax issues or any computer-related legal disputes (say, with an employer). Stop being so naive and gullible.
Really? How is that supposed to work? If you rent a server from a foreign company and put your personal information on there, then that foreign company holds your personal information and is therefore subject to these laws.
As I was trying to explain to you: the First Amendment doesn't need to define "free speech" because it isn't the source of free speech rights in the US in the first place. The extent and meaning of free speech rights has been defined by the enumerated powers in the original Constitution. That is, Americans have the right to free speech at the federal level for the simple reason that the US Constitution does not give the federal government the power to limit it. The First Amendment was put in as an additional safeguard in case the enumerated powers were interpreted too expansively by courts (which they have been since the early 20th century).
Most of the debates about "free speech" you see in the US are not at the federal level (where the US Constitution is quite clear) but in the extension of Constitutional guarantees to the local and state level, something that is inherently difficult.
The German definition of "free speech" provides no meaningful protection at all, since under it, German parliament can restrict speech pretty much arbitrarily, and they do. For example, anything you say that might make other people angry or attack their dignity is illegal under German law.
I should also add that one of the strengths of the US legal system is that much of the legal doctrine is developed through case law, instead of through legislatures. You can no more write a bug free legal code from scratch with the kind of minimal understanding legislators have than you can write a bug free large piece of software from scratch; good legal codes, like good software, requires extensive testing and bug fixing.
Yes, that is the core of Tyson's argument: space exploration is so risky and has such a low return that only "government" can undertake it. And as far as the Apollo program is concerned, he is right: the Apollo program had no private investors and the US tax payer bore pretty much all of the risk. Private investors would never have wasted their money on the Apollo program.
Where Tyson is wrong is in assuming that the same was true for Columbus's voyage. In fact, Columbus's voyage was half financed by private investors and insured by private insurance companies. It also simply wasn't very expensive; Leif Eriksson made the trip by accident 500 years before Columbus simply by drifting off course, and then sailed back and forth a few more times.
Yes, she was the head of government. What I'm pointing out is that if we apply what we learned from Columbus's voyage to NASA financing, as Tyson suggests, NASA would be a private corporation with publicly traded shares, and the US government would be a minority shareholder. Also, NASA's value would be a few million dollars.
In fact, Columbus got the private investments before going to Queen Isabella. You're confabulating facts ("without their support", "part of the deal") to support your erroneous ideas.
What I said is correct: Almost the entire Internet as it exists today is privately built and owned. The original ARPANET and NSFNET were also privately invented and built (albeit with government financing). That's just a fact. Your claim that private parties "didn't build the Internet" is clearly wrong.
Since your original statement was untenable, you now try to obfuscate and put up another straw man by talking vaguely about it being "developed by State action". In fact, the Internet was developed by software and hardware developers, most of them in private employ. Al Gore's 1991 bill just handed out money, mostly to universities and telecoms. Its crowning achievement was that it allowed Andreesen to clone Berners-Lee's browser with government funds, then make a shitload of money on it by taking it proprietary. The results were "brought to market" by Netscape and Microsoft. The original inventors of the technology were left hanging out to dry. Crony capitalism Al Gore style.
Yes, and now it also enumerates and limits the powers of states.
True, the US is far from implementing the ideals of the Constitution, but it is actually making progress. As someone who actually immigrated to the US from Europe, I can assure you from personal experience: the situation is a lot better in the US than in Europe.
Those are not restrictions on speech, they are restrictions that are part of the licensing of spectrum for broadcast. He can talk about the "Fuckups" on cable or the Internet all he wants.
Correct. So do most European constitutions. The US Constitution, however, does not define any rights for the people at all, it does something much better: it defines powers of the government (thirty enumerated powers).
Interesting. What case would that be?
The US Constitution authorizes the federal government to do certain things; adjudicating treason is one of those. Whether you consider that an infringement on "free speech" is immaterial.
Newspaper archives can retain the information, as can commercial, for-pay search services and government archives. So, politicians, journalists, corporations, and anybody with enough money can still get the information; it's just that regular folks can't.
A lot of this "shit" does matter.
In any case, while Google, as a multi-national, has to comply, rest assured that Americans will not comply with these laws.
Under current law, I have a choice. Under European or Russian law, I don't.
I like to have the choice.
Well, what can I say, you are an idiot.
Search on Amazon: there are already dozens of konjac-based noodles. They are indeed widely used for weight loss.
What's keeping you? You can do business with only Canadian companies if you want to.
You are asking for something entirely different, namely that all Canadians are forced to keep their data within easy reach of Canadian police and spy agencies. That means that you yourself can't keep your data abroad anymore, anywhere, even if you choose to. You either have to be confused or you have to be in bed with spy agencies to think that that's a good idea.
I wonder how that would work out for your Bitcoins; arguably, all your Bitcoin transactions could then only be recorded within Canadian ledgers, right?
That's because only the First Amendment provides a clear and consistent articulation of what "free speech" actually means:
The US Constitution doesn't grant you a right, it places a clear limit on government: it can't pass laws limiting the freedom of speech or the press, period. Note that the First Amendment doesn't actually create this limit; the limit was already implicitly present in the original US Constitution. The First Amendment only reminds everybody of specific consequences of general Constitutional provisions.
When you look at the constitutions and laws of other countries, they are ill-defined rights with massive exemptions.
Here is the drivel that passes for a "freedom of speech" guarantee in the German constitution (basic law, Artikel 5):
Governments can do anything in principle. The question is what a particular government can do, and what that means for the kind of society it creates. European governments can interfere with freedom of speech and freedom of association with near impunity; while European constitutions pay lip service to these principles, they are so riddled with exceptions that pretty much any restrictions can be justified even on constitutional grounds. In the US, both freedom of speech and freedom of association are protected by the US Constitution, although that still doesn't always stop the US government from interfering with them; viz, non-discrimination laws.
Dawkins acknowledged that point; FTFA: