Its entirely fair - the magic phrase "transparency in government" isn't going to fix the housing bubble, the deficit, the lack of universal medical care - heck, it avoids every single concrete issue the article blurb mentions.
Take the issue of net neutrality... those who care can find out everything they need to know. We don't need "transparency" in government - we need some common sense.
A good example is software patents. Making the process completely transparent won't fix that - only a change of law will.
Ditto for health care. Only a change of law will fix that - not transparency.
The housing bubble bust? Only house prices deflating to their historic norms (2.5 to 3x local income) will fix that. "Transparency" won't. And if it means that a couple of big banks fail because they got too greedy, that's their shareholders' problem, not the government, nor the taxpayer. Throwing a trillion bux at it won't fix the underlying problem - overly inflated housing values. "Transparency" sure won't fix it.
I'm sick and tired of politicians who don't tell it like it is and think we're stupid, which I guess means pretty much all main-stream politicians.
Transparency is a good thing, but it will not solve any of the problems currently facng the US and the rest of the world. Only concrete actions. For example, odon't just say you're in favour of net neutrality - tell us how you're going to achieve it. Specifically, what laws you intend to pass. Ditto for health care, the deficit, etc. Not "policy" - which can change, but LAW. That would be real transparency.
For example, if its the intention of the government to inflate its way out of the current bubble bust and deficit, tell us. (7 years of 10% inflation per annum should about do it - but you'll end up with a US dollar worth < $0.20 on world markets).
Hillary Clinton, however, could possibly crash the global economy.
Too late for Clinton to claim that - Bush has prior art with the housing bubble.
Housing prices have fallen every month for the last 11 months. Predictions for the next 3 years are more of the same - with the bottom anywhere from 25% to 50% from their peaks.
That's a lot of people who will be upside-down on their mortgages, with a trillion dollars of bad debt still to work its way through the system.
Employ technology to solve our nation's most pressing problems.
Most pressing problems:
Lack of universal, affordable health care
Budget deficit has mortgaged several generations' future
Housing bubble bust, impending bank collapses, 2 million homes to be foreclosed, etc.,
Real inflation (not the BS numbers that don't count essentials like food and energy)
Foreign policy in a shambles
Gee, technology will sure solve these problems...
Technology is only a tool. The political will to address the above problems has been seriously lacking during this century - on the contrary, its politicians who have created these problems in the first place.
Is Obama going to toss out the HMOs? I doubt it. Is Obama going to figure out some way to get investors to agree to write off over a trillion dollars of bad mortgages without causing a financial collapse? Gee, that's some "technology" - Steve Jobs would like his reality distortion field back...
Actually, Jobs would probably have been a better candidate.
Obama has flatly stated that he supports maximum transparency at all levels of government
Which means absolutely nothing as far as any of the issues mentioned in the summary: "Copyright infringement, net neutrality, wireless spectrum, content filtering, broadband deployment".
No wonder you posted as an AC - your answer is the same any politician would give when asked a question - use a lot of BBBs (bullshit bingo buzzwords) to avoid actually giving an answer.
The 'customers' in the search engine industry are the advertisers, and the main interest of advertisers is reaching as many consumers as possible.
And in a recession, advertisers scale back their ad buys. Instead of buying in the top 2 in any market, they buy from #1 only. Even Microsoft admits that Google is #1.
Why in the world does NASA contract out the construction of its vehicles to begin with??!
Its all CYA (Cover Your Ass). This way, when the next vehicle fails, NASA can try to claim it doesn't stand for "Needs Another Seven Astro-nuts".
(Yes, its' in poor taste, but so is NASA. It became a pork-barrel agency, first with the moving of after-launch comms to Houston (LBJ) and then with the shuttle program and Martin Thiokol getting the SRB contract, even though it required segmented booster sections and O rings, instead of a one-piece design - because Martin Thiokol had to ship sections by barge, since no barge could take a non-segmented design. Funny how the military never had to put up with that bullshit!)
NewScientist is reporting that NASA has kicked their previous space partner, Rocketplane Kistler, to the curb and is in search of a new commercial space partner. The new partnership will try to develop a new shuttle to service the International Space Station.
Well, I've got this patent pending on this REALLY BIG sling-shot, if NASA is interested...
After all, the USPTO will approve anything nowadays...
The Swedish prosecutor listed dozens of works that had been downloaded through The Pirate Bay site
Of course, he could have also listed dozens of works that have been downloaded through Microsoft Windows, through the phone company, through Dell, etc... since they didn't host the files either.
How many jobs at Electric Boat? 7,600. $500M divided by 7600 is roughly equal to 65 million dollars a person.
Actually, its $65,789.48 per job, or $14.00 per person. Since this will generate 3 years' work for each job, it works out to about $21,000 per year per job. I'd imagine these jobs pay decent wages, and the government IS getting another sub out of the deal (which has to be worth something - so deduct... I dont know - half?) Is it worth $10k a year to keep 7,600 jobs? Basically, it probably means the feds are just putting the taxes they collect back into the local economy.
They've already decided, and are just using the "process" to extract whatever additional concessions they can.
Think of it, people - dependable power, lots of fibre, stable social structure... the decision will be made on the best tech merits, not "whoever throws the most incentives at them." After all:
The incentives are one-time, the recurring costs are... well, recurring;
Even if one country offered to pay the full price, if they don't have decent infrastructure, forget it - it will cost too much (see point #1)
So, they've already decided, and they'll use this as a way to both get a few more concessions, and to help avoid bruising other countries egos - they'll find a justification "all things considered, their bid was the best."
"Comparing obscenity laws to other cases of law doesn't make too much sense. Free speech is a protected right under the constitution so the whole notion of obscenity is drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech based off community and legal standards."
No - pornography based on acceptable community standards specifically disregarded the whole "legal standards" approach in favour of community stadards. That's why what actually constitutes the "community standard" is not codified as part of the law.
Copyright isn't a "natural right" - its something that we have enacted through our governments, and we're free to change it.
The original poster claimed that using "community standards" hasn't been tried - I pointed out that this was demonstrably false, as it already has been, in the case of porn. We can do the same with copyright. If 90% of the population sees nothing wrong with casual file-sharing, its probably time to realize that the law is outdated. Copyright holders can either work to some sort of accomodation, or take their chance of being ignored as irrelevant.
In the case of music, that's pretty much already happened. The MPAA should learn from the mistakes of the RIAA, not duplicate them. They have a different product - one that can probably survive even if copyright were made much more relaxed - at least until everyone has a desktop box thats powerful enough to allow people to produce their own shows entirely in VR.
I wonder if anyone has tried to bring up the notion that the legality of an action should be decided by the majority of the people. Once a P2P site gets to a certain point, doesn't the sheer size of its membership say something about whether or not it should be legal?
The Miller test is the United States Supreme Court's test for determining whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited.
The Miller test was developed in the 1973 case Miller v. California[1]. It has three parts:
Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value. (This is also known as the (S)LAPS test- Serious Literary, Artistic, Political, Scientific).
The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied.
For legal scholars, several issues are important. One is that the test allows for community standards rather than a national standard. What offends the average person in Jackson, Mississippi, may differ from what offends the average person in New York City. The relevant community, however, is not defined.
The "community standard" for porn is "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." If the average person in a community wasn't terribly offended, it wasn't porn.
The next question is, if its reasonable to apply the community standards test to pornography, why not to other areas? Is it okay to discriminate against rights of people who aren't fans of pr0n (all 3 of them)? Is it okay to say "community standards" for pr0n but not other conduct that communities now find acceptable?
That is SO bullshit. Lawyers have been trying to re-interpret Shakespeare, but it doesn't make sense. Try this on for size. Only a lawyer would even try to make this into a defense of lawyers, and expect people to actually swallow it,
Lawyers are an impediment to justice. BTW, the examples you quote were CREATED by lawyers. People should be able to appeal directly to judges, without the rigamorole that lawyers love to use to intermediate themselves between you and the law.
Habeus corpus wasn't created by lawyers - it was a judge who "read in" the requirement. An olden time equivalent to today's "activist judges" that the government so hates.
If you want a real legal opinion, don't ask a lawyer - ask a judge. Lawyers opinions are like assholes - they've all got one, and at least half the time its full of shit, and the judge tells them so.
The fact that you and I can type our various opinions without fear of having our words erased and ourselves imprisoned without trial is because there would be a lawyer there to fight for us.
Yeah, right - why should it be limited to lawyers? Why shouldn't you or I be able to fight if someone is unlawfully imprisoned? Oh, right - we CAN. And we don't need a lawyer to do it for us. They don't have some magic lawyer pixie dust that give them powers greater than any other citizen.
Those lawyers really helped bring that war criminal Bush to justice, didn't they? Not! - it wasn't in their "best interests", I guess. How about those illegal wire taps and phone intercepts? Lawyers did a real good number stopping them! Riiiight....
We're more dependent on the media than lawyers when it comes to exposing wrong and preserving our rights. Problem is, "news" produced by FAX or CNN is usually so ingratiating to the administration, you wonder how they managed to get the shit stains off their noses before going on camera.
My background is 25+ years of engineering experience and I'm now having to deal with CAD newbies.
Call me back when you have similar experience. I'm sure you'll have something to say. Just don't place it in a bad light.
Oh wait, you're either just a troll with unlimited amounts of time to provoke, prod, prevaricate and waste time (while secretly snickering at your cleverness).
.. and I've been writing code just as long. Including assembler, back in the "good old days" when the 8x86 wasn't the dominant cpu. But neither my nor your experience has anything to do with my argument, which is that humour is the way humans channel their aggressive tendancies.
So, instead of attacking the messenger (and missing), why not try to take a second look at the premise, and see if it doesn't explain a lot. Slapstick silent films from the beginning of the previous century, for example. Looked at objectively, its not something we should enjoy - but we do. Same as we still laugh at the "pie in the face", or pretty much anything that causes embarassment. We're not laughing with - we're laughing at! That's cruel, and that's what we are. We're animals. We're aggressive. We use humour both as the bonding of "common opponent" (we laugh at the same thing/person) and as a way to attack others.
Why get so upset with the truth? Is it that hard to accept that the dominant predator has an ugly side? Without it, we wouldn't BE the dominant predator. We'd be what is otherwise known as FOOD.
"But then they would come after you for practicing law (giving legal advice) without a license. How dare you tread on their monopoly."
I'm kind of hoping they do. Their "monopoly" is unjustifiable, and easily worked around. Imagine the embarrassment of China or Russia hosting a server helping give the poor oppressed workers in the People's Republic of Amerika and Kanuckistan free legal advice:-)
People always say "Want a legal opinion? Ask a lawyer." That's bullshit. Want a real legal opinion - ask a judge. Its the only legal opinion that counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Its entirely fair - the magic phrase "transparency in government" isn't going to fix the housing bubble, the deficit, the lack of universal medical care - heck, it avoids every single concrete issue the article blurb mentions.
Take the issue of net neutrality ... those who care can find out everything they need to know. We don't need "transparency" in government - we need some common sense.
A good example is software patents. Making the process completely transparent won't fix that - only a change of law will.
Ditto for health care. Only a change of law will fix that - not transparency.
The housing bubble bust? Only house prices deflating to their historic norms (2.5 to 3x local income) will fix that. "Transparency" won't. And if it means that a couple of big banks fail because they got too greedy, that's their shareholders' problem, not the government, nor the taxpayer. Throwing a trillion bux at it won't fix the underlying problem - overly inflated housing values. "Transparency" sure won't fix it.
I'm sick and tired of politicians who don't tell it like it is and think we're stupid, which I guess means pretty much all main-stream politicians.
Transparency is a good thing, but it will not solve any of the problems currently facng the US and the rest of the world. Only concrete actions. For example, odon't just say you're in favour of net neutrality - tell us how you're going to achieve it. Specifically, what laws you intend to pass. Ditto for health care, the deficit, etc. Not "policy" - which can change, but LAW. That would be real transparency.
For example, if its the intention of the government to inflate its way out of the current bubble bust and deficit, tell us. (7 years of 10% inflation per annum should about do it - but you'll end up with a US dollar worth < $0.20 on world markets).
It must work - I clicked on this article ...
Too late for Clinton to claim that - Bush has prior art with the housing bubble.
Housing prices have fallen every month for the last 11 months. Predictions for the next 3 years are more of the same - with the bottom anywhere from 25% to 50% from their peaks.
That's a lot of people who will be upside-down on their mortgages, with a trillion dollars of bad debt still to work its way through the system.
This isn't news - for more than a year, its been predicted that more than 2 million people will lose their homes.
Most pressing problems:
- Lack of universal, affordable health care
- Budget deficit has mortgaged several generations' future
- Housing bubble bust, impending bank collapses, 2 million homes to be foreclosed, etc.,
- Real inflation (not the BS numbers that don't count essentials like food and energy)
- Foreign policy in a shambles
Gee, technology will sure solve these problemsTechnology is only a tool. The political will to address the above problems has been seriously lacking during this century - on the contrary, its politicians who have created these problems in the first place.
Is Obama going to toss out the HMOs? I doubt it. Is Obama going to figure out some way to get investors to agree to write off over a trillion dollars of bad mortgages without causing a financial collapse? Gee, that's some "technology" - Steve Jobs would like his reality distortion field back ...
Actually, Jobs would probably have been a better candidate.
Which means absolutely nothing as far as any of the issues mentioned in the summary: "Copyright infringement, net neutrality, wireless spectrum, content filtering, broadband deployment".
No wonder you posted as an AC - your answer is the same any politician would give when asked a question - use a lot of BBBs (bullshit bingo buzzwords) to avoid actually giving an answer.
And in a recession, advertisers scale back their ad buys. Instead of buying in the top 2 in any market, they buy from #1 only. Even Microsoft admits that Google is #1.
Here, let me fix that for you ...
At least they're not offering to pay in Bush coins ... yet!
Its all CYA (Cover Your Ass). This way, when the next vehicle fails, NASA can try to claim it doesn't stand for "Needs Another Seven Astro-nuts".
(Yes, its' in poor taste, but so is NASA. It became a pork-barrel agency, first with the moving of after-launch comms to Houston (LBJ) and then with the shuttle program and Martin Thiokol getting the SRB contract, even though it required segmented booster sections and O rings, instead of a one-piece design - because Martin Thiokol had to ship sections by barge, since no barge could take a non-segmented design. Funny how the military never had to put up with that bullshit!)
After all, the USPTO will approve anything nowadays ...
They're in Sweden, not the US. The law is different there
- no DMCA
- no PATRIOT ACT
- universal health care
- waterboarding is considered torture by law
Just a few of the many differencesIt wasn't the submitter:
Of course, he could have also listed dozens of works that have been downloaded through Microsoft Windows, through the phone company, through Dell, etc ... since they didn't host the files either.
I was under the impression that most of Vista`s woes reside in the userspace - the PEBKAC.
There ... fixed it for you.
I have absolutely no problems with Vista ... then again, it's probably because I don't run Vista (or windows).
Actually, its $65,789.48 per job, or $14.00 per person. Since this will generate 3 years' work for each job, it works out to about $21,000 per year per job. I'd imagine these jobs pay decent wages, and the government IS getting another sub out of the deal (which has to be worth something - so deduct ... I dont know - half?) Is it worth $10k a year to keep 7,600 jobs? Basically, it probably means the feds are just putting the taxes they collect back into the local economy.
The french are just being pro-active; in the rest of the world, BSOD ditches YOU!
They've already decided, and are just using the "process" to extract whatever additional concessions they can.
Think of it, people - dependable power, lots of fibre, stable social structure ... the decision will be made on the best tech merits, not "whoever throws the most incentives at them." After all:
So, they've already decided, and they'll use this as a way to both get a few more concessions, and to help avoid bruising other countries egos - they'll find a justification "all things considered, their bid was the best."
You heard it here first.
"Modelling bird swarming behaviour isn't new. Applying 20-year-old research to robots isn't exciting."
Or swarming worms ... DDoSwarming one web server after another.
No more need for IRC C&C ... just release the swarm into the wild.
Gee, I haven't seen that one in ages.
Last time was from zoy.org.
Warning - if you're a windows user, don't click on it - it steals your browser's clipboard contents.
TrollTech: $150 million
MySQL: 1 BILLION!
"nuclear reactor would be re-opened with a new plutonium core,"
"Someone set up us the bomb!"
"Comparing obscenity laws to other cases of law doesn't make too much sense. Free speech is a protected right under the constitution so the whole notion of obscenity is drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech based off community and legal standards."
No - pornography based on acceptable community standards specifically disregarded the whole "legal standards" approach in favour of community stadards. That's why what actually constitutes the "community standard" is not codified as part of the law.
Copyright isn't a "natural right" - its something that we have enacted through our governments, and we're free to change it.
The original poster claimed that using "community standards" hasn't been tried - I pointed out that this was demonstrably false, as it already has been, in the case of porn. We can do the same with copyright. If 90% of the population sees nothing wrong with casual file-sharing, its probably time to realize that the law is outdated. Copyright holders can either work to some sort of accomodation, or take their chance of being ignored as irrelevant.
In the case of music, that's pretty much already happened. The MPAA should learn from the mistakes of the RIAA, not duplicate them. They have a different product - one that can probably survive even if copyright were made much more relaxed - at least until everyone has a desktop box thats powerful enough to allow people to produce their own shows entirely in VR.
I thought you already had that ... or did I just dream the last 2 US elections and when I wake up its still 1998?
The "community standard" for porn is "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." If the average person in a community wasn't terribly offended, it wasn't porn.
The next question is, if its reasonable to apply the community standards test to pornography, why not to other areas? Is it okay to discriminate against rights of people who aren't fans of pr0n (all 3 of them)? Is it okay to say "community standards" for pr0n but not other conduct that communities now find acceptable?
That is SO bullshit. Lawyers have been trying to re-interpret Shakespeare, but it doesn't make sense. Try this on for size. Only a lawyer would even try to make this into a defense of lawyers, and expect people to actually swallow it,
Lawyers are an impediment to justice. BTW, the examples you quote were CREATED by lawyers. People should be able to appeal directly to judges, without the rigamorole that lawyers love to use to intermediate themselves between you and the law.
Habeus corpus wasn't created by lawyers - it was a judge who "read in" the requirement. An olden time equivalent to today's "activist judges" that the government so hates.
If you want a real legal opinion, don't ask a lawyer - ask a judge. Lawyers opinions are like assholes - they've all got one, and at least half the time its full of shit, and the judge tells them so.
Yeah, right - why should it be limited to lawyers? Why shouldn't you or I be able to fight if someone is unlawfully imprisoned? Oh, right - we CAN. And we don't need a lawyer to do it for us. They don't have some magic lawyer pixie dust that give them powers greater than any other citizen.Those lawyers really helped bring that war criminal Bush to justice, didn't they? Not! - it wasn't in their "best interests", I guess. How about those illegal wire taps and phone intercepts? Lawyers did a real good number stopping them! Riiiight ....
We're more dependent on the media than lawyers when it comes to exposing wrong and preserving our rights. Problem is, "news" produced by FAX or CNN is usually so ingratiating to the administration, you wonder how they managed to get the shit stains off their noses before going on camera.
So, instead of attacking the messenger (and missing), why not try to take a second look at the premise, and see if it doesn't explain a lot. Slapstick silent films from the beginning of the previous century, for example. Looked at objectively, its not something we should enjoy - but we do. Same as we still laugh at the "pie in the face", or pretty much anything that causes embarassment. We're not laughing with - we're laughing at! That's cruel, and that's what we are. We're animals. We're aggressive. We use humour both as the bonding of "common opponent" (we laugh at the same thing/person) and as a way to attack others.
Why get so upset with the truth? Is it that hard to accept that the dominant predator has an ugly side? Without it, we wouldn't BE the dominant predator. We'd be what is otherwise known as FOOD.
"But then they would come after you for practicing law (giving legal advice) without a license. How dare you tread on their monopoly." I'm kind of hoping they do. Their "monopoly" is unjustifiable, and easily worked around. Imagine the embarrassment of China or Russia hosting a server helping give the poor oppressed workers in the People's Republic of Amerika and Kanuckistan free legal advice :-)
People always say "Want a legal opinion? Ask a lawyer." That's bullshit. Want a real legal opinion - ask a judge. Its the only legal opinion that counts.