So not a very good argument in this particular case.
You've forgotten that SCOTUS ruled that local community standards can be used to determine what is and is not pornography, and then ban said pornography from the municipality.
There's no reason why this ruling couldn't be extended to government-controlled broadband.
Police, laws, and courts I'll go with. These are some of the necessary evils of government, because the alternative is an even greater evil: anarchy.
Hospitals? We don't have universal healthcare in in the states. Obviously government-run hospitals aren't necessary.
Social assistance? I don't think so. If you choose to volunteer your time and/or money to help those in need, then good on you. I do this as well, and welcome you to the ranks of charity supporters across the land. However, I am completely and utterly opposed to folks being forced at gunpoint to pay for social assistance they do not believe in and do not wish to support.
Employment insurance? I'm assuming you mean unemployment insurance here. Nope, don't agree with this either. This 'need' can be fulfilled like any other form of insurance; purchase a policy if you like, forego it if you don't. No need for the government to get involved.
Old age benefits? Again, no. If Social Security had stuck to the original plan of increasing the age of benefits with the longevity of the population you'd have to be *83* in order to qualify for it in the year 2005. But now I'm supposed to pay so that people over 65 get a free ride for the next 20 years? Why? Most of these folks are perfectly capable of working and I don't see why they shouldn't support themselves.
Schools? Adamantly no, for more reasons than I care to list here. Suffice to say I'm a homeschooler, convinced to take that path due to several years of personal experience as a middle school teacher. The school system is an abomination, solely designed to produce compliant, unthinking drones.
Roads? Perhaps. As a libertarian I recognize that governments are more appropriate for some tasks than businesses are. A good argument can be made for government being the primary player in infrastructure development (or at least the planner, contracting out to businesses for the actual construction). I'm not entirely sure if public roads would be better maintained than private ones, but I suspect they're a far sight more *convenient* for the average person.
While men are at work, their wives are likely at home recording their husbands favorite shows for them.
The days when women could remain out of the work force because hubby made enough to support the entire family are long past for most of America. Ozzy-and-Harriet land exists only for a small percentage of the population now.
Regardless of the sexism, it's just plain false. For most of human history humans got 90% of their calories from gathering and only 10% from hunting. On the whole, humans were lousy hunters. The whole "human-as-mighty-hunter" thing was a myth disproven decades ago, but it still manages to perpetuate itself in popular culture.
I guess guys just like to think that they're 'naturally' brave warrior types genetically suited to running down large mammals and eating them raw. In fact, most of the time the only thing a man 'ran down' was a carrot or apple.
Do I have contempt for that attitude? Yes, I do. Am I better than people who trumpet it? Yes, I am.
Do I have contempt for egomaniacs who think they're better than everyone who doesn't hold to the exact same value system that they do? Yes, no doubt about it.
Do I think they're dangerous little wannabe tin-pot dictators who'd turn Earth into a living hell if ever given a real measure of power? You bet.
I thank the gods that you and people like you remain impotent to do much more than post rants to Slashdot.
I don't see the point of your argument. It takes more money, more time, more energy, and more effort to recycle anything other than aluminum cans - and there is no shortage of aluminum on this planet. So what precisely is the point of recycling? Or recycling *now*?
If resources become too scarce then recycling will become a viable economic alternative - even a ten-year-old can see that. But until that point is reached recycling is nothing more than a boondoggle to make people feel like they're doing something about the environment.
That was the point of Penn and Teller's show, and it's straight from Econ 101.
It'd be simpler and far less damaging to the infrastructure to develop a strain of highly infectious, highly lethal SARS, unleash it on the population, and blame it on the Americans. You get everything you want without a nuclear exchange so devastating that no government could possibly survive the fallout (har har).
Ethanol is a fool's fuel. It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. How exactly does that help anyone, other than farmers in the Midwest who're take government subsidies to produce the appropriate crops?
If you've been through Egypt along the Nile, or elsewhere such as the more hilly areas of Lebanon, and compare to say--much of Jordan, you'll instantly understand. If anything, mankind through irrigation, canal building, and daming, MADE this area the ferticle crescent.
That isn't true at all. The area was at one time much more fertile than it is today, and was covered by vast temperate forests. That's a matter of historical fact. The forests brought rain, which made the area perfect for farming.
But once a critical mass of the trees were cut down the weather system sustained by those trees died, and along with it went the copious amounts of rain. What was once one of the most fertile regions on the entire planet Earth is now anything but.
Even the builders of Uruk knew they'd fucked up, and HOW they'd fucked up. Too late to do any good, of course.
Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control) and china have acted quickly and sensibly on both these issues.
Great. You get decide what needs to be done, and how it needs to be done, for the rest of us. You're undoubtedly one of those 'better minds' who has the right to force your neighbors to live the way you want them to live, all in the name of the 'greater good'.
We might see it as not having any rights or an abuse, but the same thing (just to a lesser extent) happen in the west anyway
In America we don't have any population control. If the government here were to even think of imposing such a thing every elected official and bureaucrat who didn't skedaddle for Europe would be hanging from the nearest flagpole - and good riddance. We *don't* need a government that has so much power it can decide something as basic as whether or not its citizens can breed.
Any version of SuSE beyond 8.2 is easier to install than any version of Windows, hands-down. IIRC, it takes all of three mouse-clicks and not a single reboot.
The people who complain that Linux is harder to set up than Windows have apparently never used SuSE.
Dude, the bill passed at 62%. I am sorry you disagree but the majority of the people there obviously feel differently.
Just because a majority of the people agree with the measure doesn't make it a good measure. There's a reason our founding fathers though democracy was a really bad idea, and instead opted for a tightly-restricted constitutional republic.
Now we'll get to see whether the libertarian cries that internet access as a municipal service will cause incurable diseases and economic collapse hold true.
Oh, the drama! I see you aren't prone to exaggeration.
I dunno what the Libertarian Pary thinks about this, nor do I care. As a libertarian though, I would have preferred it if the city had decided to repeal the restrictions that government utility creation and do with with municipal monopolies altogether. Either that or create the infrastructure in question and then lease it to anyone who has the cash to spend (real libertarians don't object to this second scenario; it's often far more efficient than straight-up capitalism for certain tasks).
But since the government is about to give up the profiteering it makes on selling monopolies, the only real choice the citizens had were government service or no service at all. As a libertarian actually grounded in the real world I'd choose government service over no service at all any day of the week - and then work to move the government into it's more proper role of infrastructure builder and leaser rather than cable service provider.
After all, you have to maintain a seperation between church and state.
Y'know, I didn't think of that. As an ardent (small 'l') libertarian it never occurred to me that a government-owned cable company might not be able to run religious channels.
Here's my libertarian membership card - sign me up!
There is a key difference: with government you get to vote.
And your neighbors can vote to erect a firewall that prevents 'disturbing internet sites' from 'corrupting the youth of the city'. Thanks, but I'll pass on letting my fellow citizens tell me what I can and cannot see on the internet.
Say, is anyone supposed to give a flying fuck about that?
Except that it leaves the city with absolutely no competitors over time, and gives the government complete and utter control over every citizen's internet access. Don't you find that just a bit disturbing, or are you one of those folks who trusts government (and your neighbors) implicitly?
This might be true if the forces of the free market were actually working in this situation, but they aren't. Local and state restrictions essentially mean that only large players can get into the public utility game, and most municipalities in the country grant de facto monopolies to various cable and phone companies in return for a chunk of the profits.
In this case the city had the option of repealing a number of the regulations which keep individuals and small groups from entering the market, but it chose to instead go the route of socialized government service. I can't blame the folks of this fine town for choosing socialized service over no service at all, but they were forced into that position by regulatory demands that no one other than a large corporation can meet. I'm sure their government never bothered to provide them with this third option, as it would mean an end to the profiteering that municipalities are engaged in with the artificial monopolization of public utilities.
then they shouldn't have an obligation to be there
They don't have any such obligation, nor is anyone trying to force an obligation upon them. On the other hand they don't have any business suing the municipality for providing service to areas they refuse to string line to.
This works both ways. Companies don't have to serve those they don't want to serve, and municipalities aren't required to preserve 'fallow' territory simply because the companies *might* want to bring it service at some later date. Citizens aren't 'natural resources' to be harvested at the whim of the companies in question.
the users demanding the service should find it themselves
Which they did. I find it unfortunate that they did so through the mechanism of government rather than relaxing regulatiions so that private individuals could fill the gap, but it beats having no service at all.
Some site is going to ignore 40% of the market? Please.
Try reading what I actually wrote, for a change. I'm sure that if IE7 has it's own specific codes people will undoubtedly use them because of the share it'll have in the market. I sincerely doubt they'll code *only* for IE7, and that means - quite literally - that IE7 won't be able to dictate much of anything at all when it comes to developing websites.
You said it yourself with the comment on Safari.
From Joe User's perspective the shell will be entirely overhauled == New OS.
Joe User saw the shell "entirely overhauled" with Win2000 and he and 80% of his neighbors said "fuck that". You haven't made any credible argument for why Longhorn should be any different.
ME didn't sell worse than any of the others. More wishful thinking at best.
What the hell are you talking about? WinME sold less copies (and had less copies pre-installed) than Win95, Win98, Win2000, and WinXP. What were you comparing it to? Dos 2.0?
I'd say that the adoption rate of MS OSes is determined almost entirely by the rate of PC turnover.
That I'll agree with, which is why I said 'at least for a couple of years'. People will switch to Longhorn when it comes preinstalled on their new computers. But in case you haven't been following the figures, new computer sales are some of the lowest ever seen over the last decade. The equipment Joe User has does just what he wants it to do; he doesn't want to go through yet another upgrade cycle and spend more money (especially in this economy) when the benefits of doing so aren't impressive enough to outweigh the cost (both in time and money).
Longhorn isn't going to take anything by storm. And by extension, neither will IE7.
And for most of the rest of us, it isn't. But at least you had the balls to acknowledge this as a personal opinion, rather than a Declaration of Universal Truth(TM) like many other slashdotters.
I figured out that the RIAA's music sucks five years ago and never looked back.
No, what you figured out is that YOU don't like popular music.
That matters for shit to those of us who DO like popular music. Which is called popular music, by the way, because a good many of us actually enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
So not a very good argument in this particular case.
You've forgotten that SCOTUS ruled that local community standards can be used to determine what is and is not pornography, and then ban said pornography from the municipality.
There's no reason why this ruling couldn't be extended to government-controlled broadband.
Max
Police, laws, and courts I'll go with. These are some of the necessary evils of government, because the alternative is an even greater evil: anarchy.
Hospitals? We don't have universal healthcare in in the states. Obviously government-run hospitals aren't necessary.
Social assistance? I don't think so. If you choose to volunteer your time and/or money to help those in need, then good on you. I do this as well, and welcome you to the ranks of charity supporters across the land. However, I am completely and utterly opposed to folks being forced at gunpoint to pay for social assistance they do not believe in and do not wish to support.
Employment insurance? I'm assuming you mean unemployment insurance here. Nope, don't agree with this either. This 'need' can be fulfilled like any other form of insurance; purchase a policy if you like, forego it if you don't. No need for the government to get involved.
Old age benefits? Again, no. If Social Security had stuck to the original plan of increasing the age of benefits with the longevity of the population you'd have to be *83* in order to qualify for it in the year 2005. But now I'm supposed to pay so that people over 65 get a free ride for the next 20 years? Why? Most of these folks are perfectly capable of working and I don't see why they shouldn't support themselves.
Schools? Adamantly no, for more reasons than I care to list here. Suffice to say I'm a homeschooler, convinced to take that path due to several years of personal experience as a middle school teacher. The school system is an abomination, solely designed to produce compliant, unthinking drones.
Roads? Perhaps. As a libertarian I recognize that governments are more appropriate for some tasks than businesses are. A good argument can be made for government being the primary player in infrastructure development (or at least the planner, contracting out to businesses for the actual construction). I'm not entirely sure if public roads would be better maintained than private ones, but I suspect they're a far sight more *convenient* for the average person.
Etc. etc. etc.? Have to take a pass here.
Max
While men are at work, their wives are likely at home recording their husbands favorite shows for them.
The days when women could remain out of the work force because hubby made enough to support the entire family are long past for most of America. Ozzy-and-Harriet land exists only for a small percentage of the population now.
Max
Men hunt, women gather.
Regardless of the sexism, it's just plain false. For most of human history humans got 90% of their calories from gathering and only 10% from hunting. On the whole, humans were lousy hunters. The whole "human-as-mighty-hunter" thing was a myth disproven decades ago, but it still manages to perpetuate itself in popular culture.
I guess guys just like to think that they're 'naturally' brave warrior types genetically suited to running down large mammals and eating them raw. In fact, most of the time the only thing a man 'ran down' was a carrot or apple.
Max
Do I have contempt for that attitude? Yes, I do. Am I better than people who trumpet it? Yes, I am.
Do I have contempt for egomaniacs who think they're better than everyone who doesn't hold to the exact same value system that they do? Yes, no doubt about it.
Do I think they're dangerous little wannabe tin-pot dictators who'd turn Earth into a living hell if ever given a real measure of power? You bet.
I thank the gods that you and people like you remain impotent to do much more than post rants to Slashdot.
Max
I don't see the point of your argument. It takes more money, more time, more energy, and more effort to recycle anything other than aluminum cans - and there is no shortage of aluminum on this planet. So what precisely is the point of recycling? Or recycling *now*?
If resources become too scarce then recycling will become a viable economic alternative - even a ten-year-old can see that. But until that point is reached recycling is nothing more than a boondoggle to make people feel like they're doing something about the environment.
That was the point of Penn and Teller's show, and it's straight from Econ 101.
Max
It'd be simpler and far less damaging to the infrastructure to develop a strain of highly infectious, highly lethal SARS, unleash it on the population, and blame it on the Americans. You get everything you want without a nuclear exchange so devastating that no government could possibly survive the fallout (har har).
Max
Ethanol is a fool's fuel. It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol. How exactly does that help anyone, other than farmers in the Midwest who're take government subsidies to produce the appropriate crops?
Ethanol has been a sham from the get-go.
Max
If you've been through Egypt along the Nile, or elsewhere such as the more hilly areas of Lebanon, and compare to say--much of Jordan, you'll instantly understand. If anything, mankind through irrigation, canal building, and daming, MADE this area the ferticle crescent.
That isn't true at all. The area was at one time much more fertile than it is today, and was covered by vast temperate forests. That's a matter of historical fact. The forests brought rain, which made the area perfect for farming.
But once a critical mass of the trees were cut down the weather system sustained by those trees died, and along with it went the copious amounts of rain. What was once one of the most fertile regions on the entire planet Earth is now anything but.
Even the builders of Uruk knew they'd fucked up, and HOW they'd fucked up. Too late to do any good, of course.
Max
For three quarters of the planet survival is just about the only thing people think about on a daily basis.
Max
Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control) and china have acted quickly and sensibly on both these issues.
Great. You get decide what needs to be done, and how it needs to be done, for the rest of us. You're undoubtedly one of those 'better minds' who has the right to force your neighbors to live the way you want them to live, all in the name of the 'greater good'.
We might see it as not having any rights or an abuse, but the same thing (just to a lesser extent) happen in the west anyway
In America we don't have any population control. If the government here were to even think of imposing such a thing every elected official and bureaucrat who didn't skedaddle for Europe would be hanging from the nearest flagpole - and good riddance. We *don't* need a government that has so much power it can decide something as basic as whether or not its citizens can breed.
Max
Any version of SuSE beyond 8.2 is easier to install than any version of Windows, hands-down. IIRC, it takes all of three mouse-clicks and not a single reboot.
The people who complain that Linux is harder to set up than Windows have apparently never used SuSE.
Max
Dude, the bill passed at 62%. I am sorry you disagree but the majority of the people there obviously feel differently.
Just because a majority of the people agree with the measure doesn't make it a good measure. There's a reason our founding fathers though democracy was a really bad idea, and instead opted for a tightly-restricted constitutional republic.
Democracy is just mob rule, after all.
Max
Now we'll get to see whether the libertarian cries that internet access as a municipal service will cause incurable diseases and economic collapse hold true.
Oh, the drama! I see you aren't prone to exaggeration.
I dunno what the Libertarian Pary thinks about this, nor do I care. As a libertarian though, I would have preferred it if the city had decided to repeal the restrictions that government utility creation and do with with municipal monopolies altogether. Either that or create the infrastructure in question and then lease it to anyone who has the cash to spend (real libertarians don't object to this second scenario; it's often far more efficient than straight-up capitalism for certain tasks).
But since the government is about to give up the profiteering it makes on selling monopolies, the only real choice the citizens had were government service or no service at all. As a libertarian actually grounded in the real world I'd choose government service over no service at all any day of the week - and then work to move the government into it's more proper role of infrastructure builder and leaser rather than cable service provider.
Max
you do seem a little touchy when someone starts to use the freedom of speech to promote freedom of religion
Mainly because the people so bloody interested in "freedom of religion" refuse to acknowledge that this also means "freedom FROM religion".
Max
After all, you have to maintain a seperation between church and state.
Y'know, I didn't think of that. As an ardent (small 'l') libertarian it never occurred to me that a government-owned cable company might not be able to run religious channels.
Here's my libertarian membership card - sign me up!
Max
There is a key difference: with government you get to vote.
And your neighbors can vote to erect a firewall that prevents 'disturbing internet sites' from 'corrupting the youth of the city'. Thanks, but I'll pass on letting my fellow citizens tell me what I can and cannot see on the internet.
Max
Say, is anyone supposed to give a flying fuck about that?
Except that it leaves the city with absolutely no competitors over time, and gives the government complete and utter control over every citizen's internet access. Don't you find that just a bit disturbing, or are you one of those folks who trusts government (and your neighbors) implicitly?
Max
invoke the free market dogma.
This might be true if the forces of the free market were actually working in this situation, but they aren't. Local and state restrictions essentially mean that only large players can get into the public utility game, and most municipalities in the country grant de facto monopolies to various cable and phone companies in return for a chunk of the profits.
In this case the city had the option of repealing a number of the regulations which keep individuals and small groups from entering the market, but it chose to instead go the route of socialized government service. I can't blame the folks of this fine town for choosing socialized service over no service at all, but they were forced into that position by regulatory demands that no one other than a large corporation can meet. I'm sure their government never bothered to provide them with this third option, as it would mean an end to the profiteering that municipalities are engaged in with the artificial monopolization of public utilities.
Max
then they shouldn't have an obligation to be there
They don't have any such obligation, nor is anyone trying to force an obligation upon them. On the other hand they don't have any business suing the municipality for providing service to areas they refuse to string line to.
This works both ways. Companies don't have to serve those they don't want to serve, and municipalities aren't required to preserve 'fallow' territory simply because the companies *might* want to bring it service at some later date. Citizens aren't 'natural resources' to be harvested at the whim of the companies in question.
the users demanding the service should find it themselves
Which they did. I find it unfortunate that they did so through the mechanism of government rather than relaxing regulatiions so that private individuals could fill the gap, but it beats having no service at all.
Max
Some site is going to ignore 40% of the market? Please.
Try reading what I actually wrote, for a change. I'm sure that if IE7 has it's own specific codes people will undoubtedly use them because of the share it'll have in the market. I sincerely doubt they'll code *only* for IE7, and that means - quite literally - that IE7 won't be able to dictate much of anything at all when it comes to developing websites.
You said it yourself with the comment on Safari.
From Joe User's perspective the shell will be entirely overhauled == New OS.
Joe User saw the shell "entirely overhauled" with Win2000 and he and 80% of his neighbors said "fuck that". You haven't made any credible argument for why Longhorn should be any different.
ME didn't sell worse than any of the others. More wishful thinking at best.
What the hell are you talking about? WinME sold less copies (and had less copies pre-installed) than Win95, Win98, Win2000, and WinXP. What were you comparing it to? Dos 2.0?
I'd say that the adoption rate of MS OSes is determined almost entirely by the rate of PC turnover.
That I'll agree with, which is why I said 'at least for a couple of years'. People will switch to Longhorn when it comes preinstalled on their new computers. But in case you haven't been following the figures, new computer sales are some of the lowest ever seen over the last decade. The equipment Joe User has does just what he wants it to do; he doesn't want to go through yet another upgrade cycle and spend more money (especially in this economy) when the benefits of doing so aren't impressive enough to outweigh the cost (both in time and money).
Longhorn isn't going to take anything by storm. And by extension, neither will IE7.
Max
Well for me it is.
And for most of the rest of us, it isn't. But at least you had the balls to acknowledge this as a personal opinion, rather than a Declaration of Universal Truth(TM) like many other slashdotters.
Max
It's because for every 1 person who wants to make a backup, there are at least 10 if not more who will just copy it without paying for it.
I'm sure you have a cite for this figure, published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal? Something not sponsored by the RIAA or MPAA?
No? Imagine my surprise.
Max
Which would explain the People's Republic of California.
Max
I figured out that the RIAA's music sucks five years ago and never looked back.
No, what you figured out is that YOU don't like popular music.
That matters for shit to those of us who DO like popular music. Which is called popular music, by the way, because a good many of us actually enjoy it.
Max