...that makes me think we did the rest of the country an enormous disservice by not allowed the South to secede. I suggest we correct that mistake by putting the ol' secession bug back up the asses of ignorant Southerners everywhere, then just giving 'em a big wave 'goodbye!' when they declare their independence. With any luck most of the other extremists in the country will take the opportunity to move to the new Christian States of America and the rest of us will breathe one big sigh of relief.
The people will get what they want, which is what "democracy" means.
It's a good thing we don't live in a democracy, for then we'd be truly fucked. Democracy is called "a tyranny of the majority" for good reason. Our founding fathers knew that, and opted for a constitutional republic instead.
But the stated intent itself is not bad.
That's a matter of opinion, not fact. In my equally unimportant opinion, as a parent I'm the only person on this Earth who gets to decide what sort of video games my kids can and cannot play. And I don't see it as a very big step between legislating who can and cannot *buy* a video game to who can and cannot *play* a video game. I think it's fairly obvious that the folks who want to barge into my home and tell me how I should parent my kids are using this as a first step towards putting *me* in jail if I go and buy the 'violent' video game for my child myself.
Really, these idiots need to tend to their own affairs, and stay the hell out of mine. We're talking about computer games, not crack.
Not only that, but labeling him a "pedo" just goes to show how fanatical the crowd on that side of the fence is. In my world (and in the world of most reasonable folks) a pedophile is someone who attempts to have sex with a PRE-pubescent - a child. Now, unless this girl is genetically defective in some fashion there's no way in hell that she hasn't hit puberty yet. She might not yet be a legal adult, but to say that she's a child in the same way that a prepubescent is a child involves mental and linguistic contortions that would defy the skills of the best circus act.
What the guy is, I don't know - no one here has the facts as to what happened. But we do know that he IS NOT a pedophile.
He's talking about the embedded world, not the PC world. Linux is the de facto choice because of it's modularity and it's ability to easily scale down, something no version of Windows can match. And although we tend to focus on pcs, the fact is that the vast majority of computers manufactured world-wide are embedded, e.g., run some device other than a pc.
That isn't the only reason, though. This discussion is focusing on tech jobs, but we should also recognize that a big chunk of the service industry moved to India as well, providing phone support and ordering for all kinds of businesses (not just computer-related ones).
It turned out, however, that North Americans (U.S./Canada) didn't respond nearly as well as many 'analysts' thought they would, for two reasons: a) the English of the Indian employees was often so thick as to be partially or entirely unintelligible to North Americans, and b) the Indian accent itself was (for reasons unknown) particularly irritating to North Americans, who were then far less likely to cut the person on the other end of the phone any slack. This may seem odd, but just as many North Americans find British and Australian accents 'sexy', they find the Indian accent annoying.
Does that means the jobs are coming back home? Hell, no; the same companies who sold the service portion of these industries the line that India was a great place to migrate to have now told them that other places (specifically, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia) are a better bet. Their 'studies' show that the English spoken by these folks is more intelligible to North Americans and the various accents aren't considered to be annoying.
We'll see how that one pans out. Frankly, given that Australians make about 60% of what Americans do I think it'd make far more sense to move to Australia both for the lower wages AND for the accent that so many North Americans get all hot and heavy over. Seems like the best deal overall.
women and popular culture. google it asshole. women overconsume all media.
I have no idea what you mean by "overconsume" in this context. Perhaps you explain it to me - after you give me a cite to a single empirical study, published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal backing up your claim. Go ahead, I'll wait. If you need help, I suggest that scholar.google.com might be a better bet than plain ol' Google.
only assholes and losers pay for something they can get for free.
I see. So if you can screw someone else over you're more than willing to do so, so long as you think you can get away with it. Morality doesn't even enter into the picture.
Not only a coward, but a thief as well. And a thief who can't stand the idea that he might be in the tiny minority of the human race that we call 'scum'.
that traffic kills itunes traffic by several orders of magnitude you fucking homo
Cites? Sources? Oh, but wait - you're not only a coward and a thief, but a bigot as well. Yep, 'scum' really fits the bill here.
it's because no one wants to pay for the shit asshole
It's because fucktards like you can't admit that you're the filth on the bottom of humanity's shoe and feel the need to justify your actions, primarily by insisting that everyone else is just as much a fucktard as you are - even when the actual evidence seems to indicate that most of the rest of us aren't morally bankrupt.
exception makes the rule, you fucking prick.
That one didn't even make sense. So, coward, thief, bigot - and either loon or idiot, the jury's still out. Perhaps both.
only windbags like you and your ilk would pay for something you can readily get for free
The 'windbags' here being the folks who think that something of value should actually be paid for. Us 'windbags' call that 'ethical behavior', but I'm willing to bet you wouldn't know what that was if it up and bit you in the ass.
you probably can't walk and talk at the same time. you can't think and drink, lol.
Get back to me after you grow up, move out of your parents basement, and get a real job in the real world. Then perhaps you'll learn that work has value, which is why we pay for products and services, and why we think we should be payed for what we produce and provide. Although I seriously doubt it since you seem like nothing more than a garden-variety sociopath, and not a very bright one at at.
The best I can probably hope for is that no girl will ever be stupid enough to breed with you. The gene pools is in bad enough shape as it is without the likes of you passing on your own sub-standard contribution.
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before.
I agree. What critical science has the ISS done that couldn't have been done with cheaper unmanned launches, for considerably less than $100 billion? Has it done *anything* worth $100 billion? So far as I can tell the answer is a resoundingly bloody "no!".
I say kill the project, and the shuttle along with it. I'm not interested in maintaining a manned space program with my tax dollars simply because a few geeks with far too much testosterone floating around in their bloodstreams want to measure dick sizes. Or perhaps because they think they're 'entitled' to a shot at being an astronaut on my dime.
When there's an actual NEED to send manned craft into space then we'll talk, assuming private industry hasn't already taken the lead. Until then I'll lobby my congress critters to shut down the manned program and instead put that money into unmanned probes and experiments.
If there is a government-run Mars mission it'll be in much the same vein as the Apollo missions: PR stunts with little to no real value. And you can forget about any sort of permanent colonization, much less the effort required to do something useful, e.g., mine the asteroids. Besides, any serious mining of the asteroids would crash the rare metals industry, destroying the wealth of a whole lot of very influential people; so you know *that* isn't going to happen any time soon even if we did have the technology.
There's been a viable plan to establish permanent space stations, a large moon base, and at the same time solve Earth's reliance on limited fuel sources since the '70's: the 'High Frontier' proposition, put forth by O'Neill. But no one in government cared since the payoff was so very far in the future (certainly beyond the next election), and anyways - it threatened the energy cartels. It might have been a win-win for the average Joe (or the children of the average Joe), but it's lose-lose for politicians and their flunkies.
If you want any sort of real space program it'll have to be by private interests who go into space because they see a way to make a buck, and learn the things that they do because it's necessary if they want to make the buck more efficiently (or at all). It'll begin with short suborbital rides for the wealthy, followed by longer orbital rides, then a space station designed for tourism, then a moonbase that does the same thing and perhaps gets into the mining gig as well, followed by some wealthy loon sending out a factory ship to the asteroid belt looking for a big, fat lucky strike, and so on.
Private industry will lead the way because although it defies long-standing liberal claims, private industry has more interest in long-term investment and wild long-shots than government does. Government policies are dictated by 2-year spans for representatives (actually one year, since the second is consumed by re-election), 4-year spans for Presidents (actually two years, for the same reason), and 6-year spans for senators (actually four years). With this sort of cycle and considering that their are only two monolithic parties who work based on the shortest of these terms in their eternal struggle with one another, government can never be anything but short-sighted and completely uninterested in anything that extends beyond the next crop of elections. And they sure as shit aren't interested in long-shots of any kind; the high risk of failure wouldn't be tolerated by either party.
what if it is 10pm on a Friday and you have chick over.
It's 10:00 p.m., you have a chick over, and the burning question in your mind is what movie you're going to watch? Time to come out of the closet, bub.
i think it's a bit further than that. downloading illegally is primarily a male bastion, whereas music purchasing skews towards girls and women.
Cites? Sources? A single shred of empirical evidence published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal?
Females are less likely to download and more likely to buy music and less likely to be tech savvy.
Cites? Sources? A single shred of empirical evidence published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal?
Y'know, the only thing your statement proves is that you don't get out much, and that your personal clique of friends is highly homogenous.
I'll get flamed to death for this, but only on slashdot do I hear males admit to actually buying music.
No, you'll get pitied. Do you honestly think that your anecdotal exposure amounts to anything like an actual prediction of behavior across the entire population? Although you seem to have completely missed it, iTunes tells us that tens of millions of males - apparently no one you know - are more than willing to pay for downloads of music, if they think the price is right.
Downloaders know what the perfect price for music is. It's free. The perfect price for film is also free.
The perfect price for YOU is free. Perhaps your friends as well. But again, there are a great many of us (iTunes once again providing us with STATISTICAL evidence proving the point) who think that the value of music and movies is non-zero. We might think that the price point set by the **AA's is too high, but unlike you and your freeloader buddies we don't believe that music and film are worth nothing.
ITUNES is a stop gap measure - because there is NO COMPELLING REASON for anyone ot actually buy music.
Economics 101: a thing is worth whatever the buyer thinks it's worth. iTunes has shown us that tens of millions of people think that the value of music is non-zero and will pay for music even when they could get the exact same songs for free. The "compelling reason" here is whatever the buyer says it is, and for that you'd have to sample the buyers to find out why they're paying when they could get it for free. But I seriously doubt those tens of millions of people are all pansy-asses afraid that the Big Bad Lawman is going to find them and haul them off to jail. Most of those folks aren't spineless little college twats, after all.
Google is making free work, so it's possible.
What a crock. Somebody always pays - nothing is for free. In Google's case the people paying are advertisers. Just because YOU aren't forking over cash doesn't mean it's 'free'.
They would say: "Oh, it's not FAIR that these cameras can catch me breaking the law!
What a crock of horseshit. They whined because back then Americans actually didn't like being spied on, whether or not they were doing something illegal. Obviously that's a concept that's lost on you.
All that has happened is that the technology has improved to allow us to better enforce laws already on the books.
Or to simply spy on people for shits and giggles. Or because some politico doesn't like what Joe Smith is saying about him during an election year. Or because Jane Doe has openly criticized the actions of her local police department.
Just because you used to not get caught, doesn't mean it wasn't illegal!
The point is that you don't have any business conducting random visual searches of people's private property. For that the 4th Amendment requires a signed warrant, based on probable cause. Saying that you don't need a warrant because the drone is flying, rather than peering over a fence, is something only a complete fuckwit could put forth as rational.
He's just a wannabe neo-nazi who's pissed off that we don't yet live in the Fourth Reich. Y'see, he thinks that if we were all slaves in a police state he'd be Somebody Important, not the completely nobody that he is now, and then women would actually want to fuck him. Cute women, too.
Of course they can follow you on the street. So can the guy behind you and the other guy across the sreet.
Actually, my state has anti-stalking laws. And anti-harrassment laws. My guess is that the laws only apply to us citizens, though, and that the government can stalk and harrass us as it pleases, simply because it chooses to do so.
Canada, for all of its faults, looks better and better with every passing day....
Extremist environmentalism *is* a religion. Gaia is the goddess of that religion, and the extremists have assumed the position of high priests in possession of The Truth(TM).
But the problem is neither religion nor environmentalism; it's extremism, in *any* form. Extremists are the enemies of all of the rest of us, because they will not rest until every single person is either converted to their cause, or enslaved to their cause by force (via government power). There is no compromising with these folks; they are monsters bent upon a single purpose, the excuses used in achieving that purpose ultimately irrelevent. They should be treated as monsters and dealt with accordingly.
Idiots assume that the only rights we have are those enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But the founders made it quite clear - and drove the point home in the 9th Amendment - that any power not specifically granted to the government by the people, is retained by the people. That means that the rights delineated in the Constitution are not the only rights we have; *all* power belongs to us except for that which we *explicitly* grant to the government, and which we can take back at any time.
I don't remember the people of Los Angeles County granting the executive branch the right to use these drones to further police powers. The executive branch certainly has no right to use these drones to spy on citizens on private property, without a duly signed and sealed warrant based on probable cause. The moron's argument that the drones are "in the air" and therefore not subject to warrants is nothing more than spitting on the Constitution and laughing in the face of all of those who cherish freedom.
Although I'm sure that they'll go ahead and continue to implement the New Order bit by bit, as they've been doing for decades now. People will soon think it's just fine for the police to spy on everyone - cameras everywhere for the 'public good' and 'safety' and all that rot - so long as 'everyone' means just the powerless prole on the street. I guarantee you that these little suckers will never be used to monitor the activities of the rich, or the powerful. If you think otherwise try using a drone to spy on the home of the sheriff and see just how fast your ass gets kicked six ways to Sunday.
We are a destructive species and Wikipedia is on the tipping point of being a big enough target for utter destruction.
You failed to take into account that those interested in destruction will be far more motivated to ruin the product than the vast majority of the rest of us - who aren't interested in destruction - will be to fix it. That majority doesn't see it as their 'moral obligation' to combat the core of loons who make Wikipedia their battleground. Nor should they; their lives are their own, and the thought of spending precious time in an endless war with fanatics (over a collection of web pages, of all things) isn't exactly an appealing one.
The "nutcases" are on both sides of the fence here. For example, you might get NAMBLA trying to rewrite the pedophile page to tell us all how it's a great thing to have sex with a 9-year-old boy; but by the same token you'll get the douchebags who scream 'pedophile!' at anyone who might be attracted to someone under the age of 18, whether they intend to do anything about that attraction or not.
The extremists on these topics are rampant on both ends of the spectrum, and equally immune to reason. The rest of us moderates only have so much stamina, especially when it comes to an activity like continuously correcting a web page. The moderates will, in general, burn out much faster, or find they have better things to do - like live their lives.
The point of an encyclopedia or any record isn't to be absolutely right the first time, it's to be as right as possible
Which in many cases Wikipedia certainly is not, for precisely the reasons that others have listed. Sometimes folks fuck up because they don't care to double-check their facts, sometimes they fuck up deliberately because they have an agenda they want to press on others, and at other times they engage in vandalism or the much-harder-to-catch wikipranks. And there's always that group that cites propaganda as 'fact' because they're absolutely convinced in the 'rightness' of their cause, and refuse to entertain the notion that perhaps they aren't in possession of the Absolute Truth(TM).
Anyone claiming that Wikipedia is just as accurate, or even close to as accurate, as a professional encyclopedia written by acknowledged experts in their respective fields is a moron. Probably a moron with an agenda, who's written some half-assed amateur entry in Wikipedia and thinks that fact makes him as knowledgeable as any real expert.
Let the idiots, fools, and fanatics contribute to your encyclopedia and you're bound to get idiotic, foolish, and fanatical entries.
But in other nations, like say South Korea, you can get Gigapop internet, which runs at speeds up to 100 Mbps, and you can get it for about $15 a month or cheaper.
And South Korea has the same land area as Oregon, which makes cabling the entire country a fuck of a lot easier. Not to mention implementing upgrades to equipment.
Such a scheme would be totally unthinkable in the USA where the telecom lobby goes to great length to prevent governments from doing stuff that they would never do (watch the municipal wifi debacle).
What the fuck are you talking about??? The telecoms are using the federal government to PROTECT their monopoly, specifically lobbying to get projects like municipal wifi shut down. If the federal government didn't have the power that it does, the monopolies would be toothless. They don't have their own armies, you know.
Government power here is part of the problem, not part of the solution. You can't have an artificial monopoly without a strong government around to impose the monopoly by force.
OTOH, I am sure that land lines still exist in nearly 100% of such homes.
I'm sure the lines still exist, but I'm equally sure that more and more people are abandoning them every year. I haven't had a land line for years, and many of the people I know have also abandoned their land lines for cells. We certainly aren't part of the younger crowd; more like the 'older and ornery crowd, who don't want random assholes calling and bothering us'.
One huge plus of the cell that no one has mentioned: it's illegal (at least in the States) for telemarketers to call you on your cell, for the same reason people can't fax you advertisements - because you end up having to pay for their use of your equipment. That's why my wife and I dropped the land line in favor of the cell (the convenience is a big second point), and many of our friends and family followed.
The phone is here for OUR use, not for anyone else's. If we wanted you calling us, we'd have given you our phone number. With cells, this painfully obvious fact is now an enforceable reality. I haven't had a single telemarketer call in all the years I've owned a cell, and the only people who've called me that I didn't know have been wrong numbers. My phone, in essence, has become a white-list-only device - and that is exactly the way I want it.
I need clothes, yet because there are a large number of suppliers, competition pushes the prices down to the margin.
And that is an illusion. The actual number of companies producing clothing world-wide (off the rack, at least), is quite small. They dictate price agreements to retailers, which is why the same shirt or pair of pants can cost X in America, X*1.5 in Europe, and X/3 in Korea. The margin is very close to the price in Korea, but consumers in America and Europe will never see clothing priced close to the margin because of price agreements. Americans suffer the delusion their clothes are 'reasonably' priced primarily because of most of them have never been outside the country.
Same is true with housing and food.
Food is rarely priced in accordance with the cost of production. Price supports are rampant for farmers in-country, while a combination of tariffs and quotas raise prices for food produced out-of-country. If the free market actually held sway in food prices they'd be a fraction of what you pay now and a good many American farmers would be out of business, but the actual price would stabilize a good deal below what you currently pay at the supermarket.
Slashdot Mirror
...that makes me think we did the rest of the country an enormous disservice by not allowed the South to secede. I suggest we correct that mistake by putting the ol' secession bug back up the asses of ignorant Southerners everywhere, then just giving 'em a big wave 'goodbye!' when they declare their independence. With any luck most of the other extremists in the country will take the opportunity to move to the new Christian States of America and the rest of us will breathe one big sigh of relief.
Max
The people will get what they want, which is what "democracy" means.
It's a good thing we don't live in a democracy, for then we'd be truly fucked. Democracy is called "a tyranny of the majority" for good reason. Our founding fathers knew that, and opted for a constitutional republic instead.
But the stated intent itself is not bad.
That's a matter of opinion, not fact. In my equally unimportant opinion, as a parent I'm the only person on this Earth who gets to decide what sort of video games my kids can and cannot play. And I don't see it as a very big step between legislating who can and cannot *buy* a video game to who can and cannot *play* a video game. I think it's fairly obvious that the folks who want to barge into my home and tell me how I should parent my kids are using this as a first step towards putting *me* in jail if I go and buy the 'violent' video game for my child myself.
Really, these idiots need to tend to their own affairs, and stay the hell out of mine. We're talking about computer games, not crack.
Max
Not only that, but labeling him a "pedo" just goes to show how fanatical the crowd on that side of the fence is. In my world (and in the world of most reasonable folks) a pedophile is someone who attempts to have sex with a PRE-pubescent - a child. Now, unless this girl is genetically defective in some fashion there's no way in hell that she hasn't hit puberty yet. She might not yet be a legal adult, but to say that she's a child in the same way that a prepubescent is a child involves mental and linguistic contortions that would defy the skills of the best circus act.
What the guy is, I don't know - no one here has the facts as to what happened. But we do know that he IS NOT a pedophile.
Max
He's talking about the embedded world, not the PC world. Linux is the de facto choice because of it's modularity and it's ability to easily scale down, something no version of Windows can match. And although we tend to focus on pcs, the fact is that the vast majority of computers manufactured world-wide are embedded, e.g., run some device other than a pc.
Max
That isn't the only reason, though. This discussion is focusing on tech jobs, but we should also recognize that a big chunk of the service industry moved to India as well, providing phone support and ordering for all kinds of businesses (not just computer-related ones).
It turned out, however, that North Americans (U.S./Canada) didn't respond nearly as well as many 'analysts' thought they would, for two reasons: a) the English of the Indian employees was often so thick as to be partially or entirely unintelligible to North Americans, and b) the Indian accent itself was (for reasons unknown) particularly irritating to North Americans, who were then far less likely to cut the person on the other end of the phone any slack. This may seem odd, but just as many North Americans find British and Australian accents 'sexy', they find the Indian accent annoying.
Does that means the jobs are coming back home? Hell, no; the same companies who sold the service portion of these industries the line that India was a great place to migrate to have now told them that other places (specifically, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia) are a better bet. Their 'studies' show that the English spoken by these folks is more intelligible to North Americans and the various accents aren't considered to be annoying.
We'll see how that one pans out. Frankly, given that Australians make about 60% of what Americans do I think it'd make far more sense to move to Australia both for the lower wages AND for the accent that so many North Americans get all hot and heavy over. Seems like the best deal overall.
Max
you're an idiot:
At least I'm not a coward. One up on you already.
women and popular culture. google it asshole. women overconsume all media.
I have no idea what you mean by "overconsume" in this context. Perhaps you explain it to me - after you give me a cite to a single empirical study, published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal backing up your claim. Go ahead, I'll wait. If you need help, I suggest that scholar.google.com might be a better bet than plain ol' Google.
only assholes and losers pay for something they can get for free.
I see. So if you can screw someone else over you're more than willing to do so, so long as you think you can get away with it. Morality doesn't even enter into the picture.
Not only a coward, but a thief as well. And a thief who can't stand the idea that he might be in the tiny minority of the human race that we call 'scum'.
that traffic kills itunes traffic by several orders of magnitude you fucking homo
Cites? Sources? Oh, but wait - you're not only a coward and a thief, but a bigot as well. Yep, 'scum' really fits the bill here.
it's because no one wants to pay for the shit asshole
It's because fucktards like you can't admit that you're the filth on the bottom of humanity's shoe and feel the need to justify your actions, primarily by insisting that everyone else is just as much a fucktard as you are - even when the actual evidence seems to indicate that most of the rest of us aren't morally bankrupt.
exception makes the rule, you fucking prick.
That one didn't even make sense. So, coward, thief, bigot - and either loon or idiot, the jury's still out. Perhaps both.
only windbags like you and your ilk would pay for something you can readily get for free
The 'windbags' here being the folks who think that something of value should actually be paid for. Us 'windbags' call that 'ethical behavior', but I'm willing to bet you wouldn't know what that was if it up and bit you in the ass.
you probably can't walk and talk at the same time. you can't think and drink, lol.
Get back to me after you grow up, move out of your parents basement, and get a real job in the real world. Then perhaps you'll learn that work has value, which is why we pay for products and services, and why we think we should be payed for what we produce and provide. Although I seriously doubt it since you seem like nothing more than a garden-variety sociopath, and not a very bright one at at.
The best I can probably hope for is that no girl will ever be stupid enough to breed with you. The gene pools is in bad enough shape as it is without the likes of you passing on your own sub-standard contribution.
Max
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before.
I agree. What critical science has the ISS done that couldn't have been done with cheaper unmanned launches, for considerably less than $100 billion? Has it done *anything* worth $100 billion? So far as I can tell the answer is a resoundingly bloody "no!".
I say kill the project, and the shuttle along with it. I'm not interested in maintaining a manned space program with my tax dollars simply because a few geeks with far too much testosterone floating around in their bloodstreams want to measure dick sizes. Or perhaps because they think they're 'entitled' to a shot at being an astronaut on my dime.
When there's an actual NEED to send manned craft into space then we'll talk, assuming private industry hasn't already taken the lead. Until then I'll lobby my congress critters to shut down the manned program and instead put that money into unmanned probes and experiments.
Max
If there is a government-run Mars mission it'll be in much the same vein as the Apollo missions: PR stunts with little to no real value. And you can forget about any sort of permanent colonization, much less the effort required to do something useful, e.g., mine the asteroids. Besides, any serious mining of the asteroids would crash the rare metals industry, destroying the wealth of a whole lot of very influential people; so you know *that* isn't going to happen any time soon even if we did have the technology.
There's been a viable plan to establish permanent space stations, a large moon base, and at the same time solve Earth's reliance on limited fuel sources since the '70's: the 'High Frontier' proposition, put forth by O'Neill. But no one in government cared since the payoff was so very far in the future (certainly beyond the next election), and anyways - it threatened the energy cartels. It might have been a win-win for the average Joe (or the children of the average Joe), but it's lose-lose for politicians and their flunkies.
If you want any sort of real space program it'll have to be by private interests who go into space because they see a way to make a buck, and learn the things that they do because it's necessary if they want to make the buck more efficiently (or at all). It'll begin with short suborbital rides for the wealthy, followed by longer orbital rides, then a space station designed for tourism, then a moonbase that does the same thing and perhaps gets into the mining gig as well, followed by some wealthy loon sending out a factory ship to the asteroid belt looking for a big, fat lucky strike, and so on.
Private industry will lead the way because although it defies long-standing liberal claims, private industry has more interest in long-term investment and wild long-shots than government does. Government policies are dictated by 2-year spans for representatives (actually one year, since the second is consumed by re-election), 4-year spans for Presidents (actually two years, for the same reason), and 6-year spans for senators (actually four years). With this sort of cycle and considering that their are only two monolithic parties who work based on the shortest of these terms in their eternal struggle with one another, government can never be anything but short-sighted and completely uninterested in anything that extends beyond the next crop of elections. And they sure as shit aren't interested in long-shots of any kind; the high risk of failure wouldn't be tolerated by either party.
Max
what if it is 10pm on a Friday and you have chick over.
It's 10:00 p.m., you have a chick over, and the burning question in your mind is what movie you're going to watch? Time to come out of the closet, bub.
Max
i think it's a bit further than that. downloading illegally is primarily a male bastion, whereas music purchasing skews towards girls and women.
Cites? Sources? A single shred of empirical evidence published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal?
Females are less likely to download and more likely to buy music and less likely to be tech savvy.
Cites? Sources? A single shred of empirical evidence published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal?
Y'know, the only thing your statement proves is that you don't get out much, and that your personal clique of friends is highly homogenous.
I'll get flamed to death for this, but only on slashdot do I hear males admit to actually buying music.
No, you'll get pitied. Do you honestly think that your anecdotal exposure amounts to anything like an actual prediction of behavior across the entire population? Although you seem to have completely missed it, iTunes tells us that tens of millions of males - apparently no one you know - are more than willing to pay for downloads of music, if they think the price is right.
Downloaders know what the perfect price for music is. It's free. The perfect price for film is also free.
The perfect price for YOU is free. Perhaps your friends as well. But again, there are a great many of us (iTunes once again providing us with STATISTICAL evidence proving the point) who think that the value of music and movies is non-zero. We might think that the price point set by the **AA's is too high, but unlike you and your freeloader buddies we don't believe that music and film are worth nothing.
ITUNES is a stop gap measure - because there is NO COMPELLING REASON for anyone ot actually buy music.
Economics 101: a thing is worth whatever the buyer thinks it's worth. iTunes has shown us that tens of millions of people think that the value of music is non-zero and will pay for music even when they could get the exact same songs for free. The "compelling reason" here is whatever the buyer says it is, and for that you'd have to sample the buyers to find out why they're paying when they could get it for free. But I seriously doubt those tens of millions of people are all pansy-asses afraid that the Big Bad Lawman is going to find them and haul them off to jail. Most of those folks aren't spineless little college twats, after all.
Google is making free work, so it's possible.
What a crock. Somebody always pays - nothing is for free. In Google's case the people paying are advertisers. Just because YOU aren't forking over cash doesn't mean it's 'free'.
Max
They would say: "Oh, it's not FAIR that these cameras can catch me breaking the law!
What a crock of horseshit. They whined because back then Americans actually didn't like being spied on, whether or not they were doing something illegal. Obviously that's a concept that's lost on you.
All that has happened is that the technology has improved to allow us to better enforce laws already on the books.
Or to simply spy on people for shits and giggles. Or because some politico doesn't like what Joe Smith is saying about him during an election year. Or because Jane Doe has openly criticized the actions of her local police department.
Just because you used to not get caught, doesn't mean it wasn't illegal!
The point is that you don't have any business conducting random visual searches of people's private property. For that the 4th Amendment requires a signed warrant, based on probable cause. Saying that you don't need a warrant because the drone is flying, rather than peering over a fence, is something only a complete fuckwit could put forth as rational.
Max
He's just a wannabe neo-nazi who's pissed off that we don't yet live in the Fourth Reich. Y'see, he thinks that if we were all slaves in a police state he'd be Somebody Important, not the completely nobody that he is now, and then women would actually want to fuck him. Cute women, too.
An obvious loon. Ignore him.
Max
Of course they can follow you on the street. So can the guy behind you and the other guy across the sreet.
Actually, my state has anti-stalking laws. And anti-harrassment laws. My guess is that the laws only apply to us citizens, though, and that the government can stalk and harrass us as it pleases, simply because it chooses to do so.
Canada, for all of its faults, looks better and better with every passing day....
Max
Extremist environmentalism *is* a religion. Gaia is the goddess of that religion, and the extremists have assumed the position of high priests in possession of The Truth(TM).
But the problem is neither religion nor environmentalism; it's extremism, in *any* form. Extremists are the enemies of all of the rest of us, because they will not rest until every single person is either converted to their cause, or enslaved to their cause by force (via government power). There is no compromising with these folks; they are monsters bent upon a single purpose, the excuses used in achieving that purpose ultimately irrelevent. They should be treated as monsters and dealt with accordingly.
Max
Idiots assume that the only rights we have are those enshrined in the Bill of Rights. But the founders made it quite clear - and drove the point home in the 9th Amendment - that any power not specifically granted to the government by the people, is retained by the people. That means that the rights delineated in the Constitution are not the only rights we have; *all* power belongs to us except for that which we *explicitly* grant to the government, and which we can take back at any time.
I don't remember the people of Los Angeles County granting the executive branch the right to use these drones to further police powers. The executive branch certainly has no right to use these drones to spy on citizens on private property, without a duly signed and sealed warrant based on probable cause. The moron's argument that the drones are "in the air" and therefore not subject to warrants is nothing more than spitting on the Constitution and laughing in the face of all of those who cherish freedom.
Although I'm sure that they'll go ahead and continue to implement the New Order bit by bit, as they've been doing for decades now. People will soon think it's just fine for the police to spy on everyone - cameras everywhere for the 'public good' and 'safety' and all that rot - so long as 'everyone' means just the powerless prole on the street. I guarantee you that these little suckers will never be used to monitor the activities of the rich, or the powerful. If you think otherwise try using a drone to spy on the home of the sheriff and see just how fast your ass gets kicked six ways to Sunday.
Max
We are a destructive species and Wikipedia is on the tipping point of being a big enough target for utter destruction.
You failed to take into account that those interested in destruction will be far more motivated to ruin the product than the vast majority of the rest of us - who aren't interested in destruction - will be to fix it. That majority doesn't see it as their 'moral obligation' to combat the core of loons who make Wikipedia their battleground. Nor should they; their lives are their own, and the thought of spending precious time in an endless war with fanatics (over a collection of web pages, of all things) isn't exactly an appealing one.
Max
The "nutcases" are on both sides of the fence here. For example, you might get NAMBLA trying to rewrite the pedophile page to tell us all how it's a great thing to have sex with a 9-year-old boy; but by the same token you'll get the douchebags who scream 'pedophile!' at anyone who might be attracted to someone under the age of 18, whether they intend to do anything about that attraction or not.
The extremists on these topics are rampant on both ends of the spectrum, and equally immune to reason. The rest of us moderates only have so much stamina, especially when it comes to an activity like continuously correcting a web page. The moderates will, in general, burn out much faster, or find they have better things to do - like live their lives.
Max
The point of an encyclopedia or any record isn't to be absolutely right the first time, it's to be as right as possible
Which in many cases Wikipedia certainly is not, for precisely the reasons that others have listed. Sometimes folks fuck up because they don't care to double-check their facts, sometimes they fuck up deliberately because they have an agenda they want to press on others, and at other times they engage in vandalism or the much-harder-to-catch wikipranks. And there's always that group that cites propaganda as 'fact' because they're absolutely convinced in the 'rightness' of their cause, and refuse to entertain the notion that perhaps they aren't in possession of the Absolute Truth(TM).
Anyone claiming that Wikipedia is just as accurate, or even close to as accurate, as a professional encyclopedia written by acknowledged experts in their respective fields is a moron. Probably a moron with an agenda, who's written some half-assed amateur entry in Wikipedia and thinks that fact makes him as knowledgeable as any real expert.
Let the idiots, fools, and fanatics contribute to your encyclopedia and you're bound to get idiotic, foolish, and fanatical entries.
Max
A government is never more moral than the people it represents, by definition.
Max
After all, why should we pay for the Net?
You still pay for it. It's called 'taxes'. Just because you don't get a monthly bill doesn't mean that it's free.
Max
But in other nations, like say South Korea, you can get Gigapop internet, which runs at speeds up to 100 Mbps, and you can get it for about $15 a month or cheaper.
And South Korea has the same land area as Oregon, which makes cabling the entire country a fuck of a lot easier. Not to mention implementing upgrades to equipment.
Max
And now there's a lot of free porn, too!
The free porn was here first. Everything else followed after.
Max
Such a scheme would be totally unthinkable in the USA where the telecom lobby goes to great length to prevent governments from doing stuff that they would never do (watch the municipal wifi debacle).
What the fuck are you talking about??? The telecoms are using the federal government to PROTECT their monopoly, specifically lobbying to get projects like municipal wifi shut down. If the federal government didn't have the power that it does, the monopolies would be toothless. They don't have their own armies, you know.
Government power here is part of the problem, not part of the solution. You can't have an artificial monopoly without a strong government around to impose the monopoly by force.
Max
OTOH, I am sure that land lines still exist in nearly 100% of such homes.
I'm sure the lines still exist, but I'm equally sure that more and more people are abandoning them every year. I haven't had a land line for years, and many of the people I know have also abandoned their land lines for cells. We certainly aren't part of the younger crowd; more like the 'older and ornery crowd, who don't want random assholes calling and bothering us'.
One huge plus of the cell that no one has mentioned: it's illegal (at least in the States) for telemarketers to call you on your cell, for the same reason people can't fax you advertisements - because you end up having to pay for their use of your equipment. That's why my wife and I dropped the land line in favor of the cell (the convenience is a big second point), and many of our friends and family followed.
The phone is here for OUR use, not for anyone else's. If we wanted you calling us, we'd have given you our phone number. With cells, this painfully obvious fact is now an enforceable reality. I haven't had a single telemarketer call in all the years I've owned a cell, and the only people who've called me that I didn't know have been wrong numbers. My phone, in essence, has become a white-list-only device - and that is exactly the way I want it.
Max
I need clothes, yet because there are a large number of suppliers, competition pushes the prices down to the margin.
And that is an illusion. The actual number of companies producing clothing world-wide (off the rack, at least), is quite small. They dictate price agreements to retailers, which is why the same shirt or pair of pants can cost X in America, X*1.5 in Europe, and X/3 in Korea. The margin is very close to the price in Korea, but consumers in America and Europe will never see clothing priced close to the margin because of price agreements. Americans suffer the delusion their clothes are 'reasonably' priced primarily because of most of them have never been outside the country.
Same is true with housing and food.
Food is rarely priced in accordance with the cost of production. Price supports are rampant for farmers in-country, while a combination of tariffs and quotas raise prices for food produced out-of-country. If the free market actually held sway in food prices they'd be a fraction of what you pay now and a good many American farmers would be out of business, but the actual price would stabilize a good deal below what you currently pay at the supermarket.
Max