I am actually happy this happened. This sort of atrocity should be completely banned. These would be conscience beings, it is not the right of another person to manipulate the bodies of artifically engineer bodies that would be inhabited by other conscious beings. There are too many ethical questions, and especially from intentional and unintentional manipulation of intelligence and as well life experience, we are esseentially engineering their lives which we should not havea right to do that. Something such as life should be left to the randomness of nature, which does not have an agenda or any evil schemes. Animals and people have a right to be unique, to be their own people, and uniquely created by the randomness of nature rather than have their identity and characterists defined and dominated by someone else. This is very little different from surgically altering animals or people to suit the agenda of some scientist, for whatever evil purpose, to make them more subservant or docile, or what have you. The right to physical autonomy over ones body extends to the right to a natural body randomly generated from nature for a unique one of a kind, autonomous identity out of the control of anyone else.
I do quite a bit. I ride the bus a lot, even though this is a great inconvenience. I would be happy to ride it if it were made convenient enough to do it. But the republican government here seems to like the idea of flooded coastal cities so they do not want to do anything to make public transit better. I use a clothesline (which is, astonishingly banned in places, which should be illegal!). I turn off lights. I dont run the AC unless its absolute unbearable without it. I recycle everything they will let me recycle. I use low wattage light bulbs. I cant afford solar panels but if the government did a solar panel installation economic stimulus they could cover the roof with them. Im doing everything i can think of.
I would like to add, with what they are doing and their frittering away the money of their "oil pump taxpayers" from their duopolies, those CEOs are going to need those yachts to visit their beachside cottages and plush new york condominiums, on diving expeditions. They will be underwater.
Building a starship is the least of our concerns. It baffles me that we are discussing building a fusion spaceship when it seems that very little is being done to get fusion working for making our energy here on earth. Our priorities are all mixed up. While we are spending billions on wars to give money to banks so they can use it to by their yachts, we desperately need to be spending that money on fusion and clean, environmentally friendly energy sources NOW. We cant afford to wait any more on this.
It amazes me there is not a more strong and powerful call from scientists globally to rapidly expand fusion research adn development. We should be funding not one but many different technologies via government funding, having a sort of competition with different designs being tested. With several projects development different designs and with funding to new designs that can do fusion better, cheaper and smaller, such as the Polywell, we have a better chance of getting something that will work.
With our destroying our planets environments with CO2 and toxic fossil fuel related wastes and set to totally deplete the entire supply of oil in 40 years, and with a supply that simply cannot bring electricity to everyone on planet, such as those in Africa, to alleviate the poverty and suffering there, our energy crisis for producing energy for use here on earth is the greatest challenge we face. If fusion is feasible for a spaceship, why the hell are we not building fusion plants right now or at least spending billions on development of this. We need to stop dilly daddling around here, we cant afford to sit around longer and wait for markets to somehow come up with a solution. Its clear that government funds most nuclear fusion development and corporations are not doing what we need to be doing to solve our worlds problems.
If we can develop fusion, global warming is solved and we dont have to worry about it anymore. Then why are we not doing it. Why is it sometimes I get the feeling that while everyone moans about global warming, no one wants to take the initiative and actually fix the problem? There needs to be a strong call from the scientific community to expand funding for fusion development and research as well as other renewable, environmentally friendly technologies. We need to tax the oil companies as well so that we can fund these projects with the money that consumers are struggling to pay at the pump. While we have a planet in crisis it makes me FURIOUS that oil company CEOs are using money wrenched from hardworking people via their monopoly to fund their yachts when we desperately need this money to be put into fusion research. Its like these wealthy CEOs are saying to the people of the world "screw you all, Im going to spend all of the money on my yachts and let this planet go to hell". That we see so little priority on this energy crisis in government policy, in regulating oil company profits and through a democratic and science directed process regulating their research and development priorities around goals of eliminating fossil fuel dependance ASAP? We cant afford inaction and the same old same old with oil companies wanted to pollute the environment and oceans with their rigs, to spend all of their money on yachts and oil exploitation, and for fleets of wasteful fuel inefficient 20 mpg cars when we can have 80 mpg NOW. Is it because they want their to be a global warming crisis, for whatever political agenda they have?
Whether writing is distributed online or in paper form, the author still has to afford to eat and should be able to recieve renumeration for their efforts.
I think this is somewhat due to the way the middle class is being squeezed and there is less spending money than there once was. It may also be due to video games, and that does not bode well for the video game generation who spending their time moving a figure around the screen, and who lack the intellectual and brain development that comes from reading.
This situation mirrors that of what is happening to newspapers. While blogs are the ever so popular fad, most blogs are repackaging stories which are being provided by large media institutions such as newspapers who have well paid reporters. There is some kinds of reporting that can only be done with the kinds of budgets that major media outlets have, like investigations in sometimes dangerous foreign countries. The result of losing this is americans will become even less informed and aware of what is going on in the world, and is this awareness which is essential to the functioning of a democracy, an informed population.
I think the idea of online subscriptions should be done more, maybe sci-fi mags should have a bundled print-online subscription and an online-only subscription.
For newspapers perhaps there should be a national alliance of newspapers, maybe for some additional features or perks, you would pay an online subscription to your local online paper, but that would also grant similar access to all of the other newspapers in the nation as well. The subscription revenue would go to local reporters and to national wire news agencies. This provides newspapers a source of revenue, but retains the benefits of being able to instantly access news stores from around the country via the internet.
We make choices for ourselves regarding issues that effect a large number of people, through our democracy to cover decision making that effects many people. If you want to get rid of external influence on your life and control of it you need to get rid of large corporations. Liberals instead seek to use the democratic voice of the people to provide the people a voice in these corporations so that the people have a say and a control over their destiny once again. The other option is to destroy them. Otherwise you will have increasingly little control over your life and will be reduced to slavery, with no rights, in a totalitarian corporate police state. Corporations are now gaining and consolidating power and centralising control over everything. They control people through dependance, by controlling resources, markets, retail channels, and employement, they have made people dependant on them for the basic necessities of survival.
They increasingly control farmers through genetically engineered patented poisons which are proven to cause kidney liver damage. They control farmers through controlling retail adn distribution channels. The amount of the sale price of a crop grown by a farmer has decreased drastically from somewhere around 60-70% to 20%-40 since the 1950s. GMOs made by large agribusiness corporations allow not only farmers, and consumers to be controlled economically by controlling the very things needed for life, life itself, it also allows them to control and manipulate bodies. It has been shown that GMOs cause stomach lesions and gastrointestinal disorders, contain more trypsin inhibitors and less protient, cause kidney and liver damage, cancer, and new allergies. Mortality has increased significantly with rats who have been fed GMOs. This is what every american nearly has been consuming in their diet and are not even aware of it. I have spoken with doctors who have noticed the effects on people, including a dramatic increase in increasingly complex diseases and have noted a general decline in the health of americans since GMOs were introduced. Since GMOs have been introduced in the US, the incidence of many allergic food-related illnesses have increased by 10 times in the united states. Countries where GMOs have been banned, Sweden, for instance, have not seen any similar increase in such illnesses.
Because the government per-se, due to yourself and all who vote for libertarians and republicans, has become increasingly undemocratic, and represents large corporations adn wealthy individuals, government policy is no longer dictated by the interests of the general public and overall public interest and welfare, but the interests of a small but very wealthy and powerful corporations. These corporations seek to systematically dismantle all checks and balances such as food safety inspections, labelling requirements, workplace safety, minimum wages, mandatory vacation times, maximium work week, overtime pay, democratic unions, independant environmental protection adn regulation, and so on. Just recently several persons have died as a result of salmonella outbreak. Thanks to defeats of measures to require increased monitoring, spot inspections and access to test reports and audits of food safety facilities, and cuts to safety inspections, by Republicans many children have died or have become ill.
Corporations seek to systematically dismantle democracy and you are their tool and are helping them acheive their goal. They wish to gain absolute power and need to remove whatever else remains that holds them accountable to the people, anything else that makes them operate in the public interest to improve the overall general welfare. And thus they need to abolish unions and they need to totally corrupt government by purchasing politicians with pay to play, so politicians become representives of the wealthy elite rather than we the people. It takes millions of dollars simply to run for office and massive resources. In order to run for office and have any chance one has to kiss up to corporations and
I certainly do agree. It makes me quite angry and there are all sorts of malicious ways this thing could be used. It could be used by hardware/companies/media companies etc to deny your rights to the material on your own drive. Its not even necessary because encryption can be done by the software which the user can control and make it work the way they want it to. The way this is built into hardware puts it more out of user control which makes it eisier for malicious people like MPAA, who I believe are a greater threat to our security than any cracker, to abuse it and use it against users.
It makes me mad if I have to pay extra for all of this encryption circuitry for something i dont want, and wont use, because I prefer software encryption.
Quite frankly, the do not call list should be abolished. I have worked in telemarketing and the people there were simply trying to make a living selling quality goods. There is nothing wrong with calling people and letting them know about a product. If they dont want it they can hang up, no one is forcing them to buy anything or to stay on the phone. I do understand that for many low income people they may not want to recieve calls for things they cannot afford, so i do think there should be a do no call list for low income persons only who cannot afford whatever is being offered.
The do not call list, to add insult to injury, they actually make it HARD for companies to comply with it. These are often small businesses run by employees themselves, not large greedy companies like the banks who we throw billion dollar bank bailouts at. One would think they would want to make the list easy to access so all companies could get it but on one hand they require it on the other hand they make compliance so hard because to get the database it costs huge amounts of money, whcih often cannot be afforded by low margin telesales companies.
It is so difficult now to make a living with our economy and with the constant attacks on the middle class on this country which is being strangled by a wealthy elite class, who opposes fair pay for workers, unions and aggressively corrupts government and shows the most contempt and hatred for the middle class of this country and our democracy for and by the people, that the do not call list just adds to the misery and lessens the ability of honest low income people to make a living. With a society which is dominated by massive corporations, where it costs millions just to be able to sell to consumers, where all but millionaires are locked out of much of the retailing sector, where advertising is simply outrageous in cost, telesales is often the only affordable way to reach consumers. I have never seen things so bad in this country, and people in such desperation and people so financially devastated they cant buy anything for themselves anymore. The root cause of this is globalisation. This economic collapse would have happened years ago if it had not been artificially propped up with mountains of debt. Its a house of cards and you cant build a healthy economy on debt, you have to make things and people have to receive the money from what they make, not fat cat CEOs. This situation we have is a modern form of slavery with large corporations, there has been increasing consolidation of corporations and corporations are rigging the economic system, society adn infrastructure to lock out everyone else. This is centralisation of power so a few wealthy autocrats can control and manipulate the lives of millions. They will reduce thw working people into abject poverty and they steal money from the working people from the products they make for their own luxury yachts and private jets. While large banks are getting government welfare checks of billions of dollars, these same companies are throwing money at corporate jets, million dollar CEO office redecorating and super luxury high end million dollar vacations. I for one am tired of subsidising a fat cat CEO while every day I see families struggling to fee dtheir children. I am tired of us paying a hidden tax on everything we buy, where much of the money from things we buy goes to some wealthy elite class rather than the hard working peasants whose hands put those things together. The wealthy are strangling us and want to implementat a global third world fascist state with a puppet government which primarily serves to protect their own interests, they want the government to be their own private police force to assert their totalitarian order and give them billion dollar bailouts of taxpayer money. They oppose all efforts of the people oif ths country to be able to hgave a voice and control their destiny, and make the system work for the common good rather than for wealthy elites. They oppose the unions which is the only reason they USA has had
As for the performance issues, I cannot say as to why it is so poor. One would think Cygwin is simply a layer of POSIX libraries around win32, which should not introduce so much latency.
I have used Cygwin and have found it to be useful, and I have not found the problems to be as significant. The main issues is where it falls short of full compatability, a real big one is the lack of case sensitivity. It is annoying when certain programs do not compile properly and I do try to find out what the problem is in Cygwin so I can introduce a patch. This fixes it for all other programs that rely on the feature, rather than just mine.
The concept of Cygwin is good and would actually accelerate adoption of Linux, since it would allow users to make a more gradual move to Linux, beginning with moving to Linux apps, and would help eliminate the single platform lock in that keeps users on Windows. One we can get more users using native Linux apps, that will eliminate one of the hurdles to full Linux acceptance. Another project that will also help do this is Wine, by allowing Windows apps to run on Linux.
As for KDE I hope that the new KDE is as customisable and flexible and even more so. I always think its better to make software customisable and configurable, that features should not be removed, and that instead its better to place lesser used features in advanced screens where they can easily be found but do not confuse new users. Useability is in layout and feature richness, not in feature scarcity.
Porting unix software to Windows instead of improving Cygwin to run these apps without porting is an awful waste of time. Improving a common support layer that supports Unix APIs instantly allows thousands of Unix apps to work, rather than trying to port thousands of Unix apps to Windows.
KDE4 is such a disaster on Linux I do not think that porting to Windows should be a higher priority. Fix all of the regressions and feature loss between KDE3 and KDE4. KDE 4 is an embarrassment and a piece of shit. Torvalds is right.
USe some imagination, why not just ground up the material into a powder, and then devise a devise to basically blow that dust into the air. Heck you dont even need an explosive. Impossible? Not at all.
I HIGHLY doubt that with the general ineptness of Linux, and the great difficulty of using this operating system, that it will be significantly cutting into Windows market share. Consumers just want to buy a hardware device, plug it in, click install and use it with no hassles. They just want to buy a software program, click install and use it with no hassles. Linux still does not realise how important program and driver ABI backwards compatability is, and how important it is to provide stable versions of these. As such using software and hardware is still very difficult on linux and what gnome and ubuntu has done has made it worse, by removing features and flexibility. users want features and flexibility but they do not want to spend hours trying to figure out why some crappy driver doesnt work or fiddling with arcane configuration files. Linux is worth your time if you time is worth nothing, Generally it takes 10 times as long to do anything on Linux and getting it to work the way you want is a major headache, its both hard to configure and inflexible adn wont let you make it work how you want it to without a big fight. Its basically worthless unless you are someone who likes to spend hours doung what takes a minute on windows to do, if you are a geek who enjoys such abuses and torments trying to figure out why something doesnt work right or the whole mess that Linux is of broken dependancies and library and driver chaos.
Uranium is quite radioactive and has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Many types of plutonium also have long half life. Such would be a danger not only those in the area of the release, who may end up tracking the material in their movements over a larger area, but also those who enter the area sometime after. By the time it is discovered the material may have spread over a very large area and be impossible to remove. Due to the long half life this is not a concern just for the short term but the long term. Radioactive materials, cause, cancer, birth defects and numerous other diseases, just by being close to them. Just being near these materials exposes you to copius amounts of radiation. Dispersal devices could aresolise the material cuasing it to drive for miles, rendering that area permenenantly uninhabitable. In a dense city with lots of important financial institutions are that would be devastating consequence which could paralyze the economy. Indeed dirty bombs are a highly dangerous technology that could poison millions.
The title seems to imply he wont make any more breakthroughs after taking office. Yet I hope and I think that he should continue to due science work even after taking office and there is no reason why he couldnt.
I do agree with you that we must stop this trends towards a totalitarian government which seeks to determine what people are allowed to look at. As a liberal I beleive that the purpose of government is to serve the people, to protect the rights, freedom and liberty of the people, and to work to improve human welfare, as a means for the people through democracy to be able to imrpove their living conditions and assure that basic human rights such as housing, food, water, a clean environment.
There is no connection between this totalitarianism and social programs which are to be options of last resort to keep people from dying of starvation. These programs are in fact the only thing that guarantees that every human being can live and has a right to life. These programs in fact in todays corporate dominated economy where people are laid off at the slightest whim by large corporations, are the only thing that lies between many people and starvation.
Taxes should be established through democracy by the will of the people and utilized in ways that assure and improve the overall well being of the people. Taxes are being used to pay for things that would have to be paid for anyway, like bridges, roads, libraries, health care, social safety nets and health programs, etc. Taxes are necessary, we cannot have people dying in the streets, which for many families unemployment insurance is the only thing that has kept that from happening. Taxes should however be ability to pay. A person who has less income should pay a lower tax rate as they need a greater percentage of their income for basic living expenses.
Part of the problem we have with our economy is that years of corporate greed have led to wage stagnation with hoarding of wealth at the top, and increasingly little wealth trickling down to the common people. We have a corporate elite who basically takes the money from the working class for its own enjoyment, exploiting the labour for their own benefit as a slaveholder would. This is a tax that is levied against every worker and consumer and is far more unfair adn pernicious since instead of being used to provide emergency services to and help the poor, it is used to be benefit a wealthy and elite few, and their is no democratic check over how it used. The rich and wealthy should help those who are less fortunate, but in this perverted system, the working poor are working long hours, with much of the money made by their work not going back to them, but instead going into the hands of an elite who already has too many yachts and private jets. this is in quite contrary to an ability to pay tax on the wealthy which assures they have plenty left for a good life, for helping the less fortunate.
it is true that labor, land, natural resources and so on are limited and finite resources, money simply represents these resources which are present within the economy, and therefore money is finite as well. Offshoring and immigration has aided to this and has eroded the wages of american workers by providing corporations with a supply of very desperate, easily expoitable, cheap labor who you can do anything to and abuse any way you wish, willing to live in poverty as they are used to doing from the horrificly impoverished countries they come from. This reduced the amount of money the common people had to spend, and the middle class is very important as the money from the lower income groups, since they are larger tend to circulate more broadly through the economy and the fact that these groups have to spend a much greater percentage of income on purchasing things, therefore there is less opportunity for hoardinng and more of the money re-enters the economy.
Money moving is what is needed for the economy to function again and therefore large accumulations of wealth and money hoarding needs to be discouraged. More tax breaks for the wealthy is not going to fix that. This is a liquidity crisis, with for years a wealthy elite hoarding and accumuating wealtha dn wittling down wages of the middle and low in
This is what we need. I am glad that action is being taken on the router and DNS vulnerabilities. These are very serious issues that are a danger to everyones security and privacy. Especially rerouting attacks for download and software is a perfect way to redirect users into downloading virus loaded software, and into giving confidential information to fake websites. Its about time something is done to improve the security of these systems, and they are doing the right things it appears by addressing true threats in ways that improve and protect the users rights and freedoms rather than take them away. Its clear that there are IT experts involved with this rather than politicians. What australia has done is an example of what NOT to do.
This is a question I often ponder myself. There are channels to actgion, Including writing letters to the editor, letters to politicians, and supporting parties that vow to protect these free speech rights and vow to implement a bill of rights in the UK which gaurantees free speech with no exceptions, and to pass laws banning ISPs and other common carriers from engaging in censorship. Collectively large numbers of people can be a significant force. An independant democratic media that does not recieve funding from either the legislators or the corporations is also key to the functioning of a democratic society. I believe there should be a diverse media of many different kinds of media structures, including private and publicly owned, and independant media. There probably should be a media organisation in every country which is democratic and publicly funded via independant taxation authority.
Furthermore i think we should seperate our politicians from corporate influence as best we can so that politicians represent the people, not corporations, through public campaign finance and prohibiting all corporate campaign contributions. A board of directors of this media corporation should be elected by direct election by the people. Perhaps one third of the journalists and news segments should be produced by a random lottery selection from all journalists who wish to work for the corporation, one third hired by the board of directors and one third directly elected. Perhaps half of the journalists should be given a tenure, perhaps half by popular election and the other half by lottery, to assure a certain number of journalistic freedom but also assure that there also diversity.
I do thing that big mass media still has a place. It often takes a lot of resources to do the kind of reporting they have done, the key is to assure there is independant mass media totally independant of government and corporate influence. Still much of the content of blogs is derived from big media. They also have the coverage to reach a larger number of people and are not tied up with corporate influences by employment with other corporate interests in other parts of the economy.
It is key that the UK implement a bill of rights that contains a clause "The right of the people to free speech and expression shall not be abridged prohibited or denied" with no if's, but's or exclusions.
I believe it is the responsibility to protect the rights and freedoms of all people, not to take them away, and to serve the people, not attempt to control or dominate the people. Government is to be a servant of the people, and the only good government as they say, is a government that is afraid of the people, rather than a people who are afraid of the government. Government should assure all persons right to self determination and free speech, and privacy, health care, food, water, shelter, housing and a clean environment, all of which are essential if people are to have a right to life, especially in a situation of a corporate dominated environment at the corporations discretion.
Corporations shouls serve the public interest, should be owned by the people, either the general population or equally owned by the employees, and democratically operated with management elected and decisions made by the employees or the general population. Corporations should not exist to look at the people of this planets and its environments as things to be exploited for the benefit of a wealthy and elite few, but to protect the environment and to serve the general population adn the common interest. Instead of an economy that consolidates wealth into the hands of a few elites and degrades the living conditions of most people, we need to make sure that the fruits of the labor of workers are returned to them rather than stolen from them by corporate elites, an activity that is reducing our working class to destitution and which is strangling our economy and its main driver, the middle class. Conservative policy is elitist in that it favours and condones by its in
The authors of the US constitution and some of its amendments did not trust entirely trust the majority, thats why they put the bill of rights into the constitution. Under US constitution there are certain things that even the majority cannot do and that is infringe on the basic human rights of the individual, especially that of free speech and freedom of religion. The US constitutions authors intended to protect everyone's basic rights, not to have a dictatorship of the majority as in the UK, and that there would be certain freedoms of the invidual that the majority could not undo under the constitution and the rule of law. The US constitution is one of the few that have done free speech the right way, by not allowing exemptions which basically nullify it and allow the government to do anything it wants anyway. Ive seen constitutions in some countries that do not deserve to be called free societies, which claim that the people have a right to free expression but then follow this with a list of exceptions big enough to drive a semi through, that these rights can be violated in the name of "national security" and other purposes, which basically a government can use to justify any supression of speech, including preventing democratic regime abolishment. Such is not free speech at all, its an oxymoron and a contradiction. You are also correct that the integrity of a free society can only be made with a population that is active, has a resolve that there are certain freedoms like free speech that will not be compromized, that realizes that it can make a difference and never gives up, no matter how vain it may seem, in protecting and defending their freedoms. It requires a population aware of the protections and limitations of the constitution and legal system and why they are critical in keeping us safe from the worst danger to our well being, that of government.
I strongly believe government should work to protect the freedoms and welfare of the people, and rather than enslaving people and depriving them of privacy and censoring them, that government should instead work to protect rights to free speech, housing, a clean environment, food, water, and other basic necessities, and helping to solve our planets problems of poverty and developing and encouraging technologies which move us to clean new technology, stopping climate change at the source, by reducing CO2 emissions. Government should assure the freedom and right to life of the people, rather than enslave people.
The government gives a wink and a nod, they allow it to happen. Note that when i refer to government i also refer to large corporations because the two are increasingly equivalent. More on that in a moment. The thing with choose a different ISP is that there is such a monopoly of ISPs or difficulty in finding an ISP that does not censor that this does not gaurantee that you can avoid censorship. Unfortunately most of the population is apathetic, so you cant count on there to be any sort of backlash against the ISPIf an ISP or any company is censoring information that company is a common carrier, as ISPs truly are, they have become a de facto government that is setting de facto laws and policies which effect your life and your freedoms. The government allowing or encouraging ISPs to filter is no different from the government doing it itself. Its a diversionary tactic to trick you into thinking that there is no censorship, when there really is and the end effect is just as serious as if the government was doing it itself. Do not be fooled by this clever trick. The end goal and outcome is still the same, government led or condoned mass censorship, which removes the key pillars of a free and democratic society. In order for self governance to occur in a democracy people have to be able to express their views and opinions have free and unrestricted access to information. The founders realized that it would be hard to write a constitution that could prevent every unforseen bad law from being considered, but realised that as long as people have free speech abilities and can network and inform others about such things and no one was able to supress organisations, parties and free speech, that the people would have the tools to oppose such bad laws and for each person having all sides of an opinion avialable, with no side supressed, would be able to make up their own mind with the full information and opinion spectrum available to them. The first thing any totalitarian society tries to do is supress free speech, and thus any opposition to its policies and goals, this can apply to corportions or government to keep people from being able to express their views or any kind of organisation forming to assure a democratic choice or process of self governance in government and the corporations it regulated. The corporations and government can basically keep the same power oligarchy in place by supressing calls for change and the moves against free speech in the UK are an incremental phase in that direction, it sets very dangerous precedence, first getting people used to the idea that government can censor what they look at and has a right to. All censorship is evil but these things come in phases, first the government tells you it is to keep you safe, and that its just for good purposes to make sure your safe and your children are safe. However once the censorship regime is established it becomes every so invasive and government becomes power hungry abusing it in increasingly abusive ways. By this time its hard to stop it because the very channels of free speech you need to stop it are being blocked. The government has become a far worse enemy than anything it was supposed to protect you against and this is what happens when you give up such essential liberties, its a bait and switch you see, they sell it as a sugar coated turd, hoping you will see the lovely sugar coating not what lies beneath. As Benjamin Franklin once said, those who give up essential liberty deserve and get neither. The government is a far greater danger to our children than anything they will see on the internet. I would strongly recommend you watch niaomi wolfes video on youtube about the totalitarian trends and how such a force attempts to close down a free society. The corporations and government often work in concert, corporations influencing government with campaign contributions and government influencing corporations. The key is for the people to demand that each respect our rights and our freedoms and that each is democratic, and each must follow certai
This is outrageous. No government has ANY right to censor the internet or anything else or determine what people look at. It is none of their business. I am simply disgusted, people did not fight and die for freedoms, like basic freedom of speech so that we could give it up and turn ourselves into a totalitarian dictatorship. The UK is NOT a free society, it has become a totalitarain dictatorship and its government has no right or validity to do this. Censorship is one of the most significant hallmarks of a totalitarian prison state. No free society can allow for censorship. Stand up for your rights people! Don't let them get away with enslaving you! This is what we call the totalitarian creep, just take away little peices of freedom at a time, and people dont notice what happens. People say "oh, its just a little freedom, not much", but those little peices start to add up. And in the UK they have been chipping away at the expectations of freedom and privacy for a while and getting people used to living with greater intrusions upon their freedoms and privacy all the time. Years ago, if we would have suggested that one day the government would demand to block access to content and just blatantly censor anything it pleases and monitor all of your communications, you would have been called a nutty conspiracy theorist. But it is happening right now!!! The conspiracy theorists were right and it is becoming increasingly obvious by the day that there are those in power who want to implement a total survellience and censorship society prison state, which would weaken dramatically the framework of a free soceity, leading to greater atrocities and establishment of stasi like agencies and secret police is next. Censorship of any kind is simply an atrocity and a violation of basic human rights and so is mass censorship and the presence of this are a sure sign you are not living in a free society.
It depends a lot on what you are trying to do. Openoffice shows weakness in many areas that made it rather hard for me to use it. I gave up on it. There is no good free software alternative to a desktop publishing program like Publisher, PaintShop etc. Linux pretty much sucks in every way as a desktop OS, and its actually has gotten worse in the time I have used it. Gnome is still unconfigurable and rigid as ever. While on windows you can throw in a CD and install a driver or a program, doing anything on linux is a huge fiasco. I know people who tried to get drivers to install, it was a total nightmare. Linux does things to make itself unuserfriendly and scare off people, like not providing stable application and driver ABIs which is really dumb. Trying to install one program or driver on linux can trigger an avalanche that leads to weeks wrangling with arcane configuration files and compilations, complex incompatabilities and library mismatches, leading to a total system reinstall. Ubuntu does not even run on many computers and on many computers it just spits out some arcane error message that doesnt really tell you whats happening. I mean, in Windows XP things just work, I buy a hardware device, just throw in a driver disk click install, and one minute later its installed and working, I know it will work, on Linux your in for a week of configuring and troubleshooting if it works at all.
Actually, that you mention privacy, the privacy you get from IMAP is far better since you can install an encryption plugin to encrypt your messages. you can't do that with web mail. So actually the privacy is 5000 times better with IMAP, another plus.
I have a cable modem at home but im not always at home. It doesnt matter, server requests always take a while, you are sharing a server with thousands other users. Again thats a big issue with scrolling through messages and making other requests. With IMAP, i dont have to wait so much, while the messages are being sent to the server I can work on other messages.
IMAP clients can also cache messages locally so you have a local copy, and you can still compose locally and get messages ready to send without an internet connection, then batch send when you login.
Being a web application designer as well, I know that the firefox environment has a lot of limitations and shortsights. In fact it would be fairly useless without many Microsoft innovations like innerHTML and xmlhttprequest which form a basis of many modern web2.0 features. Again i must admit that Microsoft has actually made some pretty good improvements to the web environment, which should be included in w3c standards. For instance, I found it lacking fine control over user interface elements that you need in intensive application development. One was the lack of a position control for vertical scrolling of HTML elements and scrollbar options. The platform could also benefit from web applications being able to store data locally into a local database, like storing a local copy of a letter you are working on, but you would want to let the user opt in to allow a web application to do that. Lack of 3D graphics can be addressed by bring the OpenGL API into javascript and as well implementing x3d. Finishing implementation of SVG and SMIL support. innerHTML and xmlhttprequest, and various edit modes, need to be a part of the DOM. I have also felt the need for more fine tuned access to text characteristics like font ascent and descent and 7 or so other font attributes for precise positioning of text. being able to address all of the attributes of single characters through the DOM probably would be a good idea. Pretty much the exact attributes of everything should be accessible via DOM and it mostly is, like x, y, z position, color, etc. I have felt the need for notification of expose events, in addition to mouse and keypress events of all kinds, to be important, and drawing non-persistant graphics primitives so the programmer can control how expose and redraws are handled for low level graphics programming and control. That can be useful in bitmap paint programs. This is a bit more of a thing that is needed only in some niche applications but can be important. Building an open video codec, including ogg and dirac, into web standards I find to be of essential importance in stopping the flash menace. I want the web platform to become a full featured applications development environment, which can be used as a programming environment for local desktop applications and as well web applications. It is a good idea to go the few inches further to make web an full featured applications programming environment, its almost there anyway, allowing the same code to be re-used for both desktop and web apps .
I tend to log in to multiple e-mail accounts, so I have the password stored into thunderbird, so all I have to do is start thunderbird, it connects to all of the servers automatically and looks for mail. I do use gmail, with the IMAP support feature and use thunderbird with it. I tried using gmail web application, it was okay. Another thing about thunderbird though is that scrolling through messages works a lot better, it seems to cache message headers locally so doesnt have to make a request to the server just to scroll up and down.
I have heard of the idea of looking for metals on the ocean floor. It would probably have less long term impact than mining on the continents, given that ocean crust is recycled every 50 million years, but there are problems with viability, given the depths of this area, and environmental concerns, how will this effect the ecology on the ocean floors.
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You would use placeholders, that fixes the problem. Anyone who knows the first things about SQL should know that.
I am actually happy this happened. This sort of atrocity should be completely banned. These would be conscience beings, it is not the right of another person to manipulate the bodies of artifically engineer bodies that would be inhabited by other conscious beings. There are too many ethical questions, and especially from intentional and unintentional manipulation of intelligence and as well life experience, we are esseentially engineering their lives which we should not havea right to do that. Something such as life should be left to the randomness of nature, which does not have an agenda or any evil schemes. Animals and people have a right to be unique, to be their own people, and uniquely created by the randomness of nature rather than have their identity and characterists defined and dominated by someone else. This is very little different from surgically altering animals or people to suit the agenda of some scientist, for whatever evil purpose, to make them more subservant or docile, or what have you. The right to physical autonomy over ones body extends to the right to a natural body randomly generated from nature for a unique one of a kind, autonomous identity out of the control of anyone else.
I do quite a bit. I ride the bus a lot, even though this is a great inconvenience. I would be happy to ride it if it were made convenient enough to do it. But the republican government here seems to like the idea of flooded coastal cities so they do not want to do anything to make public transit better. I use a clothesline (which is, astonishingly banned in places, which should be illegal!). I turn off lights. I dont run the AC unless its absolute unbearable without it. I recycle everything they will let me recycle. I use low wattage light bulbs. I cant afford solar panels but if the government did a solar panel installation economic stimulus they could cover the roof with them. Im doing everything i can think of.
I would like to add, with what they are doing and their frittering away the money of their "oil pump taxpayers" from their duopolies, those CEOs are going to need those yachts to visit their beachside cottages and plush new york condominiums, on diving expeditions. They will be underwater.
Building a starship is the least of our concerns. It baffles me that we are discussing building a fusion spaceship when it seems that very little is being done to get fusion working for making our energy here on earth. Our priorities are all mixed up. While we are spending billions on wars to give money to banks so they can use it to by their yachts, we desperately need to be spending that money on fusion and clean, environmentally friendly energy sources NOW. We cant afford to wait any more on this.
It amazes me there is not a more strong and powerful call from scientists globally to rapidly expand fusion research adn development. We should be funding not one but many different technologies via government funding, having a sort of competition with different designs being tested. With several projects development different designs and with funding to new designs that can do fusion better, cheaper and smaller, such as the Polywell, we have a better chance of getting something that will work.
With our destroying our planets environments with CO2 and toxic fossil fuel related wastes and set to totally deplete the entire supply of oil in 40 years, and with a supply that simply cannot bring electricity to everyone on planet, such as those in Africa, to alleviate the poverty and suffering there, our energy crisis for producing energy for use here on earth is the greatest challenge we face. If fusion is feasible for a spaceship, why the hell are we not building fusion plants right now or at least spending billions on development of this. We need to stop dilly daddling around here, we cant afford to sit around longer and wait for markets to somehow come up with a solution. Its clear that government funds most nuclear fusion development and corporations are not doing what we need to be doing to solve our worlds problems.
If we can develop fusion, global warming is solved and we dont have to worry about it anymore. Then why are we not doing it. Why is it sometimes I get the feeling that while everyone moans about global warming, no one wants to take the initiative and actually fix the problem? There needs to be a strong call from the scientific community to expand funding for fusion development and research as well as other renewable, environmentally friendly technologies. We need to tax the oil companies as well so that we can fund these projects with the money that consumers are struggling to pay at the pump. While we have a planet in crisis it makes me FURIOUS that oil company CEOs are using money wrenched from hardworking people via their monopoly to fund their yachts when we desperately need this money to be put into fusion research. Its like these wealthy CEOs are saying to the people of the world "screw you all, Im going to spend all of the money on my yachts and let this planet go to hell". That we see so little priority on this energy crisis in government policy, in regulating oil company profits and through a democratic and science directed process regulating their research and development priorities around goals of eliminating fossil fuel dependance ASAP? We cant afford inaction and the same old same old with oil companies wanted to pollute the environment and oceans with their rigs, to spend all of their money on yachts and oil exploitation, and for fleets of wasteful fuel inefficient 20 mpg cars when we can have 80 mpg NOW. Is it because they want their to be a global warming crisis, for whatever political agenda they have?
Whether writing is distributed online or in paper form, the author still has to afford to eat and should be able to recieve renumeration for their efforts.
I think this is somewhat due to the way the middle class is being squeezed and there is less spending money than there once was. It may also be due to video games, and that does not bode well for the video game generation who spending their time moving a figure around the screen, and who lack the intellectual and brain development that comes from reading.
This situation mirrors that of what is happening to newspapers. While blogs are the ever so popular fad, most blogs are repackaging stories which are being provided by large media institutions such as newspapers who have well paid reporters. There is some kinds of reporting that can only be done with the kinds of budgets that major media outlets have, like investigations in sometimes dangerous foreign countries. The result of losing this is americans will become even less informed and aware of what is going on in the world, and is this awareness which is essential to the functioning of a democracy, an informed population.
I think the idea of online subscriptions should be done more, maybe sci-fi mags should have a bundled print-online subscription and an online-only subscription.
For newspapers perhaps there should be a national alliance of newspapers, maybe for some additional features or perks, you would pay an online subscription to your local online paper, but that would also grant similar access to all of the other newspapers in the nation as well. The subscription revenue would go to local reporters and to national wire news agencies. This provides newspapers a source of revenue, but retains the benefits of being able to instantly access news stores from around the country via the internet.
We make choices for ourselves regarding issues that effect a large number of people, through our democracy to cover decision making that effects many people. If you want to get rid of external influence on your life and control of it you need to get rid of large corporations. Liberals instead seek to use the democratic voice of the people to provide the people a voice in these corporations so that the people have a say and a control over their destiny once again. The other option is to destroy them. Otherwise you will have increasingly little control over your life and will be reduced to slavery, with no rights, in a totalitarian corporate police state. Corporations are now gaining and consolidating power and centralising control over everything. They control people through dependance, by controlling resources, markets, retail channels, and employement, they have made people dependant on them for the basic necessities of survival.
They increasingly control farmers through genetically engineered patented poisons which are proven to cause kidney liver damage. They control farmers through controlling retail adn distribution channels. The amount of the sale price of a crop grown by a farmer has decreased drastically from somewhere around 60-70% to 20%-40 since the 1950s. GMOs made by large agribusiness corporations allow not only farmers, and consumers to be controlled economically by controlling the very things needed for life, life itself, it also allows them to control and manipulate bodies. It has been shown that GMOs cause stomach lesions and gastrointestinal disorders, contain more trypsin inhibitors and less protient, cause kidney and liver damage, cancer, and new allergies. Mortality has increased significantly with rats who have been fed GMOs. This is what every american nearly has been consuming in their diet and are not even aware of it. I have spoken with doctors who have noticed the effects on people, including a dramatic increase in increasingly complex diseases and have noted a general decline in the health of americans since GMOs were introduced. Since GMOs have been introduced in the US, the incidence of many allergic food-related illnesses have increased by 10 times in the united states. Countries where GMOs have been banned, Sweden, for instance, have not seen any similar increase in such illnesses.
Because the government per-se, due to yourself and all who vote for libertarians and republicans, has become increasingly undemocratic, and represents large corporations adn wealthy individuals, government policy is no longer dictated by the interests of the general public and overall public interest and welfare, but the interests of a small but very wealthy and powerful corporations. These corporations seek to systematically dismantle all checks and balances such as food safety inspections, labelling requirements, workplace safety, minimum wages, mandatory vacation times, maximium work week, overtime pay, democratic unions, independant environmental protection adn regulation, and so on. Just recently several persons have died as a result of salmonella outbreak. Thanks to defeats of measures to require increased monitoring, spot inspections and access to test reports and audits of food safety facilities, and cuts to safety inspections, by Republicans many children have died or have become ill.
Corporations seek to systematically dismantle democracy and you are their tool and are helping them acheive their goal. They wish to gain absolute power and need to remove whatever else remains that holds them accountable to the people, anything else that makes them operate in the public interest to improve the overall general welfare. And thus they need to abolish unions and they need to totally corrupt government by purchasing politicians with pay to play, so politicians become representives of the wealthy elite rather than we the people. It takes millions of dollars simply to run for office and massive resources. In order to run for office and have any chance one has to kiss up to corporations and
I certainly do agree. It makes me quite angry and there are all sorts of malicious ways this thing could be used. It could be used by hardware/companies/media companies etc to deny your rights to the material on your own drive. Its not even necessary because encryption can be done by the software which the user can control and make it work the way they want it to. The way this is built into hardware puts it more out of user control which makes it eisier for malicious people like MPAA, who I believe are a greater threat to our security than any cracker, to abuse it and use it against users.
It makes me mad if I have to pay extra for all of this encryption circuitry for something i dont want, and wont use, because I prefer software encryption.
Quite frankly, the do not call list should be abolished. I have worked in telemarketing and the people there were simply trying to make a living selling quality goods. There is nothing wrong with calling people and letting them know about a product. If they dont want it they can hang up, no one is forcing them to buy anything or to stay on the phone. I do understand that for many low income people they may not want to recieve calls for things they cannot afford, so i do think there should be a do no call list for low income persons only who cannot afford whatever is being offered.
The do not call list, to add insult to injury, they actually make it HARD for companies to comply with it. These are often small businesses run by employees themselves, not large greedy companies like the banks who we throw billion dollar bank bailouts at. One would think they would want to make the list easy to access so all companies could get it but on one hand they require it on the other hand they make compliance so hard because to get the database it costs huge amounts of money, whcih often cannot be afforded by low margin telesales companies.
It is so difficult now to make a living with our economy and with the constant attacks on the middle class on this country which is being strangled by a wealthy elite class, who opposes fair pay for workers, unions and aggressively corrupts government and shows the most contempt and hatred for the middle class of this country and our democracy for and by the people, that the do not call list just adds to the misery and lessens the ability of honest low income people to make a living. With a society which is dominated by massive corporations, where it costs millions just to be able to sell to consumers, where all but millionaires are locked out of much of the retailing sector, where advertising is simply outrageous in cost, telesales is often the only affordable way to reach consumers. I have never seen things so bad in this country, and people in such desperation and people so financially devastated they cant buy anything for themselves anymore. The root cause of this is globalisation. This economic collapse would have happened years ago if it had not been artificially propped up with mountains of debt. Its a house of cards and you cant build a healthy economy on debt, you have to make things and people have to receive the money from what they make, not fat cat CEOs. This situation we have is a modern form of slavery with large corporations, there has been increasing consolidation of corporations and corporations are rigging the economic system, society adn infrastructure to lock out everyone else. This is centralisation of power so a few wealthy autocrats can control and manipulate the lives of millions. They will reduce thw working people into abject poverty and they steal money from the working people from the products they make for their own luxury yachts and private jets. While large banks are getting government welfare checks of billions of dollars, these same companies are throwing money at corporate jets, million dollar CEO office redecorating and super luxury high end million dollar vacations. I for one am tired of subsidising a fat cat CEO while every day I see families struggling to fee dtheir children. I am tired of us paying a hidden tax on everything we buy, where much of the money from things we buy goes to some wealthy elite class rather than the hard working peasants whose hands put those things together. The wealthy are strangling us and want to implementat a global third world fascist state with a puppet government which primarily serves to protect their own interests, they want the government to be their own private police force to assert their totalitarian order and give them billion dollar bailouts of taxpayer money. They oppose all efforts of the people oif ths country to be able to hgave a voice and control their destiny, and make the system work for the common good rather than for wealthy elites. They oppose the unions which is the only reason they USA has had
As for the performance issues, I cannot say as to why it is so poor. One would think Cygwin is simply a layer of POSIX libraries around win32, which should not introduce so much latency.
I have used Cygwin and have found it to be useful, and I have not found the problems to be as significant. The main issues is where it falls short of full compatability, a real big one is the lack of case sensitivity. It is annoying when certain programs do not compile properly and I do try to find out what the problem is in Cygwin so I can introduce a patch. This fixes it for all other programs that rely on the feature, rather than just mine.
The concept of Cygwin is good and would actually accelerate adoption of Linux, since it would allow users to make a more gradual move to Linux, beginning with moving to Linux apps, and would help eliminate the single platform lock in that keeps users on Windows. One we can get more users using native Linux apps, that will eliminate one of the hurdles to full Linux acceptance. Another project that will also help do this is Wine, by allowing Windows apps to run on Linux.
As for KDE I hope that the new KDE is as customisable and flexible and even more so. I always think its better to make software customisable and configurable, that features should not be removed, and that instead its better to place lesser used features in advanced screens where they can easily be found but do not confuse new users. Useability is in layout and feature richness, not in feature scarcity.
Porting unix software to Windows instead of improving Cygwin to run these apps without porting is an awful waste of time. Improving a common support layer that supports Unix APIs instantly allows thousands of Unix apps to work, rather than trying to port thousands of Unix apps to Windows.
KDE4 is such a disaster on Linux I do not think that porting to Windows should be a higher priority. Fix all of the regressions and feature loss between KDE3 and KDE4. KDE 4 is an embarrassment and a piece of shit. Torvalds is right.
USe some imagination, why not just ground up the material into a powder, and then devise a devise to basically blow that dust into the air. Heck you dont even need an explosive. Impossible? Not at all.
I HIGHLY doubt that with the general ineptness of Linux, and the great difficulty of using this operating system, that it will be significantly cutting into Windows market share. Consumers just want to buy a hardware device, plug it in, click install and use it with no hassles. They just want to buy a software program, click install and use it with no hassles. Linux still does not realise how important program and driver ABI backwards compatability is, and how important it is to provide stable versions of these. As such using software and hardware is still very difficult on linux and what gnome and ubuntu has done has made it worse, by removing features and flexibility. users want features and flexibility but they do not want to spend hours trying to figure out why some crappy driver doesnt work or fiddling with arcane configuration files. Linux is worth your time if you time is worth nothing, Generally it takes 10 times as long to do anything on Linux and getting it to work the way you want is a major headache, its both hard to configure and inflexible adn wont let you make it work how you want it to without a big fight. Its basically worthless unless you are someone who likes to spend hours doung what takes a minute on windows to do, if you are a geek who enjoys such abuses and torments trying to figure out why something doesnt work right or the whole mess that Linux is of broken dependancies and library and driver chaos.
Uranium is quite radioactive and has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Many types of plutonium also have long half life. Such would be a danger not only those in the area of the release, who may end up tracking the material in their movements over a larger area, but also those who enter the area sometime after. By the time it is discovered the material may have spread over a very large area and be impossible to remove. Due to the long half life this is not a concern just for the short term but the long term. Radioactive materials, cause, cancer, birth defects and numerous other diseases, just by being close to them. Just being near these materials exposes you to copius amounts of radiation. Dispersal devices could aresolise the material cuasing it to drive for miles, rendering that area permenenantly uninhabitable. In a dense city with lots of important financial institutions are that would be devastating consequence which could paralyze the economy. Indeed dirty bombs are a highly dangerous technology that could poison millions.
The title seems to imply he wont make any more breakthroughs after taking office. Yet I hope and I think that he should continue to due science work even after taking office and there is no reason why he couldnt.
I do agree with you that we must stop this trends towards a totalitarian government which seeks to determine what people are allowed to look at. As a liberal I beleive that the purpose of government is to serve the people, to protect the rights, freedom and liberty of the people, and to work to improve human welfare, as a means for the people through democracy to be able to imrpove their living conditions and assure that basic human rights such as housing, food, water, a clean environment.
There is no connection between this totalitarianism and social programs which are to be options of last resort to keep people from dying of starvation. These programs are in fact the only thing that guarantees that every human being can live and has a right to life. These programs in fact in todays corporate dominated economy where people are laid off at the slightest whim by large corporations, are the only thing that lies between many people and starvation.
Taxes should be established through democracy by the will of the people and utilized in ways that assure and improve the overall well being of the people. Taxes are being used to pay for things that would have to be paid for anyway, like bridges, roads, libraries, health care, social safety nets and health programs, etc. Taxes are necessary, we cannot have people dying in the streets, which for many families unemployment insurance is the only thing that has kept that from happening. Taxes should however be ability to pay. A person who has less income should pay a lower tax rate as they need a greater percentage of their income for basic living expenses.
Part of the problem we have with our economy is that years of corporate greed have led to wage stagnation with hoarding of wealth at the top, and increasingly little wealth trickling down to the common people. We have a corporate elite who basically takes the money from the working class for its own enjoyment, exploiting the labour for their own benefit as a slaveholder would. This is a tax that is levied against every worker and consumer and is far more unfair adn pernicious since instead of being used to provide emergency services to and help the poor, it is used to be benefit a wealthy and elite few, and their is no democratic check over how it used. The rich and wealthy should help those who are less fortunate, but in this perverted system, the working poor are working long hours, with much of the money made by their work not going back to them, but instead going into the hands of an elite who already has too many yachts and private jets. this is in quite contrary to an ability to pay tax on the wealthy which assures they have plenty left for a good life, for helping the less fortunate.
it is true that labor, land, natural resources and so on are limited and finite resources, money simply represents these resources which are present within the economy, and therefore money is finite as well. Offshoring and immigration has aided to this and has eroded the wages of american workers by providing corporations with a supply of very desperate, easily expoitable, cheap labor who you can do anything to and abuse any way you wish, willing to live in poverty as they are used to doing from the horrificly impoverished countries they come from. This reduced the amount of money the common people had to spend, and the middle class is very important as the money from the lower income groups, since they are larger tend to circulate more broadly through the economy and the fact that these groups have to spend a much greater percentage of income on purchasing things, therefore there is less opportunity for hoardinng and more of the money re-enters the economy.
Money moving is what is needed for the economy to function again and therefore large accumulations of wealth and money hoarding needs to be discouraged. More tax breaks for the wealthy is not going to fix that. This is a liquidity crisis, with for years a wealthy elite hoarding and accumuating wealtha dn wittling down wages of the middle and low in
This is what we need. I am glad that action is being taken on the router and DNS vulnerabilities. These are very serious issues that are a danger to everyones security and privacy. Especially rerouting attacks for download and software is a perfect way to redirect users into downloading virus loaded software, and into giving confidential information to fake websites. Its about time something is done to improve the security of these systems, and they are doing the right things it appears by addressing true threats in ways that improve and protect the users rights and freedoms rather than take them away. Its clear that there are IT experts involved with this rather than politicians. What australia has done is an example of what NOT to do.
This is a question I often ponder myself. There are channels to actgion, Including writing letters to the editor, letters to politicians, and supporting parties that vow to protect these free speech rights and vow to implement a bill of rights in the UK which gaurantees free speech with no exceptions, and to pass laws banning ISPs and other common carriers from engaging in censorship. Collectively large numbers of people can be a significant force. An independant democratic media that does not recieve funding from either the legislators or the corporations is also key to the functioning of a democratic society. I believe there should be a diverse media of many different kinds of media structures, including private and publicly owned, and independant media. There probably should be a media organisation in every country which is democratic and publicly funded via independant taxation authority.
Furthermore i think we should seperate our politicians from corporate influence as best we can so that politicians represent the people, not corporations, through public campaign finance and prohibiting all corporate campaign contributions. A board of directors of this media corporation should be elected by direct election by the people. Perhaps one third of the journalists and news segments should be produced by a random lottery selection from all journalists who wish to work for the corporation, one third hired by the board of directors and one third directly elected. Perhaps half of the journalists should be given a tenure, perhaps half by popular election and the other half by lottery, to assure a certain number of journalistic freedom but also assure that there also diversity.
I do thing that big mass media still has a place. It often takes a lot of resources to do the kind of reporting they have done, the key is to assure there is independant mass media totally independant of government and corporate influence. Still much of the content of blogs is derived from big media. They also have the coverage to reach a larger number of people and are not tied up with corporate influences by employment with other corporate interests in other parts of the economy.
It is key that the UK implement a bill of rights that contains a clause "The right of the people to free speech and expression shall not be abridged prohibited or denied" with no if's, but's or exclusions.
I believe it is the responsibility to protect the rights and freedoms of all people, not to take them away, and to serve the people, not attempt to control or dominate the people. Government is to be a servant of the people, and the only good government as they say, is a government that is afraid of the people, rather than a people who are afraid of the government. Government should assure all persons right to self determination and free speech, and privacy, health care, food, water, shelter, housing and a clean environment, all of which are essential if people are to have a right to life, especially in a situation of a corporate dominated environment at the corporations discretion.
Corporations shouls serve the public interest, should be owned by the people, either the general population or equally owned by the employees, and democratically operated with management elected and decisions made by the employees or the general population. Corporations should not exist to look at the people of this planets and its environments as things to be exploited for the benefit of a wealthy and elite few, but to protect the environment and to serve the general population adn the common interest. Instead of an economy that consolidates wealth into the hands of a few elites and degrades the living conditions of most people, we need to make sure that the fruits of the labor of workers are returned to them rather than stolen from them by corporate elites, an activity that is reducing our working class to destitution and which is strangling our economy and its main driver, the middle class. Conservative policy is elitist in that it favours and condones by its in
The authors of the US constitution and some of its amendments did not trust entirely trust the majority, thats why they put the bill of rights into the constitution. Under US constitution there are certain things that even the majority cannot do and that is infringe on the basic human rights of the individual, especially that of free speech and freedom of religion. The US constitutions authors intended to protect everyone's basic rights, not to have a dictatorship of the majority as in the UK, and that there would be certain freedoms of the invidual that the majority could not undo under the constitution and the rule of law. The US constitution is one of the few that have done free speech the right way, by not allowing exemptions which basically nullify it and allow the government to do anything it wants anyway. Ive seen constitutions in some countries that do not deserve to be called free societies, which claim that the people have a right to free expression but then follow this with a list of exceptions big enough to drive a semi through, that these rights can be violated in the name of "national security" and other purposes, which basically a government can use to justify any supression of speech, including preventing democratic regime abolishment. Such is not free speech at all, its an oxymoron and a contradiction. You are also correct that the integrity of a free society can only be made with a population that is active, has a resolve that there are certain freedoms like free speech that will not be compromized, that realizes that it can make a difference and never gives up, no matter how vain it may seem, in protecting and defending their freedoms. It requires a population aware of the protections and limitations of the constitution and legal system and why they are critical in keeping us safe from the worst danger to our well being, that of government.
I strongly believe government should work to protect the freedoms and welfare of the people, and rather than enslaving people and depriving them of privacy and censoring them, that government should instead work to protect rights to free speech, housing, a clean environment, food, water, and other basic necessities, and helping to solve our planets problems of poverty and developing and encouraging technologies which move us to clean new technology, stopping climate change at the source, by reducing CO2 emissions. Government should assure the freedom and right to life of the people, rather than enslave people.
The government gives a wink and a nod, they allow it to happen. Note that when i refer to government i also refer to large corporations because the two are increasingly equivalent. More on that in a moment. The thing with choose a different ISP is that there is such a monopoly of ISPs or difficulty in finding an ISP that does not censor that this does not gaurantee that you can avoid censorship. Unfortunately most of the population is apathetic, so you cant count on there to be any sort of backlash against the ISPIf an ISP or any company is censoring information that company is a common carrier, as ISPs truly are, they have become a de facto government that is setting de facto laws and policies which effect your life and your freedoms. The government allowing or encouraging ISPs to filter is no different from the government doing it itself. Its a diversionary tactic to trick you into thinking that there is no censorship, when there really is and the end effect is just as serious as if the government was doing it itself. Do not be fooled by this clever trick. The end goal and outcome is still the same, government led or condoned mass censorship, which removes the key pillars of a free and democratic society. In order for self governance to occur in a democracy people have to be able to express their views and opinions have free and unrestricted access to information. The founders realized that it would be hard to write a constitution that could prevent every unforseen bad law from being considered, but realised that as long as people have free speech abilities and can network and inform others about such things and no one was able to supress organisations, parties and free speech, that the people would have the tools to oppose such bad laws and for each person having all sides of an opinion avialable, with no side supressed, would be able to make up their own mind with the full information and opinion spectrum available to them. The first thing any totalitarian society tries to do is supress free speech, and thus any opposition to its policies and goals, this can apply to corportions or government to keep people from being able to express their views or any kind of organisation forming to assure a democratic choice or process of self governance in government and the corporations it regulated. The corporations and government can basically keep the same power oligarchy in place by supressing calls for change and the moves against free speech in the UK are an incremental phase in that direction, it sets very dangerous precedence, first getting people used to the idea that government can censor what they look at and has a right to. All censorship is evil but these things come in phases, first the government tells you it is to keep you safe, and that its just for good purposes to make sure your safe and your children are safe. However once the censorship regime is established it becomes every so invasive and government becomes power hungry abusing it in increasingly abusive ways. By this time its hard to stop it because the very channels of free speech you need to stop it are being blocked. The government has become a far worse enemy than anything it was supposed to protect you against and this is what happens when you give up such essential liberties, its a bait and switch you see, they sell it as a sugar coated turd, hoping you will see the lovely sugar coating not what lies beneath. As Benjamin Franklin once said, those who give up essential liberty deserve and get neither. The government is a far greater danger to our children than anything they will see on the internet. I would strongly recommend you watch niaomi wolfes video on youtube about the totalitarian trends and how such a force attempts to close down a free society. The corporations and government often work in concert, corporations influencing government with campaign contributions and government influencing corporations. The key is for the people to demand that each respect our rights and our freedoms and that each is democratic, and each must follow certai
This is outrageous. No government has ANY right to censor the internet or anything else or determine what people look at. It is none of their business. I am simply disgusted, people did not fight and die for freedoms, like basic freedom of speech so that we could give it up and turn ourselves into a totalitarian dictatorship. The UK is NOT a free society, it has become a totalitarain dictatorship and its government has no right or validity to do this. Censorship is one of the most significant hallmarks of a totalitarian prison state. No free society can allow for censorship. Stand up for your rights people! Don't let them get away with enslaving you! This is what we call the totalitarian creep, just take away little peices of freedom at a time, and people dont notice what happens. People say "oh, its just a little freedom, not much", but those little peices start to add up. And in the UK they have been chipping away at the expectations of freedom and privacy for a while and getting people used to living with greater intrusions upon their freedoms and privacy all the time. Years ago, if we would have suggested that one day the government would demand to block access to content and just blatantly censor anything it pleases and monitor all of your communications, you would have been called a nutty conspiracy theorist. But it is happening right now!!! The conspiracy theorists were right and it is becoming increasingly obvious by the day that there are those in power who want to implement a total survellience and censorship society prison state, which would weaken dramatically the framework of a free soceity, leading to greater atrocities and establishment of stasi like agencies and secret police is next. Censorship of any kind is simply an atrocity and a violation of basic human rights and so is mass censorship and the presence of this are a sure sign you are not living in a free society.
It depends a lot on what you are trying to do. Openoffice shows weakness in many areas that made it rather hard for me to use it. I gave up on it. There is no good free software alternative to a desktop publishing program like Publisher, PaintShop etc. Linux pretty much sucks in every way as a desktop OS, and its actually has gotten worse in the time I have used it. Gnome is still unconfigurable and rigid as ever. While on windows you can throw in a CD and install a driver or a program, doing anything on linux is a huge fiasco. I know people who tried to get drivers to install, it was a total nightmare. Linux does things to make itself unuserfriendly and scare off people, like not providing stable application and driver ABIs which is really dumb. Trying to install one program or driver on linux can trigger an avalanche that leads to weeks wrangling with arcane configuration files and compilations, complex incompatabilities and library mismatches, leading to a total system reinstall. Ubuntu does not even run on many computers and on many computers it just spits out some arcane error message that doesnt really tell you whats happening. I mean, in Windows XP things just work, I buy a hardware device, just throw in a driver disk click install, and one minute later its installed and working, I know it will work, on Linux your in for a week of configuring and troubleshooting if it works at all.
Actually, that you mention privacy, the privacy you get from IMAP is far better since you can install an encryption plugin to encrypt your messages. you can't do that with web mail. So actually the privacy is 5000 times better with IMAP, another plus.
I have a cable modem at home but im not always at home. It doesnt matter, server requests always take a while, you are sharing a server with thousands other users. Again thats a big issue with scrolling through messages and making other requests. With IMAP, i dont have to wait so much, while the messages are being sent to the server I can work on other messages.
IMAP clients can also cache messages locally so you have a local copy, and you can still compose locally and get messages ready to send without an internet connection, then batch send when you login.
Being a web application designer as well, I know that the firefox environment has a lot of limitations and shortsights. In fact it would be fairly useless without many Microsoft innovations like innerHTML and xmlhttprequest which form a basis of many modern web2.0 features. Again i must admit that Microsoft has actually made some pretty good improvements to the web environment, which should be included in w3c standards. For instance, I found it lacking fine control over user interface elements that you need in intensive application development. One was the lack of a position control for vertical scrolling of HTML elements and scrollbar options. The platform could also benefit from web applications being able to store data locally into a local database, like storing a local copy of a letter you are working on, but you would want to let the user opt in to allow a web application to do that. Lack of 3D graphics can be addressed by bring the OpenGL API into javascript and as well implementing x3d. Finishing implementation of SVG and SMIL support. innerHTML and xmlhttprequest, and various edit modes, need to be a part of the DOM. I have also felt the need for more fine tuned access to text characteristics like font ascent and descent and 7 or so other font attributes for precise positioning of text. being able to address all of the attributes of single characters through the DOM probably would be a good idea. Pretty much the exact attributes of everything should be accessible via DOM and it mostly is, like x, y, z position, color, etc. I have felt the need for notification of expose events, in addition to mouse and keypress events of all kinds, to be important, and drawing non-persistant graphics primitives so the programmer can control how expose and redraws are handled for low level graphics programming and control. That can be useful in bitmap paint programs. This is a bit more of a thing that is needed only in some niche applications but can be important. Building an open video codec, including ogg and dirac, into web standards I find to be of essential importance in stopping the flash menace. I want the web platform to become a full featured applications development environment, which can be used as a programming environment for local desktop applications and as well web applications. It is a good idea to go the few inches further to make web an full featured applications programming environment, its almost there anyway, allowing the same code to be re-used for both desktop and web apps .
I tend to log in to multiple e-mail accounts, so I have the password stored into thunderbird, so all I have to do is start thunderbird, it connects to all of the servers automatically and looks for mail. I do use gmail, with the IMAP support feature and use thunderbird with it. I tried using gmail web application, it was okay. Another thing about thunderbird though is that scrolling through messages works a lot better, it seems to cache message headers locally so doesnt have to make a request to the server just to scroll up and down.
I have heard of the idea of looking for metals on the ocean floor. It would probably have less long term impact than mining on the continents, given that ocean crust is recycled every 50 million years, but there are problems with viability, given the depths of this area, and environmental concerns, how will this effect the ecology on the ocean floors.