A few tweaks like subjecting incomes higher than $110,000 to the FICA tax would bring collections closer to expenditures.
Don't you get it? The long term debt trajectory is the utter destruction of the dollar as a currency (see Zimbabwe). Eventually the increase in the debt and its associated compounding interest payments begin to approach infinity and long before that happens the dollar will have become essentially worthless anyway. So yes, the government promises to pay your social security check in worthless dollars, but what good is that to you? Ask those pensioners who received their defined payments in Zimbabwe dollars how well that worked out for them. Keep your eye on Greece if you want a preview of coming attractions, they are much farther along the path than we are.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that on the one hand the United States is rushing to develop what it calls "cyber weapons" (side note: why must everything be prefixed with cyber anyway, especially when it has nothing to do with man machine integration?), which would include autonomous programs communicating amongst themselves and coordinating activities via a command / control channel (i.e. a "botnet"), while at the same time announcing an initiative to "fight" the very programs that they are also creating? Why must everything be couched in language suggesting a "war on whatever"? Why not simply say, "we will respond in kind to those who attack us using these weapons", acknowledging the obvious fact that such weapons are inevitable, and leave it at that.
I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
This problem will be largely solved by the proliferation of cheap yet higher quality Android tablets entering the marketplace in greater numbers. The coming commoditization of the tablet will drive down prices and splinter the user base. This will have two major effects. First, it will make standards based technologies essential to apps or services designed to be accessed via these cheap iPad clones running Android. Second, it will make DRM and lockdown meaningless and counter productive because people will simply buy the tablet that doesn't have these restrictions. As for software, what's available on iOS that cannot be found on Android? Do we really need 10+ me-too apps that all do basically the same thing? At some point, the number of apps on the platform becomes a meaningless statistic because most of them are either worthless or essentially dupes of other better apps or services.
Just wait until they've got most people switched over to the cloud and then they will turn on the data caps and metered billing for network access. Will the cloud still be amazing when people are paying by the byte? It's a trap!
Honestly, this "cloud" nonsense has to stop. The marketing bullshit has to stop.
I agree. I really wish that someone out there, more knowledgeable than I, would finally lead the charge on a spirited attack against all of the marketing hype and bullshit surrounding the cloud. The tech companies don't care because they're too busy selling software and hardware to suckers who don't know what they're really buying. They promote the hype and sell the products, but they aren't drinking the cool-aid that they're serving. It's like the Realtors during the housing bubble. They knew it was a bubble and they knew the mortgages were shit, but they didn't care because they were making money and nobody wanted to be the one to break up the party before the police arrived to do it for them.
Also with more applications running off the web, you really don't need much of a computer anymore.
If you don't need much of a computer to do your work, then maybe your job can probably be automated anyway. Most of us here on Slashdot would be completely dissatisfied with dinky web apps running in the cloud. Powerful workstation, accept no substitutes.
He's always got his desktop with fast local access to network resources
The key word here is local resources. That's where the cloud tends to fall down, especially for the sorts of live action personal productivity apps that are common in the workplace. This category would include general office productivity (document editor, spreadsheet, presentation builder, etc), engineering and drafting (AutoCAD et al), video editing and graphics (Adobe Suite), or software development (Eclipse, Visual Studio, X-Code, etc). The losses as cloud apps lag and try to keep up are especially noticeable for power users who create and edit large or complex files, make frequent use of keyboard shortcuts and have high WPM typing speeds. They expect a workstation that can keep up and any lag on the part of a cloud app is simply unacceptable. It was the same problem with "thin clients" (remember that fad?) until workstation hardware became so cheap that the thin clients' margins completely evaporated and the idea was finally put out of workers' misery. The biggest cost in business, at least in the developed world, was and remains labor. It makes no sense to cheap out on hardware, virtualization or cloud apps if it costs even just a bit of worker productivity on a regular basis. It's a false savings.
and it would take a major act of Congress to get rid of them
Indeed it would, but that would require something that President Obama is sorely lacking; Leadership. If Rudy Giuliani had been in office instead of Obama, we wouldn't be having this conversation because these things would have already been done. New Yorkers don't beat around the bush, they get shit done.
(not that that would even be desirable).
That's debatable. What's not debatable is that some changes are necessary if these programs are going to remain available in any meaningful way for millennials and those now in their prime working years (approximately ages 30-50). Just go out and ask anyone under the age of 40 whether or not they believe there will be anything left once the boomers have passed through. Most of them either believe that they will get essentially nothing OR they have rocks in their heads and shouldn't be asked about financial matters in general and certainly not about actuarial matters.
at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.
The key phrase here being at the time of his death. The most decorated Marine in US history, since at least 1955, was and remains Lt. Gen Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller. Just about very Marine can remember doing "one more for Chesty" at the pullup bar or saying "goodnight Chesty, wherever you are" before lights out during boot.
I remember when being a "good Soldier/Sailor/Marine/Airman" was a compliment and there was no perceived need to call everyone a "hero".
I remember a story about one of the forward camps in Iraq where a portable toilet had scrawled on the wall, "Anyone can piss on the seat, be a hero and shit on the ceiling!"
The economist Thomas Sowell devoted an entire chapter of his book Economic Facts and Fallacies to "Male-Female Facts and Fallacies", including the question of gender inequality in the workplace. In all of the studies and data that he examined, dating back to the early part of the 20th century and continuing up through today, the single biggest factor in different workplace outcomes between men and women was not discrimination, but rather life choices which women commonly make, at the expense of maximizing their careers, but men do not. For example, it was and remains common for women to take an extended detour in their careers in order to have and raise young children and women are more willing to abandon what might otherwise be a promising career in order to do so. Furthermore, women are less likely to accept the sorts of high paying and high demand careers that men often do because attaining that level in a career requires years or even decades of dedicated work to achieve and leaves no time for raising a family or doing anything else but the career (i.e. the "glass ceiling" in the C-Suite). Sowell also found that the data is further skewed by the fact that men who are married to a female who does not work, but instead contributes home making, childcare and other household needs to the family coffers further enhances the career maximizing potential of the married man. In other words, all other things being equal, the married man earned more than his unmarried and similarly skilled male counterparts. Sowell argues that this difference is largely explained by the married men being freed up to concentrate even more on their careers, due to the efforts of their spouse, as compared to the single unmarried man. In summary, the gap between male and female earnings in the workplace both recent and historical is almost entirely explained by different life choices and not any systemic, overt or organized effort to discriminate against women in general as a class. I know that flies in the face of "conventional wisdom" regarding the narrative that is common on the left, but try reading Sowell's argument (he presents it much better than I can) and looking at his cited sources; it's compelling to say the least.
What happened to ambition, curiosity, and doing things "because it's there?"
A dose of reality? First there's the 9-5 followed by the wife and then the kids, the house, the mortgage and the cars. By the time that we're done doing all of these things there isn't much left for curiosity or doing non-essential things, "because they're there". Besides, why should I keep doing all of those things and paying my taxes so that you can live out your boyhood moon base fantasies? If you want a moon base, pay for it yourself.
For once, can we please just cut to the chase? Just stop these idiots from the beginning and a whole lot of people will save a whole lot of effort, money, time, and grief.
Yes, but then what would all those DEA people do for a living? Besides, the bureaucrats and private prison operators have budgets and contracts to protect. The "War on Drugs" is big business after all, and not just for the cartels. It would all be funny, in a farcical sort of way, if the real life consequences weren't so deadly serious.
Indeed, if it were then there would have been no need for copyright or infringement thereof as formal and separate concepts in the law because the property laws would have covered it. The fact that "copyright" does NOT fall under property law and that the "promotion of the progress of useful arts and sciences" is mentioned specifically and separately in the US Constitution, apart from any language concerning property, underscores their separateness and distinctness. The term "intellectual property" was invented and promoted by those whose interests were served by erroneously conflating the concepts of property and copyright or patent law. Indeed, the term "intellectual property" ought not to be used when referring to these matters because it injects bias and error into any discussion of patent or copyright.
And you believe that the 50% which, by your own admission, you pay the government in taxes is spent more wisely and frugally towards those ends than if instead you had directed that money yourself towards those less fortunate people? Surely you know at least a few charities that do more to help the less fortunate with a single dollar than the government can do with hundreds or even thousands? There's a reason why Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others have pledged their vast fortunes to private charitable foundations rather than to the government in the form of taxes, voluntary or otherwise. The government is stupid and incompetent compared to the private foundations and charities who maximize results and minimize costs. For example, Bill Gates has done more to help vaccinate poor people in a decade than the UN has managed to do in the better part of a century and with a fraction of the budget! If that doesn't convince you of the stunning waste and inefficiency of government, I don't know what will.
It would have to be a federal law, since there's no way in hell that cities or states would make such laws on their own.
Under what power enumerated in the US Constitution would the Federal government be able to interfere in what is quite obviously a local matter? The sales tax in question is a state tax and therefore by definition a state matter. If a local government decides to enter into a contract with a business concerning rebates of some or all of these proceeds for a finite or even an indefinite period of time then what business is that of the Federal Government? What's next, should the Federal Government be able to tell states like Texas that they have to increase or levy more taxes because states like New York and California have elected to impose higher taxes and states like Texas charging less "undercuts" their revenues? Give me a break. People should be careful what they wish for when they seek to empower the Federal Government with new and ever greater authority over their lives. Like the genie of the lamp who turns wishes against the wisher, the Federal Government will twist your dreams into nightmares and by the time you've realized your mistake it will be too late to unring the bell. Generations of Americans fought and died for limited government; don't be too quick to surrender those hard won gains for mere bread and circuses.
There is no need to charge him with treason. Pvt Manning is a uniformed member of the United States Army and as such is subject to military justice which includes the possibility of death if convicted of the charge of aiding the enemy (which he has indeed been charged with). Of course, the prosecutors have already said that they will not seek the death penalty so the point is moot, but it should be noted that treason is generally prosecuted against civilians, the Rosenbergs for example, and not uniformed members of the armed forces who are subject instead to much harsher military disciplines if convicted of similar or even lesser crimes.
You can't just rip out the pass-coded detonator and wire all the blasting caps on the explosives together
Indeed. Bypassing a PAL [Permissive Action Link] should be, as one weapons designer graphically put it, about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end."
Whenever I'm setting up a system, I generally allow seven (7) tries before locking out the user for at least 10 but not more than 20 minutes (10 + random 20). During the lockout period even the correct password will not log in and failed attempts provide no information to an attacker concerning the reason for or nature of the failure to login. With a system like this, even basic 7 character passwords with just letters and numbers provide a decent level of security. A password protected system should always be combined with an automatic lockout policy with automatic reset; it increases the strength of the login considerably by rendering increased attacker computing power useless. The only real downside to a system like this is the potential for DDOS, but even that can be mitigated by allowing only 100 or so attempts per hour from a particular IP address, on top of the regular lockout period, before automatically dropping traffic from that IP address for a couple of hours. These policies should turn away all but the most determined and best equipped attackers. The botnet DDOS might still prevent people from logging in, but if your site comes under an attack like that you've probably got bigger problems than users who cannot log in.
Does what you signed guarantee you a certain bandwidth, or is is an "up to x" sort of thing? I strongly suspect the latter.
Indeed, it's almost certainly the later. A actual guaranteed minimum speed can be had for certain types of account, notably dedicated T-Carrier type lines, but generally at much increased cost over standard consumer or small business broadband accounts. Depending upon the area, provider and speed, prices can range from several hundred to tens of thousands of dollars per month. So yes, a guaranteed minimum speed can be had here in the US but it's going to cost you a lot more than $50 per month.
At least that suggests an upper limit to how far America's population will allow their politicians to be bought.
The failure of SOPA was due less to the "grass roots" activism of individuals, although that certainly helped to provide a veneer of respectability, and more to the big money interests in the tech industry, namely Google but others too, who put their weight behind defeating it. In brief, SOPA was shot down because the technology industry, when it chooses to, has even more money to spend on lobbyists and political action committees than Hollywood and the entertainment industries do. If SOPA proved anything it proved that tech has entertainment outgunned when it comes to political payola, not that the people successfully stood up to and defeated monied interests by dint of their own effort. Hollywood's next move will be to make a deal with tech. They won't get everything they wanted in SOPA and they will probably have to make concessions to tech, but rest assured that the people will still be screwed once all is said and done.
Slashdot Mirror
A few tweaks like subjecting incomes higher than $110,000 to the FICA tax would bring collections closer to expenditures.
Don't you get it? The long term debt trajectory is the utter destruction of the dollar as a currency (see Zimbabwe). Eventually the increase in the debt and its associated compounding interest payments begin to approach infinity and long before that happens the dollar will have become essentially worthless anyway. So yes, the government promises to pay your social security check in worthless dollars, but what good is that to you? Ask those pensioners who received their defined payments in Zimbabwe dollars how well that worked out for them. Keep your eye on Greece if you want a preview of coming attractions, they are much farther along the path than we are.
Does it strike anyone else as ironic that on the one hand the United States is rushing to develop what it calls "cyber weapons" (side note: why must everything be prefixed with cyber anyway, especially when it has nothing to do with man machine integration?), which would include autonomous programs communicating amongst themselves and coordinating activities via a command / control channel (i.e. a "botnet"), while at the same time announcing an initiative to "fight" the very programs that they are also creating? Why must everything be couched in language suggesting a "war on whatever"? Why not simply say, "we will respond in kind to those who attack us using these weapons", acknowledging the obvious fact that such weapons are inevitable, and leave it at that.
How about a push to github?
I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
This problem will be largely solved by the proliferation of cheap yet higher quality Android tablets entering the marketplace in greater numbers. The coming commoditization of the tablet will drive down prices and splinter the user base. This will have two major effects. First, it will make standards based technologies essential to apps or services designed to be accessed via these cheap iPad clones running Android. Second, it will make DRM and lockdown meaningless and counter productive because people will simply buy the tablet that doesn't have these restrictions. As for software, what's available on iOS that cannot be found on Android? Do we really need 10+ me-too apps that all do basically the same thing? At some point, the number of apps on the platform becomes a meaningless statistic because most of them are either worthless or essentially dupes of other better apps or services.
Just wait until they've got most people switched over to the cloud and then they will turn on the data caps and metered billing for network access. Will the cloud still be amazing when people are paying by the byte? It's a trap!
Honestly, this "cloud" nonsense has to stop. The marketing bullshit has to stop.
I agree. I really wish that someone out there, more knowledgeable than I, would finally lead the charge on a spirited attack against all of the marketing hype and bullshit surrounding the cloud. The tech companies don't care because they're too busy selling software and hardware to suckers who don't know what they're really buying. They promote the hype and sell the products, but they aren't drinking the cool-aid that they're serving. It's like the Realtors during the housing bubble. They knew it was a bubble and they knew the mortgages were shit, but they didn't care because they were making money and nobody wanted to be the one to break up the party before the police arrived to do it for them.
Also with more applications running off the web, you really don't need much of a computer anymore.
If you don't need much of a computer to do your work, then maybe your job can probably be automated anyway. Most of us here on Slashdot would be completely dissatisfied with dinky web apps running in the cloud. Powerful workstation, accept no substitutes.
He's always got his desktop with fast local access to network resources
The key word here is local resources. That's where the cloud tends to fall down, especially for the sorts of live action personal productivity apps that are common in the workplace. This category would include general office productivity (document editor, spreadsheet, presentation builder, etc), engineering and drafting (AutoCAD et al), video editing and graphics (Adobe Suite), or software development (Eclipse, Visual Studio, X-Code, etc). The losses as cloud apps lag and try to keep up are especially noticeable for power users who create and edit large or complex files, make frequent use of keyboard shortcuts and have high WPM typing speeds. They expect a workstation that can keep up and any lag on the part of a cloud app is simply unacceptable. It was the same problem with "thin clients" (remember that fad?) until workstation hardware became so cheap that the thin clients' margins completely evaporated and the idea was finally put out of workers' misery. The biggest cost in business, at least in the developed world, was and remains labor. It makes no sense to cheap out on hardware, virtualization or cloud apps if it costs even just a bit of worker productivity on a regular basis. It's a false savings.
and it would take a major act of Congress to get rid of them
Indeed it would, but that would require something that President Obama is sorely lacking; Leadership . If Rudy Giuliani had been in office instead of Obama, we wouldn't be having this conversation because these things would have already been done. New Yorkers don't beat around the bush, they get shit done.
(not that that would even be desirable).
That's debatable. What's not debatable is that some changes are necessary if these programs are going to remain available in any meaningful way for millennials and those now in their prime working years (approximately ages 30-50). Just go out and ask anyone under the age of 40 whether or not they believe there will be anything left once the boomers have passed through. Most of them either believe that they will get essentially nothing OR they have rocks in their heads and shouldn't be asked about financial matters in general and certainly not about actuarial matters.
at the time of his death the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.
The key phrase here being at the time of his death. The most decorated Marine in US history, since at least 1955, was and remains Lt. Gen Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller. Just about very Marine can remember doing "one more for Chesty" at the pullup bar or saying "goodnight Chesty, wherever you are" before lights out during boot.
I remember when being a "good Soldier/Sailor/Marine/Airman" was a compliment and there was no perceived need to call everyone a "hero".
I remember a story about one of the forward camps in Iraq where a portable toilet had scrawled on the wall, "Anyone can piss on the seat, be a hero and shit on the ceiling!"
The economist Thomas Sowell devoted an entire chapter of his book Economic Facts and Fallacies to "Male-Female Facts and Fallacies", including the question of gender inequality in the workplace. In all of the studies and data that he examined, dating back to the early part of the 20th century and continuing up through today, the single biggest factor in different workplace outcomes between men and women was not discrimination, but rather life choices which women commonly make, at the expense of maximizing their careers, but men do not. For example, it was and remains common for women to take an extended detour in their careers in order to have and raise young children and women are more willing to abandon what might otherwise be a promising career in order to do so. Furthermore, women are less likely to accept the sorts of high paying and high demand careers that men often do because attaining that level in a career requires years or even decades of dedicated work to achieve and leaves no time for raising a family or doing anything else but the career (i.e. the "glass ceiling" in the C-Suite). Sowell also found that the data is further skewed by the fact that men who are married to a female who does not work, but instead contributes home making, childcare and other household needs to the family coffers further enhances the career maximizing potential of the married man. In other words, all other things being equal, the married man earned more than his unmarried and similarly skilled male counterparts. Sowell argues that this difference is largely explained by the married men being freed up to concentrate even more on their careers, due to the efforts of their spouse, as compared to the single unmarried man. In summary, the gap between male and female earnings in the workplace both recent and historical is almost entirely explained by different life choices and not any systemic, overt or organized effort to discriminate against women in general as a class. I know that flies in the face of "conventional wisdom" regarding the narrative that is common on the left, but try reading Sowell's argument (he presents it much better than I can) and looking at his cited sources; it's compelling to say the least.
What happened to ambition, curiosity, and doing things "because it's there?"
A dose of reality? First there's the 9-5 followed by the wife and then the kids, the house, the mortgage and the cars. By the time that we're done doing all of these things there isn't much left for curiosity or doing non-essential things, "because they're there". Besides, why should I keep doing all of those things and paying my taxes so that you can live out your boyhood moon base fantasies? If you want a moon base, pay for it yourself.
You know...after over 3 years, the "blame Bush" for everything is getting a little old.
Indeed. What did Nikita Khrushchev say about blaming your predecessor? Sit down and write two letters
For once, can we please just cut to the chase? Just stop these idiots from the beginning and a whole lot of people will save a whole lot of effort, money, time, and grief.
Yes, but then what would all those DEA people do for a living? Besides, the bureaucrats and private prison operators have budgets and contracts to protect. The "War on Drugs" is big business after all, and not just for the cartels. It would all be funny, in a farcical sort of way, if the real life consequences weren't so deadly serious.
Who fucking cares?
The bureaucrats whose budgets depend on it?
Copying is not stealing
Indeed, if it were then there would have been no need for copyright or infringement thereof as formal and separate concepts in the law because the property laws would have covered it. The fact that "copyright" does NOT fall under property law and that the "promotion of the progress of useful arts and sciences" is mentioned specifically and separately in the US Constitution, apart from any language concerning property, underscores their separateness and distinctness. The term "intellectual property" was invented and promoted by those whose interests were served by erroneously conflating the concepts of property and copyright or patent law. Indeed, the term "intellectual property" ought not to be used when referring to these matters because it injects bias and error into any discussion of patent or copyright.
And you believe that the 50% which, by your own admission, you pay the government in taxes is spent more wisely and frugally towards those ends than if instead you had directed that money yourself towards those less fortunate people? Surely you know at least a few charities that do more to help the less fortunate with a single dollar than the government can do with hundreds or even thousands? There's a reason why Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others have pledged their vast fortunes to private charitable foundations rather than to the government in the form of taxes, voluntary or otherwise. The government is stupid and incompetent compared to the private foundations and charities who maximize results and minimize costs. For example, Bill Gates has done more to help vaccinate poor people in a decade than the UN has managed to do in the better part of a century and with a fraction of the budget! If that doesn't convince you of the stunning waste and inefficiency of government, I don't know what will.
It would have to be a federal law, since there's no way in hell that cities or states would make such laws on their own.
Under what power enumerated in the US Constitution would the Federal government be able to interfere in what is quite obviously a local matter? The sales tax in question is a state tax and therefore by definition a state matter. If a local government decides to enter into a contract with a business concerning rebates of some or all of these proceeds for a finite or even an indefinite period of time then what business is that of the Federal Government? What's next, should the Federal Government be able to tell states like Texas that they have to increase or levy more taxes because states like New York and California have elected to impose higher taxes and states like Texas charging less "undercuts" their revenues? Give me a break. People should be careful what they wish for when they seek to empower the Federal Government with new and ever greater authority over their lives. Like the genie of the lamp who turns wishes against the wisher, the Federal Government will twist your dreams into nightmares and by the time you've realized your mistake it will be too late to unring the bell. Generations of Americans fought and died for limited government; don't be too quick to surrender those hard won gains for mere bread and circuses.
There is no need to charge him with treason. Pvt Manning is a uniformed member of the United States Army and as such is subject to military justice which includes the possibility of death if convicted of the charge of aiding the enemy (which he has indeed been charged with). Of course, the prosecutors have already said that they will not seek the death penalty so the point is moot, but it should be noted that treason is generally prosecuted against civilians, the Rosenbergs for example, and not uniformed members of the armed forces who are subject instead to much harsher military disciplines if convicted of similar or even lesser crimes.
You can't just rip out the pass-coded detonator and wire all the blasting caps on the explosives together
Indeed. Bypassing a PAL [Permissive Action Link] should be, as one weapons designer graphically put it, about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end."
I don't know how SDI works, but I know the sound that it makes, "pew pew pew"
Whenever I'm setting up a system, I generally allow seven (7) tries before locking out the user for at least 10 but not more than 20 minutes (10 + random 20). During the lockout period even the correct password will not log in and failed attempts provide no information to an attacker concerning the reason for or nature of the failure to login. With a system like this, even basic 7 character passwords with just letters and numbers provide a decent level of security. A password protected system should always be combined with an automatic lockout policy with automatic reset; it increases the strength of the login considerably by rendering increased attacker computing power useless. The only real downside to a system like this is the potential for DDOS, but even that can be mitigated by allowing only 100 or so attempts per hour from a particular IP address, on top of the regular lockout period, before automatically dropping traffic from that IP address for a couple of hours. These policies should turn away all but the most determined and best equipped attackers. The botnet DDOS might still prevent people from logging in, but if your site comes under an attack like that you've probably got bigger problems than users who cannot log in.
Does what you signed guarantee you a certain bandwidth, or is is an "up to x" sort of thing? I strongly suspect the latter.
Indeed, it's almost certainly the later. A actual guaranteed minimum speed can be had for certain types of account, notably dedicated T-Carrier type lines, but generally at much increased cost over standard consumer or small business broadband accounts. Depending upon the area, provider and speed, prices can range from several hundred to tens of thousands of dollars per month. So yes, a guaranteed minimum speed can be had here in the US but it's going to cost you a lot more than $50 per month.
At least that suggests an upper limit to how far America's population will allow their politicians to be bought.
The failure of SOPA was due less to the "grass roots" activism of individuals, although that certainly helped to provide a veneer of respectability, and more to the big money interests in the tech industry, namely Google but others too, who put their weight behind defeating it. In brief, SOPA was shot down because the technology industry, when it chooses to, has even more money to spend on lobbyists and political action committees than Hollywood and the entertainment industries do. If SOPA proved anything it proved that tech has entertainment outgunned when it comes to political payola, not that the people successfully stood up to and defeated monied interests by dint of their own effort. Hollywood's next move will be to make a deal with tech. They won't get everything they wanted in SOPA and they will probably have to make concessions to tech, but rest assured that the people will still be screwed once all is said and done.