"we need a new generation of politicians who will be responsive to the people they represent, will understand some of the complex technological issues and all of the social, political and economic implications that technology brings."
Have you ever considered that the problem might be with the welfare-regulatory-interventionist state as such, not the political flavor of the month?
How can someone who specializes in force and coercion be expected know more about technology than the entrepreneur/inventor who immerses his whole life in it?
"Orrin Hatch, attempted to pass legislation that would allow organizations such as the RIAA to illegally infiltrate and destroy software and information"
If there's legislation specifically allowing it, how is that "illegal"?
For what it's worth, I have been using PayPal since the beginning and I've never had a problem. My PayPal money market account has a higher rate that any "normal" bank, and is much more convenient for online stuff. I use it to accept online payment and recommend it to all my web design clients.
I feel for the users who had their accounts locked, but there's a balance between security, ease-of-use, and low costs, and personally, I'll take a little inconvenience for a higher interest rate and lower transaction costs.
You don't really "contribute" to the economy when you steal people's money and waste it on fancy government offices and shiny new policy cars. When politicians spend other people's money, it is necessarily less efficient than if those people had spent it themselves.
The key to the success of Adobe's PDF format is that it is free of any licensing restrictions, so anyone can implement PDF readers/writers. Microsoft's competitors have - both operating system vendors like Apple and Linux and competing office suites like Star Office and OpenOffice.org. However Microsoft isn't allowed to - not because Adobe has any legal right to prevent it, but because Adobe claims that it won't be able to compete with Microsoft if Microsoft makes PDF features available for free like most everyone else does. Adobe charges $449 for Adobe Acrobat - something it can only get away if Microsoft isn't allowed to compete with it. In effect, it is saying "anyone can use our format and compete with our products... unless you actually present a competitive challenge."
You'd think that given millions of people and hundreds of thousands of towers, there would be at least one case of a few people getting cancer.
For the scientifically illiterate, you get more daily radiation from 15 minutes in the sun, or your watch, than those people would have received.
Don't let that stop the enviro-freaks and scaremongers thought.
Environmentalists don't want renewable energy. Their support of "alternative" energy is just a pretense for their attack on industrial civilization itself. As soon as alternative energy becomes viable (as nuclear power has been for decades, and wind power is becoming) they oppose it.
Critics say that this rabid anti-human dogma is only representative of fringe groups. But the core of the environmentalist religion is that nature (from which man-made objects are excluded) takes a moral precedence over human life. Anyone who implicitly or explicitly accepts this moral premise must ultimately reject humanity as having a right to exist at all, since man's method of survival is the use of technology - the application of reason to change the elements of nature to achieve our values. Though only a minority ever admits or even realizes it, the goal towards which all environmentalists are working towards is the total elimination of the "unnatural" human race.
Why is the chant of the environmentalist crowd always against technology? If humans are indeed capable of inadvertently changing the climate of an entire planet, why don't they every consider solutions that involve using technology to improve our environment?
It seems to me that environmentalist will use any excuse possible to bash industrial society. They will only support a technological solution as long as it is impractical and unrealistic. Now that solar, wind, and hybrid technologies are finally becoming mainstream, they have suddenly found reasons why they are stopgap solutions, or kill birds, or ruin the view, etc, etc. Environmentalists don't know what they want to do, but they know that it involves lots of government guns and destroying the industrial society that allows them to exist.
Even if global warming is real, and humans are contributing to it, and we can do something about it, why is it a bad thing? Historically, ice ages have been the biggest threat to humanity and life on earth. It seems like turning a large part of the earth's habitable surface (tundra) from a frozen wasteland to habitable ground would be a *good* thing. Sure, there will be transition costs, but humans are becoming ever more adaptable, and creating living space for several more billion people seems great to me.
The purpose of this legislation (like most regulations) is to create monopoly protections for existing ISP's. Large existing providers will have no trouble complying, but startups will suddenly have to face new costs. I have a feeling that small competitors will end up being "reported" by "customers" and put out of business by the legal and compliance costs.
Even the threat of a $10m fine and legal costs to ensure compliance will discourage potential competitors. Consumers will not only end up paying higher prices, but will come to rely on the protected ISP's (and the government) to block spam, thus slowing innovations for consumer-run spam blocking.
I'm happy for the success of the rovers, but I think it is pathetic that NASA's resources are so badly managed that a two-year old mission is still their showcase effort. We should be hearing about a bunch of new projects, not breakdowns on old ones.
If political maneuvering didn't waste billions on the space shuttle and the ISS, we might have dozens of missions going right now.
Better yet, if they let entrepreneurs keep their money instead of taking us to death, we might all be buying tickets to space.
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Take that, LAMP-lovers!
- Mises.org webmaster
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"we need a new generation of politicians who will be responsive to the people they represent, will understand some of the complex technological issues and all of the social, political and economic implications that technology brings." Have you ever considered that the problem might be with the welfare-regulatory-interventionist state as such, not the political flavor of the month? How can someone who specializes in force and coercion be expected know more about technology than the entrepreneur/inventor who immerses his whole life in it?
"Orrin Hatch, attempted to pass legislation that would allow organizations such as the RIAA to illegally infiltrate and destroy software and information" If there's legislation specifically allowing it, how is that "illegal"?
For what it's worth, I have been using PayPal since the beginning and I've never had a problem. My PayPal money market account has a higher rate that any "normal" bank, and is much more convenient for online stuff. I use it to accept online payment and recommend it to all my web design clients. I feel for the users who had their accounts locked, but there's a balance between security, ease-of-use, and low costs, and personally, I'll take a little inconvenience for a higher interest rate and lower transaction costs.
You don't really "contribute" to the economy when you steal people's money and waste it on fancy government offices and shiny new policy cars. When politicians spend other people's money, it is necessarily less efficient than if those people had spent it themselves.
The key to the success of Adobe's PDF format is that it is free of any licensing restrictions, so anyone can implement PDF readers/writers. Microsoft's competitors have - both operating system vendors like Apple and Linux and competing office suites like Star Office and OpenOffice.org. However Microsoft isn't allowed to - not because Adobe has any legal right to prevent it, but because Adobe claims that it won't be able to compete with Microsoft if Microsoft makes PDF features available for free like most everyone else does. Adobe charges $449 for Adobe Acrobat - something it can only get away if Microsoft isn't allowed to compete with it. In effect, it is saying "anyone can use our format and compete with our products... unless you actually present a competitive challenge."
You'd think that given millions of people and hundreds of thousands of towers, there would be at least one case of a few people getting cancer. For the scientifically illiterate, you get more daily radiation from 15 minutes in the sun, or your watch, than those people would have received. Don't let that stop the enviro-freaks and scaremongers thought.
Environmentalists don't want renewable energy. Their support of "alternative" energy is just a pretense for their attack on industrial civilization itself. As soon as alternative energy becomes viable (as nuclear power has been for decades, and wind power is becoming) they oppose it.
Critics say that this rabid anti-human dogma is only representative of fringe groups. But the core of the environmentalist religion is that nature (from which man-made objects are excluded) takes a moral precedence over human life. Anyone who implicitly or explicitly accepts this moral premise must ultimately reject humanity as having a right to exist at all, since man's method of survival is the use of technology - the application of reason to change the elements of nature to achieve our values. Though only a minority ever admits or even realizes it, the goal towards which all environmentalists are working towards is the total elimination of the "unnatural" human race.
Why is the chant of the environmentalist crowd always against technology? If humans are indeed capable of inadvertently changing the climate of an entire planet, why don't they every consider solutions that involve using technology to improve our environment? It seems to me that environmentalist will use any excuse possible to bash industrial society. They will only support a technological solution as long as it is impractical and unrealistic. Now that solar, wind, and hybrid technologies are finally becoming mainstream, they have suddenly found reasons why they are stopgap solutions, or kill birds, or ruin the view, etc, etc. Environmentalists don't know what they want to do, but they know that it involves lots of government guns and destroying the industrial society that allows them to exist.
Even if global warming is real, and humans are contributing to it, and we can do something about it, why is it a bad thing? Historically, ice ages have been the biggest threat to humanity and life on earth. It seems like turning a large part of the earth's habitable surface (tundra) from a frozen wasteland to habitable ground would be a *good* thing. Sure, there will be transition costs, but humans are becoming ever more adaptable, and creating living space for several more billion people seems great to me.
The purpose of this legislation (like most regulations) is to create monopoly protections for existing ISP's. Large existing providers will have no trouble complying, but startups will suddenly have to face new costs. I have a feeling that small competitors will end up being "reported" by "customers" and put out of business by the legal and compliance costs. Even the threat of a $10m fine and legal costs to ensure compliance will discourage potential competitors. Consumers will not only end up paying higher prices, but will come to rely on the protected ISP's (and the government) to block spam, thus slowing innovations for consumer-run spam blocking.
I'm happy for the success of the rovers, but I think it is pathetic that NASA's resources are so badly managed that a two-year old mission is still their showcase effort. We should be hearing about a bunch of new projects, not breakdowns on old ones. If political maneuvering didn't waste billions on the space shuttle and the ISS, we might have dozens of missions going right now. Better yet, if they let entrepreneurs keep their money instead of taking us to death, we might all be buying tickets to space.
No di..err, n/m
Thanks to the power of ASP.Net, there's no need for the cache - the server is running at under 25% CPU usage. Take that, LAMP-lovers! - Mises.org webmaster