You really shouldn't talk. Your entire post smacked of ego. It was one pure ad hominem attack wrapped in a lame attempt at sarcasm, and with absolutely no substance.
You don't think marijuana is a problem? Fine. How about some research? How about some reasonable points to debate? Hell, how about anything other than the self-righteous crap you decided to spew instead?
Nah. Much easier to just walk around in your sarcastic holier-than-thou way.
Raise your hand if you thought your congressman would listen to you.
I didn't, but largely because they're not supposed to. At least not if "listen to you" means "vote the way of the majority opinion of his constituents." We are not a democracy. We do not vote on issues. We elect people who vote on issues for us. If we want those votes to be bound to the majority will, let's just scrap the system and do a straight vote of all Americans. Or hell, I suppose a telephone survey of 1,200 random respondents would suffice so long as the results were more than 4 percentage points or so apart.
Like I said, we vote for people who vote on issues. The key part of that is: we vote for people. If we are displeased with how we are being represented, it is our duty to VOTE, first and foremost, and to vote in people we think will do a better job. If we fail to do so, I'm not going to blame the politicians. The reason they take big money from lobbyists and vote against your wishes is because they can. They can because they aren't being held responsible by those constituents.
I've heard the "the system is rigged in favor of the two major parties!" excuses. There's a fair bit of validity about that, but I don't think it is the problem at all. The major problem is that not enough of us vote. But the secondary problem is that we don't make changes. I believe that nationally, the rate of retention for Congressmen (ie, those who are re-elected) is around 90%. Even in our "big vote for change" election of 2006, 30 seats changed hands in the House and 6 in the Senate. 36 seats changed out of 468 up for election, for a rate of change of 7.7%. That puts the retention rate nearly 92%* in an election trumpeted as calling for change.
One would assume that if we were really as disgusted as we say we are with our politicians, that we would see much greater rates of turnover--even if they just flip back and forth between the two major parties due to the "rigged system."
Yes, the system plays a part; yes, voter apathy plays a part (though blame yourself for that, not the politicians); yes, other things play a part--but the bottom line is we're not nearly as disgusted as we should be, or as we say we are. How seriously are they supposed to take our supposed disgust when we give them a 26% approval / 61% disapproval rating but retain the incumbent 90% of the time?**
Congressmen want to keep their seats. Right now the best way for them to do so is to screw you a moderate amount, take a lot of money from corporations to buy air time and leaflet mailings and such, and get re-elected with around 9-to-1 odds. Really the only danger is if they accidentally screw you just a bit more than you're prepared to accept. You want that to change? Hold them accountable. Once they see that all the corporate donations in the world won't save their jobs if they don't represent their constituents, they'll come around. Of that I have no doubt.
* It's not quite this, necessarily, because some seats had incumbents not running again and sometimes there was a challenge within the part, but I'm too lazy to look up all this information and this figure is near enough for the sake of argument.
** It actually reminds me of a West Wing quote (the polling data may be made up or may be real, I'm not sure, but the point is still valid): "68% [of Americans] think we give too much in foreign aid, and 59% think it should be cut." A scene unfolds as follows:
Will: You like that stat.
Josh: I do.
Will: Why?
Josh: Because 9% think it's too high and shouldn't be cut. 9% of respondents could not fully get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for "I have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Well, I'm not saying that "the last mile is expensive" is more than an excuse, but to be fair population density is only half the story. The square mileage of Norway (323,802), Sweden (449,964), and Finland (338,145) combined (1,111,911) is only roughly a tenth that of the United States alone (9,826,630). Obviously it's going to cost a lot more to wire up every point in the US than it would every point in those countries.
Canada is a slightly different issue because it's comparable in size (slightly bigger) than the US, but my suspicion is that while overall population density may be lower than that of the United States, that's only because large tracts are essentially uninhabited, at least as compared to the US.
That said, whether "it's expensive!" is real or an excuse it should not stand in our way. If the phone and cable companies and others aren't willing to do a real, substantial, nation-wide rollout of fiber and any required backbone enhancements, the government should pay for it. Not only can any idiot see that the Internet is the future of just about everything in general, but the more the US is content to lose manufacturing jobs in favor of technology jobs, the more important this infrastructure is going to be to our overall economy. For that matter, the government should tackle other important, related issues like network neutrality at the same time.
Unfortunately I'm not holding my breath on this happening, but one can hope. In fact I am going to write my senators about it before I go to bed this morning.
Frankly if I had mod points I would have modded both of your posts down, and I couldn't care less about the GPLv2/GPLv3 debate or its outcome. Your first post didn't say anything worth being modded up, and I don't know what that "have you stopped beating your wife?" comment was about but it smells like flamebait to me.
And this one? Aside from worthless insulting of some anonymous moderator, you bust out some fantastic "ZOMG! ANTI-GPLV3 CONSPIRACY!!!" nonsense that simply deserves to get buried. And you used your karma bonus to do it.
Perhaps instead of some vast anti-GPLv3 conspiracy to keep you down, you're just being modded down for being an ass?
I though the US had Local Loop Unbundling? Or is the FCC not in the habit of enforcing a competitive market?
Well, the fact that AT&T has basically reassembled itself after being broken up a few decades ago should be proof enough that no, they're not in the habit of enforcing a competitive market.
However yes, at the moment we still have local loop unbundling and a number of other things that allow some competition over phone lines. It's why you can get your DSL from companies like Earthlink instead of your phone company. That is not true of wireless. Nor, by recent FCC decision, will it be the case for fiber lines, which is why the phone companies are suddenly so gung-ho on building out their fiber networks when they sat on their hands for years. It's also undoubtedly why so many of them are cutting your copper when they install fiber; with a quick snip, they eliminate all competition for Internet services on their lines.
The remaining competition for Internet access is via different media: Cable (which the cable companies need not share), and wireless/satellite, which nobody needs to share. At least not yet.
Instead of being wealthy and pay tuition, you can also simply be smart and hard working.
He mentioned scholarships, though it was in an offhand way. You're certainly free to disagree with what he's saying, but insulting him twice in six sentences while "refuting" him with a point he already made is absolutely wrong on any level.
Besides which, your own point is really no gem either. Your advice to get a scholarship is to be smart and hard working? It's half true, sure. Colleges do give scholarships to people with good grades--though often you also need extra-curricular activities to put you ahead even though that really has nothing to do with intelligence or hard work, merely interest in organized activities--but those are limited. If every student in the nation suddenly became smart and hard working, it would still help only an exceptionally small percentage of them receive a scholarship. In fact, since Duke is a good school you can be relatively sure that the vast majority of students who are accepted there are already smart and hard working, so even in your limited example
I happen to think the way the OP handled himself was flamebait, but the question he raised about free education is a debate worth having. Preferably without insults.
Congratulations to your daughter for getting in, getting money and getting through--but just because she did doesn't mean everybody else can, even those equally smart and hard working.
I don't think it's correct to say that the Right to Privacy (or the Right to Party for that matter) is a Constitutional right
The term "Constitutional right" is problematic in itself. The Constitution was never intended to give people rights. For the first time in the history of the world, a document declared that a government's power comes from its people ("We the People, in order to form a more perfect union..."). We do not need to be granted our rights; they are ours.
The Constitution, rather, was an enumeration of and restriction on the powers of government. Federal government, to be precise, as it did not apply to the states until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. As another poster pointed out, some of our founding fathers objected to the inclusion of the bill of rights at all for this precise reason.
with 95% of people having no moral objection to grabbing a song off of P2P instead of actually paying for it
It isn't that black and white. There may be 95% of people who have no objection to grabbing a song off P2P instead of actually paying for it at a particular price point, but that should just be evidence that the price point needs to move.
I'll use myself as an example. I've bought a number of songs from AllofMP3. I know what people are saying -- "the artists don't get any of that!" You're probably right, but the point is that the service and convenience was worth $0.10-0.20 a track depending on the quality I wanted. It would be worth 2-3 times that for sure, maybe even four times that to me for a 320Kbps version of a song.
iTunes? I haven't bought anything from them because I disapprove of DRM, even if it isn't particularly hard to bypass. If their songs were $0.99 with no DRM I might be able to justify it even though I think it's a bit high, but I would definitely buy less at that price than I would at, say, $0.40 a pop. I might be able to get myself to pay $1.29 once in a while for one of their better-quality no-DRM tracks, but that's really, really pushing it now.
All in all though, I'd want the service to be the same as AllofMP3. If I like a song a lot, I want to be able to pay a bit more for a 320Kbps version; if it's just okay or it's likely to be a song I tire of quickly, a cheaper 192Kbps version would be just fine. I want that choice. And DRM is not an option anywhere in this chain.
But did you notice the trend? $0.10-0.20 a song? Lots of purchases. $0.30-0.60? Still quite a bit. $0.99? Pushing it, but potentially acceptable. Would purchase less though. $1.29? Rare if ever. And more than that--ie, buying a $9.99 or more CD that has only 3-4 songs you like if you're lucky? Not acceptable to me.
That's simply how economics works. At any given price point there is a certain demand for a product. $0.99 individual songs brought a lot of people to legitimate music purchases. Drop the price more and you'll bring even more people into it. You'll never get everybody if you don't hit that "free" mark, but you can get more and more as you charge less. With the cheap distribution methods for digital goods, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
If they want my business, drop the DRM and drop the prices a bit. Even if you get the non-DRM'd tracks to $0.99 it would get at least some portion of my business, whereas right now they get nothing. It really is that simple. Trying to fight the demand curves is a losing business model.
On the other hand, if I choose not to associate with you because of your affinity for midget porn, that's my perogative and I should certainly be allowed to persue that.
If you are given that information voluntarily, yes.
I think what the OP would object to, and I would agree, is the idea that you or anybody else has some sort of a right to have that information about a person without that person's permission.
Whether you are Random Slashdotter #557000 or Government Agent #557000 with information about me that I don't want you to have only matters in the "how much harm can you cause me?" sense. Frankly, sometimes private citizens having information can be worse.
I live in the US, but have a number of friends who live in Australia. A couple years ago I visited them, and knowing that they 1) didn't have extra caffeine in their MD and 2) apparently didn't have the Code Red variety at all, I brought some bottles with me. (By the way, lugging a six pack of those 24oz plastic bottles around on your back with all the rest of your luggage is rather tiring.)
Everybody pretty much liked the taste, but a couple of them were rather bothered by the caffeine. Bothered one person's stomach, another just got pretty hopped up on it. It was pretty funny.
In a just world, asking someone to marry you in front of thousands of strangers should not only lead to LESS sex, it should lead to no sex ever again for the perpetrator.
Close, but you got a little ahead of yourself. The woman ACCEPTING your marriage proposal is the point at which you get no sex ever again.
Even if they had not, being an idiot is, perhaps unfortunately, not what impeachment is for. Neither is starting a war that should not have been started.
Now if there were some concrete proof that they knowingly discarded all conflicting evidence and fabricated their own in a deliberate attempt to force the country into a war they knew was unnecessary, there might be a case. Personally I would not doubt that is exactly what happened, but thus far the evidence of that is not the sort of thing you go to trial with. Particularly when the trial is, by its very nature, really an issue of politics.
The Democrats now run Congress; why aren't they impeaching Bush?
Because they do not have the votes to do so. They might be willing to fight the losing fight here if there was a strong popular opinion for it, but I do not believe there is even a majority of support. With things as polarized as they are, the Democrats are certainly not going to do something they have no support for and will undoubtedly fail at.
Besides which, as sad as it is, Bush's presidency continuing on might be the best thing that could happen for the Democrats politically. They know for sure it is going to end in a year and a half. In the meantime it seems like every day that he is president erodes a little more support for the Republican party. If nothing else that gets the Democrats better support than a partisan impeachment would. Even if they were successful, that just moves Cheney into the Oval. Not exactly a staggering win.
In short, I imagine the Democrats are happy to spend the remainder of the next year and a half feeding Bush as much rope as he would like. They know what he will do with it. The more Republican necks he slips in there before then, the happier the Dems are.
And in a semi-off-topic, for-the-record sort of way:
No, he committed perjury. Wasn't he disbarred for that?
Yes and no. He was disbarred in Arkansas for a period of five years; I'm not sure if this is technically a disbarment or a suspension. He apparently then resigned from the Supreme Court bar before they had hearings over whether or not to disbar him from there as well. (Source)
(1) How serious people think the crime is seems to be only dependant on what colour team they support [. ..] Who is right? Who cares?
The blue team is right. Virtually everybody, if asked whether disclosing a CIA operative's name as political retribution against her husband for not supporting an administration's war, would say of course it is serious. "She didn't get hurt" and "he didn't write the stories" are excuses and nothing more.
For the record, I don't consider myself part of ANY team; I find myself on the Republican side on some issues and the Democrats' on others. And more importantly, I would absolutely feel the same if the same scenario happened with Democrats in power and the Republicans being the ones pushing it as serious. It is.
Either they honestly believe that the judgement was a miscarriage of justice (in which case, what else is the power to commute sentences supposed to be for)
So far as I can see their only complaint is that the sentence was too long. How, exactly, is handing down a sentence somewhere in the range permitted by the law a miscarriage of justice? Are they now going to lead a charge on reforming sentences? I'd applaud them if they did -- but they won't.
Further, do you have any idea how many tens of thousands of people would be let out of jail if the sentence being harsh was all it took to commute the sentence?
This was political shenanigans no matter how you slice it. It was the president and his staff acting as if they are above the law. The only surprise about it to me was that he did it now instead of at the end of his presidency; that simply speaks to the contempt he holds for the wishes of the American public (who overwhelmingly opposed commutation) and the fact that his approval ratings--and thus power--almost can't get any lower.
or he was actually up to no good, on orders from the government (in which case leaving the guy out to dry would go past the line of unethical).
You're positing a scenario in which he was ordered to break the law and you're saying that letting him go to jail when he's caught is unethical? How about ordering it in the first place? How about Libby following that order? Suddenly the people giving these kids of orders are the sort of people who care about ethical behavior?
Libby should be punished, regardless of whether he did it himself or was ordered to do so. The only thing that changes between those two scenarios is whether other people should go to jail as well.
Then again, there's nothing stopping Bush from pardoning them as well. Or himself.
You know geeks could be a powerful voting block, if they could organize and officially support a single candidate.
We can't, and shouldn't. Being a geek is only one small part of who we are as human beings. Technology issues are important to us, and in that sense we could all probably get together on who supports the positions we espouse the best.
The thing is, there are bigger problems going on in the world. We're literally at war. There's the "war on terrorism." There's the issue of things like the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There's immigration and visas. Of course on top of all these relatively new (or updated) issues, we have issues like education, health care, social security, civil liberties, privacy, economic policy, foreign policy, taxes, plus many others.
These are all far more important and far-reaching issues, and ones where there will be a lot of different and valid view points. We should vote for the person we believe best supports our entire range of issues, rather than trying to band together to support the biggest technology geek running for office at the time.
We should all vote our consciences in that regard. What we geeks should do, however, is band together on these technology issues where we mostly tend to agree and become an influential force on those specific topics, regardless of who we voted for in a particular election or who ended up in office.
5. Some folks also think privacy is some kind of inherent right, like the right to free speech, or the right not to be enslaved. They can't really support that position with history or reason though. They just assert it, like religious folks. They simply believe.
That's because some people have consciences. Look, I can appreciate the idea that there are differing views on some issues, but the idea that we only have a certain specific set of rights granted to us by somebody else is kind of silly. Your right to not be enslaved, for example? No such right existed in most countries for the majority of the history of the world. No such right existed in the United States until 1865. How many people today truly believe that you need that piece of paper to grant you the right not to be bought and sold like cattle?
Not Thomas Jefferson. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Granted by their creator. Religious arguments aside (I'm agnostic/atheist, for the record) that couldn't be more clear that it doesn't come from a piece of paper. Heck, even that specific piece of paper notes that "[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It's absolutely beyond clear that the founders recognized there were many other rights, but only chose to list a handful of them.
Do you have a freedom of expression? Of course you do. Except you don't. Read the Constitution; you will not find so much as the word expression. Not even in subsequent amendments. So far as a literal reading of the Constitution takes you, Congress could make it illegal tomorrow to wear yellow shirts and have you arrested for doing so. But they can't, because jurists understand how closely related it is to your freedom of speech. They understand that it is a natural progression. They understand that lack of specific wording should not be construed to mean you lack that right.
I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that indeed, the founding fathers were vastly concerned about government intruding into the lives of its people--the very core of privacy--and not very much with how people might abuse the rights they're given.
The bottom line is, without a right to privacy the other rights are largely useless. It is the right upon which all others are built. Though I obviously can not speak for people long dead, I have to say nonetheless that I suspect the founding fathers found this right to be such a no-brainer that they didn't call it out specifically.
I can understand people who, for example, don't think a right to privacy protects abortions or a handful of other scenarios... but gosh, are there truly people in this day and age who believe they have no right to be left alone at all? And if so, I'd absolutely love for them to be the victims of such a "lack of right" a few times and see if they change their tune. Yeah, it's easy to pretend there's no privacy right as long as it's happening to somebody else.
A handful of quotes for you to mull in closing:
The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis
Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Justice William O. Douglas
The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake
Surely the fact that people's preconceptions color their perceptions has been known for more than a year
Luckily that isn't what they showed.
There's a difference between "Google is a good company, I'm going to use them for my search" and "mmmmm, Gooooogle."
Yes, of course we knew that brands matter in decisions. What they showed was it triggers emotional reaction. Not logical decisions. Not recall of past experience with a brand. Emotions.
Not only would I say that's an interesting notion even today, I'd say it's one that needs to be studied even more.
1. First of all, these are civil proceedings. The "innocent until proven guilty" meme really doesn't even apply.
2. You're not guilty ("liable" would be the correct term, incidentally). There is no finding of fact or liability at this stage in the game. The settlement may or may not require you to admit guilt along with your $5000 check though.
3. The letters are sent by the RIAA--the "prosecutor" (petitioner) if the case goes to trial. Do you expect them to say anything other than "of course you did it and we can prove it?" Do you know many prosecutors who'll open a trial with "ladies and gentleman of the jury, I'm almost 60% sure the man is guilty of the crimes he is charged with, and there's a chance I could even prove it!" Of course not. So what's the problem here? The person who may sue you you says you did it? OMG!!
The letters are really borderline extortion, but nitpicking their wording is ridiculously stupid. Particularly when there is nothing wrong with their wording.
Yet, when it comes to software, instead of people refusing to do business with a company like Microsoft they just buy the software anyway if they can get around the restrictions.
Software is still black magic to most people. They don't understand much about it. It sounds completely reasonable to them to hear Microsoft and their game vendor tell them, "you need a newer version of Windows for that." Needing to upgrade for new features is something they've dealt with before. And to be technical, they're not really being outright lied to; playing these games without DX10 required a software hack that many are unlikely to know about.
Further, to many people Windows is still the only "game" in town. Apple is gaining a bit of traction with OS X, which is good, but anything beyond that gets you blank stares. I've literally had conversations that go: "I don't use Windows." "Oh, you have a Mac?" "No, I use linux." "What's that?" Plus the use of another OS only helps in situations like these if the game is available for that platform. Otherwise you're depending on VM tech which requires you to have a copy of the other OS anyway.
Put together, most people are clueless about the deception and most of the (average) people who understand the deception don't see that there are viable alternatives, which may or may not be true in their particular cases.
Yes, in general consumers need to grow a pair to make situations like these better, but this particular situation--involving a monopoly as it does, on top of the rest--is really something that needs to be handled in the courts or by the government.
You have just nailed one of the greatest flaws in typical human reasoning [. ..] one should consider the information itself and let it stand or fall on its own merit.
I disagree with the "importance" of the flaw. I agree that when possible the information should be judged independent of the person who delivered it, I'm just not sure that situation comes along very often.
Take the OP's comments: He was basically asking somebody for math help. In any situation where you are asking somebody something you don't know, you have to make a decision based on their reliability. When something is explained to you (rather than a n answer just provided) you certainly have the ability to sanity-check it in your own head, but there are times in life where the correct answer is counter-intuitive. Obviously, that all falls apart pretty much entirely when the discussions are about things without a strictly right and wrong answer. If a friend tells me he want to an orgy and had sex with five different women, I'm going to be awfully skeptical. No friends I have are like that. It's fairly unlikely even if they were. The judgment is about them, the context and previous experiences--as the OP said--and not the information itself.
While in some cases you might be able to research the answers yourself to see if they're right, it's simply too time consuming. The amount of things we're told in a given day and have to decide if we believe or not is fairly staggering. In some areas and some circumstances it's absolutely vital to know whether the information is right or wrong, but those are a relatively small proportion.
As far as eugenics, the reason the Nazi version doesn't get anywhere is because most people in the West consider selectively breeding human beings to be morally reprehensible. You're right that ranchers and farmers have used it for a long time and nobody has an issue with it. I'm also fairly sure that it is studied in those contexts, but even if it's not it must not be too much of an issue since it's been used successfully for a long time.
Body mechanics aside, I assure you that people on handsets have markedly worse lane control, signal less frequently, and more frequently fail to check their blind spot than people not using handsets.
Even if that is the case, it could be a symptom rather than a cause. For example, people who choose to use a headset rather than a handset might be demonstrating a raised level of responsibility that would impact the areas you describe even in the complete absence of a phone of any variety.
Does your state have a law against handsets while driving?
"it's so hard to repeal his decrees because so many people vote in venezuela." how anti-democratic.
That's not what he said at all. He said that 40% of registered voters need to vote for the results to matter, and that they are engaged in a huge voter registration campaign.
He didn't say huge numbers vote, nor did he say there was any similar program to get people out to the polls instead of just registered.
If I have 50 people with these rules, 20 of them would be required to vote. Let's say 30 do (60%, heck of a rate!). But I don't want people to overturn my decrees, so I go register another 50 to vote who are highly unlikely to vote. Poor people are probably are fairly good example. Now all the sudden 40 of the 100 need to vote, and only 30 do. It's "democratic," but act the act of registering voters was a ruse, not a well-intentioned idea that people didn't take advantage of.
We probably won't know what the intent was because it's so hard to judge intent, but that's how I read his statements.
Advertising is amazingly hard to quantify. How do you -know- if someone bought that item because of advertising, or because they just saw it in the store.
Well, there are absolutely people who look into those sorts of things. Besides which, it's probably enough to do some statistics with it; if I'm selling 1,000,000 units a day on average, I run a new ad campaign and all of the sudden I'm doing 1,250,000 units a day, the two probably aren't related.
But there are three points to make about advertising in general, rather than about the effectiveness of specific ad campaigns:
1. They do work to some degree. There's no denying it. I'm sure we've all had moments where we see something on TV, decide "that looks good" or "that looks cool" and go buy it. Even if we don't rush out to buy it specifically, if I see, for example, a new commercial for a drink that sounds really good I may well forget about it but then see it in the store and buy it. I don't think anybody denies this point.
2. You have to do what your competition is doing. A few posts up somebody asked if we really need 5,000 Coke commercials to prevent us from forgetting about it. No, we don't. However if they don't run ads but Pepsi does, it will undoubtedly bite into their sales--so they run them. Pepsi does the same thing.
3. And here comes the potentially controversial one... there is a theory that advertising, as a whole, isn't about the products they pitch. Advertising is about making you feel like whatever you have, it isn't enough. It wants to make you feel like things are missing. Most every commercial has attractive people in it even if they're completely unrelated to the product; it's not so much about "drink Coke and hot women will fawn over you!" as much as it is about making you feel like something is missing and maybe you can buy it. It doesn't necessarily help Coke that you feel like something is missing, but if that feeling gets you to go out shopping that's a win for all companies running ads.
The plans raise many troubling legal issues including privacy concerns
Anything you transfer over the Internet is touched by how many other computers before it reaches the final destination? [. ..] Ask all those people that didn't realize posting drunken pictures of themselves on Facebook or that hilarious video on Youtube.
I appreciate the thought about encryption or you're kidding yourself and I agree, but it's a vastly different issue when we're talking about something I've posted including myself (or even about my friends/family) being an invasion of privacy versus every machine along the way looking at my content.
How easy is it, as an end user, to bypass AT&T networks? [. ..] Maybe Google will need to start using all the dark fiber they were supposedly buying a while back?
For the end-user (you and I), you can't. All you have control of is how traffic leaves your machine, and unless you have multiple NICs installed that's not even a decision you really have. Once it gets out of your device, each router along the way tries to determine the best way to send it. The operators of those routers could make AT&T routes so undesirable that they are never used if they really wanted to, but only if they have capacity and redundancy to be able to connect any Point A with any Point B without touching a network outside of their control.
Google can do it better than you because they could be in control of their own networks for large hauls. Eventually, however, the traffic has to pass onto the network of the destination. If the user using a Google service uses AT&T, the fact that you avoided them right up until that last hop may be irrelevant; they could simply put the filters there. In fact that would probably be the most efficient place to put them.
Encrypting all traffic is the best approach. Encryption is fast enough that it wouldn't be a strain on the end computers to encrypt and decrypt the traffic real-time, but that it would add up quickly for the ISPs.
But then again, it will never come to that, thanks to Microsoft's clever investments in government.
Hopefully it doesn't convince Google to do the same.
Right now they seem to be basically playing by the rules; they see what they consider an anti-trust issue, write a note and hope the system that is supposed to handle it comes through. How many times will a company stomach getting slapped in the face because of, as you put it, their competition's investments in government before they decide they need to bribe--err, buy--I mean rent--no, support! Support! How long before Google decides it needs to start supporting its own politicians?
I would even have a hard time blaming them for it. I would probably do it in their position. It's sad, but politicians tend to come fairly cheap. Presumably Google thinks it is making some money with Desktop by some means or they wouldn't bother creating and supporting it, so really it just becomes a matter of "how much do we stand to lose?" versus "how much does it cost to rent the appropriate politicians per term?"
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You really shouldn't talk. Your entire post smacked of ego. It was one pure ad hominem attack wrapped in a lame attempt at sarcasm, and with absolutely no substance.
You don't think marijuana is a problem? Fine. How about some research? How about some reasonable points to debate? Hell, how about anything other than the self-righteous crap you decided to spew instead?
Nah. Much easier to just walk around in your sarcastic holier-than-thou way.
I didn't, but largely because they're not supposed to. At least not if "listen to you" means "vote the way of the majority opinion of his constituents." We are not a democracy. We do not vote on issues. We elect people who vote on issues for us. If we want those votes to be bound to the majority will, let's just scrap the system and do a straight vote of all Americans. Or hell, I suppose a telephone survey of 1,200 random respondents would suffice so long as the results were more than 4 percentage points or so apart.
Like I said, we vote for people who vote on issues. The key part of that is: we vote for people. If we are displeased with how we are being represented, it is our duty to VOTE, first and foremost, and to vote in people we think will do a better job. If we fail to do so, I'm not going to blame the politicians. The reason they take big money from lobbyists and vote against your wishes is because they can. They can because they aren't being held responsible by those constituents.
I've heard the "the system is rigged in favor of the two major parties!" excuses. There's a fair bit of validity about that, but I don't think it is the problem at all. The major problem is that not enough of us vote. But the secondary problem is that we don't make changes. I believe that nationally, the rate of retention for Congressmen (ie, those who are re-elected) is around 90%. Even in our "big vote for change" election of 2006, 30 seats changed hands in the House and 6 in the Senate. 36 seats changed out of 468 up for election, for a rate of change of 7.7%. That puts the retention rate nearly 92%* in an election trumpeted as calling for change.
One would assume that if we were really as disgusted as we say we are with our politicians, that we would see much greater rates of turnover--even if they just flip back and forth between the two major parties due to the "rigged system."
Yes, the system plays a part; yes, voter apathy plays a part (though blame yourself for that, not the politicians); yes, other things play a part--but the bottom line is we're not nearly as disgusted as we should be, or as we say we are. How seriously are they supposed to take our supposed disgust when we give them a 26% approval / 61% disapproval rating but retain the incumbent 90% of the time?**
Congressmen want to keep their seats. Right now the best way for them to do so is to screw you a moderate amount, take a lot of money from corporations to buy air time and leaflet mailings and such, and get re-elected with around 9-to-1 odds. Really the only danger is if they accidentally screw you just a bit more than you're prepared to accept. You want that to change? Hold them accountable. Once they see that all the corporate donations in the world won't save their jobs if they don't represent their constituents, they'll come around. Of that I have no doubt.
* It's not quite this, necessarily, because some seats had incumbents not running again and sometimes there was a challenge within the part, but I'm too lazy to look up all this information and this figure is near enough for the sake of argument.
** It actually reminds me of a West Wing quote (the polling data may be made up or may be real, I'm not sure, but the point is still valid): "68% [of Americans] think we give too much in foreign aid, and 59% think it should be cut." A scene unfolds as follows:
Will: You like that stat.
Josh: I do.
Will: Why?
Josh: Because 9% think it's too high and shouldn't be cut. 9% of respondents could not fully get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for "I have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
Well, I'm not saying that "the last mile is expensive" is more than an excuse, but to be fair population density is only half the story. The square mileage of Norway (323,802), Sweden (449,964), and Finland (338,145) combined (1,111,911) is only roughly a tenth that of the United States alone (9,826,630). Obviously it's going to cost a lot more to wire up every point in the US than it would every point in those countries.
Canada is a slightly different issue because it's comparable in size (slightly bigger) than the US, but my suspicion is that while overall population density may be lower than that of the United States, that's only because large tracts are essentially uninhabited, at least as compared to the US.
That said, whether "it's expensive!" is real or an excuse it should not stand in our way. If the phone and cable companies and others aren't willing to do a real, substantial, nation-wide rollout of fiber and any required backbone enhancements, the government should pay for it. Not only can any idiot see that the Internet is the future of just about everything in general, but the more the US is content to lose manufacturing jobs in favor of technology jobs, the more important this infrastructure is going to be to our overall economy. For that matter, the government should tackle other important, related issues like network neutrality at the same time.
Unfortunately I'm not holding my breath on this happening, but one can hope. In fact I am going to write my senators about it before I go to bed this morning.
Frankly if I had mod points I would have modded both of your posts down, and I couldn't care less about the GPLv2/GPLv3 debate or its outcome. Your first post didn't say anything worth being modded up, and I don't know what that "have you stopped beating your wife?" comment was about but it smells like flamebait to me.
And this one? Aside from worthless insulting of some anonymous moderator, you bust out some fantastic "ZOMG! ANTI-GPLV3 CONSPIRACY!!!" nonsense that simply deserves to get buried. And you used your karma bonus to do it.
Perhaps instead of some vast anti-GPLv3 conspiracy to keep you down, you're just being modded down for being an ass?
Well, the fact that AT&T has basically reassembled itself after being broken up a few decades ago should be proof enough that no, they're not in the habit of enforcing a competitive market.
However yes, at the moment we still have local loop unbundling and a number of other things that allow some competition over phone lines. It's why you can get your DSL from companies like Earthlink instead of your phone company. That is not true of wireless. Nor, by recent FCC decision, will it be the case for fiber lines, which is why the phone companies are suddenly so gung-ho on building out their fiber networks when they sat on their hands for years. It's also undoubtedly why so many of them are cutting your copper when they install fiber; with a quick snip, they eliminate all competition for Internet services on their lines.
The remaining competition for Internet access is via different media: Cable (which the cable companies need not share), and wireless/satellite, which nobody needs to share. At least not yet.
blarg, correction: so even in your limited example... the advice isn't particularly helpful.
He mentioned scholarships, though it was in an offhand way. You're certainly free to disagree with what he's saying, but insulting him twice in six sentences while "refuting" him with a point he already made is absolutely wrong on any level.
Besides which, your own point is really no gem either. Your advice to get a scholarship is to be smart and hard working? It's half true, sure. Colleges do give scholarships to people with good grades--though often you also need extra-curricular activities to put you ahead even though that really has nothing to do with intelligence or hard work, merely interest in organized activities--but those are limited. If every student in the nation suddenly became smart and hard working, it would still help only an exceptionally small percentage of them receive a scholarship. In fact, since Duke is a good school you can be relatively sure that the vast majority of students who are accepted there are already smart and hard working, so even in your limited example
I happen to think the way the OP handled himself was flamebait, but the question he raised about free education is a debate worth having. Preferably without insults.
Congratulations to your daughter for getting in, getting money and getting through--but just because she did doesn't mean everybody else can, even those equally smart and hard working.
The term "Constitutional right" is problematic in itself. The Constitution was never intended to give people rights. For the first time in the history of the world, a document declared that a government's power comes from its people ("We the People, in order to form a more perfect union..."). We do not need to be granted our rights; they are ours.
The Constitution, rather, was an enumeration of and restriction on the powers of government. Federal government, to be precise, as it did not apply to the states until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. As another poster pointed out, some of our founding fathers objected to the inclusion of the bill of rights at all for this precise reason.
It isn't that black and white. There may be 95% of people who have no objection to grabbing a song off P2P instead of actually paying for it at a particular price point, but that should just be evidence that the price point needs to move.
I'll use myself as an example. I've bought a number of songs from AllofMP3. I know what people are saying -- "the artists don't get any of that!" You're probably right, but the point is that the service and convenience was worth $0.10-0.20 a track depending on the quality I wanted. It would be worth 2-3 times that for sure, maybe even four times that to me for a 320Kbps version of a song.
iTunes? I haven't bought anything from them because I disapprove of DRM, even if it isn't particularly hard to bypass. If their songs were $0.99 with no DRM I might be able to justify it even though I think it's a bit high, but I would definitely buy less at that price than I would at, say, $0.40 a pop. I might be able to get myself to pay $1.29 once in a while for one of their better-quality no-DRM tracks, but that's really, really pushing it now.
All in all though, I'd want the service to be the same as AllofMP3. If I like a song a lot, I want to be able to pay a bit more for a 320Kbps version; if it's just okay or it's likely to be a song I tire of quickly, a cheaper 192Kbps version would be just fine. I want that choice. And DRM is not an option anywhere in this chain.
But did you notice the trend? $0.10-0.20 a song? Lots of purchases. $0.30-0.60? Still quite a bit. $0.99? Pushing it, but potentially acceptable. Would purchase less though. $1.29? Rare if ever. And more than that--ie, buying a $9.99 or more CD that has only 3-4 songs you like if you're lucky? Not acceptable to me.
That's simply how economics works. At any given price point there is a certain demand for a product. $0.99 individual songs brought a lot of people to legitimate music purchases. Drop the price more and you'll bring even more people into it. You'll never get everybody if you don't hit that "free" mark, but you can get more and more as you charge less. With the cheap distribution methods for digital goods, that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
If they want my business, drop the DRM and drop the prices a bit. Even if you get the non-DRM'd tracks to $0.99 it would get at least some portion of my business, whereas right now they get nothing. It really is that simple. Trying to fight the demand curves is a losing business model.
If you are given that information voluntarily, yes.
I think what the OP would object to, and I would agree, is the idea that you or anybody else has some sort of a right to have that information about a person without that person's permission.
Whether you are Random Slashdotter #557000 or Government Agent #557000 with information about me that I don't want you to have only matters in the "how much harm can you cause me?" sense. Frankly, sometimes private citizens having information can be worse.
I live in the US, but have a number of friends who live in Australia. A couple years ago I visited them, and knowing that they 1) didn't have extra caffeine in their MD and 2) apparently didn't have the Code Red variety at all, I brought some bottles with me. (By the way, lugging a six pack of those 24oz plastic bottles around on your back with all the rest of your luggage is rather tiring.)
Everybody pretty much liked the taste, but a couple of them were rather bothered by the caffeine. Bothered one person's stomach, another just got pretty hopped up on it. It was pretty funny.
Close, but you got a little ahead of yourself. The woman ACCEPTING your marriage proposal is the point at which you get no sex ever again.
Going backward for a moment...
Even if they had not, being an idiot is, perhaps unfortunately, not what impeachment is for. Neither is starting a war that should not have been started.
Now if there were some concrete proof that they knowingly discarded all conflicting evidence and fabricated their own in a deliberate attempt to force the country into a war they knew was unnecessary, there might be a case. Personally I would not doubt that is exactly what happened, but thus far the evidence of that is not the sort of thing you go to trial with. Particularly when the trial is, by its very nature, really an issue of politics.
Because they do not have the votes to do so. They might be willing to fight the losing fight here if there was a strong popular opinion for it, but I do not believe there is even a majority of support. With things as polarized as they are, the Democrats are certainly not going to do something they have no support for and will undoubtedly fail at.
Besides which, as sad as it is, Bush's presidency continuing on might be the best thing that could happen for the Democrats politically. They know for sure it is going to end in a year and a half. In the meantime it seems like every day that he is president erodes a little more support for the Republican party. If nothing else that gets the Democrats better support than a partisan impeachment would. Even if they were successful, that just moves Cheney into the Oval. Not exactly a staggering win.
In short, I imagine the Democrats are happy to spend the remainder of the next year and a half feeding Bush as much rope as he would like. They know what he will do with it. The more Republican necks he slips in there before then, the happier the Dems are.
And in a semi-off-topic, for-the-record sort of way:
Yes and no. He was disbarred in Arkansas for a period of five years; I'm not sure if this is technically a disbarment or a suspension. He apparently then resigned from the Supreme Court bar before they had hearings over whether or not to disbar him from there as well. (Source)
The blue team is right. Virtually everybody, if asked whether disclosing a CIA operative's name as political retribution against her husband for not supporting an administration's war, would say of course it is serious. "She didn't get hurt" and "he didn't write the stories" are excuses and nothing more.
For the record, I don't consider myself part of ANY team; I find myself on the Republican side on some issues and the Democrats' on others. And more importantly, I would absolutely feel the same if the same scenario happened with Democrats in power and the Republicans being the ones pushing it as serious. It is.
So far as I can see their only complaint is that the sentence was too long. How, exactly, is handing down a sentence somewhere in the range permitted by the law a miscarriage of justice? Are they now going to lead a charge on reforming sentences? I'd applaud them if they did -- but they won't.
Further, do you have any idea how many tens of thousands of people would be let out of jail if the sentence being harsh was all it took to commute the sentence?
This was political shenanigans no matter how you slice it. It was the president and his staff acting as if they are above the law. The only surprise about it to me was that he did it now instead of at the end of his presidency; that simply speaks to the contempt he holds for the wishes of the American public (who overwhelmingly opposed commutation) and the fact that his approval ratings--and thus power--almost can't get any lower.
You're positing a scenario in which he was ordered to break the law and you're saying that letting him go to jail when he's caught is unethical? How about ordering it in the first place? How about Libby following that order? Suddenly the people giving these kids of orders are the sort of people who care about ethical behavior?
Libby should be punished, regardless of whether he did it himself or was ordered to do so. The only thing that changes between those two scenarios is whether other people should go to jail as well.
Then again, there's nothing stopping Bush from pardoning them as well. Or himself.
We can't, and shouldn't. Being a geek is only one small part of who we are as human beings. Technology issues are important to us, and in that sense we could all probably get together on who supports the positions we espouse the best.
The thing is, there are bigger problems going on in the world. We're literally at war. There's the "war on terrorism." There's the issue of things like the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There's immigration and visas. Of course on top of all these relatively new (or updated) issues, we have issues like education, health care, social security, civil liberties, privacy, economic policy, foreign policy, taxes, plus many others.
These are all far more important and far-reaching issues, and ones where there will be a lot of different and valid view points. We should vote for the person we believe best supports our entire range of issues, rather than trying to band together to support the biggest technology geek running for office at the time.
We should all vote our consciences in that regard. What we geeks should do, however, is band together on these technology issues where we mostly tend to agree and become an influential force on those specific topics, regardless of who we voted for in a particular election or who ended up in office.
That's because some people have consciences. Look, I can appreciate the idea that there are differing views on some issues, but the idea that we only have a certain specific set of rights granted to us by somebody else is kind of silly. Your right to not be enslaved, for example? No such right existed in most countries for the majority of the history of the world. No such right existed in the United States until 1865. How many people today truly believe that you need that piece of paper to grant you the right not to be bought and sold like cattle?
Not Thomas Jefferson. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Granted by their creator. Religious arguments aside (I'm agnostic/atheist, for the record) that couldn't be more clear that it doesn't come from a piece of paper. Heck, even that specific piece of paper notes that "[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It's absolutely beyond clear that the founders recognized there were many other rights, but only chose to list a handful of them.
Do you have a freedom of expression? Of course you do. Except you don't. Read the Constitution; you will not find so much as the word expression. Not even in subsequent amendments. So far as a literal reading of the Constitution takes you, Congress could make it illegal tomorrow to wear yellow shirts and have you arrested for doing so. But they can't, because jurists understand how closely related it is to your freedom of speech. They understand that it is a natural progression. They understand that lack of specific wording should not be construed to mean you lack that right.
I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that indeed, the founding fathers were vastly concerned about government intruding into the lives of its people--the very core of privacy--and not very much with how people might abuse the rights they're given.
The bottom line is, without a right to privacy the other rights are largely useless. It is the right upon which all others are built. Though I obviously can not speak for people long dead, I have to say nonetheless that I suspect the founding fathers found this right to be such a no-brainer that they didn't call it out specifically.
I can understand people who, for example, don't think a right to privacy protects abortions or a handful of other scenarios... but gosh, are there truly people in this day and age who believe they have no right to be left alone at all? And if so, I'd absolutely love for them to be the victims of such a "lack of right" a few times and see if they change their tune. Yeah, it's easy to pretend there's no privacy right as long as it's happening to somebody else.
A handful of quotes for you to mull in closing:
The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis
Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Justice William O. Douglas
The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake
Luckily that isn't what they showed.
There's a difference between "Google is a good company, I'm going to use them for my search" and "mmmmm, Gooooogle."
Yes, of course we knew that brands matter in decisions. What they showed was it triggers emotional reaction. Not logical decisions. Not recall of past experience with a brand. Emotions.
Not only would I say that's an interesting notion even today, I'd say it's one that needs to be studied even more.
Well...
1. First of all, these are civil proceedings. The "innocent until proven guilty" meme really doesn't even apply.
2. You're not guilty ("liable" would be the correct term, incidentally). There is no finding of fact or liability at this stage in the game. The settlement may or may not require you to admit guilt along with your $5000 check though.
3. The letters are sent by the RIAA--the "prosecutor" (petitioner) if the case goes to trial. Do you expect them to say anything other than "of course you did it and we can prove it?" Do you know many prosecutors who'll open a trial with "ladies and gentleman of the jury, I'm almost 60% sure the man is guilty of the crimes he is charged with, and there's a chance I could even prove it!" Of course not. So what's the problem here? The person who may sue you you says you did it? OMG!!
The letters are really borderline extortion, but nitpicking their wording is ridiculously stupid. Particularly when there is nothing wrong with their wording.
Software is still black magic to most people. They don't understand much about it. It sounds completely reasonable to them to hear Microsoft and their game vendor tell them, "you need a newer version of Windows for that." Needing to upgrade for new features is something they've dealt with before. And to be technical, they're not really being outright lied to; playing these games without DX10 required a software hack that many are unlikely to know about.
Further, to many people Windows is still the only "game" in town. Apple is gaining a bit of traction with OS X, which is good, but anything beyond that gets you blank stares. I've literally had conversations that go: "I don't use Windows." "Oh, you have a Mac?" "No, I use linux." "What's that?" Plus the use of another OS only helps in situations like these if the game is available for that platform. Otherwise you're depending on VM tech which requires you to have a copy of the other OS anyway.
Put together, most people are clueless about the deception and most of the (average) people who understand the deception don't see that there are viable alternatives, which may or may not be true in their particular cases.
Yes, in general consumers need to grow a pair to make situations like these better, but this particular situation--involving a monopoly as it does, on top of the rest--is really something that needs to be handled in the courts or by the government.
I disagree with the "importance" of the flaw. I agree that when possible the information should be judged independent of the person who delivered it, I'm just not sure that situation comes along very often.
Take the OP's comments: He was basically asking somebody for math help. In any situation where you are asking somebody something you don't know, you have to make a decision based on their reliability. When something is explained to you (rather than a n answer just provided) you certainly have the ability to sanity-check it in your own head, but there are times in life where the correct answer is counter-intuitive. Obviously, that all falls apart pretty much entirely when the discussions are about things without a strictly right and wrong answer. If a friend tells me he want to an orgy and had sex with five different women, I'm going to be awfully skeptical. No friends I have are like that. It's fairly unlikely even if they were. The judgment is about them, the context and previous experiences--as the OP said--and not the information itself.
While in some cases you might be able to research the answers yourself to see if they're right, it's simply too time consuming. The amount of things we're told in a given day and have to decide if we believe or not is fairly staggering. In some areas and some circumstances it's absolutely vital to know whether the information is right or wrong, but those are a relatively small proportion.
As far as eugenics, the reason the Nazi version doesn't get anywhere is because most people in the West consider selectively breeding human beings to be morally reprehensible. You're right that ranchers and farmers have used it for a long time and nobody has an issue with it. I'm also fairly sure that it is studied in those contexts, but even if it's not it must not be too much of an issue since it's been used successfully for a long time.
Even if that is the case, it could be a symptom rather than a cause. For example, people who choose to use a headset rather than a handset might be demonstrating a raised level of responsibility that would impact the areas you describe even in the complete absence of a phone of any variety.
Does your state have a law against handsets while driving?
That's not what he said at all. He said that 40% of registered voters need to vote for the results to matter, and that they are engaged in a huge voter registration campaign.
He didn't say huge numbers vote, nor did he say there was any similar program to get people out to the polls instead of just registered.
If I have 50 people with these rules, 20 of them would be required to vote. Let's say 30 do (60%, heck of a rate!). But I don't want people to overturn my decrees, so I go register another 50 to vote who are highly unlikely to vote. Poor people are probably are fairly good example. Now all the sudden 40 of the 100 need to vote, and only 30 do. It's "democratic," but act the act of registering voters was a ruse, not a well-intentioned idea that people didn't take advantage of.
We probably won't know what the intent was because it's so hard to judge intent, but that's how I read his statements.
Well, there are absolutely people who look into those sorts of things. Besides which, it's probably enough to do some statistics with it; if I'm selling 1,000,000 units a day on average, I run a new ad campaign and all of the sudden I'm doing 1,250,000 units a day, the two probably aren't related.
But there are three points to make about advertising in general, rather than about the effectiveness of specific ad campaigns:
1. They do work to some degree. There's no denying it. I'm sure we've all had moments where we see something on TV, decide "that looks good" or "that looks cool" and go buy it. Even if we don't rush out to buy it specifically, if I see, for example, a new commercial for a drink that sounds really good I may well forget about it but then see it in the store and buy it. I don't think anybody denies this point.
2. You have to do what your competition is doing. A few posts up somebody asked if we really need 5,000 Coke commercials to prevent us from forgetting about it. No, we don't. However if they don't run ads but Pepsi does, it will undoubtedly bite into their sales--so they run them. Pepsi does the same thing.
3. And here comes the potentially controversial one... there is a theory that advertising, as a whole, isn't about the products they pitch. Advertising is about making you feel like whatever you have, it isn't enough. It wants to make you feel like things are missing. Most every commercial has attractive people in it even if they're completely unrelated to the product; it's not so much about "drink Coke and hot women will fawn over you!" as much as it is about making you feel like something is missing and maybe you can buy it. It doesn't necessarily help Coke that you feel like something is missing, but if that feeling gets you to go out shopping that's a win for all companies running ads.
I appreciate the thought about encryption or you're kidding yourself and I agree, but it's a vastly different issue when we're talking about something I've posted including myself (or even about my friends/family) being an invasion of privacy versus every machine along the way looking at my content.
For the end-user (you and I), you can't. All you have control of is how traffic leaves your machine, and unless you have multiple NICs installed that's not even a decision you really have. Once it gets out of your device, each router along the way tries to determine the best way to send it. The operators of those routers could make AT&T routes so undesirable that they are never used if they really wanted to, but only if they have capacity and redundancy to be able to connect any Point A with any Point B without touching a network outside of their control.
Google can do it better than you because they could be in control of their own networks for large hauls. Eventually, however, the traffic has to pass onto the network of the destination. If the user using a Google service uses AT&T, the fact that you avoided them right up until that last hop may be irrelevant; they could simply put the filters there. In fact that would probably be the most efficient place to put them.
Encrypting all traffic is the best approach. Encryption is fast enough that it wouldn't be a strain on the end computers to encrypt and decrypt the traffic real-time, but that it would add up quickly for the ISPs.
Hopefully it doesn't convince Google to do the same.
Right now they seem to be basically playing by the rules; they see what they consider an anti-trust issue, write a note and hope the system that is supposed to handle it comes through. How many times will a company stomach getting slapped in the face because of, as you put it, their competition's investments in government before they decide they need to bribe--err, buy--I mean rent--no, support! Support! How long before Google decides it needs to start supporting its own politicians?
I would even have a hard time blaming them for it. I would probably do it in their position. It's sad, but politicians tend to come fairly cheap. Presumably Google thinks it is making some money with Desktop by some means or they wouldn't bother creating and supporting it, so really it just becomes a matter of "how much do we stand to lose?" versus "how much does it cost to rent the appropriate politicians per term?"