EFF is a private organization. Right now you respect them. By morning they could be a wholly-owned subsidiary of a holding company owned by Microsoft. And I'm not saying which morning.
You were probably trying to be funny, but the EFF is not a private organization the way you are thinking. You cannot just buy out a 501(c)(3) and start controlling it. It's run by a board of directors and a set of bylaws that must be followed. Unless the directors end up disillusioned with the organization or its mission, there's really not much an outside party can do to influence it.
This. (sorry) I was doing pretty well performing programming and consultant work myself until the same thing happened to me. I even found RFPs out there that stated explicitly "Do not bother to apply if you are American". WTF? This despite the fact that these idiots look at nothing but the hourly rate, and when they get burned by the fact that most of those guys are 1/10th as productive, and also end up doing significant re-work because they didn't understand the requirements as well as I can.
I do still have some loyal customers, including a couple that came back when they realized that I was giving them a better value than the cheap-as-crap-found-them-on-the-web foreigners.
I am a frequent commenter on Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and many other sites frequented by technology opinion leaders. I am also very poor, have no scruples, but with excellent persuasive writing skills.
Can you please put me in touch with some folks looking for people like me to act as insightful and frequent contributors to praise and defend companies and their products? I would appreciate it.
You're drinking the cool-aid if you think it's progressives leading the charge towards feudalism.
You mean "Kool-aid"? All I hear from progressives is "more government, no spending cuts, more regulation, bigger taxes", etc. No delusions at all.
Conservative economic policies are what protect the wealthy 'feudal lords' you're talking about. Their regressive tax structures make social mobility much more difficult, which is useful for keeping the wealth concentrated in as few hands as possible.
I don't know what you are talking about here. Only about half the population in the US pays income tax at all. The top 2% pay more than the bottom 95%. Corporate welfare and complicated tax incentives, breaks, and all that crazy crap isn't "conservative economic policy" - balanced budgets and smaller government that gets out of the way are what conservative policy [should] be about.
Conservative social policies...
Social authoritarians, regardless of political stripe, need to get out of the way. People own themselves and that should be respected. But the progressives want to control every aspect of everyone's life, including how much water and energy they are allowed to use, what they should eat, where they should live, etc., etc. Nice straw man there with the whole social authoritarian rant.
Conservative educational policies
Education isn't a government function - maybe you could justify some government financial support for educating the less privileged, but you're so enamored with the monopolistic state indoctrination centers all you can complain about are the religious types trying to interject their views. Really?
Please provide some sort of example of how progressive policies try to control the population to a greater extent than conservative policies...
Protecting property rights is all the state is doing, and it is one of the basic fundamental functions of government. That is different than granting a commercial monopoly. Maybe you're confused by the "Intellectual Property" term. That's intentional, because the things that fall under that definition are not really "property" at all. The term is just a clever trick by corporate lawyers to confuse the issue.
If I build a pool in my back yard, I have monopoly control over who uses the pool.
And if you didn't, you would never build the pool. Why put your own time and resources into something when it can be taken away from you? But to compare it to copyright, you would have to not only have control over your own pool, but the ability to ban your neighbors from building a similar pool in their back yards.
Arguing that a monopoly granted by the state is wrong is arguing that all property is theft: it undermines the whole basis of capitalism.
Not really. I'm reminded of the Jefferson's statement about ideas in reference to patents: "... no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me."
You're thinking of it entirely wrong. The monopoly that copyright grants you isn't control of the work you created - you can do anything you want with it regardless of copyright. The monopoly is a ban on any other individual's right to make a copy. So it's actually a restriction on rights, rather than protection of them.
This is exactly the type of rhetoric we hear from the left all the time. "You should listen to those who know better. You should care more about the community over your own desires; conservatives are just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies clinging to old ideas and fooled in to voting against their own best interests"
In actuality, the left is leading us right back into feudalism, where men are enslaved to lords, knowledge is left to the ruling class, and freedom and ingenuity are hindered to prevent man from reaching his full potential. This is exactly why our founders pulled us away from the ideas of Europe and gave us every right and freedom the feudalists said were wrong to have.
If they try such a thing, it should be thrown out on summary judgement, as Verizon and Comcast have already had an opportunity to serve those areas and chose not to. Therefore, they do not have standing.
I really haven't been following this story, so I wasn't aware of any maltreatment. From what I have found from a quick Google, your description does not appear to be entirely accurate (though even if it were, there is no way I would consider it "torture" - it leaves us without a word to describe techniques like nail-ripping, skin peeling, and testicle electrocution).
Manning, who is being held in the brig at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia, has been confined to "maximum custody." He also has been subject to a "prevention of injury" order. The result is that he is kept in his cell 23 hours a day. According to his attorney, Manning is also denied sheets, forbidden to exercise in his cell and not allowed to sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m.
So he gets an hour of exercise a day, he just can't do more in his cell.
Most recently, the attorney has alleged that Manning has been stripped naked at bedtime — the result, apparently, of Manning's sarcastic comment that if he wanted to commit suicide, he could use the elastic band in his underwear or his flip-flops. After requiring him to sleep naked for several days, the Pentagon says Manning now sleeps in "tear-proof garments."
So he can wear clothes, but his guards figured out a way to retaliate when he gave them a hard time.
I agree with P.J. Crowley that his treatment is "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." (Why on earth would he be dismissed for that!?!?) Still, not "torture".
And if they had, due to their interconnections with the rest of the financial system, and the economy as a whole, all hell would've broken loose. You may choose to ignore that reality (libertarians are very good at that sort of thing), but the politicians couldn't.
Pure statist bullshit. What, you think there wasn't enough money lying around in private hands willing to pick up those assets at fire sale prices? I beg to differ. What we got instead was Larry and Richard propping up Bernie and waving his arm going "Hi, everybody - see, everything's fine, just keep partying!" What's stunning is people like you buying into this bullshit and ignoring how Bernie never seems to actually say anything himself and not even noticing the stench.
Of course, proper regulation (among other things) would've helped avoid that situation, but of course, your good buddy Alan Greenspan disagreed with that approach, so econopocalypse it is!
"If only we could have cracked a few more skulls everything would have been fine!" Sure, that's a great attitude. And fuck Greenspan. That court jester is at least as complicit as anyone else in causing the whole bubble and meltdown in the first place, as well as supporting the crazy ideas that keep rolling into more bubbles and monetary fakery. Why would you criticize him since he totally supports your position.
The rest of your rant isn't even worthy of a response. I don't have any "rich buddies" and I'm certainly not supporting the criminal bastards at the top of the system that are screwing everybody. All you want to do is tear down the 3 - 7 million people in the country that actually have enough power to oppose the tyrants. Meanwhile you want to supply even more power to the gamesters at the top, as if there was something different between those at the top of the financial institutions and at the top of the Federal government, rather than facing the truth that they are the same people (and swapping positions all the time between one and the other).
Yes, Jeremy, those things do not count as wealth creation. What you are talking about is infrastructure. In many cases, it makes sense for government to take on the job of creating infrastructure, and while they have completely screwed it up, public support for educating populations that cannot afford education is a benefit to society as a whole.
So those thinks support wealth creation, but they do not represent wealth creation. When the highway is complete, the money taken from citizens has not provided additional wealth, it has simply turned into a highway. Assuming the public education system actually worked, you simply have a citizen ready for a productive job, but the citizen will create the wealth for himself. And the money to do it was taken out of the economy first.
None of those things will fill a silo with grain, allow a family to buy a bigger house, or allow a manufacturer to expand his production facility. Now, you could argue that the manufacturer now has roads to transport his goods, but he could have done that with the money taken from him and other productive members of society anyway - and still have the road.
Yeah, tell that to BoA or Goldman Sachs. They create nothing, and have destroyed the lives of millions. The idea that the rich are solely responsible for "creating" anything in the US is an absurd fantasy. Are those who excel important? Yes. Do top top 1% of Americans deserve 50% of the wealth? Fuck no.
BoA and Goldman Sachs should have been allowed to fail. What happened instead? The government (which you want to give more money = more power) bailed them out to the detriment of everyone else. Talk about a solution being worse than the problem. Then because of these few dozen (scores? hundreds? whatever) of bad actors, you want to punish about 3.5 million people, most of whom had nothing to do with it. Those 3.5 million people do have a net worth that amounts to somewhere between 40 and 45% of the country's wealth - they also contribute about 40% of the total annual revenues of the federal government, so it's a bit of a trade-off.
It is the private sector that is responsible for creating all the wealth in the country. Government creates exactly none of it.
Listening to CEOs and PR reps is a waste of time, they have no idea what's really going on underneath them.
The top men know exactly what's going on. They have set up the system to be filled with incompetence and overwork because that enables them to get away with defrauding billions from millions.
The system is broken by design.
Exactly! They implement these massively complicated rule structures on top of everything else and don't even let the officers read it before they vote on it. They're like "Well we have to pass it to know what's in it!".
decried attempts to correct this wealth and power imbalance as "class warfare", thus actively working against their own self-interests.
Maybe they just don't like the methods suggested, namely an increase in the power of government to confiscate greater wealth from private hands. Maybe if their paycheck comes from one of those targets, they don't see it in their self-interest to be biting those hands, especially when only private interests can actually create wealth, while governments simply use it up.
Besides, income taxes do little other than control inflation, since the government can print and distribute fiat money all they want. If you could trust everyone to do it, you could just have everyone (that is, the less than 50% that actually contribute via income tax) just take the taxes they owe out in the back yard and burn it up. It would have exactly the same effect.
How about this? If we decide that we are so jealous of some one else's success, we should get together to hire some goons to go to their house, armed to the teeth, and demand they give up a vast portion of it. Then the goons can take their cut and distribute the rest to us poor folk.... Oh, wait...
...And if you think that's bad, consider that the US is the 18th least corrupt out of 180 countries. That is, only 17 places are considered less corrupt. The bad news is that the US has been falling in that ranking, and is the most populous country among the least corrupt 25.
Being imprisoned in Quantico is torture now? I don't get this whole line of reasoning. Rendition and water boarding and many other techniques used under Rumsfeld et. al. were absolutely heinous and wrong, but this whole idea that every POW or prisoner of the military is somehow being tortured is just turning into a joke.
Is there some reason you are making this claim, or are we just assuming that everyone the US holds in custody now considered a victim of torture?
That's not the way I see it. I've worked with Drupal for some time, and I think the problem he's trying to solve here is to get the development community a little more focused on the boring stuff that really needs work, rather than their own little world of modules and the patches for those modules. This happens a lot - there's a critical bug that needs to be fixed, and it's blocking not just a release, but also several patches with new features that are required by various modules. That means that critical but is holding up a *lot* of work. But often it's a boring problem, or the core maintainers are so swamped with stuff they don't have time for it.
I think Dries is hoping that by rejecting more stuff when there are critical bugs to work on in the core that it will motivate more developers to divert additional time to getting those bugs fixed.
Google for bonobos (also known as pygmy chimpanzees), they've gotten us beaten hands down on that front.
Not so much. Sure, Bonobos are a great deal more promiscuous and use sex for social bonding as a group, but I think the OP was referring to the pair-bonding required for long-term care of very vulnerable offspring. Bonobos do not have monogamous sexual relationships at all.
...worrying about the 0.02% (random guess) of people in the state that participate in such actions.
Please, I hope it's not that prevalent! That's somewhere around 6,800,000 people running around buggering sheep (or whatever they think will stand still for it). If they're all in Florida, that's 1/3 of the population. It's also means there are more sheep-fuckers in the U.S. than sheep!
Slashdot Mirror
EFF is a private organization. Right now you respect them. By morning they could be a wholly-owned subsidiary of a holding company owned by Microsoft. And I'm not saying which morning.
You were probably trying to be funny, but the EFF is not a private organization the way you are thinking. You cannot just buy out a 501(c)(3) and start controlling it. It's run by a board of directors and a set of bylaws that must be followed. Unless the directors end up disillusioned with the organization or its mission, there's really not much an outside party can do to influence it.
This. (sorry) I was doing pretty well performing programming and consultant work myself until the same thing happened to me. I even found RFPs out there that stated explicitly "Do not bother to apply if you are American". WTF? This despite the fact that these idiots look at nothing but the hourly rate, and when they get burned by the fact that most of those guys are 1/10th as productive, and also end up doing significant re-work because they didn't understand the requirements as well as I can.
I do still have some loyal customers, including a couple that came back when they realized that I was giving them a better value than the cheap-as-crap-found-them-on-the-web foreigners.
Mr. Viablos,
I am a frequent commenter on Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and many other sites frequented by technology opinion leaders. I am also very poor, have no scruples, but with excellent persuasive writing skills.
Can you please put me in touch with some folks looking for people like me to act as insightful and frequent contributors to praise and defend companies and their products? I would appreciate it.
Thanks,
Floyd Markian
You're drinking the cool-aid if you think it's progressives leading the charge towards feudalism.
You mean "Kool-aid"? All I hear from progressives is "more government, no spending cuts, more regulation, bigger taxes", etc. No delusions at all.
Conservative economic policies are what protect the wealthy 'feudal lords' you're talking about. Their regressive tax structures make social mobility much more difficult, which is useful for keeping the wealth concentrated in as few hands as possible.
I don't know what you are talking about here. Only about half the population in the US pays income tax at all. The top 2% pay more than the bottom 95%. Corporate welfare and complicated tax incentives, breaks, and all that crazy crap isn't "conservative economic policy" - balanced budgets and smaller government that gets out of the way are what conservative policy [should] be about.
Conservative social policies...
Social authoritarians, regardless of political stripe, need to get out of the way. People own themselves and that should be respected. But the progressives want to control every aspect of everyone's life, including how much water and energy they are allowed to use, what they should eat, where they should live, etc., etc. Nice straw man there with the whole social authoritarian rant.
Conservative educational policies
Education isn't a government function - maybe you could justify some government financial support for educating the less privileged, but you're so enamored with the monopolistic state indoctrination centers all you can complain about are the religious types trying to interject their views. Really?
Please provide some sort of example of how progressive policies try to control the population to a greater extent than conservative policies...
Sure. Here you go.
Protecting property rights is all the state is doing, and it is one of the basic fundamental functions of government. That is different than granting a commercial monopoly. Maybe you're confused by the "Intellectual Property" term. That's intentional, because the things that fall under that definition are not really "property" at all. The term is just a clever trick by corporate lawyers to confuse the issue.
If I build a pool in my back yard, I have monopoly control over who uses the pool.
And if you didn't, you would never build the pool. Why put your own time and resources into something when it can be taken away from you? But to compare it to copyright, you would have to not only have control over your own pool, but the ability to ban your neighbors from building a similar pool in their back yards.
Arguing that a monopoly granted by the state is wrong is arguing that all property is theft: it undermines the whole basis of capitalism.
Not really. I'm reminded of the Jefferson's statement about ideas in reference to patents: "... no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me."
You're thinking of it entirely wrong. The monopoly that copyright grants you isn't control of the work you created - you can do anything you want with it regardless of copyright. The monopoly is a ban on any other individual's right to make a copy. So it's actually a restriction on rights, rather than protection of them.
This is exactly the type of rhetoric we hear from the left all the time. "You should listen to those who know better. You should care more about the community over your own desires; conservatives are just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies clinging to old ideas and fooled in to voting against their own best interests"
In actuality, the left is leading us right back into feudalism, where men are enslaved to lords, knowledge is left to the ruling class, and freedom and ingenuity are hindered to prevent man from reaching his full potential. This is exactly why our founders pulled us away from the ideas of Europe and gave us every right and freedom the feudalists said were wrong to have.
If they try such a thing, it should be thrown out on summary judgement, as Verizon and Comcast have already had an opportunity to serve those areas and chose not to. Therefore, they do not have standing.
That's funny - I thought there was a hiring freeze. Or does that just apply to border guards?
Some of us are quite clear on when and how this started. Please dispel your own delusions.
I really haven't been following this story, so I wasn't aware of any maltreatment. From what I have found from a quick Google, your description does not appear to be entirely accurate (though even if it were, there is no way I would consider it "torture" - it leaves us without a word to describe techniques like nail-ripping, skin peeling, and testicle electrocution).
Manning, who is being held in the brig at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia, has been confined to "maximum custody." He also has been subject to a "prevention of injury" order. The result is that he is kept in his cell 23 hours a day. According to his attorney, Manning is also denied sheets, forbidden to exercise in his cell and not allowed to sleep between 5 a.m. and 8 p.m.
So he gets an hour of exercise a day, he just can't do more in his cell.
Most recently, the attorney has alleged that Manning has been stripped naked at bedtime — the result, apparently, of Manning's sarcastic comment that if he wanted to commit suicide, he could use the elastic band in his underwear or his flip-flops. After requiring him to sleep naked for several days, the Pentagon says Manning now sleeps in "tear-proof garments."
So he can wear clothes, but his guards figured out a way to retaliate when he gave them a hard time.
I agree with P.J. Crowley that his treatment is "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." (Why on earth would he be dismissed for that!?!?) Still, not "torture".
And if they had, due to their interconnections with the rest of the financial system, and the economy as a whole, all hell would've broken loose. You may choose to ignore that reality (libertarians are very good at that sort of thing), but the politicians couldn't.
Pure statist bullshit. What, you think there wasn't enough money lying around in private hands willing to pick up those assets at fire sale prices? I beg to differ. What we got instead was Larry and Richard propping up Bernie and waving his arm going "Hi, everybody - see, everything's fine, just keep partying!" What's stunning is people like you buying into this bullshit and ignoring how Bernie never seems to actually say anything himself and not even noticing the stench.
Of course, proper regulation (among other things) would've helped avoid that situation, but of course, your good buddy Alan Greenspan disagreed with that approach, so econopocalypse it is!
"If only we could have cracked a few more skulls everything would have been fine!" Sure, that's a great attitude. And fuck Greenspan. That court jester is at least as complicit as anyone else in causing the whole bubble and meltdown in the first place, as well as supporting the crazy ideas that keep rolling into more bubbles and monetary fakery. Why would you criticize him since he totally supports your position.
The rest of your rant isn't even worthy of a response. I don't have any "rich buddies" and I'm certainly not supporting the criminal bastards at the top of the system that are screwing everybody. All you want to do is tear down the 3 - 7 million people in the country that actually have enough power to oppose the tyrants. Meanwhile you want to supply even more power to the gamesters at the top, as if there was something different between those at the top of the financial institutions and at the top of the Federal government, rather than facing the truth that they are the same people (and swapping positions all the time between one and the other).
Yes, Jeremy, those things do not count as wealth creation. What you are talking about is infrastructure. In many cases, it makes sense for government to take on the job of creating infrastructure, and while they have completely screwed it up, public support for educating populations that cannot afford education is a benefit to society as a whole.
So those thinks support wealth creation, but they do not represent wealth creation. When the highway is complete, the money taken from citizens has not provided additional wealth, it has simply turned into a highway. Assuming the public education system actually worked, you simply have a citizen ready for a productive job, but the citizen will create the wealth for himself. And the money to do it was taken out of the economy first.
None of those things will fill a silo with grain, allow a family to buy a bigger house, or allow a manufacturer to expand his production facility. Now, you could argue that the manufacturer now has roads to transport his goods, but he could have done that with the money taken from him and other productive members of society anyway - and still have the road.
I call bullshit. Show me where Apple is making such claims.
How about on their website?
Mac OS X doesn’t get PC viruses. And its built-in defenses help keep you safe from other malware without the hassle of constant alerts and sweeps.
... which of course everyone reads as
Mac OS X doesn’t get viruses. And its built-in defenses help keep you safe from other malware.
Organized crime also has vast resources derived from its traditional operations to finance the hiring of quality hackers around the world.
How do I get in on that?
Yeah, tell that to BoA or Goldman Sachs. They create nothing, and have destroyed the lives of millions. The idea that the rich are solely responsible for "creating" anything in the US is an absurd fantasy. Are those who excel important? Yes. Do top top 1% of Americans deserve 50% of the wealth? Fuck no.
BoA and Goldman Sachs should have been allowed to fail. What happened instead? The government (which you want to give more money = more power) bailed them out to the detriment of everyone else. Talk about a solution being worse than the problem. Then because of these few dozen (scores? hundreds? whatever) of bad actors, you want to punish about 3.5 million people, most of whom had nothing to do with it. Those 3.5 million people do have a net worth that amounts to somewhere between 40 and 45% of the country's wealth - they also contribute about 40% of the total annual revenues of the federal government, so it's a bit of a trade-off.
It is the private sector that is responsible for creating all the wealth in the country. Government creates exactly none of it.
The top men know exactly what's going on. They have set up the system to be filled with incompetence and overwork because that enables them to get away with defrauding billions from millions.
The system is broken by design.
Exactly! They implement these massively complicated rule structures on top of everything else and don't even let the officers read it before they vote on it. They're like "Well we have to pass it to know what's in it!".
Wait. What were we talking about?
Annnnd... It's gone.
decried attempts to correct this wealth and power imbalance as "class warfare", thus actively working against their own self-interests.
Maybe they just don't like the methods suggested, namely an increase in the power of government to confiscate greater wealth from private hands. Maybe if their paycheck comes from one of those targets, they don't see it in their self-interest to be biting those hands, especially when only private interests can actually create wealth, while governments simply use it up.
Besides, income taxes do little other than control inflation, since the government can print and distribute fiat money all they want. If you could trust everyone to do it, you could just have everyone (that is, the less than 50% that actually contribute via income tax) just take the taxes they owe out in the back yard and burn it up. It would have exactly the same effect.
How about this? If we decide that we are so jealous of some one else's success, we should get together to hire some goons to go to their house, armed to the teeth, and demand they give up a vast portion of it. Then the goons can take their cut and distribute the rest to us poor folk. ... Oh, wait...
...And if you think that's bad, consider that the US is the 18th least corrupt out of 180 countries. That is, only 17 places are considered less corrupt. The bad news is that the US has been falling in that ranking, and is the most populous country among the least corrupt 25.
Being imprisoned in Quantico is torture now? I don't get this whole line of reasoning. Rendition and water boarding and many other techniques used under Rumsfeld et. al. were absolutely heinous and wrong, but this whole idea that every POW or prisoner of the military is somehow being tortured is just turning into a joke.
Is there some reason you are making this claim, or are we just assuming that everyone the US holds in custody now considered a victim of torture?
That's not the way I see it. I've worked with Drupal for some time, and I think the problem he's trying to solve here is to get the development community a little more focused on the boring stuff that really needs work, rather than their own little world of modules and the patches for those modules. This happens a lot - there's a critical bug that needs to be fixed, and it's blocking not just a release, but also several patches with new features that are required by various modules. That means that critical but is holding up a *lot* of work. But often it's a boring problem, or the core maintainers are so swamped with stuff they don't have time for it.
I think Dries is hoping that by rejecting more stuff when there are critical bugs to work on in the core that it will motivate more developers to divert additional time to getting those bugs fixed.
But hey, Drupal only has 2% market share [builtwith.com] of all sites on the web...
And yet has almost 22% of the CMS market share (from the link you provided). It's second only to [*cough* ahem! *cough*] WordPress.
Maybe there should be more WordPress [*ack* *ack*] stories?
Where are my mod points when I need them? Funniest thing I've read all day.
Google for bonobos (also known as pygmy chimpanzees), they've gotten us beaten hands down on that front.
Not so much. Sure, Bonobos are a great deal more promiscuous and use sex for social bonding as a group, but I think the OP was referring to the pair-bonding required for long-term care of very vulnerable offspring. Bonobos do not have monogamous sexual relationships at all.
...worrying about the 0.02% (random guess) of people in the state that participate in such actions.
Please, I hope it's not that prevalent! That's somewhere around 6,800,000 people running around buggering sheep (or whatever they think will stand still for it). If they're all in Florida, that's 1/3 of the population. It's also means there are more sheep-fuckers in the U.S. than sheep!