Big government is evil, but not all government is evil.
Sure it is. But, as many have pointed out, including the founders of the US Constitution, it's a necessary evil. That was the point of establishing one with "supremacy", but putting it in chains (a.k.a., a Constitution).
But more importantly, people who are flat out against a large and powerful federal government can be completely for the same at a state and local level where the public has more power to control it.
Well, maybe not large and powerful, but with more authority for its specific sphere of influence. Because smaller groups can more easily agree on things to cooperate on. Family > Neighborhood > Community > County > State > Federal.
Chile is often held up as being one of the more libertarian governments. As such it seems logical that it would often appear to be a federation of businesses.
Some people are always claiming libertarian governments would mean big businesses would run everything. But if that were true, you have to wonder why big businesses never support libertarian ideas, but prefer big government instead.
Yep, I would consider this a bargain. According to TFS:
In a survey, 98% of consumers said they wouldn't be willing to pay that much for the ability to browse without advertisements.
Obviously those folks are not considering all the concomitant pollution of the Internet as a whole that results from entire advertisement funding model. SEO poisoning (and attempts), click bait, adware, slow loading pages and pop-ups and all the rest. Sure, you can mitigate some of that with things like adblock and noscript and putting the Flash plug-in into "Always ask" mode, but that just escalates the war for eyeball revenue, browser hijacking adware, and all those copycat domain registrations put up just to get ad revenue from URL typos.
I think the whole ad supported model is doomed to implode anyway. The ads don't work, and right now Google and Facebook are actually considered high-value stocks on nothing but the ability to sell ads. Eventually the advertisers will wise up, and it will all crash. It's happening to newspapers right now. And that's moved to TV and the Internet because that's where the eyeballs are. But who actually spends money based on those ads they see? Are companies really getting the value they think they buying them? What happens when they find out they've been wasting their marketing budgets on it?
Better to call it a webcast, i.e. episodic publication of audio files on the Internet.
Podcast is just Apples branding of the webcast for its iPod, and it came later.
This patent troll claimed *podcasts* infringed on its patent, as they came later,
This is all completely wrong. First, Personal Audio is not technically "troll" - it didn't buy patents to troll, it actually developed the (somewhat obvious) technologies. Paul Logan is a real inventor that has brought real products to market.
Second, there is no patent for "podcasting" at all. The Personal Audio patents are about distribution and organizing of episodic content. Yes, they had a real product that did that, until Apple incorporated the same techniques into iTunes.
Paul Logan's Slashdot interview might be a little instructive for those that have only heard Adam Corolla's inflammatory fundraising scheme.
Logan: Well, I could answer this question by arguing that I did try to build a product. That I spent $1.6 million of my own money trying to realize our vision of a custom listening experience that ended up, at the end of the day, being implemented in the form of a cassette tape product, and not the digital player system we envisioned and patented.
When I left MicroTouch to start Personal Audio in 1996, we employed 500 people making touch screens in Massachusetts. Without those patents, we would never have gotten the company off the ground.
Personal Audio has been trying to assert patents they claim cover podcasting
This is completely false. The patents don't cover podcasting per se, rather they cover methods for displaying and indexing podcast directories for distribution, the way they are organized in, for instance, the iTunes store. You can podcast all you want, distribute your podcasts and do everything else with them without Personal Audio making a claim, unless you put them into an iTunes store-like directory.
Not saying that it's a whole lot better, but this patent is easily avoidable, and the description is just disinformation.
That's why they , hold various campaigns, negotiate with relevant parties in domestic disputes and so on.
LOL I missed that in my first reply. You've really been sold a bill of goods, and bought into some specious marketing claims
patrol the streets
Very little of police resources are used for this type of activity, but when it is, it is more properly termed "looking for someone to arrest for something."
hold various campaigns
...In an attempt to "improve their image". You've obviously bought into this marketing, but many people have not.
negotiate with relevant parties in domestic disputes
There are now federal rules (Violence Against Women Act) that generally requires an arrest to be made when a domestic call is made. The "negotiation" you're so fond of the police conducting is basically an exercise of "deciding who to arrest" and "collecting evidence on the perp". The only "prevention" aspect of this is that someone gets locked up, and prevented from beating up their domestic partner again for a day or two.
In addition to being the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup is a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley
So first he screwed us with that god-awful bastardization of C, then screwed us again with convoluted derivatives that no one could figure out were worthless, ushering in the worst global economic recession since World War II.
Pitchforks and torches are too good for this guy, I say. String him up on the yard arm.
It distinguishes a person more closely to the culture they spring from like the difference between saying European or German( although it may be nice to break this subset down to their staadts as well.).
The trend is just the opposite in the EU, though. I've been dealing with a lot of folks from France lately, and they almost universally refer to themselves as "European", or "from Europe".
Really think about it is there some filter that puts idiots in to government employment while private industry only get the goods ones while paying a lower wage?
Sort of. It's generally referred to as "job security". Most government agencies have both good and worthless employees. The thing is, in government, the worthless employees are almost impossible to get rid of. So those agencies can never be as efficient as a company that can hire people at-will, and can cut staff that is not contributing. Yes, it's possible to fire government employees, but it's very difficult, and it requires putting resources into all the paperwork required to make it happen and avoid lawsuits. And there are all kinds of things that go on in government that perpetuates that, such as tribute, PC issues, long-term employees with strategic relationships, etc. And so the response when more resources are needed is never to look for the lowest-level contributors, but to simply hire more people to make up for the dead weight.
Of course this issue is not strictly limited to government, it can happen to some degree in any old, large bureaucratic organization. But since most government agencies fall into that category, and exist in perpetuity, and rarely if ever face budget cuts, it's more pervasive in government than in private industry.
It's a regular template among the privatization crowd. Government only had to accomplish X but screwed up here, here, and here. Privatize and that won't happen. Barely hidden assumptions include: private operations never screw up, private operations never cheat.
Making these kinds of generalizations are not very helpful. What is X, what was the screw up, here, here, here, and what's the best way to handle it? Sometimes privatization IS the answer, but jumping to it can lead to crony capitalism, favoritism, secret deals and even worse outcomes than before. Frankly, I always thought the best examples of slow, opaque, inefficient bureaucracy were in federal government agencies - then I had to deal with Northrop Grumman.
One major issue that must be considered when privatizing, is the function that is being privatized. If you have a service provided by government that can wholly be done by private companies and provide better and more efficient service to citizens, it's certainly a candidate to consider. What is often done, though, is outsourcing of internal functions, such as accounting or IT or, as in this case, facility management. The problem is that when these things are privatized, it's done though legislation, the function is handed over to a company, government employees are laid off or transitioned, and now the actually customer, which is the agency still providing services. But now they are stuck with basically a monopoly providing those services. Due to the top-down nature of control from the legislature and administration, the agency itself is unable to control the costs and service levels. I've seen agencies lay off front-line service employees to cover increasing costs from their private IT contractor. They are unable to fire or hold their service company to account - they have to lobby the legislators or legislative oversight committees to do that. And the contractor has their own lobbyists. This is where "privatization" goes horribly wrong.
There are earthworm species that are native to North America (see, for instance, Hendrix's Earthworm Ecology and Biogeography in North America). There are also exotic / invasive species. These species (as well as one or two native species with expanding ranges) are definitely a problem, but that is a different statement from "earthworms are not native to America."
I don't know about earthworms, but I did hear years ago that the native species of lady bug in North America had been entirely supplanted by an Asian variety, and there were no native Lady Bug species left.
The paradox arises when this system falls into a black hole causing the information to devolve into a single state.
Or... maybe it doesn't devolve into a single state at all. We can't actually see what goes on inside of black hole... but if our assumptions about what actually happens appear to create a paradox, then maybe it's our assumptions aren't valid, rather than the original basic concept of what a black hole supposedly is. I believe that the concept that black holes are necessarily singularities may be flawed. Space is so distorted by gravity in their vicinity that straight lines which intersect their event horizon never exit it, but I do not think that means that all of a black hole's mass is necessarily at its center, or even necessarily collapsing inexorably towards its center. Its center is just its center of mass.
And yeah, I know that astrophysicists with a vastly more qualifications than I have came up with these ideas, but in the end, an argument from authority does not make one actually right.
The theory of black holes did not come from any observations of physical phenomenon, it came from studying Einstein's theories. The math suggested the possibility of singularities, but at first no one thought they would actually exist in our universe. Of course now we know that black holes DO exist, so those theories are validated. Now we're just trying to figure out how to reconcile with OTHER theories.
Braidamaged, toxic, idiotic, retard conservative culture (You. You heard me. Did I fucking stutter?) has convinced everyone that nothing can be ever developed in house by a government, ever.
It's known as "crony capitalism", or "Public-private-partnerships (PPP)", and we called it Fascism in the 1930's and 1940's. Leadership on the "progressive" or "liberal" side is at least as guilty of promoting these things as conservative culture, in fact it seems to be conservatives that want to back away from it, while the Democrats are doubling-down. It was the Democrat governor Mark Warner that handed all of Virginia's IT work over to Northrop Grumman many years ago. And, of course, the liberal appointees at Obama's HHS that outsourced the HealthCare.gov website for millions of dollars more than should have been spent to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Big government is evil, but not all government is evil.
Sure it is. But, as many have pointed out, including the founders of the US Constitution, it's a necessary evil. That was the point of establishing one with "supremacy", but putting it in chains (a.k.a., a Constitution).
But more importantly, people who are flat out against a large and powerful federal government can be completely for the same at a state and local level where the public has more power to control it.
Well, maybe not large and powerful, but with more authority for its specific sphere of influence. Because smaller groups can more easily agree on things to cooperate on. Family > Neighborhood > Community > County > State > Federal.
One way to fix the problem is to go to war and kill off the extra men.
Or, they could just adapt some aspects of ancient Greek culture. The Chinese leaders are pretty good and implementing cultural revolutions, after all.
Chile is often held up as being one of the more libertarian governments. As such it seems logical that it would often appear to be a federation of businesses.
Some people are always claiming libertarian governments would mean big businesses would run everything. But if that were true, you have to wonder why big businesses never support libertarian ideas, but prefer big government instead.
Yep, I would consider this a bargain. According to TFS:
In a survey, 98% of consumers said they wouldn't be willing to pay that much for the ability to browse without advertisements.
Obviously those folks are not considering all the concomitant pollution of the Internet as a whole that results from entire advertisement funding model. SEO poisoning (and attempts), click bait, adware, slow loading pages and pop-ups and all the rest. Sure, you can mitigate some of that with things like adblock and noscript and putting the Flash plug-in into "Always ask" mode, but that just escalates the war for eyeball revenue, browser hijacking adware, and all those copycat domain registrations put up just to get ad revenue from URL typos.
I think the whole ad supported model is doomed to implode anyway. The ads don't work, and right now Google and Facebook are actually considered high-value stocks on nothing but the ability to sell ads. Eventually the advertisers will wise up, and it will all crash. It's happening to newspapers right now. And that's moved to TV and the Internet because that's where the eyeballs are. But who actually spends money based on those ads they see? Are companies really getting the value they think they buying them? What happens when they find out they've been wasting their marketing budgets on it?
I looked on the company's website, and it appears to list no royalty schedule, unlike MPEG LA and MP3Licensing (Fraunhofer/Technicolor).
Well those guys are involved in "standard" organizations, so their patents have to have a schedule so they qualify as RAND patents.
There are still some gems out there. You should check out Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak's No Agenda Show.
Better to call it a webcast, i.e. episodic publication of audio files on the Internet.
Podcast is just Apples branding of the webcast for its iPod, and it came later.
This patent troll claimed *podcasts* infringed on its patent, as they came later ,
This is all completely wrong. First, Personal Audio is not technically "troll" - it didn't buy patents to troll, it actually developed the (somewhat obvious) technologies. Paul Logan is a real inventor that has brought real products to market.
Second, there is no patent for "podcasting" at all. The Personal Audio patents are about distribution and organizing of episodic content. Yes, they had a real product that did that, until Apple incorporated the same techniques into iTunes.
Paul Logan's Slashdot interview might be a little instructive for those that have only heard Adam Corolla's inflammatory fundraising scheme.
Logan: Well, I could answer this question by arguing that I did try to build a product. That I spent $1.6 million of my own money trying to realize our vision of a custom listening experience that ended up, at the end of the day, being implemented in the form of a cassette tape product, and not the digital player system we envisioned and patented.
When I left MicroTouch to start Personal Audio in 1996, we employed 500 people making touch screens in Massachusetts. Without those patents, we would never have gotten the company off the ground.
Personal Audio has been trying to assert patents they claim cover podcasting
This is completely false. The patents don't cover podcasting per se, rather they cover methods for displaying and indexing podcast directories for distribution, the way they are organized in, for instance, the iTunes store. You can podcast all you want, distribute your podcasts and do everything else with them without Personal Audio making a claim, unless you put them into an iTunes store-like directory.
Not saying that it's a whole lot better, but this patent is easily avoidable, and the description is just disinformation.
Ironically if you actually read that page it contradicts you, starting in the second paragraph FFS
You mean the part where it says "Before the mid-1800s..." ?
That's why they , hold various campaigns, negotiate with relevant parties in domestic disputes and so on.
LOL I missed that in my first reply. You've really been sold a bill of goods, and bought into some specious marketing claims
patrol the streets
Very little of police resources are used for this type of activity, but when it is, it is more properly termed "looking for someone to arrest for something."
hold various campaigns
...In an attempt to "improve their image". You've obviously bought into this marketing, but many people have not.
negotiate with relevant parties in domestic disputes
There are now federal rules (Violence Against Women Act) that generally requires an arrest to be made when a domestic call is made. The "negotiation" you're so fond of the police conducting is basically an exercise of "deciding who to arrest" and "collecting evidence on the perp". The only "prevention" aspect of this is that someone gets locked up, and prevented from beating up their domestic partner again for a day or two.
The main subset is in fact crime prevention.
Incorrect. In fact, the US courts explicitly ruled that the police do not have a duty or obligation to protect anyone, or prevent any crime.
"only 40% of its versions can be stopped by antivirus software" Take a general case. What proportion of crime is stopped by the police?
Bad analogy. Antivirus software is designed to stop virus infections, but the police are designed to make arrests, not to stop crime.
In addition to being the creator of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup is a Managing Director in the technology division of Morgan Stanley
So first he screwed us with that god-awful bastardization of C, then screwed us again with convoluted derivatives that no one could figure out were worthless, ushering in the worst global economic recession since World War II.
Pitchforks and torches are too good for this guy, I say. String him up on the yard arm.
Maybe since linkedin is such a useless website that's making no money, the judge thought continuing to exist was punishment enough.
And yet their stock is selling for over $200 a share...
Blame Sun.
Thanks, Obama!
Error messages, too, have disappeared
Users won't understand the error message anyway, just give them a frowny face and be done with it!
These comments suck.
How's that for "just putting the head in"?
The term is "just the tip" - and is an example of the biggest lie ever told. Close runner-up is "Only the very rich".
It distinguishes a person more closely to the culture they spring from like the difference between saying European or German( although it may be nice to break this subset down to their staadts as well.).
The trend is just the opposite in the EU, though. I've been dealing with a lot of folks from France lately, and they almost universally refer to themselves as "European", or "from Europe".
Really think about it is there some filter that puts idiots in to government employment while private industry only get the goods ones while paying a lower wage?
Sort of. It's generally referred to as "job security". Most government agencies have both good and worthless employees. The thing is, in government, the worthless employees are almost impossible to get rid of. So those agencies can never be as efficient as a company that can hire people at-will, and can cut staff that is not contributing. Yes, it's possible to fire government employees, but it's very difficult, and it requires putting resources into all the paperwork required to make it happen and avoid lawsuits. And there are all kinds of things that go on in government that perpetuates that, such as tribute, PC issues, long-term employees with strategic relationships, etc. And so the response when more resources are needed is never to look for the lowest-level contributors, but to simply hire more people to make up for the dead weight.
Of course this issue is not strictly limited to government, it can happen to some degree in any old, large bureaucratic organization. But since most government agencies fall into that category, and exist in perpetuity, and rarely if ever face budget cuts, it's more pervasive in government than in private industry.
It's a regular template among the privatization crowd. Government only had to accomplish X but screwed up here, here, and here. Privatize and that won't happen. Barely hidden assumptions include: private operations never screw up, private operations never cheat.
Making these kinds of generalizations are not very helpful. What is X, what was the screw up, here, here, here, and what's the best way to handle it? Sometimes privatization IS the answer, but jumping to it can lead to crony capitalism, favoritism, secret deals and even worse outcomes than before. Frankly, I always thought the best examples of slow, opaque, inefficient bureaucracy were in federal government agencies - then I had to deal with Northrop Grumman.
One major issue that must be considered when privatizing, is the function that is being privatized. If you have a service provided by government that can wholly be done by private companies and provide better and more efficient service to citizens, it's certainly a candidate to consider. What is often done, though, is outsourcing of internal functions, such as accounting or IT or, as in this case, facility management. The problem is that when these things are privatized, it's done though legislation, the function is handed over to a company, government employees are laid off or transitioned, and now the actually customer, which is the agency still providing services. But now they are stuck with basically a monopoly providing those services. Due to the top-down nature of control from the legislature and administration, the agency itself is unable to control the costs and service levels. I've seen agencies lay off front-line service employees to cover increasing costs from their private IT contractor. They are unable to fire or hold their service company to account - they have to lobby the legislators or legislative oversight committees to do that. And the contractor has their own lobbyists. This is where "privatization" goes horribly wrong.
[citation please]
There are earthworm species that are native to North America (see, for instance, Hendrix's Earthworm Ecology and Biogeography in North America). There are also exotic / invasive species. These species (as well as one or two native species with expanding ranges) are definitely a problem, but that is a different statement from "earthworms are not native to America."
I don't know about earthworms, but I did hear years ago that the native species of lady bug in North America had been entirely supplanted by an Asian variety, and there were no native Lady Bug species left.
Or... maybe it doesn't devolve into a single state at all. We can't actually see what goes on inside of black hole... but if our assumptions about what actually happens appear to create a paradox, then maybe it's our assumptions aren't valid, rather than the original basic concept of what a black hole supposedly is. I believe that the concept that black holes are necessarily singularities may be flawed. Space is so distorted by gravity in their vicinity that straight lines which intersect their event horizon never exit it, but I do not think that means that all of a black hole's mass is necessarily at its center, or even necessarily collapsing inexorably towards its center. Its center is just its center of mass.
And yeah, I know that astrophysicists with a vastly more qualifications than I have came up with these ideas, but in the end, an argument from authority does not make one actually right.
The theory of black holes did not come from any observations of physical phenomenon, it came from studying Einstein's theories. The math suggested the possibility of singularities, but at first no one thought they would actually exist in our universe. Of course now we know that black holes DO exist, so those theories are validated. Now we're just trying to figure out how to reconcile with OTHER theories.
"My name is George McFly, and I am your density."
Braidamaged, toxic, idiotic, retard conservative culture (You. You heard me. Did I fucking stutter?) has convinced everyone that nothing can be ever developed in house by a government, ever.
It's known as "crony capitalism", or "Public-private-partnerships (PPP)", and we called it Fascism in the 1930's and 1940's. Leadership on the "progressive" or "liberal" side is at least as guilty of promoting these things as conservative culture, in fact it seems to be conservatives that want to back away from it, while the Democrats are doubling-down. It was the Democrat governor Mark Warner that handed all of Virginia's IT work over to Northrop Grumman many years ago. And, of course, the liberal appointees at Obama's HHS that outsourced the HealthCare.gov website for millions of dollars more than should have been spent to do it.