The fact that life is not fair doesn't mean that Republicans don't believe in fairness, they're just pragmatic about it. They realize that attempts at artificially created fairness often result in unfairness to others, even sometimes to the very people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries.
You want an example of this? Title IX. Schools that are forced to either cut men's sports programs or coerce women into joining teams just so the statistics don't prove the school disciminates and loses funding. Which is a better situation: "we have a great women's field hockey program with a lot of athletes who want to be there to compete", or "we have a women's field hockey team because we have to, and we know the girls try really hard but..." Same girls, same school, one is with Title IX the other without.
They can no more create complete fairness in life than you could fly to the moon on a pogostick. You don't believe in the moon!
Thank you for making my point for me. Yes, it's all Bush's fault, there was nothing the Democrats did to create the problems, like CRA or failure to update the banking regulations like Bush wanted... And even six years later, while Gitmo is still open, we're still in Afghanistan, people are losing the health insurance that they wanted and cant' see the doctors they like, unemployment numbers are better only because so many people have just stopped looking for work, and most recent reports indicate that ACA will cost even more jobs than originally predicted, it is all still Bush's fault. Right.
It does not establish copyright. It gives Congress the power, if it so chooses, to establish a LIMITED system whereby creators are given TEMPORARY monopolies on their ideas,
And THAT, dear sir, proves that you do NOT have an "unalienable" right to use ideas as you see fit. If it were unalienable, then Congress could not establish ANY system that limited your right. An unalienable right cannot be taken from you, and copyright does just that -- albeit for a limited time.
Copyright exists to enrich the public domain, as per the Constitution.
The purpose of copyright is not in question, only the idea that there is some inalienable right to use other people's intellectual property. As I've said before, commercial speech has always had limits.
Of course they do. It is patently absurd statements like this that make political discussions on/. so nonproductive.
They just don't have the same definition for the subjective term "fairness" that you do. For example, they think it is fair that if you work hard and make a lot of money that you should get to keep it. Others think that forcing people who work hard to make a lot of money to give their money to other people so they can enjoy it too is fair.
It's the same nonsense with the argument about who supports "torture". Nobody disagrees on the obvious things like the Iron Maiden or the rack, but if someone doesn't believe that waterboarding is torture then they are accused of blanket support for turture, even though they certainly don't hold that opinion.
Under a dictator, there is always repeal by bullet.
Unfortunately, it is usually the "voter" who is repealed by a bullet and not the dictator. Many more "voters" were repealed under Saddam Hussein than Saddams were repealed by bullets.
On the topic of this story, though, "are you better off than four years ago" is not the correct question to ask. As many people here tend to point out, well into Barack Obama's first term the performance of the economy etc. was "the fault" of Mr. Bush. Some even claim that it is still his fault today. Just as the first year or so of a new regime can be on a downward trend from the previous leader and the current one is bringing things back, the first year or so could be on an upward trend and only start back down due to the new leader's programs.
In short, the correct question to ask is "are the current programs making things better or worse", which, amazingly, is just what we're being told that most voters base their votes upon. Voters not so dumb after all.
No, he doesn't. Intellectual "property" is not property.
Yes, it is.
I have the natural, unalienable free speech right to repeat your idea/story/song/whatever.
No, you don't.
Yes, I do.
The US Constitution disagrees with you. Were your "right" to be "unalienable", copyright could not exist. The very existence of copyright disproves your claim. As I pointed out, and you ignored, commercial speech has always had limits.
Commercial speech has always had limitations, and rightly so. You want to talk about one of the characters in my creative works, go ahead. You want to make a profit using one of them, then you are in the realm of commercial speech.
You would (probably) have no complaint if a company was prohibited by commercial speech limitations from claiming their product was "new" (after being on the market for ten years) or that they "cured cancer and increased your car's gas mileage by 400%", but then, what about their right to free speech?
So you see the difference? You're acting like you have a fundamental, natural right to your idea/story/song/whatever, but you don't.
It's called "property rights", and yes, he does.
I have the natural, unalienable free speech right to repeat your idea/story/song/whatever.
seriously. how could you, with a clear conscience, be against fairness in network access?
Your flamebait doesn't deserve much of a response, other than to point out that 194 pages of FCC regulation doesn't necessarily either 1) provide fairness in network access or 2) do it the right way.
For example, you probably didn't know that on page 2 of FCC 10-201 the following appears:
No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications,
services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful
websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony
services;
The way I read that, any ISP that uses the RBL or other email blocking service is breaking the law. They are blocking lawful content.
and like racial segregation from the 50's, history will show the republicans to be on the wrong side of history, too.
Yeah, like that Civil Rights Act of 1964 that they all filibustered and voted against. Oh, wait... some truth:
The most fervent opposition to the bill came from Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC): "This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress...
On the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) completed a filibustering address that he had begun 14 hours and 13 minutes earlier opposing the legislation.
In other words, filibustered by Democrats, and every vote on the issue, while around 2:1 (mostly less) by Democrats, was never less than 4:1 supported by Republicans.
A day earlier, Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the bill's manager, concluded he had the 67 votes required at that time to end the debate and end the filibuster.
You might notice from the vote tally that had the Democrats "rallied around the flag" and provided the 67 votes themselves, there would never have been a filibuster, and that of the 100 votes total, Republicans had just 6 of the nays.
Well some people doing their PhD do some research their supervisor thinks is important and get funding that way. Other people propose their own research. It is not easy for the research proposal to get accepted though. It was bloody hard.
In Earth Sciences in the US, you cannot write a grant proposal unless you are a "principal investigator", and at this University you cannot be a principal investigator unless you have a PhD. Grad students can write proposals, but they must be submitted by the supervisor and he must put his name behind it.
As for Graduate school not being well suited to work on long term projects... Google's founders developed their prototype and Map-Reduce algorithm back then AFAIK.
I didn't say it wasn't intended to do research in algorithms that may wind up in a product later, just that "long term" and "grad school" are not truly compatible concepts.
I did not get into a graduate student program just for the money. For me it was a chance to work on something I thought was important.
I didn't go to graduate school for the money, either. I didn't go to work on something important, I went so I could learn things that would let me get a job where I could work on something important of my own when I graduated. I knew when I went in that I was going to work on something my major professor thought was important.
The market is not interested in long term projects.
Graduate school isn't supposed to be a long-term project. It's supposed to be school. Thinking it is supposed to be a place where you get paid to develop marketable products, well, it is nice if it happens but not the reason to be there.
What other business could possibly do such a poor job of serving its customers and survive?
What makes you think a 20% graduation rate isn't serving the customers well? Would it be better to water down the material to the point that 90% graduate (and the last ten percent don't because they just decided they would go to another school...) and the Universities start turning out the same wonderfully educated graduates that the high schools have been turning out based on THEIR "move them up so they become someone else's problem" philosophy? Would making the undergraduate degree even more worthless than it is today be a service to the graduates or a failure?
Why do you think so many jobs have an artificial college degree requirement? Could it be because the high school degree has become such a poor indicator of an educated person?
And then there's college football, the very sort of thing that promotes partying and undermines the main point of school.
There are perhaps 100 people on our University's football team. That's out of 25,000 students. A very low percentage. One in 250. They exist in a program that is run mostly by donations and ticket and TV sales. True, they consume space on campus. But to blame them for the propensity of college students to party is, well, you don't know college students very well.
and worked on making math and chess competitions and such cerebral sports more telegenic and popular.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously, how do you make a math competition more telegenic? Who is going to watch three hours of people sitting in a room solving math problems, other than the half a dozen rectors who are paid to be there? "Look, Bill, the team quarterback has just fumbled the problem with a sign mistake in the third line of the equation, that's going to move them back ten yards. Oh, wait, the other team has intercepted the integral and ran it back for a score!"
The government budget must be balanced-- on the backs of the poor and the young!
The tax limit ballot measures I'm familiar with have all been from the middle class and lower objecting to the budget being balanced on their backs, and they have the majority of the votes. That's why college tuition goes up like it has.
But there are many science and engineering jobs with poor pay. Pay for postdocs is low, and shamefully low for grad students taking on teaching fellowships. Internships are another.
None of those are STEM jobs, they are designed to be short-term support for people who are still in the educational system. This is the same kind of changed thinking that has turned the minimum-wage entry-level cashier job at Mickey-D's into what people consider a long-term family-supporting job.
But anecdotal evidence is the best kind, so I'll just add that when I was in graduate school the stipend was sufficient to live a reasonable life. Not plush, not with a new car every year and a three bedroom house, but sufficient to meet my needs and most of my wants.
And if that isn't enough, what about employers who cheat their regular employees,
Fraud and breach of contract are still fraud and breach of contract. Should there be a special class for those laws called "STEM crimes" to go along with the "hate crimes" classification that ups the penalties for other already-illegal things?
This is your first misuse of "regulation", because this is enforcement that you are looking for.
It's isn't a misuse of anything. The parent talked about "more regulation." I told him it wasn't "more", it was "the same". It's already in the books. It is "more enforcement", but if that was what you truly were arguing about you'd be jumping down the throat of the OP for saying "more regulation" instead of "more enforcement". He didn't, and you didn't.
This is your second mistaken use of "regulation", because this again is enforcement and not regulation.
And this is where I've already told you that I assumed that people who read/. would be smart enough to recognize that there cannot be prosecution without regulation to start with. I forgot about you. Saying "don't regulate, prosecute" is impossible, which was the point I was making. A secondary point only, with the main point being that this is not "more regulation", it is the same regulation that already exists. It is already being applied to other educational activities, and now it is being applied to programming "boot camps".
The last sentence is arguing _for_ this additional regulation.
Nowhere do I say "additional regulations". In fact, I am VERY EXPLICIT in saying that this is the SAME REGULATION, not additional ones. You quoted it but don't want to read it yourself: "It isn't "more regulation", it's "applying the regulations that already exist." The regulation being applied and under discussion here already exists. That should be, by now, painfully obvious. You could have learned that had you read the article. Or even the summary.
This may not be what you intended to mean, but it is surely what is meant when reading.
No. it is your repeated comprehension failure and attempt at putting words in my mouth in the face of explicit information to the contrary. Now knock it off and go harass someone else for a change.
The person stated that there was no need for additional regulation, and you said what I quoted in response arguing for further regulation. I did not rework your wording, you can read your own words.
You are wrong. I made no argument for "further regulation". In fact, I was explicit in saying it isn't new regulation, it is enforcement of existing regulations. Apparently it is you that cannot read my own words.
And you missed some of his words. "Don't regulate" is not "there is no need for additional regulations". It is a statement that no regulations are needed.
You did not leave out a link, you simply misused the word "regulation".
Once again, you misread. I did not say I left out a "link", I said that I assumed that people who read the simple statements I made would know that enforcement requires regulation, so that when "the person" said "don't regulate, enforce..." he was wrong. You can't enforce what you haven't regulated. Regulation is a necessary condition for enforcement.
On the surface, this may seem pedantic.
No, it is simply a case of failure to read the words and a desire on your part to argue with me for things exactly opposite of what I actually wrote.
Prosecuting fraud is how you enforce the regulation against fraud. You need the latter before you can do the former. If you say "don't regulate", then there is nothing to prosecute, and you can't say "don't regulate, just prosecute".
I wasn't using the terms interchangeably, I just left out the causal link that I assumed everyone could figure out for themselves.
that communities not presently served by affordable broadband will remain shit outta luck,
The good thing about capitalism is that if a company can make money doing something they will. The fact there is no "affordable" broadband somewhere is a good indication that broadband cannot be done at a cost that you find "affordable". One reason some places get broadband at what you find to be "affordable" prices is because everyone else subsidizes it. I.e., people who have no interest in broadband pay for your broadband.
and communities served by a sole-provider monopoly will continue to get screwed.
I've been reading this discussion looking for someone to bring up the "monopoly" status of companies who are working under non-exclusive franchise agreements.
When I read this summary it was clear to me that the main result of this law would be a LACK of municipal meddling in the market that would create MORE monopolistic situations. I mean, how could a city subsidizing one broadband provider so that they could charge "affordable" rates NOT work to shut out every other provider who could only survive by charging UNaffordable rates? If a company could make a profit selling broadband at affordable rates in a city without the city subsidizing it, then they would already be doing it. The fact that the city has to help out proves it can't be done otherwise.
We've seen what happens many many times already. A city gives a cable company a non-exclusive franchise and nobody else comes in to compete, creating a de facto but not de jure monopoly. And many many people here keep confusing the two and railing against the monopolistic cable megaliths created by government. This law would serve to limit government creation of more broadband "monopolies" and it's bad?
Companies are replacing many software engineers with low-paid outsourced "coders" with similar credentials to what these people will end up with.
Are these "low-paid... coders" what you would consider to be the "computer scientists" that make "over six figure salaries" that the co-founder of Hack Reactor talks about, just after claiming that 99 percent of graduates of his course get "a job"?
I suppose that in theory, the people coming out of these programs would be qualified to compete for those jobs.
If Hack Reactor ten-week wonders are competing for "over six figure" salaried jobs currently held by "computer scientists", that's a really scathing condemnation of computer science as a science, I would say.
It isn't "more regulation", it's "applying the regulations that already exist."
Deceptive advertising is fraud. Don't "regulate" --
Prosecuting for fraud IS regulation. And when statements like this appear:
At Hack Reactor, where tuition costs over $17,000, 99 percent of students are offered a job at companies like Adobe and Google. According to Phillips, the average salary for a computer scientist at these firms is over six figures.
it isn't fraud (assuming the 99 percent claim is true.) It's YOUR fault if you misread "a job" as meaning "a computer scientist" job. It certainly IS your fault if you think that you can teach someone to be a computer scientist worth a six figure salary in just ten weeks.
And I hate to say this (no I really don't) but any outfit that charges $17000 for a ten week course needs some kind of overview. Even if the first two or three companies doing this are legit, such ridiculous amounts of money are going to draw hucksters like iron filings to buckey cubes. Legit course providers should have no problem with the regulation because it will help keep the less legitimate players out.
And doesn't digital cable require a new TV or converter box to get all the channels? It's the same thing except monthly fees added to it.
And once again you've ignored every other advantage that cable has and laser-focused on "converter box". You've ignored the fact that cable doesn't force me to jigger up a rat's nest of cables and splitters and amplifiers so I can get the "new" (one network) channels and the "old" (four other networks), it's all on one wire. Plus a lot more. Plus it fails much more gracefully than OTA digital.
Just because you couldn't understand how to wire that up
Stop being insulting. Had I wanted to create a complex juryrig whackado system I could have. You're the one who doesn't understand -- or you've deliberately missed the point.
I'm still wondering why you think I should have gotten an RF modulator to modulate the RF signal out of the adapter box. At least I'm smart enough to know you don't need an RF modulator to do that.
And it was not all that expensive.
My time and convenience is worth something to me, even if you care nothing about yours.
Which was the original point.
No, my original point was that you made a blanket claim that cable was a poor alternative to the government rebated converter box and OTA TV. I've told you that a couple of times now, and you keep wandering off trying to tell me how to solve a problem that went away years ago and wouldn't work the way you keep telling me to do it anyway.
They didn't leave cave paintings or anything that indicates capacity for symbolic reasoning.
"Billy, stop that drawing! Your father and I don't provide a warm comfortable cave for you to live in just so you can scribble all over the walls like a proto-hominid or one of those low-class Egyptian pyramid dwellers. Now clean that off before your father gets home, and go wash your hands for dinner. The brontosaurus steaks are almost ready... I mean 'uggh, food hot, eat now'."
And yet even more fiddly cobble-together to try to justify your claim that cable was the wrong solution. All to get just one TV to work and keep from losing the analog signals during the dual-format time period.
I'm sorry you're sore about losing your analog broadcasts.
I'm sorry you haven't understood a single thing I've written. You made a claim that getting cable was the wrong solution to the digital transition (based on how cheap and easy it was to get a DTV adapter) and I showed where it was not as cut and dried as you pretended. I've listed several advantages, including the fact that even a marginal cable signal is orders of magnitude better than the blue screen nothing I now get for four out of five networks under the digital TV paradigm.
And since cable has done the same digital transition, you don't even have the crappy cable picture quality to use as an excuse.
And other people are enjoying their Verizon LTE
Goodie for them. And I'm still asking you why you think that has anything to do with whether cable was a reasonable alternate solution to getting a modulator and a splitter and more cables and a better antenna and a signal amplifier and whatever else it is I'd need to get any digital video (except for the two channels of PBS).
But I'll point out now that you bring it up -- you're happy that a large monopolistic over-charging bandwidth-limiting mega-corporation is making even more money and that it's great that a large number of people (especially in places that don't even have cable as an option to start with) have lost their free OTA TV? Hmmmm...... I thought it was rather outrageous when I walked into the local Verizon store to see about getting a simple lowest-tier data plan for my existing tablet and found out that it was $45 a month for almost nothing. A fair exchange for free TV, I guess.
That's a long rant to ignore my suggestion that you just get an RF modulator to run the converter box through.
And you ignored the fact that the converter box was already doing RF output. WHY would I need a modulator to modulate something that was already modulated?
And you've still ignored the detail that the TV had one RF input, which means I could not connect both the antenna (connected to the adapter) and the adapter to the TV at the same time. Add in more cables, a switch box, a modulator, etc etc and it is no longer just a simple case of "$10 for a converter" that you claim makes cable such a bad alternative.
If you're suffering from multipath, then you're going to have bigger problems with analog (ghosting).
And yet, I didn't. I guess the fact that the analog channels are on a different frequency and/or coming from a different place doesn't matter?
If you did 1080i without compression, you'd need 150MHz per channel -
It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. Five networks down to one. Degraded digital signal == blue screen of nothing. Degraded analog signal == a bit of snow. One contains information, one does not.
So, you went from five networks to one (likely with 4 digital subchannels,
No, I went from five networks to one that had two channels -- both PBS. I think I said that from the start.
each of which are a better picture than analog).
You remind me of the drunk who was searching the sidewalk under the streetlamp looking for his keys. He was asked where he lost them and he said "back in that dark alley". "Why are you looking for them here?" "The light's better." Yeah, two really nice beautiful pictures of programs I didn't care about watching. How nice.
The local advertisers on the network certainly don't care, because you're not going to drive far enough to buy their services.
And this has anything to do with how bad a decision it is to get cable because of how simple and cheap it is to just hook up one of the government-funded converter boxes precisely how?
I know it's common practice, but it really shouldn't be -- the last four digits of your credit card number are really 3 digits plus the Luhn check. That means that with that string, you can test out all the number combinations and arrive at a significantly narrowed set of possible credit card numbers.
It doesn't matter where the check digit is, the fact that it exists changes a 16 digit number into a 15 digit one. (And AMEX is an exception, they're only 15 to start with.) I can give you three digits and the "check" and you will need to guess the other 7 (because one of the 8 is constricted by checksum), or I give you four digits and you guess 7 more and calculate the check.
Once you have the bank and the last four, it is still 7 you get to guess at and the 8th is still limited by having to meet the check.
but it means that if you have access to the last four digits of 1,000 cards, you're likely going to get the correct card number on the first try on a significant portion of them.
One in 10 to the 7th power for each one, right on the first guess, assuming you know the first four from the bank for each one. Let's see, the chance of getting it wrong is 1-1e7, so getting all 1000 wrong is (1-1e7)^1000. I get 0.99990. Very close to 1, but about 1/10,000. Odds say you won't get any of them right on the first guess.
And of course, now that I look up the actual Luhn algorithm it is clear that giving you the check digit actually doesn't help you as much as giving you one of the real digits would. If you have to guess 8 digits that match the check I've given you, you will get false positives for all the failure modes listed in the reference, but if I give you an extra digit you'll have one less digit to get wrong.
What on earth are you talking about? The TV needs an RF input for the antenna, and preferably composite (RCA style) input for the converter box - yes, the $50 converters had composite.
None of the ones I had did composite, and neither did the TV. I thought that was pretty clear. Had the RF input on the TV been free to attach to an antenna, then the fact that the first round of adapters didn't do passthrough wouldn't have been an issue.
If your TV is even older with nothing but antenna input, you need to manually switch the cables when you want to switch between analog and digital
D'oh. Yeah, if I wanted to go back to analog, I'd have to dive behind the TV and change the connections. Perhaps you don't see that having a remote control that allows changing channels is a convenience, but I do. The remote isn't much good if I have to not only go over to the TV to change channels, but rewire the connections.
Hey, here's a solution. Cable. Not only do I get all the networks (two versions of some) but the picture is good and I don't have to rewire anything when I change channels. And I get more things than just the local stations. But according to some, getting cable wasn't the answer. I guess having to swap cables around was better after all.
But cutting the signal in half isn't that important if you have a decent signal amplifier
Here's the point. I didn't NEED a signal amplifier to get the existing analog channels. And a signal amplifier won't help the digital signals when they suffer from multipath or are too weak to start with.
So now we're at the point where you say I needed a good antenna and a signal amplifier to go with my almost free adapter box, and a few more cables and a splitter or two. We've gone from "simple" and "cheap" to "complicated" and "fiddly".
codec = digital compression scheme. Two ways of saying the same thing.
Not exactly synonyms. Codecs don't have to include compression. Doesn't matter, the result is the same -- "codec" or "compression scheme", five networks to one because of the digital transition.
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You want an example of this? Title IX. Schools that are forced to either cut men's sports programs or coerce women into joining teams just so the statistics don't prove the school disciminates and loses funding. Which is a better situation: "we have a great women's field hockey program with a lot of athletes who want to be there to compete", or "we have a women's field hockey team because we have to, and we know the girls try really hard but ..." Same girls, same school, one is with Title IX the other without.
They can no more create complete fairness in life than you could fly to the moon on a pogostick. You don't believe in the moon!
Thank you for making my point for me. Yes, it's all Bush's fault, there was nothing the Democrats did to create the problems, like CRA or failure to update the banking regulations like Bush wanted ... And even six years later, while Gitmo is still open, we're still in Afghanistan, people are losing the health insurance that they wanted and cant' see the doctors they like, unemployment numbers are better only because so many people have just stopped looking for work, and most recent reports indicate that ACA will cost even more jobs than originally predicted, it is all still Bush's fault. Right.
It does not establish copyright. It gives Congress the power, if it so chooses, to establish a LIMITED system whereby creators are given TEMPORARY monopolies on their ideas,
And THAT, dear sir, proves that you do NOT have an "unalienable" right to use ideas as you see fit. If it were unalienable, then Congress could not establish ANY system that limited your right. An unalienable right cannot be taken from you, and copyright does just that -- albeit for a limited time.
Copyright exists to enrich the public domain, as per the Constitution.
The purpose of copyright is not in question, only the idea that there is some inalienable right to use other people's intellectual property. As I've said before, commercial speech has always had limits.
Republicans don't believe in fairness.
Of course they do. It is patently absurd statements like this that make political discussions on /. so nonproductive.
They just don't have the same definition for the subjective term "fairness" that you do. For example, they think it is fair that if you work hard and make a lot of money that you should get to keep it. Others think that forcing people who work hard to make a lot of money to give their money to other people so they can enjoy it too is fair.
It's the same nonsense with the argument about who supports "torture". Nobody disagrees on the obvious things like the Iron Maiden or the rack, but if someone doesn't believe that waterboarding is torture then they are accused of blanket support for turture, even though they certainly don't hold that opinion.
You targeted the unnecessary use of one of the two adjectives. I would have asked what he did with the ugly one.
Under a dictator, there is always repeal by bullet.
Unfortunately, it is usually the "voter" who is repealed by a bullet and not the dictator. Many more "voters" were repealed under Saddam Hussein than Saddams were repealed by bullets.
On the topic of this story, though, "are you better off than four years ago" is not the correct question to ask. As many people here tend to point out, well into Barack Obama's first term the performance of the economy etc. was "the fault" of Mr. Bush. Some even claim that it is still his fault today. Just as the first year or so of a new regime can be on a downward trend from the previous leader and the current one is bringing things back, the first year or so could be on an upward trend and only start back down due to the new leader's programs.
In short, the correct question to ask is "are the current programs making things better or worse", which, amazingly, is just what we're being told that most voters base their votes upon. Voters not so dumb after all.
No, he doesn't. Intellectual "property" is not property.
Yes, it is.
I have the natural, unalienable free speech right to repeat your idea/story/song/whatever.
No, you don't.
Yes, I do.
The US Constitution disagrees with you. Were your "right" to be "unalienable", copyright could not exist. The very existence of copyright disproves your claim. As I pointed out, and you ignored, commercial speech has always had limits.
What about my right to free speech?
Commercial speech has always had limitations, and rightly so. You want to talk about one of the characters in my creative works, go ahead. You want to make a profit using one of them, then you are in the realm of commercial speech.
You would (probably) have no complaint if a company was prohibited by commercial speech limitations from claiming their product was "new" (after being on the market for ten years) or that they "cured cancer and increased your car's gas mileage by 400%", but then, what about their right to free speech?
So you see the difference? You're acting like you have a fundamental, natural right to your idea/story/song/whatever, but you don't.
It's called "property rights", and yes, he does.
I have the natural, unalienable free speech right to repeat your idea/story/song/whatever.
No, you don't.
seriously. how could you, with a clear conscience, be against fairness in network access?
Your flamebait doesn't deserve much of a response, other than to point out that 194 pages of FCC regulation doesn't necessarily either 1) provide fairness in network access or 2) do it the right way.
For example, you probably didn't know that on page 2 of FCC 10-201 the following appears:
The way I read that, any ISP that uses the RBL or other email blocking service is breaking the law. They are blocking lawful content.
and like racial segregation from the 50's, history will show the republicans to be on the wrong side of history, too.
Yeah, like that Civil Rights Act of 1964 that they all filibustered and voted against. Oh, wait ... some truth:
In other words, filibustered by Democrats, and every vote on the issue, while around 2:1 (mostly less) by Democrats, was never less than 4:1 supported by Republicans.
You might notice from the vote tally that had the Democrats "rallied around the flag" and provided the 67 votes themselves, there would never have been a filibuster, and that of the 100 votes total, Republicans had just 6 of the nays.
Well some people doing their PhD do some research their supervisor thinks is important and get funding that way. Other people propose their own research. It is not easy for the research proposal to get accepted though. It was bloody hard.
In Earth Sciences in the US, you cannot write a grant proposal unless you are a "principal investigator", and at this University you cannot be a principal investigator unless you have a PhD. Grad students can write proposals, but they must be submitted by the supervisor and he must put his name behind it.
As for Graduate school not being well suited to work on long term projects... Google's founders developed their prototype and Map-Reduce algorithm back then AFAIK.
I didn't say it wasn't intended to do research in algorithms that may wind up in a product later, just that "long term" and "grad school" are not truly compatible concepts.
I did not get into a graduate student program just for the money. For me it was a chance to work on something I thought was important.
I didn't go to graduate school for the money, either. I didn't go to work on something important, I went so I could learn things that would let me get a job where I could work on something important of my own when I graduated. I knew when I went in that I was going to work on something my major professor thought was important.
The market is not interested in long term projects.
Graduate school isn't supposed to be a long-term project. It's supposed to be school. Thinking it is supposed to be a place where you get paid to develop marketable products, well, it is nice if it happens but not the reason to be there.
What other business could possibly do such a poor job of serving its customers and survive?
What makes you think a 20% graduation rate isn't serving the customers well? Would it be better to water down the material to the point that 90% graduate (and the last ten percent don't because they just decided they would go to another school...) and the Universities start turning out the same wonderfully educated graduates that the high schools have been turning out based on THEIR "move them up so they become someone else's problem" philosophy? Would making the undergraduate degree even more worthless than it is today be a service to the graduates or a failure?
Why do you think so many jobs have an artificial college degree requirement? Could it be because the high school degree has become such a poor indicator of an educated person?
And then there's college football, the very sort of thing that promotes partying and undermines the main point of school.
There are perhaps 100 people on our University's football team. That's out of 25,000 students. A very low percentage. One in 250. They exist in a program that is run mostly by donations and ticket and TV sales. True, they consume space on campus. But to blame them for the propensity of college students to party is, well, you don't know college students very well.
and worked on making math and chess competitions and such cerebral sports more telegenic and popular.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Seriously, how do you make a math competition more telegenic? Who is going to watch three hours of people sitting in a room solving math problems, other than the half a dozen rectors who are paid to be there? "Look, Bill, the team quarterback has just fumbled the problem with a sign mistake in the third line of the equation, that's going to move them back ten yards. Oh, wait, the other team has intercepted the integral and ran it back for a score!"
The government budget must be balanced-- on the backs of the poor and the young!
The tax limit ballot measures I'm familiar with have all been from the middle class and lower objecting to the budget being balanced on their backs, and they have the majority of the votes. That's why college tuition goes up like it has.
But there are many science and engineering jobs with poor pay. Pay for postdocs is low, and shamefully low for grad students taking on teaching fellowships. Internships are another.
None of those are STEM jobs, they are designed to be short-term support for people who are still in the educational system. This is the same kind of changed thinking that has turned the minimum-wage entry-level cashier job at Mickey-D's into what people consider a long-term family-supporting job.
But anecdotal evidence is the best kind, so I'll just add that when I was in graduate school the stipend was sufficient to live a reasonable life. Not plush, not with a new car every year and a three bedroom house, but sufficient to meet my needs and most of my wants.
And if that isn't enough, what about employers who cheat their regular employees,
Fraud and breach of contract are still fraud and breach of contract. Should there be a special class for those laws called "STEM crimes" to go along with the "hate crimes" classification that ups the penalties for other already-illegal things?
This is your first misuse of "regulation", because this is enforcement that you are looking for.
It's isn't a misuse of anything. The parent talked about "more regulation." I told him it wasn't "more", it was "the same". It's already in the books. It is "more enforcement", but if that was what you truly were arguing about you'd be jumping down the throat of the OP for saying "more regulation" instead of "more enforcement". He didn't, and you didn't.
This is your second mistaken use of "regulation", because this again is enforcement and not regulation.
And this is where I've already told you that I assumed that people who read /. would be smart enough to recognize that there cannot be prosecution without regulation to start with. I forgot about you. Saying "don't regulate, prosecute" is impossible, which was the point I was making. A secondary point only, with the main point being that this is not "more regulation", it is the same regulation that already exists. It is already being applied to other educational activities, and now it is being applied to programming "boot camps".
The last sentence is arguing _for_ this additional regulation.
Nowhere do I say "additional regulations". In fact, I am VERY EXPLICIT in saying that this is the SAME REGULATION, not additional ones. You quoted it but don't want to read it yourself: "It isn't "more regulation", it's "applying the regulations that already exist." The regulation being applied and under discussion here already exists. That should be, by now, painfully obvious. You could have learned that had you read the article. Or even the summary.
This may not be what you intended to mean, but it is surely what is meant when reading.
No. it is your repeated comprehension failure and attempt at putting words in my mouth in the face of explicit information to the contrary. Now knock it off and go harass someone else for a change.
The person stated that there was no need for additional regulation, and you said what I quoted in response arguing for further regulation. I did not rework your wording, you can read your own words.
You are wrong. I made no argument for "further regulation". In fact, I was explicit in saying it isn't new regulation, it is enforcement of existing regulations. Apparently it is you that cannot read my own words.
And you missed some of his words. "Don't regulate" is not "there is no need for additional regulations". It is a statement that no regulations are needed.
You did not leave out a link, you simply misused the word "regulation".
Once again, you misread. I did not say I left out a "link", I said that I assumed that people who read the simple statements I made would know that enforcement requires regulation, so that when "the person" said "don't regulate, enforce..." he was wrong. You can't enforce what you haven't regulated. Regulation is a necessary condition for enforcement.
On the surface, this may seem pedantic.
No, it is simply a case of failure to read the words and a desire on your part to argue with me for things exactly opposite of what I actually wrote.
I wasn't using the terms interchangeably, I just left out the causal link that I assumed everyone could figure out for themselves.
that communities not presently served by affordable broadband will remain shit outta luck,
The good thing about capitalism is that if a company can make money doing something they will. The fact there is no "affordable" broadband somewhere is a good indication that broadband cannot be done at a cost that you find "affordable". One reason some places get broadband at what you find to be "affordable" prices is because everyone else subsidizes it. I.e., people who have no interest in broadband pay for your broadband.
and communities served by a sole-provider monopoly will continue to get screwed.
I've been reading this discussion looking for someone to bring up the "monopoly" status of companies who are working under non-exclusive franchise agreements.
When I read this summary it was clear to me that the main result of this law would be a LACK of municipal meddling in the market that would create MORE monopolistic situations. I mean, how could a city subsidizing one broadband provider so that they could charge "affordable" rates NOT work to shut out every other provider who could only survive by charging UNaffordable rates? If a company could make a profit selling broadband at affordable rates in a city without the city subsidizing it, then they would already be doing it. The fact that the city has to help out proves it can't be done otherwise.
We've seen what happens many many times already. A city gives a cable company a non-exclusive franchise and nobody else comes in to compete, creating a de facto but not de jure monopoly. And many many people here keep confusing the two and railing against the monopolistic cable megaliths created by government. This law would serve to limit government creation of more broadband "monopolies" and it's bad?
Companies are replacing many software engineers with low-paid outsourced "coders" with similar credentials to what these people will end up with.
Are these "low-paid ... coders" what you would consider to be the "computer scientists" that make "over six figure salaries" that the co-founder of Hack Reactor talks about, just after claiming that 99 percent of graduates of his course get "a job"?
I suppose that in theory, the people coming out of these programs would be qualified to compete for those jobs.
If Hack Reactor ten-week wonders are competing for "over six figure" salaried jobs currently held by "computer scientists", that's a really scathing condemnation of computer science as a science, I would say.
This doesn't require any more regulation.
It isn't "more regulation", it's "applying the regulations that already exist."
Deceptive advertising is fraud. Don't "regulate" --
Prosecuting for fraud IS regulation. And when statements like this appear:
it isn't fraud (assuming the 99 percent claim is true.) It's YOUR fault if you misread "a job" as meaning "a computer scientist" job. It certainly IS your fault if you think that you can teach someone to be a computer scientist worth a six figure salary in just ten weeks.
And I hate to say this (no I really don't) but any outfit that charges $17000 for a ten week course needs some kind of overview. Even if the first two or three companies doing this are legit, such ridiculous amounts of money are going to draw hucksters like iron filings to buckey cubes. Legit course providers should have no problem with the regulation because it will help keep the less legitimate players out.
And doesn't digital cable require a new TV or converter box to get all the channels? It's the same thing except monthly fees added to it.
And once again you've ignored every other advantage that cable has and laser-focused on "converter box". You've ignored the fact that cable doesn't force me to jigger up a rat's nest of cables and splitters and amplifiers so I can get the "new" (one network) channels and the "old" (four other networks), it's all on one wire. Plus a lot more. Plus it fails much more gracefully than OTA digital.
Just because you couldn't understand how to wire that up
Stop being insulting. Had I wanted to create a complex juryrig whackado system I could have. You're the one who doesn't understand -- or you've deliberately missed the point.
I'm still wondering why you think I should have gotten an RF modulator to modulate the RF signal out of the adapter box. At least I'm smart enough to know you don't need an RF modulator to do that.
And it was not all that expensive.
My time and convenience is worth something to me, even if you care nothing about yours.
Which was the original point.
No, my original point was that you made a blanket claim that cable was a poor alternative to the government rebated converter box and OTA TV. I've told you that a couple of times now, and you keep wandering off trying to tell me how to solve a problem that went away years ago and wouldn't work the way you keep telling me to do it anyway.
They didn't leave cave paintings or anything that indicates capacity for symbolic reasoning.
"Billy, stop that drawing! Your father and I don't provide a warm comfortable cave for you to live in just so you can scribble all over the walls like a proto-hominid or one of those low-class Egyptian pyramid dwellers. Now clean that off before your father gets home, and go wash your hands for dinner. The brontosaurus steaks are almost ready... I mean 'uggh, food hot, eat now'."
I'm sorry you're sore about losing your analog broadcasts.
I'm sorry you haven't understood a single thing I've written. You made a claim that getting cable was the wrong solution to the digital transition (based on how cheap and easy it was to get a DTV adapter) and I showed where it was not as cut and dried as you pretended. I've listed several advantages, including the fact that even a marginal cable signal is orders of magnitude better than the blue screen nothing I now get for four out of five networks under the digital TV paradigm.
And since cable has done the same digital transition, you don't even have the crappy cable picture quality to use as an excuse.
And other people are enjoying their Verizon LTE
Goodie for them. And I'm still asking you why you think that has anything to do with whether cable was a reasonable alternate solution to getting a modulator and a splitter and more cables and a better antenna and a signal amplifier and whatever else it is I'd need to get any digital video (except for the two channels of PBS).
But I'll point out now that you bring it up -- you're happy that a large monopolistic over-charging bandwidth-limiting mega-corporation is making even more money and that it's great that a large number of people (especially in places that don't even have cable as an option to start with) have lost their free OTA TV? Hmmmm...... I thought it was rather outrageous when I walked into the local Verizon store to see about getting a simple lowest-tier data plan for my existing tablet and found out that it was $45 a month for almost nothing. A fair exchange for free TV, I guess.
That's a long rant to ignore my suggestion that you just get an RF modulator to run the converter box through.
And you ignored the fact that the converter box was already doing RF output. WHY would I need a modulator to modulate something that was already modulated?
And you've still ignored the detail that the TV had one RF input, which means I could not connect both the antenna (connected to the adapter) and the adapter to the TV at the same time. Add in more cables, a switch box, a modulator, etc etc and it is no longer just a simple case of "$10 for a converter" that you claim makes cable such a bad alternative.
If you're suffering from multipath, then you're going to have bigger problems with analog (ghosting).
And yet, I didn't. I guess the fact that the analog channels are on a different frequency and/or coming from a different place doesn't matter?
If you did 1080i without compression, you'd need 150MHz per channel -
It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. Five networks down to one. Degraded digital signal == blue screen of nothing. Degraded analog signal == a bit of snow. One contains information, one does not.
So, you went from five networks to one (likely with 4 digital subchannels,
No, I went from five networks to one that had two channels -- both PBS. I think I said that from the start.
each of which are a better picture than analog).
You remind me of the drunk who was searching the sidewalk under the streetlamp looking for his keys. He was asked where he lost them and he said "back in that dark alley". "Why are you looking for them here?" "The light's better." Yeah, two really nice beautiful pictures of programs I didn't care about watching. How nice.
The local advertisers on the network certainly don't care, because you're not going to drive far enough to buy their services.
And this has anything to do with how bad a decision it is to get cable because of how simple and cheap it is to just hook up one of the government-funded converter boxes precisely how?
I know it's common practice, but it really shouldn't be -- the last four digits of your credit card number are really 3 digits plus the Luhn check. That means that with that string, you can test out all the number combinations and arrive at a significantly narrowed set of possible credit card numbers.
It doesn't matter where the check digit is, the fact that it exists changes a 16 digit number into a 15 digit one. (And AMEX is an exception, they're only 15 to start with.) I can give you three digits and the "check" and you will need to guess the other 7 (because one of the 8 is constricted by checksum), or I give you four digits and you guess 7 more and calculate the check.
Once you have the bank and the last four, it is still 7 you get to guess at and the 8th is still limited by having to meet the check.
but it means that if you have access to the last four digits of 1,000 cards, you're likely going to get the correct card number on the first try on a significant portion of them.
One in 10 to the 7th power for each one, right on the first guess, assuming you know the first four from the bank for each one. Let's see, the chance of getting it wrong is 1-1e7, so getting all 1000 wrong is (1-1e7)^1000. I get 0.99990. Very close to 1, but about 1/10,000. Odds say you won't get any of them right on the first guess.
And of course, now that I look up the actual Luhn algorithm it is clear that giving you the check digit actually doesn't help you as much as giving you one of the real digits would. If you have to guess 8 digits that match the check I've given you, you will get false positives for all the failure modes listed in the reference, but if I give you an extra digit you'll have one less digit to get wrong.
What on earth are you talking about? The TV needs an RF input for the antenna, and preferably composite (RCA style) input for the converter box - yes, the $50 converters had composite.
None of the ones I had did composite, and neither did the TV. I thought that was pretty clear. Had the RF input on the TV been free to attach to an antenna, then the fact that the first round of adapters didn't do passthrough wouldn't have been an issue.
If your TV is even older with nothing but antenna input, you need to manually switch the cables when you want to switch between analog and digital
D'oh. Yeah, if I wanted to go back to analog, I'd have to dive behind the TV and change the connections. Perhaps you don't see that having a remote control that allows changing channels is a convenience, but I do. The remote isn't much good if I have to not only go over to the TV to change channels, but rewire the connections.
Hey, here's a solution. Cable. Not only do I get all the networks (two versions of some) but the picture is good and I don't have to rewire anything when I change channels. And I get more things than just the local stations. But according to some, getting cable wasn't the answer. I guess having to swap cables around was better after all.
But cutting the signal in half isn't that important if you have a decent signal amplifier
Here's the point. I didn't NEED a signal amplifier to get the existing analog channels. And a signal amplifier won't help the digital signals when they suffer from multipath or are too weak to start with.
So now we're at the point where you say I needed a good antenna and a signal amplifier to go with my almost free adapter box, and a few more cables and a splitter or two. We've gone from "simple" and "cheap" to "complicated" and "fiddly".
codec = digital compression scheme. Two ways of saying the same thing.
Not exactly synonyms. Codecs don't have to include compression. Doesn't matter, the result is the same -- "codec" or "compression scheme", five networks to one because of the digital transition.