Just because Kerry is richer than Bush doesn't make Bush not rich, and riding to a significant extent on his family's coattails.
What bugs me is that Democrats tend to bring this out as something unique about Bush, when it's pretty much standard in politics. Take Ted Kennedy, where do you think he got his money or his start in politics from? Couldn't have anything to do with his last name, could it? What about Hillary Clinton? Al Gore? They're all from political families, and pretty well off.
Kerry treats the assets like his own, and spends them, so for the purposes of assessing the lifestyle at which he lives, they ought to be included. On his personal income, he doesn't even make enough money to pay the property taxes on the various homes that the couple own and live in.
Most of his money was made from buying the Texas Rangers for a low price and selling them years later for a much higher price, also known as a successful investment. It's true he had significant money from his parents to get that started, but it was less than $1m, while he now has more like $10m. So he inherited money, but most of the money he currently has is not money he inherited.
That links shows how much they've raised in campaign donations. It is indeed true that Bush has raised more in campaign donations. What the previous poster was saying, however, is that Kerry's personal wealth is much greater than Bush's personal wealth.
Some ballpark figures for assets, drawn partly from here: Kerry (incl. wife): $500 to $600 million Cheney: $17 to $85 million Edwards: ~$19 million Bush: $6 to $14 million
So as you can see, even if those numbers are off by a lot, Kerry is still the richest by far, and Bush is the poorest of the four.
I think you're being a little over-dramatic
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Netscape 7.2 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Most of the people who built Netscape, who were there from the old Mosaic days, left a long time ago, and many of them are fabulously wealthy. Neither Marc Andreessen nor Jim Clarke particularly need to work in the future to support themselves, and jwz took his money and is doing a semi-business/semi-hobby sort of thing by running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco (just to pick three examples).
And even to the people there at the end, AOL was quite helpful. First of all, they vastly overpaid for Netscape, since they were sold it on the basis partly that they could use it as an embedded browser for he AOL client, while technically Mozilla was always too bloated and un-modular to do that well (maybe just now it's starting to get to the point where that'd be possible, but it wasn't when they bought it, or even a year or two after they bought it). Once they realized it wasn't much use to them, they didn't even just say "well, fuck you guys": they transitioned it to a new Mozilla.org foundation, and became the single largest donor (by far) to that non-profit foundation, giving them all the equipment they had previously been using (webservers, test build machines, file servers, etc.) and $2m cash.
All in all I don't think AOL are really the evil ones here. You don't see any other major companies donating $2m cash to mozilla.org.
how do they run it badly?
on
Craig and his List
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· Score: 2, Informative
From everything I've heard PayPal has improved markedly since eBay bought it.
You're basically saying that all copyright law is by definition censorship, which is not the usual meaning of the term "censorship".
Some examples:
Censorship: Prohibiting your publication of a book you wrote because it criticizes the government.
Not censorship: Prohibiting your publication of a book I wrote because, well, I'm the one that wrote it.
Censorship: Prohibiting you from distributing copies of a CD you recorded because it's "offensive".
Not censorship: Prohibiting you from distributing copies of a CD someone else recorded because it's copyrighted.
The sorts of restrictions that come under the term "censorship" are not all restrictions on content distribution, but particular ones. I can provide some more examples if you're still confused.
In your "information wants to be free" world, the word "censorship" might be redefined to mean "any restrictions on passing on information", but out here in the real world, that's not what it means. Censorship is preventing you from saying something because of its content. If you're thrown in jail for criticizing President Bush, that's censorshp. That is not what's happening here.
Here the Olympic Committee is saying that, in the US, only NBC, who paid them a lot of money, is allowed to show their competition. As the Olympic Committee is in charge of the competition, they're allowed to say that. Similarly, if I was holding a competition in my garage, I could set restrictions on who can televise it, and I would not be "censoring" people by doing so.
Bus fare simply doesn't raise enough revenue to cover operating costs. Gas tax does raise enough revenue to cover construction and maintenance cost, with some left over to pay for buses.
You can say similar things about nearly anything. For example, are bars taxed heavily enough to pay for the increased police presence required? Increased medical costs due to crash injuries? What about hardware stores that sell spray-paint? Are they taxed heavily enough to pay for the cost of graffiti cleanup? Etc.
And, fwiw, gas taxes actually do pay for an assortment of "other stuff" besides actual road construction and maintenance: usually there's an overrun, which is siphoned off into other budget areas. Often non-road transportation such as light rail and subways are also paid for by taxes paid by road users, so not only are road users paying for the roads they use, but they're also paying a portion of the costs of the subways other people use.
(and my numbers were a bit low; apparently the US gas tax average is $0.40/gallon, according to Wikipedia)
The highway infrastructure, at least in the United States, is not subsidized by non-users at all: it's entirely paid for by the approximately $0.30/gallon taxes on gasoline (in some areas supplemented by local gasoline taxes and/or tolls).
Fair is defined as a level playing field. If we are playing a game of soccer, and your team cheats, the match was not fair. If no one cheats, it is a fair match. It is not required that our teams like each other: it's quite possible to play a fair match against someone you absolutely despise.
Fair competition is the same. If a government is heavily subsidizing a company, that's not fair competition. If a group of companies is colluding to drive a competitor out of business, that's not fair competition. If lots of people are making the same thing, thereby driving down prices, that's fair competition.
What you seem to be looking for is no competition, wherein either a government or cartel sets prices, rather than the market. That has nothing to do with fair competition, and is really about the exact opposite.
That second excerpt there seems almost exactly like the descriptions Bush gives of the terrorists. They're crazed religious nutjobs with an irrational hatred of Jews and anyone who associates with or befriends Jews. Sure, it's a specific and clear reason, but it's still wacko bullshit.
I can think of tons of outside forces that wouldn't qualify as gender discrimination. Unless you take a wholly "genes determine your destiny" approach, a large part of what people are is culturally informed. In most cultures, men and women do not have identical social roles, and most men and women do not even think that the two sexes should have identical social roles. Therefore, it's to be expected that their likes and dislikes may differ on average. So fewer women like sitting at a computer and programming all day than men. So what? Why do we need to change this? Is there something inherently good about equal percentages of men and women enjoying programming?
It's one thing if there are women who truly enjoy programming, who are the sorts of people who sat around at home through high school puttering around on BBSes, who then can't go into CS because they're unwelcome. That's gender discrimination, and ought to be dealt with. But if on average fewer women want to go into CS, because they simply don't like it, then why does that necessarily need to be changed? Why does it matter? There's percentage-wise more Indian CS PhD students in the US than white CS PhD students. Is this prima facie evidence of discrimination against white CS PhD students? I don't think so.
Does she have local dialup numbers in nearly all parts of the US?
Those of us who travel would like to make local calls from hotel rooms, instead of paying long-distance charges to connect to the internet. At least until broadband internet in hotel rooms becomes common/cheaper ($10/day is not acceptable).
That's the main advantage of AOL, Earthlink, and other national ISPs.
Just because it's a real word in Latin doesn't mean it's not trademarkable. "Kentucky Fried Chicken" is a generic phrase in English, and it's a trademark. So is "Red Hat".
There are two major candidates for the next election: George W. Bush and John Kerry. Both support the expansion of police powers at the expense of civil liberty so we can fight a "war on terror". Most notably, both strongly supported the Patriot Act and worked towards its passage (and in the end, Kerry voted for it and Bush signed it).
Unless, of course, you were implying we ought to vote for Nader, in which case I'd say go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
He's a pretty intelligent person, and surprisingly good at politics. Certainly not the world's smartest man, but he sure beats Streisand and Baldwin.
Just because Kerry is richer than Bush doesn't make Bush not rich, and riding to a significant extent on his family's coattails.
What bugs me is that Democrats tend to bring this out as something unique about Bush, when it's pretty much standard in politics. Take Ted Kennedy, where do you think he got his money or his start in politics from? Couldn't have anything to do with his last name, could it? What about Hillary Clinton? Al Gore? They're all from political families, and pretty well off.
"Microsoft and its W3C allies"...
Kerry treats the assets like his own, and spends them, so for the purposes of assessing the lifestyle at which he lives, they ought to be included. On his personal income, he doesn't even make enough money to pay the property taxes on the various homes that the couple own and live in.
Most of his money was made from buying the Texas Rangers for a low price and selling them years later for a much higher price, also known as a successful investment. It's true he had significant money from his parents to get that started, but it was less than $1m, while he now has more like $10m. So he inherited money, but most of the money he currently has is not money he inherited.
That links shows how much they've raised in campaign donations. It is indeed true that Bush has raised more in campaign donations. What the previous poster was saying, however, is that Kerry's personal wealth is much greater than Bush's personal wealth.
Some ballpark figures for assets, drawn partly from here:
Kerry (incl. wife): $500 to $600 million
Cheney: $17 to $85 million
Edwards: ~$19 million
Bush: $6 to $14 million
So as you can see, even if those numbers are off by a lot, Kerry is still the richest by far, and Bush is the poorest of the four.
Most of the people who built Netscape, who were there from the old Mosaic days, left a long time ago, and many of them are fabulously wealthy. Neither Marc Andreessen nor Jim Clarke particularly need to work in the future to support themselves, and jwz took his money and is doing a semi-business/semi-hobby sort of thing by running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco (just to pick three examples).
And even to the people there at the end, AOL was quite helpful. First of all, they vastly overpaid for Netscape, since they were sold it on the basis partly that they could use it as an embedded browser for he AOL client, while technically Mozilla was always too bloated and un-modular to do that well (maybe just now it's starting to get to the point where that'd be possible, but it wasn't when they bought it, or even a year or two after they bought it). Once they realized it wasn't much use to them, they didn't even just say "well, fuck you guys": they transitioned it to a new Mozilla.org foundation, and became the single largest donor (by far) to that non-profit foundation, giving them all the equipment they had previously been using (webservers, test build machines, file servers, etc.) and $2m cash.
All in all I don't think AOL are really the evil ones here. You don't see any other major companies donating $2m cash to mozilla.org.
From everything I've heard PayPal has improved markedly since eBay bought it.
You're basically saying that all copyright law is by definition censorship, which is not the usual meaning of the term "censorship".
Some examples:
Censorship: Prohibiting your publication of a book you wrote because it criticizes the government.
Not censorship: Prohibiting your publication of a book I wrote because, well, I'm the one that wrote it.
Censorship: Prohibiting you from distributing copies of a CD you recorded because it's "offensive".
Not censorship: Prohibiting you from distributing copies of a CD someone else recorded because it's copyrighted.
The sorts of restrictions that come under the term "censorship" are not all restrictions on content distribution, but particular ones. I can provide some more examples if you're still confused.
The word "here" clearly referred to "the prohibition on internet broadcast of olympic events in the United States".
I don't see what relevance your link has to that.
In your "information wants to be free" world, the word "censorship" might be redefined to mean "any restrictions on passing on information", but out here in the real world, that's not what it means. Censorship is preventing you from saying something because of its content. If you're thrown in jail for criticizing President Bush, that's censorshp. That is not what's happening here.
Here the Olympic Committee is saying that, in the US, only NBC, who paid them a lot of money, is allowed to show their competition. As the Olympic Committee is in charge of the competition, they're allowed to say that. Similarly, if I was holding a competition in my garage, I could set restrictions on who can televise it, and I would not be "censoring" people by doing so.
I watched a lot of the coverage in Europe, and it was absolute crap.* Looked like stuff indymedia would've done.
* The BBC being exempt from this, as it actually had some decent coverage.
While "rediculously ludacrus" has a certain ring to it, I personally prefer "ridiculously ludicrous".
Bus fare simply doesn't raise enough revenue to cover operating costs. Gas tax does raise enough revenue to cover construction and maintenance cost, with some left over to pay for buses.
You can say similar things about nearly anything. For example, are bars taxed heavily enough to pay for the increased police presence required? Increased medical costs due to crash injuries? What about hardware stores that sell spray-paint? Are they taxed heavily enough to pay for the cost of graffiti cleanup? Etc.
And, fwiw, gas taxes actually do pay for an assortment of "other stuff" besides actual road construction and maintenance: usually there's an overrun, which is siphoned off into other budget areas. Often non-road transportation such as light rail and subways are also paid for by taxes paid by road users, so not only are road users paying for the roads they use, but they're also paying a portion of the costs of the subways other people use.
(and my numbers were a bit low; apparently the US gas tax average is $0.40/gallon, according to Wikipedia)
Whenever gas prices go up, people get pissy and start demanding the government do something about it.
The highway infrastructure, at least in the United States, is not subsidized by non-users at all: it's entirely paid for by the approximately $0.30/gallon taxes on gasoline (in some areas supplemented by local gasoline taxes and/or tolls).
Fair is defined as a level playing field. If we are playing a game of soccer, and your team cheats, the match was not fair. If no one cheats, it is a fair match. It is not required that our teams like each other: it's quite possible to play a fair match against someone you absolutely despise.
Fair competition is the same. If a government is heavily subsidizing a company, that's not fair competition. If a group of companies is colluding to drive a competitor out of business, that's not fair competition. If lots of people are making the same thing, thereby driving down prices, that's fair competition.
What you seem to be looking for is no competition, wherein either a government or cartel sets prices, rather than the market. That has nothing to do with fair competition, and is really about the exact opposite.
That second excerpt there seems almost exactly like the descriptions Bush gives of the terrorists. They're crazed religious nutjobs with an irrational hatred of Jews and anyone who associates with or befriends Jews. Sure, it's a specific and clear reason, but it's still wacko bullshit.
I can think of tons of outside forces that wouldn't qualify as gender discrimination. Unless you take a wholly "genes determine your destiny" approach, a large part of what people are is culturally informed. In most cultures, men and women do not have identical social roles, and most men and women do not even think that the two sexes should have identical social roles. Therefore, it's to be expected that their likes and dislikes may differ on average. So fewer women like sitting at a computer and programming all day than men. So what? Why do we need to change this? Is there something inherently good about equal percentages of men and women enjoying programming?
It's one thing if there are women who truly enjoy programming, who are the sorts of people who sat around at home through high school puttering around on BBSes, who then can't go into CS because they're unwelcome. That's gender discrimination, and ought to be dealt with. But if on average fewer women want to go into CS, because they simply don't like it, then why does that necessarily need to be changed? Why does it matter? There's percentage-wise more Indian CS PhD students in the US than white CS PhD students. Is this prima facie evidence of discrimination against white CS PhD students? I don't think so.
Does she have local dialup numbers in nearly all parts of the US?
Those of us who travel would like to make local calls from hotel rooms, instead of paying long-distance charges to connect to the internet. At least until broadband internet in hotel rooms becomes common/cheaper ($10/day is not acceptable).
That's the main advantage of AOL, Earthlink, and other national ISPs.
I don't think it's necessary to respect all genres of music if one understands things about music.
"Apple".
Just because it's a real word in Latin doesn't mean it's not trademarkable. "Kentucky Fried Chicken" is a generic phrase in English, and it's a trademark. So is "Red Hat".
There are two major candidates for the next election: George W. Bush and John Kerry. Both support the expansion of police powers at the expense of civil liberty so we can fight a "war on terror". Most notably, both strongly supported the Patriot Act and worked towards its passage (and in the end, Kerry voted for it and Bush signed it).
Unless, of course, you were implying we ought to vote for Nader, in which case I'd say go for it.