This might blow your mind, but people can be Libertarians and also respect the dangers Marx discussed with respect to the concept of the Alienation of Labor. Or do you think that the instant anyone even hints that they like even a single aspect of a political movement they must support every aspect of that movement's platform to the most absurd level possible?
Are you suggesting that the parent post is just as extremist and denies all forms of capitalism? If modern libertarians could refer to Marx in a way that discusses him as anything other than the antichrist, perhaps we could let this go, but I don't suspect that we need the perfect-market analogies of objectivism to recognize that dangers exist when government gets involved with private business. It's the discussion of absolutes that brings us here in the first place, the idea that any government intervention whatsoever leads us to become "like the nightmare Statist government in Ayn Rand's novels."
Do you think the demand for automobiles would have disappeared just because GM went under? Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc. would have had to expand their capacity to meet increased demand.
And with the country going into a recession, a certain proportion of the workforce being laid off, and the sudden downturn in sales for their suppliers, all reducing the amount of available consumer resources - where is the increased demand supposed to come from?
Some stakeholders have proposed amending the Copyright Act to specifically recognize hot news protection. Advocates argue "the copyright act allows parasitic aggregators to 'free ride' on others' substantial journalistic investments," by protecting only expression and not the underlying facts, which are often gathered at great expense...
Hot news advocates are divided, however, on whether federal law should be revised to encourage state law development of hot news doctrine or to provide uniform, statutory federal hot news protection...
The likely effects of a more vigorous hot news doctrine are controversial. For example, on eworkshop participant noted that New York's hot news doctrine was important to the AP's efforts to protect its intellectual property, but recognized that any "federalization" of the doctrine would need to be very carefully drafted to avoid unintended costs... Others also have argued that expanded IP protections for the news would be too costly. News organizations and writers, including print, broadcast, op-ed writers, and other commentators, routinely borrow from each other. One panelist suggested that "[m]uch of what is done by newspapers with each other is actually problematic under existing hot news doctrine."
The paper does include a number of possible direct revenue sources from the government as possibilities, such as tax breaks or increasing punding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, it also includes the following:
Representative Waxman noted in remarks to the FTC workshop on December 2, 2009, that those advocating for public funding "need to articulate the scope of such support, in terms of the activities to be supported and the dollars required. They need to respond to the concern that government support of journalism would lead to government control of content. And they need to explain the source of revenues."
Most of the paper goes on like this, presenting different sides of each proposal. Which is to say that unlike what the commentator in the OP states, this isn't so much the FTC dictating that the government deliberately save the news industry in any one particular way, but is more a roundtable discussion about different ways that it might occur. If you disagree with what's discussed, you might want to leave your Congressman a call.
Short reminder - Kay Bailey Hutchinson is the Senator from Texas. Less funding to NASA = less government funding going to Texas. Not difficult to extrapolate.
The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
There was once a guy on my favorite forum that argued politics a lot, and his favorite trick was to link to an encyclopedia entry on logical fallacies every time someone made an argument against him, pointing out which fallacy they had made. I once asked openly if there was a logical fallacy for people who replied to every question with an accusation of a logical fallacy rather than just arguing the merits of the question. His reply was that there was - but he wouldn't tell me which one it is.
The problem I have with your statement is that there are limits to the Appeal to Authority Fallacy. The A2AF would almost certainly come into play if, say, something was wrong with your company's business and you asked why it wasn't fixed, and you were told it wasn't being fixed because your boss said it was fine. The other stupid extreme there is that if your doctor says that you need a surgery but you argue that it's unnecessary, when your friends try to tell you that you should listen to your doctor, are you going to claim that they're just appealing to the doctor's authority?
There's got to be a hair to split around the difference between appealing to an arbitrary / managerial authority and appealing to a knowledgable / professional authority. There's a point at which appealing to the authority of a person who is highly trained in a specific background with relevant application to a "hard" science, one that is testable and falsifiable, should be relevant against an opposition that does not have that same depth of experience.
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Many of the truly controversial scientific actions that occur lately have been cases in which one side has a majority of scientists in agreement with them, while the other appeals to a very small subset of scientists who gain notoriety by positing contradictory theories, without even bringing up the issue of who may be funding either group or if they have the relevant scientific backgrounds. We're supposed to believe that the opinions of a few are supposed to be given equal weight and consideration as the greater opinion against them, even without published methods or peer examination. I've got a different logical fallacy for that - the false equivalency.
And what you've just said is a well-known political tactic. If there's a scientific issue that comes out that certain people are nto comfortable with or stand to lose profits as a result, make it a political issue. Introduce contradictory evidence without fully sourcing it. When anyone says that your claims are biased and untrustworthy, claim the same thing right back at them. Claim that those scientists have just as much of an agenda as yours do. In this way, you can invalidate a scientific opinion in the public trust.
Are you daring TX to vote out a sitting Republican Senator? Ah, let me know how that works. Incumbents from strongly partisan states aren't that open to criticism.
So the Natal itself is $150, not counting the system. The Wii, on the other hand, is a full system that costs $200 new. Is this seriously how they plan to start pulling away part of the Wii userbase?
"Fixing it" requires investment in the infrastructure. The major telco / cable companies aren't generally interested in this in more than small amounts. If you're Comcast, you just need to be as fast as the telephone company, and vice versa. Speeds are actually finally coming up from the 1.5 MB standard that a lot of cable lines get to 3-6 MB down as services like AT&T UVerse compete with Comcast's "Power Boost" service in some areas as well as the pressure coming from expansions in 4G wireless. As I've said in threads elsewhere, you know the American internet system is lagging when wireless is starting to surpass landlines in some areas.
But most of these new upgrades to landlines are coming in service and boxtop improvements rather than in the lines. You'll note that Verizon isn't currently expanding their FiOS services anymore. The environment just isn't competitive enough to require the corps to expand at the pace that other countries' do, for whatever reasons that they beat us at speed. When it comes right down to it, improving landline service is going to require government investment in the infrastructure. And considering the current political environment that equates government investments in infrastructure to be ANTI-CAPITALIST SOCIALISM!!!, you'll probably be holding your breath for a while.
The U.S. generally considers itself to be technologically advanced compared to other nations and believes that it helps to drive our economy and keep people in their houses. If it were to turn out that we actually aren't the best in the world at technological issues... well, actually, we'll probably just deny it and say that we are and whine about our lack of population density making it hard to build more infrastructure.
Satellite -- high latency, but can do better than 1.5mbit. Heck, cell towers give better than 1.5mbit down these days. Is there a Verizon tower in your town? Is the town so small it doesn't have a cable company?
I looked into satellite as an alternative to the cheap cable internet at my new apartment. It was going to cost me much more than $30/month to get just 1 Mbps down. Satellite can fill a niche where there's absolutely no service, but it's not always economically feasible compared to landlines.
From what I've read as well, a 3G tower will not beat 1.5 MBps down - I believe it tends to run in the 500K range, don't quote me on that. 4G coverage can actually beat standard cable landlines by quite a bit, but you have to live in a generally well-populated area to get that installed in your neighborhood. Still, I've been hearing good things about Clear or Spring 4G coverage around Houston, so it's a good alternative if you can get it.
If we have a nation of geeks who were supposed to be getting "up to 1/3/6 Mbps down" who are all going to this site and are never seeing those max speeds in testing, what will it say about the need for truth in advertising? For that matter, connections are neutral - it doesn't matter if I'm a nerd or a jock or whatever, I have a Comcast connection like everyone else.
Instead of griping over it, this might be the time for a small campaign. My own personal plan is to put posts on my blog/whatever telling friends to run the test and answer the survey to see if they're getting what they're supposed to be.
What are the effects of conglomeration? Smaller, local stations will be crowded out and unable to compete for business.
How do you fight against this tide? Quit trying to emulate CNN and fill a niche that attracts customers who can't find something anywhere else. For example, focus on smaller, local news items that big name cable channels won't touch.
Wait, did you just hear something? Like a localized implosion?
"2) They're playing primarily for social interactions and the "grind" is mostly something to do while hanging out with friends, so they don't mind it."
Experience boosting weekends and speeding up the grind allow new players to catch up with their friends who are at the level cap so that they can all go raid together. Without server mergers, you may have servers that are so low in population that you can't always get enough people together for a high-end dungeon, so server mergers can help to increase social interaction on low-pop servers by putting you in contact with more people. Heck, I remember people playing on low-pop WoW servers starting forum threads asking for their server to be merged with another for just that reason.
If you don't have the social experience in an MMO, then you may as well go back to playing single-player RPGs. Stuff like this does actually matter on occasion - some of this stuff might get the Aion players who still want to stick around a better chance to hang out together.
I played WoW for a while and seem to remember the forums constantly being filled with topics about how "I'm leaving WoW to go play WHO / LoTRO / Vanguard / Conan / GuildWars / insert new MMO coming out next month here!"
It's also worth noting that we're currently writing another arms-reduction treaty with Russia, and some Republicans are signaling that they may not vote to sign the treaty in part because they believe that it would limit our ability to develop a missile defense system. (There's a left-biased view on the matter here, I apologize for not having something more neutral immediately off-hand.)
I was wondering if anyone else would get around to DDR. I remember that back when I was in college seven years ago or so, you could walk into any arcade in the country and meet that one guy who was 20 pounds overweight who used to be 80 pounds overweight, and the reason he'd gotten so much closer was just because of DDR. That sucker introduced a certain generation of nerds to the concept of sweating outside of gym class, and it was great.
A lot of people talk about, oh, just go to the gym! Go play some sports! Stop playing stupid video games! But the truth is that motivation matters. If you're not enjoying your workout or your diet, you're not going to hold to it. A better message would be that if you enjoy the Wii, you should get out there and try some different things, try to find some pick-up games of different sports, try things at the gym, go find something active that you enjoy doing. And if you can't find something out there that you enjoy, then by all means, keep swinging that Wiimote. It's better to own a WiiFit and use it four times a week than to own a gym membership and stop using it after a month.
And if any more than a minority of people who live in dense urban areas could get that kind of speed - while other countries are smoking us on bandwidth by splitting up the pipe-owners and the content providers - then you might have a point.
Slashdot Mirror
This might blow your mind, but people can be Libertarians and also respect the dangers Marx discussed with respect to the concept of the Alienation of Labor. Or do you think that the instant anyone even hints that they like even a single aspect of a political movement they must support every aspect of that movement's platform to the most absurd level possible?
Are you suggesting that the parent post is just as extremist and denies all forms of capitalism? If modern libertarians could refer to Marx in a way that discusses him as anything other than the antichrist, perhaps we could let this go, but I don't suspect that we need the perfect-market analogies of objectivism to recognize that dangers exist when government gets involved with private business. It's the discussion of absolutes that brings us here in the first place, the idea that any government intervention whatsoever leads us to become "like the nightmare Statist government in Ayn Rand's novels."
Do you think the demand for automobiles would have disappeared just because GM went under? Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc. would have had to expand their capacity to meet increased demand.
And with the country going into a recession, a certain proportion of the workforce being laid off, and the sudden downturn in sales for their suppliers, all reducing the amount of available consumer resources - where is the increased demand supposed to come from?
Here's one clip from the first proposal:
Some stakeholders have proposed amending the Copyright Act to specifically recognize hot news protection. Advocates argue "the copyright act allows parasitic aggregators to 'free ride' on others' substantial journalistic investments," by protecting only expression and not the underlying facts, which are often gathered at great expense...
Hot news advocates are divided, however, on whether federal law should be revised to encourage state law development of hot news doctrine or to provide uniform, statutory federal hot news protection... The likely effects of a more vigorous hot news doctrine are controversial. For example, on eworkshop participant noted that New York's hot news doctrine was important to the AP's efforts to protect its intellectual property, but recognized that any "federalization" of the doctrine would need to be very carefully drafted to avoid unintended costs... Others also have argued that expanded IP protections for the news would be too costly. News organizations and writers, including print, broadcast, op-ed writers, and other commentators, routinely borrow from each other. One panelist suggested that "[m]uch of what is done by newspapers with each other is actually problematic under existing hot news doctrine."
The paper does include a number of possible direct revenue sources from the government as possibilities, such as tax breaks or increasing punding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, it also includes the following:
Representative Waxman noted in remarks to the FTC workshop on December 2, 2009, that those advocating for public funding "need to articulate the scope of such support, in terms of the activities to be supported and the dollars required. They need to respond to the concern that government support of journalism would lead to government control of content. And they need to explain the source of revenues."
Most of the paper goes on like this, presenting different sides of each proposal. Which is to say that unlike what the commentator in the OP states, this isn't so much the FTC dictating that the government deliberately save the news industry in any one particular way, but is more a roundtable discussion about different ways that it might occur. If you disagree with what's discussed, you might want to leave your Congressman a call.
Short reminder - Kay Bailey Hutchinson is the Senator from Texas. Less funding to NASA = less government funding going to Texas. Not difficult to extrapolate.
The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
There was once a guy on my favorite forum that argued politics a lot, and his favorite trick was to link to an encyclopedia entry on logical fallacies every time someone made an argument against him, pointing out which fallacy they had made. I once asked openly if there was a logical fallacy for people who replied to every question with an accusation of a logical fallacy rather than just arguing the merits of the question. His reply was that there was - but he wouldn't tell me which one it is.
The problem I have with your statement is that there are limits to the Appeal to Authority Fallacy. The A2AF would almost certainly come into play if, say, something was wrong with your company's business and you asked why it wasn't fixed, and you were told it wasn't being fixed because your boss said it was fine. The other stupid extreme there is that if your doctor says that you need a surgery but you argue that it's unnecessary, when your friends try to tell you that you should listen to your doctor, are you going to claim that they're just appealing to the doctor's authority?
There's got to be a hair to split around the difference between appealing to an arbitrary / managerial authority and appealing to a knowledgable / professional authority. There's a point at which appealing to the authority of a person who is highly trained in a specific background with relevant application to a "hard" science, one that is testable and falsifiable, should be relevant against an opposition that does not have that same depth of experience.
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Many of the truly controversial scientific actions that occur lately have been cases in which one side has a majority of scientists in agreement with them, while the other appeals to a very small subset of scientists who gain notoriety by positing contradictory theories, without even bringing up the issue of who may be funding either group or if they have the relevant scientific backgrounds. We're supposed to believe that the opinions of a few are supposed to be given equal weight and consideration as the greater opinion against them, even without published methods or peer examination. I've got a different logical fallacy for that - the false equivalency.
And what you've just said is a well-known political tactic. If there's a scientific issue that comes out that certain people are nto comfortable with or stand to lose profits as a result, make it a political issue. Introduce contradictory evidence without fully sourcing it. When anyone says that your claims are biased and untrustworthy, claim the same thing right back at them. Claim that those scientists have just as much of an agenda as yours do. In this way, you can invalidate a scientific opinion in the public trust.
I plan on selling prepaid phones on eBay at a large markup. :V
If I were in TX or NY I'd vote these guys out!
Are you daring TX to vote out a sitting Republican Senator? Ah, let me know how that works. Incumbents from strongly partisan states aren't that open to criticism.
So the Natal itself is $150, not counting the system. The Wii, on the other hand, is a full system that costs $200 new. Is this seriously how they plan to start pulling away part of the Wii userbase?
Oh and I should mention that it's our lack of population density that ... ;)
If there is a Discussion of U.S. Internet Drinking Game, rule #1 is, "Every time someone says the words 'population density,' take a shot."
"Fixing it" requires investment in the infrastructure. The major telco / cable companies aren't generally interested in this in more than small amounts. If you're Comcast, you just need to be as fast as the telephone company, and vice versa. Speeds are actually finally coming up from the 1.5 MB standard that a lot of cable lines get to 3-6 MB down as services like AT&T UVerse compete with Comcast's "Power Boost" service in some areas as well as the pressure coming from expansions in 4G wireless. As I've said in threads elsewhere, you know the American internet system is lagging when wireless is starting to surpass landlines in some areas.
But most of these new upgrades to landlines are coming in service and boxtop improvements rather than in the lines. You'll note that Verizon isn't currently expanding their FiOS services anymore. The environment just isn't competitive enough to require the corps to expand at the pace that other countries' do, for whatever reasons that they beat us at speed. When it comes right down to it, improving landline service is going to require government investment in the infrastructure. And considering the current political environment that equates government investments in infrastructure to be ANTI-CAPITALIST SOCIALISM!!!, you'll probably be holding your breath for a while.
The U.S. generally considers itself to be technologically advanced compared to other nations and believes that it helps to drive our economy and keep people in their houses. If it were to turn out that we actually aren't the best in the world at technological issues... well, actually, we'll probably just deny it and say that we are and whine about our lack of population density making it hard to build more infrastructure.
Satellite -- high latency, but can do better than 1.5mbit. Heck, cell towers give better than 1.5mbit down these days. Is there a Verizon tower in your town? Is the town so small it doesn't have a cable company?
I looked into satellite as an alternative to the cheap cable internet at my new apartment. It was going to cost me much more than $30/month to get just 1 Mbps down. Satellite can fill a niche where there's absolutely no service, but it's not always economically feasible compared to landlines.
From what I've read as well, a 3G tower will not beat 1.5 MBps down - I believe it tends to run in the 500K range, don't quote me on that. 4G coverage can actually beat standard cable landlines by quite a bit, but you have to live in a generally well-populated area to get that installed in your neighborhood. Still, I've been hearing good things about Clear or Spring 4G coverage around Houston, so it's a good alternative if you can get it.
I wonder if we'll give away billions to ISPs without getting anything in return again.
I wonder if the stats revealed by this survey will show that we shouldn't...
If we have a nation of geeks who were supposed to be getting "up to 1/3/6 Mbps down" who are all going to this site and are never seeing those max speeds in testing, what will it say about the need for truth in advertising? For that matter, connections are neutral - it doesn't matter if I'm a nerd or a jock or whatever, I have a Comcast connection like everyone else.
Instead of griping over it, this might be the time for a small campaign. My own personal plan is to put posts on my blog/whatever telling friends to run the test and answer the survey to see if they're getting what they're supposed to be.
What, just people today?
You'd almost swear he waited to have his works released until now because he knew that this is when they'd be most relevant...
What are the effects of conglomeration? Smaller, local stations will be crowded out and unable to compete for business.
How do you fight against this tide? Quit trying to emulate CNN and fill a niche that attracts customers who can't find something anywhere else. For example, focus on smaller, local news items that big name cable channels won't touch.
Wait, did you just hear something? Like a localized implosion?
"2) They're playing primarily for social interactions and the "grind" is mostly something to do while hanging out with friends, so they don't mind it."
Experience boosting weekends and speeding up the grind allow new players to catch up with their friends who are at the level cap so that they can all go raid together. Without server mergers, you may have servers that are so low in population that you can't always get enough people together for a high-end dungeon, so server mergers can help to increase social interaction on low-pop servers by putting you in contact with more people. Heck, I remember people playing on low-pop WoW servers starting forum threads asking for their server to be merged with another for just that reason.
If you don't have the social experience in an MMO, then you may as well go back to playing single-player RPGs. Stuff like this does actually matter on occasion - some of this stuff might get the Aion players who still want to stick around a better chance to hang out together.
I played WoW for a while and seem to remember the forums constantly being filled with topics about how "I'm leaving WoW to go play WHO / LoTRO / Vanguard / Conan / GuildWars / insert new MMO coming out next month here!"
>>> The trouble with Bush Derangement Syndrome is that it makes its victims incoherent.
>>> He was too limp dealing with the rabid ultra anti American elements in our midst...
>>> Those coming decades you speak of are going to be the worst nightmare of the Obamazoids.
Hoooookayyy.... so when do we get to start using the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome?"
It's also worth noting that we're currently writing another arms-reduction treaty with Russia, and some Republicans are signaling that they may not vote to sign the treaty in part because they believe that it would limit our ability to develop a missile defense system. (There's a left-biased view on the matter here, I apologize for not having something more neutral immediately off-hand.)
I was wondering if anyone else would get around to DDR. I remember that back when I was in college seven years ago or so, you could walk into any arcade in the country and meet that one guy who was 20 pounds overweight who used to be 80 pounds overweight, and the reason he'd gotten so much closer was just because of DDR. That sucker introduced a certain generation of nerds to the concept of sweating outside of gym class, and it was great.
A lot of people talk about, oh, just go to the gym! Go play some sports! Stop playing stupid video games! But the truth is that motivation matters. If you're not enjoying your workout or your diet, you're not going to hold to it. A better message would be that if you enjoy the Wii, you should get out there and try some different things, try to find some pick-up games of different sports, try things at the gym, go find something active that you enjoy doing. And if you can't find something out there that you enjoy, then by all means, keep swinging that Wiimote. It's better to own a WiiFit and use it four times a week than to own a gym membership and stop using it after a month.
I've invented a device that sneaks nerdy physics jokes into primetime programming!
...I've also invented a machine that makes you read this aloud in your head, in my voice!
And if any more than a minority of people who live in dense urban areas could get that kind of speed - while other countries are smoking us on bandwidth by splitting up the pipe-owners and the content providers - then you might have a point.
What the heck does "just as serious a gaming platform" mean?
:D
That's exactly why it's the right term for trolling people.