Because Quaero, which was born out of this exact same idea and thought process, also which cost in the 12 digits, was such the raving success that politicians said it would be.
That goes both ways. The French by and large deeply resent the fact that the internet originated in the US, and many of their politicians fought tooth and nail to keep minitel alive. Chirac even spent millions of euros of taxpayer money to try to create a French version of Google (it was called Quaero, and it failed miserably.)
Numerous governments around the world have laws in place that require content distribution sources must provide a minimum quota of domestically created content. Ones I can think of right off of the top of my head include Canada, France, Australia, and England. The idea behind these laws is that they want to restrict American cultural influence on their populace. It doesn't matter what the end users demand or what sells best. There really is no logical reason to want to do this other than some politicians simply don't like America just for the sake of not liking America. Common arguments I've heard from people in these countries is that this particular person hates American content, which is why these rules need to be there. Even though market research shows that pretty much everybody else doesn't feel the same way.
No matter how you look at it, it is pure xenophobia. In the US, laws like this simply don't exist. For example, there are a ton of broadcasters in the US that only broadcast content produced in Mexico. In fact in Arizona, more than half of the local TV stations do this. If you want more American content, you have to subscribe to cable.
The above also applies to politics in general. People in Canada for example are known to support policy changes just because of the fact that they are contrary to what is done in the US. In Europe it happens too, though I haven't done any research to analyze to what extent.
However as far as the metric system goes, I don't think that is seen as foreign pressure. One thing you can notice, is that in Europe, all of the countries that are doing well have fiscal policies that the party you mention want. In Germany, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden for example, there are no defined wage floors.
That really doesn't make any sense at all, and it doesn't seem that you are basing this off of anything at all other than your own biases that the GP has. Conservatives are called that just for the mere fact that it is a label they refer to themselves as. In other countries, conservative means the same thing that liberal means in the US. Exact same thing.
Liberals, in the US sense, want to ban ownership of firearms and restrict free speech rights in the form of banning paid campaign speech, as well as many other issues that remove freedoms. So how does the term "liberal" apply to them, exactly? From my perspective, the only thing they are pro freedom on is gay rights, other than that they believe the state should be given greater control of our lives. There's nothing "liberal" about that. In fact, in a sense that would be "conservative", because the old ways before modern democracy spread across the west, this is how governments behaved.
If US conservatives wanted to stick with the old ways just for the sake of doing so, then I think they would have been opposed to lowering taxes in the 80's.
And finally, the last nail in the coffin of your argument is this: The white house response, written by a liberal, says they won't actively change the present state from being as it already is.
Other than for being labels that people simply want to apply to themselves, the distinction between liberal and conservative is rather meaningless.
That goes both ways. I've lost count of the number of times that liberals talk about how things are far worse today in all sorts of areas.
For example, they frequently state that the poor are poorer than ever. It's a big load of shit though. Here's a list of things that used to be something only the rich owned, which now even the poorest of the poor own:
- Automobiles - DVD players - more than one TV - A personal computer - A mobile phone
Food is cheaper than ever and more easily available. I pay less for a 50mbit internet connection than I paid for a dialup internet account plus dedicated phone line in the late 90's. However try finding a slashdot article without a comment somewhere that says today we live in a feudal society.
Other things I can think of are that liberals often state how there is too much war today, even though less than 100 years ago it was still very common for economic expansion to come via means of conquest, which is almost unheard of today.
If we're going to reverse citizens united, then while we're at it we should also ban unions from making political contributions. Even if any one of their members disagrees with a political message, they have to fund it with their union dues anyways, or else their union has the power to get them fired. It's both stupid and unfair to hold somebody's job over their head if they decide to have an independent voice.
Ban hollywood photo-ops too. Those are extremely valuable from a marketing perspective, and if you were to put a dollar figure on it, it would easily amount in the 9 or possibly 10 digits.
Or perhaps we could just leave the first amendment as it is.
I really don't think measurements are a political party thing. There's no major religious argument in favor of it (keword: major) akin to say evolution vs creationism, and there's no party line that we have to use X system. It's just that average joe's prefer things a certain way.
Ever since I was in the Army, I've always written my dates as 12-FEB-09, and sometimes when I do so, somebody gives me shit because I don't use the same date format that "everybody else" uses, and it is never a conservative or liberal thing. I could see maybe if I wrote 12/02/09, which would easily be interpreted as either december 9th or february 12th, but I like that date format for the same reason that the Army uses it as standard: There is no ambiguity. No matter what day of the month it is, the date/month is obvious, but people still complain to me about it anyways.
Likewise, I could see why they'd complain even more about measurements. It's hard to mentally picture units that you aren't used to thinking in without doing a manual conversion.
And FFS I'm sick of this constant political divisiveness just for the sake of political divisiveness. Stop pointing fingers at the "other side" just because something doesn't go your way. If you stop to look for a second, you'll often find that members of the "other side" agree with you on more things than you realize.
On that note, it is possible that if this goes too far, you'll see industry pressure for legislation to mandate unrestricted resale of previously owned digital media. Larry Lessig referred to this behavior as "little greedy bastards vs big greedy bastards" when congress banned the practice of transaction processors from forcing merchants to pay debit card transaction fees (which subsequently resulted in BofA threatening to add a $5 a month fee to debit card users.)
I'm not sure what any legitimate company would do with your phone number anyways. Most people register with the do not call registry, and the only people who don't follow the do not call rules are breaking the law to begin with. I think twitter would be in for some nasty PR, possibly legal trouble, if they were caught doing business with such an organization.
Unless they're politicians of course - they put specific rules in to allow themselves to spam you in both email and phone calls. This is one reason why I no longer register to vote. (The other is that I feel there hasn't been any decent politician in a long time, so no point in voting.)
I think a malfunction in a metallic weapon is probably more dangerous than a plastic one. I just doubt that plastic shrapnel is as deadly as metal shrapnel.
Still though, I think that would set a horrible precedent. They want to outlaw downloading it. Any material downloaded is essentially an idea - a thought, or a speech pattern, rather than a physical good. There's no sugar coating it, banning that IS censorship.
Besides, I can think of much worse ways of hurting yourself in Australia.
As a side note, the poor - and everybody else for that matter - are wealthier than they've ever been. Not by a little, but by a lot. DVD players, cell phones, cars, personal computers...If you look back far enough, only the richest of the rich owned any one of these things. This is the difference between wealth and money. Try to find somebody who doesn't have any one of these things who wants one.
Actually the US Department of Commerce is. The US DoC delegates that authority (as well as IP address allocation) to ICANN, who themselves delegated that authority to IANA. More info:
If you look at it further than that, the US federal government has the ultimate authority over the DoC. And there isn't mutual agreement either. The UN and numerous nations have repeatedly tried to usurp this authority and hand it to the ITU, which has broader influence from China, Russia, and other countries who demand better control for censorship purposes. And then of course there's France, who for whatever reason thinks that the internet harms its national pride, and really hates the idea that the US effectively has the final say of anything that happens on the internet. (I'm not joking on this btw, French politicians frequently get upset over this - Chirac being the worst offender.)
IP address control being the most critical by the way. If everybody disagreed on IP address assignment, then the internet would truly splinter. Because of that fact, the internet isn't quite as decentralized as most people think, and something like tor can't change that.
Every resource is limited. Even the sun is (though it will last for millions or perhaps billions of years longer.) The ultimate purpose of an economy is to determine ownership of those resources. I think by unique he means it is a one of a kind thing. There are numerous oil wells throughout the world - arguing that oil is unique is just plain stupid.
The Keynesian model did fail though. Unlike say Fisker, Solyndra, or a number of other failed green energy companies, Tesla was the only one that had significant venture capitalist backing, because the venture capitalists recognized that they were the only one who had a viable business model. The government investments didn't even bother to look at their business model. The other ones got loan guarantees just because of the fact that they were green energy companies and they paid the right politicians (if you notice, the list of companies who received these loans is basically a who's who list of Obama campaign sponsors.)
Chances are that Tesla would have been just fine without the government loans. However when you look at this list:
It's shocking how people use Tesla as the poster child of Keynesian success, meanwhile literally billions were just thrown out. If venture capitalists made decisions as badly as the government does, there would be no venture capitalism.
That must be it because they aren't in it for justice. Neither is wikileaks. This is why I hate both of them. They take it upon themselves to be guardians of justice but have no concern for their own wrongdoings. For example, wikileaks original claim to fame was the collateral murder video, which they put off as US soldiers simply committing murder. When it was investigated though, there was no wrongdoing - you can clearly see those guys carrying weapons (a Kalashnikov of some variation and an RPG are easily made out by anybody who has ever handled either - meanwhile wikileaks still claims that they are cameras, and I can't think of a commonly used camera that has a shape even remotely similar, neither as long, narrow, and pointed as the RPG, nor with something akin to a buttstock and pistol grip with a narrow front end.)
Groups like anonymous and wikileaks don't really seem to give a shit which innocents they expose or whether anything they put out is a flat out fabrication - they just want a name for themselves. Julian Assange was called out by people within wikileaks on exactly this. I think they like having zero accountability.
What if you pronounced it linooks? You know, if say you only heard the term ubuntu and figured that the word linux had a derivative of a non-english u.
So given that can have a third and fourth pronunciation, surely we can call it gnu/linux now right?:D
Wait a minute, are we talking about an actual "router" (as in something that deterministically routes packets) or are we talking about the a "layer 3 switch that also includes a wireless access point" which laypeople refer to simply as a router?
There are quite some not-so-subtle differences between the two, and if we're being scientific about this, we should note the distinction. If it is just the access point component, then that has broader implications on anything that runs at the 2.4ghz spectrum (or 5ghz, another potentially important detail.)
I haven't seen the new one yet, but your point does hold true for the 2009 one now that I think about it. Abrams has done some very good jobs at the more cerebral sci-fi. Lost (even though it wasn't sci-fi per se - or rather it didn't start that way at least) and Fringe definitely offer that thought invoking aspect, so it isn't as if he is incapable of it.
That's basically the way I look at it. In fact geology cross referenced with the fossil record tells us that macro scale life thrived in a climate far warmer than what we have now.
If the pangae theory is correct, then pangaea ultima is correct too. And that being the case, we're already guaranteed to have much warmer times in the future - solar activity or atmospheric contents notwithstanding. And no, the greenhouse effect won't amplify this, though solar activity could.
You can say that again. I personally am not concerned with global warming (basically for all of the same reasons that Patrick Moore isn't), but I really do love evolution. Nothing would frustrate me more than for the religious nuts to suddenly have the ammunition to remove all traces of evolution from education, all on the basic premise that empirical science is inherently flawed, using this as the basis of their argument. That would be some damn good ammunition that I really don't want to go against.
Sometimes I really REALLY doubt the effectiveness of the slashdot moderation system, and this is one of those times.
I'd really like to hear a good argument for why the parent post is either overrated or is flamebait.
In fact, I really think slashdot should get rid of the "overrated" option from the moderation system, because when I myself moderate, I haven't seen any good use for it. Anybody care to argue why the overrated option should be there in the first place?
I think I'm more interested in what will happen with the quality of care received. Presently the US is THE destination of the world for nearly all forms of specialty care, such as e.g. cancer, cardiac, and neurology. It often happens that somebody in Europe or Canada needs care that simply isn't offered there, or the physicians there say that the person stands a much better chance of survival at X hospital in the US, so their country pays to send them here to be cared for.
I really don't want to see that go away.
A Stanford researcher examined the issue of why in spite of this, the US ranks low in outcome of care compared to many other first world countries, and it turns out that this is due to poor lifestyle habits:
(I know, the source is fox news, so most of slashdot will simply dismiss it outright, but it's merely a summary of what somebody else found)
This also explains why, for example, that the claim that our lifespans are shorter than most first world countries because we don't have free health care is a false one. Denmark for example as as free health care as you can get, is a first world country, and yet their lifespans are within a margin of error of ours.
How can the rich be out of touch with reality? I mean I get that on slashdot, the wealthy are the bane to our existence, but you you can't have it both ways here.
If you are arguing that they got rich because they steal and manipulate...how the fuck does somebody who is "out of touch" manipulate? If you are arguing that they got rich because they understand the market so well that they can exploit it (in either a good way or a bad way)...how the fuck does somebody who is "out of touch" understand anything enough to be able to do that?
I think it is the ones who identify as the 99% that are out of touch. To me, out of touch means having your priorities so backwards that nobody would ever hire you because you aren't worth a shit. I am what the occupy movement identifies as the 99%, but I'll never associate myself with the crowd that just craves this kind of divisiveness to such a level that they create an arbitrary percentile number to point fingers at (see: Emmanuel Goldstein - and the government didn't create this one, rather the tyranny of the mob did.)
The poor today have it better than they have ever had it. Ever. If you don't believe that, YOU are out of touch with reality, not the rich.
The only thing that is happening today is a widening gap in income, however in terms of wealth, every category (rich or poor) is getting wealthier. The analogy that there is a pie that everybody gets a slice of is a fallacy. Unless of course this pie were to constantly grow in size, and as it grows your "slice percent" might shrink, but at the same time your "slice size" still increases.
Prior to the industrial revolution, it used to be that being poor meant you could barely afford a pair of shoes and would be lucky if you could have a hot meal every now and again. Middle class meant you owned something akin to what today is a studio apartment. Today in first world countries, poor includes those owning a car, a house, and even a luxury item such as an ipad, in many cases even all three. I mean literally, people at occupy wall street were complaining about their ipads getting stolen...and yet they refer to themselves as the downtrodden and the oppressed.
I'm not so sure about the copyright issue - I don't think youtube claims copyright on any of the videos it hosts. I think their concern is for those who do upload what is otherwise published content (say music videos, or how the studio that produced gunsmoke put every single episode up) that they can be fairly sure that most people won't download it - thus they continue to upload their content, making youtube more valuable to both them and their visitors.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Quaero, which was born out of this exact same idea and thought process, also which cost in the 12 digits, was such the raving success that politicians said it would be.
That goes both ways. The French by and large deeply resent the fact that the internet originated in the US, and many of their politicians fought tooth and nail to keep minitel alive. Chirac even spent millions of euros of taxpayer money to try to create a French version of Google (it was called Quaero, and it failed miserably.)
Numerous governments around the world have laws in place that require content distribution sources must provide a minimum quota of domestically created content. Ones I can think of right off of the top of my head include Canada, France, Australia, and England. The idea behind these laws is that they want to restrict American cultural influence on their populace. It doesn't matter what the end users demand or what sells best. There really is no logical reason to want to do this other than some politicians simply don't like America just for the sake of not liking America. Common arguments I've heard from people in these countries is that this particular person hates American content, which is why these rules need to be there. Even though market research shows that pretty much everybody else doesn't feel the same way.
No matter how you look at it, it is pure xenophobia. In the US, laws like this simply don't exist. For example, there are a ton of broadcasters in the US that only broadcast content produced in Mexico. In fact in Arizona, more than half of the local TV stations do this. If you want more American content, you have to subscribe to cable.
The above also applies to politics in general. People in Canada for example are known to support policy changes just because of the fact that they are contrary to what is done in the US. In Europe it happens too, though I haven't done any research to analyze to what extent.
However as far as the metric system goes, I don't think that is seen as foreign pressure. One thing you can notice, is that in Europe, all of the countries that are doing well have fiscal policies that the party you mention want. In Germany, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden for example, there are no defined wage floors.
That really doesn't make any sense at all, and it doesn't seem that you are basing this off of anything at all other than your own biases that the GP has. Conservatives are called that just for the mere fact that it is a label they refer to themselves as. In other countries, conservative means the same thing that liberal means in the US. Exact same thing.
Liberals, in the US sense, want to ban ownership of firearms and restrict free speech rights in the form of banning paid campaign speech, as well as many other issues that remove freedoms. So how does the term "liberal" apply to them, exactly? From my perspective, the only thing they are pro freedom on is gay rights, other than that they believe the state should be given greater control of our lives. There's nothing "liberal" about that. In fact, in a sense that would be "conservative", because the old ways before modern democracy spread across the west, this is how governments behaved.
If US conservatives wanted to stick with the old ways just for the sake of doing so, then I think they would have been opposed to lowering taxes in the 80's.
And finally, the last nail in the coffin of your argument is this: The white house response, written by a liberal, says they won't actively change the present state from being as it already is.
Other than for being labels that people simply want to apply to themselves, the distinction between liberal and conservative is rather meaningless.
That goes both ways. I've lost count of the number of times that liberals talk about how things are far worse today in all sorts of areas.
For example, they frequently state that the poor are poorer than ever. It's a big load of shit though. Here's a list of things that used to be something only the rich owned, which now even the poorest of the poor own:
- Automobiles
- DVD players
- more than one TV
- A personal computer
- A mobile phone
Food is cheaper than ever and more easily available. I pay less for a 50mbit internet connection than I paid for a dialup internet account plus dedicated phone line in the late 90's. However try finding a slashdot article without a comment somewhere that says today we live in a feudal society.
Other things I can think of are that liberals often state how there is too much war today, even though less than 100 years ago it was still very common for economic expansion to come via means of conquest, which is almost unheard of today.
If we're going to reverse citizens united, then while we're at it we should also ban unions from making political contributions. Even if any one of their members disagrees with a political message, they have to fund it with their union dues anyways, or else their union has the power to get them fired. It's both stupid and unfair to hold somebody's job over their head if they decide to have an independent voice.
Ban hollywood photo-ops too. Those are extremely valuable from a marketing perspective, and if you were to put a dollar figure on it, it would easily amount in the 9 or possibly 10 digits.
Or perhaps we could just leave the first amendment as it is.
I really don't think measurements are a political party thing. There's no major religious argument in favor of it (keword: major) akin to say evolution vs creationism, and there's no party line that we have to use X system. It's just that average joe's prefer things a certain way.
Ever since I was in the Army, I've always written my dates as 12-FEB-09, and sometimes when I do so, somebody gives me shit because I don't use the same date format that "everybody else" uses, and it is never a conservative or liberal thing. I could see maybe if I wrote 12/02/09, which would easily be interpreted as either december 9th or february 12th, but I like that date format for the same reason that the Army uses it as standard: There is no ambiguity. No matter what day of the month it is, the date/month is obvious, but people still complain to me about it anyways.
Likewise, I could see why they'd complain even more about measurements. It's hard to mentally picture units that you aren't used to thinking in without doing a manual conversion.
And FFS I'm sick of this constant political divisiveness just for the sake of political divisiveness. Stop pointing fingers at the "other side" just because something doesn't go your way. If you stop to look for a second, you'll often find that members of the "other side" agree with you on more things than you realize.
On that note, it is possible that if this goes too far, you'll see industry pressure for legislation to mandate unrestricted resale of previously owned digital media. Larry Lessig referred to this behavior as "little greedy bastards vs big greedy bastards" when congress banned the practice of transaction processors from forcing merchants to pay debit card transaction fees (which subsequently resulted in BofA threatening to add a $5 a month fee to debit card users.)
I'm not sure what any legitimate company would do with your phone number anyways. Most people register with the do not call registry, and the only people who don't follow the do not call rules are breaking the law to begin with. I think twitter would be in for some nasty PR, possibly legal trouble, if they were caught doing business with such an organization.
Unless they're politicians of course - they put specific rules in to allow themselves to spam you in both email and phone calls. This is one reason why I no longer register to vote. (The other is that I feel there hasn't been any decent politician in a long time, so no point in voting.)
I think a malfunction in a metallic weapon is probably more dangerous than a plastic one. I just doubt that plastic shrapnel is as deadly as metal shrapnel.
Still though, I think that would set a horrible precedent. They want to outlaw downloading it. Any material downloaded is essentially an idea - a thought, or a speech pattern, rather than a physical good. There's no sugar coating it, banning that IS censorship.
Besides, I can think of much worse ways of hurting yourself in Australia.
http://www.mid-day.com/opinion/2009/jan/260109-Gordon-Lyons-Arm-amputated-snake-bites-9-times-Sydney-Khalidoscope-Royal-Darwin-Hospital.htm
They call people like this "bogan".
You're confusing wealth with money.
As a side note, the poor - and everybody else for that matter - are wealthier than they've ever been. Not by a little, but by a lot. DVD players, cell phones, cars, personal computers...If you look back far enough, only the richest of the rich owned any one of these things. This is the difference between wealth and money. Try to find somebody who doesn't have any one of these things who wants one.
http://buburuza.net/2009/01/homeless-bum-using-the-web/
Capitalism has done for the poor what the government never could.
Actually the US Department of Commerce is. The US DoC delegates that authority (as well as IP address allocation) to ICANN, who themselves delegated that authority to IANA. More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority
If you look at it further than that, the US federal government has the ultimate authority over the DoC. And there isn't mutual agreement either. The UN and numerous nations have repeatedly tried to usurp this authority and hand it to the ITU, which has broader influence from China, Russia, and other countries who demand better control for censorship purposes. And then of course there's France, who for whatever reason thinks that the internet harms its national pride, and really hates the idea that the US effectively has the final say of anything that happens on the internet. (I'm not joking on this btw, French politicians frequently get upset over this - Chirac being the worst offender.)
IP address control being the most critical by the way. If everybody disagreed on IP address assignment, then the internet would truly splinter. Because of that fact, the internet isn't quite as decentralized as most people think, and something like tor can't change that.
Every resource is limited. Even the sun is (though it will last for millions or perhaps billions of years longer.) The ultimate purpose of an economy is to determine ownership of those resources. I think by unique he means it is a one of a kind thing. There are numerous oil wells throughout the world - arguing that oil is unique is just plain stupid.
Bass to mouth?
The Keynesian model did fail though. Unlike say Fisker, Solyndra, or a number of other failed green energy companies, Tesla was the only one that had significant venture capitalist backing, because the venture capitalists recognized that they were the only one who had a viable business model. The government investments didn't even bother to look at their business model. The other ones got loan guarantees just because of the fact that they were green energy companies and they paid the right politicians (if you notice, the list of companies who received these loans is basically a who's who list of Obama campaign sponsors.)
Chances are that Tesla would have been just fine without the government loans. However when you look at this list:
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/30/as-many-as-fifty-obama-backed-green-energy-companies-bankrupt-or-troubled/
It's shocking how people use Tesla as the poster child of Keynesian success, meanwhile literally billions were just thrown out. If venture capitalists made decisions as badly as the government does, there would be no venture capitalism.
That must be it because they aren't in it for justice. Neither is wikileaks. This is why I hate both of them. They take it upon themselves to be guardians of justice but have no concern for their own wrongdoings. For example, wikileaks original claim to fame was the collateral murder video, which they put off as US soldiers simply committing murder. When it was investigated though, there was no wrongdoing - you can clearly see those guys carrying weapons (a Kalashnikov of some variation and an RPG are easily made out by anybody who has ever handled either - meanwhile wikileaks still claims that they are cameras, and I can't think of a commonly used camera that has a shape even remotely similar, neither as long, narrow, and pointed as the RPG, nor with something akin to a buttstock and pistol grip with a narrow front end.)
Groups like anonymous and wikileaks don't really seem to give a shit which innocents they expose or whether anything they put out is a flat out fabrication - they just want a name for themselves. Julian Assange was called out by people within wikileaks on exactly this. I think they like having zero accountability.
Who watches the watchmen?
What if you pronounced it linooks? You know, if say you only heard the term ubuntu and figured that the word linux had a derivative of a non-english u.
So given that can have a third and fourth pronunciation, surely we can call it gnu/linux now right? :D
Perhaps with marshmallow inside.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/153005/chocolate-suicide
Wait a minute, are we talking about an actual "router" (as in something that deterministically routes packets) or are we talking about the a "layer 3 switch that also includes a wireless access point" which laypeople refer to simply as a router?
There are quite some not-so-subtle differences between the two, and if we're being scientific about this, we should note the distinction. If it is just the access point component, then that has broader implications on anything that runs at the 2.4ghz spectrum (or 5ghz, another potentially important detail.)
I haven't seen the new one yet, but your point does hold true for the 2009 one now that I think about it. Abrams has done some very good jobs at the more cerebral sci-fi. Lost (even though it wasn't sci-fi per se - or rather it didn't start that way at least) and Fringe definitely offer that thought invoking aspect, so it isn't as if he is incapable of it.
That's basically the way I look at it. In fact geology cross referenced with the fossil record tells us that macro scale life thrived in a climate far warmer than what we have now.
If the pangae theory is correct, then pangaea ultima is correct too. And that being the case, we're already guaranteed to have much warmer times in the future - solar activity or atmospheric contents notwithstanding. And no, the greenhouse effect won't amplify this, though solar activity could.
You can say that again. I personally am not concerned with global warming (basically for all of the same reasons that Patrick Moore isn't), but I really do love evolution. Nothing would frustrate me more than for the religious nuts to suddenly have the ammunition to remove all traces of evolution from education, all on the basic premise that empirical science is inherently flawed, using this as the basis of their argument. That would be some damn good ammunition that I really don't want to go against.
Sometimes I really REALLY doubt the effectiveness of the slashdot moderation system, and this is one of those times.
I'd really like to hear a good argument for why the parent post is either overrated or is flamebait.
In fact, I really think slashdot should get rid of the "overrated" option from the moderation system, because when I myself moderate, I haven't seen any good use for it. Anybody care to argue why the overrated option should be there in the first place?
I think I'm more interested in what will happen with the quality of care received. Presently the US is THE destination of the world for nearly all forms of specialty care, such as e.g. cancer, cardiac, and neurology. It often happens that somebody in Europe or Canada needs care that simply isn't offered there, or the physicians there say that the person stands a much better chance of survival at X hospital in the US, so their country pays to send them here to be cared for.
I really don't want to see that go away.
A Stanford researcher examined the issue of why in spite of this, the US ranks low in outcome of care compared to many other first world countries, and it turns out that this is due to poor lifestyle habits:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/15/facts-about-americas-health-care-quality-that-world-doesnt-know/
(I know, the source is fox news, so most of slashdot will simply dismiss it outright, but it's merely a summary of what somebody else found)
This also explains why, for example, that the claim that our lifespans are shorter than most first world countries because we don't have free health care is a false one. Denmark for example as as free health care as you can get, is a first world country, and yet their lifespans are within a margin of error of ours.
Mod parent up.
How can the rich be out of touch with reality? I mean I get that on slashdot, the wealthy are the bane to our existence, but you you can't have it both ways here.
If you are arguing that they got rich because they steal and manipulate...how the fuck does somebody who is "out of touch" manipulate?
If you are arguing that they got rich because they understand the market so well that they can exploit it (in either a good way or a bad way)...how the fuck does somebody who is "out of touch" understand anything enough to be able to do that?
I think it is the ones who identify as the 99% that are out of touch. To me, out of touch means having your priorities so backwards that nobody would ever hire you because you aren't worth a shit. I am what the occupy movement identifies as the 99%, but I'll never associate myself with the crowd that just craves this kind of divisiveness to such a level that they create an arbitrary percentile number to point fingers at (see: Emmanuel Goldstein - and the government didn't create this one, rather the tyranny of the mob did.)
The poor today have it better than they have ever had it. Ever. If you don't believe that, YOU are out of touch with reality, not the rich.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/09/how_rich_are_poor_people.html
The only thing that is happening today is a widening gap in income, however in terms of wealth, every category (rich or poor) is getting wealthier. The analogy that there is a pie that everybody gets a slice of is a fallacy. Unless of course this pie were to constantly grow in size, and as it grows your "slice percent" might shrink, but at the same time your "slice size" still increases.
Prior to the industrial revolution, it used to be that being poor meant you could barely afford a pair of shoes and would be lucky if you could have a hot meal every now and again. Middle class meant you owned something akin to what today is a studio apartment. Today in first world countries, poor includes those owning a car, a house, and even a luxury item such as an ipad, in many cases even all three. I mean literally, people at occupy wall street were complaining about their ipads getting stolen...and yet they refer to themselves as the downtrodden and the oppressed.
I'm not so sure about the copyright issue - I don't think youtube claims copyright on any of the videos it hosts. I think their concern is for those who do upload what is otherwise published content (say music videos, or how the studio that produced gunsmoke put every single episode up) that they can be fairly sure that most people won't download it - thus they continue to upload their content, making youtube more valuable to both them and their visitors.