Just curious, is Netflix OK with you ripping their content and posting it on the Internet or is it laden with DRM. I'm assuming its just a DVD so seems like a good way for a pirate to cheaply put all content on the Internet for free in full digital quality.
The Netflix website is a little short on detail on their TV offerings, can you watch any TV show when it premiers or just the ones that have made it to DVD. It kind of sounds like the latter. Not sure it will fly with a lot of people if you have a limited selection and it is much delayed. Not sure the networks could make producing content viable with that model. I think the networks are OK with the Netflix model because its basically old content entering the rerun stage, and they are just milking it for what the extra they can get out of it. Not sure its a viable primary business model for them.
Also not sure how the Internet will cope if everyone actually started watching TV through their ISP, especially with HD being the norm now.
If everyone started ordering all their TV through the mail it might be a boon to the post office but seems like a kind of inefficient distribution model, especially with the price of fuel.
Probably wont be a popular thing to say but back in the VCR days the stakes were a lot lower than they are today. It didn't matter so much back then because the tape of the show inherently couldn't travel very far and there was inherent pain in stripping out or fast forwarding through the commercials, to they were mostly for fair use.
In the digital and Internet age, most people might record for fairly benign fair use purposes, but some people are going to record, strip the commercials, put the shows on the Internet and undermine the business model under which TV networks currently function.
Me personally I'm not sure I can think of any content NBC produces I would actually want to watch or record, let alone post on the Internet, its not like they have a Daily Show or Colbert report. To counter my own argument John Stewart and Stephen Colbert seem to do OK encouraging free Internet trafficking in their shows but thats because their shows are A. wildly popular and B. cheap to produce.
Here is a question for all the Slashdot crowd that want all their media freed from the man. Do you want to watch content that actually costs a lot to produce, you know with writers, actors, sets. This would mean pretty much anything beyond game shows and reality TV. If so how do you expect the producers to pay for them? The options are pretty limited. One model depends on you watchings ads, and unfortunately its fairly rare for people to actually want to watch ads outside of the Super Bowl. If you let people strip the ads at a wholesale level the model doesn't work. Are you willing to pay a subscription fee for all content? Some people will pay for some content, its just wont work for most people and most content. What else is there? Shows which sucker you into voting or calling in for prizes and charge you on your phone bill? Do you want to just watch content mostly produced for free on YouTube, kind of entertaining and weird, but not exactly compelling drama?
Free network TV is a business model that is failing so desperation on the part of the networks is understandable. It worked when there were three networks, not many other mass market entertainment options and no digital recordings. Now there are so many channels diluting the market, and people are spending more time on the Internet and games. As a result ads don't produce as much revenue, so the networks counter by loading up shows with more and more of them in more obnoxious ways and try harder to force you to watch them. In turn they are annoying people more and more, causing a snowballing effect that will drive down their ratings and their revenue. If the networks allow people to rip the shows, cut the commercials, and post them on the Internet its inevitable more and more people will watch them there instead and further destroy any motivation to produce content in the first place.
"Automation makes quality and service better for the client."
Excepting of course on example of "automation" is you get to punch endless numbers on a telephone when you call customer support and it takes a small miracle to actually talk to a human being, and of course there is a fair chance that person will be sitting in India and have no clue what they are talking about, they were hired because they work cheap and can speak English, sort of, after all.
All in all I think that is a stuffed shirt talking, and he might actually believe what he is pushing but there are times when you do in fact need to have human beings, working on manual, who actually have knowledge of their field if you want happy customers.
Until the day after the merger, the execs cache out, and the infighting between the remaining managers starts. Executives on the bottom end of the merger always do one of two things:
- Cash out - Try to outmaneuver the execs on the top end of the merger and take over the whole company, with a lot of bitter intrigue in the process
You have to wonder how current EDS customers who are attached to their non HP hardware and software will feel about this when EDS suddenly has a massive bias to drive every nail with an HP hammer.
Solar panels at $1 a watt appears to be just around the corner, if Nanosolar delivers. If these new printed solar panels can be manufactured and deployed on a large scale they should be a really great way to generate electricity during the day at least, which also happens to be when consumption peaks. If innovators can do something smart like this it sure seems like a lot better idea than clinging to fossil fuels until they are completely depleted.
The fundamental problem with fossil fuels is they are a finite resource. It took hundreds of millions of years to make the reserves we've burned through in a few hundred years. Sure you can keep coming up with more reserves...for a while...but they will inevitably run out. They simply aren't a sustainable energy source. Why squander money on fossil fuels research that is ultimately a dead end when it could better be spent developing renewable energy sources like solar and wind that will solve the problem for good.
Unfortunately there are big fossil fuel companies that are much more focused on maximizing their profits, and preserving their market share by locking the planet in to buying their product, than on doing what is right for the planet or the people on it. The greedy speculators currently driving up fossil fuels on the commodities markets are doing the world a giant favor, as painful as it is in the short run. Theyonly way to break the stranglehold fossil fuels had on the world, was for the greedy SOB's to make it so expensive everyone finally came to their senses and realize we had to do something different. The oil companies knew peak oil was coming and they knew they would get filthy rich if the planet was still addicted to oil when it happened, they did everything in their power to make sure we were and they reaping a bonanaza now at everyone else's expense.
Oil in particular has been at the root of to many wars in the last century. World War II in the Pacific was a fight over oil, the U.S., Dutch and British embargoed Japan's oil supply especially out of Indonesia so Japan took it back, by force. Pearl Harbor wasn't a surprise attack, the U.S. knew Japan was going to retaliate one way or another for the oil embargo. Two wars in Iraq were also entirely over control of oil. Multiple coups in Iran over control of its oil reserves sponsored by the U.S. and Britain, lead to the Shah taking power, which in turn led to the Ayatollah Khomeni taking power, and could well lead to a war between the U.S. and Iran.
"Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, and too much work being done by lots of people on different, competing projects. You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others."
The flaw in your argument is that you seem to think that there is one right answer to every question. Unfortunately in software there are myriad different ways to do just about everything. You almost always end up with a bunch of developers who want to do things one way and a bunch who want to do them the other. Then you have a bunch of users who like the way the first set of developers want it, and another camp that likes the second way, and maybe a bunch who want it a third and fourth way since there are usually a lot more users than there are developers. You can try to make EVERYONE happy but that is usually worse than satisfying some users and hacking off others. It takes real brilliance to come up with solutions that make everyone happy on a regular basis. Linus has a talent for pulling the kernel developers together but in a lot of ways kernels are easier than UI. All UI development is a war waiting to happen.
If you are Microsoft and Apple you hire the absolute best architects you can find, and pay them a lot, to sit above it all and make calls on which developers and which users you decide to declare "right". This approach often works really well, like OSX. iPod and iPhone, it is often a complete disaster, like Vista, when the architects make all the wrong decisions.
There is structural flaw, or feature depending on your viewpoint, in open source that instead of everyone getting channeled in to a single direction by an architect/dictator, people are often going to fork so the two camps can each do their own thing. Sometimes the forks work out great because the fork ends up better than the old crappy solution. There is a consensus that X.Org was worlds better than the old XFree86 dictators and the fork was a great thing. Often times the forks create debilitating fragmentation, squandered resources and end up pissing everyone off. Gtk/Gnome and Qt/KDE is certainly among the worst and crippling to Linux on the desktop...Thanks for all the forks Miguel....
I used to rant about the fragmentation in Linux too, and then the epiphany came that it is just an inherent part of open source development. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it so there ain't no point in ranting about it. Your only option is to abandon your freedoms and drink the Microsoft or Apple Koolaid. Of course when you drank the Microsoft Koolaid and the flavor turned out to be Vista you are royally screwed there too. With Vista you kind of wish Microsoft could have forked and a team could have ran with XP and refined it, and let Vista die the quick death it deserved.
Not sure I would call it a consipracy but Intel was royally pissed that OLPC was running an AMD CPU and didn't want AMD to gain a massive foothold in the third world at their expensive. They did most definitely, start a brutal campaign to compete against OLPC and undercut it in every country that was considering adopting it. Its not a very level playing field for a multibillion dollar near monopoly to use hard ball tactics and deep pockets against an idealistic non profit that just wanted kids, often in poor and isolated areas, to get a good education and to connect to the world.
Intel and Microsoft weren't exactly rushing out to get low cost computers in to the hands of kids in third world countries until OLPC started doing it and they suddenly realized it threatened their monopolies, especially Microsoft's if there were to be millions of kids who grew up with Linux instead of Microsoft.
"Open source is like so many things (human rights and the lead free nonsense come to mind) where some people go overboard and just take it way too far."
There are some pretty strong statistical indications that when lead additives were banned from gasoline, there were substantial drops in crime 20 years later as we stopped poisoning children with lead in the air. Lead poisoning causes impulsive behavior and inability to appreciate the consequences of your actions so it is stongly correlated to criminal tendancies. There is a theory the fall of the roman empire might have been aided by their adoption of lead water pipes. Lead poisoning really is serious, its effects are subtle, but serious.
To stay on topic, does anyone know if Negroponte and Bender were inspired by Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Nell's illustrated primer strikes me as being very similar in goals to OLPC. Unfortunately OLPC encountered there brutal realities of being idealists taking on two cut throat monopolists, Microsoft and Intel, who didn't appreciate the possibility of the world's poor being trained in Linux on AMD CPU's.
"At this point the adversary relationship is our choice, and as China becomes more powerful we should consider its functional value rather than our post-Colonial nostalgia for White power in Asia."
While its true China was thoroughly abused by the west, that was a long time ago. My animosity to China isn't racial. Its based on the simple fact that they currently have a corrupt, repressive one party state. Many of their new billionaires got that way through their high positions in the Communist party not by their prowess as businessmen. For all the economic transformation they've undergone their government hasn't really changed at all since they were shunned by the West. The only thing they changed was they allowed ownership of capital and made it possible for Western capitalists to exploit their dirt cheap, huge, oppressed labor pool. Its interesting to not that Chinese workers had almost no rights until a new labor law was introduced in China in January. It appears China is going to lose some of its luster as the world's cheap labor pool, now that Chinese workers have rights and aren't for all practical purposes slave labor which is what they were until recently. Manufacturers are now looking for a new location besides the southern China coast for their factories and a new pool of dirt, cheap oppressed labor.
"China never invaded the West"
China did back North Korea's invasion of South Korea and they did most definitely attack U.N. forces in Korea. They have propped up a North Korean government that is one of the most brutal on earth.
I think you are just getting a dose of turn about is fair play. The CIA and NSA have tampered with electronics being sold to America's adversaries for years. Countries like China and Brazil have zero confidence in Windows because of the possibility of back doors allowing the NSA and CIA access, which is why Linux is so popular in these countries, especially for government use.
I'm not exactly sure why counterfeit Cisco routers are considered more of a security threat than real Cisco routers since Cisco, like a lot of American companies, are outsourcing so much of their hardware manufacture and software development to China. The Chinese government can just as easily put an agent in to any of these companies and slip back doors in to the real products.
All in all this is just the price you pay for exploiting cheap labor in a country that has been a bitter adversary for the last 60 years.
"Take out a cheap ship, and you're likely to get wtfpwned by someone in a better ship."
EvE is good for adrenaline rush. But you also just summarized its fatal flaw. PvP in EvE is almost always so unbalanced that one side or the other is going to win before the confrontation even starts. The normal scenario is six people are gate camping with a stunning amount of fire power and one or two suckers gate in and get owned. There are a few skills involved that might get you out of it if you are an underdog but the deck is stacked against you, if you gate in and your propulsion is jammed then you sit there and die, and have to grind for hours to days to replace all the gear you just lost because of the "Law of the Jungle". So the end result is you have to join a good PvP corp and always travel in packs with scouts so that you are always going to dominate the unfortunates you run in to.
For PvP to be good both sides have to be evenly matched and evenly equipped, so its skill and tactics that determine the winner. BF2 is a pretty good model for this since everyone has the same weapons. The fatal flaw of BF2 is it lets people switch teams at their whim so the teams end up constantly stacked with all the experienced plays on one team and all the noobs on the other. This creates the EvE scenario where one side has always won before the battle starts. BF2 would be and awesome PvP game if EA would force parity between the teams. It also suffers from complete absence of persistence, horrendous numbers of hackers and you have to suffer with servers run by the people you are playing with or against and they administration is often arbitrary and poor.
Is there a game with the pure PvP fun of BF2 but with more persistence... and I would be glad to pay a subscription for properly administered servers with low tolerance for hacks.
I forget what they were called in Everquest but they are the evil twin of Paladin. The sad thing about WoW is its Dungeons and Dragons and there hasn't been ANYTHING actually new or innovative done in he genre in nearly 10 or is that 20 years so everyone should stop pretending like anything in WoW is really new.
The only thing that made WoW a raging success while EQ failed was Blizzard made dungeons in to instances to get rid of the constant camp fighting in EQ that made it massively annoying to play. That one thing along created a multimillion dollar franchise and buried EQ. They also dumbed down the game so anyone could play, while EQ was often cryptic, frustrating and hard, though that also made it kind of interesting.
In another EQ analogy they went down this exact same track of constantly bumping up the level cap so the addicts would always have more levels to grind. I might have kept playing WoW if they HADN'T bumped the level cap up in Burning Crusade and trashed all the level 60 gear it had taken everyone months to get. Level grinding isn't the good part of MMORPG. Its running new and difficult dungeons with friends, solving problems and collecting crack....err...gear.
I'm hoping both game developers and players will have an epiphany and realize that level grinding shouldn't be the whole point. Yes you do need to grind levels for a while to weed out the lazy people and make them learn how to play the game but level grinding isn't what the genre should be about. It should be about making ever more interesting PVE content to challenge players, and developing better PVP too. The best thing they could do on the PVE side is to develop content with more random or intelligently changing behavior in the dungeon so people can't memorize a routine to beat a dungeon. If there were dungeons that constantly changed, without being completely erratic, that would be a fascinating challenge and it wouldn't get really old like the current instances in WoW do.
"This is the kind of brainwashing and history erasing going on in China and it sickens me. If you control history you control the present.."
Large numbers of American still think Saddam and Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and had something to do with 9/11 because their government told them so. Fox News told Americans that Saddam had UAV's he was going to use to spray chemical and biological weapons on American cities. We still don't know how Anthrax from an American biological weapons lab was mailed to assorted media outlets and Democratic Congressman though it was an awfully convenient tool to make American's extremely sensitive to biological weapons so this could be used as a basis for invading Iraq. It is as least possible that someone in our own government mailed the anthrax to manipulate the American people in to going along with the dismantling of American civil liberties and the Constitution.
Unfortunately most governments engage in propaganda and manipulation. The Chinese are really blatant about it. The United States is VERY subtle and sophisticated about it. Most American's think their country is a universal champion of Freedom and Democracy though it has propped up as many brutal dictators as anyone, engaged in genocide(Native Americans), spent most of its 200 years practicing slavery followed by segregation, practiced torture(School of the America's has trained Latin Americans in it for years, use of torture in the Phillipine counterinsurgency in the early 20th century, Guantanamo and waterboarding in the 21st century), and has seized territory in numerous aggressive wars, the Spanish American and Mexican war in particular. The Spanish American war was manufactured almost entirely by the propaganda efforts of the Hearst newspaper empire.
I don't mean to be overly critical of the U.S., most countries who have risen to the pinnacle of economic and military power have had their dirty laundry, nice guys finish last in geopolitics. Its a little hard to watch American's be all holier than thou about the Chinese though, especially when American business and consumers are fueling the Chinese economy and going a long way to endorsing their repressive one party regime as being A-OK as long as its profitable doing business with them. They rationalize that doing business there will eventually lead to the end of the repressive one party state though I really doubt it. Its more likely that the Communist Party will cement its hold on power China becomes increasingly wealthy and standard of living rises. Much the same approach was taken with Nazi Germany in the 30's when American business rushed to do business with them because it was profitable with little regard for their abusive tendencies. As the standard of living for Germans went from dismal to great most were willing to overlook the excesses of the Nazi's.
You would have to be nearly insane to trash a perfectly good copy of Windows XP by "upgrading" it to Vista. This leads me to believe that the only reason anyone would buy a Vista "upgrade" box is if the customer doesn't have a copy of Windows installed and knows the "trick" for a new homebuilt machine for example. If Microsoft didn't do this, on purpose, they wouldn't sell any Vista "upgrades" at all and retailers would be pissed they were stuck with the worthless boxes on their shelves. So, I wager they did do this on purpose and counted on the Internet to widely disseminate the "trick".
I was looking at Dell's gaming machines on their website the other day. The computers I looked at defaulted to Vista but you can opt for Windows XP.... and pay $50 more. The burning question is does XP cost more because its outdated and its a pain for Dell to ship it or is Vista such a piece of crap that Windows XP commands a $50 premium over it. I wager gamers are willing to pay a premium for Windows XP at least up until there is a must have game that requires Vista and DirectX 10.
"The problems begin if they start putting heavy spin on bad news to make it sound good, fabricating stories, or pretend there is no bad news and not report it, then we have a problem."
Uh.... Fox news has been doing exactly that for the Pentagon and the White House for years. Fox almost single handedly talked America in to invading Iraq. I still vividly remember Fox broadcasts about Saddam's imminent plans to use UAV's to spray American cities with biological and chemical weapons, just to whip up the last bit of was frenzy right before Shock and Awe.
Not sure why anyone would get upset about bloggers doing this when Fox has been doing this every effectively for years.
As an interesting aside CNN passed Fox news in total viewers last quarter for the first time since 9/11, mostly based on their campaign coverage. This is kind of an amazing commentary considering how the smoldering pit CNN has turned in to as a news network though their debate and election coverage has been fairly decent.
Another interesting read on the topic of American/Nazi collaboration is the Business Plot. There isn't a lot of corroboration for it but its strongly suspected that prominent American big business and rich American families including the DuPonts were backing a military coup to overthrow FDR and install a Fascist regime in the U.S. Prescott Bush's name was also mentioned.
Its a dirty little secret that is usually brushed under the rug but there were some substantial Nazi sympathies in America in the 1930's . Big business and many right wing rich American dynasties really did hate FDR with a passion for his socialist leanings and much prefered Fasicm for its pro big business bent.
During the 1930's Nazi Germany was one of the few economies that was booming while most of the rest of the world was grappling with depression. Germany's depression was in the 20's thanks to losing World War I and war reparations. As a result pretty much every American company was doing business with them because they were buying stuff when no one else was. The American upper class and big business was also pretty right leaning at the time because the Soviet Union and labor unions were the big threat to them. Nazi Germany and big business were natural allies in the 30's. It was German industrialists who put Hitler in power because they were more afraid of Communism and labor unions than they were the Nazi's. Fritz Thyssen in particular was the rich German industrialist who facilitated Hitlers rise. His banker/broker in the U.S. happened to be George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush. Prescott's Union Banking Corporation was shut down after Pearl Harbor under the trading with the enemy act.
There are some distinct parallels between American business and Nazi Germany in '30's and American business and China in the 21st century. China has transformed in to a Fascist regime with a cheap, repressed, work force just like Nazi Germany. While the economies in the U.S. and Europe are floundering, China is a very profitable place to do business. If a place is profitable business men almost never pass it up on the grounds the government is brutal or repressive. In fact big business really likes repressive regimes as long as they are anti communist and they respect private ownership of capital. That's why the U.S. has propped up so many dictators over the last 100 years. That why when China abandoned communism for capitalism western business rushed there and embraced them with open arms, though their repressive one party state hadn't change at all, it just transformed overnight from Communism to Fascism and truth be told big business just LOVES Fascism. Fascim is pretty close to the ideal system for big business as long as you are on the good side of the party in power.
"The management and executives at Motorola are, and were, incompetent losers, and that's the label they carry and the price that they pay for those golden parachutes.
When you have $100 million in the bank I'm pretty sure you really don't care what label you have to wear. That is the fundamental problem with the current system. Most execs, especially in America, are just looking for the big score to get their FU money. They will do anything to get it including completely cratering the company they are running. There are people like Jobs, Ellison and even Gates who are/were looking to build sustainable empires, but most execs are just climbing the ladder until they make the big score and they could care less what kind of devastation they leave in their wakes or what people think of them after. If they can milk some underlings and be successful and get even richer they will but if they actually have to be smart and work hard to succeed.... why should they, they know they will still be rich when they get cashed out so why not just be a jet setter, party and screw the pooch.
The preventive measure against this is supposed to be a board of directors who keeps an eye on the execs and make sure they do the right thing for the long term health of the company and shareholders. But most boards are now so incestuous that they are just there to not make waves and get as much FU money out of the deal too. If you get all your friends on your board and you serve on their boards you develop a system where there is no accountability. At the end of the day its only big shareholders like Icahn who have huge stakes in the company that can enforce any accountability. Unfortunately its really hard for someone with a 5 or 10 percent of the stock to do anything unless shareholders band together and elect new boards. The only problem is shareholders aren't really interested in the well being of the company either, they often just want to pop the stock price so they can cash out and make some more FU money.
The only really good companies are the ones built from scratch where the executives are the same people who risked everything and worked hard to make a company out of nothing, are huge shareholders, and to whom the company is something they built and cherish. They wont do stupid, destructive things because they have their skin in the game. Its the rock star CEO's that are the cancer. They walk in the door and are handed huge stakes in companies that they did nothing to build and nothing to earn. They could care less if they destroy it as long as they cash about before it craters.
"A quick google search shows that the Bank Secrecy Act was signed into law in 1970. That's 38 friggin years"
What exactly difference does it make when it was passed? Oh by the way 1970 was the height of Nixon's reign when he as freaking spying on EVERYONE and using dirty tricks to get his way, to get reelected and he used the dirt he found to destroy everyone who opposed him.
If you researched a little more you will find its a creeping intrusion and has been ratcheted up multiple times since then. Classic growth of a police state. Start out small, get people used to to it, ratchet it up, ratchet it up again, use baby steps so people will say gee we've had this since 1970.....
It was dramatically expended in 1990 when the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network was created.
Spying on peoples bank accounts officially reached oppressive when it was expended against under the Patriot Act.
Again its not just transactions over $10,000 now, its ANY transaction some bank employee decides is suspicious and the system has turned every bank employee in to a little spy, just like good old fashioned police states.
"Markets are intended to reward performance and promote capitalization, not provide and easier way for individuals to make money."
I hate to break it to you but your being a little idealistic. Markets in the U.S. are so completely disfunctional at this this point they are entirely about easier ways for affluent and usually unethical individuals to make money. The entire U.S. economy has turned in to one pyramid scheme, ponzi scheme and bubble after another. CEO of a major corporation is now a license to steal tens and hundreds of millions of dollars from shareholders and workers.
Most of the people involved in the subprime mortgage fiasco made out like bandits, as long as they cashed out before the inevitable crash came. At this point there is a massive morale hazard because the Fed is now massively exchanging treasuries that are worth something for mortgage backed securities that no one wants and are essentially worthless. Chances are the U.S. tax payer is going to eat hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars of free market garbage, while all the mortgage brokers, house flippers and bank execs who got rich off the housing bubble are laughing all the way to the bank as long as they cashed out early enough. Pretty much exactly the same thing happened in the S&L crisis in the 80's, a bunch of crooks got rich, taxpayers had to bail out the mess.
It would be great if free markets work but time and time again its been proven that markets that aren't aggressively regulated lead to blatant excesses where some people make out like bandits and everyone else gets screwed. In this case every lower and middle income person in America is getting screwed by the fact that the dollar is cratering, inflation is spiraling out of control, their savings are being decimated all because our government is printing money at a furious rate to bail out a bunch of crooked bankers and mortgage brokers who got rich gaming your beloved "markets" and getting rewarded for their "performance" as con artists.
The one saving grace of the Bush administration was they screwed up nearly everything but at least the economy was still doing reasonably well. Now they don't even have that and it appears the economy is teetering on the edge of the worse collapse since the Depression, all because they were looking the other way while the mortgage bubble decimated our economy. They looked the other way because for a while it made our economy look vastly better than it really was.
From the 40's until recently the United States was a booming country, everyone was getting richer, the standard of living was great and improving. The U.S. benefited greatly from the fact the rest of the world has been flattened by World War II. People tend to be generally happy with their government when they are prosperous. Look no further than today's Russia where people LOVE Putin because their income is skyrocketing partially thanks to the huge influx of oil and gas revenue, even though he is for all practical purposes a ruthless thug, and returning Russia to a one party state.
People tend to hate their government if A. their standard of living is bad and declining or the B. repressive measures impact them directly. If America's standard of living continues to decline American attitude towards their government will change. Ranting about peoples indifference wont change it, putting them in the poor house will. People also tend to be indifferent to spying unless and until it directly impacts them (i.e the get arrested for something).
Widespread spying has an extremely corrosive effect on good government but most people don't realize that or are to indifferent to care. As with Nixon and Hoover it almost inevitably is used to find dirt on people. In the case of politicians that dirt is then used against them to make them vote the way the people who have the dirt on them want them to vote, or to drive them out of office. Spying is almost inevitably used to destroy Democracy, that is why its bad. In the case of vocal opponents and protesters its used to silence them and lock them up. Widespread spying is a great way to find little indiscretions like drug use, infidelity, sexual indiscretions and tax evasion.
You need to look no further than Eliot Spitzer. He was caught by the fact that there is now widespread spying on EVERYONE's bank accounts. Any transaction over $10,000 in your account is reported to the government. ANY transaction some bank employee decides is a little fishy can be reported through a SAR(Suspicious Activity Report). The fact Spitzer was destroyed by something as innocuous as flings with a prostitute, almost certainly came about only because of spying on his bank accounts. All politicians are especially closely monitored. It is quite possible some powerful people decided to destroy Spitzer because of his crusade against the thieves on Wall Street who have been quite obviously stealing this country in to poverty. You have to wonder if Spitzer had his money in a bank where the bankers decided to retaliate for his crusades against Wall Street.
Science and technology junkies don't need to feel bad. Its pretty tough to get more than a minute of news in five hours for anything but the latest murder or kidnapping of some pretty young white girl, the latest on Brittany and Paris, and hour after hour of campaign coverage. Cable news is only going to cover news that gets them ratings, not what is important. Unfortunately the female demographic overwhelming wants sordid crime stories, preferably involving pretty young white women as the victim. They also want entertainment news... preferably about pretty young white women.
The campaign coverage is the only thing on their list that is actually important, something we've just now rediscovered the hard way by electing, and then more amazingly reelecting, one of the worst Presidents in American history. A President whose administration has so permanently damaged America to the point it will probably never recover. Unfortunately 2 years is way to long to be covering a presidential campaign 24x7. They are so desperate for "news" that they end up creating most of it and most of it is negative and silly just because its entertaining and people will watch. They also are showing an ever increasing bandwagon mentality where they just take the last winner and make them in to an unstoppable force, until of course they lose a round and and they jump to the next bandwagon and try to pretend they weren't idiots for calling the last guy the shoe in.
I've pretty much given up on the cable news networks in America. All three have reached a point where they are unwatchable. BBC America is the only news coverage I watch. They at least cover some important international news which you just can't get on American cable anymore unless something completely explodes. I've also turned to CNBC just because financial news networks never cover murders of, or gossip about, pretty young white women and they don't cover Brittany or Paris unless there is some financial impact on the markets.
Reference Admiral Fallon who was either fired, or resigned yesterday as head of Centcom, because of his excessive honesty in this Esquire article or General Shinseki who had his head taken off for pointing out the Iraq war was being waged with to few troops and they wouldn't be able to control Iraq during or after the invasion. Someone what Fallon said in that article completely escape censorship, but it didn't certainly "shorten" his career. I wager he was so sick of the Bush administration he didn't care if his career ended, just so he could get away from them.
Honesty in military chain of command is an incredibly complex problem. You can't really have loose cannons saying controversial things or publicly contradicting their superiors especially the Commander in Chief. The military has to answer to chain of command and to its civilian leaders in our system. If they don't you risk a coup and military dictatorship.
On the other hand when the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense are completely incompetent, and do stupid things, which appears to be the case with Bush and Rumsfeld(Gates is a lot better than Rumsfeld) you have to hope that the men and women in the military will know when to say no, reject wrongful orders, and tell the American public the truth, even if it costs them their careers.
For example, the day the White House authorized the use of torture, something Bush once again endorsed with a veto last week, was the day the military had just cause to reject the legitimacy of their Commander in Chief and chain of command. The men and women in the military have the highest stake in upholding the Geneva conventions and military code. If they ever become prisoners of war they have no basis for demanding the protection of those same conventions, if they are torturing prisoners and violating those conventions themselves. You can argue semantics whether "enemy combatants" fall under those protections, and Al Qaeda may torture its prisoners, but its a simple fact if you torture you completely lose the moral high ground, and the damage you do to your cause far out weighs any benefit you got from the suspect intelligence you get through torture when the victim will say anything to make you stop. For example I seriously doubt Al Qaeda was planning to attack the library tower in Los Angeles because it has no strategic value. But because someone being tortured said it was a target, the Bush administration has used it ever since as a "success" story in stopping an attack an in rationalizing the use of torture.
...and Apple doesn't care one little bit about you because 99.99% of their market is people who are completely happy with iTunes and iPhone like they are.
Something slashdotters need to get a grip on is you are a tiny, extremely hard to please, demographic. Most companies recognize it will cost them a lot in one form or another to satisfy you, and the revenue they get off you wont make up for it. The only impact you have in this particular arena is Apple apparently wants geeks to develop apps for their phone. But there are probably going to be about a million geeks doing that even with the restrictions in their terms of service.
I like Linux and the myriad options it gives personally, but Apple wants to maintain a coherent and stable software ecosystem for their phone. They really don't need to have 5 different browsers, and a bazillion apps designed for geeks instead of polished standards conforming apps that fit in to their phone experience. The iPhone works pretty well the way it is now, if they can grow their software ecosystem some they will be happy. I'm pretty sure they don't want to turn it in to a confusing train wreck, kind of like the Linux desktop with 10 different window managers, a half dozen GUI toolkits, 20 different browsers, some awesome apps and a lot of brain dead broken ones, none of which adhere to the same set of UI guidelines.
You can't just "park" a ship a few miles from the ISS. The ISS orbit is constantly decaying and being boosted. You would have to exactly match its orbit to the ISS to keep anything "parked" anywhere near it. If its not doing anything useful there is no point burning the propellant.
You could maybe make a case for attaching all these ships to the ISS and growing its storage, lab or habitation space, but there are no docking ports designed for this, they would grow the mass of the ISS requiring more propellant to maintain orbit. They would also just complicate power, pressurization, etc so if they aren't doing anything useful they probably aren't really worth it. To make them useful on orbit would substantially increase the expense to build them and reduce their cargo capacity.
Otherwise this is awesome news and cheers for ESA. It is about time the NASA/Russia stanglehold on the ISS was broken. NASA and the U.S. in particular just haven't been sane managers of the ISS or just about anything else about the manned space program since Apollo ended. Its especially sad all the money that is being poured in to the cosmic ray detector that would actually do valuable research on ISS for a change, but NASA probably wont launch it.
It remains to be seen if ESA and Japan can make the ISS useful and worth the expense but they sure can't do any worse than NASA in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious, is Netflix OK with you ripping their content and posting it on the Internet or is it laden with DRM. I'm assuming its just a DVD so seems like a good way for a pirate to cheaply put all content on the Internet for free in full digital quality.
The Netflix website is a little short on detail on their TV offerings, can you watch any TV show when it premiers or just the ones that have made it to DVD. It kind of sounds like the latter. Not sure it will fly with a lot of people if you have a limited selection and it is much delayed. Not sure the networks could make producing content viable with that model. I think the networks are OK with the Netflix model because its basically old content entering the rerun stage, and they are just milking it for what the extra they can get out of it. Not sure its a viable primary business model for them.
Also not sure how the Internet will cope if everyone actually started watching TV through their ISP, especially with HD being the norm now.
If everyone started ordering all their TV through the mail it might be a boon to the post office but seems like a kind of inefficient distribution model, especially with the price of fuel.
Probably wont be a popular thing to say but back in the VCR days the stakes were a lot lower than they are today. It didn't matter so much back then because the tape of the show inherently couldn't travel very far and there was inherent pain in stripping out or fast forwarding through the commercials, to they were mostly for fair use.
In the digital and Internet age, most people might record for fairly benign fair use purposes, but some people are going to record, strip the commercials, put the shows on the Internet and undermine the business model under which TV networks currently function.
Me personally I'm not sure I can think of any content NBC produces I would actually want to watch or record, let alone post on the Internet, its not like they have a Daily Show or Colbert report. To counter my own argument John Stewart and Stephen Colbert seem to do OK encouraging free Internet trafficking in their shows but thats because their shows are A. wildly popular and B. cheap to produce.
Here is a question for all the Slashdot crowd that want all their media freed from the man. Do you want to watch content that actually costs a lot to produce, you know with writers, actors, sets. This would mean pretty much anything beyond game shows and reality TV. If so how do you expect the producers to pay for them? The options are pretty limited. One model depends on you watchings ads, and unfortunately its fairly rare for people to actually want to watch ads outside of the Super Bowl. If you let people strip the ads at a wholesale level the model doesn't work. Are you willing to pay a subscription fee for all content? Some people will pay for some content, its just wont work for most people and most content. What else is there? Shows which sucker you into voting or calling in for prizes and charge you on your phone bill? Do you want to just watch content mostly produced for free on YouTube, kind of entertaining and weird, but not exactly compelling drama?
Free network TV is a business model that is failing so desperation on the part of the networks is understandable. It worked when there were three networks, not many other mass market entertainment options and no digital recordings. Now there are so many channels diluting the market, and people are spending more time on the Internet and games. As a result ads don't produce as much revenue, so the networks counter by loading up shows with more and more of them in more obnoxious ways and try harder to force you to watch them. In turn they are annoying people more and more, causing a snowballing effect that will drive down their ratings and their revenue. If the networks allow people to rip the shows, cut the commercials, and post them on the Internet its inevitable more and more people will watch them there instead and further destroy any motivation to produce content in the first place.
"Automation makes quality and service better for the client."
Excepting of course on example of "automation" is you get to punch endless numbers on a telephone when you call customer support and it takes a small miracle to actually talk to a human being, and of course there is a fair chance that person will be sitting in India and have no clue what they are talking about, they were hired because they work cheap and can speak English, sort of, after all.
All in all I think that is a stuffed shirt talking, and he might actually believe what he is pushing but there are times when you do in fact need to have human beings, working on manual, who actually have knowledge of their field if you want happy customers.
"We are -- and will remain -- EDS."
Until the day after the merger, the execs cache out, and the infighting between the remaining managers starts. Executives on the bottom end of the merger always do one of two things:
- Cash out
- Try to outmaneuver the execs on the top end of the merger and take over the whole company, with a lot of bitter intrigue in the process
You have to wonder how current EDS customers who are attached to their non HP hardware and software will feel about this when EDS suddenly has a massive bias to drive every nail with an HP hammer.
Solar panels at $1 a watt appears to be just around the corner, if Nanosolar delivers. If these new printed solar panels can be manufactured and deployed on a large scale they should be a really great way to generate electricity during the day at least, which also happens to be when consumption peaks. If innovators can do something smart like this it sure seems like a lot better idea than clinging to fossil fuels until they are completely depleted.
The fundamental problem with fossil fuels is they are a finite resource. It took hundreds of millions of years to make the reserves we've burned through in a few hundred years. Sure you can keep coming up with more reserves...for a while...but they will inevitably run out. They simply aren't a sustainable energy source. Why squander money on fossil fuels research that is ultimately a dead end when it could better be spent developing renewable energy sources like solar and wind that will solve the problem for good.
Unfortunately there are big fossil fuel companies that are much more focused on maximizing their profits, and preserving their market share by locking the planet in to buying their product, than on doing what is right for the planet or the people on it. The greedy speculators currently driving up fossil fuels on the commodities markets are doing the world a giant favor, as painful as it is in the short run. Theyonly way to break the stranglehold fossil fuels had on the world, was for the greedy SOB's to make it so expensive everyone finally came to their senses and realize we had to do something different. The oil companies knew peak oil was coming and they knew they would get filthy rich if the planet was still addicted to oil when it happened, they did everything in their power to make sure we were and they reaping a bonanaza now at everyone else's expense.
Oil in particular has been at the root of to many wars in the last century. World War II in the Pacific was a fight over oil, the U.S., Dutch and British embargoed Japan's oil supply especially out of Indonesia so Japan took it back, by force. Pearl Harbor wasn't a surprise attack, the U.S. knew Japan was going to retaliate one way or another for the oil embargo. Two wars in Iraq were also entirely over control of oil. Multiple coups in Iran over control of its oil reserves sponsored by the U.S. and Britain, lead to the Shah taking power, which in turn led to the Ayatollah Khomeni taking power, and could well lead to a war between the U.S. and Iran.
"Too many people who think they know better than the end-users, and too much work being done by lots of people on different, competing projects. You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others."
The flaw in your argument is that you seem to think that there is one right answer to every question. Unfortunately in software there are myriad different ways to do just about everything. You almost always end up with a bunch of developers who want to do things one way and a bunch who want to do them the other. Then you have a bunch of users who like the way the first set of developers want it, and another camp that likes the second way, and maybe a bunch who want it a third and fourth way since there are usually a lot more users than there are developers. You can try to make EVERYONE happy but that is usually worse than satisfying some users and hacking off others. It takes real brilliance to come up with solutions that make everyone happy on a regular basis. Linus has a talent for pulling the kernel developers together but in a lot of ways kernels are easier than UI. All UI development is a war waiting to happen.
If you are Microsoft and Apple you hire the absolute best architects you can find, and pay them a lot, to sit above it all and make calls on which developers and which users you decide to declare "right". This approach often works really well, like OSX. iPod and iPhone, it is often a complete disaster, like Vista, when the architects make all the wrong decisions.
There is structural flaw, or feature depending on your viewpoint, in open source that instead of everyone getting channeled in to a single direction by an architect/dictator, people are often going to fork so the two camps can each do their own thing. Sometimes the forks work out great because the fork ends up better than the old crappy solution. There is a consensus that X.Org was worlds better than the old XFree86 dictators and the fork was a great thing. Often times the forks create debilitating fragmentation, squandered resources and end up pissing everyone off. Gtk/Gnome and Qt/KDE is certainly among the worst and crippling to Linux on the desktop...Thanks for all the forks Miguel....
I used to rant about the fragmentation in Linux too, and then the epiphany came that it is just an inherent part of open source development. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it so there ain't no point in ranting about it. Your only option is to abandon your freedoms and drink the Microsoft or Apple Koolaid. Of course when you drank the Microsoft Koolaid and the flavor turned out to be Vista you are royally screwed there too. With Vista you kind of wish Microsoft could have forked and a team could have ran with XP and refined it, and let Vista die the quick death it deserved.
Not sure I would call it a consipracy but Intel was royally pissed that OLPC was running an AMD CPU and didn't want AMD to gain a massive foothold in the third world at their expensive. They did most definitely, start a brutal campaign to compete against OLPC and undercut it in every country that was considering adopting it. Its not a very level playing field for a multibillion dollar near monopoly to use hard ball tactics and deep pockets against an idealistic non profit that just wanted kids, often in poor and isolated areas, to get a good education and to connect to the world.
Intel and Microsoft weren't exactly rushing out to get low cost computers in to the hands of kids in third world countries until OLPC started doing it and they suddenly realized it threatened their monopolies, especially Microsoft's if there were to be millions of kids who grew up with Linux instead of Microsoft.
"Open source is like so many things (human rights and the lead free nonsense come to mind) where some people go overboard and just take it way too far."
There are some pretty strong statistical indications that when lead additives were banned from gasoline, there were substantial drops in crime 20 years later as we stopped poisoning children with lead in the air. Lead poisoning causes impulsive behavior and inability to appreciate the consequences of your actions so it is stongly correlated to criminal tendancies. There is a theory the fall of the roman empire might have been aided by their adoption of lead water pipes. Lead poisoning really is serious, its effects are subtle, but serious.
To stay on topic, does anyone know if Negroponte and Bender were inspired by Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Nell's illustrated primer strikes me as being very similar in goals to OLPC. Unfortunately OLPC encountered there brutal realities of being idealists taking on two cut throat monopolists, Microsoft and Intel, who didn't appreciate the possibility of the world's poor being trained in Linux on AMD CPU's.
"At this point the adversary relationship is our choice, and as China becomes more powerful we should consider its functional value rather than our post-Colonial nostalgia for White power in Asia."
While its true China was thoroughly abused by the west, that was a long time ago. My animosity to China isn't racial. Its based on the simple fact that they currently have a corrupt, repressive one party state. Many of their new billionaires got that way through their high positions in the Communist party not by their prowess as businessmen. For all the economic transformation they've undergone their government hasn't really changed at all since they were shunned by the West. The only thing they changed was they allowed ownership of capital and made it possible for Western capitalists to exploit their dirt cheap, huge, oppressed labor pool. Its interesting to not that Chinese workers had almost no rights until a new labor law was introduced in China in January. It appears China is going to lose some of its luster as the world's cheap labor pool, now that Chinese workers have rights and aren't for all practical purposes slave labor which is what they were until recently. Manufacturers are now looking for a new location besides the southern China coast for their factories and a new pool of dirt, cheap oppressed labor.
"China never invaded the West"
China did back North Korea's invasion of South Korea and they did most definitely attack U.N. forces in Korea. They have propped up a North Korean government that is one of the most brutal on earth.
I think you are just getting a dose of turn about is fair play. The CIA and NSA have tampered with electronics being sold to America's adversaries for years. Countries like China and Brazil have zero confidence in Windows because of the possibility of back doors allowing the NSA and CIA access, which is why Linux is so popular in these countries, especially for government use.
I'm not exactly sure why counterfeit Cisco routers are considered more of a security threat than real Cisco routers since Cisco, like a lot of American companies, are outsourcing so much of their hardware manufacture and software development to China. The Chinese government can just as easily put an agent in to any of these companies and slip back doors in to the real products.
All in all this is just the price you pay for exploiting cheap labor in a country that has been a bitter adversary for the last 60 years.
"Take out a cheap ship, and you're likely to get wtfpwned by someone in a better ship."
EvE is good for adrenaline rush. But you also just summarized its fatal flaw. PvP in EvE is almost always so unbalanced that one side or the other is going to win before the confrontation even starts. The normal scenario is six people are gate camping with a stunning amount of fire power and one or two suckers gate in and get owned. There are a few skills involved that might get you out of it if you are an underdog but the deck is stacked against you, if you gate in and your propulsion is jammed then you sit there and die, and have to grind for hours to days to replace all the gear you just lost because of the "Law of the Jungle". So the end result is you have to join a good PvP corp and always travel in packs with scouts so that you are always going to dominate the unfortunates you run in to.
For PvP to be good both sides have to be evenly matched and evenly equipped, so its skill and tactics that determine the winner. BF2 is a pretty good model for this since everyone has the same weapons. The fatal flaw of BF2 is it lets people switch teams at their whim so the teams end up constantly stacked with all the experienced plays on one team and all the noobs on the other. This creates the EvE scenario where one side has always won before the battle starts. BF2 would be and awesome PvP game if EA would force parity between the teams. It also suffers from complete absence of persistence, horrendous numbers of hackers and you have to suffer with servers run by the people you are playing with or against and they administration is often arbitrary and poor.
Is there a game with the pure PvP fun of BF2 but with more persistence... and I would be glad to pay a subscription for properly administered servers with low tolerance for hacks.
I forget what they were called in Everquest but they are the evil twin of Paladin. The sad thing about WoW is its Dungeons and Dragons and there hasn't been ANYTHING actually new or innovative done in he genre in nearly 10 or is that 20 years so everyone should stop pretending like anything in WoW is really new.
The only thing that made WoW a raging success while EQ failed was Blizzard made dungeons in to instances to get rid of the constant camp fighting in EQ that made it massively annoying to play. That one thing along created a multimillion dollar franchise and buried EQ. They also dumbed down the game so anyone could play, while EQ was often cryptic, frustrating and hard, though that also made it kind of interesting.
In another EQ analogy they went down this exact same track of constantly bumping up the level cap so the addicts would always have more levels to grind. I might have kept playing WoW if they HADN'T bumped the level cap up in Burning Crusade and trashed all the level 60 gear it had taken everyone months to get. Level grinding isn't the good part of MMORPG. Its running new and difficult dungeons with friends, solving problems and collecting crack....err...gear.
I'm hoping both game developers and players will have an epiphany and realize that level grinding shouldn't be the whole point. Yes you do need to grind levels for a while to weed out the lazy people and make them learn how to play the game but level grinding isn't what the genre should be about. It should be about making ever more interesting PVE content to challenge players, and developing better PVP too. The best thing they could do on the PVE side is to develop content with more random or intelligently changing behavior in the dungeon so people can't memorize a routine to beat a dungeon. If there were dungeons that constantly changed, without being completely erratic, that would be a fascinating challenge and it wouldn't get really old like the current instances in WoW do.
"This is the kind of brainwashing and history erasing going on in China and it sickens me. If you control history you control the present.."
Large numbers of American still think Saddam and Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and had something to do with 9/11 because their government told them so. Fox News told Americans that Saddam had UAV's he was going to use to spray chemical and biological weapons on American cities. We still don't know how Anthrax from an American biological weapons lab was mailed to assorted media outlets and Democratic Congressman though it was an awfully convenient tool to make American's extremely sensitive to biological weapons so this could be used as a basis for invading Iraq. It is as least possible that someone in our own government mailed the anthrax to manipulate the American people in to going along with the dismantling of American civil liberties and the Constitution.
Unfortunately most governments engage in propaganda and manipulation. The Chinese are really blatant about it. The United States is VERY subtle and sophisticated about it. Most American's think their country is a universal champion of Freedom and Democracy though it has propped up as many brutal dictators as anyone, engaged in genocide(Native Americans), spent most of its 200 years practicing slavery followed by segregation, practiced torture(School of the America's has trained Latin Americans in it for years, use of torture in the Phillipine counterinsurgency in the early 20th century, Guantanamo and waterboarding in the 21st century), and has seized territory in numerous aggressive wars, the Spanish American and Mexican war in particular. The Spanish American war was manufactured almost entirely by the propaganda efforts of the Hearst newspaper empire.
I don't mean to be overly critical of the U.S., most countries who have risen to the pinnacle of economic and military power have had their dirty laundry, nice guys finish last in geopolitics. Its a little hard to watch American's be all holier than thou about the Chinese though, especially when American business and consumers are fueling the Chinese economy and going a long way to endorsing their repressive one party regime as being A-OK as long as its profitable doing business with them. They rationalize that doing business there will eventually lead to the end of the repressive one party state though I really doubt it. Its more likely that the Communist Party will cement its hold on power China becomes increasingly wealthy and standard of living rises. Much the same approach was taken with Nazi Germany in the 30's when American business rushed to do business with them because it was profitable with little regard for their abusive tendencies. As the standard of living for Germans went from dismal to great most were willing to overlook the excesses of the Nazi's.
You would have to be nearly insane to trash a perfectly good copy of Windows XP by "upgrading" it to Vista. This leads me to believe that the only reason anyone would buy a Vista "upgrade" box is if the customer doesn't have a copy of Windows installed and knows the "trick" for a new homebuilt machine for example. If Microsoft didn't do this, on purpose, they wouldn't sell any Vista "upgrades" at all and retailers would be pissed they were stuck with the worthless boxes on their shelves. So, I wager they did do this on purpose and counted on the Internet to widely disseminate the "trick".
.... and pay $50 more. The burning question is does XP cost more because its outdated and its a pain for Dell to ship it or is Vista such a piece of crap that Windows XP commands a $50 premium over it. I wager gamers are willing to pay a premium for Windows XP at least up until there is a must have game that requires Vista and DirectX 10.
I was looking at Dell's gaming machines on their website the other day. The computers I looked at defaulted to Vista but you can opt for Windows XP
"The problems begin if they start putting heavy spin on bad news to make it sound good, fabricating stories, or pretend there is no bad news and not report it, then we have a problem."
Uh.... Fox news has been doing exactly that for the Pentagon and the White House for years. Fox almost single handedly talked America in to invading Iraq. I still vividly remember Fox broadcasts about Saddam's imminent plans to use UAV's to spray American cities with biological and chemical weapons, just to whip up the last bit of was frenzy right before Shock and Awe.
Not sure why anyone would get upset about bloggers doing this when Fox has been doing this every effectively for years.
As an interesting aside CNN passed Fox news in total viewers last quarter for the first time since 9/11, mostly based on their campaign coverage. This is kind of an amazing commentary considering how the smoldering pit CNN has turned in to as a news network though their debate and election coverage has been fairly decent.
Another interesting read on the topic of American/Nazi collaboration is the Business Plot. There isn't a lot of corroboration for it but its strongly suspected that prominent American big business and rich American families including the DuPonts were backing a military coup to overthrow FDR and install a Fascist regime in the U.S. Prescott Bush's name was also mentioned.
Its a dirty little secret that is usually brushed under the rug but there were some substantial Nazi sympathies in America in the 1930's . Big business and many right wing rich American dynasties really did hate FDR with a passion for his socialist leanings and much prefered Fasicm for its pro big business bent.
During the 1930's Nazi Germany was one of the few economies that was booming while most of the rest of the world was grappling with depression. Germany's depression was in the 20's thanks to losing World War I and war reparations. As a result pretty much every American company was doing business with them because they were buying stuff when no one else was. The American upper class and big business was also pretty right leaning at the time because the Soviet Union and labor unions were the big threat to them. Nazi Germany and big business were natural allies in the 30's. It was German industrialists who put Hitler in power because they were more afraid of Communism and labor unions than they were the Nazi's. Fritz Thyssen in particular was the rich German industrialist who facilitated Hitlers rise. His banker/broker in the U.S. happened to be George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush. Prescott's Union Banking Corporation was shut down after Pearl Harbor under the trading with the enemy act.
There are some distinct parallels between American business and Nazi Germany in '30's and American business and China in the 21st century. China has transformed in to a Fascist regime with a cheap, repressed, work force just like Nazi Germany. While the economies in the U.S. and Europe are floundering, China is a very profitable place to do business. If a place is profitable business men almost never pass it up on the grounds the government is brutal or repressive. In fact big business really likes repressive regimes as long as they are anti communist and they respect private ownership of capital. That's why the U.S. has propped up so many dictators over the last 100 years. That why when China abandoned communism for capitalism western business rushed there and embraced them with open arms, though their repressive one party state hadn't change at all, it just transformed overnight from Communism to Fascism and truth be told big business just LOVES Fascism. Fascim is pretty close to the ideal system for big business as long as you are on the good side of the party in power.
"The management and executives at Motorola are, and were, incompetent losers, and that's the label they carry and the price that they pay for those golden parachutes.
When you have $100 million in the bank I'm pretty sure you really don't care what label you have to wear. That is the fundamental problem with the current system. Most execs, especially in America, are just looking for the big score to get their FU money. They will do anything to get it including completely cratering the company they are running. There are people like Jobs, Ellison and even Gates who are/were looking to build sustainable empires, but most execs are just climbing the ladder until they make the big score and they could care less what kind of devastation they leave in their wakes or what people think of them after. If they can milk some underlings and be successful and get even richer they will but if they actually have to be smart and work hard to succeed.... why should they, they know they will still be rich when they get cashed out so why not just be a jet setter, party and screw the pooch.
The preventive measure against this is supposed to be a board of directors who keeps an eye on the execs and make sure they do the right thing for the long term health of the company and shareholders. But most boards are now so incestuous that they are just there to not make waves and get as much FU money out of the deal too. If you get all your friends on your board and you serve on their boards you develop a system where there is no accountability. At the end of the day its only big shareholders like Icahn who have huge stakes in the company that can enforce any accountability. Unfortunately its really hard for someone with a 5 or 10 percent of the stock to do anything unless shareholders band together and elect new boards. The only problem is shareholders aren't really interested in the well being of the company either, they often just want to pop the stock price so they can cash out and make some more FU money.
The only really good companies are the ones built from scratch where the executives are the same people who risked everything and worked hard to make a company out of nothing, are huge shareholders, and to whom the company is something they built and cherish. They wont do stupid, destructive things because they have their skin in the game. Its the rock star CEO's that are the cancer. They walk in the door and are handed huge stakes in companies that they did nothing to build and nothing to earn. They could care less if they destroy it as long as they cash about before it craters.
"A quick google search shows that the Bank Secrecy Act was signed into law in 1970. That's 38 friggin years"
What exactly difference does it make when it was passed? Oh by the way 1970 was the height of Nixon's reign when he as freaking spying on EVERYONE and using dirty tricks to get his way, to get reelected and he used the dirt he found to destroy everyone who opposed him.
If you researched a little more you will find its a creeping intrusion and has been ratcheted up multiple times since then. Classic growth of a police state. Start out small, get people used to to it, ratchet it up, ratchet it up again, use baby steps so people will say gee we've had this since 1970.....
It was dramatically expended in 1990 when the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network was created.
Spying on peoples bank accounts officially reached oppressive when it was expended against under the Patriot Act.
Again its not just transactions over $10,000 now, its ANY transaction some bank employee decides is suspicious and the system has turned every bank employee in to a little spy, just like good old fashioned police states.
"Markets are intended to reward performance and promote capitalization, not provide and easier way for individuals to make money."
I hate to break it to you but your being a little idealistic. Markets in the U.S. are so completely disfunctional at this this point they are entirely about easier ways for affluent and usually unethical individuals to make money. The entire U.S. economy has turned in to one pyramid scheme, ponzi scheme and bubble after another. CEO of a major corporation is now a license to steal tens and hundreds of millions of dollars from shareholders and workers.
Most of the people involved in the subprime mortgage fiasco made out like bandits, as long as they cashed out before the inevitable crash came. At this point there is a massive morale hazard because the Fed is now massively exchanging treasuries that are worth something for mortgage backed securities that no one wants and are essentially worthless. Chances are the U.S. tax payer is going to eat hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars of free market garbage, while all the mortgage brokers, house flippers and bank execs who got rich off the housing bubble are laughing all the way to the bank as long as they cashed out early enough. Pretty much exactly the same thing happened in the S&L crisis in the 80's, a bunch of crooks got rich, taxpayers had to bail out the mess.
It would be great if free markets work but time and time again its been proven that markets that aren't aggressively regulated lead to blatant excesses where some people make out like bandits and everyone else gets screwed. In this case every lower and middle income person in America is getting screwed by the fact that the dollar is cratering, inflation is spiraling out of control, their savings are being decimated all because our government is printing money at a furious rate to bail out a bunch of crooked bankers and mortgage brokers who got rich gaming your beloved "markets" and getting rewarded for their "performance" as con artists.
The one saving grace of the Bush administration was they screwed up nearly everything but at least the economy was still doing reasonably well. Now they don't even have that and it appears the economy is teetering on the edge of the worse collapse since the Depression, all because they were looking the other way while the mortgage bubble decimated our economy. They looked the other way because for a while it made our economy look vastly better than it really was.
From the 40's until recently the United States was a booming country, everyone was getting richer, the standard of living was great and improving. The U.S. benefited greatly from the fact the rest of the world has been flattened by World War II. People tend to be generally happy with their government when they are prosperous. Look no further than today's Russia where people LOVE Putin because their income is skyrocketing partially thanks to the huge influx of oil and gas revenue, even though he is for all practical purposes a ruthless thug, and returning Russia to a one party state.
People tend to hate their government if A. their standard of living is bad and declining or the B. repressive measures impact them directly. If America's standard of living continues to decline American attitude towards their government will change. Ranting about peoples indifference wont change it, putting them in the poor house will. People also tend to be indifferent to spying unless and until it directly impacts them (i.e the get arrested for something).
Widespread spying has an extremely corrosive effect on good government but most people don't realize that or are to indifferent to care. As with Nixon and Hoover it almost inevitably is used to find dirt on people. In the case of politicians that dirt is then used against them to make them vote the way the people who have the dirt on them want them to vote, or to drive them out of office. Spying is almost inevitably used to destroy Democracy, that is why its bad. In the case of vocal opponents and protesters its used to silence them and lock them up. Widespread spying is a great way to find little indiscretions like drug use, infidelity, sexual indiscretions and tax evasion.
You need to look no further than Eliot Spitzer. He was caught by the fact that there is now widespread spying on EVERYONE's bank accounts. Any transaction over $10,000 in your account is reported to the government. ANY transaction some bank employee decides is a little fishy can be reported through a SAR(Suspicious Activity Report). The fact Spitzer was destroyed by something as innocuous as flings with a prostitute, almost certainly came about only because of spying on his bank accounts. All politicians are especially closely monitored. It is quite possible some powerful people decided to destroy Spitzer because of his crusade against the thieves on Wall Street who have been quite obviously stealing this country in to poverty. You have to wonder if Spitzer had his money in a bank where the bankers decided to retaliate for his crusades against Wall Street.
Science and technology junkies don't need to feel bad. Its pretty tough to get more than a minute of news in five hours for anything but the latest murder or kidnapping of some pretty young white girl, the latest on Brittany and Paris, and hour after hour of campaign coverage. Cable news is only going to cover news that gets them ratings, not what is important. Unfortunately the female demographic overwhelming wants sordid crime stories, preferably involving pretty young white women as the victim. They also want entertainment news... preferably about pretty young white women.
The campaign coverage is the only thing on their list that is actually important, something we've just now rediscovered the hard way by electing, and then more amazingly reelecting, one of the worst Presidents in American history. A President whose administration has so permanently damaged America to the point it will probably never recover. Unfortunately 2 years is way to long to be covering a presidential campaign 24x7. They are so desperate for "news" that they end up creating most of it and most of it is negative and silly just because its entertaining and people will watch. They also are showing an ever increasing bandwagon mentality where they just take the last winner and make them in to an unstoppable force, until of course they lose a round and and they jump to the next bandwagon and try to pretend they weren't idiots for calling the last guy the shoe in.
I've pretty much given up on the cable news networks in America. All three have reached a point where they are unwatchable. BBC America is the only news coverage I watch. They at least cover some important international news which you just can't get on American cable anymore unless something completely explodes. I've also turned to CNBC just because financial news networks never cover murders of, or gossip about, pretty young white women and they don't cover Brittany or Paris unless there is some financial impact on the markets.
"Did anyone seriously expect anything else?"
Reference Admiral Fallon who was either fired, or resigned yesterday as head of Centcom, because of his excessive honesty in this Esquire article or General Shinseki who had his head taken off for pointing out the Iraq war was being waged with to few troops and they wouldn't be able to control Iraq during or after the invasion. Someone what Fallon said in that article completely escape censorship, but it didn't certainly "shorten" his career. I wager he was so sick of the Bush administration he didn't care if his career ended, just so he could get away from them.
Honesty in military chain of command is an incredibly complex problem. You can't really have loose cannons saying controversial things or publicly contradicting their superiors especially the Commander in Chief. The military has to answer to chain of command and to its civilian leaders in our system. If they don't you risk a coup and military dictatorship.
On the other hand when the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense are completely incompetent, and do stupid things, which appears to be the case with Bush and Rumsfeld(Gates is a lot better than Rumsfeld) you have to hope that the men and women in the military will know when to say no, reject wrongful orders, and tell the American public the truth, even if it costs them their careers.
For example, the day the White House authorized the use of torture, something Bush once again endorsed with a veto last week, was the day the military had just cause to reject the legitimacy of their Commander in Chief and chain of command. The men and women in the military have the highest stake in upholding the Geneva conventions and military code. If they ever become prisoners of war they have no basis for demanding the protection of those same conventions, if they are torturing prisoners and violating those conventions themselves. You can argue semantics whether "enemy combatants" fall under those protections, and Al Qaeda may torture its prisoners, but its a simple fact if you torture you completely lose the moral high ground, and the damage you do to your cause far out weighs any benefit you got from the suspect intelligence you get through torture when the victim will say anything to make you stop. For example I seriously doubt Al Qaeda was planning to attack the library tower in Los Angeles because it has no strategic value. But because someone being tortured said it was a target, the Bush administration has used it ever since as a "success" story in stopping an attack an in rationalizing the use of torture.
...and Apple doesn't care one little bit about you because 99.99% of their market is people who are completely happy with iTunes and iPhone like they are.
Something slashdotters need to get a grip on is you are a tiny, extremely hard to please, demographic. Most companies recognize it will cost them a lot in one form or another to satisfy you, and the revenue they get off you wont make up for it. The only impact you have in this particular arena is Apple apparently wants geeks to develop apps for their phone. But there are probably going to be about a million geeks doing that even with the restrictions in their terms of service.
I like Linux and the myriad options it gives personally, but Apple wants to maintain a coherent and stable software ecosystem for their phone. They really don't need to have 5 different browsers, and a bazillion apps designed for geeks instead of polished standards conforming apps that fit in to their phone experience. The iPhone works pretty well the way it is now, if they can grow their software ecosystem some they will be happy. I'm pretty sure they don't want to turn it in to a confusing train wreck, kind of like the Linux desktop with 10 different window managers, a half dozen GUI toolkits, 20 different browsers, some awesome apps and a lot of brain dead broken ones, none of which adhere to the same set of UI guidelines.
You can't just "park" a ship a few miles from the ISS. The ISS orbit is constantly decaying and being boosted. You would have to exactly match its orbit to the ISS to keep anything "parked" anywhere near it. If its not doing anything useful there is no point burning the propellant.
You could maybe make a case for attaching all these ships to the ISS and growing its storage, lab or habitation space, but there are no docking ports designed for this, they would grow the mass of the ISS requiring more propellant to maintain orbit. They would also just complicate power, pressurization, etc so if they aren't doing anything useful they probably aren't really worth it. To make them useful on orbit would substantially increase the expense to build them and reduce their cargo capacity.
Otherwise this is awesome news and cheers for ESA. It is about time the NASA/Russia stanglehold on the ISS was broken. NASA and the U.S. in particular just haven't been sane managers of the ISS or just about anything else about the manned space program since Apollo ended. Its especially sad all the money that is being poured in to the cosmic ray detector that would actually do valuable research on ISS for a change, but NASA probably wont launch it.
It remains to be seen if ESA and Japan can make the ISS useful and worth the expense but they sure can't do any worse than NASA in this regard.