The BSA's tactic of requiring companies to be audited and then pay large amounts for any product that they can't prove that they own makes them pretty unpopular.
They seem to be a pretty popular way for disgruntled IT employees to screw over their employer though. Every BSA audit I've ever heard of or been involved in came about because of some employee or ex-employee with an axe to grind.
I've always wondered what happens if you refuse to let them onto your property. Presumably their only recourse would be to sue you and obtain access to your computer systems through the discovery process. Given the "speed" with which the court system moves I wonder if you could have the whole operation switched over an open source movement by the time it reached that point?
Alternatively what happens if you claim trade secrets or privacy restrictions (HIPAA?) on your computer system?
Is it really? I've never bothered to look at slashcode. I just always assumed the UID was 0 for AC's. It's pretty funny if they defined it as 666 though.
They can try to reverse the situation in China, but they won't see benefits for many, many years, and the potential drain on finances would be enormous.
I don't think "they" as in RIAA can do much about China. I do think that "they" as in the Federal Government could have some influence though. It seems absurd that we are running a trade deficit with China in the hundreds of billions of dollars while they condone the theft of billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property. The Chinese Government should do something about this or we should hit their goods with tariffs.
It's not free trade when we pay for their crap and they steal ours.
Well obviously. "Anonymous Coward" has been here since the very beginning and has an even lower UID than CmdrTaco;)
I'll save everybody the trouble and just link to the only one that's remotely interesting. The AOL-Time Warner merger. How'd that work out again? I stopped getting three AOL CDs/disks a week so they must have done something right;)
I don't know if you're be facetious, but there is no right to keep and bear arms.
And that attitude right there is why your countrymen are losing freedoms on a regular basis. Your rights are not granted to you by the government -- they are natural rights that all human beings have. One of those is the right to keep and bear arms for defense of the person and community. The fact that you've allowed your Government to infringe upon your natural rights suggests to me that you have no concept of what your rights are and were destined to lose them before the debate even began.
the crown hasn't wanted an armed populace for a while.
You mean the Commons, right? Either way, therein lies your problem. Your Government doesn't regard your rights as inviolable. Hence why you continue to lose them as time goes on. The country that gave us the Magna Carta is now ruled by people that don't think you should have the right to remain silent, the right not to be a witness against yourself or the right to keep and bear arms.
Way to live up to your history. I guess the 13 colonies got out just in the nick of time, didn't we?
We do have a constitution. Parliament is the supreme power in the nation though, so effectively the constitution can be changed with a simple majority vote in the Commons.
How well does that system work at protecting your right against self-incrimination, right to remain silent or right to keep and bear arms?
It does when the general population has to pay higher prices for merchandise because some of it keeps walking out of the store. Or when they have to pay a higher rate for homeowners/renters coverage because of the number of break-ins in their neighborhood.
And yes, making copyright infringement will make less cost for them, yes you will be protecting their rights, and yes it will cost the taxpayer to do so in the short term, but in the long term, it will result in much fairer and transparent copyright infringement prosecution system, and it will help keep prices down.
In the long term I don't understand why the industry is focusing so much of it's lobbying clout on going after teenagers who use Kazaa when there are whole countries out there (China, I'm looking at you) wherein the Governments all but condone copyright infringement on an industrial scale. Interestingly enough these countries are also the ones that we run a massive trade deficit with. It would seem to be in our collective interest to address this problem before we start worrying about the acne covered teenager down the street.
Countries like Portugal have decriminalised drugs but I think they are still illegal. I am guessing it is something to do with the enforcement.
I can't speak for Portugal but here in the states when they do that it's usually accomplished in one of two different ways:
1) Change in enforcement. I.e: We won't arrest you for possession unless you are doing something really stupid (smoking weed in public) and even if we do arrest you we are going to give you a slap on the wrist (stay out trouble for six months and the charges go away) without a criminal record.
2) Change in the laws. This is what my home state of New York has done. If you are caught with 25 grams or less of pot it's considered a "violation", not a misdemeanor or felony. You receive the same summons as you would for a traffic ticket and pay a $100 fine if convicted.
You forgot about the part where Rich Coke Addict gets elected as President and totally F's this country.
But it's OK 'cause he was Born Again and has One-On-Ones with God now.
When did Obama claim to be born again?;)
Oh, wait, n/m, you were talking about the last hypocritical President that admitted to using coke yet remains in favor of drug prohibition. Sorry, I thought you were talking about the current one.
You will need some regulation to prevent companies from coming in and abusing the public right of way. Perhaps both legacy and newcomers will need to pay right of way fees to keep it under control.
Hey, I've never said that some regulation isn't required. You just have to be weary of regulatory capture that results in companies like AT&T abusing the right of way with the full force of the law backing them up. To me the ideal balance would be somewhere between "you must negotiate with each landowner over the placement of each utility pole" and "we can put whatever we want on your property and your only choice is to bend over and take it"
But I think you answer your own question. They know the approximate rate of cable adoption, and they can manage the costs of buildout and franchise fees, in exchange for the monopoly market.
And you don't think that cable network would still be expanded even without the benefit of the monopoly? In the modern era where people want high speed internet access and 200 channels to zone out with? Somehow I suspect someone would be there to service that market even without the promise of a Governmental monopoly. Whatever arguments could have been made for it in the past don't really seem to apply to the modern world.
No, but it certainly seems like a lot of the loudest conservatives (note: not all conservatives are Republicans and vice versa, but people rarely make the distinction, same with liberals / Democrats) are always shouting about limited government, free capitalism, let the free market solve all our problems, and so on.
If you tune to some of the loudest leftists (note: not all leftists are Democrats and vice versa) you will hear them shouting things that would have made Karl Marx cringe. The rich only got rich on the back of the poor, Wall Street is responsible for every single thing that goes wrong in this country, "General betray us", etc, etc, etc.
When your exposure to conservative ideals comes from these guys
Do you judge liberalism by the likes of Michael Moore? No? Then why judge conservatism by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh?
It's usually accompanied by lines like "Do you really think the government can do anything right?"
Can it though? In my area we have a mixture of private garbage collection and municipal. Some communities have municipal service and some have private service. Follow the two trucks around for a few minutes one day to see the difference between the private sector and the public sector. The private guys haul ass -- the municipal guys prod along and are lucky to cover half the ground that the private guys do. You know what makes it even more pathetic? The muni guys are paid nearly three times as much.
but the people asking are usually happy to be protected by a government-run police, fire, and military force, drink from the municpial water supply, drive on state-constructed roads, use cellphones and GPS and other things made possible by NASA, eat food and take medicine knowing it's been inspected by the FDA and they don't need to personally inspect the farm / pharmacy, live and work in buildings that won't collapse because they've been built to government-approved codes, and so forth. Seems a strange position to take, if you ask me.
I don't think it's strange at all. Some of what you just listed could be accomplished more efficiently by the private sector (municipal water). NASA didn't set out to deploy GPS -- it set out to keep us competitive with the Russians. It's great that we got some civilian applications out of that investment but don't kid yourself into thinking that's why we spent the money.
As far as the FDA goes, I don't trust them at all and many people would argue that they've done more harm than good. They've turned the process for approving new drugs into a bureaucratic nightmare and have denied dying people the right to take experimental medicines even though they are fully aware of the risks of doing so. Given the events of the last few years I think I'd trust an organization like the Underwriters Laboratories more than Uncle Sam. My UL approved outlet and appliances have yet to burn my house down. My FDA approved peanut butter and drugs on the other hand....
For telecom considerations, wireless has a pretty low infrastructure requirement.
And? The cable company doesn't have to write a check with nine zeros on it to the US Treasury in order to establish themselves. Not having worked for the accounting department at AT&T or Comcast I can't attest as to which one is more expensive but I'd wager that whatever money the wireless carrier saves by not having to string wires is offset by the amount of money that they had to pay to obtain licenses for the frequencies that they operate on.
So I would again ask why it's necessary for local Governments to guarantee a monopoly to the likes of Comcast and Time Warner? If the barrier to entry is as high as you say it is then why do the cable companies willingly operate under such a system? Do they enjoy paying franchise fees or do they get something out of the arrangement?
A rational incumbent economic actor in a high cap industry will dramatically reduce prices if an interloper tries to deploy a similar product.
Such behavior may very well be illegal and would seem to be easier to address than the clusterfuck that we have now. In any event that doesn't directly answer the question -- why is government complacent with the cable monopoly? They don't (at least in my area) franchise the power company or the telephone company. Only the cable company is singled out for this treatment. Why?
Hey, I didn't say I was concerned about random bomb attacks. All I said was that police dogs aren't limited to rescuing people or finding drugs. They can find bombs and track down fleeing criminals as well. In either case if they save a human life I'd say they did their job and were worth having around.
Mind you, I don't think they should be able to be used to obtain probable cause. It's entirely too easy for them to hit on something by mistake or even for a less than honest handler to have them "hit" on something. I don't have a problem with the police using them once they have probable cause though. If the officer pulls you over and smells pot smoke he's probably justified in using the dog to help locate your contraband. If he pulls you over and his dog starts barking I don't think that should give him the right to search your property.
(Of course, I also think the War on Drugs is complete bullshit, but that's another discussion....)
Only if more people vote for the union than vote against it. That's what elections mean, whether the votes are cast by checking a card or by raising a hand or by super-secret, computer-tallied, proprietary Sequoia machines.
Except if you make me raise my hand in front of my co-workers and boss I'm potentially subject to intimidation and coercion by either side. Tell me, why are the Union folks so eager to see the elimination of the secret ballot?
People who like to spread FUD about unions and organized labor generally really ought to take a look at how organized labor was instrumental in creating a prosperous middle class in America who could count out safe working conditions and reasonable working hours.
And people who drink the Union kool-aid really ought to look a hard look at the downsides of organized labor. Tell me, would you rather work somewhere that rewards you for competence or somewhere that rewards you based on seniority? Guess which system is more likely under the unionized shop?
Unions were necessary back in the day. Anybody who has ever taken a tour of an old coal mine and seen the working conditions those poor bastards worked under can attest to that. The problem is that many of the Unions ceased to be about the workers a long time ago. Now they are all about protecting the institution and expanding it's power and reach. This tends to happen with most organizations after awhile and is one of the many reasons why I'm skeptical of unions.
and face it, the Republicans deregulated, deregulated, and deregulated some more. Of course there were exceptions, but on the whole they're mostly for deregulation.
You won't get any argument out of me that the Republicans fucked up and dug us a hole that will take the better part of a generation to dig out of. I'm just tired of left-leaning partisans wielding the GWB administration as a shield to deflect any and all criticism of the current government. Here's the typical conservation with one of them:
"I'm worried about the national deficit and how much it's going to rise under Obama."
"When George W. Bush took office he had a SURPLUS. Then he passed his TAX CUT FOR THE RICH and now we have a huge deficit. Republicans can't claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility any longer"
Umm, yeah, and how does that relate to my current concerns?
Not all regulation is good, not all deregulation is bad; what you need is effective regulation.
I don't have a problem with all regulation. It's clearly called for in some instances. I just don't think it's fair to blame the free market for the likes of Comcast when Comcast isn't operating under anything that remotely resembles a free market.
And the answer is found in Econ 101 - significant barriers to entry (massive infrastructure requirement) and the inefficiency of duplicating expensive infrastructure.
Neither one of which has stopped the wireless industry from rolling out no less than four different networks across large portions of the United States. That's not even counting the regional players either. Am I supposed to believe that T-Mobile can find it profitable to roll their own network to compete with AT&T and Verizon but some upstart couldn't do the same with cable in my community if the local government would let him try?
whoever gets there first has a huge advantage over latecomers, and can drive them out of business by undercutting their prices
What makes you think it's all about price? Verizon has come out and said that they don't intend to compete on price with regards to FIOS. And they don't have too -- many people are perfectly willing to pay the money they are asking for the service they are offering. You wouldn't do business with an ISP that promised not to mess with your traffic and have hours of downtime just because they cost a few bucks more than Comcast?
I think he was trying to give an example of why gov regs are good.;x
No, he was trying to pander to the left-leaning partisan audience with mod points. Why else would he aim his comment at Republicans? Are all Republicans opposed to all forms of regulation? Are all non-Republicans automatically in favor of them?
Do you need any more proof that the government needs strong regulative powers?
This is stupid one-sided political trolling. Why don't you take your partisan blinders off and ask yourself who it was that supported telecommunications deregulation back in the 90s? My memory is a little hazy but I'm pretty sure he was a Democrat who had a fondness for cigars and centrist (some would say "corporatist") domestic policy.
One could also make the counter-argument -- that it's the very involvement of government that gives Comcast their monopoly in the first place. Ever ask yourself why you can't just find some investors and start up a cable company to compete with them?
They should work with Obama to get executive orders and statutes written to position the federal government's management to not only hire 1099s like the private sector can, but to have that become the norm.
That will never happen. The public sector unions are huge supporters of the Democratic Party. Care to take a wild guess as to what they would think about a plan to increase the number of independent contractors working for government?
What would make you believe that? Because the Democrats are in charge? Pa-lease. That just means the no-bid contracts will be going to their friends instead of those of the GOP.
Amazing how the new kind of politics looks and smells a lot like the old, isn't it?
For legitimate rescue, I think dogs are great, useful, for most anything else as it intersects police work...starts to get wonky quickly.
You wouldn't think that if a police dog had located a bomb that would have taken your life if it hadn't been found. Just saying, they have other uses in between "War on Drugs" and "Rescue".
Of course I am also in favor of ending the retarded prohibition laws, because they just cause more harm than good.
if you really like thc you can never get too fucked
That depends on what you are looking for, doesn't it? If you are just looking to take the edge off for a few hours you probably don't want to get baked to the point that you have to concentrate really hard to remember your name.....
I've been at both points and have found that the "take the edge off" stage is generally more enjoyable than the "can't remember my own name" stage. Of course if I'm ever lucky enough to get to go to Amsterdam I suspect I'll wind up in the "can't remember his name" stage;)
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The BSA's tactic of requiring companies to be audited and then pay large amounts for any product that they can't prove that they own makes them pretty unpopular.
They seem to be a pretty popular way for disgruntled IT employees to screw over their employer though. Every BSA audit I've ever heard of or been involved in came about because of some employee or ex-employee with an axe to grind.
I've always wondered what happens if you refuse to let them onto your property. Presumably their only recourse would be to sue you and obtain access to your computer systems through the discovery process. Given the "speed" with which the court system moves I wonder if you could have the whole operation switched over an open source movement by the time it reached that point?
Alternatively what happens if you claim trade secrets or privacy restrictions (HIPAA?) on your computer system?
Is it really? I've never bothered to look at slashcode. I just always assumed the UID was 0 for AC's. It's pretty funny if they defined it as 666 though.
They can try to reverse the situation in China, but they won't see benefits for many, many years, and the potential drain on finances would be enormous.
I don't think "they" as in RIAA can do much about China. I do think that "they" as in the Federal Government could have some influence though. It seems absurd that we are running a trade deficit with China in the hundreds of billions of dollars while they condone the theft of billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property. The Chinese Government should do something about this or we should hit their goods with tariffs.
It's not free trade when we pay for their crap and they steal ours.
and no, I'm not new here.
Well obviously. "Anonymous Coward" has been here since the very beginning and has an even lower UID than CmdrTaco ;)
I'll save everybody the trouble and just link to the only one that's remotely interesting. The AOL-Time Warner merger. How'd that work out again? I stopped getting three AOL CDs/disks a week so they must have done something right ;)
I don't know if you're be facetious, but there is no right to keep and bear arms.
And that attitude right there is why your countrymen are losing freedoms on a regular basis. Your rights are not granted to you by the government -- they are natural rights that all human beings have. One of those is the right to keep and bear arms for defense of the person and community. The fact that you've allowed your Government to infringe upon your natural rights suggests to me that you have no concept of what your rights are and were destined to lose them before the debate even began.
the crown hasn't wanted an armed populace for a while.
You mean the Commons, right? Either way, therein lies your problem. Your Government doesn't regard your rights as inviolable. Hence why you continue to lose them as time goes on. The country that gave us the Magna Carta is now ruled by people that don't think you should have the right to remain silent, the right not to be a witness against yourself or the right to keep and bear arms.
Way to live up to your history. I guess the 13 colonies got out just in the nick of time, didn't we?
And it's hard to offend a British person. We just denigrate you for being different and then ignore you, mostly.
And people wonder where us Americans get it from ;) Yet another thing we can thank the mother country for :)
We do have a constitution. Parliament is the supreme power in the nation though, so effectively the constitution can be changed with a simple majority vote in the Commons.
How well does that system work at protecting your right against self-incrimination, right to remain silent or right to keep and bear arms?
Theft bears no damage to the general population
It does when the general population has to pay higher prices for merchandise because some of it keeps walking out of the store. Or when they have to pay a higher rate for homeowners/renters coverage because of the number of break-ins in their neighborhood.
And yes, making copyright infringement will make less cost for them, yes you will be protecting their rights, and yes it will cost the taxpayer to do so in the short term, but in the long term, it will result in much fairer and transparent copyright infringement prosecution system, and it will help keep prices down.
In the long term I don't understand why the industry is focusing so much of it's lobbying clout on going after teenagers who use Kazaa when there are whole countries out there (China, I'm looking at you) wherein the Governments all but condone copyright infringement on an industrial scale. Interestingly enough these countries are also the ones that we run a massive trade deficit with. It would seem to be in our collective interest to address this problem before we start worrying about the acne covered teenager down the street.
Countries like Portugal have decriminalised drugs but I think they are still illegal. I am guessing it is something to do with the enforcement.
I can't speak for Portugal but here in the states when they do that it's usually accomplished in one of two different ways:
1) Change in enforcement. I.e: We won't arrest you for possession unless you are doing something really stupid (smoking weed in public) and even if we do arrest you we are going to give you a slap on the wrist (stay out trouble for six months and the charges go away) without a criminal record.
2) Change in the laws. This is what my home state of New York has done. If you are caught with 25 grams or less of pot it's considered a "violation", not a misdemeanor or felony. You receive the same summons as you would for a traffic ticket and pay a $100 fine if convicted.
You forgot about the part where Rich Coke Addict gets elected as President and totally F's this country.
But it's OK 'cause he was Born Again and has One-On-Ones with God now.
When did Obama claim to be born again? ;)
Oh, wait, n/m, you were talking about the last hypocritical President that admitted to using coke yet remains in favor of drug prohibition. Sorry, I thought you were talking about the current one.
You will need some regulation to prevent companies from coming in and abusing the public right of way. Perhaps both legacy and newcomers will need to pay right of way fees to keep it under control.
Hey, I've never said that some regulation isn't required. You just have to be weary of regulatory capture that results in companies like AT&T abusing the right of way with the full force of the law backing them up. To me the ideal balance would be somewhere between "you must negotiate with each landowner over the placement of each utility pole" and "we can put whatever we want on your property and your only choice is to bend over and take it"
But I think you answer your own question. They know the approximate rate of cable adoption, and they can manage the costs of buildout and franchise fees, in exchange for the monopoly market.
And you don't think that cable network would still be expanded even without the benefit of the monopoly? In the modern era where people want high speed internet access and 200 channels to zone out with? Somehow I suspect someone would be there to service that market even without the promise of a Governmental monopoly. Whatever arguments could have been made for it in the past don't really seem to apply to the modern world.
No, but it certainly seems like a lot of the loudest conservatives (note: not all conservatives are Republicans and vice versa, but people rarely make the distinction, same with liberals / Democrats) are always shouting about limited government, free capitalism, let the free market solve all our problems, and so on.
If you tune to some of the loudest leftists (note: not all leftists are Democrats and vice versa) you will hear them shouting things that would have made Karl Marx cringe. The rich only got rich on the back of the poor, Wall Street is responsible for every single thing that goes wrong in this country, "General betray us", etc, etc, etc.
When your exposure to conservative ideals comes from these guys
Do you judge liberalism by the likes of Michael Moore? No? Then why judge conservatism by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh?
It's usually accompanied by lines like "Do you really think the government can do anything right?"
Can it though? In my area we have a mixture of private garbage collection and municipal. Some communities have municipal service and some have private service. Follow the two trucks around for a few minutes one day to see the difference between the private sector and the public sector. The private guys haul ass -- the municipal guys prod along and are lucky to cover half the ground that the private guys do. You know what makes it even more pathetic? The muni guys are paid nearly three times as much.
but the people asking are usually happy to be protected by a government-run police, fire, and military force, drink from the municpial water supply, drive on state-constructed roads, use cellphones and GPS and other things made possible by NASA, eat food and take medicine knowing it's been inspected by the FDA and they don't need to personally inspect the farm / pharmacy, live and work in buildings that won't collapse because they've been built to government-approved codes, and so forth. Seems a strange position to take, if you ask me.
I don't think it's strange at all. Some of what you just listed could be accomplished more efficiently by the private sector (municipal water). NASA didn't set out to deploy GPS -- it set out to keep us competitive with the Russians. It's great that we got some civilian applications out of that investment but don't kid yourself into thinking that's why we spent the money.
As far as the FDA goes, I don't trust them at all and many people would argue that they've done more harm than good. They've turned the process for approving new drugs into a bureaucratic nightmare and have denied dying people the right to take experimental medicines even though they are fully aware of the risks of doing so. Given the events of the last few years I think I'd trust an organization like the Underwriters Laboratories more than Uncle Sam. My UL approved outlet and appliances have yet to burn my house down. My FDA approved peanut butter and drugs on the other hand....
For telecom considerations, wireless has a pretty low infrastructure requirement.
And? The cable company doesn't have to write a check with nine zeros on it to the US Treasury in order to establish themselves. Not having worked for the accounting department at AT&T or Comcast I can't attest as to which one is more expensive but I'd wager that whatever money the wireless carrier saves by not having to string wires is offset by the amount of money that they had to pay to obtain licenses for the frequencies that they operate on.
So I would again ask why it's necessary for local Governments to guarantee a monopoly to the likes of Comcast and Time Warner? If the barrier to entry is as high as you say it is then why do the cable companies willingly operate under such a system? Do they enjoy paying franchise fees or do they get something out of the arrangement?
A rational incumbent economic actor in a high cap industry will dramatically reduce prices if an interloper tries to deploy a similar product.
Such behavior may very well be illegal and would seem to be easier to address than the clusterfuck that we have now. In any event that doesn't directly answer the question -- why is government complacent with the cable monopoly? They don't (at least in my area) franchise the power company or the telephone company. Only the cable company is singled out for this treatment. Why?
Hey, I didn't say I was concerned about random bomb attacks. All I said was that police dogs aren't limited to rescuing people or finding drugs. They can find bombs and track down fleeing criminals as well. In either case if they save a human life I'd say they did their job and were worth having around.
Mind you, I don't think they should be able to be used to obtain probable cause. It's entirely too easy for them to hit on something by mistake or even for a less than honest handler to have them "hit" on something. I don't have a problem with the police using them once they have probable cause though. If the officer pulls you over and smells pot smoke he's probably justified in using the dog to help locate your contraband. If he pulls you over and his dog starts barking I don't think that should give him the right to search your property.
(Of course, I also think the War on Drugs is complete bullshit, but that's another discussion....)
Only if more people vote for the union than vote against it. That's what elections mean, whether the votes are cast by checking a card or by raising a hand or by super-secret, computer-tallied, proprietary Sequoia machines.
Except if you make me raise my hand in front of my co-workers and boss I'm potentially subject to intimidation and coercion by either side. Tell me, why are the Union folks so eager to see the elimination of the secret ballot?
People who like to spread FUD about unions and organized labor generally really ought to take a look at how organized labor was instrumental in creating a prosperous middle class in America who could count out safe working conditions and reasonable working hours.
And people who drink the Union kool-aid really ought to look a hard look at the downsides of organized labor. Tell me, would you rather work somewhere that rewards you for competence or somewhere that rewards you based on seniority? Guess which system is more likely under the unionized shop?
Unions were necessary back in the day. Anybody who has ever taken a tour of an old coal mine and seen the working conditions those poor bastards worked under can attest to that. The problem is that many of the Unions ceased to be about the workers a long time ago. Now they are all about protecting the institution and expanding it's power and reach. This tends to happen with most organizations after awhile and is one of the many reasons why I'm skeptical of unions.
and face it, the Republicans deregulated, deregulated, and deregulated some more. Of course there were exceptions, but on the whole they're mostly for deregulation.
You won't get any argument out of me that the Republicans fucked up and dug us a hole that will take the better part of a generation to dig out of. I'm just tired of left-leaning partisans wielding the GWB administration as a shield to deflect any and all criticism of the current government. Here's the typical conservation with one of them:
"I'm worried about the national deficit and how much it's going to rise under Obama."
"When George W. Bush took office he had a SURPLUS. Then he passed his TAX CUT FOR THE RICH and now we have a huge deficit. Republicans can't claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility any longer"
Umm, yeah, and how does that relate to my current concerns?
Not all regulation is good, not all deregulation is bad; what you need is effective regulation.
I don't have a problem with all regulation. It's clearly called for in some instances. I just don't think it's fair to blame the free market for the likes of Comcast when Comcast isn't operating under anything that remotely resembles a free market.
And the answer is found in Econ 101 - significant barriers to entry (massive infrastructure requirement) and the inefficiency of duplicating expensive infrastructure.
Neither one of which has stopped the wireless industry from rolling out no less than four different networks across large portions of the United States. That's not even counting the regional players either. Am I supposed to believe that T-Mobile can find it profitable to roll their own network to compete with AT&T and Verizon but some upstart couldn't do the same with cable in my community if the local government would let him try?
whoever gets there first has a huge advantage over latecomers, and can drive them out of business by undercutting their prices
What makes you think it's all about price? Verizon has come out and said that they don't intend to compete on price with regards to FIOS. And they don't have too -- many people are perfectly willing to pay the money they are asking for the service they are offering. You wouldn't do business with an ISP that promised not to mess with your traffic and have hours of downtime just because they cost a few bucks more than Comcast?
I think he was trying to give an example of why gov regs are good. ;x
No, he was trying to pander to the left-leaning partisan audience with mod points. Why else would he aim his comment at Republicans? Are all Republicans opposed to all forms of regulation? Are all non-Republicans automatically in favor of them?
Do you need any more proof that the government needs strong regulative powers?
This is stupid one-sided political trolling. Why don't you take your partisan blinders off and ask yourself who it was that supported telecommunications deregulation back in the 90s? My memory is a little hazy but I'm pretty sure he was a Democrat who had a fondness for cigars and centrist (some would say "corporatist") domestic policy.
One could also make the counter-argument -- that it's the very involvement of government that gives Comcast their monopoly in the first place. Ever ask yourself why you can't just find some investors and start up a cable company to compete with them?
They should work with Obama to get executive orders and statutes written to position the federal government's management to not only hire 1099s like the private sector can, but to have that become the norm.
That will never happen. The public sector unions are huge supporters of the Democratic Party. Care to take a wild guess as to what they would think about a plan to increase the number of independent contractors working for government?
I thought the days of Haliburten were over ...
What would make you believe that? Because the Democrats are in charge? Pa-lease. That just means the no-bid contracts will be going to their friends instead of those of the GOP.
Amazing how the new kind of politics looks and smells a lot like the old, isn't it?
For legitimate rescue, I think dogs are great, useful, for most anything else as it intersects police work...starts to get wonky quickly.
You wouldn't think that if a police dog had located a bomb that would have taken your life if it hadn't been found. Just saying, they have other uses in between "War on Drugs" and "Rescue".
Of course I am also in favor of ending the retarded prohibition laws, because they just cause more harm than good.
Amen to that.
if you really like thc you can never get too fucked
That depends on what you are looking for, doesn't it? If you are just looking to take the edge off for a few hours you probably don't want to get baked to the point that you have to concentrate really hard to remember your name.....
I've been at both points and have found that the "take the edge off" stage is generally more enjoyable than the "can't remember my own name" stage. Of course if I'm ever lucky enough to get to go to Amsterdam I suspect I'll wind up in the "can't remember his name" stage ;)
NASA is years away from building, lofting and installing anything that requires miles of tubing.
That's not true. They've got a website don't they?