The ultimate test of the chemistry hypothesis is be to construct life from inert chemicals off the shelf.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand science at all.
Science isn't in the business of proving hypotheses. It's in the business of disproving them. The one trait that all theories of science have is that they are all possible to disprove. The same goes for the theory of the chemical (or, more precisely, the physical) basis of life.
In this case, it's real simple: if you take apart something living and find a mechanism that doesn't have its roots in chemistry or physics, then and only then can you say that life isn't based on physical properties alone.
Until then, the reason we say that life is based strictly on physical properties is that not only have attempts at the above not ever uncovered something that wasn't physical in nature, this theory makes predictions that so far have proven correct. For instance, it follows from the physical nature of life theory that disrupting a life form at the physical level should cause it to cease functioning. And that's exactly what happens. Whenever we discover something new about the chemistry or physics of life, we find new means of causing life to stop functioning properly. We find new ways to kill.
If life had its roots in something other than physics or chemistry then we'd expect to be able to determine that. There should be, must be, some way to differentiate between life based strictly on physical properties and life based on something else. Without that the hypothesis that life is based on something other than physical mechanisms is untestable, and therefore worthless.
Even if Microsoft turned around tomorrow and made everything GPL, fixed their security holes and sent chocolates and hookers to Linus and RMS, I'd still prefer Unix for the power of the command line.
Yeah, but what if they sent chocolates and hookers to you?
I think the point was that the coffee was way too hot, scalding temperature, when there is no way it should have been. Who would have thought that there was two sides to an issue?
Yeah, and I'm sure that it was the first time she'd ever bought coffee from McDonald's, so there's no way she could have possibly known about the temperature of the coffee, right?
I'm a small-ISP manager, so take the below with the corresponding grain of salt: Bytes cost us money.
No, bytes don't cost you money, your connection does.
Understand this: there is no fixed relationship between traffic and cost.
Here's what a connection costs:
Equipment acquisition: variable, one-time charge. Varies based on the capabilities of the equipment. But this equipment is more or less subject to Moore's Law, so the acquisition costs of equipment with a given bandwidth capability should be dropping over time unless the market's broken.
Provisioning: fixed, one-time charge. More or less independent of bandwidth. It costs about as much to run a copper wire as it does to run fiber, but fiber has a lot more bandwidth.
Support and maintenance: Fixed, periodic cost. There may be some variation here because the highest-end equipment tends to be rarer and thus getting people who can maintain it well will be more expensive, but other than that the problems are the same and the expertise required to keep it going is the same.
Business overhead: Variable, periodic cost. Varies based primarily on the size of the company relative to the number of customers it has.
The only cost that has any relationship at all with bandwidth capability is the acquisition of equipment, and as I noted that should be something which drops significantly over time because of Moore's Law.
So: the fact that your upstream provider charges you based on your bandwidth usage is artificial. It needn't be that way. I'll go so far as to say that it shouldn't be that way.
It seems to me that a lot of this nonsense would disappear if upstream providers charged for what they're actually providing: a pipe, and little more.
Anyway, people need to get a clue about what bandwidth costs and why it costs. Then they'd realize that download caps are nonsense.
Remember that the FCC right now is run by Michael "Corporate Bitch" Powell.
That means that you can expect at a minimum that this rule will go into effect much later than what they're currently saying, or more likely that it'll be overturned entirely.
People routinely pay 25% more for one car over another brand, becauses it trendy, or the market leader, or whatnot, even though the cars are nearly identical.
Yes, they do. But they do not routinely pay 100% more than another brand just because it's "trendy" or whatever. Nobody pays that much more for essentially the same thing unless they have no other choice.
What is being presented is a claim that Microsoft enjoys abnormally high profit margins, and the question has been raised is whether those margins are, in fact,
abnormally high.
A company that doesn't have abnormally high profit margins in a market won't and can't ever end up with 40 billion dollars of cash in the bank while at the same time all of its competitors in that same market either go bankrupt or barely survive.
Think about it. What problem(s) are we trying to solve here?
If you're trying to (for instance) prevent people from taking over an airplane, then the answer is simple: you make that impossible, by completely separating the control section of the aircraft from the passenger compartment of the aircraft. A passenger can't gain control of the aircraft if he can't get at the controls.
Similarly, if you don't want people to bomb an aircraft, then prevent them from being able to get one on board. That's what luggage screening is all about.
So how do IDs help with either of those problems? The answer is that they don't.
IDs aren't needed for any stage of airline transportation. They're not needed for the purchase of a ticket (one can use cash for that, or a credit card that requires a code to unlock it. Such a code is usually referred to as a PIN, but that term is actually not accurate), they're not needed to board the plane (you have a ticket for that), and they're not needed for collection of luggage at the destination (you have a ticket for that).
Rental of an automobile is a bit more of a problem, but only because of the possibility that the automobile may get stolen or damaged in an accident. Easy enough to deal with, though: the renter must supply a valid insurance number. If the number is fraudulent, then the actual owner of the insurance policy can get the number changed, just like he can get his credit card number changed in the event that his card is stolen. Proof that you can legally drive requires that you show a driver's license, but there's nothing inherent about a driver's license that requires it to be a photo-ID. Today a driver's license could just as easily work the way ATM cards work: the owner would have to supply a number when using it to rent a car or something.
If you think about it, you'll find that almost everything can be accomplished safely without the use of any form of ID. And the reason is that you're not trying to prevent someone from doing something, but rather trying to prevent someone from doing something. It's the something that needs to be dealt with, not the someone.
The only reason for a government to be interested in an individual is to make life difficult for that specific person. But that's exactly what we don't want to do, really: we want to prevent actions, not individuals.
The only truly valid reason I can think of for government interest in an individual is because they believe that individual has done something harmful. In that case, good classical detective work is what's needed: tracking evidence back to a location and eventually to an individual. You don't generally need an ID card to do that, because such detective work was successfully done long before ID cards were conceived of. Today, once you have DNA evidence, you can verify that it belongs to a specific person by matching it against that specific person's DNA. But it's proper that the authorities be required to get a warrant before performing such a match against a specific individual: the evidence against a person should be more specific than just their DNA.
Keep all this in mind whenever someone claims they need people to carry some sort of ID.
MELBOURNE, Florida, November 4, 2002 -- Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS) announced today that its Type 1 Encrypted, Secure Wireless Local Area Network (SWLAN) product, ClipperNet 11(TM), has been certified by the National Security Agency's (NSA) Commercial COMSEC Endorsement Program (CCEP). CLipperNet 11 is a revolutionary new product that enables civilian users to securely communicate multimedia information, including data, voice and video, via a wireless network at an unprecedented 11 Megabits-per-second (Mbps).
"ClipperNet 11 is an innovative new product that allows us to provide our civilian customers with the advantages of secure wireless communications," said an NSA spokesperson. "With Type 1 Encryption, NSANet 11 meets the Department of Defense's stringent requirements for wireless transmission of both classified and unclassified information."
When asked whether the product had any relationship with the Clipper chip proposal of the mid 1990's, the NSA declined to comment. "Er, emm... we don't have any comment on that", said one NSA spokesperson, who was last seen leaving hastily.
"Don't worry", a Harris spokesperson said. "We would never even think of embedding any technology into our products that would make it possible for secret government agencies to read the encrypted data stream, and we would certainly never use any information gained in that way for marketing purposes. Trust us!"
Version control is something any user-friendly system should handle automatically. It seems to me that programs should automatically save the diffs against the previous version and should save the full version on a very regular basis (with saves happening after a relatively short timeout or after a certain amount of changes have been made, whichever comes first). Reverting to an old version is a matter of applying the diffs in reverse to the current version. You should always be able to drop back to any previous version you want.
There's no need for a "save as new version" button: the program will do that automatically when you exit, when you switch to a different program, or when the timeout/max diff condition occurs.
What is needed in addition is something that should be intuitively obvious: "create a new document based on this one". This will create a "fork", and doing so will cause the program to ask you by what name you'd like to refer to the new document (as it should whenever you create a new document). Perhaps this is what you were talking about.
We've gotten so used to working with low-level files that methodologies like this get discarded automatically by developers. But that should be done only if there's a lot of hard data that shows that users actually have a harder time dealing with it that way. That may be true of users who are used to dealing with files, but I strongly suspect people who are new to computers will have an easier time with an application that doesn't know about "files" but only about "documents". The system should keep track of the mapping between the two, and the filestore should never be seen directly except with a tool designed to manage it.
Now if you think you can write a filter that can translate the above or something like it into a useable document without inside information, you're welcome to try. But you'll have no more success than you would if you were trying to reverse engineer the current Word format.
The fact that a document is in XML doesn't mean shit, and I wish people would get that through their heads.
Anonymity has never been a right of every citizen (that's the American way, just ask the advertising and marketing industry).
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." -- 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Just because the right to anonymity isn't enumerated doesn't mean it's nonexistent. Given the situation and the values of the framers during the time the U.S. was founded, and especially given the anonymous nature of the Federalist Papers, I'd say the framers probably thought that anonymity was a right even if they didn't explicitly enumerate it.
The problem is that this ruling sets a precedent. Even if you started a new lawsuit, it seems to me that this ruling would significantly reduce the probability that a verdict in your favor would be reached.
In the settlement it talks about MS having to disclose information only to companies with a sound business model that meats critera set out by MS. Where does OSS fall? Can MS say OSS is not up to its standards and therefore not release the code?
Hell, Microsoft can rightly say that any business model involves competing with Microsoft is automatically unsound because Microsoft is a monopoly, and you can't compete with a monopoly!
Think about it: these days Microsoft can get away with acknowledging that it really is a monopoly ("We're a monopoly. So? What are you gonna do about it, huh?") and start acting like one. Nothing will happen to them if they do this. The U.S. government, the only entity that could do anything, has proven that it has neither the balls nor the skills to take Microsoft down.
Guys, I hate to say it, but Microsoft is free. They've won completely. There's nobody left in the U.S. who can stand in their way. Because of this, Linux in the U.S. will probably be dead within the decade.
I'll continue to use Linux as long as I can, but I fully expect Palladium and TCPA (or its descendants) to make it horribly expensive, and ultimately impossible, to do so in the future.
This really sucks. The two things I love the most, free computing and personal aviation, will probably disappear in the next 20 years (see
this for why I believe personal aviation will disappear).
No, really. Think about it. If you don't buy it..they won't sell it.
For this to work, there has to be something else that the customer can buy.
But if all the manufacturers agree to build only Palladium-capable equipment (anyone who refuses will suddenly no longer be able to host Windows, since it'll require a Palladium-capable system to run it), customers won't have any other choice.
What'll probably happen is that manufacturers will continue to supply non-Palladium-enabled hardware, but will sell it as a premium, since obviously only someone who is running a "server class" OS like Linux will be interested in such hardware... right? Expect Linux-capable hardware to cost 3-5 times as much as Windows-capable hardware. Now what do you think that will do to the Linux market, hmm?
And they'll be able to get away with doing that, too. That's what happens when the OS that requires Palladium has 90+% of the market.
Seriously... I think it would be close to hilarious to see what they would come up with to try to stop that.
What they would come up with is probably close to what many "ISP"s (that are owned by the media corps) in the U.S. would like to do to their individual ("peon") customers: block all inbound TCP connections and all inbound UDP packets, and only allow outbound TCP connections -- which will of course go through a transparent proxy.
If you want to actually sit there and listen on a port, you have to buy the premium "server" service -- at a factor of 5 price increase.
You can bet this is exactly what will happen in the U.S. when sufficient consolidation amongst the broadband providers occurs. I'm frankly somewhat surprised it hasn't happened already.
"J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall: 1. Require Microsoft to document, disclose or license to third parties: (a)
...
or (b) any API, interface or
other information related to any Microsoft product if lawfully directed not to do
so by a governmental agency of competent jurisdiction."
Hmm....so if the DOJ is buddy-buddy with Microsoft (anyone here who thinks they aren't raise your hand so you can be smacked with a cluestick), they can "order" Microsoft to not release any API information that Microsoft doesn't want to.
DOJ: "We're sorry, Microsoft, but we simply can't allow you to release API information that you haven't already released to the public, except that which you decide would be beneficial to you. For, um, "National Security" reasons... yeah, that's it. Sorry about that <wink, wink, nudge, nudge>."
It's not that these companies brought companies to the market, it's how they misrepresented the dogs they brought to the market.
It's worse than that, actually. Many, perhaps even most, VCs intentionally sacrificed the survivability of the company they were managing in order to make it look good for an IPO. How many of us heard the mantra "grow now, worry about being profitable later"? That mantra was intentional: its sole purpose was to make the company look good for an IPO. Smoke and mirrors, in other words.
And as a result, it all came crashing down: if your long term viability is questionable, investors will eventually figure it out and your market value will tank. And it did, for so many companies that the ripple effects are still being felt today, a couple of years later.
This is why I believe VCs are much more responsible for today's economy than Dan seems willing to acknowledge. It was rare to hear of a startup company where the mantra wasn't "grow now, be profitable later". That mantra usually came from VC management, not the startups' founders.
(Put your name in a blank... and a strip of duct tape over your mouth. Bye bye, 1st Amendment.)
Think giving money to politicians is the same thing as exercising your right to free speech, huh?
Okay, then you'd better be willing to take this argument all the way. It means that if I'm on trial, I should be able to give as much money as I want to the judge, or to any member of the jury, right? Because after all, I'm just exercising my right to free speech, aren't I? I lose the right to free speech only when I'm convicted, and not one moment before, right? And if they happen to change their mind, well, that just means they found my argument persuasive, right? Just another exercise of free speech, right?
Or if I've been pulled over by a cop, I can give him as much money as I'd like, because it's just a form of free speech, right? If the cop decides to "overlook" my transgression, well, that's certainly his right. It just means that my "speech" was sufficiently persuasive to change his mind, right?
Or if I own a business and want to dump some waste into the local river, the law says I can't. But I might be able to convince others with the appropriate "speech" that I shouldn't be prevented from doing so.
Are you starting to get the idea yet? Either money is speech or it isn't. You can't have it both ways at the same time.
I mean, the government gets whatever it wants, because it has all the power. It has all the power because it has all the guns, and that is especially true in the UK.
What differs from country to country is how well the government knows what it wants. If the government in this case is determined enough to pass a law requiring that ISPs keep mandatory records, there's nothing the ISPs can do about it. If the population of the UK is anything like that of the US, the people won't even notice or care.
I guess the biggest difference between the UK and the US is that the media isn't privately owned to quite the same degree in the UK as it is in the US, right? But that media which isn't owned by private entities is owned by the government, so we get right back to the issue of how much the government itself actually wants this.
No matter how this turns out, though, I have to give a hand to the ISPs for telling the government where to stick it...
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, they have the same rights as individuals.
This is when the U.S. began its slide from a representative republic towards a corporate plutocracy.
When the world exceeds your cynicism, then you should adjust your cynicism appropriately.
In this case, it appears you need to become more cynical than you are.
I suspect that I'm more or less sufficiently cynical. I certainly hope so, at any rate...
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand science at all.
Science isn't in the business of proving hypotheses. It's in the business of disproving them. The one trait that all theories of science have is that they are all possible to disprove. The same goes for the theory of the chemical (or, more precisely, the physical) basis of life.
In this case, it's real simple: if you take apart something living and find a mechanism that doesn't have its roots in chemistry or physics, then and only then can you say that life isn't based on physical properties alone.
Until then, the reason we say that life is based strictly on physical properties is that not only have attempts at the above not ever uncovered something that wasn't physical in nature, this theory makes predictions that so far have proven correct. For instance, it follows from the physical nature of life theory that disrupting a life form at the physical level should cause it to cease functioning. And that's exactly what happens. Whenever we discover something new about the chemistry or physics of life, we find new means of causing life to stop functioning properly. We find new ways to kill.
If life had its roots in something other than physics or chemistry then we'd expect to be able to determine that. There should be, must be, some way to differentiate between life based strictly on physical properties and life based on something else. Without that the hypothesis that life is based on something other than physical mechanisms is untestable, and therefore worthless.
Yeah, but what if they sent chocolates and hookers to you?
Yeah, and I'm sure that it was the first time she'd ever bought coffee from McDonald's, so there's no way she could have possibly known about the temperature of the coffee, right?
Not bloody likely.
No, bytes don't cost you money, your connection does.
Understand this: there is no fixed relationship between traffic and cost.
Here's what a connection costs:
The only cost that has any relationship at all with bandwidth capability is the acquisition of equipment, and as I noted that should be something which drops significantly over time because of Moore's Law.
So: the fact that your upstream provider charges you based on your bandwidth usage is artificial. It needn't be that way. I'll go so far as to say that it shouldn't be that way.
It seems to me that a lot of this nonsense would disappear if upstream providers charged for what they're actually providing: a pipe, and little more.
Anyway, people need to get a clue about what bandwidth costs and why it costs. Then they'd realize that download caps are nonsense.
That means that you can expect at a minimum that this rule will go into effect much later than what they're currently saying, or more likely that it'll be overturned entirely.
Yes, they do. But they do not routinely pay 100% more than another brand just because it's "trendy" or whatever. Nobody pays that much more for essentially the same thing unless they have no other choice.
A company that doesn't have abnormally high profit margins in a market won't and can't ever end up with 40 billion dollars of cash in the bank while at the same time all of its competitors in that same market either go bankrupt or barely survive.
If you're trying to (for instance) prevent people from taking over an airplane, then the answer is simple: you make that impossible, by completely separating the control section of the aircraft from the passenger compartment of the aircraft. A passenger can't gain control of the aircraft if he can't get at the controls.
Similarly, if you don't want people to bomb an aircraft, then prevent them from being able to get one on board. That's what luggage screening is all about.
So how do IDs help with either of those problems? The answer is that they don't.
IDs aren't needed for any stage of airline transportation. They're not needed for the purchase of a ticket (one can use cash for that, or a credit card that requires a code to unlock it. Such a code is usually referred to as a PIN, but that term is actually not accurate), they're not needed to board the plane (you have a ticket for that), and they're not needed for collection of luggage at the destination (you have a ticket for that).
Rental of an automobile is a bit more of a problem, but only because of the possibility that the automobile may get stolen or damaged in an accident. Easy enough to deal with, though: the renter must supply a valid insurance number. If the number is fraudulent, then the actual owner of the insurance policy can get the number changed, just like he can get his credit card number changed in the event that his card is stolen. Proof that you can legally drive requires that you show a driver's license, but there's nothing inherent about a driver's license that requires it to be a photo-ID. Today a driver's license could just as easily work the way ATM cards work: the owner would have to supply a number when using it to rent a car or something.
If you think about it, you'll find that almost everything can be accomplished safely without the use of any form of ID. And the reason is that you're not trying to prevent someone from doing something, but rather trying to prevent someone from doing something. It's the something that needs to be dealt with, not the someone.
The only reason for a government to be interested in an individual is to make life difficult for that specific person. But that's exactly what we don't want to do, really: we want to prevent actions, not individuals.
The only truly valid reason I can think of for government interest in an individual is because they believe that individual has done something harmful. In that case, good classical detective work is what's needed: tracking evidence back to a location and eventually to an individual. You don't generally need an ID card to do that, because such detective work was successfully done long before ID cards were conceived of. Today, once you have DNA evidence, you can verify that it belongs to a specific person by matching it against that specific person's DNA. But it's proper that the authorities be required to get a warrant before performing such a match against a specific individual: the evidence against a person should be more specific than just their DNA.
Keep all this in mind whenever someone claims they need people to carry some sort of ID.
Even this probably won't happen even if the civilians wanted it to. Here's why (link is to Kuro5hin).
"ClipperNet 11 is an innovative new product that allows us to provide our civilian customers with the advantages of secure wireless communications," said an NSA spokesperson. "With Type 1 Encryption, NSANet 11 meets the Department of Defense's stringent requirements for wireless transmission of both classified and unclassified information."
When asked whether the product had any relationship with the Clipper chip proposal of the mid 1990's, the NSA declined to comment. "Er, emm ... we don't have any comment on that", said one NSA spokesperson, who was last seen leaving hastily.
"Don't worry", a Harris spokesperson said. "We would never even think of embedding any technology into our products that would make it possible for secret government agencies to read the encrypted data stream, and we would certainly never use any information gained in that way for marketing purposes. Trust us!"
Harris shares were up 2 3/4 points today.
There's no need for a "save as new version" button: the program will do that automatically when you exit, when you switch to a different program, or when the timeout/max diff condition occurs.
What is needed in addition is something that should be intuitively obvious: "create a new document based on this one". This will create a "fork", and doing so will cause the program to ask you by what name you'd like to refer to the new document (as it should whenever you create a new document). Perhaps this is what you were talking about.
We've gotten so used to working with low-level files that methodologies like this get discarded automatically by developers. But that should be done only if there's a lot of hard data that shows that users actually have a harder time dealing with it that way. That may be true of users who are used to dealing with files, but I strongly suspect people who are new to computers will have an easier time with an application that doesn't know about "files" but only about "documents". The system should keep track of the mapping between the two, and the filestore should never be seen directly except with a tool designed to manage it.
All IMHO, of course.
Sigh.
I really wish people would get a clue about XML.
The following is valid (more or less...enough to make the point) XML:
Now if you think you can write a filter that can translate the above or something like it into a useable document without inside information, you're welcome to try. But you'll have no more success than you would if you were trying to reverse engineer the current Word format.
The fact that a document is in XML doesn't mean shit, and I wish people would get that through their heads.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." -- 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Just because the right to anonymity isn't enumerated doesn't mean it's nonexistent. Given the situation and the values of the framers during the time the U.S. was founded, and especially given the anonymous nature of the Federalist Papers, I'd say the framers probably thought that anonymity was a right even if they didn't explicitly enumerate it.
Yes. And what has happened to Echelon since then? Not a goddamned thing.
So don't get your hopes up.
Sigh...
Hell, Microsoft can rightly say that any business model involves competing with Microsoft is automatically unsound because Microsoft is a monopoly, and you can't compete with a monopoly!
Think about it: these days Microsoft can get away with acknowledging that it really is a monopoly ("We're a monopoly. So? What are you gonna do about it, huh?") and start acting like one. Nothing will happen to them if they do this. The U.S. government, the only entity that could do anything, has proven that it has neither the balls nor the skills to take Microsoft down.
Guys, I hate to say it, but Microsoft is free. They've won completely. There's nobody left in the U.S. who can stand in their way. Because of this, Linux in the U.S. will probably be dead within the decade.
I'll continue to use Linux as long as I can, but I fully expect Palladium and TCPA (or its descendants) to make it horribly expensive, and ultimately impossible, to do so in the future.
This really sucks. The two things I love the most, free computing and personal aviation, will probably disappear in the next 20 years (see this for why I believe personal aviation will disappear).
For this to work, there has to be something else that the customer can buy.
But if all the manufacturers agree to build only Palladium-capable equipment (anyone who refuses will suddenly no longer be able to host Windows, since it'll require a Palladium-capable system to run it), customers won't have any other choice.
What'll probably happen is that manufacturers will continue to supply non-Palladium-enabled hardware, but will sell it as a premium, since obviously only someone who is running a "server class" OS like Linux will be interested in such hardware ... right? Expect Linux-capable hardware to cost 3-5 times as much as Windows-capable hardware. Now what do you think that will do to the Linux market, hmm?
And they'll be able to get away with doing that, too. That's what happens when the OS that requires Palladium has 90+% of the market.
What they would come up with is probably close to what many "ISP"s (that are owned by the media corps) in the U.S. would like to do to their individual ("peon") customers: block all inbound TCP connections and all inbound UDP packets, and only allow outbound TCP connections -- which will of course go through a transparent proxy.
If you want to actually sit there and listen on a port, you have to buy the premium "server" service -- at a factor of 5 price increase.
You can bet this is exactly what will happen in the U.S. when sufficient consolidation amongst the broadband providers occurs. I'm frankly somewhat surprised it hasn't happened already.
Hmm....so if the DOJ is buddy-buddy with Microsoft (anyone here who thinks they aren't raise your hand so you can be smacked with a cluestick), they can "order" Microsoft to not release any API information that Microsoft doesn't want to.
DOJ: "We're sorry, Microsoft, but we simply can't allow you to release API information that you haven't already released to the public, except that which you decide would be beneficial to you. For, um, "National Security" reasons ... yeah, that's it. Sorry about that <wink, wink, nudge, nudge>."
It's worse than that, actually. Many, perhaps even most, VCs intentionally sacrificed the survivability of the company they were managing in order to make it look good for an IPO. How many of us heard the mantra "grow now, worry about being profitable later"? That mantra was intentional: its sole purpose was to make the company look good for an IPO. Smoke and mirrors, in other words.
And as a result, it all came crashing down: if your long term viability is questionable, investors will eventually figure it out and your market value will tank. And it did, for so many companies that the ripple effects are still being felt today, a couple of years later.
This is why I believe VCs are much more responsible for today's economy than Dan seems willing to acknowledge. It was rare to hear of a startup company where the mantra wasn't "grow now, be profitable later". That mantra usually came from VC management, not the startups' founders.
XNU/Darwin??
Think giving money to politicians is the same thing as exercising your right to free speech, huh?
Okay, then you'd better be willing to take this argument all the way. It means that if I'm on trial, I should be able to give as much money as I want to the judge, or to any member of the jury, right? Because after all, I'm just exercising my right to free speech, aren't I? I lose the right to free speech only when I'm convicted, and not one moment before, right? And if they happen to change their mind, well, that just means they found my argument persuasive, right? Just another exercise of free speech, right?
Or if I've been pulled over by a cop, I can give him as much money as I'd like, because it's just a form of free speech, right? If the cop decides to "overlook" my transgression, well, that's certainly his right. It just means that my "speech" was sufficiently persuasive to change his mind, right?
Or if I own a business and want to dump some waste into the local river, the law says I can't. But I might be able to convince others with the appropriate "speech" that I shouldn't be prevented from doing so.
Are you starting to get the idea yet? Either money is speech or it isn't. You can't have it both ways at the same time.
I mean, the government gets whatever it wants, because it has all the power. It has all the power because it has all the guns, and that is especially true in the UK.
What differs from country to country is how well the government knows what it wants. If the government in this case is determined enough to pass a law requiring that ISPs keep mandatory records, there's nothing the ISPs can do about it. If the population of the UK is anything like that of the US, the people won't even notice or care.
I guess the biggest difference between the UK and the US is that the media isn't privately owned to quite the same degree in the UK as it is in the US, right? But that media which isn't owned by private entities is owned by the government, so we get right back to the issue of how much the government itself actually wants this.
No matter how this turns out, though, I have to give a hand to the ISPs for telling the government where to stick it...