You're dodging the original point to which I was responding -- that of censorship of certain foul words, a practice for which we have a double-standard: in newspapers, censorship is bad, but on the radio and TV, it's good. At least, that is the effect on society the FCC has.
I'm saying that they are bombarding me with radiation. Do you understand that one bombards my home, against my will, with radiation 24 hours a day?
Are radio waves (EM waves, really) harmful to the body? Evidence?
We get bombarded with all kinds of radiation on a daily basis. Radiation from the Sun, radium, radiation that is *still* in the atmosphere from above-ground nuclear explosions over the past half-century, and every single electrical device you own -- including the computer you're using to respond to me (look out for those nasty radiations from the CRT).
But the question is, "are these things dangerous? Do they promote cancerous growths?" Radiation from cellphones is thought to increase the chances of cancer, so it's certainly a possibility. But the realistic question is "how much am I affected? Is the trade-off for this vastly-improved technology worth the increased risk (if one exists at all) of cancer?"
And that depends on the risk.
In any case, unless you're concerned about other forms of radiation, your worries are rather irrational.
Again, by worrying about the effects of radio waves (while, ironically, sitting in front of a computer responding to me), you're ignoring my original point. The overall discussion here is that of freedom of speech and censorship and government approval of speech -- these are questions of content (words), not of medium (means of transmitting words)...
Because if I want a newspaper, I have to go out and get it, or pay someone to deliver it. Radio is beamed into my home against my will. To get beamed into my house against my will, it is beamed over goverment land, and crosses state lines, and all that.
So? You still have to go out and get a radio to intercept those radio waves. Without going out and getting a radio, your ability to intercept that information is as impossible as it is by not going out and getting a newspaper; both require action on your part in order to gain access to foul language.
I still fail to see the difference. Both are mediums over which foul language may be carried, so within the question regarding foul language, why should one be the scorn of regulatory nanny-state bureaucrats in the FCC, but newspapers and magazines are not?
Again, both require action on your part to get access. After your purchase, radios require a technological means plus your auditory senses and listening ability, whereas newspapers require only your vision and your literacy.
How is it that you can "turn off" the newspaper, but you cannot "turn off" the radio? Just because radio waves pass through your home does not mean you can decode them; doing so requires action on your part.
Surely the original intent was just to make it perfectly clear that criticism of the government, peaceful protests (e.g. marches), and freedom to practice ones own religion was permitted. Child pornography was unthinkable, the US didn't have a military, and the radio was yet to be invented.
So how, exactly, in terms of informational content communication, is radio different from the newspaper (which they had at the time of America's founding)?
The newspapers, you must agree from a reading of the First Amendment, are allowed to print distasteful words like "fuck", "shit", "ass" and so forth. How is that any different from saying "fuck", "shit", and "ass" on the radio? Both are expressing the words, in whatever context we choose.
I see no difference.
As to child porn, that's possible. Society was considerably more Puritanical then than now, so if when child molestation happened in those days, it was quite-probably not discussed much publicly, if at all. They also did not have the means of mass-distribution of images, e.g. photographs, image file formats to contain images sent around the world over the Internet, etc.. But surely they could have envisioned scenarios in which people (probably anonymously) wrote about their experiences molesting children? And after all, there *are* people who get off on erotic literature; no doubt such twisted people exist who get off on pedophilic literature. Further, it's possible that people could have painted pictures to illustrate such acts.
Why then, didn't the Founding Fathers ban such literature depicting child molestation, whether in text or in paintings?
And as for the military... The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789.The U.S. military was also created in 1789. Which one was created first? It appears the Constitution, but clearly, if they came about during the same year, and especially after just having fought a war with England, then the world's most-powerful nation, then it stands to reason that creating a military certainly was on their minds to some degree.
Hence, if they wanted to make special provisions in the Constitution for the military, they could have done so. So where are those provisions?
There *are* more reasonable libertarians out there, usually denoted by the "small-l", rather than the "big-L"...
I consider myself of the "small-l" (i.e. not strictly aligned with the loony U.S. Libertarian Party) variety. My take on your "shooting a gun at somebody as long as they miss" scenario is there are a couple problems within such an action:
1) It violates the victim's right to be left alone. They are being harassed in a physically-threatening manner by another person -- hence, it's a violation of their personal physical liberty (from other people).
2) The freedom to do something is premised on the idea that one is responsible for their actions, which in turn is premised on the ability of the individual to *control* their actions. One largely cannot control where a bullet will go once the trigger has been pulled except in a specifically-designed environment (such as a shooting range), hence, it's possible for the bullet to ricochet and hit somebody else, it's possible for the victim to move at just the right moment and in the right direction such that they would be shot, and so forth. Hence, I agree with you that firing a gun in somebody's general direction (without their permission) ought to remain illegal, unlike your "Libertarian" associate.
It is this reason of control that, even while I advocate lowering barrier to owning and carrying firearms (including automatic weapons) and scaling back many of the things which infringe the 2nd Amendment, I diverge from the more-radical, less-reasonable libertarian elements who advocate allowing people to own nukes and such. I agree that nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of virtually any size are arms which cannot be controlled by the individual. After all, once a nuke is detonated, how do you have control over exactly who it harms? You don't; even if it is of such small size as to kill one person or a small group of people (e.g. like a grenade), the radioactive fallout will render the land around its detonation unusable for thousands of years - hence, it harms future generations.
That said, penalties for improper handling of firearms, whether intentional or not, should be extremely severe, else, the justification of banning things "for our own good" sees common use and the responsibility of the individual -- and therefore, their rights -- get waived, regardless of whether they are competent to wield those rights.
In all cases, with increased freedoms comes an increased level of responsibility... And being of a libertarian persuasion, IMO it's better that we permit those freedoms and associate hefty penalties for abusing them, rather than to trod the totalitarian path of restricting peoples' rights for "the good of society." Those who are competent to wield those responsibilities, may do so, those who prove themselves incompetent and harm others in the process will wind up in prison and/or pay hefty amounts of damages, and those who choose not to wield those responsibilities at all have nothing to fear from those who do (at least in an ideal world, as if such a world exists. But it is nevertheless the world to which we ought to aspire...).
a) Public schools are generally run by local governments, which are under state control. The First Amendment to the federal constitution does not apply to state governments.
WTF? I don't own a PSP yet, and with SCE's President telling me that if I buy one, I'll have to "adapt" to their failure, I don't think I will *ever* buy one.
You want me to adapt? Damn right I'll adapt -- I'll adapt the $200 I would've spent on your PSP (plus games) to some other purpose I'll enjoy more, like a new video card or some lapdances... Eat my cock, Mr. Kutaragi, you're not getting my money for a defective piece of shit.
Rule #1 of business: never, ever tell the customer to deal with your mistake. If you want to remain in the game, then fix your mistake, or get run into the ground by the competition.
Comparing the iPod and Mac to the classic Gillette razor and blade paradigm isn't really accurate. Gillette sells those products in the mass-market, to the mass-market, at prices the mass-market can afford, whereas Apple sells their products only somewhat in the mass-market (mostly just their iPods; everything else is still niche), to a niche market, at prices that the mass-market doesn't want to afford when comparing Apple's products to their Wintel counterparts (and possibly cannot afford, in some practical (not political) Lintel cases).
Moreover, unlike Gillette, Apple doesn't really cater to the masses, they cater to a more upscale market (or at least that's the way their market sees themselves, and they spend accordingly).
It's an interesting, but inaccurate comparison, IMO. I'm sure there's a better analogy for Apple's marketing, but none come to mind...
Possible/. reaction: OMG, what if the cops get these and use them to shoot people?
Alternate reaction: What if people get these and use them to shoot abusive cops? (or soldiers of oppressive governments, their leaders, etc., as during the American Revolution)
Event: Ian Clarke starts writing Freenet.
Possible/. reaction 1: OMG, what if the cops use this to exchange info about people they've obtained illegally (e.g. without a warrant)?
Alternate reaction 1: What if citizens use this to exchange info about cops, fearing the heavy foot of government censorship?
Possible/. reaction 2: OMG, what if people use this to distribute kiddie pr0n?
Alternate reaction 2: What if people use this to distribute info from oppressive regimes, like Iraq, Iran, China, N. Korea, and increasingly, modern-day America and Europe? What if this allows whistleblowers from inside governments and businesses to expose wrongs which would not be exposed otherwise?
Event: Microsoft buys DOS from some guy in Washington state, making personal computing dirt-cheap relative to only a few years previous.
Possible/. reaction: OMG, this will allow the riff-raff to use PeeCees! Now we have to deal with lusers!
Alternate reaction: This will spur economic growth and give rise to millions of directly computer-related jobs, making it easier to find work in the future.
Moral: As any good Slashdotter should know by now, all technologies have good and bad purposes. The key is not to try to remove the technology from our knowledge, but to work around it.
In this case, if HP has some tech. which blurs your digital camera's picture, then let's invent a camera resistant to HP's blurring device...
In closing, here's an alternate reaction for this HP blurring tech.: What if somebody uses this to evade surveillance cameras?
Being a privacy advocate, I say *anything* which can increase individual privacy is a good thing, even if it can be used for nefarious purposes... Props to HP in this case.
... screw it. The Market will deal with it. If users want usenet access, they'll leave and find a better ISP.
But I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that this is not the case, because most consumers just don't think that way. So by extension the whole self-regulating market thing is immediately dead in the water.
If AOL users who know about Usenet want Usenet access, they can switch ISPs or buy an account with Giganews or some other Usenet feed provider.
Since most AOL users are clueless, AOL's shutting off of Usenet access will have little effect on their userbase. Again, those whom it affects will notice, and because getting the same level of Usenet service will now cost them extra, they may well seek alternatives.
Most consumers *do* ask what the alternatives are when they are faced with a loss of service like this; even economically-illiterate lefties who have satellite access and dialup, who want faster Internet access, will think "if I get cable, then in order to get a better deal, I have to get the cable TV/ISP package. Alternatively, I can get DSL with my existing phone company. Guess I'll get DSL!" (a neighbor of mine is exactly this example).
Only a total fucking loser sits in their chair and cries about how they don't have choices when choices are clearly available and advertised regularly...
I haven't tried OpenBSD or NetBSD yet, but I've run FreeBSD and am thoroughly a fan. It remains my favorite open-source OS overall.
The only reason I don't run it on my laptop is because my university uses a closed-source VPN client from Cisco, with binaries available only for Win9x/NT/2k/XP, OSX, x86 Linux (no ARM binary for my Zaurus, sadly:( ), and PocketPC -- no FBSD. That, and I remember getting Linux-binary Flash and Java plugins to work in Firefox under FBSD is a PITA. And native builds of Firefox ran slower on FBSD than Linux too, IME (this was a bit over a year ago though).
Otherwise, I actually prefer FBSD's ports system to Gentoo's portage, in part because I have yet to find a tool comparable to FBSD's "portsclean" to remove old distfiles from portage's local cache... I've tried various Bourne and Perl scripts posted to the Gentoo forums, and none check whether the existing tarballs are required for the latest versions of the given software (so, tarballs which shouldn't be deleted, are, and those which should be deleted, aren't)... There's no reason such a script couldn't be written for portage, it's just that I haven't seen one yet.
Really, FBSD makes a better server than desktop; for serving, however, it *rules*. Rock solid stable, although, the 5.x branch's performance has been surpassed by Linux 2.6 and NetBSD, unfortunately...
(Licensing is another small point. The BSD license is as close to a truly free-as-in-freedom OSS license as I've seen, whereas the GPL locks you into making available the source for 3 years if you distribute binaries of modified software. Not that it bothers me for noncommercial software, but I just don't like the feeling of being forced to behave a certain way.)
Charitable trusts are extremely useful tax shelters
Yeah, so? The money still goes to charity. Is it so bad that the federal govn't gives tax breaks to people who give charitably? Just what exactly is your complaint?
You sound like the brother of Henry Reardon in "Atlas Shrugged", a begger for charitable causes who wants to be a chooser too; somebody for whom no amount of charity will ever suffice.
They also buy the goodwill of saps like you, who think that this evil miser must not be such a bad guy after all, regardless of the number of lives he's ruined over the years.
Lives he's ruined? Microsoft more or less jumpstarted the PC industry as we know it today. If you work in IT, very likely you owe some part of your job's existence to Big Mean Bill.
MSFT has shitty business practices, occasionally shady legal moves, and godawful software, and Bill Gates himself can be a schmuck once in a while (see his comments about Linux users being "communists").
But that doesn't mean the company's impact on the industry hasn't been enormously-positive... Heck, these are largely the reasons people work on OSS. Were it not for crappy MSFT products, and (at the time) overpriced Unix offerings, we might not have Linux and many of the apps/libs surrounding it. In that regard, MSFT's "badness" is offset by the competition of OSS's "goodness" -- OSS is, IMO, simply a natural response by the free market against the practices of MSFT.
On the whole, MSFT has been rather beneficial: for the IT industry, for charitable purposes, and for getting powerful computing technology in ever-more hands which might not have been able to afford it otherwise...
Paranoid enough to tell you only that I use techniques that are commonly *thought* to be secure, e.g. encryption, secure proxies, etc.. Paranoid enough not to be more specific than that.:P
(No, security through obscurity isn't a "secure" defense. But it *is* a speedbump; much as a safe with 6' thick walls and 8 combos is a speedbump to safe-crackers who had no prior knowledge and were underestimatedly-guessing the existence of a 2' wall and 2 combos. Obscurity is just one more layer, but is not by any means a sole defense.)
Basic microeconomics (the Fisher Equation) says you take the wage increase rate and subtract the inflation rate, in order to get the real wage growth.
0.5% - 3.26% = -2.76%
So, assuming your wage increases with this 0.5% rise, you're still not increasing your pay enough to outpace inflation. This means your real purchasing power will be decreasing this year, by 2.76% if the figure above remains anywhere near accurate.
Salary rising by 0.5% this year? Quite a shitter, if you ask me. But, of course, it could be worse (we could be seeing negative growth).
(The data security guys still come out ahead though: 5.1% - 3.26% = 1.84% real pay increase. At $90k/year, that's another $1656 in purchasing power they can afford, in real terms.)
My above post points out an error I made in my original post. I originally thought the fertility rate was per every 2 parents, not per 1,000 mothers 15-49 years old. *BIG* difference.:-)
But the values for those figures are the same, regardless...
With your precise use of the term "fertility rate," I'm wondering if you're neglecting to account for immigration... which is substantial.
The fertility rate is the number of children born per 1,000 mothers aged 15-49, so yeah, it leaves out immigration (and kids born to women aged 50+, rare as they are).
Indeed, immigration is substantial, though lower than around 1990. (warning: 2.73MB PDF) The U.S. appears to admit, roughly averaging the last 15 years or so, about 1m people. That doesn't count the illegal immigrants, who neither pay into nor receive SS funds (else, they would have a record w/ the govn't which may well be found out by the IRS).
Given that approx 550k of the 700k or so immigrants in 2003 were of working age (16 and older), that's about 78% of immigrants being of working age. Hence, given my 1m/year average, we can say that due to immigration, we're adding about 780k payers into SS per year.
Of course, most immigrants work disproportionately low-wage jobs, and therefore contribute less to SS funding than the rest of us natives (in fact, 188k of them in 2003 didn't work at all; they were students or children. 310k of the total - about 45% - were declared "no occupation/not working outside the home"). So their effect on SS funding is lessened by virtue of low pay and/or no pay at all...
So, as a social safety net for all (even the unemployed and non-working immigrants, as I understand), the immigrants really stand almost as a *liability* to the U.S. Social Security system; a drain on whatever efficiency and fairness SS can claim to have in making its payments.
Such is the problem with socialism (including Socialist Security)...
Anyway, if you think we got it bad, you should see the German problem. 1.45, I think.
Good lord... I hadn't seriously looked into it, but I do recall it being unusually low.
Anyway, it's terrible, and they're socialism collapse will be such a big bang it will make whatever little adjustment pains SS has look like only a small firecracker.
Probably.:) That won't stop the Euro-folk from swearing by socialist policies, of course, but sooner or later, their economies will cease to float such policies, and the masses will have to learn to take the hit. Of course, their labor unions and culture will have a *very* hard time adjusting...
Indeed, Social Security sells no product; it is a redistributive fiscal policy. It pays no commission to its investors -- the younger working class which does not collect SS. Hence, SS is clearly a Ponzi scheme.
The grandparent is correct: the weakness of SS is that it is a Ponzi scheme. The parent is incorrect: most businesses (i.e. legit ones, seeing as Ponzi schemes are illegal) have a product or service to sell, making them *not* Ponzi schemes, unlike SS.
To clarify SS's status as a Ponzi scheme and demonstrate the problem here, SS is premised, like all Ponzi schemes, on the idea that there will be more young people to fund the program than existing elderly people to receive from it. Hence, SS's ability to succeed at all is fundamentally based on the fertility rate.
The fertility rate is a measure of how many people are born to a set of parents. In the 1930s, when SS was created, there were 3.5 children for every 2 parents -- considerably more than the replacement rate of 2.1 children. Throughout most of the 1980s, the fertility rate was around 1.8, meaning there were being born too-few children to replace their parents. Today, the rate is around 2.0-2.1, and has been for the last 5 years or so, having risen slightly from its 1980s levels.
This indicates a serious problem: if SS requires more payers (children) than recipients (parents), then where are the payers going to come from? Clearly, for the last 20 years at least, there has not been a large enough number of children being born to take care of their parents...
And yet, defenders of SS say there is no problem. How silly (not only on the grounds of fertility rates, but on the grounds of existing tax levels vs. when the SS trust fund will run out; if we are to keep the existing system, then we must raise taxes - hardly a desirable event, and that mere fact alone indicates that the system is ailing. So long as the system requires tweaking, all is *not* fine; problems exist which require tweaking, else, there would be no tweaking required)...
Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game. That'll totally win over the RTS gamers used to Starcraft (which can run under WINE), C&C, the Warcraft series, and so on.
SuperTux is cute though. Might win the kiddies with that one at least...
Don't get me wrong; none of this is meant to slight or discourage the development of these games. In fact, I've often thought about writing games myself, quite-possibly making them OSS (I'm thinking of a fighting game).
My point is simple: these are not games you woo people away from Windows to play. There are plenty of similarly low-budget games on Windows, so why should anybody play these?
These are games that Linux-only zealots are content to play, on the grounds that most Windows games don't run very well with WINE, WineX costs money, and such people don't want to run Windows. Hence, they're stuck with these games and/or their consoles...
Remember GDP doesn't measure net gain, only overall paid-for work.
Indeed; it's the overall output (assumed equal to overall income in macroeconomics) of the economy produced by labor and property within a geographical boundary (i.e.the U.S. borders). I don't think I ever explicitly said, nor intended to imply, that GDP measures *net* gain...
Google for the parable of the broken window.
The broken window fallacy would apply here, at least in part. But that same fallacy ignores the possibility that something new may accidentally result from a hidden cost.
For example, in Europe, due to high population density in small geographical areas, there isn't much incentive to develop long-range wireless communications (802.11b via directional antennas, say). But here in the U.S., our vast expanses of land make development of this technology a desireable and useful thing. Because we work more on it, due to our geographical "disadvantage", we gain in terms of technology -- and that gain, necessarily, is an improvement in the wealth and welfare of the U.S. (and eventually, those nations which learn from our work).
Likewise, were the U.S. to have higher fuel prices, we would focus more on fuel-efficiency, again due to our geographic "disadvantage" -- and the efficiency gains would, in the long-run, outweigh the costs of researching those efficiencies.
Austrian economists assume full employment of resources, and that's a fine and (IMO) reasonable assumption, but I see nothing there about technological growth; an obviously unignorable factor in any economy's standard of living....
It is without a doubt that Americans earn more than Europeans. Per head, about 23% more. But if they are working longer hours (and they do) just blow it all that on extra expenses, they aren't any better off. Are they?
That assumes that 100% of the marginal level of income Americans earn compared to their European counterparts -- the 23% more that you note -- is spent on those geographical (mass-transit example) and cultural (higher prison population percentage example) differences.
Freenet has, for practical purposes, died due to overcomplexity.
I haven't attempted to use Freenet in months, but the last time I did, it'd been almost a year since Freenet really worked reasonably-well.
It's too bad too, because Freenet was arguably the most secure, most anonymous widespread, publicly-available means of communication on the 'net at the time. If it still worked, it still would be.
As/. grows, the average intelligence of the user population moves leftward along the normal distribution curve. I've seen it happen w/ other forums as well; it's just a sad fact of life.:-(
(Disclaimer: my UID is high, but I lurked here as an AC for years before finally registering a nick.)
Run with it! Synthesizing various biases in the media into a relatively objective, fair report is something done largely in academia these days, and rarely occurs in journalism.
Perhaps Wikinews, through the variety of biases found in individuals of "the mob", really *can* attain some level of objectivity and agreeability on news items. It'll be a good experiment, anyway.:)
Alternatively, I can see the project failing because of the nature of news -- it's here for a moment, then probably never referenced again by most people. That means that whoever waits a few days to modify the article can say whatever they want, and as time goes on (as they lag their modification), it becomes less-likely that somebody else will change or notice that modification.
Of course, it also means their change has less impact, and hence, the modifying person has less incentive to change the article to begin with. It's entirely possible that somebody could literally "rewrite history" by changing Wikinews, but the question, for practical purposes, is "will somebody, or an organization of somebodies, do so?" I'm rather doubtful (that said, I do worry that the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, Interpol, FOX News, MSNBC, IndyMedia, etc. would have reason to change those articles to manipulate public thought. But due to the fact that they would be greatly-outnumbered by the people who would be reading/changing the articles, they would face a long, hard battle to do so, and again, their influence decreases over time, as people reference the article at a decreasing rate. Hence my doubt that this is a probable stumbling block).
Your points about software (expense vs. investment), climate, and crime are reasonable points. In those areas, Americans do spend and produce more to improve the living standard compensating for our environment and culture than may be necessary in Europe.
The mass-transit (not necessarily public transit) transportation argument is debatable. Physics dictate that the transportation of people will require the expense of energy either way; the question is, which is more efficient, mass-transit or individual transit? That depends on how it's measured.
On one hand, moving a bulk of people as mass-transit does from 1 major location to another (a Chicago hub to a NYC hub for a train, for example) is more efficient than an individual vehicle. OTOH, if somebody wants to go to a particular location (their doorstep, rather than a block or two from their doorstep), then mass-transit becomes more questionable, and in that regard, American living standards and personal welfare are higher than in Europe, because we afford a greater level of individualization and specificity in our travels than do Europeans. Hence, it makes sense that the GDP goes higher.
Americans keep 2 million people in prison, a far higher proportion than in Europe, and even that makes American GDP higher.
This makes no sense at all. People living in prison are not productive, therefore, how are they producing anything and thereby adding to the GDP of the U.S.? This is a terribly-flawed argument, even ignoring the question of whether prison construction is factored into the GDP.
Don't have too much faith in the GDP figures as a measure of personal welfare.
The GDP is not perfect, but the *vast* majority of economists agree that it's the closest thing to a single measure of a nation's productive capacity (and the personal welfare which results from it) than any other. Hence, it's an important figure.
The per-capita GDP (not simply GDP), however IMO, is an even more-useful figure, because it puts the GDP in perspective of the population which produced it. And by this measure, the U.S. outstrips every single European nation except Luxeomburg by a wide margin.
Slashdot Mirror
You're dodging the original point to which I was responding -- that of censorship of certain foul words, a practice for which we have a double-standard: in newspapers, censorship is bad, but on the radio and TV, it's good. At least, that is the effect on society the FCC has.
I'm saying that they are bombarding me with radiation. Do you understand that one bombards my home, against my will, with radiation 24 hours a day?
Are radio waves (EM waves, really) harmful to the body? Evidence?
We get bombarded with all kinds of radiation on a daily basis. Radiation from the Sun, radium, radiation that is *still* in the atmosphere from above-ground nuclear explosions over the past half-century, and every single electrical device you own -- including the computer you're using to respond to me (look out for those nasty radiations from the CRT).
But the question is, "are these things dangerous? Do they promote cancerous growths?" Radiation from cellphones is thought to increase the chances of cancer, so it's certainly a possibility. But the realistic question is "how much am I affected? Is the trade-off for this vastly-improved technology worth the increased risk (if one exists at all) of cancer?"
And that depends on the risk.
In any case, unless you're concerned about other forms of radiation, your worries are rather irrational.
Again, by worrying about the effects of radio waves (while, ironically, sitting in front of a computer responding to me), you're ignoring my original point. The overall discussion here is that of freedom of speech and censorship and government approval of speech -- these are questions of content (words), not of medium (means of transmitting words)...
Because if I want a newspaper, I have to go out and get it, or pay someone to deliver it. Radio is beamed into my home against my will. To get beamed into my house against my will, it is beamed over goverment land, and crosses state lines, and all that.
So? You still have to go out and get a radio to intercept those radio waves. Without going out and getting a radio, your ability to intercept that information is as impossible as it is by not going out and getting a newspaper; both require action on your part in order to gain access to foul language.
I still fail to see the difference. Both are mediums over which foul language may be carried, so within the question regarding foul language, why should one be the scorn of regulatory nanny-state bureaucrats in the FCC, but newspapers and magazines are not?
Again, both require action on your part to get access. After your purchase, radios require a technological means plus your auditory senses and listening ability, whereas newspapers require only your vision and your literacy.
How is it that you can "turn off" the newspaper, but you cannot "turn off" the radio? Just because radio waves pass through your home does not mean you can decode them; doing so requires action on your part.
Surely the original intent was just to make it perfectly clear that criticism of the government, peaceful protests (e.g. marches), and freedom to practice ones own religion was permitted. Child pornography was unthinkable, the US didn't have a military, and the radio was yet to be invented.
So how, exactly, in terms of informational content communication, is radio different from the newspaper (which they had at the time of America's founding)?
The newspapers, you must agree from a reading of the First Amendment, are allowed to print distasteful words like "fuck", "shit", "ass" and so forth. How is that any different from saying "fuck", "shit", and "ass" on the radio? Both are expressing the words, in whatever context we choose.
I see no difference.
As to child porn, that's possible. Society was considerably more Puritanical then than now, so if when child molestation happened in those days, it was quite-probably not discussed much publicly, if at all. They also did not have the means of mass-distribution of images, e.g. photographs, image file formats to contain images sent around the world over the Internet, etc.. But surely they could have envisioned scenarios in which people (probably anonymously) wrote about their experiences molesting children? And after all, there *are* people who get off on erotic literature; no doubt such twisted people exist who get off on pedophilic literature. Further, it's possible that people could have painted pictures to illustrate such acts.
Why then, didn't the Founding Fathers ban such literature depicting child molestation, whether in text or in paintings?
And as for the military... The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789. The U.S. military was also created in 1789. Which one was created first? It appears the Constitution, but clearly, if they came about during the same year, and especially after just having fought a war with England, then the world's most-powerful nation, then it stands to reason that creating a military certainly was on their minds to some degree.
Hence, if they wanted to make special provisions in the Constitution for the military, they could have done so. So where are those provisions?
There *are* more reasonable libertarians out there, usually denoted by the "small-l", rather than the "big-L"...
I consider myself of the "small-l" (i.e. not strictly aligned with the loony U.S. Libertarian Party) variety. My take on your "shooting a gun at somebody as long as they miss" scenario is there are a couple problems within such an action:
1) It violates the victim's right to be left alone. They are being harassed in a physically-threatening manner by another person -- hence, it's a violation of their personal physical liberty (from other people).
2) The freedom to do something is premised on the idea that one is responsible for their actions, which in turn is premised on the ability of the individual to *control* their actions. One largely cannot control where a bullet will go once the trigger has been pulled except in a specifically-designed environment (such as a shooting range), hence, it's possible for the bullet to ricochet and hit somebody else, it's possible for the victim to move at just the right moment and in the right direction such that they would be shot, and so forth. Hence, I agree with you that firing a gun in somebody's general direction (without their permission) ought to remain illegal, unlike your "Libertarian" associate.
It is this reason of control that, even while I advocate lowering barrier to owning and carrying firearms (including automatic weapons) and scaling back many of the things which infringe the 2nd Amendment, I diverge from the more-radical, less-reasonable libertarian elements who advocate allowing people to own nukes and such. I agree that nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of virtually any size are arms which cannot be controlled by the individual. After all, once a nuke is detonated, how do you have control over exactly who it harms? You don't; even if it is of such small size as to kill one person or a small group of people (e.g. like a grenade), the radioactive fallout will render the land around its detonation unusable for thousands of years - hence, it harms future generations.
That said, penalties for improper handling of firearms, whether intentional or not, should be extremely severe, else, the justification of banning things "for our own good" sees common use and the responsibility of the individual -- and therefore, their rights -- get waived, regardless of whether they are competent to wield those rights.
In all cases, with increased freedoms comes an increased level of responsibility... And being of a libertarian persuasion, IMO it's better that we permit those freedoms and associate hefty penalties for abusing them, rather than to trod the totalitarian path of restricting peoples' rights for "the good of society." Those who are competent to wield those responsibilities, may do so, those who prove themselves incompetent and harm others in the process will wind up in prison and/or pay hefty amounts of damages, and those who choose not to wield those responsibilities at all have nothing to fear from those who do (at least in an ideal world, as if such a world exists. But it is nevertheless the world to which we ought to aspire...).
This is why I'm a fan of yours -- so few people understand the conceptual link between free markets for goods/services and free markets for ideas. :-)
Most people try to divorce the two, when in fact, they are closely-interconnected...
a) Public schools are generally run by local governments, which are under state control. The First Amendment to the federal constitution does not apply to state governments.
Wrong. Federal laws supercede state laws, and state laws in turn supercede local/municipal laws.
Constitutional laws -- such as the 1st Amendment -- supercede Federal law. We are, after all, a "Constitutional Republic."
Hence, the 1st Amendment applies to all levels of government, from the Federal level on down.
This is basic Civics/Government stuff...
b) Even if it did, the guarentee of freedom of speech does not mean that the government has to sponsor that speech.
Correct.
Indeed, any sponsorship of the government necessarily means that taxpayer money is used to promote the speech, and although such sponsorship happens regularly enough (such as in California, where a the state pension plan agency was working to oppose President Bush's attempts to partially privatize Social Security, or the recent scandal surrounding the promoter of the "No Child Left Behind Act", or various works put out by the ONDCP), it's almost invariably condemned as a waste of taxpayer money and a sign of overbearing government abuse of power (as if governments abusing their power were uncommon).
c) Even if it did, minors do not have the full range of legal rights, just as they don't have the full range of legal responsibility.
Incorrect. 2 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment rights of minors, saying in the majority opinion "minors enjoy the protection of the First Amendment"
WTF? I don't own a PSP yet, and with SCE's President telling me that if I buy one, I'll have to "adapt" to their failure, I don't think I will *ever* buy one.
You want me to adapt? Damn right I'll adapt -- I'll adapt the $200 I would've spent on your PSP (plus games) to some other purpose I'll enjoy more, like a new video card or some lapdances... Eat my cock, Mr. Kutaragi, you're not getting my money for a defective piece of shit.
Rule #1 of business: never, ever tell the customer to deal with your mistake. If you want to remain in the game, then fix your mistake, or get run into the ground by the competition.
Comparing the iPod and Mac to the classic Gillette razor and blade paradigm isn't really accurate. Gillette sells those products in the mass-market, to the mass-market, at prices the mass-market can afford, whereas Apple sells their products only somewhat in the mass-market (mostly just their iPods; everything else is still niche), to a niche market, at prices that the mass-market doesn't want to afford when comparing Apple's products to their Wintel counterparts (and possibly cannot afford, in some practical (not political) Lintel cases).
Moreover, unlike Gillette, Apple doesn't really cater to the masses, they cater to a more upscale market (or at least that's the way their market sees themselves, and they spend accordingly).
It's an interesting, but inaccurate comparison, IMO. I'm sure there's a better analogy for Apple's marketing, but none come to mind...
Event: Man invents gun.
/. reaction: OMG, what if the cops get these and use them to shoot people?
/. reaction 1: OMG, what if the cops use this to exchange info about people they've obtained illegally (e.g. without a warrant)?
/. reaction 2: OMG, what if people use this to distribute kiddie pr0n?
/. reaction: OMG, this will allow the riff-raff to use PeeCees! Now we have to deal with lusers!
Possible
Alternate reaction: What if people get these and use them to shoot abusive cops? (or soldiers of oppressive governments, their leaders, etc., as during the American Revolution)
Event: Ian Clarke starts writing Freenet.
Possible
Alternate reaction 1: What if citizens use this to exchange info about cops, fearing the heavy foot of government censorship?
Possible
Alternate reaction 2: What if people use this to distribute info from oppressive regimes, like Iraq, Iran, China, N. Korea, and increasingly, modern-day America and Europe? What if this allows whistleblowers from inside governments and businesses to expose wrongs which would not be exposed otherwise?
Event: Microsoft buys DOS from some guy in Washington state, making personal computing dirt-cheap relative to only a few years previous.
Possible
Alternate reaction: This will spur economic growth and give rise to millions of directly computer-related jobs, making it easier to find work in the future.
Moral: As any good Slashdotter should know by now, all technologies have good and bad purposes. The key is not to try to remove the technology from our knowledge, but to work around it.
In this case, if HP has some tech. which blurs your digital camera's picture, then let's invent a camera resistant to HP's blurring device...
In closing, here's an alternate reaction for this HP blurring tech.: What if somebody uses this to evade surveillance cameras?
Being a privacy advocate, I say *anything* which can increase individual privacy is a good thing, even if it can be used for nefarious purposes... Props to HP in this case.
But I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that this is not the case, because most consumers just don't think that way. So by extension the whole self-regulating market thing is immediately dead in the water.
If AOL users who know about Usenet want Usenet access, they can switch ISPs or buy an account with Giganews or some other Usenet feed provider.
Since most AOL users are clueless, AOL's shutting off of Usenet access will have little effect on their userbase. Again, those whom it affects will notice, and because getting the same level of Usenet service will now cost them extra, they may well seek alternatives.
Most consumers *do* ask what the alternatives are when they are faced with a loss of service like this; even economically-illiterate lefties who have satellite access and dialup, who want faster Internet access, will think "if I get cable, then in order to get a better deal, I have to get the cable TV/ISP package. Alternatively, I can get DSL with my existing phone company. Guess I'll get DSL!" (a neighbor of mine is exactly this example).
Only a total fucking loser sits in their chair and cries about how they don't have choices when choices are clearly available and advertised regularly...
I haven't tried OpenBSD or NetBSD yet, but I've run FreeBSD and am thoroughly a fan. It remains my favorite open-source OS overall.
:( ), and PocketPC -- no FBSD. That, and I remember getting Linux-binary Flash and Java plugins to work in Firefox under FBSD is a PITA. And native builds of Firefox ran slower on FBSD than Linux too, IME (this was a bit over a year ago though).
The only reason I don't run it on my laptop is because my university uses a closed-source VPN client from Cisco, with binaries available only for Win9x/NT/2k/XP, OSX, x86 Linux (no ARM binary for my Zaurus, sadly
Otherwise, I actually prefer FBSD's ports system to Gentoo's portage, in part because I have yet to find a tool comparable to FBSD's "portsclean" to remove old distfiles from portage's local cache... I've tried various Bourne and Perl scripts posted to the Gentoo forums, and none check whether the existing tarballs are required for the latest versions of the given software (so, tarballs which shouldn't be deleted, are, and those which should be deleted, aren't)... There's no reason such a script couldn't be written for portage, it's just that I haven't seen one yet.
Really, FBSD makes a better server than desktop; for serving, however, it *rules*. Rock solid stable, although, the 5.x branch's performance has been surpassed by Linux 2.6 and NetBSD, unfortunately...
(Licensing is another small point. The BSD license is as close to a truly free-as-in-freedom OSS license as I've seen, whereas the GPL locks you into making available the source for 3 years if you distribute binaries of modified software. Not that it bothers me for noncommercial software, but I just don't like the feeling of being forced to behave a certain way.)
Charitable trusts are extremely useful tax shelters
Yeah, so? The money still goes to charity. Is it so bad that the federal govn't gives tax breaks to people who give charitably? Just what exactly is your complaint?
You sound like the brother of Henry Reardon in "Atlas Shrugged", a begger for charitable causes who wants to be a chooser too; somebody for whom no amount of charity will ever suffice.
They also buy the goodwill of saps like you, who think that this evil miser must not be such a bad guy after all, regardless of the number of lives he's ruined over the years.
Lives he's ruined? Microsoft more or less jumpstarted the PC industry as we know it today. If you work in IT, very likely you owe some part of your job's existence to Big Mean Bill.
MSFT has shitty business practices, occasionally shady legal moves, and godawful software, and Bill Gates himself can be a schmuck once in a while (see his comments about Linux users being "communists").
But that doesn't mean the company's impact on the industry hasn't been enormously-positive... Heck, these are largely the reasons people work on OSS. Were it not for crappy MSFT products, and (at the time) overpriced Unix offerings, we might not have Linux and many of the apps/libs surrounding it. In that regard, MSFT's "badness" is offset by the competition of OSS's "goodness" -- OSS is, IMO, simply a natural response by the free market against the practices of MSFT.
On the whole, MSFT has been rather beneficial: for the IT industry, for charitable purposes, and for getting powerful computing technology in ever-more hands which might not have been able to afford it otherwise...
Paranoid enough to tell you only that I use techniques that are commonly *thought* to be secure, e.g. encryption, secure proxies, etc.. Paranoid enough not to be more specific than that. :P
(No, security through obscurity isn't a "secure" defense. But it *is* a speedbump; much as a safe with 6' thick walls and 8 combos is a speedbump to safe-crackers who had no prior knowledge and were underestimatedly-guessing the existence of a 2' wall and 2 combos. Obscurity is just one more layer, but is not by any means a sole defense.)
...so they can check for dupes *before* posting!
/. headlines sometime... You can even do it via RSS, so no need to reload the whole homepage!
Hey timothy, try reading
IT salaries to rise 0.5%? That's great...
...until you factor in inflation, to get the *real* salary growth rate, rather than the nominal rate.
Consumer price inflation (CPI) is around 3.26%.
Basic microeconomics (the Fisher Equation) says you take the wage increase rate and subtract the inflation rate, in order to get the real wage growth.
0.5% - 3.26% = -2.76%
So, assuming your wage increases with this 0.5% rise, you're still not increasing your pay enough to outpace inflation. This means your real purchasing power will be decreasing this year, by 2.76% if the figure above remains anywhere near accurate.
Salary rising by 0.5% this year? Quite a shitter, if you ask me. But, of course, it could be worse (we could be seeing negative growth).
(The data security guys still come out ahead though: 5.1% - 3.26% = 1.84% real pay increase. At $90k/year, that's another $1656 in purchasing power they can afford, in real terms.)
My above post points out an error I made in my original post. I originally thought the fertility rate was per every 2 parents, not per 1,000 mothers 15-49 years old. *BIG* difference. :-)
But the values for those figures are the same, regardless...
With your precise use of the term "fertility rate," I'm wondering if you're neglecting to account for immigration... which is substantial.
:) That won't stop the Euro-folk from swearing by socialist policies, of course, but sooner or later, their economies will cease to float such policies, and the masses will have to learn to take the hit. Of course, their labor unions and culture will have a *very* hard time adjusting...
The fertility rate is the number of children born per 1,000 mothers aged 15-49, so yeah, it leaves out immigration (and kids born to women aged 50+, rare as they are).
Indeed, immigration is substantial, though lower than around 1990. (warning: 2.73MB PDF) The U.S. appears to admit, roughly averaging the last 15 years or so, about 1m people. That doesn't count the illegal immigrants, who neither pay into nor receive SS funds (else, they would have a record w/ the govn't which may well be found out by the IRS).
Given that approx 550k of the 700k or so immigrants in 2003 were of working age (16 and older), that's about 78% of immigrants being of working age. Hence, given my 1m/year average, we can say that due to immigration, we're adding about 780k payers into SS per year.
Of course, most immigrants work disproportionately low-wage jobs, and therefore contribute less to SS funding than the rest of us natives (in fact, 188k of them in 2003 didn't work at all; they were students or children. 310k of the total - about 45% - were declared "no occupation/not working outside the home"). So their effect on SS funding is lessened by virtue of low pay and/or no pay at all...
So, as a social safety net for all (even the unemployed and non-working immigrants, as I understand), the immigrants really stand almost as a *liability* to the U.S. Social Security system; a drain on whatever efficiency and fairness SS can claim to have in making its payments.
Such is the problem with socialism (including Socialist Security)...
Anyway, if you think we got it bad, you should see the German problem. 1.45, I think.
Good lord... I hadn't seriously looked into it, but I do recall it being unusually low.
Anyway, it's terrible, and they're socialism collapse will be such a big bang it will make whatever little adjustment pains SS has look like only a small firecracker.
Probably.
So you're saying it's run like the typical business?
Incorrect. Ponzi schemes generally require there to be no product being sold and pays no commission to investors who recruit new members - only money changing hands in the shape of a pyramid: from a large foundation of payers towards a small roof of recipients.
Indeed, Social Security sells no product; it is a redistributive fiscal policy. It pays no commission to its investors -- the younger working class which does not collect SS. Hence, SS is clearly a Ponzi scheme.
The grandparent is correct: the weakness of SS is that it is a Ponzi scheme. The parent is incorrect: most businesses (i.e. legit ones, seeing as Ponzi schemes are illegal) have a product or service to sell, making them *not* Ponzi schemes, unlike SS.
To clarify SS's status as a Ponzi scheme and demonstrate the problem here, SS is premised, like all Ponzi schemes, on the idea that there will be more young people to fund the program than existing elderly people to receive from it. Hence, SS's ability to succeed at all is fundamentally based on the fertility rate.
The fertility rate is a measure of how many people are born to a set of parents. In the 1930s, when SS was created, there were 3.5 children for every 2 parents -- considerably more than the replacement rate of 2.1 children. Throughout most of the 1980s, the fertility rate was around 1.8, meaning there were being born too-few children to replace their parents. Today, the rate is around 2.0-2.1, and has been for the last 5 years or so, having risen slightly from its 1980s levels.
This indicates a serious problem: if SS requires more payers (children) than recipients (parents), then where are the payers going to come from? Clearly, for the last 20 years at least, there has not been a large enough number of children being born to take care of their parents...
And yet, defenders of SS say there is no problem. How silly (not only on the grounds of fertility rates, but on the grounds of existing tax levels vs. when the SS trust fund will run out; if we are to keep the existing system, then we must raise taxes - hardly a desirable event, and that mere fact alone indicates that the system is ailing. So long as the system requires tweaking, all is *not* fine; problems exist which require tweaking, else, there would be no tweaking required)...
Wow, TORCS looks just like Gran Turismo 3!
Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game. That'll totally win over the RTS gamers used to Starcraft (which can run under WINE), C&C, the Warcraft series, and so on.
SuperTux is cute though. Might win the kiddies with that one at least...
Don't get me wrong; none of this is meant to slight or discourage the development of these games. In fact, I've often thought about writing games myself, quite-possibly making them OSS (I'm thinking of a fighting game).
My point is simple: these are not games you woo people away from Windows to play. There are plenty of similarly low-budget games on Windows, so why should anybody play these?
These are games that Linux-only zealots are content to play, on the grounds that most Windows games don't run very well with WINE, WineX costs money, and such people don't want to run Windows. Hence, they're stuck with these games and/or their consoles...
CNN won't release the #1 innovation until Sunday, January 18 at 8pm EST (Monday, Jan 19 @ 1AM GMT),
Umm, Jan. 18 is a Tuesday, Jan. 19 is a Wednesday. In 2005, that is.
Remember GDP doesn't measure net gain, only overall paid-for work.
Indeed; it's the overall output (assumed equal to overall income in macroeconomics) of the economy produced by labor and property within a geographical boundary (i.e.the U.S. borders). I don't think I ever explicitly said, nor intended to imply, that GDP measures *net* gain...
Google for the parable of the broken window.
The broken window fallacy would apply here, at least in part. But that same fallacy ignores the possibility that something new may accidentally result from a hidden cost.
For example, in Europe, due to high population density in small geographical areas, there isn't much incentive to develop long-range wireless communications (802.11b via directional antennas, say). But here in the U.S., our vast expanses of land make development of this technology a desireable and useful thing. Because we work more on it, due to our geographical "disadvantage", we gain in terms of technology -- and that gain, necessarily, is an improvement in the wealth and welfare of the U.S. (and eventually, those nations which learn from our work).
Likewise, were the U.S. to have higher fuel prices, we would focus more on fuel-efficiency, again due to our geographic "disadvantage" -- and the efficiency gains would, in the long-run, outweigh the costs of researching those efficiencies.
Austrian economists assume full employment of resources, and that's a fine and (IMO) reasonable assumption, but I see nothing there about technological growth; an obviously unignorable factor in any economy's standard of living....
It is without a doubt that Americans earn more than Europeans. Per head, about 23% more. But if they are working longer hours (and they do) just blow it all that on extra expenses, they aren't any better off. Are they?
That assumes that 100% of the marginal level of income Americans earn compared to their European counterparts -- the 23% more that you note -- is spent on those geographical (mass-transit example) and cultural (higher prison population percentage example) differences.
That's a rather nebulous assumption, I would say.
Freenet has, for practical purposes, died due to overcomplexity.
I haven't attempted to use Freenet in months, but the last time I did, it'd been almost a year since Freenet really worked reasonably-well.
It's too bad too, because Freenet was arguably the most secure, most anonymous widespread, publicly-available means of communication on the 'net at the time. If it still worked, it still would be.
As /. grows, the average intelligence of the user population moves leftward along the normal distribution curve. I've seen it happen w/ other forums as well; it's just a sad fact of life. :-(
(Disclaimer: my UID is high, but I lurked here as an AC for years before finally registering a nick.)
Run with it! Synthesizing various biases in the media into a relatively objective, fair report is something done largely in academia these days, and rarely occurs in journalism.
:)
:-)
Perhaps Wikinews, through the variety of biases found in individuals of "the mob", really *can* attain some level of objectivity and agreeability on news items. It'll be a good experiment, anyway.
Alternatively, I can see the project failing because of the nature of news -- it's here for a moment, then probably never referenced again by most people. That means that whoever waits a few days to modify the article can say whatever they want, and as time goes on (as they lag their modification), it becomes less-likely that somebody else will change or notice that modification.
Of course, it also means their change has less impact, and hence, the modifying person has less incentive to change the article to begin with. It's entirely possible that somebody could literally "rewrite history" by changing Wikinews, but the question, for practical purposes, is "will somebody, or an organization of somebodies, do so?" I'm rather doubtful (that said, I do worry that the FBI, CIA, NSA, KGB, Interpol, FOX News, MSNBC, IndyMedia, etc. would have reason to change those articles to manipulate public thought. But due to the fact that they would be greatly-outnumbered by the people who would be reading/changing the articles, they would face a long, hard battle to do so, and again, their influence decreases over time, as people reference the article at a decreasing rate. Hence my doubt that this is a probable stumbling block).
I say go for it, and let's see what comes out.
Your points about software (expense vs. investment), climate, and crime are reasonable points. In those areas, Americans do spend and produce more to improve the living standard compensating for our environment and culture than may be necessary in Europe.
The mass-transit (not necessarily public transit) transportation argument is debatable. Physics dictate that the transportation of people will require the expense of energy either way; the question is, which is more efficient, mass-transit or individual transit? That depends on how it's measured.
On one hand, moving a bulk of people as mass-transit does from 1 major location to another (a Chicago hub to a NYC hub for a train, for example) is more efficient than an individual vehicle. OTOH, if somebody wants to go to a particular location (their doorstep, rather than a block or two from their doorstep), then mass-transit becomes more questionable, and in that regard, American living standards and personal welfare are higher than in Europe, because we afford a greater level of individualization and specificity in our travels than do Europeans. Hence, it makes sense that the GDP goes higher.
Americans keep 2 million people in prison, a far higher proportion than in Europe, and even that makes American GDP higher.
This makes no sense at all. People living in prison are not productive, therefore, how are they producing anything and thereby adding to the GDP of the U.S.? This is a terribly-flawed argument, even ignoring the question of whether prison construction is factored into the GDP.
Don't have too much faith in the GDP figures as a measure of personal welfare.
The GDP is not perfect, but the *vast* majority of economists agree that it's the closest thing to a single measure of a nation's productive capacity (and the personal welfare which results from it) than any other. Hence, it's an important figure.
The per-capita GDP (not simply GDP), however IMO, is an even more-useful figure, because it puts the GDP in perspective of the population which produced it. And by this measure, the U.S. outstrips every single European nation except Luxeomburg by a wide margin.