It's nice to blame the government, and easy, too. You can only get so much blood from a rock, until the rock can give no more. That's what we've done to the budget process by starving off taxes. Greed knows no boundaries.
No matter how many times you repeat it makes no difference. There is no government spending plan that will every please everyone. It's not possible. There'll always be someone that says- too much!
To get rid of deficits, raise revenues. The meme of the impossibility of surpluses isn't rational, in my opinion.
I've been working with social services agencies as a volunteer long before you were born (1960s). There are a lot of people with unfortunate circumstances, poor decisions made, drugs, and all varieties of misery. Some rise out of that. We're still responsible for those that can't make it.
On the past weekend, I saw a guy playing in a cafe with a tip jar out. Pretty good. I put money in the jar not knowing he was homeless. Yesterday morning, in another part of town, they found a homeless man frozen to death. You do what you do. Others may or may not be motivated to achieve your sense of justice. This is their problem; I know my own.
We must disagree. And the funded programs you speak of are funded in different ways.
Spending? Yes, it's badly done. But we're not ready to blow money on Mars travel until the other issues are taken care of. Perhaps we can agree on that.
The problems in Greece are a red herring for this argument. That problem has been brewing for decades. It's a different culture, and the problems Greece faces are for vastly different circumstances. Drawing parallels to Greece isn't tenable.
No one said their was a free lunch. I willingly pay more than my intake because I believe people are important. Taxes are too cheap in this country. I want healthy people, and insurance that's underwritten by the entire populace, including you and me. That's not "free"; it's responsible. We all sink or swim together. I believe we'll swim. I have faith in my fellow Americans and in their ability to create a place where you don't go bankrupt because you work at McDonalds and get breast cancer.
Given the crux of your points, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree. But we can try to see the benefits of understanding where the real economic problems are, rather than repeating political propaganda points.
1999: end of the DotCom boom 2012: end of the war in Iraq after nine years; still going in Afghanistan after nine years; war on terror still moving; banks nearly collapse in 2008, still ongoing.
And sometimes deficits are what happen when the world goes nuts. Deficits don't mean justice. Deficits don't mean luxury. Deficits mean you got to live, rather than die, or go into deep financial depression.
Sadly, you're wrong. There's a Libertarian-ish meme out there that purports this, but indeed, there's a revenue problem of horrific size. The outflows of money are huge, despite how much money the Fed has printed. There must be real work done to surfeit the GDP; raw materials and work applied is the crux of the economy. From there, it becomes more complex.
We are a larger, and more complex economy than most people realize. We have far too many US corporate products sequestered offshore, instead of being taxed and brought home. But this only scratches the surface of the problem; we have a very contentious political system right now, and we've ground to a halt with infighting and K Street bribery of the Legislatures.
Maybe you think this about a luddite Obama, but it's more about the fact that the government is squeezed in all quarters. The deficit roars, pension and public programs liability soars, there are huge pressures to keep taxes down in the face of an economic recovery, and it's not a wonder that Mars trip funding gets a heel on the garden hose.
This isn't about leadership, this is about revenue. Go tell your friends that the government is nearly broke and needs real funding. Then, bills assuaged, we can dream about Mars and beyond. Until then, the piggy bank is empty, as in no dough.
I think you get the point: this is about an open, more exploitable Internet, rather than a more private Internet where organizations like Google and Facebook can't make oodles of capital gain based on yours, mine, and our private information and memories. The Internet never forgets, and hence portends to make us all look like fools, eventually.
No, you don't. Ideas and concepts are the cheapest currency in the known universe. Copyrights protect expressed text, and are vary two-dimensional. You have a medium, and an expression. Copy it verbatim, and you've ripped off the original author, subject to the law and the author's granted rights. Paraphrase, encapsulate, use it in any of the Fair Use methods, make a parody of it that encapsulates it, and that's fair game.
You cannot protect ideas. You can patent novel expressions of ideas, but only the specific expression in its novelty. Everyone has ideas. Protecting ideas is impossible. You cannot control creativity: it will do what it will do, as is the order of the universe. A newly described expression of an idea can have that expression patented. But you cannot stanch dreams, no concept can do that.
Yes, they did. In some areas, they still do. Organizations emerged that were exempt of taxes under varying historical schemes, that became utilities. Most were mutuals, some were government owned, or cooperatively owned. Over the course of history, some became for profit.
The theory of who grants utilities rights also is quite varied. The common law of owner rights to their land became muddied with utility easements, and right-of-ways became additionally muddied. Some states said that once you changed the nature of an easement, you had to renegotiate the rights, hence the battles of Williams putting fiber optic cable through their oil pipelines.
The who-owns-what is further muddied by the fact that AT&T is actually Southwestern Bell with lipstick, and is not the AT&T of your grandparents. By hook and crook and bribery, the work of Judge Greene to break up the original AT&T has been methodically vanquished so that AT&T has much of the monopoly power it once owned. The old AT&T's assets and the new AT&T assets are at once the same thing, and completely different. What happened along the way is that acquisition of the "Baby Bells" allowed AT&T to gobble up huge turf(s) for a pittance. In real terms, they ought to pay a capital gain on the sale of those assets to reflect their actual climb in value from the point of acquisition. But it won't happen-- no one has the balls to tax the real and actual and true value of those assets. They range from huge tracts in Illinois where Ameritech once stood, to assets in California that are mind-boggling in true size.
Instead, they'll tuck it away on their balance sheet to make up for the "loss" of the T-Mobile monopoly failure.
Snarl, snort. Feed the troll, especially the attorney in the post.
The problem is much deeper than what you can cover in a slashdot reply, but I'll try to capture the salient points:
1) the US Patent Office process is broken, and despite attempts to the assuage the problem, it grants patents to unbelieveably looneytunes stuff.
2) ideas shouldn't be patented, but they are granted patents, see #1
3) there is no model for compensation, rather, it's what the "inventor" desires, or wants to do battle with, so the output of the process is unpredictable in almost every way; it's a compensation plan for attorneys, not a business model
4) standards and protocols should never be patented, for they are agreements and processes, not inventions. You can't patent math because math is prior art. Algorithms, presentation values are all math. Attempts to patent genes should be met with life without parole: life is prior art.
The life of patents is dubious, and getting worse now that the madmen of media have allowed retroactive protection for "works". It is out of control, and the attorney in the post is indeed snacking from the insanity.
You also need to remember that the older AT&T said that ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and LAN-E (Ethernet over ATM) would rule the world.
They invested in tons of stuff, and only the dark fiber is paying back. Now, scattered through neighborhoods across the country, are enormous beige cans full of DSL equipment, blighting the hemisphere. Instead of doing FTTH, they continue do deploy various versions of DSL. Their "micro central offices" get state sanctioned easements and right-of-ways that the new AT&T rarely has to pay for.
Utilities once belonged to the people, and the rights of ways and easements were granted to them. Now they own this stuff, just like when the mutual insurance companies were gobbled up by WellPoint and others, they turned enormously valuable assets into private enterprises owned by shareholders. People that owned the mutuals got benefits, but not in proportion to the new for-profit shareholders.
Conclusion: tax the living hell out of AT&T's real estate property assets. Tax them like a noose.
That's useless paranoia. The drive needs to be identified, in terms of ownership, the prior owner notified. It's THEIR data. Then complain noisily to vendor, and let your favorite social media site understand the problem.
Vendors have no excuse for this kind of behavior. Worse users need to take ownership in their data, and understand what the privacy laws are all about. It should start with the user, but the vendor has an inspection job to do, too.
Looking at the data is very unlikely to put you at any risk. The purchaser owns the drive, and ostensibly, the data. Erasing the data is the original owner's job, as vetted through the vendor's processes.
I believe that someone broke in and stole stuff from Symantec. I think that much is real. What did they steal? I don't think that we know the extent. Worse, I don't think Symantec knows, and that the extortion plot is possibly a ruse to save face on Symantec's part. Symantec and Verisign.... it seems like a potentially coordinated effort. I wish I could believe Symantec, but they've lied before and I feel they're untrustworthy. Does this mean that the facts are different than what they claim? For me, only third party verification of the claims will make me believe them. "Hacker communiques" are somewhat meaningless until someone coughs more code. I'm betting there's much more stuff stolen, but this is only a feeling.
And I admit that Symantec might be submitting the facts. But I have to doubt it until the picture becomes clearer. The fact that they had no knowledge of the break-in means that other areas were also vulnerable, and they didn't know that. In an organization whose business is the best security, being breached successfully is tough to forgive. Add in the fact that they're still not sure of the extent, and it seems as though internal systems failure could have been rampant-- and maybe they'll never know, but would NEVER admit such a thing. Heads ought to roll there in a major way. Enrique leaves a negative legacy there....
It's only statistically significant as another anecdotal sign that RIM needs to change its tune. Haliburton gouged the people of the US, moved their assets base offshore, and generally fucked the USA. During the Mideast wars, they repeatedly gouged, profiteered, and were poster boys and girls for how to bone your country.
So now they're changing to iOS. Who.Fucking. Cares.
In Verizon and Sprint's business models, their use of CDMA means no SIMs. And at least for now, there aren't any GSM-specific hacks to be worried or annoyed about.
That Verizon doesn't support CDMA-specific hacks only means that they don't get a few carrier signals and the LBS features are somewhat stunted. Fine. Angry Birds doesn't need to know my location, phone list, etc.
SIM cards, in the USA, are not an advantage. In the bad old days, SIM cards held your contacts, and were a pain in the butt-- IN THE USA. These days, you backup to somebody's storage silo, get a different phone, and restore your stuff, although this is operating system-specific.There aren't any GSM device-density issues to deal with, and with CDMA, everyone's on the same frequency page.
IMHO, this is a who-cares? issue that has about zero effect. But it was nice to push a stick up the hornet's nest on a Sunday morning, just to see what was buzzing, and who had their facts straight.
Finding ways around syslogs are all the rage these days. It requires stealth. Oh, wait....
My take is that this is a genuine catastrophe. If they can't figure out what happened, there is a systematic failure that's a near death-blow. Security is what Verisign and Symantec sell. Both have been compromised, and neither of them knew what or the extent of it, and didn't in at least one case, inform management. If I were their board(s), I'd be lawyering up about now.
To your first argument, as long as there's money to be made, a back door will be found. Honoring the verbiage that somehow justifies the weasel wording still means that the solution is a cop-out.
As to your admonition that you don't work K St, maybe you should. The lesser of two evils is the kind of expediency that's a hallmark of the mephistids that permeate the alleys there. Wishing you were there means that you're driven by the same evil: moolah.
My suggestion: watch the Bob Fosse version of the movie: Lenny. Yeah, he was nuts. Yeah, he was a hero for free speech. Yeah, he was a junkie. But guys like Lenny were heavily censored, and the right for you to say almost anything, let alone the word "cocksucker" comes from people like Lenny.
Let's hand Blogger censorship over to the country's TLD control. It's banal fascism and pandering to government interests at its finest. There is no question of good and evil here:
1) it's evil-- censorship of all but exploiting images is inherently evil
2) it's evil-- this is the Internet, where populism is supposed to be the controller.
3) it's evil-- it's hypocracy to leave China in a huff over its email scheme, then let a country essentially in through the back door to step on its citizenry. Government works for us (presuming you're in a somewhat free country) on rare occasion, but in many areas of the world, the government is not your friend, no matter if you do, or do not do other evil.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice to blame the government, and easy, too. You can only get so much blood from a rock, until the rock can give no more. That's what we've done to the budget process by starving off taxes. Greed knows no boundaries.
No matter how many times you repeat it makes no difference. There is no government spending plan that will every please everyone. It's not possible. There'll always be someone that says- too much!
To get rid of deficits, raise revenues. The meme of the impossibility of surpluses isn't rational, in my opinion.
I've been working with social services agencies as a volunteer long before you were born (1960s). There are a lot of people with unfortunate circumstances, poor decisions made, drugs, and all varieties of misery. Some rise out of that. We're still responsible for those that can't make it.
On the past weekend, I saw a guy playing in a cafe with a tip jar out. Pretty good. I put money in the jar not knowing he was homeless. Yesterday morning, in another part of town, they found a homeless man frozen to death. You do what you do. Others may or may not be motivated to achieve your sense of justice. This is their problem; I know my own.
We must disagree. And the funded programs you speak of are funded in different ways.
Spending? Yes, it's badly done. But we're not ready to blow money on Mars travel until the other issues are taken care of. Perhaps we can agree on that.
The problems in Greece are a red herring for this argument. That problem has been brewing for decades. It's a different culture, and the problems Greece faces are for vastly different circumstances. Drawing parallels to Greece isn't tenable.
No one said their was a free lunch. I willingly pay more than my intake because I believe people are important. Taxes are too cheap in this country. I want healthy people, and insurance that's underwritten by the entire populace, including you and me. That's not "free"; it's responsible. We all sink or swim together. I believe we'll swim. I have faith in my fellow Americans and in their ability to create a place where you don't go bankrupt because you work at McDonalds and get breast cancer.
Given the crux of your points, I'm not sure we'll be able to agree. But we can try to see the benefits of understanding where the real economic problems are, rather than repeating political propaganda points.
1999: end of the DotCom boom
2012: end of the war in Iraq after nine years; still going in Afghanistan after nine years; war on terror still moving; banks nearly collapse in 2008, still ongoing.
And sometimes deficits are what happen when the world goes nuts. Deficits don't mean justice. Deficits don't mean luxury. Deficits mean you got to live, rather than die, or go into deep financial depression.
Sadly, you're wrong. There's a Libertarian-ish meme out there that purports this, but indeed, there's a revenue problem of horrific size. The outflows of money are huge, despite how much money the Fed has printed. There must be real work done to surfeit the GDP; raw materials and work applied is the crux of the economy. From there, it becomes more complex.
We are a larger, and more complex economy than most people realize. We have far too many US corporate products sequestered offshore, instead of being taxed and brought home. But this only scratches the surface of the problem; we have a very contentious political system right now, and we've ground to a halt with infighting and K Street bribery of the Legislatures.
But for a bit of luck, you're off welfare. Don't be so quick to judge.
Maybe you think this about a luddite Obama, but it's more about the fact that the government is squeezed in all quarters. The deficit roars, pension and public programs liability soars, there are huge pressures to keep taxes down in the face of an economic recovery, and it's not a wonder that Mars trip funding gets a heel on the garden hose.
This isn't about leadership, this is about revenue. Go tell your friends that the government is nearly broke and needs real funding. Then, bills assuaged, we can dream about Mars and beyond. Until then, the piggy bank is empty, as in no dough.
Delete the other applications, and replace the hosts file so that the unit can only point at one IP.
I think you get the point: this is about an open, more exploitable Internet, rather than a more private Internet where organizations like Google and Facebook can't make oodles of capital gain based on yours, mine, and our private information and memories. The Internet never forgets, and hence portends to make us all look like fools, eventually.
No, you don't. Ideas and concepts are the cheapest currency in the known universe. Copyrights protect expressed text, and are vary two-dimensional. You have a medium, and an expression. Copy it verbatim, and you've ripped off the original author, subject to the law and the author's granted rights. Paraphrase, encapsulate, use it in any of the Fair Use methods, make a parody of it that encapsulates it, and that's fair game.
You cannot protect ideas. You can patent novel expressions of ideas, but only the specific expression in its novelty. Everyone has ideas. Protecting ideas is impossible. You cannot control creativity: it will do what it will do, as is the order of the universe. A newly described expression of an idea can have that expression patented. But you cannot stanch dreams, no concept can do that.
Yes, they did. In some areas, they still do. Organizations emerged that were exempt of taxes under varying historical schemes, that became utilities. Most were mutuals, some were government owned, or cooperatively owned. Over the course of history, some became for profit.
The theory of who grants utilities rights also is quite varied. The common law of owner rights to their land became muddied with utility easements, and right-of-ways became additionally muddied. Some states said that once you changed the nature of an easement, you had to renegotiate the rights, hence the battles of Williams putting fiber optic cable through their oil pipelines.
The who-owns-what is further muddied by the fact that AT&T is actually Southwestern Bell with lipstick, and is not the AT&T of your grandparents. By hook and crook and bribery, the work of Judge Greene to break up the original AT&T has been methodically vanquished so that AT&T has much of the monopoly power it once owned. The old AT&T's assets and the new AT&T assets are at once the same thing, and completely different. What happened along the way is that acquisition of the "Baby Bells" allowed AT&T to gobble up huge turf(s) for a pittance. In real terms, they ought to pay a capital gain on the sale of those assets to reflect their actual climb in value from the point of acquisition. But it won't happen-- no one has the balls to tax the real and actual and true value of those assets. They range from huge tracts in Illinois where Ameritech once stood, to assets in California that are mind-boggling in true size.
Instead, they'll tuck it away on their balance sheet to make up for the "loss" of the T-Mobile monopoly failure.
.....then you should be compensated....
Snarl, snort. Feed the troll, especially the attorney in the post.
The problem is much deeper than what you can cover in a slashdot reply, but I'll try to capture the salient points:
1) the US Patent Office process is broken, and despite attempts to the assuage the problem, it grants patents to unbelieveably looneytunes stuff.
2) ideas shouldn't be patented, but they are granted patents, see #1
3) there is no model for compensation, rather, it's what the "inventor" desires, or wants to do battle with, so the output of the process is unpredictable in almost every way; it's a compensation plan for attorneys, not a business model
4) standards and protocols should never be patented, for they are agreements and processes, not inventions. You can't patent math because math is prior art. Algorithms, presentation values are all math. Attempts to patent genes should be met with life without parole: life is prior art.
The life of patents is dubious, and getting worse now that the madmen of media have allowed retroactive protection for "works". It is out of control, and the attorney in the post is indeed snacking from the insanity.
You also need to remember that the older AT&T said that ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and LAN-E (Ethernet over ATM) would rule the world.
They invested in tons of stuff, and only the dark fiber is paying back. Now, scattered through neighborhoods across the country, are enormous beige cans full of DSL equipment, blighting the hemisphere. Instead of doing FTTH, they continue do deploy various versions of DSL. Their "micro central offices" get state sanctioned easements and right-of-ways that the new AT&T rarely has to pay for.
Utilities once belonged to the people, and the rights of ways and easements were granted to them. Now they own this stuff, just like when the mutual insurance companies were gobbled up by WellPoint and others, they turned enormously valuable assets into private enterprises owned by shareholders. People that owned the mutuals got benefits, but not in proportion to the new for-profit shareholders.
Conclusion: tax the living hell out of AT&T's real estate property assets. Tax them like a noose.
That's useless paranoia. The drive needs to be identified, in terms of ownership, the prior owner notified. It's THEIR data. Then complain noisily to vendor, and let your favorite social media site understand the problem.
Vendors have no excuse for this kind of behavior. Worse users need to take ownership in their data, and understand what the privacy laws are all about. It should start with the user, but the vendor has an inspection job to do, too.
Looking at the data is very unlikely to put you at any risk. The purchaser owns the drive, and ostensibly, the data. Erasing the data is the original owner's job, as vetted through the vendor's processes.
Ja. Funf.
I believe that someone broke in and stole stuff from Symantec. I think that much is real. What did they steal? I don't think that we know the extent. Worse, I don't think Symantec knows, and that the extortion plot is possibly a ruse to save face on Symantec's part. Symantec and Verisign.... it seems like a potentially coordinated effort. I wish I could believe Symantec, but they've lied before and I feel they're untrustworthy. Does this mean that the facts are different than what they claim? For me, only third party verification of the claims will make me believe them. "Hacker communiques" are somewhat meaningless until someone coughs more code. I'm betting there's much more stuff stolen, but this is only a feeling.
And I admit that Symantec might be submitting the facts. But I have to doubt it until the picture becomes clearer. The fact that they had no knowledge of the break-in means that other areas were also vulnerable, and they didn't know that. In an organization whose business is the best security, being breached successfully is tough to forgive. Add in the fact that they're still not sure of the extent, and it seems as though internal systems failure could have been rampant-- and maybe they'll never know, but would NEVER admit such a thing. Heads ought to roll there in a major way. Enrique leaves a negative legacy there....
Makes me wonder if Symantec is ginning this all up to save face. I wonder if we're being "handled".
It's only statistically significant as another anecdotal sign that RIM needs to change its tune. Haliburton gouged the people of the US, moved their assets base offshore, and generally fucked the USA. During the Mideast wars, they repeatedly gouged, profiteered, and were poster boys and girls for how to bone your country.
So now they're changing to iOS. Who.Fucking. Cares.
In Verizon and Sprint's business models, their use of CDMA means no SIMs. And at least for now, there aren't any GSM-specific hacks to be worried or annoyed about.
That Verizon doesn't support CDMA-specific hacks only means that they don't get a few carrier signals and the LBS features are somewhat stunted. Fine. Angry Birds doesn't need to know my location, phone list, etc.
SIM cards, in the USA, are not an advantage. In the bad old days, SIM cards held your contacts, and were a pain in the butt-- IN THE USA. These days, you backup to somebody's storage silo, get a different phone, and restore your stuff, although this is operating system-specific.There aren't any GSM device-density issues to deal with, and with CDMA, everyone's on the same frequency page.
IMHO, this is a who-cares? issue that has about zero effect. But it was nice to push a stick up the hornet's nest on a Sunday morning, just to see what was buzzing, and who had their facts straight.
Finding ways around syslogs are all the rage these days. It requires stealth. Oh, wait....
My take is that this is a genuine catastrophe. If they can't figure out what happened, there is a systematic failure that's a near death-blow. Security is what Verisign and Symantec sell. Both have been compromised, and neither of them knew what or the extent of it, and didn't in at least one case, inform management. If I were their board(s), I'd be lawyering up about now.
To your first argument, as long as there's money to be made, a back door will be found. Honoring the verbiage that somehow justifies the weasel wording still means that the solution is a cop-out.
As to your admonition that you don't work K St, maybe you should. The lesser of two evils is the kind of expediency that's a hallmark of the mephistids that permeate the alleys there. Wishing you were there means that you're driven by the same evil: moolah.
My suggestion: watch the Bob Fosse version of the movie: Lenny. Yeah, he was nuts. Yeah, he was a hero for free speech. Yeah, he was a junkie. But guys like Lenny were heavily censored, and the right for you to say almost anything, let alone the word "cocksucker" comes from people like Lenny.
You're weasel-working it.
Let's hand Blogger censorship over to the country's TLD control. It's banal fascism and pandering to government interests at its finest. There is no question of good and evil here:
1) it's evil-- censorship of all but exploiting images is inherently evil
2) it's evil-- this is the Internet, where populism is supposed to be the controller.
3) it's evil-- it's hypocracy to leave China in a huff over its email scheme, then let a country essentially in through the back door to step on its citizenry. Government works for us (presuming you're in a somewhat free country) on rare occasion, but in many areas of the world, the government is not your friend, no matter if you do, or do not do other evil.
An "out"? What are you, a K-Street lobbyist?
Sure.
When I tried to install it, it asked. Your citation is your citation; my experience is my experience.
So I opted out.
I didn't install. And I won't.
The creepiness factor is huge, and the buzzwords seemed to do it.
And the who-cares quotient is large enough to cause vehement backlash to Pickens, who's become Slim, rather than Hugh.