Just because the government does a few things well, does not mean that anything the government does will work.
Considering your three examples.
FDA - Been around since the early 20th century in one form or another
OSHA - Dates from the early 70s
NHTSA - Dates also from the early 70s
None actually sells anything or provides anything other than regulation.
The FDA is an organization that regulates food. It does not nationalize food production to ensure quality standards.
OSHA does not make ladders or build warehouses. It simply regulates how these things are constructed.
NHTSA does not make cars. It simply regulates the standards to which cars are built.
Nationalized healthcare would not be concerned with regulating insurance. It is concerned with providing insurance, or paying for insurance (I don't know what the cockup plan of the day is today). If the great and glorious leader wishes to create an agency to deal with regulating insurance, well that's a whole other ball of wax. The healthcare system in America is a mess, no doubt about it. But why does an already existing system need to suddenly be run by the government. I might understand if there was NO form of insurance, and all healthcare was paid for out of pocket, but the truth is that unless I get cancer or some other kind of long wasting disease that is not immediately lethal, I will not be denied care.
In fact, the government services that we rely on daily have been running in one form or another for years. Mainly because they were recognized as necessary when the country was founded. Mail, Military, Police, Fire, etc... I don't see what services the federal government needs to provide above these.
I can't find any reference to OSHA, NHTSA, or the FDA replacing similar and already functioning industries when they were created, which is why it was deemed necessary for the government to step in.
Please do not make the mistake of assuming that because politicians in previous years were able to create legislation that was beneficial and helpful to all that the current crop will do the same.
Do not assume that because there exists government organizations that do their job efficiently and are necessary that all government organizations and programs will be this way. People love to talk about the post office and OSHA, but nobody ever talks about the miserably failed programs that no longer exist.
The technology exists to either completely destroy, or at least severely reduce, the mobile paradigm that exists today. Eventually wireless internet will be ubiquitous, or near enough for most purposes. The actual bandwidth needed to send a voice communication is not all that extreme (Ass-pulled number: 200kbs?). As advances in technology lead us to faster and more widespread coverage, is it not conceivable that all phones could simply use a VOIP system for communication?
Such a system will never happen, or will be many many years in the future though, despite the fact that the knowledge and tech is already there (maybe the infrastructure isn't). The mobile carriers in the US are too focused on charging for set amounts of minutes and will be loathe to give up their cash cow. I can never see Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or anybody voluntarily releasing any kind of phone that will allow you to make all the calls you want as long as you have internet access. Tethering technology for phones has been here for years and yet such things are not commonplace. I owned a Razr v3 way back when they were the new hot thing, and Sprint wanted me to pay some ridiculous monthly fee to tether it, despite selling me unlimited data for 15 bucks a month. The phone could do it, my laptop could do it, but sprint had some lock on the actual software of the phone preventing me from doing it and wanted to sell me the ability to do something with my own stuff. Imagine if you bought a monitor and half of it was blank unless you paid the manufacturer a monthly fee. Its money grabbing extortion, nothing more.
Its always fun to be surrounded by the most amazing things ever seen on earth and know that the buggy whip manufacturers of the world are standing in the way of progress. Imagine where we could be in a world where technology is used to its fullest extent and people were less focused on the convenience of doing business as usual for profit.
People love their money too much and do not want progress. This is why change is almost always due to a revolutionary technology brought in by a newcomer, not motivated by an already established giant of industry.
Now that the rock formation is gone, its just another chunk of rock... why not find something equally iconic instead of lamenting the loss of something of vague importance...
QUICK! We have to shellac the grand canyon so it doesn't eventually decay into something not so awesome...
Time will make dust of us all anyway. I'm hearing wonderful things about photography these days.
You are so entirely correct. In fact, just this morning as I skydived from a plane into the middle of a battle and single handedly defeated the enemy with nothing but a pistol and a medkit I was thinking something similar.
The thought began to grow when I left the battle in my car, cruising 200 mph around the streets of downtown manhattan and shooting policemen. I think there were hookers.
But alas, I had to put this thought on hold... ALIEN INVASION!
I jumped into my 1000 pound battle suit and charged up my shields and start blasting away with my rifle. Later when I was jumping out of orbit and crashing into africa I had a few minutes to think...
Why don't more people lead the kind of life I do?
I didn't have too much longer to worry about it though, because out of no where a giant meteor began to fall towards earth. As I journeyed to the north pole to figure out the source, I stumbled upon the answer....
Everyone is lazy! Why aren't they leading the normal mundane outside life I am? Is there something about video games that's more awesome than this? I think NOT!
And if you need to be absolutely hidden, you *gasp* put your hands over them, or wear a baseball type cap that will enable you to see well enough to walk, but not be seen.
There's 3 types of people when it comes to media like this...
1) Grandma Wilson, who buys everything legally, thinks a torrent is a large amount of rain, and wouldn't know an AVI file if it bit her in the ass.
2) Joe Sixpack, who pirates his media, but either lacks the technical skills to rip Grandma Wilson's DVD collection for his own use, or the will too (he can get it easier off The Pirate Bay or wherever)
3) Joe Hacker, who tags himself online with along with a bunch of other guys with names like Xor or NoTV... these are the guys stealing the DVDs outta the pressing plant, ripping them, and putting them out before the retail DVD even gets shipped. It works its way down to The Pirate Bay, where Joe Sixpack downloads it.
Now in this scenario, Grandma Wilson is the only one giving money to the content owner. Your argument that DRM will prevent Joe Sixpack from "stealing" the content because he lacks the technical skill to rip a Blu-ray disk is about as valid now as it is for DVDRips now... the average guy doesn't know how to rip a DVD and make it into the 700 meg AVI file he torrents. Same with Blu-ray/HD-DVD... we've seen that Joe Hacker fixed it so he can rip em.... he's the one what's gonna turn it into whatever file he puts up on the topsites before it filters down so Joe Sixpack can grab it. Nothing changes, except that maybe Joe Sixpack goes "huh, Batman Begins in isn't up in HD yet, wtf" and waits a few months for it to be cracked.
NOTHING has even remotely changed. Even if you make DRM the most hardass thing you can.... all Joe Hacker has to do is crack it, and rip it. Now EVERYONE can steal it.... DRM does abso-fucking-lutely nothing except make it more difficult for Joe Sixpack or Grandma Wilson to back up their rightful purchase.
Bit late for this thread, but I thought I'd point something else out... with a fat PS2, you can exploit a hole in the memory card with nothing more than an Action Replay Max disk (30 bucks?), and a USB thumbdrive, which everyone these days has. Then install Simple Media System and voila, a network connected box that can play videos and music. (Ok, so its not the greatest media player ever to grace the world, but for what it does, its great)
Slashdot Mirror
I love the sentence banks plan to..... it always fills me with hope for how their service is going to benefit me even more...
What exactly is it that you think happens to old dining tables?
Just because the government does a few things well, does not mean that anything the government does will work.
Considering your three examples.
FDA - Been around since the early 20th century in one form or another
OSHA - Dates from the early 70s
NHTSA - Dates also from the early 70s
None actually sells anything or provides anything other than regulation.
The FDA is an organization that regulates food. It does not nationalize food production to ensure quality standards.
OSHA does not make ladders or build warehouses. It simply regulates how these things are constructed.
NHTSA does not make cars. It simply regulates the standards to which cars are built.
Nationalized healthcare would not be concerned with regulating insurance. It is concerned with providing insurance, or paying for insurance (I don't know what the cockup plan of the day is today). If the great and glorious leader wishes to create an agency to deal with regulating insurance, well that's a whole other ball of wax. The healthcare system in America is a mess, no doubt about it. But why does an already existing system need to suddenly be run by the government. I might understand if there was NO form of insurance, and all healthcare was paid for out of pocket, but the truth is that unless I get cancer or some other kind of long wasting disease that is not immediately lethal, I will not be denied care.
In fact, the government services that we rely on daily have been running in one form or another for years. Mainly because they were recognized as necessary when the country was founded. Mail, Military, Police, Fire, etc... I don't see what services the federal government needs to provide above these.
I can't find any reference to OSHA, NHTSA, or the FDA replacing similar and already functioning industries when they were created, which is why it was deemed necessary for the government to step in.
Please do not make the mistake of assuming that because politicians in previous years were able to create legislation that was beneficial and helpful to all that the current crop will do the same.
Do not assume that because there exists government organizations that do their job efficiently and are necessary that all government organizations and programs will be this way. People love to talk about the post office and OSHA, but nobody ever talks about the miserably failed programs that no longer exist.
But steak is fucking awesome
The technology exists to either completely destroy, or at least severely reduce, the mobile paradigm that exists today. Eventually wireless internet will be ubiquitous, or near enough for most purposes. The actual bandwidth needed to send a voice communication is not all that extreme (Ass-pulled number: 200kbs?). As advances in technology lead us to faster and more widespread coverage, is it not conceivable that all phones could simply use a VOIP system for communication?
Such a system will never happen, or will be many many years in the future though, despite the fact that the knowledge and tech is already there (maybe the infrastructure isn't). The mobile carriers in the US are too focused on charging for set amounts of minutes and will be loathe to give up their cash cow. I can never see Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or anybody voluntarily releasing any kind of phone that will allow you to make all the calls you want as long as you have internet access. Tethering technology for phones has been here for years and yet such things are not commonplace. I owned a Razr v3 way back when they were the new hot thing, and Sprint wanted me to pay some ridiculous monthly fee to tether it, despite selling me unlimited data for 15 bucks a month. The phone could do it, my laptop could do it, but sprint had some lock on the actual software of the phone preventing me from doing it and wanted to sell me the ability to do something with my own stuff. Imagine if you bought a monitor and half of it was blank unless you paid the manufacturer a monthly fee. Its money grabbing extortion, nothing more.
Its always fun to be surrounded by the most amazing things ever seen on earth and know that the buggy whip manufacturers of the world are standing in the way of progress. Imagine where we could be in a world where technology is used to its fullest extent and people were less focused on the convenience of doing business as usual for profit.
People love their money too much and do not want progress. This is why change is almost always due to a revolutionary technology brought in by a newcomer, not motivated by an already established giant of industry.
Welcome our zombie ant overlords.
Store em on the floor of your mom's basement like i do. Just don't step on them when you get up to get more pizza.
I also support other such measures like:
Stripping people of their cars for speeding.
Banning certain people from owning hammers after being sued in civil court for a case only tangentially involving a hammer.
Chopping the dicks off of sex offenders.
Taking aspirin to pretend I don't have cancer.
Making razor blades illegal to stop cocaine abuse.
Where's the torrent?
Now that the rock formation is gone, its just another chunk of rock... why not find something equally iconic instead of lamenting the loss of something of vague importance...
QUICK! We have to shellac the grand canyon so it doesn't eventually decay into something not so awesome...
Time will make dust of us all anyway. I'm hearing wonderful things about photography these days.
If it goes to a foundation for the study of the long term effects of marijuana.
I love being nickeled and dimed to death by everyone.
we all drive around with ethernet cables hooked to rollers on the side of the freeway?
Or maybe it'll use the cellular network, but I don't see many people paying mobile phone prices to access the internet...
Someone more observant than I maybe want to point out the technical details?
Accidentally hit redundant mod, I was aiming for insightful.... posting to remove my point.
Blame the weed
now watch a huge spike in google trends for really short periods suddenly appear out of nowhere on June 16
Ok, after five seconds, I found an "autoscroll" checkbox in the "advanced" options tab.
But still, surely this is the default expected behavior by now?
can't I fucking scroll by clicking in the middle mouse button?
Who decided to make it load up the homepage anyway?
... too bad it'll never be able to detect irony. As a sarcastic person, I rely on savage mockery to let my hatred of idiocy show.
OMG U CN'T BLOCK M3!!!!!!!1111 I R SMARTER THAN U GHEYFAGS
You are so entirely correct. In fact, just this morning as I skydived from a plane into the middle of a battle and single handedly defeated the enemy with nothing but a pistol and a medkit I was thinking something similar.
The thought began to grow when I left the battle in my car, cruising 200 mph around the streets of downtown manhattan and shooting policemen. I think there were hookers.
But alas, I had to put this thought on hold... ALIEN INVASION!
I jumped into my 1000 pound battle suit and charged up my shields and start blasting away with my rifle. Later when I was jumping out of orbit and crashing into africa I had a few minutes to think...
Why don't more people lead the kind of life I do?
I didn't have too much longer to worry about it though, because out of no where a giant meteor began to fall towards earth. As I journeyed to the north pole to figure out the source, I stumbled upon the answer....
Everyone is lazy! Why aren't they leading the normal mundane outside life I am? Is there something about video games that's more awesome than this? I think NOT!
I sat here for about 10 minutes before realizing that s/h/it wasn't a regex joke and why it was actually funny... :-/
now blind people can have porn too.
"Feels like a couple of hills over here, maybe a park a bit lower, feels like some bushes...."
Which is why you don't cover your fricking eyes.
And if you need to be absolutely hidden, you *gasp* put your hands over them, or wear a baseball type cap that will enable you to see well enough to walk, but not be seen.
Ford wants Chevy to stop making trucks
I gotta say this (no idea if its been said)
There's 3 types of people when it comes to media like this...
1) Grandma Wilson, who buys everything legally, thinks a torrent is a large amount of rain, and wouldn't know an AVI file if it bit her in the ass.
2) Joe Sixpack, who pirates his media, but either lacks the technical skills to rip Grandma Wilson's DVD collection for his own use, or the will too (he can get it easier off The Pirate Bay or wherever)
3) Joe Hacker, who tags himself online with along with a bunch of other guys with names like Xor or NoTV... these are the guys stealing the DVDs outta the pressing plant, ripping them, and putting them out before the retail DVD even gets shipped. It works its way down to The Pirate Bay, where Joe Sixpack downloads it.
Now in this scenario, Grandma Wilson is the only one giving money to the content owner. Your argument that DRM will prevent Joe Sixpack from "stealing" the content because he lacks the technical skill to rip a Blu-ray disk is about as valid now as it is for DVDRips now... the average guy doesn't know how to rip a DVD and make it into the 700 meg AVI file he torrents. Same with Blu-ray/HD-DVD... we've seen that Joe Hacker fixed it so he can rip em.... he's the one what's gonna turn it into whatever file he puts up on the topsites before it filters down so Joe Sixpack can grab it. Nothing changes, except that maybe Joe Sixpack goes "huh, Batman Begins in isn't up in HD yet, wtf" and waits a few months for it to be cracked.
NOTHING has even remotely changed. Even if you make DRM the most hardass thing you can.... all Joe Hacker has to do is crack it, and rip it. Now EVERYONE can steal it.... DRM does abso-fucking-lutely nothing except make it more difficult for Joe Sixpack or Grandma Wilson to back up their rightful purchase.
Bit late for this thread, but I thought I'd point something else out... with a fat PS2, you can exploit a hole in the memory card with nothing more than an Action Replay Max disk (30 bucks?), and a USB thumbdrive, which everyone these days has. Then install Simple Media System and voila, a network connected box that can play videos and music. (Ok, so its not the greatest media player ever to grace the world, but for what it does, its great)