4 more years is a lot less than the 50+ years that the space programs of all the worlds governments combined working on space travel and not coming up with anything that the normal person could even remotely hope to purchase a flight on.
So don't complain... the X-Prize has already made it very likely that in your lifetime, if you save your money and do OK in your career, you will be able to travel into space.
Put a countdown on a webpage with half-ass myserious writing with nothing explicitly bad whatsoever, and people are willing to take vigilante action to shut it down?
Right now it is funny because it was designed in a bad spy movie kind of way. But if you did the same thing, with mysterious Arabic writing and music, a world map with locations, and a countdown, I am certain the results would be as bad (or most likely even worse), and the discussion certainly would not be as light-hearted. It turned out not that bad because it was such an obviously contrived thing that people thought it could be an ad for a movie or video game.
People, nowadays, have such a paranoid lynch mob mentality, it is getting scary. If it isn't terrorists, it is myspace predators, or crystal meth rampages, or school shooters, or bird flu, or whatever other astronomicly unlikely boogyman. Even people on Slashdot, who love to joke "someone think of the children!!!" are starting to become more and more paranoid within the bounds of their political beliefs (people on the right tend to be paranoid about terrorists and foriegners, where as people on the left tend to be paranoid about sexual preditors and school violence... people tend to discount the other guys paranoid fears, while maintaining that theirs are, of course, rational!).
Is the government promoting the hysteria in order to gain more power? Or is the government just reacting to the popular hysteria of the people? I don't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if we started hunting witches again (real old-school Communists are just to damn irrelevant for some good ol' fashion Red hunting... but the power of Satan is eternal!). Is there some ergot growing in our wheat supply nowadays that is causing people to lose their minds? Is it all that floride in the water? Cosmic rays? What the hell is going on?
Re:My $0.02 (or $0.00 if you are against the penny
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Own the Last Mile
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They used it, and now they charge us for it. Money that should have been given to towns and cities went to corporations. I love America.
Ummm... if you have ever lived in a totally corrupt one-party political machine city, lower income areas with poor infrastructure (the people who are the least likely to be able to pay a lot of money to the telcos for broadband), are also the places where those grants would essentially go straight into the pockets of the local political machine and not help anyone at all.
The idea that the government is somehow less greedy or exploitive than the telcos is just silly, and the idea that the government doesn't charge it's customers is just silly. Government is simply a profit making corporation that can legally kidnap or kill people provided that people in silly costumes perform the proper rituals. Community ownership might work in small towns and suburban cities (where I suspect the vast majority of Slashdot users never venture out of), which are simply not old enough or big enough to have a deeply entrenched political machine, and are not big enough that people can't leave... but community ownership is just not an option to those who would benifit most by it. Dump a billion dollars for "data infrastructure" into Detroit, and the only thing it will do is make a lot of city councilman and their friends very rich.
The telcos, while pretty damn greedy, can actually be prosecuted for some of their behavior (which is virtually impossible with politicians in a one-party system). There is actually something barely resembling a market for their services (unlike with cities). I can tell you from first hand knowledge, than in large old cities, most people have a lot more power with even a big telco company than they do with their local city government.
Do they go around giving brochures to businesses that don't have some form of controlled-access to their parking lots? Because, at night, someone might pull in and sell an eightball, hate to have the owner of the business arrested..
Actually, a buisness I worked for was threatened with legal action when teenage kids were hanging out (without permission, they were just neighborhood kids who were hanging out there after hours) in the open parking lot. They were not selling drugs, but the police believed they were "troublemakers". So the scenario you present is dead on... if anything the situation is worse than you presented it.
Also, in the U.S., there is a federal "crackhouse" law, that says that you can go to prison (for life), just for people selling drugs on the property you own or at a property you are renting (even if you are not participating in selling the drugs). There have been several nightclub owners and party promoters who are serving life sentences, because they didn't do enough to discourage drug use amoung partygoers.
You won't get convicted for the actual crime, but negligence that allowed the crime. Kind of like if you leave your gun unlocked, and someone takes it and commits murder with it, you will get in trouble. You SHOULD be able to leave your gun unlocked all that you like, but that doesn't mean you won't get punished if you don't. You won't be convicted of murder, but if it is a crime that people are hysterical about people will want someone to pay, they can lock you away on some sort of crime.
And if the person wasn't doing kiddie porn, but was only trading music files, that will still get you... because I have heard the RIAA was suing people who didn't even own computers!
A blanket denial of software and buisness model patents are EXACTLY what is needed. Patents weren't supposed to protect the "idea" of the little guy, because ideas were never supposed to be patented. Patents were about a company that spent a lot of money developing a specific technology to recover the financial cost of the development if other people are making money on the technology. If it is an "idea", or software or a buisness process, there is no real cost of development (remember, people don't patent code, the patent the concept with software patents. It would be like me patenting a time machine, without providing a mechanism for how to actually time travel).
Nelson Mandela was fighting against Apartied and for basic human digity for entire classes of people. Putting your ass on the line for that is a bit different than putting your ass on the line in order to run an open wireless router. Segragation and mass opression, and password protecting your wireless hub, are not morally the same.
While I think it is great that you are running an open network for the benifit of others... and I wish that our society wasn't so damn authoritarian that it was something we had to worry about.
But yikes, could you imagine the problems you could have if someone was using your open network for downloading child porn, or even for trading copyrighted music or movies, or for some sort of "terrorist" activity. Even if you have nothing to do with it, when the authorities have trouble catching the people actually doing the cimes they are going to look for a scapegoat, and that will be you for "recklessly enabling" the crime!
I am not saying you are doing anything morally or legaly wrong, I think what you are doing is a good thing. But I think what you are doing is a bit unwise. Just like it is morally right for Falong Gong to openly practice their religion in China, but it is a very bad idea for them to do so... I say it is a bad idea to run an open network! Sorry, but your instinct for self-preservation should be higher than your altruism.
The problem with the GPL is that it is awefully restrictive for being "free" software. When I think of "free", I think of a crazy bearded guy, driving down the freeway without a helmet at breakneck speeds on his hog or something like that... not the rigid, arbitrary moral and legal document of some sort of utopian zealot. I think the GPL is more "freedom" in the G. W. Bush use of the word, than the wild-ass anarchist sense of the word.
I consider the new BSD licence to be much closer to "free software"... Do whatever the hell you want with the code, but you are not allowed to restrict the use by anyone else or sue anyone!
Now, you may say that I don't understand the GPL... which might very well be true! I don't claim to be an expert at all. But that just proves my point - If I need to master some complex and subtle understanding of the GPL in order to use it properly, then it is not free in any conventional sense of the word. Police need to read a person their rights when they are being arrested, because if a person doesn't understand their rights then they don't have any rights. If I don't understand the GPL, then clearly I have no rights under the GPL.
The BSD licence, on the other hand, is pretty damn easy to understand, and it is as damn near anarchist as a binding legal agreement can get.
There is nothing with Geek Squad, in the same way there is nothing wrong with Taco Bell. Both provide a low quality product for a low cost. If you want excellent service, you have to pay a premium... just like if you want excellent food, you have to pay a premium (or learn how to cook). For many cheap computer systems, paying a premium for a highly skilled technician just doesn't make a lot of sense... especially when, in many cases, the problem can be solved by any marginally computer literate person.
Now, there are some people who might say that Geek Squad is overpriced. I don't know what the going rate for tech support is, but it seems to me that Geek Squad is far from a monopoly on tech support, and that people are either happy with the service, or prefer the one-stop Best Buy concept than to open a phone book and look for a place themselves.
I agree with you 100%. High cigarette taxes would simply leave organized crime to fill the need, and they won't be paying any tax at all. But likewise, I think the people who make the taxes have a pretty good idea of the threshold where the black market starts to come into play, and they also take that into consideration as well to maximize profit.
My point wasn't that cigarette tax is an effective tool against smoking. I was more trying to say that it is a bad idea for the government to make a profit from something it wants to discourage. I am not sure that it is the governments job to try to fight vice, but assuming it is, having the government profit from vice is not a good way to make sure it combats vice.
Parking meters are supposed to discourage people from parking, in order to make sure those spots are used by people for only short periods of time so that everyone has a fair share of parking spots and only those with a real need get to use the spot. Parking meters are supposed to be a method for the government to allocate a scarce public resource to the most amount of people. There is a conflict of interest when the government is both trying to allocate the resource and maximize its own profit.
In theory, meter parking is designed to make sure that parking is temporary... but in reality, it is simply a revenue grab by the city. It is just not polite for the government to say "WE WANT MORE MONEY!!!! GIVE US MORE MONEY!!!", so every tax/fee needs a respectable sounding reason to exist.
There are other examples of this:
1. If they REALLY wanted to curb speeding, they would make all speeding tickets be for $10,000 and 30 days in jail, and speeding would stop overnight! Speeding fines are calculated to be as high as possible, without actually detering speeding, in order to maximize profits.
2. Same thing with cigarette tax: Presumably they want to discourage smoking - but if they wanted to do that they could place a huge tax on cigarettes, maybe $50 per pack or something. The trouble with that, is that everyone would quit smoking if they had to pay $50+ a pack. So they make the cigarette tax as high as possible without actually discouraging smoking, to maximize profits.
If you want the government to actually discourage behavior, the last thing you want the government to do is make a profit from that behavior. That is why all the brothel owners in Nevada are trying to get the state to pass a special extra-high prostitution tax - they know that once the government gets used to having that money, they won't want to give it up and therefore prostitution will always remain legal! The best way to make sure something will last forever is to give the government a cut of the profits!
While your paranoia is admirable, you are missing something important:
If you want the man to believe you are somewhere, you have the perfect way to establish an alibi!
On a more serious note though:
1. I don't think it uses a credit card, I believe it shows up on your cell phone bill. 2. How do you pay for plane tickets and whatnot without a credit card?
At first I thought, "Whats the point?"... Replacing change with cell-phone calls doesn't make sense. But the idea of sending an expiration notice when time runs out, and being able to pay while being away from the meter by cell phone, is brilliant. A system like this would probably save me money even with the 30cent fee, because I always overpay parking meters to give me a little extra leeway in case I am running late.
DRM isn't dangerous... DRM is simply encryption, and encryption isn't bad. I don't think anyone here wants encryption restricted in any way. Everyone has the right to encrypt any data in any way they want, period!
What IS dangerous is the government requiring DRM or giving it special legal protection. It is dangerous if the government mandates DRM, and makes it illegal for me to circumvent DRM. If I can crack the DRM on media, and convert it to an unprotected format for myself, without any fear of legal consequences, then my rights are not being restricted in any way.
What is also dangerous is people thinking that the government should act against DRM. Seriously, that is just as bad as DRM. It is going to come back to bite people in the ass when those anti-DRM laws start restricting how you are allowed to encrypt your own data. If I create data, I want to be able to encrypt it in any way I choose... just because you find it annoying that it takes 10 seconds to run your itunes music through a utility to convert it to mp3, doesn't mean you have the right to restrict me from encrypting my data however I want.
Basicly, keep all the legal restrictions out of it, and let people do whatever the hell they want want... that is the only truly safe thing to do.
The rise of democracy was driven by the citizens' desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm's-length system of public obligation. The principle tool of that obligation was taxation.
Just so you know, this quote is total bullshit. The rise of Democracy as a global movement started in the late 18th century, as a reaction by the growing middle class "Bourgeois" to the massive taxation and economic mismanagement of European monarchs. This was long before there was any popular concept of the welfare state.
The first welfare state programs were created by Otto von Bismarck (a hard core right-wing militarist)... and the welfare state really began on a large scale by mid-20th century facists. But even before the 19th and 20th centuries, state provided "charity" was always a function of political control and totalitarianism (think "Bread and Circuses" of the Roman empire, or "Voting Gifts" of Tammany Hall era NYC).
Above is fact, now to my personal take on it:
The welfare state is about totalitarian state control. When your home, your job, your health care, your children's education, and virtually all public services and civil discourse are controlled by the state, Democracy cannot exist - The political power elite control all the carrots and all the sticks, and therefore have the power to intimidate anyone and completly manipulate the political process. A prison provides food, health care, housing to people... but there is nothing democratic about it. Slave owners provided food, health care, and housing to their slaves... but there is nothing democratic about it. And counting a few peices of paper every couple years does not turn a prison or a plantation into a Democracy.
There is nothing remotly altruistic or humanitarian or charitable about the welfare state - To have a monopoly on a person's needs is to enslave them. The state is by definition an absolute monopoly, and one which can legally use violence to maintain it's monopoly... therefore, state control of basic human needs is the ULTIMATE WEAPON of human enslavement. State provided "charity" is an act of brutality and intimidation, and the very antithesis of freedom and democracy.
While private charity might be paternalistic, it is nowhere near being a monopoly in the way the state is a monopoly. While I would like to see charity be far more decentralized and closer to the common working people than donations by a few billionares like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet... the money being donated by Gates or Buffet will do some good, where as every penny of money spent through the "welfare state" will only do great evil!
Seriously, nearly every western government has had a sort of financial big-brother police state already in place, so that it can tax you! A total loss of privacy is the price you pay in order to have a powerful central government and welfare state. Why start complaining now when it comes to terrorism?
Instead of going after terrorists for terrorism, they should go after them for some tiny insignificant infraction of the tax code. That way it would be politically correct and "progressive" to deny them their rights.
Your missing MY point... I asked YOU to select the data. I didn't create a metric for you, I asked you to create the metric. I am not making the facts say whatever I want them to, because I am not making the facts say anything. I am saying that YOU should figure out the metrics and the data and do the experiment for yourself.
I am very confident that if YOU honestly look at the data, there is a pretty undeniable corralation between the centralization of power in the government, and centralization of power in a handful of corporations.
Maybe the folks like Rush Limbaugh wouldn't be fighting so hard against it if every proposed solution to global warming wasn't just a rehash of 1970's style socialism. (OK, maybe Rush Limbaugh is a bad example because he is just a reactionary demagog parroting the conservative party line, and would rally behind Bush if Dubya declared a "War On Carbon"... but replace Rush Limbaugh with some other *sentient* individual critical of the idea of global warming).
If you look at the popular enviornmental movement, the sollutions to global warming and pollution in general are:
1. The government managing and controlling industry and manufacturing. 2. The government limiting resource consumption, and then rationing the limited resources. 3. The government creating a vast domestic police state to monitor enviornmental law compliance.
When Marxist economics became discredited in the 80's, the totalitarians abandoned Marxism and jumped on to the enviornmentalism bandwagon. If you look at the modern enviornmental movement, it has changed from the scientific based movement that incorporated people from all over the political spectrum, to a radical left-wing ideology that blames all enviornmental problems on "capitalism" (they like to ignore the enviornmental catastrophy in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and many Eastern Bloc socialist economies... not this is not hipocracy, because their goals are political not enviornmental).
When the people organizing "enviornmentalist" marches in Washington D.C. are openly declaring their intention to "Destroy Capitalism!", and when the so-called "Green" party incorporates a whole bunch of political ideology that has absolutly nothing to do with climate, pollution, or science... well, those of us who aren't too fond of having our enviornment "protected" by Uncle Joe are naturaly going to try to oppose you.
Even moderate "Al Gore" enviornmentalists support retarded things like the Kyoto protocal (Which will *INCREASE* CO2 emmissions by moving heavy industry from highly regulated first world countries in North America and Western Europe, to countries with virtually no enviornmental regulation like China who aren't required to meet a CO2 quota... and by discouraging zero-emmission energy production like nuclear power and things like forest conservation, because the Kyoto protocal explicitly forbids nuclear energy and forest conservation from being used toward Kyoto reductions... not to mention helping large politically connected multinational corporations who were the ones lobbying for Kyoto, by creating "tradable carbon credits" and carbon taxes that will drive everyone but a tiny corporate oligarchy out of buisness).
You could get a 4 door sedan to be orders of magnitude more efficient, if you made the body out of plastic, fiberglass, with plexiglass windshields, gave it a hybrid engine, bike-like wheels and brakes, etc. Of course, such a thing would probably be illegal, as it wouldn't meet the safety standards. Not that it wouldn't be safe, because people drive bikes and motorcycles all the time - but it would not be "soccer mom" "think of the children" safe.
You see, we want super efficient cars - but we want to sue the car company for 100 million if the car can't withstand a 150MPH head-on collision from another car without exploding, even fifteen years after the car was build and is now a pile of rust, and the guy in the other card was driving drunk. Our enviornmental hysteria and product safety hysteria are mutually exclusive. It is the Ralph Nadar paradox!
a "metric" is "a system of related measures that facilitates the quantification of some particular characteristic". I didn't mention any specific metrics, but for measuring "government regulation", you could count the number of pages of federal laws there are... or you could count the total number of people employed in enforcing government regulations... or the percentage of GDP consumed by government regulating bodies like the FDA, ATF, etc.
For "government management of the economy", you could use the dollars spent by the federal government adjusted for inflation... or you could use the percentage GDP consumed by the government.
For "centralization of capital", you could use a figure such as the percentage of capital owned by the top 5% wealthiest people.
All of the above are just examples of metrics you can use to try to quantify those things I mentioned. I figured that the people I was writing to were smart enough to figure out a metric they could use to measure those things for themselves. I figured that you select a metric that satisfies your own curiosity and compare it.
Now, I realize that your comment is a smart-ass way to avoid addressing what I am saying... make a few smarmy comments designed to end this discussion, or lower it to a flame war, instead of making a real arguement. Kind of like when a Creationist says "Do you really think your Great Great Grandpa was a monkey?". But for the benifit of anyone else reading the thread, I though it important to mention a few ways one could measure those things.
In other fields, it is common to compare things using some sort of metric. For example, lines of code produced in a given time is a metric used to measure "productivity" in programming. When discussing oil, we talk about a mythical "barrel of oil", even though a barrel of Texas Sweet is worth more than Alberta Tar. A "barrel" of oil isn't the perfect metric, but good enough for a lot of things. In computers, we compare mips, even though it isn't a perfect measure of how "fast" a computer system is. Even if our metric is slightly flawed, it gives us some sort of way to make rational comparison.
Bribery and corruption is the manifestation entrophy in large social systems... it is a natural result of size and complexity of our government. There is no way to eliminate corruption, any more than you can eliminate friction in an engine, or packet loss in a large complex computer network.
Bribery and corruption isn't a "moral" problem, or a "spiritual" problem... it is a physics and enginering problem - and the solution to corruption is to keep things small, encapsulated, diversified, and decentralized - the exact opposite of the type of vast national regulation super-structure you support.
The rise of the mega-corporations is the inevitable result of the centralization of the state and increase regulation of the economy. Plot of a graph with a metric representing government regulation and subsides, government management of the economy, and a metric representing the centralization of capital and increase size of large corporations, and you will see they match each other almost perfectly.
Eliminate politicians accepting bribes? It that all we have to do? Well, golly, I guess it is just that easy! And all we have to do is eliminate viruses and bacteria, and we can cure disease too!
At least the people in office need my vote and, on paper at least, serve my interests.
First of all, the people in office could care less about your vote. The country is so gerimandered, the elections so regulated and controlled by those already in power, that your vote is meaningless.
And we all know that market solutions breed big expensive and oppressive monopolies that are only good for the existing big players.
Absolutly not. It is pure mythology that "big corporations" are for free markets. Big corporations are behind nearly all regulation "to protect the consumer". Big corporations LOVE regulation. Regulation creates fixed costs, that corporations can easily afford but prices out smaller competitors. Also, big corporations are well connected enough to make sure that the regulations are selectivly enforced only on their competitors.
Universally, more regulation = more monopolies. In a free market, any institution hits natural limits to growth... a point where the cost of maintaining the corporate institution are greater that the increased profits it can make. This is why you see many unprofitable corporations DOWNSIZING (i.e. larger marketshare is not worth the larger costs of maintaining the institution). The way to get around this problem is to lobby the government for subsidies and contracts ("The government needs to make sure every child has a laptop! And please give us the contract!"... or "Iraq is a threat to the U.S.... that is why you need our military hardware!)... or to create a regulatory enviornment that in order to meet government standards you need massive amounts of capital (no one is going to start a small drug company, or a small automobile company, because the costs of meeting government regulations are in the billions for a single product which no small company is going to have. The regulations ensure that the established corporations have an oligarchy. Which is why auto companies and drug companies are the biggest lobbiest FOR government regulation of those industries).
And, of course I can make the old standby arguement against any typical leftist support for government regulation. The FCC is part of the executive branch, which means the president is the highest authority when it comes to regulation telecommunications (and the Internet if you have your way). If you don't trust G. W. Bush to regulate the internet, then you shouldn't support government regulation of the internet... cause G. W. Bush got elected twice, and it is very possible someone like him will get elected again, and they will be VERY happy to regulate the internet how they see fit! If you don't trust the Republicans and Bush to regulate the internet, then how can you trust the government to regulate the internet?
Is there some very important reason that companies like myspace operate in the United States? It seems to me they could incorporate in the Caymen, contract another company to operate the physical servers in the U.S., and avoid the whole lawsuit thing.
It seems to me that the U.S. (and even Canada and Western Europe, although not as bad yet) are just becoming too difficult to do buisness in... I understand that a factory producing goods for the domestic market, or a service industry, or something like that might be difficult to move overseas. But, really, does this need to be the case for Internet buisnesses?
Slashdot Mirror
4 more years is a lot less than the 50+ years that the space programs of all the worlds governments combined working on space travel and not coming up with anything that the normal person could even remotely hope to purchase a flight on.
So don't complain... the X-Prize has already made it very likely that in your lifetime, if you save your money and do OK in your career, you will be able to travel into space.
Put a countdown on a webpage with half-ass myserious writing with nothing explicitly bad whatsoever, and people are willing to take vigilante action to shut it down?
Right now it is funny because it was designed in a bad spy movie kind of way. But if you did the same thing, with mysterious Arabic writing and music, a world map with locations, and a countdown, I am certain the results would be as bad (or most likely even worse), and the discussion certainly would not be as light-hearted. It turned out not that bad because it was such an obviously contrived thing that people thought it could be an ad for a movie or video game.
People, nowadays, have such a paranoid lynch mob mentality, it is getting scary. If it isn't terrorists, it is myspace predators, or crystal meth rampages, or school shooters, or bird flu, or whatever other astronomicly unlikely boogyman. Even people on Slashdot, who love to joke "someone think of the children!!!" are starting to become more and more paranoid within the bounds of their political beliefs (people on the right tend to be paranoid about terrorists and foriegners, where as people on the left tend to be paranoid about sexual preditors and school violence... people tend to discount the other guys paranoid fears, while maintaining that theirs are, of course, rational!).
Is the government promoting the hysteria in order to gain more power? Or is the government just reacting to the popular hysteria of the people? I don't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if we started hunting witches again (real old-school Communists are just to damn irrelevant for some good ol' fashion Red hunting... but the power of Satan is eternal!). Is there some ergot growing in our wheat supply nowadays that is causing people to lose their minds? Is it all that floride in the water? Cosmic rays? What the hell is going on?
They used it, and now they charge us for it. Money that should have been given to towns and cities went to corporations. I love America.
Ummm... if you have ever lived in a totally corrupt one-party political machine city, lower income areas with poor infrastructure (the people who are the least likely to be able to pay a lot of money to the telcos for broadband), are also the places where those grants would essentially go straight into the pockets of the local political machine and not help anyone at all.
The idea that the government is somehow less greedy or exploitive than the telcos is just silly, and the idea that the government doesn't charge it's customers is just silly. Government is simply a profit making corporation that can legally kidnap or kill people provided that people in silly costumes perform the proper rituals. Community ownership might work in small towns and suburban cities (where I suspect the vast majority of Slashdot users never venture out of), which are simply not old enough or big enough to have a deeply entrenched political machine, and are not big enough that people can't leave... but community ownership is just not an option to those who would benifit most by it. Dump a billion dollars for "data infrastructure" into Detroit, and the only thing it will do is make a lot of city councilman and their friends very rich.
The telcos, while pretty damn greedy, can actually be prosecuted for some of their behavior (which is virtually impossible with politicians in a one-party system). There is actually something barely resembling a market for their services (unlike with cities). I can tell you from first hand knowledge, than in large old cities, most people have a lot more power with even a big telco company than they do with their local city government.
Do they go around giving brochures to businesses that don't have some form of controlled-access to their parking lots? Because, at night, someone might pull in and sell an eightball, hate to have the owner of the business arrested..
Actually, a buisness I worked for was threatened with legal action when teenage kids were hanging out (without permission, they were just neighborhood kids who were hanging out there after hours) in the open parking lot. They were not selling drugs, but the police believed they were "troublemakers". So the scenario you present is dead on... if anything the situation is worse than you presented it.
Also, in the U.S., there is a federal "crackhouse" law, that says that you can go to prison (for life), just for people selling drugs on the property you own or at a property you are renting (even if you are not participating in selling the drugs). There have been several nightclub owners and party promoters who are serving life sentences, because they didn't do enough to discourage drug use amoung partygoers.
You won't get convicted for the actual crime, but negligence that allowed the crime. Kind of like if you leave your gun unlocked, and someone takes it and commits murder with it, you will get in trouble. You SHOULD be able to leave your gun unlocked all that you like, but that doesn't mean you won't get punished if you don't. You won't be convicted of murder, but if it is a crime that people are hysterical about people will want someone to pay, they can lock you away on some sort of crime.
And if the person wasn't doing kiddie porn, but was only trading music files, that will still get you... because I have heard the RIAA was suing people who didn't even own computers!
A blanket denial of software and buisness model patents are EXACTLY what is needed. Patents weren't supposed to protect the "idea" of the little guy, because ideas were never supposed to be patented. Patents were about a company that spent a lot of money developing a specific technology to recover the financial cost of the development if other people are making money on the technology. If it is an "idea", or software or a buisness process, there is no real cost of development (remember, people don't patent code, the patent the concept with software patents. It would be like me patenting a time machine, without providing a mechanism for how to actually time travel).
Nelson Mandela was fighting against Apartied and for basic human digity for entire classes of people. Putting your ass on the line for that is a bit different than putting your ass on the line in order to run an open wireless router. Segragation and mass opression, and password protecting your wireless hub, are not morally the same.
While I think it is great that you are running an open network for the benifit of others... and I wish that our society wasn't so damn authoritarian that it was something we had to worry about.
But yikes, could you imagine the problems you could have if someone was using your open network for downloading child porn, or even for trading copyrighted music or movies, or for some sort of "terrorist" activity. Even if you have nothing to do with it, when the authorities have trouble catching the people actually doing the cimes they are going to look for a scapegoat, and that will be you for "recklessly enabling" the crime!
I am not saying you are doing anything morally or legaly wrong, I think what you are doing is a good thing. But I think what you are doing is a bit unwise. Just like it is morally right for Falong Gong to openly practice their religion in China, but it is a very bad idea for them to do so... I say it is a bad idea to run an open network! Sorry, but your instinct for self-preservation should be higher than your altruism.
The problem with the GPL is that it is awefully restrictive for being "free" software. When I think of "free", I think of a crazy bearded guy, driving down the freeway without a helmet at breakneck speeds on his hog or something like that... not the rigid, arbitrary moral and legal document of some sort of utopian zealot. I think the GPL is more "freedom" in the G. W. Bush use of the word, than the wild-ass anarchist sense of the word.
I consider the new BSD licence to be much closer to "free software"... Do whatever the hell you want with the code, but you are not allowed to restrict the use by anyone else or sue anyone!
Now, you may say that I don't understand the GPL... which might very well be true! I don't claim to be an expert at all. But that just proves my point - If I need to master some complex and subtle understanding of the GPL in order to use it properly, then it is not free in any conventional sense of the word. Police need to read a person their rights when they are being arrested, because if a person doesn't understand their rights then they don't have any rights. If I don't understand the GPL, then clearly I have no rights under the GPL.
The BSD licence, on the other hand, is pretty damn easy to understand, and it is as damn near anarchist as a binding legal agreement can get.
There is nothing with Geek Squad, in the same way there is nothing wrong with Taco Bell. Both provide a low quality product for a low cost. If you want excellent service, you have to pay a premium... just like if you want excellent food, you have to pay a premium (or learn how to cook). For many cheap computer systems, paying a premium for a highly skilled technician just doesn't make a lot of sense... especially when, in many cases, the problem can be solved by any marginally computer literate person.
Now, there are some people who might say that Geek Squad is overpriced. I don't know what the going rate for tech support is, but it seems to me that Geek Squad is far from a monopoly on tech support, and that people are either happy with the service, or prefer the one-stop Best Buy concept than to open a phone book and look for a place themselves.
I agree with you 100%. High cigarette taxes would simply leave organized crime to fill the need, and they won't be paying any tax at all. But likewise, I think the people who make the taxes have a pretty good idea of the threshold where the black market starts to come into play, and they also take that into consideration as well to maximize profit.
My point wasn't that cigarette tax is an effective tool against smoking. I was more trying to say that it is a bad idea for the government to make a profit from something it wants to discourage. I am not sure that it is the governments job to try to fight vice, but assuming it is, having the government profit from vice is not a good way to make sure it combats vice.
Parking meters are supposed to discourage people from parking, in order to make sure those spots are used by people for only short periods of time so that everyone has a fair share of parking spots and only those with a real need get to use the spot. Parking meters are supposed to be a method for the government to allocate a scarce public resource to the most amount of people. There is a conflict of interest when the government is both trying to allocate the resource and maximize its own profit.
In theory, meter parking is designed to make sure that parking is temporary... but in reality, it is simply a revenue grab by the city. It is just not polite for the government to say "WE WANT MORE MONEY!!!! GIVE US MORE MONEY!!!", so every tax/fee needs a respectable sounding reason to exist.
There are other examples of this:
1. If they REALLY wanted to curb speeding, they would make all speeding tickets be for $10,000 and 30 days in jail, and speeding would stop overnight! Speeding fines are calculated to be as high as possible, without actually detering speeding, in order to maximize profits.
2. Same thing with cigarette tax: Presumably they want to discourage smoking - but if they wanted to do that they could place a huge tax on cigarettes, maybe $50 per pack or something. The trouble with that, is that everyone would quit smoking if they had to pay $50+ a pack. So they make the cigarette tax as high as possible without actually discouraging smoking, to maximize profits.
If you want the government to actually discourage behavior, the last thing you want the government to do is make a profit from that behavior. That is why all the brothel owners in Nevada are trying to get the state to pass a special extra-high prostitution tax - they know that once the government gets used to having that money, they won't want to give it up and therefore prostitution will always remain legal! The best way to make sure something will last forever is to give the government a cut of the profits!
While your paranoia is admirable, you are missing something important:
If you want the man to believe you are somewhere, you have the perfect way to establish an alibi!
On a more serious note though:
1. I don't think it uses a credit card, I believe it shows up on your cell phone bill.
2. How do you pay for plane tickets and whatnot without a credit card?
At first I thought, "Whats the point?"... Replacing change with cell-phone calls doesn't make sense. But the idea of sending an expiration notice when time runs out, and being able to pay while being away from the meter by cell phone, is brilliant. A system like this would probably save me money even with the 30cent fee, because I always overpay parking meters to give me a little extra leeway in case I am running late.
DRM isn't dangerous... DRM is simply encryption, and encryption isn't bad. I don't think anyone here wants encryption restricted in any way. Everyone has the right to encrypt any data in any way they want, period!
What IS dangerous is the government requiring DRM or giving it special legal protection. It is dangerous if the government mandates DRM, and makes it illegal for me to circumvent DRM. If I can crack the DRM on media, and convert it to an unprotected format for myself, without any fear of legal consequences, then my rights are not being restricted in any way.
What is also dangerous is people thinking that the government should act against DRM. Seriously, that is just as bad as DRM. It is going to come back to bite people in the ass when those anti-DRM laws start restricting how you are allowed to encrypt your own data. If I create data, I want to be able to encrypt it in any way I choose... just because you find it annoying that it takes 10 seconds to run your itunes music through a utility to convert it to mp3, doesn't mean you have the right to restrict me from encrypting my data however I want.
Basicly, keep all the legal restrictions out of it, and let people do whatever the hell they want want... that is the only truly safe thing to do.
The rise of democracy was driven by the citizens' desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm's-length system of public obligation. The principle tool of that obligation was taxation.
Just so you know, this quote is total bullshit. The rise of Democracy as a global movement started in the late 18th century, as a reaction by the growing middle class "Bourgeois" to the massive taxation and economic mismanagement of European monarchs. This was long before there was any popular concept of the welfare state.
The first welfare state programs were created by Otto von Bismarck (a hard core right-wing militarist)... and the welfare state really began on a large scale by mid-20th century facists. But even before the 19th and 20th centuries, state provided "charity" was always a function of political control and totalitarianism (think "Bread and Circuses" of the Roman empire, or "Voting Gifts" of Tammany Hall era NYC).
Above is fact, now to my personal take on it:
The welfare state is about totalitarian state control. When your home, your job, your health care, your children's education, and virtually all public services and civil discourse are controlled by the state, Democracy cannot exist - The political power elite control all the carrots and all the sticks, and therefore have the power to intimidate anyone and completly manipulate the political process. A prison provides food, health care, housing to people... but there is nothing democratic about it. Slave owners provided food, health care, and housing to their slaves... but there is nothing democratic about it. And counting a few peices of paper every couple years does not turn a prison or a plantation into a Democracy.
There is nothing remotly altruistic or humanitarian or charitable about the welfare state - To have a monopoly on a person's needs is to enslave them. The state is by definition an absolute monopoly, and one which can legally use violence to maintain it's monopoly... therefore, state control of basic human needs is the ULTIMATE WEAPON of human enslavement. State provided "charity" is an act of brutality and intimidation, and the very antithesis of freedom and democracy.
While private charity might be paternalistic, it is nowhere near being a monopoly in the way the state is a monopoly. While I would like to see charity be far more decentralized and closer to the common working people than donations by a few billionares like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet... the money being donated by Gates or Buffet will do some good, where as every penny of money spent through the "welfare state" will only do great evil!
Seriously, nearly every western government has had a sort of financial big-brother police state already in place, so that it can tax you! A total loss of privacy is the price you pay in order to have a powerful central government and welfare state. Why start complaining now when it comes to terrorism?
Instead of going after terrorists for terrorism, they should go after them for some tiny insignificant infraction of the tax code. That way it would be politically correct and "progressive" to deny them their rights.
Your missing MY point... I asked YOU to select the data. I didn't create a metric for you, I asked you to create the metric. I am not making the facts say whatever I want them to, because I am not making the facts say anything. I am saying that YOU should figure out the metrics and the data and do the experiment for yourself.
I am very confident that if YOU honestly look at the data, there is a pretty undeniable corralation between the centralization of power in the government, and centralization of power in a handful of corporations.
Maybe the folks like Rush Limbaugh wouldn't be fighting so hard against it if every proposed solution to global warming wasn't just a rehash of 1970's style socialism. (OK, maybe Rush Limbaugh is a bad example because he is just a reactionary demagog parroting the conservative party line, and would rally behind Bush if Dubya declared a "War On Carbon"... but replace Rush Limbaugh with some other *sentient* individual critical of the idea of global warming).
If you look at the popular enviornmental movement, the sollutions to global warming and pollution in general are:
1. The government managing and controlling industry and manufacturing.
2. The government limiting resource consumption, and then rationing the limited resources.
3. The government creating a vast domestic police state to monitor enviornmental law compliance.
When Marxist economics became discredited in the 80's, the totalitarians abandoned Marxism and jumped on to the enviornmentalism bandwagon. If you look at the modern enviornmental movement, it has changed from the scientific based movement that incorporated people from all over the political spectrum, to a radical left-wing ideology that blames all enviornmental problems on "capitalism" (they like to ignore the enviornmental catastrophy in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and many Eastern Bloc socialist economies... not this is not hipocracy, because their goals are political not enviornmental).
When the people organizing "enviornmentalist" marches in Washington D.C. are openly declaring their intention to "Destroy Capitalism!", and when the so-called "Green" party incorporates a whole bunch of political ideology that has absolutly nothing to do with climate, pollution, or science... well, those of us who aren't too fond of having our enviornment "protected" by Uncle Joe are naturaly going to try to oppose you.
Even moderate "Al Gore" enviornmentalists support retarded things like the Kyoto protocal (Which will *INCREASE* CO2 emmissions by moving heavy industry from highly regulated first world countries in North America and Western Europe, to countries with virtually no enviornmental regulation like China who aren't required to meet a CO2 quota... and by discouraging zero-emmission energy production like nuclear power and things like forest conservation, because the Kyoto protocal explicitly forbids nuclear energy and forest conservation from being used toward Kyoto reductions... not to mention helping large politically connected multinational corporations who were the ones lobbying for Kyoto, by creating "tradable carbon credits" and carbon taxes that will drive everyone but a tiny corporate oligarchy out of buisness).
You could get a 4 door sedan to be orders of magnitude more efficient, if you made the body out of plastic, fiberglass, with plexiglass windshields, gave it a hybrid engine, bike-like wheels and brakes, etc. Of course, such a thing would probably be illegal, as it wouldn't meet the safety standards. Not that it wouldn't be safe, because people drive bikes and motorcycles all the time - but it would not be "soccer mom" "think of the children" safe.
You see, we want super efficient cars - but we want to sue the car company for 100 million if the car can't withstand a 150MPH head-on collision from another car without exploding, even fifteen years after the car was build and is now a pile of rust, and the guy in the other card was driving drunk. Our enviornmental hysteria and product safety hysteria are mutually exclusive. It is the Ralph Nadar paradox!
Yes, Tacos are a renewable energy source... but I hear it also can produce some undesirable "gas-emmissions".
a "metric" is "a system of related measures that facilitates the quantification of some particular characteristic". I didn't mention any specific metrics, but for measuring "government regulation", you could count the number of pages of federal laws there are... or you could count the total number of people employed in enforcing government regulations... or the percentage of GDP consumed by government regulating bodies like the FDA, ATF, etc.
For "government management of the economy", you could use the dollars spent by the federal government adjusted for inflation... or you could use the percentage GDP consumed by the government.
For "centralization of capital", you could use a figure such as the percentage of capital owned by the top 5% wealthiest people.
All of the above are just examples of metrics you can use to try to quantify those things I mentioned. I figured that the people I was writing to were smart enough to figure out a metric they could use to measure those things for themselves. I figured that you select a metric that satisfies your own curiosity and compare it.
Now, I realize that your comment is a smart-ass way to avoid addressing what I am saying... make a few smarmy comments designed to end this discussion, or lower it to a flame war, instead of making a real arguement. Kind of like when a Creationist says "Do you really think your Great Great Grandpa was a monkey?". But for the benifit of anyone else reading the thread, I though it important to mention a few ways one could measure those things.
In other fields, it is common to compare things using some sort of metric. For example, lines of code produced in a given time is a metric used to measure "productivity" in programming. When discussing oil, we talk about a mythical "barrel of oil", even though a barrel of Texas Sweet is worth more than Alberta Tar. A "barrel" of oil isn't the perfect metric, but good enough for a lot of things. In computers, we compare mips, even though it isn't a perfect measure of how "fast" a computer system is. Even if our metric is slightly flawed, it gives us some sort of way to make rational comparison.
Bribery and corruption is the manifestation entrophy in large social systems... it is a natural result of size and complexity of our government. There is no way to eliminate corruption, any more than you can eliminate friction in an engine, or packet loss in a large complex computer network.
Bribery and corruption isn't a "moral" problem, or a "spiritual" problem... it is a physics and enginering problem - and the solution to corruption is to keep things small, encapsulated, diversified, and decentralized - the exact opposite of the type of vast national regulation super-structure you support.
The rise of the mega-corporations is the inevitable result of the centralization of the state and increase regulation of the economy. Plot of a graph with a metric representing government regulation and subsides, government management of the economy, and a metric representing the centralization of capital and increase size of large corporations, and you will see they match each other almost perfectly.
Eliminate politicians accepting bribes? It that all we have to do? Well, golly, I guess it is just that easy! And all we have to do is eliminate viruses and bacteria, and we can cure disease too!
At least the people in office need my vote and, on paper at least, serve my interests.
... that is why you need our military hardware!)... or to create a regulatory enviornment that in order to meet government standards you need massive amounts of capital (no one is going to start a small drug company, or a small automobile company, because the costs of meeting government regulations are in the billions for a single product which no small company is going to have. The regulations ensure that the established corporations have an oligarchy. Which is why auto companies and drug companies are the biggest lobbiest FOR government regulation of those industries).
First of all, the people in office could care less about your vote. The country is so gerimandered, the elections so regulated and controlled by those already in power, that your vote is meaningless.
And we all know that market solutions breed big expensive and oppressive monopolies that are only good for the existing big players.
Absolutly not. It is pure mythology that "big corporations" are for free markets. Big corporations are behind nearly all regulation "to protect the consumer". Big corporations LOVE regulation. Regulation creates fixed costs, that corporations can easily afford but prices out smaller competitors. Also, big corporations are well connected enough to make sure that the regulations are selectivly enforced only on their competitors.
Universally, more regulation = more monopolies. In a free market, any institution hits natural limits to growth... a point where the cost of maintaining the corporate institution are greater that the increased profits it can make. This is why you see many unprofitable corporations DOWNSIZING (i.e. larger marketshare is not worth the larger costs of maintaining the institution). The way to get around this problem is to lobby the government for subsidies and contracts ("The government needs to make sure every child has a laptop! And please give us the contract!"... or "Iraq is a threat to the U.S.
And, of course I can make the old standby arguement against any typical leftist support for government regulation. The FCC is part of the executive branch, which means the president is the highest authority when it comes to regulation telecommunications (and the Internet if you have your way). If you don't trust G. W. Bush to regulate the internet, then you shouldn't support government regulation of the internet... cause G. W. Bush got elected twice, and it is very possible someone like him will get elected again, and they will be VERY happy to regulate the internet how they see fit! If you don't trust the Republicans and Bush to regulate the internet, then how can you trust the government to regulate the internet?
Is there some very important reason that companies like myspace operate in the United States? It seems to me they could incorporate in the Caymen, contract another company to operate the physical servers in the U.S., and avoid the whole lawsuit thing.
It seems to me that the U.S. (and even Canada and Western Europe, although not as bad yet) are just becoming too difficult to do buisness in... I understand that a factory producing goods for the domestic market, or a service industry, or something like that might be difficult to move overseas. But, really, does this need to be the case for Internet buisnesses?