[quote]But, as someone posted earlier, if Macs are 5% of the computer market, why aren't 5% of the viruses and spyware on Macs? That would be tens of thousands, not a few dozen.[/quote]
Because, like all things, there is a sweet spot where writing spyware becomes economicly viable. You are only going to write spyware/adware for platforms where your returns are going to be at least equal or greater than the cost of developing and deploying the spyware.
Mac usage has not yet reached economic viability for spyware/adware.
Of course Windows is the dominant corporate operating system in the U.S., and there are far more intelligence agencies around the world who engage in corporate espionage than just the NSA/CIA (actually, the U.S. is probably behind in corporate espionage compared to say the Chinese or French - we are too worried about terrorist or whatnot). The idea that the NSA/CIA would encourage something that would be used against Americans by foriegn powers as much or more than against the "enemies" of the U.S. makes the story seem more like conspiracy theory / urban legend.
Digital Rights Management... If you can control a box using a WMF file, there is all sorts of digital rights management mischieve you can do to prevent a machine from copying a file, or decoding a file, or whatever.
For someone so quick to call everyone morons, the most basic grade-school logic seems to have escaped your mental abilities.
I send a massive list of emails to this government office, and they tell me which of those emails to remove from the list... I take that list of names they tell me to remove, and now I have a confrimed list of the children's emails (or at least a huge chunk of the list thereof).
If I was a marketing company, I can send in my half billion name list of email leads, and find out which are children in a specific area (hopefully more states than Utah and Michigan require this, so that I can get a list of children's emails categorized by state). I can then specificly target those emails with advertising for children (toys, candy, etc.), and specificly for offers in their state!
You can disconnect your server from the internet if you want to save disk storage and bandwidth... Build your own private intranet (that is what many companies do to avoid paying for unnessicary bandwidth), and you can have all the control you want.
But PLEASE don't turn the Internet into some over-regulated ultra-controlled medium, like telephone, radio, and everything else. You may think you are oh so cleverly stopping the Spammers by having the Internet micromanaged by the same people who brought you the Patriot Act... but I garantee that it will bite you in the ass and in the long run will cost you orders of magnitude more that whatever your spam bandwidth costs (and probably won't have any effect on Spam whatsoever)!
You say that we need a police state because churches, schools, neighborhoods are all somehow filled with rapists, child molestors, and serial killers just waiting to exploit or murder your children first chance they get. We should trust no one!
The only problem with your theory (well, other than having a unrealistic paranoid nightmare view of the world), is that the $25,000 a year cop you are now puting your faith in to protect your children is in no way more trustworthy than your clergy, or neighbor, or whoever. Nor is the minimum wage data entry person who has access to your childrens private information. Now you got a bunch of gun toting, union-protected child molestors and serial killers privey to all your private information and with absolute power over your life!
After all, having an available registry of confirmed emails of children is a god send for many marketers. Nice of the government to subsidize the market research so that advertising agencies can be 100% sure that their spam for toys, or candy, or xbox games is going to the target market!
Sure, the list is only supposed to be available to "authorized third party auditors" or translation: a bunch of minimum wage data entry people. Which means that it will be available to just about anyone willing to pay a few bucks! And don't expect this info not to be given to military recruiters, or anyone the government WANTS to market to your children.
And marketers are not the worst type of people who could have this information!
We must also be careful about "energy conservation" technology. Take my clothes dryer for example: It is a "high efficency" clothes drier. Do you know what the technology was to make it a high efficency clothes dryer? PAINT! See, instead of painting a gradient of "Dry" to "Less Dry" om the dial, they painted a gradient of "Extra Dry", to "Dry", to "Less Dry". Tada! The normal "Dry" cycle now takes half the energy that it did before, and it now conforms to the very strict standards enviornmental standards of my city! (of course, everyone who uses that type of dryer will just go to the "Extra Dry" setting, because it is the only way to get the clothes dry). And of course the same enviornmentalists who mandate it's use are not going to let anyone create an enviornmental and fire hazard (translation: eyesore!) of hanging clothes on a line outside, god forbid!
So much of the "conservation" regulations we have are crap. I have a super low water usage toilet, which I am sure gives enviornmental regulators lots of joy when they mandated its use on paper. Of course, you need to flush two or three times for anything more than a Kleenex to go down. My "energy efficent" dishwasher is extremely energy efficent on the normal cycle - it uses only a fraction of the energy and water... but to get dishes clean I must either practicly handwash them first (despite the myth that says otherwise, handwashing dishes uses more energy and water than most modern energy saving dishwashers with a full load), or set it on the pots and pans setting (which negates half of my energy and water savings... although is still marginaly better than a less efficent dishwasher or hand washing, if the dishwasher company propoganda is to be believed - They are the same company that used paint to make my dryer high efficency, so who knows!).
Just because a copyright expires, doesn't mean that one doesn't have to stop using DRM. If I copyright a story, then keep my copy in a vault for the duration of the copyright, I still (or rather, my grandchildren the way copyright works nowadays) can release that work with DRM... I simply wouldn't have any legal recourse if someone broke that DRM and then distributed the unprotected version of that work.
In fact, I could apply DRM to the bible, or shakespeare, or something public domain and distribute it if I want... I just wouldn't have any legal recourse to stop others from distributing their own encrypted or unencrypted versions of it.
There is nothing wrong with DRM, if you don't like it you can choose not to purchase products with DRM. The only moral problem with DRM is when the government mandates DRM (or makes it illegal to crack DRM).
Protecting people from "harrasment" has a huge cost. Since "harrasment" is a totaly subjective concept, this legislation could easily be used to go after nearly anyone. Legit political commentary, satire, etc., can be considered harrasment (Micheal Moore has made his career on harrasing people). It is completly possible that the cost of being protected from "harrasment" is just not worth the cost in loss of free expression. Even if the government is the absolute best way of protecting people from harrasment, it is not clear that is what we want it to do.
So no, not all of us believe that the government should be in the buisness of stopping harrasment.
What you are saying is true, but only to a certain extent.
Yes, at the present state of time, we probably still need a small state to protect us from certain groups who would step in and take power in the absence of the government. But that is a huge jump to saying that we need the monster government that we have today.
First of all, you are assuming that the government protects us from, lets say, a corporation. It is clear right now that corporations use law suits, government legistlation, intellectual property laws, all as tools for control and intimidation. It is not that the government protects us from corporations, but more like our government is being used as an enforcer for corporations.
Intimidation of minorities was/is largely carried out by the government (Jim Crow laws then, drug and gun laws now that almost exclusivly target minorities now) Ask a black man living in inner city Detroit if he is more scared of the KKK, or of the police! At least half a million black men are imprisioned right now for victimless crimes... When you consider that there is only 10-15 million black men in the United States, I would say that the U.S. government is several orders of magnitude more dangerous to minorities that the KKK.
In most places, the government acts WITH organized crime... for example, in many places you can't get a building permit unless you pay off the local goodguy, who then pays off the local politician to let you build. Or we have drug laws that do more to raise the price of illegal drugs and make them highly profitable than they do to stop illegal drugs (the DEA is the OPEC of drug smuggling!!! And I won't even go into the CIA drug operations).
And, I am of course talking about the United States. The Soviet Union and Stalin's purges, Mao and his "Cultural Revolution" and "Great Leap Forward", Pol Pot in Cambodia, Nicolia Chochecau in Romaina, I could go on and on about governments with far greater domestic power than the United States and the attrocities they commited. The United States is generally a more pleasent place to live because the lack of total government control. (But even without a totalitarian government, we have the U.S. government's participation in the genocide of native Americans, or massive bombing of civilians in WWII and Vietnam, and other attrocities that have nothing to do with fighting big corporations or the mafia).
Yes, you are correct, an immediate jump to anarchy is probably not a good thing right now... we probably need the government to protect us from warlords, aggressive foriegn governments, powerful economic interests, etc. But you are not defending that, you are defending a government that regularly invades peoples homes on the slightest of pretext, spies on its own citizens, takes 80% of their income in taxes and hidden fees, and now can arbitrarily throw people in jail for being "annoying". We are so far away from the concept of liberal democracy that maybe having a few more mafia people might be an acceptable price to pay for a little bit more freedom.
Yes, as soon as we eliminate insideous new-fangled web bullying, a bully will have to go back to the good wholesome old fashion forms of bullying, like beating kids up for their lunch money, knocking books out of their hands, or giving people wedgies! Baseball, Apple Pie, Hotdogs, and swirlies! Those were the days!
It is clear why all of you would be against this legislation. According to the article, this is also part of the "Violence Against Women Act"! Clearly the "Violence Against Women Act" is to protect women - Anyone who dares question any part of this law clearly has a problem with the government protecting women against violence! Why would the government put the clause in, if it wasn't to protect women!? Obviously, you are all part of some right-wing conspiracy to oppress women! I have read the "Handmaids Tale", I know what your agenda is!
I am going to be reporting you all to the government! Many people here are posting annoying things, using fake names! Clearly, you are all doing so to facilitate some sort of violence against women! Slashdot's days of being a secret haven of women haters will be over very quickly!
Please, think of the children... err, I mean think of the women!
Now, if we can only do something about those people who have a problem with patriotism, and so are against the Patriot act!
Actually, Canada has quite strict "Hate Crime" laws... and the language of the laws are so loose (and the concept in itself is so subjective), that virtually anyone could be accused of "Hate Speech" (There have been serious attempts to keep Al-Jazeera, Fox News, RAI [Italy's State TV Network similiar to the CBC] from being available in Canada by classifying them as "hate speech"... Even Don Cherry has in all seriousness been called a "Hate Criminal" by the BQ). So while yes, the U.S. government can't do anything to you about posting annoying messages, your own government would have the authority to do so (And, of course, you could always just post your message in some other country, defying your own government).
I think the real danger is, like you said, some sort of international treaty that would limit free speech. This isn't as outlandish as it might seem. Already the U.N. has approved a resolution, with almost unanimous support, that endorses the "right" of any nation to completly ban any sort of foriegn news, music, or entertainment under the guise of "protect national culture". It is only a short step from complete censorship of foriegn media (which has been approved by the U.N.), to complete censorship of domestic media.
No, there are great enviornmental benifits to having vast sources of energy. Here are a few benifits from having massive amounts of energy:
1. Desalination of sea water is easy to do, if you have lots of cheap energy. Right now we are depleating our natural sources of fresh water from home use and irrigation. But we can take almost endless amounts from the sea, conserving our fresh water.
2. Hydroponic farming is very useful to conservation. There is no reason why we can't build giant multi-story hydroponic farms in urban areas - the reason we don't do much hydroponic farming is because the energy costs. By farming inside an enviornmentally controlled structure, without crop loss due to weather, and pests, we can massivly increase productivity. And, since they will be isolated, no nasty pesticides would be needed. And, we can use geneticly modified crops without worrying about them being released into the wild.
3. Specialization will be enhanced. There are certain places that manufacture things at a slight advantage than other places, but that advantage is diminished because the cost of transport is greater than the savings. With cheap virtually unlimited energy, transport would no longer be an issue, causing resources to be used more efficiently.
4. There are energy-innefficient ways to dramaticly reduce manufacturing polutants. For example, factory emmissions can be super-heated and seperated based on different types of gas. This requires insane amounts of energy, so it isn't useful. But with vast new pools of energy, it could be effective.
Energy is good. Fossil fuel energy is bad, because of global warming amoung other things, but nuclear energy which is essentially pollution free, cheap (if not being actively sabotaged), has the potential for enourmous good.
Or, we could have a solid state drive for the OS (for fast bootup), and for software that might need to read/write lots of data to and from disk (such as doing manipulation on a video file too big to fit in memory)... and we could have a disk drive for everything else.
Terrorism is revelant here... not because there is any likelyhood whatsoever about terrorists hijacking spacecraft and doing a lot of harm (at least not anywhere in the near future), but it is relevant because it is an politically acceptable excuse for doing things. People will accept any sort of government intervnetion into society, if it is to "stop terrorists". Terrorism, therefore, is worth mentioning in the context of civilian space flight - even if only as a political concept and not as a practicle concern.
I live in Canada, and I know that there is no garantee whatsoever of recieving the healthcare I need. I am garanteed that I will never recieve a bill for the healthcare rendered, but that is different that being garanteed health care. I know of two people first hand, who had to travel to the U.S., or chose to remain in the U.S., because the "universal" health care of Canada was not going to give them the medical care they needed. The healthcare was easily available to them in the U.S., despite the fact that they had very little and no insurance.
Sweden, Japan, and South Korea are all extremely free market countries. Somalia, Northern Pakistan, Eastern Congo, are all warzones with petty dictatorships and warlords. Somalia, Northern Pakistan, and Eastern Congo are not free of the state, rather they are a mish mash of small totalitarian dictatorships struggling for power. Also, war and violence in Somalia, Northern Pakistan, and Eastern Congo are subsidized by states fighting proxy warfare over their resources or ideology.
Sweden is in the top 20 most free market countries... If I remember correctly, Canada was 15th, Sweden 14th, and America was 13th in free market policies - Although the U.S. will likely be rated less of a free market than Sweden and Canada next year, thanks to G. W. Bush pissing money away. Right now, America likely has a higher tax rate than Sweden, when you adjust the tax rate for future debt.
Somalia is a bad example, because it wasn't a voluntary attempt at anarchy or minarchy. An internal civil war destroyed the state - the bad effects comming not from a lack of central state, but from the violence that destroyed the state.
[quote]They're too busy talking about the financial freedom lost when you have a work force of illiterates who can't add.[/quote] Your arguement is based on several assumptions:
1. You assume that government schools are teaching kids literacy and math. ("public" schools are churing out illiterates who can't add in record numbers. It terms of science, math, and english, are children are getting stupider as government takes a larger and larger role in their education).
2. You assume that the government is the only institution capable of providing education (When in fact, homeschooling, religious schools, private secular schools in the U.S. seem to do better that public schools in teaching math, science, and literacy... There are an infinite amount of possible education models besides the State-Run Prussian Military School model we use in the United States).
3. You ignore the terrible social effects public schools have on children (conditioning them to obedience to authority, squeltching individualism and diversity, taking away their privacy, age and skill segregation). Government schools primary purpose is social conditioning and propogandizing... Education is secondary... at least according to the founders of modern public education in America (check out http://johntaylorgatto.com/ for lots of information on the history and purposes of public education in the U.S.)
We don't all share your absolute faith in government, and government is not the only model of social cooperation that we are able to comprehend. No Government Schools != No Education... that might be hard for someone to grasp who has been conditioned that the state is everything.
[quote]And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.[/quote] Once again, your statement has many assumptions... A Christian says "How are you going to avoid going to hell if you don't except Christ to wash away your sins", and the statement seems common sense to them, because they have already assumed all the premises of Christianity (for example, that hell exists, that there is actually something called sin, and that Jesus can redeem sin, etc. etc.). But if a Buddist, or Taoist, or Athiest hears that sentence, it just sounds silly, because they have not accepted all the Christian assumptions on which this "common sense" is based.
Here are your assumptions:
1. You assume that Medicare is the only social structure capable of providing health care to those that need it. (In fact, there are any number of models of healthcare that we could use, if the government would allow such things... government isn't the only means of social organization).
2. You assume that Medicare somehow makes healthcare more available (instead of, say, pumping money in without increasing supply, and thus raising the price of medical care for everyone - acting as an unofficial government subsidy of big pharma, the people who pay to lobby to increase medicare).
3. You assume that Medicare is a sustainable, viable system. (Social Security, of which Medicare is a part, will no longer be financial viable when the number of people collecting benifits approaches the number of people paying into the system. This is set to happen when the baby boomers stop paying, and start collecting).
I mean, listen to the rhetoric we are using: "If we don't have Medicare, thousands and thousand will die on the street or be commiting horrible crime!" - I mean what kind of sensational reactionary statement is that? Let me do one better:
"You must all send me $10,000 - because if you don't, I will not be able to say my magical incantations, and thousands and thousands of people will be killed by angry spirits! What, you don't want to send me $10,00
The trouble is that the solution people offer to inequity is usually what caused the problem in the first place.
When people complain about inequity, the solution they are usually talking about is to give more power and resources to the state (i.e. a centralized top down command structure controlled by a small political elite). And when you talk about Socialism, Communism, or any one of the the 19th century ideologies that are popular with people complaining about inequality, you are talking about a giant, massive, centralized, authoritarian state.
The state IS inequality... it is by it's very nature and structure a system of hierarchy and authority, and so increasing the power and resources of the state can only increase inequality and subjugation. People may say that they want to use the state to end inequality, but what they really mean is that they want their own ethnic/political/social group to be the authority in power subjigating others.
If you truly want equality, then you would support decentralization of power, and the reduction and/or elimination of the state. Inequality comes from violence... it comes from situations where people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves and instead are forced to do something under the threat of violence. The economic underclass we have in the western world are victims of government violence or threat of violence (the violence/threat might be prompted by corporations, religions, or powerful interests bribing the government to act on their behalf... or the violence/threat might be some real but misguided attempt to "help" people).
Free people from a giant, violent, centralized authority like a government, and equality, prosperity, and peace are the natural result. But government and equality are fundamentally opposed and incompatible situations. Most likely (and if I am misinterpreting you and you are not advocating some centralized government plan, I apologize), the very political policies you support are the cause of the inequality you are against.
1. That scientists, engineers, etc., should work on developing the technology to better utilize alcohol or biofuel or something?
2. That the government, or some central planning force, needs to impose this on us?
In response to #1, I think it would probably be better to get 100% efficient solar power panels and use hydrogen cells to store it (as bio-fuels are just inefficient solar power anyway). I think bio-fuels are useful when it comes to getting rid of waste (turning food surpluses into fuel, turning biological waste into fuel), but not something you can base an entire industrial economy on.
You show 'em Tennesse! Let buinnesses know that no way shape or form Tennesse is going to let anyone avoid paying the state it's cut! Tell those stinkin' companies they can go to China if they want low taxes!
We all love the failing schools, highest murder and incarcaratiion rate in the industrialized world, and billion dollar bridges to remote islands off the shore of Alaska! So please, please, please take more of our money! Tell that lazy single mother of three she is just gonna have to work overtime to buy the kids Christmas gifts this year, because the government has some brilliant ideas on where they can spend her money.
But on the real, you do realize that schools, roads, and police service make up a tiny fraction of the Federal budget? That we could pay for all those things many times over with the taxes we pay? You do realize that providing the extra money will do absolutly nothing to provide those things... most countries have no problem providing all of those for 1/20th the resources that the United States Federal Government has?
Until the government cleans up it's act, and they are at least as honest and responsible as Enron or Ivan Boesky, I don't think the government needs another cent of money.
Slashdot Mirror
[quote]But, as someone posted earlier, if Macs are 5% of the computer market, why aren't 5% of the viruses and spyware on Macs? That would be tens of thousands, not a few dozen.[/quote]
Because, like all things, there is a sweet spot where writing spyware becomes economicly viable. You are only going to write spyware/adware for platforms where your returns are going to be at least equal or greater than the cost of developing and deploying the spyware.
Mac usage has not yet reached economic viability for spyware/adware.
Of course Windows is the dominant corporate operating system in the U.S., and there are far more intelligence agencies around the world who engage in corporate espionage than just the NSA/CIA (actually, the U.S. is probably behind in corporate espionage compared to say the Chinese or French - we are too worried about terrorist or whatnot). The idea that the NSA/CIA would encourage something that would be used against Americans by foriegn powers as much or more than against the "enemies" of the U.S. makes the story seem more like conspiracy theory / urban legend.
Digital Rights Management... If you can control a box using a WMF file, there is all sorts of digital rights management mischieve you can do to prevent a machine from copying a file, or decoding a file, or whatever.
For someone so quick to call everyone morons, the most basic grade-school logic seems to have escaped your mental abilities.
I send a massive list of emails to this government office, and they tell me which of those emails to remove from the list... I take that list of names they tell me to remove, and now I have a confrimed list of the children's emails (or at least a huge chunk of the list thereof).
If I was a marketing company, I can send in my half billion name list of email leads, and find out which are children in a specific area (hopefully more states than Utah and Michigan require this, so that I can get a list of children's emails categorized by state). I can then specificly target those emails with advertising for children (toys, candy, etc.), and specificly for offers in their state!
You can disconnect your server from the internet if you want to save disk storage and bandwidth... Build your own private intranet (that is what many companies do to avoid paying for unnessicary bandwidth), and you can have all the control you want.
But PLEASE don't turn the Internet into some over-regulated ultra-controlled medium, like telephone, radio, and everything else. You may think you are oh so cleverly stopping the Spammers by having the Internet micromanaged by the same people who brought you the Patriot Act... but I garantee that it will bite you in the ass and in the long run will cost you orders of magnitude more that whatever your spam bandwidth costs (and probably won't have any effect on Spam whatsoever)!
You say that we need a police state because churches, schools, neighborhoods are all somehow filled with rapists, child molestors, and serial killers just waiting to exploit or murder your children first chance they get. We should trust no one!
The only problem with your theory (well, other than having a unrealistic paranoid nightmare view of the world), is that the $25,000 a year cop you are now puting your faith in to protect your children is in no way more trustworthy than your clergy, or neighbor, or whoever. Nor is the minimum wage data entry person who has access to your childrens private information. Now you got a bunch of gun toting, union-protected child molestors and serial killers privey to all your private information and with absolute power over your life!
After all, having an available registry of confirmed emails of children is a god send for many marketers. Nice of the government to subsidize the market research so that advertising agencies can be 100% sure that their spam for toys, or candy, or xbox games is going to the target market!
Sure, the list is only supposed to be available to "authorized third party auditors" or translation: a bunch of minimum wage data entry people. Which means that it will be available to just about anyone willing to pay a few bucks! And don't expect this info not to be given to military recruiters, or anyone the government WANTS to market to your children.
And marketers are not the worst type of people who could have this information!
We must also be careful about "energy conservation" technology. Take my clothes dryer for example: It is a "high efficency" clothes drier. Do you know what the technology was to make it a high efficency clothes dryer? PAINT! See, instead of painting a gradient of "Dry" to "Less Dry" om the dial, they painted a gradient of "Extra Dry", to "Dry", to "Less Dry". Tada! The normal "Dry" cycle now takes half the energy that it did before, and it now conforms to the very strict standards enviornmental standards of my city! (of course, everyone who uses that type of dryer will just go to the "Extra Dry" setting, because it is the only way to get the clothes dry). And of course the same enviornmentalists who mandate it's use are not going to let anyone create an enviornmental and fire hazard (translation: eyesore!) of hanging clothes on a line outside, god forbid!
So much of the "conservation" regulations we have are crap. I have a super low water usage toilet, which I am sure gives enviornmental regulators lots of joy when they mandated its use on paper. Of course, you need to flush two or three times for anything more than a Kleenex to go down. My "energy efficent" dishwasher is extremely energy efficent on the normal cycle - it uses only a fraction of the energy and water... but to get dishes clean I must either practicly handwash them first (despite the myth that says otherwise, handwashing dishes uses more energy and water than most modern energy saving dishwashers with a full load), or set it on the pots and pans setting (which negates half of my energy and water savings... although is still marginaly better than a less efficent dishwasher or hand washing, if the dishwasher company propoganda is to be believed - They are the same company that used paint to make my dryer high efficency, so who knows!).
Just because a copyright expires, doesn't mean that one doesn't have to stop using DRM. If I copyright a story, then keep my copy in a vault for the duration of the copyright, I still (or rather, my grandchildren the way copyright works nowadays) can release that work with DRM... I simply wouldn't have any legal recourse if someone broke that DRM and then distributed the unprotected version of that work.
In fact, I could apply DRM to the bible, or shakespeare, or something public domain and distribute it if I want... I just wouldn't have any legal recourse to stop others from distributing their own encrypted or unencrypted versions of it.
There is nothing wrong with DRM, if you don't like it you can choose not to purchase products with DRM. The only moral problem with DRM is when the government mandates DRM (or makes it illegal to crack DRM).
Protecting people from "harrasment" has a huge cost. Since "harrasment" is a totaly subjective concept, this legislation could easily be used to go after nearly anyone. Legit political commentary, satire, etc., can be considered harrasment (Micheal Moore has made his career on harrasing people). It is completly possible that the cost of being protected from "harrasment" is just not worth the cost in loss of free expression. Even if the government is the absolute best way of protecting people from harrasment, it is not clear that is what we want it to do.
So no, not all of us believe that the government should be in the buisness of stopping harrasment.
What you are saying is true, but only to a certain extent.
Yes, at the present state of time, we probably still need a small state to protect us from certain groups who would step in and take power in the absence of the government. But that is a huge jump to saying that we need the monster government that we have today.
First of all, you are assuming that the government protects us from, lets say, a corporation. It is clear right now that corporations use law suits, government legistlation, intellectual property laws, all as tools for control and intimidation. It is not that the government protects us from corporations, but more like our government is being used as an enforcer for corporations.
Intimidation of minorities was/is largely carried out by the government (Jim Crow laws then, drug and gun laws now that almost exclusivly target minorities now) Ask a black man living in inner city Detroit if he is more scared of the KKK, or of the police! At least half a million black men are imprisioned right now for victimless crimes... When you consider that there is only 10-15 million black men in the United States, I would say that the U.S. government is several orders of magnitude more dangerous to minorities that the KKK.
In most places, the government acts WITH organized crime... for example, in many places you can't get a building permit unless you pay off the local goodguy, who then pays off the local politician to let you build. Or we have drug laws that do more to raise the price of illegal drugs and make them highly profitable than they do to stop illegal drugs (the DEA is the OPEC of drug smuggling!!! And I won't even go into the CIA drug operations).
And, I am of course talking about the United States. The Soviet Union and Stalin's purges, Mao and his "Cultural Revolution" and "Great Leap Forward", Pol Pot in Cambodia, Nicolia Chochecau in Romaina, I could go on and on about governments with far greater domestic power than the United States and the attrocities they commited. The United States is generally a more pleasent place to live because the lack of total government control. (But even without a totalitarian government, we have the U.S. government's participation in the genocide of native Americans, or massive bombing of civilians in WWII and Vietnam, and other attrocities that have nothing to do with fighting big corporations or the mafia).
Yes, you are correct, an immediate jump to anarchy is probably not a good thing right now... we probably need the government to protect us from warlords, aggressive foriegn governments, powerful economic interests, etc. But you are not defending that, you are defending a government that regularly invades peoples homes on the slightest of pretext, spies on its own citizens, takes 80% of their income in taxes and hidden fees, and now can arbitrarily throw people in jail for being "annoying". We are so far away from the concept of liberal democracy that maybe having a few more mafia people might be an acceptable price to pay for a little bit more freedom.
Yes, as soon as we eliminate insideous new-fangled web bullying, a bully will have to go back to the good wholesome old fashion forms of bullying, like beating kids up for their lunch money, knocking books out of their hands, or giving people wedgies! Baseball, Apple Pie, Hotdogs, and swirlies! Those were the days!
It is clear why all of you would be against this legislation. According to the article, this is also part of the "Violence Against Women Act"! Clearly the "Violence Against Women Act" is to protect women - Anyone who dares question any part of this law clearly has a problem with the government protecting women against violence! Why would the government put the clause in, if it wasn't to protect women!? Obviously, you are all part of some right-wing conspiracy to oppress women! I have read the "Handmaids Tale", I know what your agenda is!
I am going to be reporting you all to the government! Many people here are posting annoying things, using fake names! Clearly, you are all doing so to facilitate some sort of violence against women! Slashdot's days of being a secret haven of women haters will be over very quickly!
Please, think of the children... err, I mean think of the women!
Now, if we can only do something about those people who have a problem with patriotism, and so are against the Patriot act!
Actually, Canada has quite strict "Hate Crime" laws... and the language of the laws are so loose (and the concept in itself is so subjective), that virtually anyone could be accused of "Hate Speech" (There have been serious attempts to keep Al-Jazeera, Fox News, RAI [Italy's State TV Network similiar to the CBC] from being available in Canada by classifying them as "hate speech"... Even Don Cherry has in all seriousness been called a "Hate Criminal" by the BQ). So while yes, the U.S. government can't do anything to you about posting annoying messages, your own government would have the authority to do so (And, of course, you could always just post your message in some other country, defying your own government).
I think the real danger is, like you said, some sort of international treaty that would limit free speech. This isn't as outlandish as it might seem. Already the U.N. has approved a resolution, with almost unanimous support, that endorses the "right" of any nation to completly ban any sort of foriegn news, music, or entertainment under the guise of "protect national culture". It is only a short step from complete censorship of foriegn media (which has been approved by the U.N.), to complete censorship of domestic media.
No, there are great enviornmental benifits to having vast sources of energy. Here are a few benifits from having massive amounts of energy:
1. Desalination of sea water is easy to do, if you have lots of cheap energy. Right now we are depleating our natural sources of fresh water from home use and irrigation. But we can take almost endless amounts from the sea, conserving our fresh water.
2. Hydroponic farming is very useful to conservation. There is no reason why we can't build giant multi-story hydroponic farms in urban areas - the reason we don't do much hydroponic farming is because the energy costs. By farming inside an enviornmentally controlled structure, without crop loss due to weather, and pests, we can massivly increase productivity. And, since they will be isolated, no nasty pesticides would be needed. And, we can use geneticly modified crops without worrying about them being released into the wild.
3. Specialization will be enhanced. There are certain places that manufacture things at a slight advantage than other places, but that advantage is diminished because the cost of transport is greater than the savings. With cheap virtually unlimited energy, transport would no longer be an issue, causing resources to be used more efficiently.
4. There are energy-innefficient ways to dramaticly reduce manufacturing polutants. For example, factory emmissions can be super-heated and seperated based on different types of gas. This requires insane amounts of energy, so it isn't useful. But with vast new pools of energy, it could be effective.
Energy is good. Fossil fuel energy is bad, because of global warming amoung other things, but nuclear energy which is essentially pollution free, cheap (if not being actively sabotaged), has the potential for enourmous good.
Or, we could have a solid state drive for the OS (for fast bootup), and for software that might need to read/write lots of data to and from disk (such as doing manipulation on a video file too big to fit in memory)... and we could have a disk drive for everything else.
Terrorism is revelant here... not because there is any likelyhood whatsoever about terrorists hijacking spacecraft and doing a lot of harm (at least not anywhere in the near future), but it is relevant because it is an politically acceptable excuse for doing things. People will accept any sort of government intervnetion into society, if it is to "stop terrorists". Terrorism, therefore, is worth mentioning in the context of civilian space flight - even if only as a political concept and not as a practicle concern.
I live in Canada, and I know that there is no garantee whatsoever of recieving the healthcare I need. I am garanteed that I will never recieve a bill for the healthcare rendered, but that is different that being garanteed health care. I know of two people first hand, who had to travel to the U.S., or chose to remain in the U.S., because the "universal" health care of Canada was not going to give them the medical care they needed. The healthcare was easily available to them in the U.S., despite the fact that they had very little and no insurance.
Sweden, Japan, and South Korea are all extremely free market countries. Somalia, Northern Pakistan, Eastern Congo, are all warzones with petty dictatorships and warlords. Somalia, Northern Pakistan, and Eastern Congo are not free of the state, rather they are a mish mash of small totalitarian dictatorships struggling for power. Also, war and violence in Somalia, Northern Pakistan, and Eastern Congo are subsidized by states fighting proxy warfare over their resources or ideology.
Sweden is in the top 20 most free market countries... If I remember correctly, Canada was 15th, Sweden 14th, and America was 13th in free market policies - Although the U.S. will likely be rated less of a free market than Sweden and Canada next year, thanks to G. W. Bush pissing money away. Right now, America likely has a higher tax rate than Sweden, when you adjust the tax rate for future debt.
Somalia is a bad example, because it wasn't a voluntary attempt at anarchy or minarchy. An internal civil war destroyed the state - the bad effects comming not from a lack of central state, but from the violence that destroyed the state.
[quote]They're too busy talking about the financial freedom lost when you have a work force of illiterates who can't add.[/quote]
... that might be hard for someone to grasp who has been conditioned that the state is everything.
Your arguement is based on several assumptions:
1. You assume that government schools are teaching kids literacy and math. ("public" schools are churing out illiterates who can't add in record numbers. It terms of science, math, and english, are children are getting stupider as government takes a larger and larger role in their education).
2. You assume that the government is the only institution capable of providing education (When in fact, homeschooling, religious schools, private secular schools in the U.S. seem to do better that public schools in teaching math, science, and literacy... There are an infinite amount of possible education models besides the State-Run Prussian Military School model we use in the United States).
3. You ignore the terrible social effects public schools have on children (conditioning them to obedience to authority, squeltching individualism and diversity, taking away their privacy, age and skill segregation). Government schools primary purpose is social conditioning and propogandizing... Education is secondary... at least according to the founders of modern public education in America (check out http://johntaylorgatto.com/ for lots of information on the history and purposes of public education in the U.S.)
We don't all share your absolute faith in government, and government is not the only model of social cooperation that we are able to comprehend. No Government Schools != No Education
[quote]And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.[/quote]
Once again, your statement has many assumptions... A Christian says "How are you going to avoid going to hell if you don't except Christ to wash away your sins", and the statement seems common sense to them, because they have already assumed all the premises of Christianity (for example, that hell exists, that there is actually something called sin, and that Jesus can redeem sin, etc. etc.). But if a Buddist, or Taoist, or Athiest hears that sentence, it just sounds silly, because they have not accepted all the Christian assumptions on which this "common sense" is based.
Here are your assumptions:
1. You assume that Medicare is the only social structure capable of providing health care to those that need it. (In fact, there are any number of models of healthcare that we could use, if the government would allow such things... government isn't the only means of social organization).
2. You assume that Medicare somehow makes healthcare more available (instead of, say, pumping money in without increasing supply, and thus raising the price of medical care for everyone - acting as an unofficial government subsidy of big pharma, the people who pay to lobby to increase medicare).
3. You assume that Medicare is a sustainable, viable system. (Social Security, of which Medicare is a part, will no longer be financial viable when the number of people collecting benifits approaches the number of people paying into the system. This is set to happen when the baby boomers stop paying, and start collecting).
I mean, listen to the rhetoric we are using: "If we don't have Medicare, thousands and thousand will die on the street or be commiting horrible crime!" - I mean what kind of sensational reactionary statement is that? Let me do one better:
"You must all send me $10,000 - because if you don't, I will not be able to say my magical incantations, and thousands and thousands of people will be killed by angry spirits! What, you don't want to send me $10,00
The trouble is that the solution people offer to inequity is usually what caused the problem in the first place.
When people complain about inequity, the solution they are usually talking about is to give more power and resources to the state (i.e. a centralized top down command structure controlled by a small political elite). And when you talk about Socialism, Communism, or any one of the the 19th century ideologies that are popular with people complaining about inequality, you are talking about a giant, massive, centralized, authoritarian state.
The state IS inequality... it is by it's very nature and structure a system of hierarchy and authority, and so increasing the power and resources of the state can only increase inequality and subjugation. People may say that they want to use the state to end inequality, but what they really mean is that they want their own ethnic/political/social group to be the authority in power subjigating others.
If you truly want equality, then you would support decentralization of power, and the reduction and/or elimination of the state. Inequality comes from violence... it comes from situations where people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves and instead are forced to do something under the threat of violence. The economic underclass we have in the western world are victims of government violence or threat of violence (the violence/threat might be prompted by corporations, religions, or powerful interests bribing the government to act on their behalf... or the violence/threat might be some real but misguided attempt to "help" people).
Free people from a giant, violent, centralized authority like a government, and equality, prosperity, and peace are the natural result. But government and equality are fundamentally opposed and incompatible situations. Most likely (and if I am misinterpreting you and you are not advocating some centralized government plan, I apologize), the very political policies you support are the cause of the inequality you are against.
Please clarify what you are suggesting:
1. That scientists, engineers, etc., should work on developing the technology to better utilize alcohol or biofuel or something?
2. That the government, or some central planning force, needs to impose this on us?
In response to #1, I think it would probably be better to get 100% efficient solar power panels and use hydrogen cells to store it (as bio-fuels are just inefficient solar power anyway). I think bio-fuels are useful when it comes to getting rid of waste (turning food surpluses into fuel, turning biological waste into fuel), but not something you can base an entire industrial economy on.
In response to #2, hell no!
You show 'em Tennesse! Let buinnesses know that no way shape or form Tennesse is going to let anyone avoid paying the state it's cut! Tell those stinkin' companies they can go to China if they want low taxes!
We all love the failing schools, highest murder and incarcaratiion rate in the industrialized world, and billion dollar bridges to remote islands off the shore of Alaska! So please, please, please take more of our money! Tell that lazy single mother of three she is just gonna have to work overtime to buy the kids Christmas gifts this year, because the government has some brilliant ideas on where they can spend her money.
But on the real, you do realize that schools, roads, and police service make up a tiny fraction of the Federal budget? That we could pay for all those things many times over with the taxes we pay? You do realize that providing the extra money will do absolutly nothing to provide those things... most countries have no problem providing all of those for 1/20th the resources that the United States Federal Government has?
Until the government cleans up it's act, and they are at least as honest and responsible as Enron or Ivan Boesky, I don't think the government needs another cent of money.