No... a corporation doesn't nessicarily want to return the biggest dividends, it can use profit for capital expenditures (In the case of government capital expenditure would be manufacturing a crisis that require even more government spending... say something like the Iraq war). And for a government, it is not nessicarily bad to borrow money, because they control the money supply and can always devalue the currency (and the current ruling party, or at least the current leaders, will not be around when the debt comes due anyway, so why worry about it?).
The BBC is no great thing. They have a few good shows, of course (which is great for people in North America who get the [best of] BBC as a few of the 500 commercial channels in their cable package). But a lot of the BBC is either cheap ripoffs of American shows, or insipid pseudo-intellectual crap so that the viewers can feel "cultured". Yes, "Doctor Who" is great in a Anglo-kitch kind of way, but for every "Doctor Who" there is a "Fat Friends" or "Space Cadets". And the BBC is absolutly monolithic in showing only the whitebread petty bougiouse government beurocrats eye view of the world. Give me commercial programing over the BBC any day.
And the BBC gets a good chunck of it's revenue for licencing it's content on the free market abroad (probably more than it gets from licencing frees, although I couldn't find the exact numbers published online) - so as a poster child of socialism, the BBC is a bad example. For most of the world, the BBC is just another commercial network competing on the free market, not a government agency. I certainly don't pay any compulsary licence for the several BBC channels I recieve!
Sadly the networks cannot condone properly taking care of the needs of the end users. That wouldn't be fiscally responsible to their pockets. Not only wouldn't it be fiscally responsible to their pockets, it wouldn't be possible. It costs money to pay employees, to purchase equipment, to advertise a show. All that takes resources. You either bring in more resources than you pay out, or you do not have the resources to make the show. There is no magical fairy that is going to give us everything we want without cost. There is no way to escape the laws of reality. Even the government is a profit making corporation (the difference between a private corporation and the government is the government is a monopoly and can use violence... but both private corporations and government corporations are for-profit).
Some alternatives to this are:
1) Have shows produced completly by hobbiests. The hobbiests of course still need to make a profit, but they do that with their day job. In which case, expensive shows like Myth Busters will be very few and far between.
2) Have shows produced by some sort of government monopoly. Welcome to the world of Dubya TV! The police handle ensuring the profit model... this works, so long as you are in the same social group as the ruling class. If you want some programing that the government doesn't approve of, you are out of luck.
So far, commercial programing happens to be the best model we have for producing good television.
Suck it up! The same thing you have been wishing on everyone else in every other human activity is now going to happen to you. What, you thought the government would regulate just about everything on the planet, but leave your precious internet alone?
If you want the government to keep it's hands off the internet, then maybe you should support other people who don't want the government regulating the things they are into. If the government regulates the internet such that only big corporations and large government agencies can use it, well it serves you right! Perhaps it will get people to abandon their totalitarian "the government should control everything, except what I enjoy" ideology.
Sure, Ebay has fraud, but that is not what this is about. Go to your local flea market, swap meet, etc., and there too will be lots of bootleg designer clothes and DVDs, cheap brand consumer electronics with expensive brand stickers on them, people selling stolen goods, people selling things that don't work, etc.... Go to the camera stores in any big city tourist area, and the camera shops will pull all kinds of scams (bait and switch, or selling you the included extras for high price, etc., etc.).
If the police and government were really concerned about fraud, they would immediatly stop those things, which would be WAY EASIER to stop. And if it was something customers were really worried about, they could use an escrow service.
The real reason for going after Ebay is because too many individuals, small buisnesses, etc., are competing with large established companies, or effecting their buisness model (people can buy used stuff instead of purchasing it new, effecting sales of new items... You can see if "rare collectors edition" items are really that rare by doing a quick Ebay search... There is the possibility you could buy a CD, rip it, then resell it, evecting the record companies "buisness model"). So of course a few big corporations are going to lobby the government to "take action", and cripple ebay and online auction sites. People will once again be forced to buy things from big companies. And the sad thing is, all they have to do is say "this is to protect the consumer", and all you suckers will buy into it!
[sarcasm]Yeah! Stupid poor and ugly people... nothing they need more than some snotty paternalistic bougouise elite to protect them from thinking they could be as attractive as us if they only had the money.
Because, of course, upper class people are naturally beautiful and attractive, because of their genetic superiority and sparkling personalities... it has nothing, absolutly nothing, to do on the fact that they spend more money on clothing, consmetics, and other consumer items![/sarcasm]
As annoying as the concept of animated consumer products are, I am much more annoyed at the people who think that we somehow need to be "protected" from the technology.
The disfunction is not in the companies who sell products to children, it is in parents who purchase the product for their children. Children in 1950 bugged their parents just as much for a packaged food because it had a crudely illustrated rocket ship on the box (children are imaginative enough to create exciting flashing images in thier head).
However, in the 1950s, children were less pandered to, and parents were not spineless, so it wasn't a problem.
And I expect good parents to whack them upside the head until they say please. And then expect some busybody to call the police, and for you to be arrested.
This is not an orbital launch... but once the industry is developed it will improve over time. Within 50 years, have no doubts, they will be sending people to orbit, for a fraction of the cost of NASA.
Much the same way single engine airplanes are not 747s, and humanity didn't jump straight from the Train to building huge International Jetways all over the world. They started building small airports, not much fancier than a farmers fields, and within 50 years the jet age began. You don't start building an entire industry over night. You build it in small, financially sensible steps.
NASA is a dead end for getting the average person into space.
Lots of web scripts have database login information hardcoded (probably assigned to a variable at the begining). Go to hotscripts.com and you will see that for small sized web apps, it is pretty much standard.
[quote]You know what? Every democracy on the planet will have some representative somewhere who decides to take up some kooky cause. One of the strengths of a democracy is that the majority can prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality.[/quote] No, the Democratic majority cannot prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality, because the "nanny state" also regulates the media that reports such things, strictly controls things like election elgibility and funding, controls the education system, and the government generates so much laws / policies / paperwork that no individual can properly oversee it (most lawmakers don't even have the time to read the laws they make).
"Activist government", "Nanny State", "Socialism", "Totalitarianism", whatever you want to call it, is incompatible with Democracy. Democracy is more that popular elections... there have been plenty of popular elected dictators in history.
[quote]I am reserved about how effective this can be. Can the private sector really do it for a lower cost?[/quote] The private sector CAN do it cheaper for the private sector. Meaning, if a private company needs something launched, a private company can probably do it cheaper if all restrictions are removed by the government.
But, don't expect private industry to make it cheaper when selling services to the government. Contracts are awarded based on politics... not cost or practicality.
[quote]And to comment on the article's constant mention of space start-ups: perhaps I shouldn't judge so much on just one incident, but the whole X-Prize thing did not serve as a good first impression for me personally for the private-sector start-up space industry. The kind of hoopula that went into what was essentially a glorified rocket plane that momentarily touched space and won by a design that was geared specifically towards meeting the winning requirements was really discouraging (like studying for a test by studying the test instead of the real material), and I fear that, at the moment, much of the talk about space start-ups in the US is just hype.[/quote] The X-Prize is an incremental step. The contest was designed in order for the private space industry to develop technology in incrememtal stages. You solve the problems of sub-orbital flight, then you move on to orbital flight. And please remember that they did it for less money than it would cost to design the logo and letterhead for a project if it was NASA. Seriously, it cost less to win the X-Prize than to design and build the toilet on the Space Shuttle. Already they are building a fleet of suborbital ships to take tourists into space. NASA hasn't even come close to developing anything that will take the general public to space.
NASA is the worst! The best thing that could happen to space travel would be to shut NASA down. Already the demand for satalites would be enought to get the private industry jumpstarted.
Except that anti-trust laws can be used as a less controversial form of protectionism. South Korea has lots of state subsidized industries, and protectionist policies that the United States looks the other way on.
In diplomacy, the U.S. can't just come out and say "You go after our companies, we will go after your companies - and since the balance of trade is in your favor, you have more to lose than us." So when Bruce comes forward and says what he said, he is in diplomatic language warning South Korea that its companies are going to start coming under increased regulatory scrutiny and legal action in the U.S.
Nothing is illegal if the people who are supposed to enforce the law are the ones commiting the crime. If the technology exists to track people, the government will track people. End of story.
You don't need to convince me that there is a legal precedent for restricting this kind of thing. I am sure that what they are doing has been done in the past, and there is legal apparatus to go after the guy. (Although, from the article, it appears that what he is doing is legal, if the city council had to pass a law after the fact specificly to stop him)
What I am questioning is the sanity and morality of it. Laws are supposed to provide some sort of benifit or protection to society. The government having the power to restrict something, is not a justification for the government to restrict something. (although faith in the government is becoming almost a self-justifying quasi-religion in itself nowadays).
Having a car crusher in your back yard creates a lot of noise, water runoff from the vehicles can put metals and plastic residue into the soil - There is a danger, and hence a rational reason for restricting it with zoning laws.
But there is no noise, pollution, or any other danger from having this device! Not letting the guy have the device is about as rational as not letting the guy own a Ouji board because it will attract evil spirits to the neigborhood. It is because people fear the words "Nuclear", or "Radiation", the same way they would fear the number "13", or the number "666". It is a perfect example of anti-science fearmongering, and NIMBY politics, regardless of any legality of the thing.
1. The guy is already running his buisness out of his home. It is a small buisness, and running buisnesses out of the home is something that many people in the U.S. do.
2. The guy is not doing this for profit. The guy lost his father to cancer and is now on a mission to fight cancer, and the area where they are at (Alaska) only has a handful of the things, making it difficult to provide people with cancer treatments. The cyclotron was given for free by John Hopkins University because of the the critical lack of cyclotrons.
3. All the experts agree that this machine is no danger to the public. "Probably the worst thing that could happen with small cyclotrons is that the operator might electrocute themselves."
Sure, I guess there are all kinds of government regulations, rules, restrictions, etc., etc., that "protect" us (kind of like the Mafia protects people), that could be used to shut this thing down... but remember that these rules have costs. Why do you think that surgery that cost a days wages in 1950 now costs $70,000+? Or that patients who are on the verge of dying from AIDS can't take experimental drugs (until they have been determined "safe")?
To restrict the production of medicines that sick people need, where there is no danger to the general public, purely on the principle of enforcing the rules, or NIMBY paranoia, is insanity.
I think that Godwin's law is a cop out really. There is no way that argueing a government policy is oppressive or Nazi like is harmful... in fact, we should probably assume so unless those creating the law can prove to us otherwise. Look at the type of government policies that we have lately that we would have never guess we would see in a democracy 10 years ago. Not enough people are screaming Nazi nowadays.
Don't worry, when people are shot in the head for wearing backpacks on subways, when there are investigations into secret CIA prisons in Europe, if you can't illustrate a childrens book on Islam in Europe without being arrested, those 14,357 comments warning of the decline in civil liberties won't do anything to stem the tide of authoritarianism. God damn it, the roads will be safe how you like it, even if the government has to crack a few skulls and put the fear of Stalin in people to do it! And I am sure it won't be much longer till it is a crime not to support those laws and the government comes for the 14,357 of us who would dare question the infailability of the government.
The question is, given the abuses by government (government killed at least 170 million of their own citizens in the 20th century), is this kind of Big Brother survailence state is more dangerous than speeding?
There are LOTS of ways to stop people from doing things that are illegal. If we cut the hands off of shoplifters, I am fairly certain there would be a significant decrease in shoplifting. I am sure if we forced teenagers to undergo temporary chemical castration, there would be a lot less teen pregnancy. We could require that all email messages have to go through a government screener, to make sure you aren't doing anything illegal, and I am sure criminals would stop using email pretty quick. For most people the ends don't justify the means, and the problems of shoplifting, or teenage pregnacy, or not enough to justify such extreme authoritarian measures to stop it.
Most reasonable, rational people are utterly disturbed that reasonably democratic first world country like Canada would entertain such Orwellian techniques for a problem as trivial as speeding.
Actually, when the FBI started, they were not a police force. FBI agents were not allowed to carry guns, and the FBI was largely a small agency used to coordinate local police forces investigations for crime that crossed state borders. If the FBI was downsized to it's very limited non-law-enforcement role, it would arguably be constitutional.
If McDuck tried to sell all that gold, it would flood the market, and the prices he would get would be much less than what the current market value is.
You can't fight entropy. The bigger and more complex an entity comes, the more and more resources it takes just to keep said entity going, and the more complex it is to fix anything or make any changes. That is why those big huge dinosoaurs had to spend 24 hours a day eating, and the slightest upset in the envoirnment would kill a whole bunch off. Entrophy limits expansion. There gets to be a point of diminished returns when getting larger ceases to be a benifit.
Microsoft cant solve it's problems, BECAUSE it is a vast and complex corporation with huge manpower and resources. With the numbers of employees they have, the established work processes they have, and the beurocratic momentum, it requires a lot more effort and resources to make fixes and changes than it would be for a small, volunteer, open source project.
I mean, Microsoft is almost like a government agency in it's size, resources, and almost-monopoly on the OS market. Most people know that government provided postal service, government provided health care, or anything run by a vast monopolist government agency sucks, why do we think that a vast beurocratic corporation that is ALMOST like a government will be any different? We wouldn't want some government "Bureau of Operating Systems" to have a monopoly on our software, so why should we expect much different from Microsoft?
That is not to say there isn't danger in the open source community. I suppose it would be possible with corporate and government subsidies that an open source foundation could have the same problems as Microsoft if it got big enough and powerful enough. However, the chances of this happening with open source are less, because a project can always fork off and a newer, smaller group can take over development. While not completly innvulnerable to beurocracy, the open source process being by definition open and non-heirarchical tends to diffuse a lot of the problems someone like Microsoft would have.
Because the job of retailers is not to raise your children for you. The job of retailers is to sell product to the consumer.
It is not my job or anyone elses to make sure that your child is not exposed to anything you might find objectionable. Not everyone has the same taboos, religious restrictions, or pop-psychology beliefs as you, so there is no way we can fairly manage to classify this stuff, even assuming that everyone else has the responsibility to look after your brats.
You are free to get together with other citizens, and to purchase property with and create a "planned community", where the people who live there are required to follow your own set of beliefs. You are free to only take your family to stores that enforce your viewpoint. You are free to send your kid to a private school instead of to public school. You have every oportunity to create the protected, sheltered, censored lifestyle that you want for your family. The only catch is, you have to do it yourself.
When you want to enforce your arbitrary subjective morality on the rest of the world through the government, because your ass is too lazy and irresponsible to do it yourself, don't be upset when people call you out on it. Stop trying to turn America into your dream authoritarian utopoia! Stop your war on the rest of America who aren't fearful, uptight, intolorant, neo-Communists!
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No... a corporation doesn't nessicarily want to return the biggest dividends, it can use profit for capital expenditures (In the case of government capital expenditure would be manufacturing a crisis that require even more government spending... say something like the Iraq war). And for a government, it is not nessicarily bad to borrow money, because they control the money supply and can always devalue the currency (and the current ruling party, or at least the current leaders, will not be around when the debt comes due anyway, so why worry about it?).
OK, I was giving hobby TV as a bad example, but you are making it seem kinda fresh!
The BBC is no great thing. They have a few good shows, of course (which is great for people in North America who get the [best of] BBC as a few of the 500 commercial channels in their cable package). But a lot of the BBC is either cheap ripoffs of American shows, or insipid pseudo-intellectual crap so that the viewers can feel "cultured". Yes, "Doctor Who" is great in a Anglo-kitch kind of way, but for every "Doctor Who" there is a "Fat Friends" or "Space Cadets". And the BBC is absolutly monolithic in showing only the whitebread petty bougiouse government beurocrats eye view of the world. Give me commercial programing over the BBC any day.
And the BBC gets a good chunck of it's revenue for licencing it's content on the free market abroad (probably more than it gets from licencing frees, although I couldn't find the exact numbers published online) - so as a poster child of socialism, the BBC is a bad example. For most of the world, the BBC is just another commercial network competing on the free market, not a government agency. I certainly don't pay any compulsary licence for the several BBC channels I recieve!
Sadly the networks cannot condone properly taking care of the needs of the end users. That wouldn't be fiscally responsible to their pockets.
Not only wouldn't it be fiscally responsible to their pockets, it wouldn't be possible. It costs money to pay employees, to purchase equipment, to advertise a show. All that takes resources. You either bring in more resources than you pay out, or you do not have the resources to make the show. There is no magical fairy that is going to give us everything we want without cost. There is no way to escape the laws of reality. Even the government is a profit making corporation (the difference between a private corporation and the government is the government is a monopoly and can use violence... but both private corporations and government corporations are for-profit).
Some alternatives to this are:
1) Have shows produced completly by hobbiests. The hobbiests of course still need to make a profit, but they do that with their day job. In which case, expensive shows like Myth Busters will be very few and far between.
2) Have shows produced by some sort of government monopoly. Welcome to the world of Dubya TV! The police handle ensuring the profit model... this works, so long as you are in the same social group as the ruling class. If you want some programing that the government doesn't approve of, you are out of luck.
So far, commercial programing happens to be the best model we have for producing good television.
... until it regulates the thing they are into!
Suck it up! The same thing you have been wishing on everyone else in every other human activity is now going to happen to you. What, you thought the government would regulate just about everything on the planet, but leave your precious internet alone?
If you want the government to keep it's hands off the internet, then maybe you should support other people who don't want the government regulating the things they are into. If the government regulates the internet such that only big corporations and large government agencies can use it, well it serves you right! Perhaps it will get people to abandon their totalitarian "the government should control everything, except what I enjoy" ideology.
Sure, Ebay has fraud, but that is not what this is about. Go to your local flea market, swap meet, etc., and there too will be lots of bootleg designer clothes and DVDs, cheap brand consumer electronics with expensive brand stickers on them, people selling stolen goods, people selling things that don't work, etc. ... Go to the camera stores in any big city tourist area, and the camera shops will pull all kinds of scams (bait and switch, or selling you the included extras for high price, etc., etc.).
If the police and government were really concerned about fraud, they would immediatly stop those things, which would be WAY EASIER to stop. And if it was something customers were really worried about, they could use an escrow service.
The real reason for going after Ebay is because too many individuals, small buisnesses, etc., are competing with large established companies, or effecting their buisness model (people can buy used stuff instead of purchasing it new, effecting sales of new items... You can see if "rare collectors edition" items are really that rare by doing a quick Ebay search... There is the possibility you could buy a CD, rip it, then resell it, evecting the record companies "buisness model"). So of course a few big corporations are going to lobby the government to "take action", and cripple ebay and online auction sites. People will once again be forced to buy things from big companies. And the sad thing is, all they have to do is say "this is to protect the consumer", and all you suckers will buy into it!
[sarcasm]Yeah! Stupid poor and ugly people... nothing they need more than some snotty paternalistic bougouise elite to protect them from thinking they could be as attractive as us if they only had the money.
Because, of course, upper class people are naturally beautiful and attractive, because of their genetic superiority and sparkling personalities... it has nothing, absolutly nothing, to do on the fact that they spend more money on clothing, consmetics, and other consumer items![/sarcasm]
As annoying as the concept of animated consumer products are, I am much more annoyed at the people who think that we somehow need to be "protected" from the technology.
The disfunction is not in the companies who sell products to children, it is in parents who purchase the product for their children. Children in 1950 bugged their parents just as much for a packaged food because it had a crudely illustrated rocket ship on the box (children are imaginative enough to create exciting flashing images in thier head).
However, in the 1950s, children were less pandered to, and parents were not spineless, so it wasn't a problem.
And I expect good parents to whack them upside the head until they say please.
And then expect some busybody to call the police, and for you to be arrested.
This is not an orbital launch... but once the industry is developed it will improve over time. Within 50 years, have no doubts, they will be sending people to orbit, for a fraction of the cost of NASA.
Much the same way single engine airplanes are not 747s, and humanity didn't jump straight from the Train to building huge International Jetways all over the world. They started building small airports, not much fancier than a farmers fields, and within 50 years the jet age began. You don't start building an entire industry over night. You build it in small, financially sensible steps.
NASA is a dead end for getting the average person into space.
Sounds like a great idea to me, player hater!
Except that H1-B visa employees are not really any cheaper than hiring a domestic employee.
Lots of web scripts have database login information hardcoded (probably assigned to a variable at the begining). Go to hotscripts.com and you will see that for small sized web apps, it is pretty much standard.
[quote]You know what? Every democracy on the planet will have some representative somewhere who decides to take up some kooky cause. One of the strengths of a democracy is that the majority can prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality.[/quote]
No, the Democratic majority cannot prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality, because the "nanny state" also regulates the media that reports such things, strictly controls things like election elgibility and funding, controls the education system, and the government generates so much laws / policies / paperwork that no individual can properly oversee it (most lawmakers don't even have the time to read the laws they make).
"Activist government", "Nanny State", "Socialism", "Totalitarianism", whatever you want to call it, is incompatible with Democracy. Democracy is more that popular elections... there have been plenty of popular elected dictators in history.
[quote]I am reserved about how effective this can be. Can the private sector really do it for a lower cost?[/quote]
The private sector CAN do it cheaper for the private sector. Meaning, if a private company needs something launched, a private company can probably do it cheaper if all restrictions are removed by the government.
But, don't expect private industry to make it cheaper when selling services to the government. Contracts are awarded based on politics... not cost or practicality.
[quote]And to comment on the article's constant mention of space start-ups: perhaps I shouldn't judge so much on just one incident, but the whole X-Prize thing did not serve as a good first impression for me personally for the private-sector start-up space industry. The kind of hoopula that went into what was essentially a glorified rocket plane that momentarily touched space and won by a design that was geared specifically towards meeting the winning requirements was really discouraging (like studying for a test by studying the test instead of the real material), and I fear that, at the moment, much of the talk about space start-ups in the US is just hype.[/quote]
The X-Prize is an incremental step. The contest was designed in order for the private space industry to develop technology in incrememtal stages. You solve the problems of sub-orbital flight, then you move on to orbital flight. And please remember that they did it for less money than it would cost to design the logo and letterhead for a project if it was NASA. Seriously, it cost less to win the X-Prize than to design and build the toilet on the Space Shuttle. Already they are building a fleet of suborbital ships to take tourists into space. NASA hasn't even come close to developing anything that will take the general public to space.
NASA is the worst! The best thing that could happen to space travel would be to shut NASA down. Already the demand for satalites would be enought to get the private industry jumpstarted.
Except that anti-trust laws can be used as a less controversial form of protectionism. South Korea has lots of state subsidized industries, and protectionist policies that the United States looks the other way on.
In diplomacy, the U.S. can't just come out and say "You go after our companies, we will go after your companies - and since the balance of trade is in your favor, you have more to lose than us." So when Bruce comes forward and says what he said, he is in diplomatic language warning South Korea that its companies are going to start coming under increased regulatory scrutiny and legal action in the U.S.
Nothing is illegal if the people who are supposed to enforce the law are the ones commiting the crime. If the technology exists to track people, the government will track people. End of story.
You don't need to convince me that there is a legal precedent for restricting this kind of thing. I am sure that what they are doing has been done in the past, and there is legal apparatus to go after the guy. (Although, from the article, it appears that what he is doing is legal, if the city council had to pass a law after the fact specificly to stop him)
What I am questioning is the sanity and morality of it. Laws are supposed to provide some sort of benifit or protection to society. The government having the power to restrict something, is not a justification for the government to restrict something. (although faith in the government is becoming almost a self-justifying quasi-religion in itself nowadays).
Having a car crusher in your back yard creates a lot of noise, water runoff from the vehicles can put metals and plastic residue into the soil - There is a danger, and hence a rational reason for restricting it with zoning laws.
But there is no noise, pollution, or any other danger from having this device! Not letting the guy have the device is about as rational as not letting the guy own a Ouji board because it will attract evil spirits to the neigborhood. It is because people fear the words "Nuclear", or "Radiation", the same way they would fear the number "13", or the number "666". It is a perfect example of anti-science fearmongering, and NIMBY politics, regardless of any legality of the thing.
1. The guy is already running his buisness out of his home. It is a small buisness, and running buisnesses out of the home is something that many people in the U.S. do.
2. The guy is not doing this for profit. The guy lost his father to cancer and is now on a mission to fight cancer, and the area where they are at (Alaska) only has a handful of the things, making it difficult to provide people with cancer treatments. The cyclotron was given for free by John Hopkins University because of the the critical lack of cyclotrons.
3. All the experts agree that this machine is no danger to the public. "Probably the worst thing that could happen with small cyclotrons is that the operator might electrocute themselves."
Sure, I guess there are all kinds of government regulations, rules, restrictions, etc., etc., that "protect" us (kind of like the Mafia protects people), that could be used to shut this thing down... but remember that these rules have costs. Why do you think that surgery that cost a days wages in 1950 now costs $70,000+? Or that patients who are on the verge of dying from AIDS can't take experimental drugs (until they have been determined "safe")?
To restrict the production of medicines that sick people need, where there is no danger to the general public, purely on the principle of enforcing the rules, or NIMBY paranoia, is insanity.
I think that Godwin's law is a cop out really. There is no way that argueing a government policy is oppressive or Nazi like is harmful... in fact, we should probably assume so unless those creating the law can prove to us otherwise. Look at the type of government policies that we have lately that we would have never guess we would see in a democracy 10 years ago. Not enough people are screaming Nazi nowadays.
Don't worry, when people are shot in the head for wearing backpacks on subways, when there are investigations into secret CIA prisons in Europe, if you can't illustrate a childrens book on Islam in Europe without being arrested, those 14,357 comments warning of the decline in civil liberties won't do anything to stem the tide of authoritarianism. God damn it, the roads will be safe how you like it, even if the government has to crack a few skulls and put the fear of Stalin in people to do it! And I am sure it won't be much longer till it is a crime not to support those laws and the government comes for the 14,357 of us who would dare question the infailability of the government.
The question is, given the abuses by government (government killed at least 170 million of their own citizens in the 20th century), is this kind of Big Brother survailence state is more dangerous than speeding?
There are LOTS of ways to stop people from doing things that are illegal. If we cut the hands off of shoplifters, I am fairly certain there would be a significant decrease in shoplifting. I am sure if we forced teenagers to undergo temporary chemical castration, there would be a lot less teen pregnancy. We could require that all email messages have to go through a government screener, to make sure you aren't doing anything illegal, and I am sure criminals would stop using email pretty quick. For most people the ends don't justify the means, and the problems of shoplifting, or teenage pregnacy, or not enough to justify such extreme authoritarian measures to stop it.
Most reasonable, rational people are utterly disturbed that reasonably democratic first world country like Canada would entertain such Orwellian techniques for a problem as trivial as speeding.
Actually, when the FBI started, they were not a police force. FBI agents were not allowed to carry guns, and the FBI was largely a small agency used to coordinate local police forces investigations for crime that crossed state borders. If the FBI was downsized to it's very limited non-law-enforcement role, it would arguably be constitutional.
If McDuck tried to sell all that gold, it would flood the market, and the prices he would get would be much less than what the current market value is.
You can't fight entropy. The bigger and more complex an entity comes, the more and more resources it takes just to keep said entity going, and the more complex it is to fix anything or make any changes. That is why those big huge dinosoaurs had to spend 24 hours a day eating, and the slightest upset in the envoirnment would kill a whole bunch off. Entrophy limits expansion. There gets to be a point of diminished returns when getting larger ceases to be a benifit.
Microsoft cant solve it's problems, BECAUSE it is a vast and complex corporation with huge manpower and resources. With the numbers of employees they have, the established work processes they have, and the beurocratic momentum, it requires a lot more effort and resources to make fixes and changes than it would be for a small, volunteer, open source project.
I mean, Microsoft is almost like a government agency in it's size, resources, and almost-monopoly on the OS market. Most people know that government provided postal service, government provided health care, or anything run by a vast monopolist government agency sucks, why do we think that a vast beurocratic corporation that is ALMOST like a government will be any different? We wouldn't want some government "Bureau of Operating Systems" to have a monopoly on our software, so why should we expect much different from Microsoft?
That is not to say there isn't danger in the open source community. I suppose it would be possible with corporate and government subsidies that an open source foundation could have the same problems as Microsoft if it got big enough and powerful enough. However, the chances of this happening with open source are less, because a project can always fork off and a newer, smaller group can take over development. While not completly innvulnerable to beurocracy, the open source process being by definition open and non-heirarchical tends to diffuse a lot of the problems someone like Microsoft would have.
Because the job of retailers is not to raise your children for you. The job of retailers is to sell product to the consumer.
It is not my job or anyone elses to make sure that your child is not exposed to anything you might find objectionable. Not everyone has the same taboos, religious restrictions, or pop-psychology beliefs as you, so there is no way we can fairly manage to classify this stuff, even assuming that everyone else has the responsibility to look after your brats.
You are free to get together with other citizens, and to purchase property with and create a "planned community", where the people who live there are required to follow your own set of beliefs. You are free to only take your family to stores that enforce your viewpoint. You are free to send your kid to a private school instead of to public school. You have every oportunity to create the protected, sheltered, censored lifestyle that you want for your family. The only catch is, you have to do it yourself.
When you want to enforce your arbitrary subjective morality on the rest of the world through the government, because your ass is too lazy and irresponsible to do it yourself, don't be upset when people call you out on it. Stop trying to turn America into your dream authoritarian utopoia! Stop your war on the rest of America who aren't fearful, uptight, intolorant, neo-Communists!