It is certainly moral. The question of legality is usually practical. The guy crawling through your basement window could be the paramedics when you fall down your basement stairs and need medical help... or it could be the neighbors dog who smells the food you have in your cellar and is curious. It could be a kid playing hide-and-go-seek and thinks your basement is good hiding spot.
The arguement against booby traps is quite practical. But if we had a hypothetical boobytrap 100% garanteed only to stop burglars, it would be moral, sure.
Seriously, do these people even think for a second before flushing billions of taxpayer money down the toilet?
People regularly take flights with several layovers rather than the much shorter direct flight in order to save a few hundred dollars. Other than a few rich millionares who want to fly from Tokyo to New York to do some shopping on the weekend, the average person isn't really that worried about long airline flights.
You want to make airline flight better for the consumer? How about spending orders of magnitude less money in order to design ergonomic seats that don't give you leg cramps, or trays that don't spill your food when the person in front of you leans back?
The supersonic jetliner is 1960s space-age dream bullshit. Yes, we CAN build supersonic passenger jet planes. But we don't have the technology to make it economical. Most airlines are barely profitable and need huge government subsidies using the super-economy Boeing and Airbus jets.
So you can get from Tokyo to New York in 6 hours instead of 12. But you are still going to have to get to the airport 3 hours early in Tokyo, and wait 3 hours getting you luggage and clearing customs in New York. Those things can be fixed for a fraction of the cost of building a supersonic jet liner, and those thing will benifit everyone, not just the super-rich.
What you are saying is true. But what you discuss is a technical/practical problem. By using counter-attacks to defend myself, I may in fact be doing an innocent harm, and be doing worse harm than the criminals. There are a whole slew of problems with electronic self-defense, that may bring the practice into question.
What I was saying is that the morality of it shouldn't be in question. Just the technical feasability. Arguing that an atomic bomb is an ineffective way for me to deter my home from being robbed, is not the same as saying I have no right to defend my home.
If someone is trying to kill me or rob me, I have the right to defend myself using force. Likewise, if someone is using some sort of data attack or trying to steal my information, I have a right to defend myself using those means.
The police and government protecting me are only an extension to my own right to self defense. There are cases were individuals are not able to defend themselves, or where they might think they are defending themselves but doing the wrong person harm, and so we have professional police, judges, who in theory are better at defending us and preserving a civil society than we would be ourselves. They are specialists, just like a doctor is a specialist in treating disease, and so we assume they doing it more efficiently with the least harm.
BUT, if the profesionals (i.e. the police, judges, etc.) are not able to effectivly defend me and preserve a civil society, I have every moral right to defend myself. Period. Yes, some countries have passed laws against self defense, but the rejection of the right of individual self-defense is part of an overall authoritarian philosophy that rejects any kind of individual rights.
There can be a discussion of the practical problems of self-defense (How can I be sure that the person who appears to be doing a denial of service attack is the perpitrator? Will retaliation have negative effects on innocent people who are not involved? Can these techniques be abused or exploited by a third party? Will I really be defending myself by using this technology?), but all of these are technical/practical discussions. But from the moral perspective, only a few of the most extremly authoritarian or collectivist ideologies would deny a person the right to self defense.
Why should we waste money subsidizing classical music? Or subsidizing the education of people studying things that we don't really need (we don't need any more psychology students, or women's studies students, or english majors, etc.)? Or fighting a war on drugs, when drug abuse used to be orders of magnitude lower back in 1900 when an 8 year old could buy cocaine at the drug store?
Because it is an excuse for people to take our money and give it to other people!
China is "Socialist" government... when they the law to censor people, that is good.
Microsoft is "Capitalist", so when they obey the laws that "Socialists" put in place to censor people, they are bad.
Of course, if Microsoft refused to obey the Chinese laws, the opinion on Slashdot would be "evil capitalists, threatening the sovernty of 'Socialist' China".
Basicly, the perfect world according to the Slashdot crowd is a world where a totalitarian one world government controls all economy, media, and everything else in the world, except Apple (because all capitalism is evil, except Apple who are "totaly rad!").
How is this news? People with a political or economic agenda will manipulate the research they support.
Any research that clearly supports or detracts from a government policy should be suspect. Sure, it is clear that Bush suppressed research that is applicable to the Kyoto protocal. But it is clear that lots of the research that supports the Kyoto Protocal comes from people like Enron who hoped to buy up carbon-shares and then sell them at an inflated price. And lost of the research was presented by governments or government funded organizations, who are going to naturally produce research that supports increased government power.
The research on both sides of the issue is highly suspect.
Enviornmentalism destructive to the Enviornment.
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Nanotech Protests Begin
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
The ideology of "Enviornmentalism" is actually destructive to the enviornment. Examples:
Nuclear power is greenest form of energy production that is currently practicle. It is cheap, safe, and produces lots of energy. According to Greenpeace, 50,000 people die in North America die to illness due to the burning of fossil fuels. Even if there was a Chernobyl every year, according to their own figures, it wouldn't be any worse than we have now burning fossil fuels. In addition, it would stop greenhouse emmisions, the energy abundance would make technology like water desalination affordable which would help protect our natural fresh water, and it would make super-clean energy-expensive manufacturing techniques affordable.
But instead we have a society that considers nuclear energy dangerous based on knee-jerk fear, and movies about giant atomic ants.
Enviornmentalists like to wax on about how great food grown without pesticides are. However, many of these "natural" methods are orders of magnitude less efficent that standard farming techniques. So if the "natural" way of growing something is 1/5th as efficent, it means that we need 5 times the land in order to grow the same about of food. Agriculture is one of the most destructive things you can do to an enviornment, even if it doesn't use pesticides. We would end up destroying huge sections of natural land just to avoid a little peciticide. Also, farming requires fossil fuels for tractors, etc.. Increasing the land use by 5 times means expending 5 times as much fossil fuels.
And now, here is a technology that keeps pants nice and stain free. What does this mean? That means that I won't have to throw a pair of pants out after it gets something staining on it, or I won't have to put it in some highly toxic stain removing detergent. Which means we save on the resources in manufacturing new pants, the energy and transportation costs of that, and we save the water polution of using so many nasty detergents.
And we have morons protesting this, because there is not 100% proof that this technology will never cause any sort of problems... despite the many enviornmentaly positive things about these pants.
The enviornmentalist movement has been taken over by a coalition of anti-technology luddites and free-market hating Stalinists, combining an absolute hatred of all technology, with an absolute dedication to authoritarian government as the only solution to enviornmental problems.
This is actually done because of the pressure from networks outside the U.S..
If a television network in Canada or Australia licences a TV program from Showtime, they want to be seen as the exlusive source for that program in their home market. Hence, most networks outside the U.S. demand this sort of blocking as a requirement of their licencing deals.
And it works both ways. The BBC and such, block content from the U.S. for things that they plan to licence to U.S. networks.
Um, no, this is a disaster for small buisness. Large corporations have huge legal teams that can afford to fight these insane software patents, and even if they were to lose they sell so much software that the cost of the patent licence is a very small part of the product cost.
However, small buisnesses don't have the resources to fight for years on end in court. A legal battle going on for two years can easily cost you a million dollars. And they don't have a large enough customer base to pass the charges on to their consumer.
People are so rabidly and mindlessly anti-Microsoft, that they are willing to have draconian patent enforcement that will destroy small buisness, just to see Microsoft lose a tiny amount of money that they will make back in less that one hour. Software patents are killing small software developers.
You can have Totalitarianism without Communism, that is true. But you cannot have Communism without totalitarianism. Communism is a subset of the larger group of totalitarian ideologies. Communism is, by its own definitition, a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat".
We have market economies becoming more and more totalitarian, that is true. But in all those cases, as they become more and more totalitarian, the government has greater control over the economy, and they become less and less free market. For example, George W. Bush, who brought us the Patriot Act, the War of Terror and such, also is responsible for the largest single increase in social spending in the Western world, has pledged more aid for HIV in Africa than all other nations combined, has signed broad new laws regulating the stock market and banking (which in terms of sheer volume, go far beyond anything in the Western world right now), he put tarrifs on European Steel and Chinese Textiles despite claiming to be for free trade. By any concrete form of measure (i.e. comparing changing social spending as a percentage of GDP, comparing the number of words in a law governing an industry, as opposed to arguing "Socialism is togetherness of mankind" or other subjective nonsense), George W. Bush is the most extreme Socialist in power in the Western world. He may claim to be "free-market", but in terms of actually implementing government policy, he is less free-market than many Euro-crats who outright claim to be Socialists.
So using someone like G. W. Bush as a model of a free-market dictator is incorrect. G.W.Bush is about as free-market as Fidel Castro. You could argue that Fidel Castro is actually more free market, as Castro has been liberalizing parts of his economy, where G.W.Bush has consistantly done the opposite.
True Communists in the spirit of Marx believe that all forms of communication should be put in the hands of the state, and that state should be controlled exclusivly by the Communist Party (read The Communist Manifesto - http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifes to.html).
How is placing all radio, television, newspapers, telephone, and internet, etc. under the absolute control of a single political party not censorship?
According to Marx, free speech is liberal "Bourgeois Sentimentality".
I suppose it would be way to much to expect people to RTFA before they post on Slashdot...
But if you had, you would have seen that the developer ISNT IN THE UNITED STATES!
In most countries, judges can give court orders for nearly anything. Anyone with enough lawyers can make you do anything they want, against your will, period... and if you don't have an army of lawyers to back you up, you are powerless to do anything about it.
This could be true, but the hackers would have to be based outside North Korea.
Why? Because NK doesn't have a whole slew of bandwidth coming in / going out. Every single packet going in/out of NK is probably intercepted by the U.S. and S. Korea. And it would not be any sort of disruption to cut off NK internet access.
However, I am assuming NK could send covert agents to SK, and launch their cyber attack there. Intercepting and analysing all packets would not be an option with a wired country like SK... and cutting off SK from the U.S. would not be economicly or politicly viable, if it could even be done.
Personally, I am not worried about some great cyber attack. Every day on the Internet is a cyber attack. There are people who are not affiliated with any government, and maybe aren't even political, who are probably just as good as NK hackers, and do all kinds of mischief and mayhem every day. In a strange way, all the hackers, work creaters, script kiddies, and zombie spammers have made the net immune to any sort of attack (because any sort of attack would probably be unnoticable from any normal day).
Telus, here in Toronto Canada. You can probably find out more at Telus.ca...
I don't know if everyone can get a 100M connection though. I live in a new building in a downtown urban area, wired with fiber optic cable. And because of the speed of servers and the net itself, you really only get about 1.5M of bandwidth consistantly. But Telus is the best service provider I have ever used, and I highly recommend them!
I used to be a die hard PC gamer. I loved the greater depth and the willingness to experiment that PC games had over console games. Sim City, Civilazation, Falcon 3.0, Starflight, The Sims... these were amazing games.
But that era of PC gaming is dead. The games now all require the newest hardware in order to play the game and have it look anything whatsoever like the screenshots on the box. In order to keep up with the cutting edge in PC gaming, I would have to spend $400 on a new graphics card every month.
It is not only the 3D shooters that are like this. I can't even play a strategy game like "Imperial Glory" on my one year old laptop.
And even if you do having the newest graphic hardware, the games are now released full of bugs and problems that need patching for the next 6th months, and I need to fiddle with my graphics card drivers and a whole bunch of other crap to get it all working properly.
To the PC game industry: I am sick of it. I am not going to spend 5 Gs a year in order to play your crappy games. Yes, I could spent twice as much to buy a gamer laptop so I can play a strategy game like "Imperial Glory" on my laptop... but really, I have a 3GHz processor, several gigs of ram, a 1000M network card with a 100M internet connection, and I don't have the technology to play a damn strategy game on my laptop? Telling me how silly I am because I don't spend enough money, or because the keyboard and mouse is such a wonderful control system isn't enough to get me to give you another cent.
To the PC gaming industry, hopefully there are enough uber-geeks who will pay $400 every 6 months for a new graphics card, and occasionally will actually buy a game instead of download it off a warez site, to keep your industry together, because the casual gamers are no longer having it.
I can buy a cutting edge console for $300, and know it will play all the coolest games for the next 5 years. And not only that, I can play the games on my sofa, with a big-ass screen and surround sound cranked up, which more than makes up for the marginaly better graphics on high end PCs. And I don't have to worry about installing new drivers for every game I want to play, I can actually play the games when they are released instead of having bugs patched for the next 6 months.
So long PC gaming. Your industry might be dying, but there is nothing left there to mourn.
Ok, then were are all these laisse faire free-market Socialists then? I have yet to see a politician calling themselves "Socialist" who didn't advocate a command economy, government control of industry, extreme government regulation etc., etc. But according to you, they are out there. Please point me to a web site, or a news story, or a book, or some other source of information on Socialists who don't support big government.
We here at The Government are worried about you open-source and free software developers being exploited.
Therefore, in the interests of humanity, we take it apon ourselves to regulate, control, and licence all free software. Yes, don't worry, we don't want these companies taking advantage of your free labor, so we are going to tax these companies for their use of free software. We will keep the money for ourselves, after all, the Government IS the people, so when we make lots of money off of this, you will make lots of money off of this.
Don't worry, it will only cost you $200 a year to get your open source developers permit. Hardly a sacrafice at all! And just don't try to work on anything controversial like file-sharing and what not, otherwise we will have to revoke your licence, and perhaps send you to jail for coding without a licence.
A private monopoly is wrong, of course. But I don't buy that a state monopoly is not a private monopoly. Yes, yes, I understand that "we all own the state", but this is just pretty rhetoric. I don't have any more power over the officials of state monopolies than I do private monopolies. One vote out of tens or hundreds of millions every X years for a leader, who will appoint a cabinent memeber/minister, who will appoint a head of a state run industry is so abstracted as to be meaningless. And because state monopolies tend to be over "socially critical" matters, the mistakes they make are just that much more harmful.
As for socialized medicine, the U.S. government spends more per capita on health care than a lot of EU countries, so it is a bit unfair to say that the U.S. isn't socialized medicine. However, having lived with the U.S. 60%-70% quasi-socialized system, and living now with Canadas 100% socialized system, that health care in the U.S. is orders of magnitude better. Even the poorest people without insurance where I lived in the U.S. got better health care than where I live in Canada. And Canada's system is considered comparable with most EU countries, so I don't see why it would be any different there. One thing to remember is that the U.S. government desperatly wants to control everything in the world, including health care, and EU countries need to justify their massive government monopolies, so both the E.U. and the U.S. find it convienient to spread the same propoganda.
When we discuss "Socialism", we mean central planning, nationalization of the means of production, the elimination of private property, etc., etc. This is how you Socialists plan to bring about your "classless state". A "classless state" and "the people have power" is so vauge and subjective it is meaningless unless we also discuss the methods you want to use to achieve those goals.
Socialist economies employ central planning. What is central planning? It is where people "are told what to do, and when and how to do it".
Socialism and Facism are not mutually exclusive concepts, in fact central planning, nationalization of industry, etc., are nessicary in order for a Facist state to exist.
Nearly all genocidal and oppressive regimes of the 20th Century, from the Nationalist Socialists of Germany, to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, etc., claim that they are giving "power to the people", and creating a "classless state", through "Socialism".
Wasn't the old Euro-socialist arguement that competition was bad for consumers and employees, and therefore it was natural that industry be nationalized, and monopolies be created?
When did the Euro love affair with monopolies end? Or is this anti-Americanism disguised as free-marketism? Seems to me a 100% monopoly on health care services, or airline travel, is a lot more disturbing, dangerous, and anti-democratic than bundling an audio player in an OS with maybe a 70% market share.
What is this "we" that you are talking about? This law doesn't stop "us" from creating a better, cheaper, more efficient system at all. "We" will still be allowed to set up whatever kind of community wifi that we want. Friends and neighbors can get together, raise money, and create any sort of community broadband that they like.
Let me explain something to you. The government is not "you", or "me", or "us". "We" are not the government. Don't believe the bullshit propoganda that the "government" is somehow the same thing as "the people".
The government is a profit making organization, like any other buisness. The only thing that distinguishes the government from any other big corporation is that the government has police that will throw you in jail or kill you if you don't buy what they are selling.
It is time to overcome this socialist, fascist propoganda that the government is "the people".
The USPS sucks. Service is terrible and unreliable. It is "cheaper" than UPS or Federal Express only because the USPS had a law passed that says IT IS ILLEGAL TO CHARGE LESS THAN THE USPS (and lets not forget it is subsidized by billions in taxes every year).
Great... So instead of Big Brother, we will have Catch-22. "Don't worry, it won't turn into a totalitarian system... just an increadably wasteful and crappy government program". Fantastic.
What about Hindu children who do not eat mean? What about Muslims who only eat Halal foods? What about Jewish students who much not eat cheese with meat and follow very strict rules about preperation. What about diabetic children? Or those with a peanut alergy.
Your idea will fail for the same reason public education itself is failing: Because the one-size-fits-all government aproach doesn't work in a diverse society. Either the system will fail, or if it doesn't fail it will succeeding by destroying all diversity.
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It is certainly moral. The question of legality is usually practical. The guy crawling through your basement window could be the paramedics when you fall down your basement stairs and need medical help... or it could be the neighbors dog who smells the food you have in your cellar and is curious. It could be a kid playing hide-and-go-seek and thinks your basement is good hiding spot.
The arguement against booby traps is quite practical. But if we had a hypothetical boobytrap 100% garanteed only to stop burglars, it would be moral, sure.
Seriously, do these people even think for a second before flushing billions of taxpayer money down the toilet?
People regularly take flights with several layovers rather than the much shorter direct flight in order to save a few hundred dollars. Other than a few rich millionares who want to fly from Tokyo to New York to do some shopping on the weekend, the average person isn't really that worried about long airline flights.
You want to make airline flight better for the consumer? How about spending orders of magnitude less money in order to design ergonomic seats that don't give you leg cramps, or trays that don't spill your food when the person in front of you leans back?
The supersonic jetliner is 1960s space-age dream bullshit. Yes, we CAN build supersonic passenger jet planes. But we don't have the technology to make it economical. Most airlines are barely profitable and need huge government subsidies using the super-economy Boeing and Airbus jets.
So you can get from Tokyo to New York in 6 hours instead of 12. But you are still going to have to get to the airport 3 hours early in Tokyo, and wait 3 hours getting you luggage and clearing customs in New York. Those things can be fixed for a fraction of the cost of building a supersonic jet liner, and those thing will benifit everyone, not just the super-rich.
What you are saying is true. But what you discuss is a technical/practical problem. By using counter-attacks to defend myself, I may in fact be doing an innocent harm, and be doing worse harm than the criminals. There are a whole slew of problems with electronic self-defense, that may bring the practice into question.
What I was saying is that the morality of it shouldn't be in question. Just the technical feasability. Arguing that an atomic bomb is an ineffective way for me to deter my home from being robbed, is not the same as saying I have no right to defend my home.
If someone is trying to kill me or rob me, I have the right to defend myself using force. Likewise, if someone is using some sort of data attack or trying to steal my information, I have a right to defend myself using those means.
The police and government protecting me are only an extension to my own right to self defense. There are cases were individuals are not able to defend themselves, or where they might think they are defending themselves but doing the wrong person harm, and so we have professional police, judges, who in theory are better at defending us and preserving a civil society than we would be ourselves. They are specialists, just like a doctor is a specialist in treating disease, and so we assume they doing it more efficiently with the least harm.
BUT, if the profesionals (i.e. the police, judges, etc.) are not able to effectivly defend me and preserve a civil society, I have every moral right to defend myself. Period. Yes, some countries have passed laws against self defense, but the rejection of the right of individual self-defense is part of an overall authoritarian philosophy that rejects any kind of individual rights.
There can be a discussion of the practical problems of self-defense (How can I be sure that the person who appears to be doing a denial of service attack is the perpitrator? Will retaliation have negative effects on innocent people who are not involved? Can these techniques be abused or exploited by a third party? Will I really be defending myself by using this technology?), but all of these are technical/practical discussions. But from the moral perspective, only a few of the most extremly authoritarian or collectivist ideologies would deny a person the right to self defense.
Why should we waste money subsidizing classical music? Or subsidizing the education of people studying things that we don't really need (we don't need any more psychology students, or women's studies students, or english majors, etc.)? Or fighting a war on drugs, when drug abuse used to be orders of magnitude lower back in 1900 when an 8 year old could buy cocaine at the drug store?
Because it is an excuse for people to take our money and give it to other people!
China is "Socialist" government... when they the law to censor people, that is good.
Microsoft is "Capitalist", so when they obey the laws that "Socialists" put in place to censor people, they are bad.
Of course, if Microsoft refused to obey the Chinese laws, the opinion on Slashdot would be "evil capitalists, threatening the sovernty of 'Socialist' China".
Basicly, the perfect world according to the Slashdot crowd is a world where a totalitarian one world government controls all economy, media, and everything else in the world, except Apple (because all capitalism is evil, except Apple who are "totaly rad!").
It will not be unguided... it will be computer guided. And it will land verticaly under thrust. RTFA.
How is this news? People with a political or economic agenda will manipulate the research they support.
Any research that clearly supports or detracts from a government policy should be suspect. Sure, it is clear that Bush suppressed research that is applicable to the Kyoto protocal. But it is clear that lots of the research that supports the Kyoto Protocal comes from people like Enron who hoped to buy up carbon-shares and then sell them at an inflated price. And lost of the research was presented by governments or government funded organizations, who are going to naturally produce research that supports increased government power.
The research on both sides of the issue is highly suspect.
The ideology of "Enviornmentalism" is actually destructive to the enviornment. Examples:
Nuclear power is greenest form of energy production that is currently practicle. It is cheap, safe, and produces lots of energy. According to Greenpeace, 50,000 people die in North America die to illness due to the burning of fossil fuels. Even if there was a Chernobyl every year, according to their own figures, it wouldn't be any worse than we have now burning fossil fuels. In addition, it would stop greenhouse emmisions, the energy abundance would make technology like water desalination affordable which would help protect our natural fresh water, and it would make super-clean energy-expensive manufacturing techniques affordable.
But instead we have a society that considers nuclear energy dangerous based on knee-jerk fear, and movies about giant atomic ants.
Enviornmentalists like to wax on about how great food grown without pesticides are. However, many of these "natural" methods are orders of magnitude less efficent that standard farming techniques. So if the "natural" way of growing something is 1/5th as efficent, it means that we need 5 times the land in order to grow the same about of food. Agriculture is one of the most destructive things you can do to an enviornment, even if it doesn't use pesticides. We would end up destroying huge sections of natural land just to avoid a little peciticide. Also, farming requires fossil fuels for tractors, etc.. Increasing the land use by 5 times means expending 5 times as much fossil fuels.
And now, here is a technology that keeps pants nice and stain free. What does this mean? That means that I won't have to throw a pair of pants out after it gets something staining on it, or I won't have to put it in some highly toxic stain removing detergent. Which means we save on the resources in manufacturing new pants, the energy and transportation costs of that, and we save the water polution of using so many nasty detergents.
And we have morons protesting this, because there is not 100% proof that this technology will never cause any sort of problems... despite the many enviornmentaly positive things about these pants.
The enviornmentalist movement has been taken over by a coalition of anti-technology luddites and free-market hating Stalinists, combining an absolute hatred of all technology, with an absolute dedication to authoritarian government as the only solution to enviornmental problems.
This is actually done because of the pressure from networks outside the U.S..
If a television network in Canada or Australia licences a TV program from Showtime, they want to be seen as the exlusive source for that program in their home market. Hence, most networks outside the U.S. demand this sort of blocking as a requirement of their licencing deals.
And it works both ways. The BBC and such, block content from the U.S. for things that they plan to licence to U.S. networks.
It isn't some conspiracy theory.
Um, no, this is a disaster for small buisness. Large corporations have huge legal teams that can afford to fight these insane software patents, and even if they were to lose they sell so much software that the cost of the patent licence is a very small part of the product cost.
However, small buisnesses don't have the resources to fight for years on end in court. A legal battle going on for two years can easily cost you a million dollars. And they don't have a large enough customer base to pass the charges on to their consumer.
People are so rabidly and mindlessly anti-Microsoft, that they are willing to have draconian patent enforcement that will destroy small buisness, just to see Microsoft lose a tiny amount of money that they will make back in less that one hour. Software patents are killing small software developers.
You can have Totalitarianism without Communism, that is true. But you cannot have Communism without totalitarianism. Communism is a subset of the larger group of totalitarian ideologies. Communism is, by its own definitition, a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat".
We have market economies becoming more and more totalitarian, that is true. But in all those cases, as they become more and more totalitarian, the government has greater control over the economy, and they become less and less free market. For example, George W. Bush, who brought us the Patriot Act, the War of Terror and such, also is responsible for the largest single increase in social spending in the Western world, has pledged more aid for HIV in Africa than all other nations combined, has signed broad new laws regulating the stock market and banking (which in terms of sheer volume, go far beyond anything in the Western world right now), he put tarrifs on European Steel and Chinese Textiles despite claiming to be for free trade. By any concrete form of measure (i.e. comparing changing social spending as a percentage of GDP, comparing the number of words in a law governing an industry, as opposed to arguing "Socialism is togetherness of mankind" or other subjective nonsense), George W. Bush is the most extreme Socialist in power in the Western world. He may claim to be "free-market", but in terms of actually implementing government policy, he is less free-market than many Euro-crats who outright claim to be Socialists.
So using someone like G. W. Bush as a model of a free-market dictator is incorrect. G.W.Bush is about as free-market as Fidel Castro. You could argue that Fidel Castro is actually more free market, as Castro has been liberalizing parts of his economy, where G.W.Bush has consistantly done the opposite.
True Communists in the spirit of Marx believe that all forms of communication should be put in the hands of the state, and that state should be controlled exclusivly by the Communist Party (read The Communist Manifesto - http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifes to.html).
How is placing all radio, television, newspapers, telephone, and internet, etc. under the absolute control of a single political party not censorship?
According to Marx, free speech is liberal "Bourgeois Sentimentality".
Do Marxists bother to read Marx nowadays? Go to http://www.marxists.org/ and read up.
I suppose it would be way to much to expect people to RTFA before they post on Slashdot...
But if you had, you would have seen that the developer ISNT IN THE UNITED STATES!
In most countries, judges can give court orders for nearly anything. Anyone with enough lawyers can make you do anything they want, against your will, period... and if you don't have an army of lawyers to back you up, you are powerless to do anything about it.
This could be true, but the hackers would have to be based outside North Korea.
Why? Because NK doesn't have a whole slew of bandwidth coming in / going out. Every single packet going in/out of NK is probably intercepted by the U.S. and S. Korea. And it would not be any sort of disruption to cut off NK internet access.
However, I am assuming NK could send covert agents to SK, and launch their cyber attack there. Intercepting and analysing all packets would not be an option with a wired country like SK... and cutting off SK from the U.S. would not be economicly or politicly viable, if it could even be done.
Personally, I am not worried about some great cyber attack. Every day on the Internet is a cyber attack. There are people who are not affiliated with any government, and maybe aren't even political, who are probably just as good as NK hackers, and do all kinds of mischief and mayhem every day. In a strange way, all the hackers, work creaters, script kiddies, and zombie spammers have made the net immune to any sort of attack (because any sort of attack would probably be unnoticable from any normal day).
Telus, here in Toronto Canada. You can probably find out more at Telus.ca ...
I don't know if everyone can get a 100M connection though. I live in a new building in a downtown urban area, wired with fiber optic cable. And because of the speed of servers and the net itself, you really only get about 1.5M of bandwidth consistantly. But Telus is the best service provider I have ever used, and I highly recommend them!
PC gaming is dead.
I used to be a die hard PC gamer. I loved the greater depth and the willingness to experiment that PC games had over console games. Sim City, Civilazation, Falcon 3.0, Starflight, The Sims... these were amazing games.
But that era of PC gaming is dead. The games now all require the newest hardware in order to play the game and have it look anything whatsoever like the screenshots on the box. In order to keep up with the cutting edge in PC gaming, I would have to spend $400 on a new graphics card every month.
It is not only the 3D shooters that are like this. I can't even play a strategy game like "Imperial Glory" on my one year old laptop.
And even if you do having the newest graphic hardware, the games are now released full of bugs and problems that need patching for the next 6th months, and I need to fiddle with my graphics card drivers and a whole bunch of other crap to get it all working properly.
To the PC game industry: I am sick of it. I am not going to spend 5 Gs a year in order to play your crappy games. Yes, I could spent twice as much to buy a gamer laptop so I can play a strategy game like "Imperial Glory" on my laptop... but really, I have a 3GHz processor, several gigs of ram, a 1000M network card with a 100M internet connection, and I don't have the technology to play a damn strategy game on my laptop? Telling me how silly I am because I don't spend enough money, or because the keyboard and mouse is such a wonderful control system isn't enough to get me to give you another cent.
To the PC gaming industry, hopefully there are enough uber-geeks who will pay $400 every 6 months for a new graphics card, and occasionally will actually buy a game instead of download it off a warez site, to keep your industry together, because the casual gamers are no longer having it.
I can buy a cutting edge console for $300, and know it will play all the coolest games for the next 5 years. And not only that, I can play the games on my sofa, with a big-ass screen and surround sound cranked up, which more than makes up for the marginaly better graphics on high end PCs. And I don't have to worry about installing new drivers for every game I want to play, I can actually play the games when they are released instead of having bugs patched for the next 6 months.
So long PC gaming. Your industry might be dying, but there is nothing left there to mourn.
Ok, then were are all these laisse faire free-market Socialists then? I have yet to see a politician calling themselves "Socialist" who didn't advocate a command economy, government control of industry, extreme government regulation etc., etc. But according to you, they are out there. Please point me to a web site, or a news story, or a book, or some other source of information on Socialists who don't support big government.
We here at The Government are worried about you open-source and free software developers being exploited.
Therefore, in the interests of humanity, we take it apon ourselves to regulate, control, and licence all free software. Yes, don't worry, we don't want these companies taking advantage of your free labor, so we are going to tax these companies for their use of free software. We will keep the money for ourselves, after all, the Government IS the people, so when we make lots of money off of this, you will make lots of money off of this.
Don't worry, it will only cost you $200 a year to get your open source developers permit. Hardly a sacrafice at all! And just don't try to work on anything controversial like file-sharing and what not, otherwise we will have to revoke your licence, and perhaps send you to jail for coding without a licence.
Thanks for your support!
Your Big Brother
A private monopoly is wrong, of course. But I don't buy that a state monopoly is not a private monopoly. Yes, yes, I understand that "we all own the state", but this is just pretty rhetoric. I don't have any more power over the officials of state monopolies than I do private monopolies. One vote out of tens or hundreds of millions every X years for a leader, who will appoint a cabinent memeber/minister, who will appoint a head of a state run industry is so abstracted as to be meaningless. And because state monopolies tend to be over "socially critical" matters, the mistakes they make are just that much more harmful.
As for socialized medicine, the U.S. government spends more per capita on health care than a lot of EU countries, so it is a bit unfair to say that the U.S. isn't socialized medicine. However, having lived with the U.S. 60%-70% quasi-socialized system, and living now with Canadas 100% socialized system, that health care in the U.S. is orders of magnitude better. Even the poorest people without insurance where I lived in the U.S. got better health care than where I live in Canada. And Canada's system is considered comparable with most EU countries, so I don't see why it would be any different there. One thing to remember is that the U.S. government desperatly wants to control everything in the world, including health care, and EU countries need to justify their massive government monopolies, so both the E.U. and the U.S. find it convienient to spread the same propoganda.
When we discuss "Socialism", we mean central planning, nationalization of the means of production, the elimination of private property, etc., etc. This is how you Socialists plan to bring about your "classless state". A "classless state" and "the people have power" is so vauge and subjective it is meaningless unless we also discuss the methods you want to use to achieve those goals.
Socialist economies employ central planning. What is central planning? It is where people "are told what to do, and when and how to do it".
Socialism and Facism are not mutually exclusive concepts, in fact central planning, nationalization of industry, etc., are nessicary in order for a Facist state to exist.
Nearly all genocidal and oppressive regimes of the 20th Century, from the Nationalist Socialists of Germany, to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, etc., claim that they are giving "power to the people", and creating a "classless state", through "Socialism".
Wasn't the old Euro-socialist arguement that competition was bad for consumers and employees, and therefore it was natural that industry be nationalized, and monopolies be created?
When did the Euro love affair with monopolies end? Or is this anti-Americanism disguised as free-marketism? Seems to me a 100% monopoly on health care services, or airline travel, is a lot more disturbing, dangerous, and anti-democratic than bundling an audio player in an OS with maybe a 70% market share.
What is this "we" that you are talking about? This law doesn't stop "us" from creating a better, cheaper, more efficient system at all. "We" will still be allowed to set up whatever kind of community wifi that we want. Friends and neighbors can get together, raise money, and create any sort of community broadband that they like.
Let me explain something to you. The government is not "you", or "me", or "us". "We" are not the government. Don't believe the bullshit propoganda that the "government" is somehow the same thing as "the people".
The government is a profit making organization, like any other buisness. The only thing that distinguishes the government from any other big corporation is that the government has police that will throw you in jail or kill you if you don't buy what they are selling.
It is time to overcome this socialist, fascist propoganda that the government is "the people".
The USPS sucks. Service is terrible and unreliable. It is "cheaper" than UPS or Federal Express only because the USPS had a law passed that says IT IS ILLEGAL TO CHARGE LESS THAN THE USPS (and lets not forget it is subsidized by billions in taxes every year).
Great... So instead of Big Brother, we will have Catch-22. "Don't worry, it won't turn into a totalitarian system... just an increadably wasteful and crappy government program". Fantastic.
What about Hindu children who do not eat mean? What about Muslims who only eat Halal foods? What about Jewish students who much not eat cheese with meat and follow very strict rules about preperation. What about diabetic children? Or those with a peanut alergy.
Your idea will fail for the same reason public education itself is failing: Because the one-size-fits-all government aproach doesn't work in a diverse society. Either the system will fail, or if it doesn't fail it will succeeding by destroying all diversity.