Obviously you don't understand how government works.
If the government is offering million dollar contracts to provide a service, and politicians are staking their reputation on this spending (and most likely getting kickbacks), how receptive do you think those very powerful people are going to be to a group of people rolling out their own wireless network with better service at a fraction of the cost?
Unless the city rollout fails, if you try to run your community wireless network, you are going to have the city fighting you tooth and nail every step of the way. And even if they can't stop the community network, you are going to find your property has recently been reassesed for taxes as twice the market value, you are going to find city inspectors have cited your home, your place of buisness, for a bunch of civil infractions. There will be retaliation.
Once the government decides to take something over, unless it completly fails, you are stuck with it being a monopoly pretty much permanently and forever.
Most people in North America do not have broadband. And most high bandwidth content is completly useless and annoying to the user.
And even if everyone had really fast broadband into their house, that doesn't mean that "the internet is faster". All those people now consuming more broadband means server loads would be greater, packets would take longer to get to their destination. I have a 100M connection at home, and I consider it very lucky if I can download something at 1.5M. And we are not going to see another dot-com era orgy of spending to improve things this time around.
In fact, dialup improves the quality of websites in ways you don't even know. I can tell you that the only thing keeping most Corporate websites from being one giant streaming video television commercial is that designers can say "What about the dialup users? They are still in the majority!". When everyone has broadband, get ready for websites to become a whole lot less useable (not that they haven't turned into Flash and streaming-video nightmares already).
Sure, suing the ex-boyfriend would be a lot more appropriate here.
Of course, the ex-boyfriend doesn't have millions of dollars, and Yahoo does. Remember, in our culture, you are only responsible for things if you have lots of money.
For example, if you where to climb a barbed wire fence with a sign that says "Keep Out", and then ran up and touched the big electric capaciter that says "DANGER: 50,000 VOLTS! WILL CAUSE DEATH!", you are not responsible for said action, because you are not rich. But if you record a rock song with curse words, and wear stupid costumes, you ARE responsible if a kid who doesn't even like your music decides to shoot up his school... provided that you have enough assets to be taken away.
Fortunatly, the RIAA is egalitarian and interested in the common man, and trying to even things out. Thanks to the RIAA, being sued frivolously is no longer an experience just for the rich.
I am not "liberal" in the modern sense at all. Isn't property rights considered "conservative" nowadays? You are the "liberal", because you are the one who advocates dramatic government involvment in the lives of people that supercede their property rights.
Here in Toronto, it is Chinese immigrants, as well as other immigrants, who are funding new development, starting new buisnesses, creating most of the new jobs, and adding to the economic and cultural wealth of everyone. And it is the white upper-class who are constantly trying to stop development or growth by using these "community standards" arguments. Of course, a wealthy white person doesn't need to worry about creating new jobs and buisnesses (because they are happy to have their established buisness have no competition, and they already have a job). Rich white people own most of the rental housing, so do they want to see new development of housing that lowers prices and competes with them? No.
And the arguements they always give for their racist, anti-free-market government intervention is always "protecting our heratage", "protecting us from unchecked growth", "protecting the enviornment", etc., etc. But it is amazing how these "social standards" are always protecting the estetics and interests of the upper class and the expense of freedom and property rights.
Community codes have a lot to do with racism, national pride, etc.
For example, here in Toronto there is a group that wants to "protect" certain "lovely Victorian neighborhoods". Now, who feels nostalgic about the Victorian era? An era of racist imperialist conquering, an era of horrible sexual repression? Clearly this is the values of white upper class people feeling nostalgic about an era when they ruled the world. I don't hear immigrants from China or India saying how much they would like to live in lovely Victorian neighborhoods.
Or recently in Vancouver, they passed a law to make sure that resterants were not emmiting "foul smells". Then they went after the places that emitted the "foul smells". Of course they didn't go after the French bakery, or the English Fish & Chips shops, or even KFC. They went after Indian and Middle Eastern resterants. "But those are the only resterants that got complaints". Well, of course, the "Community Standards" are there to enforce the standards of white, upper class people. It is the ethnic minorities that diverge from these "community standards".
A law against having a big rusting truck in your driveway? Only poor people have old cars, and working class people often need trucks. Don't try to tell me that they are not trying to keep out people of "the wrong class".
Yes, I don't thing the idea of community standards are going to go away in this era where people in North America and Europe are becoming rabidly totalitarian. But anyone who looks at things with a clear mind should be able to understand that estetics are not morality, and that nearly all community codes are to enforce segregation and the superiority of one culture over another.
...Without a central-planned nannie state to control and legislate every single aspect of people's lives?
If working 10 months out of 12 to pay off taxes, and putting up with an overbearing totalitarian government, and destroying diversity by enforcing a monolithic one-size-fits-all concept of health on people regardless of body type and culture is the price we have to pay in order to keep kids from eating twinkies, then so be it.
Fortunatly, western governments are doing their best to regulate our economy, agriculture, and society to a point where we will have the healthy low-calorie diets that more progressive nations like North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Zambia enjoy.
It is about time that governments stop this food-terrorism. Like our glorious crusade in Iraq, no sacrifice is too great, no cost too high, no tactic too extreme, in order to protect our children from... soda and chips!
How is a third world dictatorship, where you can't surf the internet without explicit permission from the government, switching to Linux supposed to bring good attention to Linux? Shouldn't this be something that Linux advocates try to downplay?
Next Up: The government of Sudan has endorced Linux - "We wouldn't be able to carry out our genocide of non-muslims without it! We have 3,000,000 corpses to attest to the efficiency of open source software!".
Also in News: The president of NAMBLA announces the growth of Linux use amoung child pornographers. "Windows just isn't secure enough to download kiddie porn without worrying about some police force exploiting a Windows flaw to catch us. Linux is the only OS for hardcore child-porn fanatics!"
Yeah, great... Just when Linux and Open Source software is starting to get good publicity from the press, Linux "Advocates" are now trying to link Linux to totalitarian regimes. With friends like these, who needs enemies!
People should learn about the technology before they post their paranoid rants: you cannot be tracked with RFID tags any more than you can be tracked with an ID card.
RFID tags need to be within about a meter max to be read (and really, they need to be closer than that). RFID tags don't allow people to bring up some sort of map and see your blinking dot moving around like the tracking system in some spy movie.
In the system they are talking about, checkpoints would keep track of a person moving through (the same way they would if they used a swipe card or something like that). It is probably not much different than the system you have at work if you work in a big office building.
The only difference between RFID tags and swipe cards is RFID tags are a lot quicker, because you don't need to swipe it through a slot.
I was disapointed that this was not a manned balloon.
I always thought that a high-altitude balloon ride to 100,000 feet would be a lot of fun. With the whole low pressure thing, being able to see the curvature of the earth, seeing a black sky, it would be the closest that a normal person can hope to get into space. And this is completly do-able to make it within the budget of the average person from North America, Western Europe, etc. Yes a few people have done manned balloon rides to those heights, but they have always been super-funded. Never normal people doing a hobby project.
People are worried about some slightly anomolous results from voting machines...
Meanwhile, both the Democracts and Republicans have so gerrimandered voting districts as to give each party unending total control of entire areas. The Democrats and Republicans have created laws across the country which require that political party selection be open to everyone, so that they can send in their people to sabatoge smaller political parties like the Libertarians and the Greens (Democrats even openly organized and then claimed credit when they sabatoged Nadar's bid for the Green nomination). Democrats and Republicans openly call people, and ask them their names, and if they are going to vote in the next election, so that they have a list of who is not going to vote in a district in the next election. They then send their activists to vote in those districts as the people not voting. The Democrats and Republicans limit the amount of money that people can give to political parties, thereby ensuring that only candidates who are part of the two large parties are able to advertise.
If you voted for Democrats and Republicans, you knowingly and willingly voted for a party that commits widespread electorial fraud. Most of it is completly in the open and in public record, and the stuff that isn't is easy to see/confirm for yourself by volunteering for one of the big parties. You have to either be retarded, or completly brainwashed and blinded by your alegence to the Democrats or Republicans not to think those parties engage in vast widespread election fraud.
So, if you voted for Democrats or Republicans, shut up already. "Boohoo, the Republicans stole the election with electronic voting machines"... well, Democrats, I can see you can be a little upset that the other party was a lot more sophisticated that you were in their attemps at fraud... but neither the Democrats or Republicans can make any sort of moral arguement against the fraud of the other. Fraud acusations are something that Democrats and Republicans throw at each other when they have been beat at their own fraud game.
Everyone on slashdot loves the idea of the government providing "free" WiFi (free, provided you pay 80% of your income in tax), but things like this show what a bad idea it is.
There is nothing that any type of government does, that isn't politicized. So anything run by the government is going to be censored, controled, and manipulated by politics.
Now, this WiFi access is only accessable by people at rest-stops (i.e. people driving on freeways, most likely across state lines). By its very nature, it is only going to be accessable by adults, or children driving with their legal guardians in plain view. If the government doesn't trust grown adults to access uncensored internet in a public place where people are the least likely to be viewing pornography, political websites, etc., then do you really thing that wonderful municipal or state run WiFi network accessable in schools and homes are going to be uncensored?
But I guess we need to have the government provide WiFi, because otherwise how are poor people going to access the Internet on their Powerbooks when they are out having a capiccino?
Throw the term "Community" or "Socialism" on Big Brother seizing control of private communication and people normally "commited" to choice and privacy will rejoice and throwing it all away.
So what if the government controlling Internet access means that the police will be able to monitor your communications without a warrant (After all, you are using THEIR wifi network, they are free to monitor the traffic all they like)... so what if your location will be tracked by the government (if they are operating a grid of wifi stations, they can determine where you are by which cell you are connected to)... So what if it means the people providing wifi will be obligated to enforce every rediculous court order (RIAA banning file sharing, some religious nuts banning "pornography" and info about birth control). Running against the Mayor in your town? How do you know your private browsing history, emails, etc., won't end up in the hands of the public? (oh yeah, I forget, the government never leaks secret information!). And instead of having your service shut off when you don't pay your bill, when you don't pay your Internet tax you will be sent to prison. And sure, I am sure government wifi service will be great once there is a government monopoly on it. Yeah great... if I don't like my service provider now, I can find another one... but with the government running it I can expect the same great service one has come to expect from the U.S. Postal Service, public schools, the IRS and DMV. Fantastic!
"The government running wifi networks won't stop private companies from providing the services!" you say. Oh really? How many people can afford to pay for Internet service twice? Once for the government wifi tax and one for your private service. How many private buisnesses will bother setting up wifi networks when for the 10% minority of people concerned about privacy?
Are all the geeks at Slashdot thinking they are gonna make it rich with big government wifi contracts? Or have even the Slashdot crowd become a bunch of government worshiping suckers, with absolute blind faith in the government?
The big corporations, large interest groups, etc., will always be able to bribe politicians. Invite the politician for an "informational seminar" at the beachside estate your company/organization owns in Hawaii. Or when the politician retires, they will be able to count on big-bucks speaking gigs from your organization. etc., etc. They have resources that the normal person does not have, and there is always a way around any sufficiently complex law. Politicians WILL be bribed by the rich and powerful, they always have, they always will. The questions is will I be freely able to point out such corruption, or will those corrupt politicians also have the right to "regulate" what I say about their corruption?
The only people who are effected by these laws are normal people and grass roots organizations. These organizations depend on resources from a few dedicated individuals. Limit everyones donations, and of course the largest parties (ie. the Democrats and Repulicans), are the ones who profit, because they can rely on their huge membership to make small donations, and that will add up to big money.
When a product is first developed, that research and development cost, tooling costs, etc., need to be recouped. It is passed on to the consumers when a product is new. After a product has been on the market and recoups those costs, they prices start going down.
In effect, those rich geeks who buy all the fancy toys before everyone else subsidize the development for us poor geeks who purchase the product a few years later for next to nothing.
Making a computer especially for poor people makes no sense. Everyone knows that the killer PDAs of today will be available as $50 knockoffs from China in 2 or 3 years. I have seen old Palm PDAs people were trying to get rid of for $10-$15 bucks.
The Liberals have been in power for at least 80 of the last 100 years in Canada... I would say that Canada is more a one-party system than any sort of true multiparty democracy.
And if you want to talk campaign finance reform, the Liberals spend billions of the taxpayers money promoting themselves, they call it the CBC!
Actually, it is both. It is a freedom of speech campaign, that is trying to get past PAC restrictions.
Political parties, political organizations, issue groups, and the like should be free to give whatever money they want, to whoever they want, for any reason they want. That is freedom of speech and expression.
The campaign finance laws are not there to protect the American people, they are there to hurt alternative political parties. A smaller political party like the Greens, or the Libertarian party, need extra cash in order to compete with the big boys who control the government and the media. A few big donations from generous people is what those parties need in order to grow. However, limiting funding means that the largest parties can rely on their huge base to make smaller donations, and small parties are forcefully silenced.
Any restriction on speech, or the funding of such speech, destroys free speech, period.
Then don't use Google. Google is not REPLACING any source of information, it is simply offering another information source. People are free to choose what and where to get information. Google is doing a great thing.
What might be disturbing, is if there are not enough alternative sources of information to Google. But that is not Google's responsibility, that is the responsibility of competing companies, organizations, services, user groups, etc..
Just like Wikipedia is great, it is just too bad there isn't also Alternapedia and Free-o-pedia and Encylotron to choose from.
Them why don't the people who want this program pay for it out of their pocket? All it would take is 1000 people to donate $4000. That isn't that much at all.
If someone doesn't feel strongly enough about it to try to organize something like this, or donate money, then it isn't that important to them. They are just whining because the government can't sprinkle magic fairy dust and give everything to everybody for nothing.
Not true... I cross the Detroit/Winsor border all the time (I am American but I live in Canada). You can still cross both ways with a drivers licence or birth certificate, and most of the time they don't even ask for any ID at all (both ways).
However, the whole passport thing is extremly stupid. 99.9% of the U.S./Canadian border has no border guards, and getting past the U.S. Canada border has to be just about the easiest border in the world to secretly cross. The passport thing is like threatening to prosecute hyjackers for flying without an FAA licence.
Judges routinly "seal" testimony, in not letting government records of testimony out into the public, or not letting cameras into a courtroom. They are not allowed to ban the publishing of stuff, which amounts to censorship. There is a huge difference.
Yes, we definitly need the U.S. government to make sure those evil corporations don't lie to us.
For example, lets say an evil corporation decides they want to make money selling insurance. They then charge consumers money. They then take that money and spend it on other things that they want, not investing it or saving it or anything. Their buisness plan is to keep increasing the size of their customer base, and pay off any insurance obligations with the payments they bring in. This is called a "ponzy" scheme, or a pyramid scem. This is concidered fraud and highly illegal and people working for any corporation running such a scheme would find themselves in prison. Except, of course, the largest insurance program in the world, Social Security, is exactly what I described. Funny how the government doesn't do such a good job reporting that kind of fraud.
Or what, if your local condo board told you that one of the tenants had illegal weapons in their apartment. THey charged you a huge fee so they could send their security people into that apartment, attack anyone who put up a fight, and then kicked out the owner. Turns out later that the condo board knew there was never any illegal weapons in the apartment. Those guys would surely go to jail... unless of course, it is the government doing the invading. Then it isn't an evil corporate thing, it is a great patriotic act.
How can anyone seriously expect the government to protect consumers from misinformation and scams when governments are the #1 source of misinformation and scams. Has all these years of government-run schools and government regulated media dulled people's critical thinking to the point that they really trust the government to decide what is "truth" and what are "lies". Give a corporation monopoly and a Flag and guns and call it a government, and the people claim to hate corporations are willing to give them absolute control.
I much rather depend on myself, the internet, recommendations from my friends, and the media, then on the government. Don't take away my right to choose for myself because you all are a bunch of government-worshiping suckers.
No. It is copyright violation to sell Linux, PHP, Apache, etc. It is legal to distribute it with something you sell. So RedHat can sell a Linux CD, and you pay for the installer software, etc.
It is also illegal to distribute open source software without making the source available. So if I was selling a modified Linux kernal, pre-compiled, it would be a violation of the copyright.
I support of the guy selling his own Scrabble software in defiance of Hasbro's copyrights, I will be selling a new OS software I call 'Linux'. Licences start at only $100 per workstation. For $200 dollars I will throw in Apache and PHP. For $400 extra I will throw in my software own software OpenOffice.
Yes, in fact, just go to Source Forge. I will sell you any of that software for only $100 per workstation.
Maybe these movies are not being shown, not because any fundamentalists find it controversial, but because the movies suck.
Oliver Stone was complaining that people didn't go see the movie Alexander because the main character's bi-sexuality was too controversial. Uh, no Mr. Stone, they didn't see it because it was lame, panned by critics, and most of your movies nowadays suck.
Michael Moore complained that F9/11 didn't do well because of censorship, people threatening boycotts, etc... Except that the movie was one of the best selling documentaries of all time and was show everywhere across the United States. If it didn't do as well as Jurassic Park, it is because people don't usually go to the theaters to see documentaries.
I find it far more realistic that people just rather see "Disney's Goofy 3D" or something on the IMAX, rather than underwater fish. And the people who show these movies can deflect blame by blaming religious zealots who don't exists.
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Obviously you don't understand how government works.
If the government is offering million dollar contracts to provide a service, and politicians are staking their reputation on this spending (and most likely getting kickbacks), how receptive do you think those very powerful people are going to be to a group of people rolling out their own wireless network with better service at a fraction of the cost?
Unless the city rollout fails, if you try to run your community wireless network, you are going to have the city fighting you tooth and nail every step of the way. And even if they can't stop the community network, you are going to find your property has recently been reassesed for taxes as twice the market value, you are going to find city inspectors have cited your home, your place of buisness, for a bunch of civil infractions. There will be retaliation.
Once the government decides to take something over, unless it completly fails, you are stuck with it being a monopoly pretty much permanently and forever.
Most people in North America do not have broadband. And most high bandwidth content is completly useless and annoying to the user.
And even if everyone had really fast broadband into their house, that doesn't mean that "the internet is faster". All those people now consuming more broadband means server loads would be greater, packets would take longer to get to their destination. I have a 100M connection at home, and I consider it very lucky if I can download something at 1.5M. And we are not going to see another dot-com era orgy of spending to improve things this time around.
In fact, dialup improves the quality of websites in ways you don't even know. I can tell you that the only thing keeping most Corporate websites from being one giant streaming video television commercial is that designers can say "What about the dialup users? They are still in the majority!". When everyone has broadband, get ready for websites to become a whole lot less useable (not that they haven't turned into Flash and streaming-video nightmares already).
Sure, suing the ex-boyfriend would be a lot more appropriate here.
Of course, the ex-boyfriend doesn't have millions of dollars, and Yahoo does. Remember, in our culture, you are only responsible for things if you have lots of money.
For example, if you where to climb a barbed wire fence with a sign that says "Keep Out", and then ran up and touched the big electric capaciter that says "DANGER: 50,000 VOLTS! WILL CAUSE DEATH!", you are not responsible for said action, because you are not rich. But if you record a rock song with curse words, and wear stupid costumes, you ARE responsible if a kid who doesn't even like your music decides to shoot up his school... provided that you have enough assets to be taken away.
Fortunatly, the RIAA is egalitarian and interested in the common man, and trying to even things out. Thanks to the RIAA, being sued frivolously is no longer an experience just for the rich.
I am not "liberal" in the modern sense at all. Isn't property rights considered "conservative" nowadays? You are the "liberal", because you are the one who advocates dramatic government involvment in the lives of people that supercede their property rights.
Here in Toronto, it is Chinese immigrants, as well as other immigrants, who are funding new development, starting new buisnesses, creating most of the new jobs, and adding to the economic and cultural wealth of everyone. And it is the white upper-class who are constantly trying to stop development or growth by using these "community standards" arguments. Of course, a wealthy white person doesn't need to worry about creating new jobs and buisnesses (because they are happy to have their established buisness have no competition, and they already have a job). Rich white people own most of the rental housing, so do they want to see new development of housing that lowers prices and competes with them? No.
And the arguements they always give for their racist, anti-free-market government intervention is always "protecting our heratage", "protecting us from unchecked growth", "protecting the enviornment", etc., etc. But it is amazing how these "social standards" are always protecting the estetics and interests of the upper class and the expense of freedom and property rights.
Community codes have a lot to do with racism, national pride, etc.
For example, here in Toronto there is a group that wants to "protect" certain "lovely Victorian neighborhoods". Now, who feels nostalgic about the Victorian era? An era of racist imperialist conquering, an era of horrible sexual repression? Clearly this is the values of white upper class people feeling nostalgic about an era when they ruled the world. I don't hear immigrants from China or India saying how much they would like to live in lovely Victorian neighborhoods.
Or recently in Vancouver, they passed a law to make sure that resterants were not emmiting "foul smells". Then they went after the places that emitted the "foul smells". Of course they didn't go after the French bakery, or the English Fish & Chips shops, or even KFC. They went after Indian and Middle Eastern resterants. "But those are the only resterants that got complaints". Well, of course, the "Community Standards" are there to enforce the standards of white, upper class people. It is the ethnic minorities that diverge from these "community standards".
A law against having a big rusting truck in your driveway? Only poor people have old cars, and working class people often need trucks. Don't try to tell me that they are not trying to keep out people of "the wrong class".
Yes, I don't thing the idea of community standards are going to go away in this era where people in North America and Europe are becoming rabidly totalitarian. But anyone who looks at things with a clear mind should be able to understand that estetics are not morality, and that nearly all community codes are to enforce segregation and the superiority of one culture over another.
...Without a central-planned nannie state to control and legislate every single aspect of people's lives?
If working 10 months out of 12 to pay off taxes, and putting up with an overbearing totalitarian government, and destroying diversity by enforcing a monolithic one-size-fits-all concept of health on people regardless of body type and culture is the price we have to pay in order to keep kids from eating twinkies, then so be it.
Fortunatly, western governments are doing their best to regulate our economy, agriculture, and society to a point where we will have the healthy low-calorie diets that more progressive nations like North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Zambia enjoy.
It is about time that governments stop this food-terrorism. Like our glorious crusade in Iraq, no sacrifice is too great, no cost too high, no tactic too extreme, in order to protect our children from... soda and chips!
How is a third world dictatorship, where you can't surf the internet without explicit permission from the government, switching to Linux supposed to bring good attention to Linux? Shouldn't this be something that Linux advocates try to downplay?
Next Up: The government of Sudan has endorced Linux - "We wouldn't be able to carry out our genocide of non-muslims without it! We have 3,000,000 corpses to attest to the efficiency of open source software!".
Also in News: The president of NAMBLA announces the growth of Linux use amoung child pornographers. "Windows just isn't secure enough to download kiddie porn without worrying about some police force exploiting a Windows flaw to catch us. Linux is the only OS for hardcore child-porn fanatics!"
Yeah, great... Just when Linux and Open Source software is starting to get good publicity from the press, Linux "Advocates" are now trying to link Linux to totalitarian regimes. With friends like these, who needs enemies!
People should learn about the technology before they post their paranoid rants: you cannot be tracked with RFID tags any more than you can be tracked with an ID card.
RFID tags need to be within about a meter max to be read (and really, they need to be closer than that). RFID tags don't allow people to bring up some sort of map and see your blinking dot moving around like the tracking system in some spy movie.
In the system they are talking about, checkpoints would keep track of a person moving through (the same way they would if they used a swipe card or something like that). It is probably not much different than the system you have at work if you work in a big office building.
The only difference between RFID tags and swipe cards is RFID tags are a lot quicker, because you don't need to swipe it through a slot.
Yes! Which is what would make it so cool!
I was disapointed that this was not a manned balloon.
I always thought that a high-altitude balloon ride to 100,000 feet would be a lot of fun. With the whole low pressure thing, being able to see the curvature of the earth, seeing a black sky, it would be the closest that a normal person can hope to get into space. And this is completly do-able to make it within the budget of the average person from North America, Western Europe, etc. Yes a few people have done manned balloon rides to those heights, but they have always been super-funded. Never normal people doing a hobby project.
People are worried about some slightly anomolous results from voting machines...
Meanwhile, both the Democracts and Republicans have so gerrimandered voting districts as to give each party unending total control of entire areas. The Democrats and Republicans have created laws across the country which require that political party selection be open to everyone, so that they can send in their people to sabatoge smaller political parties like the Libertarians and the Greens (Democrats even openly organized and then claimed credit when they sabatoged Nadar's bid for the Green nomination). Democrats and Republicans openly call people, and ask them their names, and if they are going to vote in the next election, so that they have a list of who is not going to vote in a district in the next election. They then send their activists to vote in those districts as the people not voting. The Democrats and Republicans limit the amount of money that people can give to political parties, thereby ensuring that only candidates who are part of the two large parties are able to advertise.
If you voted for Democrats and Republicans, you knowingly and willingly voted for a party that commits widespread electorial fraud. Most of it is completly in the open and in public record, and the stuff that isn't is easy to see/confirm for yourself by volunteering for one of the big parties. You have to either be retarded, or completly brainwashed and blinded by your alegence to the Democrats or Republicans not to think those parties engage in vast widespread election fraud.
So, if you voted for Democrats or Republicans, shut up already. "Boohoo, the Republicans stole the election with electronic voting machines"... well, Democrats, I can see you can be a little upset that the other party was a lot more sophisticated that you were in their attemps at fraud... but neither the Democrats or Republicans can make any sort of moral arguement against the fraud of the other. Fraud acusations are something that Democrats and Republicans throw at each other when they have been beat at their own fraud game.
Everyone on slashdot loves the idea of the government providing "free" WiFi (free, provided you pay 80% of your income in tax), but things like this show what a bad idea it is.
There is nothing that any type of government does, that isn't politicized. So anything run by the government is going to be censored, controled, and manipulated by politics.
Now, this WiFi access is only accessable by people at rest-stops (i.e. people driving on freeways, most likely across state lines). By its very nature, it is only going to be accessable by adults, or children driving with their legal guardians in plain view. If the government doesn't trust grown adults to access uncensored internet in a public place where people are the least likely to be viewing pornography, political websites, etc., then do you really thing that wonderful municipal or state run WiFi network accessable in schools and homes are going to be uncensored?
But I guess we need to have the government provide WiFi, because otherwise how are poor people going to access the Internet on their Powerbooks when they are out having a capiccino?
Throw the term "Community" or "Socialism" on Big Brother seizing control of private communication and people normally "commited" to choice and privacy will rejoice and throwing it all away.
So what if the government controlling Internet access means that the police will be able to monitor your communications without a warrant (After all, you are using THEIR wifi network, they are free to monitor the traffic all they like)... so what if your location will be tracked by the government (if they are operating a grid of wifi stations, they can determine where you are by which cell you are connected to)... So what if it means the people providing wifi will be obligated to enforce every rediculous court order (RIAA banning file sharing, some religious nuts banning "pornography" and info about birth control). Running against the Mayor in your town? How do you know your private browsing history, emails, etc., won't end up in the hands of the public? (oh yeah, I forget, the government never leaks secret information!). And instead of having your service shut off when you don't pay your bill, when you don't pay your Internet tax you will be sent to prison. And sure, I am sure government wifi service will be great once there is a government monopoly on it. Yeah great... if I don't like my service provider now, I can find another one... but with the government running it I can expect the same great service one has come to expect from the U.S. Postal Service, public schools, the IRS and DMV. Fantastic!
"The government running wifi networks won't stop private companies from providing the services!" you say. Oh really? How many people can afford to pay for Internet service twice? Once for the government wifi tax and one for your private service. How many private buisnesses will bother setting up wifi networks when for the 10% minority of people concerned about privacy?
Are all the geeks at Slashdot thinking they are gonna make it rich with big government wifi contracts? Or have even the Slashdot crowd become a bunch of government worshiping suckers, with absolute blind faith in the government?
The big corporations, large interest groups, etc., will always be able to bribe politicians. Invite the politician for an "informational seminar" at the beachside estate your company/organization owns in Hawaii. Or when the politician retires, they will be able to count on big-bucks speaking gigs from your organization. etc., etc. They have resources that the normal person does not have, and there is always a way around any sufficiently complex law. Politicians WILL be bribed by the rich and powerful, they always have, they always will. The questions is will I be freely able to point out such corruption, or will those corrupt politicians also have the right to "regulate" what I say about their corruption?
The only people who are effected by these laws are normal people and grass roots organizations. These organizations depend on resources from a few dedicated individuals. Limit everyones donations, and of course the largest parties (ie. the Democrats and Repulicans), are the ones who profit, because they can rely on their huge membership to make small donations, and that will add up to big money.
OK, let me explain something.
When a product is first developed, that research and development cost, tooling costs, etc., need to be recouped. It is passed on to the consumers when a product is new. After a product has been on the market and recoups those costs, they prices start going down.
In effect, those rich geeks who buy all the fancy toys before everyone else subsidize the development for us poor geeks who purchase the product a few years later for next to nothing.
Making a computer especially for poor people makes no sense. Everyone knows that the killer PDAs of today will be available as $50 knockoffs from China in 2 or 3 years. I have seen old Palm PDAs people were trying to get rid of for $10-$15 bucks.
The Liberals have been in power for at least 80 of the last 100 years in Canada... I would say that Canada is more a one-party system than any sort of true multiparty democracy.
And if you want to talk campaign finance reform, the Liberals spend billions of the taxpayers money promoting themselves, they call it the CBC!
Actually, it is both. It is a freedom of speech campaign, that is trying to get past PAC restrictions.
Political parties, political organizations, issue groups, and the like should be free to give whatever money they want, to whoever they want, for any reason they want. That is freedom of speech and expression.
The campaign finance laws are not there to protect the American people, they are there to hurt alternative political parties. A smaller political party like the Greens, or the Libertarian party, need extra cash in order to compete with the big boys who control the government and the media. A few big donations from generous people is what those parties need in order to grow. However, limiting funding means that the largest parties can rely on their huge base to make smaller donations, and small parties are forcefully silenced.
Any restriction on speech, or the funding of such speech, destroys free speech, period.
Then don't use Google. Google is not REPLACING any source of information, it is simply offering another information source. People are free to choose what and where to get information. Google is doing a great thing.
What might be disturbing, is if there are not enough alternative sources of information to Google. But that is not Google's responsibility, that is the responsibility of competing companies, organizations, services, user groups, etc..
Just like Wikipedia is great, it is just too bad there isn't also Alternapedia and Free-o-pedia and Encylotron to choose from.
Them why don't the people who want this program pay for it out of their pocket? All it would take is 1000 people to donate $4000. That isn't that much at all.
If someone doesn't feel strongly enough about it to try to organize something like this, or donate money, then it isn't that important to them. They are just whining because the government can't sprinkle magic fairy dust and give everything to everybody for nothing.
Not true... I cross the Detroit/Winsor border all the time (I am American but I live in Canada). You can still cross both ways with a drivers licence or birth certificate, and most of the time they don't even ask for any ID at all (both ways).
However, the whole passport thing is extremly stupid. 99.9% of the U.S./Canadian border has no border guards, and getting past the U.S. Canada border has to be just about the easiest border in the world to secretly cross. The passport thing is like threatening to prosecute hyjackers for flying without an FAA licence.
Judges routinly "seal" testimony, in not letting government records of testimony out into the public, or not letting cameras into a courtroom. They are not allowed to ban the publishing of stuff, which amounts to censorship. There is a huge difference.
Yes, we definitly need the U.S. government to make sure those evil corporations don't lie to us.
For example, lets say an evil corporation decides they want to make money selling insurance. They then charge consumers money. They then take that money and spend it on other things that they want, not investing it or saving it or anything. Their buisness plan is to keep increasing the size of their customer base, and pay off any insurance obligations with the payments they bring in. This is called a "ponzy" scheme, or a pyramid scem. This is concidered fraud and highly illegal and people working for any corporation running such a scheme would find themselves in prison. Except, of course, the largest insurance program in the world, Social Security, is exactly what I described. Funny how the government doesn't do such a good job reporting that kind of fraud.
Or what, if your local condo board told you that one of the tenants had illegal weapons in their apartment. THey charged you a huge fee so they could send their security people into that apartment, attack anyone who put up a fight, and then kicked out the owner. Turns out later that the condo board knew there was never any illegal weapons in the apartment. Those guys would surely go to jail... unless of course, it is the government doing the invading. Then it isn't an evil corporate thing, it is a great patriotic act.
How can anyone seriously expect the government to protect consumers from misinformation and scams when governments are the #1 source of misinformation and scams. Has all these years of government-run schools and government regulated media dulled people's critical thinking to the point that they really trust the government to decide what is "truth" and what are "lies". Give a corporation monopoly and a Flag and guns and call it a government, and the people claim to hate corporations are willing to give them absolute control.
I much rather depend on myself, the internet, recommendations from my friends, and the media, then on the government. Don't take away my right to choose for myself because you all are a bunch of government-worshiping suckers.
No. It is copyright violation to sell Linux, PHP, Apache, etc. It is legal to distribute it with something you sell. So RedHat can sell a Linux CD, and you pay for the installer software, etc.
It is also illegal to distribute open source software without making the source available. So if I was selling a modified Linux kernal, pre-compiled, it would be a violation of the copyright.
I support of the guy selling his own Scrabble software in defiance of Hasbro's copyrights, I will be selling a new OS software I call 'Linux'. Licences start at only $100 per workstation. For $200 dollars I will throw in Apache and PHP. For $400 extra I will throw in my software own software OpenOffice.
Yes, in fact, just go to Source Forge. I will sell you any of that software for only $100 per workstation.
Maybe these movies are not being shown, not because any fundamentalists find it controversial, but because the movies suck.
Oliver Stone was complaining that people didn't go see the movie Alexander because the main character's bi-sexuality was too controversial. Uh, no Mr. Stone, they didn't see it because it was lame, panned by critics, and most of your movies nowadays suck.
Michael Moore complained that F9/11 didn't do well because of censorship, people threatening boycotts, etc... Except that the movie was one of the best selling documentaries of all time and was show everywhere across the United States. If it didn't do as well as Jurassic Park, it is because people don't usually go to the theaters to see documentaries.
I find it far more realistic that people just rather see "Disney's Goofy 3D" or something on the IMAX, rather than underwater fish. And the people who show these movies can deflect blame by blaming religious zealots who don't exists.