10-20% of us know that (that's more people than most European nations), and are trying to do something to fix it. Unfortunately there are structural and procedural features of the US government which make it a statistical certainty that we'll never have more than two viable parties. Worse, the process to fix it would require cooperation from one or both of those parties (and their financial backers) so that's not going to happen.
There are people in the US advocating for social democracy, there are people who realize moving farther and farther to the right of the economic spectrum is destroying us and rotting away the middle class. There are people who realize that there is no such thing as a scaleable market solution for basic scientific research, education, or health care--but those things still need to get done. We exist, but there's just too few, and everyone else is either too scared of the caricature of "evil socialism" built up from after WWII to even consider something left of a center-right party, or they just don't care. And again, those people who don't care and opt-out of participating in civil society end up playing into the hands of the party that least represents their interest due to the structure of our election system.
You mean the long-timers that developed Hubble, the Shuttle program, ISS, and (mostly) successful Mars rovers?
If anything, NASA gets worse with each new generation. As I saw on reddit once, "If you watch NASA backwards, it's about a space agency that has no spaceflight capability, then does low-orbit flights, then lands on moon"
I don't buy that that's the problem when you have some corps paying ZERO taxes, and many even receiving money from the government despite pulling in record profits.
You think they're running on a Pentium III server in Sergey's garage? It's Google we are talking about, not Twitter:p
They already index the whole world, read everyone's e-mail, and watch you from roving surveillance vans. Connecting you with your friends and letting you share pics shouldn't tax them too much.
You need a friend who already has it to invite you. They are not doing "official" invites right now, but you can still get an invite by having someone add you to a circle and then send you a notification of some content being posted. That's how I got in, a stranger from 4chan added my e-mail address and I got a link in the e-mail to sign up.
They are most definitely not suffering massive losses. Massive copyright infringement does not necessarily mean massive losses, the two have never been connected in any meaningful way. It's merely speculation, fuzzy math, and fear-mongering from big business.
Facebook gets to decide how and when you use their site. The best solution is to use something else if you want to access and store your files on your terms. I use Facebook, but I treat it as a secondary system for whatever feature they have. Do not rely on anything related to Facebook as your primary method to do something like store photos, IM, E-mail, etc. The files were deleted to send a message, that you have to use their implementation of a feature if you want to use it at all.
Probably the worst example of Facebook's policy abuses is the censorship. Try making a status update linking to a site critical of Facebook's policies, or about blocking ads on Facebook, link to Firefox and Ad Block Plus. See how long it takes for your status to disappear. Or if it doesn't, ask your friends if they can see it, you might find that it has been made invisible to everyone but you.
You underestimate me. I'm a social democrat, I accept that capitalism and profit-seeking will have a part to play in any economy we could realistically imagine for the time being. The goal is to reduce exploitation and top-down abuse; and I see a lot of that in our current copyright system.
I was confused by the wording in the article and I understood it to mean that Transdroid was a program to download torrents on your phone. This makes more sense, and obviously wouldn't bring up the issues of bandwidth that I mentioned.
You don't know the economic situation of everyone. There are plenty of people for whom physical media IS prohibitively expensive, even legal downloadable versions are often not significantly cheaper. When one region of the world is sold a downloadable copy for X amount and the US is sold the same downloadable copy for 10*X, that's exploitation. Downloading a free copy is no worse than downloading a cheaper foreign version in the eyes of the content-cartels who have tried to convince us that EULAs and terms of use constitute law or are legally valid forms of contract. They shouldn't expect us to play nice when they don't.
One thing is certain, no matter what downloading a torrent of a commercial work is, it is NOT theft. Use of the term theft or piracy is an Orwellian manipulation and you are playing right into their hands every time you repeat it when you actually mean copyright infringement.
More likely than the copyright angle (or maybe in addition to it) is the explanation that they got rid of it after receiving pressure from the wireless service providers. Verizon and AT&T hate when people use bandwidth they actually pay for, and someone running torrents on their phone will probably end up using it in 3G mode at least some of the time. They want you paying as much as possible, and then they do everything they can to dissuade you from actually making use of what you buy. I see this as probably another manifestation of their entitlement mentality. I wish it were the most egregious and aggravating, but the sad fact is this is just one in a long line of abuses.
I agree, but you then have to accept that there is an entire separate conversation society should be having; is copyright in its current form an ethical social contract? We're seeing three or four different bodies of laws rolled into one nebulous and overreaching concept called "intellectual property" which is in reality a power-play by big business to handcuff culture and make sure nothing ever enters public domain again.
The current copyright system is broken, it's ethically bankrupt, so we no longer have an obligation to hold up our end of the social contract.
We have the same problem in the US, except both of our major parties are unable to deal with the issue for different reasons. No matter who we choose (the two party system is a statistical certainty given our constitution) we will end up with a government that won't solve this problem. It'll keep getting worse for us until something breaks. I hope it's our constitution (certain provisions regarding apportionment and representation) and not our entire economy and way of life.
Taxation is NOT robbery. Only in the warped mind of a libertarian is taxation akin to theft. Most people can recognize that taxes allow for the foundation of a modern civilized society, and that the mandatory nature is necessary because people are short-sighted and greedy, unable to see the benefits that The State, even when run inefficiently, provides for them. Market solutions work in some areas, but not all. We can either do without those things, accept that they'll only be provided for people who can pay, or tax everyone and use a collective solution to the problem called government and taxation. The two systems compliment each other, and either will fail if a society chooses to rely on only one to meet all its needs.
They still haven't fixed a glaring bug in how tabs work in the OS X version. Tabs aren't drawn correctly in the title bar in OS X, as Chrome does, but are on their own bar right below it. This results in wasted vertical space and just looks ugly.
And I didn't say I don't see any arguments for borders, read it again until it makes sense. I said why is capital allowed to cross borders freely but labor cannot? That's a more detailed question, and you just ignored it and attack the strawman you erected yourself just now. Nice try though. Likewise you are incapable of pointing to a time in history when drug prohibition has been more successful than other forms of controlling the negative effects of drugs. There is plenty of evidence on my side showing how prohibition doesn't work, you seem to be ignorant of that. I'm unaware of any evidence FOR it not out of ignorance, but out of lack of evidence. It doesn't work, and you're supporting it or feeling like it is morally right doesn't make it so. You also are just blatantly making things up when you say I don't like the idea of military being used to defend the country. I find the attitude of, "You better like this country and be patriotic or git out!" to be incredibly repulsive and not conducive to fixing problems. It just conditions people to accept mistreatment and exploitation and to attack anyone who dares point out that things could be done differently and better.
Yes, I am unhappy with the way the world and my country is right now. But that doesn't mean I want to be some sort of dictator. It doesn't mean I am going to leave (or could) I just want to be part of a society that is more inclusive and fair, for the betterment of everyone. That's not the same as pushing my views, no matter how much you disagree with me, it doesn't make it so. I'm no more pushing my own views on others than you are.
Because universal heatlhcare or not, he will be treated. Right now, he gets sick and goes to the ER which you pay for indirectly. That's currently how we handle things. We could have been giving him preventative care which usually ends up being cheaper in almost all cases. And you can solve the smoking problem by increasing the taxes on cigarettes, and making the tax money be only or mostly used for funding the treatment of smokers. Have them pay for their own health care that their habit causes (and probably a little extra, subsidizing others who don't smoke).
I guess we could even save more money by kicking him to the curb when he shows up for smoking related illnesses and he was too poor to afford to pay taxes or buy insurance, but I don't want to live in a country that does that. Do you? I know there are a lot of people who actually would say yes to that, which is why there is an ethical divide about this topic that makes debate impossible beyond a certain point. It's not possible to have a real discussion about healthcare with someone who thinks it's acceptable to let people die who can't afford care.
You're ALREADY paying for all those people you are so don't like. Yes, it's true, you pay in form of taxes which cover ER visits that never get paid by poor people (who are often also unhealthy, go figure); you pay in the form of higher insurance premiums so that health care can be profitable (and because the pool of people is much smaller); you pay in the form of your business having less healthy employees; you pay in the form of a more dangerous society, as more people get pushed into crime because they cannot afford to care for themselves even working full time.
The jokes is really on you, because if you'd give up your ideological hatred for those people and for the idea that some social problems can be best tackled collectively through strategic actions by government, you'd end up paying less in taxes to cover Universal Healthcare than you currently pay for private insurance and all the unseen costs of having the terrible system we have today in the US.
I understand your frustration, but you're advocating a position that actually ends up being counter productive to your stated goals.
He wasn't a "friend" he was just an op on the network their channel also happened to be on. They didn't abandon anyone, you're reading waaaay too much into this.
Slashdot Mirror
10-20% of us know that (that's more people than most European nations), and are trying to do something to fix it. Unfortunately there are structural and procedural features of the US government which make it a statistical certainty that we'll never have more than two viable parties. Worse, the process to fix it would require cooperation from one or both of those parties (and their financial backers) so that's not going to happen.
There are people in the US advocating for social democracy, there are people who realize moving farther and farther to the right of the economic spectrum is destroying us and rotting away the middle class. There are people who realize that there is no such thing as a scaleable market solution for basic scientific research, education, or health care--but those things still need to get done. We exist, but there's just too few, and everyone else is either too scared of the caricature of "evil socialism" built up from after WWII to even consider something left of a center-right party, or they just don't care. And again, those people who don't care and opt-out of participating in civil society end up playing into the hands of the party that least represents their interest due to the structure of our election system.
You mean the long-timers that developed Hubble, the Shuttle program, ISS, and (mostly) successful Mars rovers?
If anything, NASA gets worse with each new generation. As I saw on reddit once, "If you watch NASA backwards, it's about a space agency that has no spaceflight capability, then does low-orbit flights, then lands on moon"
I don't buy that that's the problem when you have some corps paying ZERO taxes, and many even receiving money from the government despite pulling in record profits.
Just use a throw-away account, something like Hushmail.
You think they're running on a Pentium III server in Sergey's garage? It's Google we are talking about, not Twitter :p
They already index the whole world, read everyone's e-mail, and watch you from roving surveillance vans. Connecting you with your friends and letting you share pics shouldn't tax them too much.
You need a friend who already has it to invite you. They are not doing "official" invites right now, but you can still get an invite by having someone add you to a circle and then send you a notification of some content being posted. That's how I got in, a stranger from 4chan added my e-mail address and I got a link in the e-mail to sign up.
There isn't any of those games, apps, fan pages
Shut up and take my money!
They are most definitely not suffering massive losses. Massive copyright infringement does not necessarily mean massive losses, the two have never been connected in any meaningful way. It's merely speculation, fuzzy math, and fear-mongering from big business.
Facebook gets to decide how and when you use their site. The best solution is to use something else if you want to access and store your files on your terms. I use Facebook, but I treat it as a secondary system for whatever feature they have. Do not rely on anything related to Facebook as your primary method to do something like store photos, IM, E-mail, etc. The files were deleted to send a message, that you have to use their implementation of a feature if you want to use it at all.
Probably the worst example of Facebook's policy abuses is the censorship. Try making a status update linking to a site critical of Facebook's policies, or about blocking ads on Facebook, link to Firefox and Ad Block Plus. See how long it takes for your status to disappear. Or if it doesn't, ask your friends if they can see it, you might find that it has been made invisible to everyone but you.
You underestimate me. I'm a social democrat, I accept that capitalism and profit-seeking will have a part to play in any economy we could realistically imagine for the time being. The goal is to reduce exploitation and top-down abuse; and I see a lot of that in our current copyright system.
I was confused by the wording in the article and I understood it to mean that Transdroid was a program to download torrents on your phone. This makes more sense, and obviously wouldn't bring up the issues of bandwidth that I mentioned.
I see now. I understood "torrent download manager" to mean a program that manages your torrent downloads on the phone. Honest mistake.
You don't know the economic situation of everyone. There are plenty of people for whom physical media IS prohibitively expensive, even legal downloadable versions are often not significantly cheaper. When one region of the world is sold a downloadable copy for X amount and the US is sold the same downloadable copy for 10*X, that's exploitation. Downloading a free copy is no worse than downloading a cheaper foreign version in the eyes of the content-cartels who have tried to convince us that EULAs and terms of use constitute law or are legally valid forms of contract. They shouldn't expect us to play nice when they don't.
One thing is certain, no matter what downloading a torrent of a commercial work is, it is NOT theft. Use of the term theft or piracy is an Orwellian manipulation and you are playing right into their hands every time you repeat it when you actually mean copyright infringement.
More likely than the copyright angle (or maybe in addition to it) is the explanation that they got rid of it after receiving pressure from the wireless service providers. Verizon and AT&T hate when people use bandwidth they actually pay for, and someone running torrents on their phone will probably end up using it in 3G mode at least some of the time. They want you paying as much as possible, and then they do everything they can to dissuade you from actually making use of what you buy. I see this as probably another manifestation of their entitlement mentality. I wish it were the most egregious and aggravating, but the sad fact is this is just one in a long line of abuses.
I agree, but you then have to accept that there is an entire separate conversation society should be having; is copyright in its current form an ethical social contract? We're seeing three or four different bodies of laws rolled into one nebulous and overreaching concept called "intellectual property" which is in reality a power-play by big business to handcuff culture and make sure nothing ever enters public domain again.
The current copyright system is broken, it's ethically bankrupt, so we no longer have an obligation to hold up our end of the social contract.
We have the same problem in the US, except both of our major parties are unable to deal with the issue for different reasons. No matter who we choose (the two party system is a statistical certainty given our constitution) we will end up with a government that won't solve this problem. It'll keep getting worse for us until something breaks. I hope it's our constitution (certain provisions regarding apportionment and representation) and not our entire economy and way of life.
The act of censorship is always more obscene than the material being censored. My personal opinion.
Taxation is NOT robbery. Only in the warped mind of a libertarian is taxation akin to theft. Most people can recognize that taxes allow for the foundation of a modern civilized society, and that the mandatory nature is necessary because people are short-sighted and greedy, unable to see the benefits that The State, even when run inefficiently, provides for them. Market solutions work in some areas, but not all. We can either do without those things, accept that they'll only be provided for people who can pay, or tax everyone and use a collective solution to the problem called government and taxation. The two systems compliment each other, and either will fail if a society chooses to rely on only one to meet all its needs.
No, I just listen to Twit :)
They still haven't fixed a glaring bug in how tabs work in the OS X version. Tabs aren't drawn correctly in the title bar in OS X, as Chrome does, but are on their own bar right below it. This results in wasted vertical space and just looks ugly.
You still haven't actually shown anything.
And I didn't say I don't see any arguments for borders, read it again until it makes sense. I said why is capital allowed to cross borders freely but labor cannot? That's a more detailed question, and you just ignored it and attack the strawman you erected yourself just now. Nice try though. Likewise you are incapable of pointing to a time in history when drug prohibition has been more successful than other forms of controlling the negative effects of drugs. There is plenty of evidence on my side showing how prohibition doesn't work, you seem to be ignorant of that. I'm unaware of any evidence FOR it not out of ignorance, but out of lack of evidence. It doesn't work, and you're supporting it or feeling like it is morally right doesn't make it so. You also are just blatantly making things up when you say I don't like the idea of military being used to defend the country. I find the attitude of, "You better like this country and be patriotic or git out!" to be incredibly repulsive and not conducive to fixing problems. It just conditions people to accept mistreatment and exploitation and to attack anyone who dares point out that things could be done differently and better.
Yes, I am unhappy with the way the world and my country is right now. But that doesn't mean I want to be some sort of dictator. It doesn't mean I am going to leave (or could) I just want to be part of a society that is more inclusive and fair, for the betterment of everyone. That's not the same as pushing my views, no matter how much you disagree with me, it doesn't make it so. I'm no more pushing my own views on others than you are.
Because universal heatlhcare or not, he will be treated. Right now, he gets sick and goes to the ER which you pay for indirectly. That's currently how we handle things. We could have been giving him preventative care which usually ends up being cheaper in almost all cases. And you can solve the smoking problem by increasing the taxes on cigarettes, and making the tax money be only or mostly used for funding the treatment of smokers. Have them pay for their own health care that their habit causes (and probably a little extra, subsidizing others who don't smoke).
I guess we could even save more money by kicking him to the curb when he shows up for smoking related illnesses and he was too poor to afford to pay taxes or buy insurance, but I don't want to live in a country that does that. Do you? I know there are a lot of people who actually would say yes to that, which is why there is an ethical divide about this topic that makes debate impossible beyond a certain point. It's not possible to have a real discussion about healthcare with someone who thinks it's acceptable to let people die who can't afford care.
I care about Bitcoin, I like seeing some news about it. I find it interesting.
Then I have some really bad news for you.
You're ALREADY paying for all those people you are so don't like. Yes, it's true, you pay in form of taxes which cover ER visits that never get paid by poor people (who are often also unhealthy, go figure); you pay in the form of higher insurance premiums so that health care can be profitable (and because the pool of people is much smaller); you pay in the form of your business having less healthy employees; you pay in the form of a more dangerous society, as more people get pushed into crime because they cannot afford to care for themselves even working full time.
The jokes is really on you, because if you'd give up your ideological hatred for those people and for the idea that some social problems can be best tackled collectively through strategic actions by government, you'd end up paying less in taxes to cover Universal Healthcare than you currently pay for private insurance and all the unseen costs of having the terrible system we have today in the US.
I understand your frustration, but you're advocating a position that actually ends up being counter productive to your stated goals.
He wasn't a "friend" he was just an op on the network their channel also happened to be on. They didn't abandon anyone, you're reading waaaay too much into this.