This should be especially important when the military is fighting an immoral, unnecessary and imperialistic war.
Right! Especially when most of the casualties, day-in and day-out, are the result of other medeival-minded religious zealots people from neighboring countries blowing up civilians with car bombs paid for by Syrians and Iranians. Maybe we'll finally get that imperialism right though. We keep letting whole countries like France, Japan, Germany, Kuwait and more slip through our clumsy imperialist fingers.
Identifying them is not the same as defending them.
Most of the subsidies don't even lower the cost of production: they are paid to _prevent_ production!
The rationale is to prevent the need for farmers to, in a bad year, permanently sell off part of their capacity to produce. But the reason I don't like that sort of maneuvering is that it's usually mis-applied and ceases to be strategically wise... and just turns into welfare. There are some special considerations with farming, howerver. The CRP program, for example. There is only so much land, period. To the extent that we all want some healthy bands of trees, flourishing wildlife, and the esthetic intangibles of something other than completely utilized ditch-to-ditch farming for hundreds of miles at a time, the feds have a program that allowed farmers to set aside X percentage of their property and let it return to native (for example, prairie) conditions. They don't get paid for this, but it allows them some tax considerations if they commit to letting that land shelter species that are under pressure, or let it help a disturbed watershed regain some vegitation, etc. The reduction in what a farmer in South Dakota pays on some of his taxes while putting land aside under CRP is going to go right into your "subsidies" column... but do you think the same way when a crowded suburb in Massachussetts pays to develop a local park? Yes, CRP is paying farmers not to farm. But it buys a commitment to growing back some precious strips of semi-wilderness for the long haul. Those are issues that simply don't come up in most blue states, or not with the same regularity. Not trying to split hairs, here, but trying to point out that this stuff is a little more nuanced than the talking points would have you believe. Now, should ADM get paid with your tax dollars to fiddle with their processing yields? No.
Exurbs of the city don't really count, since they are so city-focused
What's an exurb, to you? I think that people who live 2-4 hours from Baltimore (say, in western MD, or across the bay and south another hundred miles) can rightly feel that they're not sub- or ex-urbs of that blighted urban mess. I live in a DC-area suburb. The "city," for us, is DC, not Baltimore. Residents of Annapolis feel the same way. But over half of my tax dollars (state-wise) are spent on Baltimore social programs, or are as high as they are because of tax breaks given to people living in that area. That's the sort of thing I'm referring to.
You seem to be the one filled with all these hateful descriptions. I wonder why that is?
Um, mostly because of how often I hear them bandied about right here. I (critically, and rhetorically) trot them out in a slashdot thread because the audience/commenters here are so quick to remind us of their condescending posture towards everyone that hasn't memorized the IP address that their Starbucks hotspot's WiFi DHCP handed them this morning. Most of the "OMG republicats are teh nazis!" crowd follow up those shrewd observations with reminders about how the only reason that their candidates didn't get elected was because of the addled-brained actions of witless red-state rubes, blah blah blah. You can't be as engaged in this thread as you are without clearly following a lot of the chatter here, so I know you know what I'm referring to. This is not to say that you hold such a position... I meant my point pretty literally: that I'm amazed how often such an attitude is exhibited.
If you put quotes around something, is it then magically no longer locally profitable?
I'm using "spent" in quotes to point out that the people who are employed by a large rurally located Air Force base (as an example) are providing a service that nation has decided to buy (rather than simply sending that cash to the rural town and hoping they all enjoy their leisure time). The benefits of havin
Keeping the price of food artificially high with government money is not exactly a winner from someone that claims that the government is too big and spends too much
First, you're misunderstanding me. I do not like or want subsidies (to farmers or to Indian reservations, or to New Jersey casino operators, or to long-dead Pittsburgh-area steel towns). To the extent that subsidies impact food prices though, they lower the price to consumers (raising them back up, again, indirectly through their taxes, of course - but only well-off people pay any federal taxes of consequence, so that seems to be fine with most income-redistribution fans). The difference between subsidizing a farmer, though, and subsidizing, say, a family living in town in Pennsylvania that will never again have a working steel mill... is that we (as a country) want to be absolutely sure that we have the farmer in place and functioning and able to respond to shifting food production requirements. The people living where what used to be work is now long gone, and who are not going to be asked, in their older line of work, to jump back up and do that same thing for a living in six months... well, paying them to stay in that condition is bad for everyone, especially them. But a farmer who has 10,000 acres and only has a market at the moment for what he can grow (because of drought, say) on half of it, is going to be vital to his region's, and to the nation's economy and well being 6 months later, with all of his land in use. Seeing him go bankrupt isn't very helpful.
That being said, he (the farmer) would be in better shape if his competition (for beef, for example) coming in from South America wasn't able to keep prices low by using their land in horrific, ruinous ways. It's not a level playing field that standard market economics (globally speaking) can sort out and still leave us with a stable agro-sector. I find it frustrating.
Yes, there are _less_ people in most red states, and they still get more total federal spending (probably in part because Senators are the ultimate porkmasters, and every state gets two of em, regardless of population).
I think you're thinking more in per-capita terms, not totals. Surely you don't think that federal spending in New York is, in aggregate, lower than in places like Montana or North Dakota? I takes a lot more dollars to put big highways across giant states like Wyoming than it does in, say, Connecticut... and since CT has over six times the population of WY, but WY is 175 times the size of CT, some comparisons aren't as obvious as you might think. How are you measuring federal spending, specifically? Are you comparing what gets spent on things like Air Force bases? Most dense coastal "blue state" urban populations wouldn't put up with having the huge military facilities that you see across the midwest - but that's many billions of dollars that get "spent" in those areas. Or, are you thinking strictly in terms of medicare and wellfare spending? Those are all per-capita things that depend on population. If you're really just complaining about farm subsidies, that's a pretty specialized conversation.
Incidentally, I live in Maryland. The largest population center is Baltimore. They also collect the least taxes, and all of the counties in Maryland run at a tax deficit, with money being shipped out of those parts of the state to subsidize the Baltimore population's huge burden. They have high unemployment, huge per-student educational costs, and lots of state-run projects to try to breath some life into the city's infrastructure. From a local political demographics point of view, you should note that the "red" counties in rural MD are the ones subsidizing the "blue" urban areas (in terms of simple cash flow, a la your red/blue state comment). I suspect you'll find that many states have similar internal per-capita issues, but are counted as "blue" states because of the large urban populations. The notion that all rural residents are ju
The only laws I've seen Dems support have no effect at all on hunting or hunting weapons or even home protection weapons (i.e. barring guns from public schools, trying to rduce unliscenced bulk gun sales, etc.) that are so disant from the scare rhetoric of the NRA that's hard to imagine.
I suppose that when I think of Democrats and gun control, I think of things like the "only fingerprint/bracelet-sensing 'smart gun' sales allowed" legislation that the Dem-controlled state legislature and Dem governor pushed through in my state. An unworkable, technically nonsensical bit of feel-goodism with only one purpose and outcome: the effective elimination of the sale of "standard" items to residents in the state. Happily, the more recently elected Republican governor has acted to undo that which executive orders allow him to undo.
Or, I think of John Kerry's vocal backing of a law that would ban the sale of a certain types of (among other things) repeating shotguns. Of course, during the fall campaign, he was careful to do a photo op shooting clay pigeons (no ear or eye protection!) with some midwest hunters, and used a shotgun that would have been banned by the legislation he was endorsing. Or, you could think through his refusal to protect businesses from nuisance lawsuits brought by people who were the victims of criminals mis-using perfectly legal, functional products. The only, only purpose of such suits is to put manufacturers out of business. Hell, he's even voted to ban most flavors of center-fire ammunition - an act that would indeed leave hunters without usable hunting rifles. There's more, but you get the idea... and he's the guy that the Dems put forward as the primary face and voice of their party in a presidential election. Is that closer to the reality you're thinking of?
far more federal tax money come FROM blue states and go INTO red states
Probably most due to the overwhelmingly out of balance populations in the two. That, and the fact that because of entanglements with overseas transactions, a lot of subsidies get aimed at farming - which, of all the pork I hate, is the least porky. Our food supply, and the stability of that piece of the economy in our day-to-day lives and subsistence, is strategically vital. And, when I say "red-staters," I'm talking about the person politics of the people I know living in those states. Most of them are the most self-sufficient, accountable, and tax/spending adverse people I know.
I'm not a partisan. I pick and choose for whom I vote, usually on more than one variable. Some Republicans are deficit hawks, and some are not. Some Democrats are Income-Redistribution-Loons, some are not.
The current administration is out-spending any othe post WWII one by an enormous margin
How about during WWII? You know, when the entire purpose of the defense department, and the very nature of the economy and driving technologies, was being completely altered by the nature of the world? FDR wasn't exactly pinching pennies. And if Carter had spent some money in stimulative ways (and on the right things), we'd probably be sitting, right now, in a much better position.
I fail to understand how people can continue to support the Republican party on fiscal grounds
Why preach at me? I didn't say that I do. I said that some of the people I vote for are Republicans. Can you really tell me that the ocean of Democrats that voted for Reagan (twice) were suddenly Republican partisans? Despite all of the whining from the leftier part of the Democratic party a few years ago, that they still couldn't muster the votes they just knew they'd have for Kerry. That wasn't because a whole bunch suddenly supported "the Republican Party," but because (perhaps?) they just couldn't stomach Kerry's fantasic lack of an articulated purpose of any kind? Happily, people don't only vote on party lines.
Republicans hands off on personal lives?!? That is complete insanity.
Hands off on markets and businesses?!? The Republicans are number one on corporate welfare.
Let's see. Here in my state, the Democrats are the absolute worst when it comes to giving away state land to corporate developers so that they can get the long-term tax revenue from the businesses and residents that will live/work in the developed areas. They raise other people's property taxes to pay for the roads and facilities into the newly developed areas, and give huge tax incentives to lure in new developers. In other words, they reach into my pocket to pay for the bait they're using to give a big company an almost zero-cost shot at developing what dwindling land we have left in the area and making a bundle off of selling million dollar homes and pricey office parks. Not Republicans, Democrats. Unanimously, and without fail. And of course, those same developers fund the re-election campaigns for those same council and legislature perennials. The Republican minority screams from the rooftops to make the businesses fund their own developments and the cost to the rest of us, but they're voices in the wilderness.
As for who gets into whose personal lives: again, in my state, we have increasingly busy-bodied local and state government layers that are tackling things like whether you can smoke in (or even outside) your own house (I don't smoke and wouldn't but it still grates). The prevailing theory behind nearly every new bit of legislation impacting my life is: "nothing is your fault, everything is someone else's responsibility." Which would be easy to tolerate if I was a lazy dumbass, but instead I'm on the side of the equation that pays more into that engine than comes back out. Substantially so, even taking into account the services I expect my state and local governments to provide. But rather than hiring more law enforcement to deal with the decaying quality of life in the DC suburbs (my town has a looming gang crime problem - MS13 are not nice guys), they're pitching for some new taxes (on local service businesses!) to pay for free services to illegal immigrants who provide under-the-table (and non-taxed) services that shortcut the local taxpaying businesses. Incredible.
The governor in our state (a Republican, which is unusual) has proposed all sorts of measures to keep businesses from fleeing to cheaper areas in neighboring states, the better to retain the economic activity that they generate. His political opponents look at these large employers as cash cows, and see only tax hikes as the means by which to pay for more discretionary spending. They crafted a law last month designed to levy a colossal per-employee tax ("fee," they're calling it) against only one (and the second largest) employer in the state. If I were looking at the political climate in the surrounding states, trying to decide where to settle down and employ people in my growing business, the needle-like intrusiveness and graspiness of those lawmakers would accomplish exactly the opposite of bringing more truly productive jobs and services to the state. Astounding, and only offset by the favors they do for the real estate development companies.
You can also look at how the Democrat-run state board of education has handled things like high school graduation requirements. Students must, like convicted criminals, satisfy significant 'community service' hours to show that they are academically intact. In a fantastic display of irony, our local school has decided that they will help their students "earn" their diplomas by assigning them to clean up the trash left around the areas (two infamous local parking lots) used by illegal immigrants waiting for pick-up landscaping and construction work. I love how it all comes together.
So, you disagree with their theocratic issues, but vote for them nonetheless because once upon a time they actually believed in other things which you agree with even though it's been decades since th
That people continue to trot out this incredible statement that the Republicans are less likely to run up a huge deficit and Democrats are less likely to balance the budget, when for the past twenty years exactly the opposite has been true, is a measure of how alien and anomalous science is in human experience.
Please don't confuse my embrace of the position that government should tax and spend less with confusion over what actually happens in Congress. Depending on which way the pendulum is swinging or the wind is blowing, you may be right that the party that's talking the loudest, this week, about balancing the budget are the Democrats. It serves them, politically, to do so. But their ongoing proposition isn't to spend less, it's to tax more. That's not the way to grow the economy. The budget deficit is an artifact of overall economic growth vs. the burdens placed upon (or grabbed by) the government. Taking my own state as an example, we were facing a big budget problem, including a large defecit. Both parties (the very democrat legislature, and the - for us - unusually republican executive branch) talked a lot about how they'd solve the problem... but the boost in the overall level of local economic activity solved it regardless, before too many changes could have been made or taken effect either way. But jacking up taxes, especially on local employers, is a guaranteed way to chase that economic activity into the next state. Or out of the country.
I have to vote for somebody. There are (I think) far, far more important issues than just the degree to which one party or the next spends pork dollars in congress. Paying interest on it sucks, but not even having the economic activity sucks even more. The happy budget position that Clinton got to enjoy had more to do with post-tax-cut inertia from years before than it did anything else. The recession that got under way before he left office, and which had a role in kicking off the current defecit as much as many other factors, was partly cyclical, and partly owing to policies that took shape during those 8 years. It's already correcting itself, and more people - substantially more - are working now than they were then. I'm not seeing all of this through rose-colored glasses, but my point is that it's not as simple "this year, the Republicans are spending more, so it's their fault." It all hinges on the larger economy, and that's as impacted by weather, energy costs, baby boomer aging demographics, and jillion other factors as anything else. But taxing the activities (and invesments/investors) that keep things moving/growing doesn't help, and the urge to do so (or not) is a pretty clear philosophical distinction between the two political camps.
It's not just commercial interests with money...
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NASA Science Under Attack
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You need lots of money to reach an office and you can get that money (and office) if you crawl in bed with corporations
It's worth mentioning that "corporations" can't donate more than a little cash to a particular candidate's campaign, and can't instruct their employees to each pony up, either. But you're also glossing over the enormous impact of the money thrown around by individuals (like George Soros - willing to spend millions to impact elections his way) and non-profits (like labor unions, trial lawyer associations, trade groups, environmental organizations... the moveon.org types, etc). You sound like you'd prefer maybe that a retired person to have a stronger voice in the election, but when they join a group that donates just as much money as a corporation does, what then? Is that better? Worse?
I certainly don't want my tax dollars to support every candidate that fills in the right forms. I'd rather put my money behind campaigns that actually represent what I think. As for your point about the more parlimentary approach to things - I'm not sure that the squabbling that takes place (look at the last election in Germany) allows the country to actually do anything when it really has to. There's no pleasing everybody, but certain actions (or choices not to act) are all the more frustrating when the party actually making the decision only really got 12% of the vote.
This is one of the reasons why USA is so hated around the world, their simplistic worldview does not coincide with the rest of the world's worldview.
You're right. We should be more like Denmark. See? They're only hated around the world because they allow freedom of the press. Hell, those embassies needed to be rebuilt anyway.
I understand your point. The main, functioning aspects of the two big parties certainly would appear to be more similar than disimilar from, say (picking an obvious example), a German point of view.
But I'm not talking about whether the Democrats (as a functioning party) are truly "left" in the outright-practicing-socialists way, or whether the Republicans are "right" in the "OMG Bush is teh Nazis!" way. I'm referring to which world views push and nudge policy decisions this-a-way or that-a-way, more or less, over the longer time frame. The Big Boat of US Culture/Politics is going more or less right down the middle, listing a little too much to the side where the religious crazies have their quarters. And, to extend the metaphor, all of on the boat have to talk a little louder to be heard because of the endless shrieking from people that happen to have nice, shiny, entertainment/celebrity-empowered microphones and audiences with softer intellects. I mean really... policy isn't being set by Barbara Streisand or Oprah, but if you didn't know better you might think so. Likewise, you might (if you listen to the bloggers) think that any minute the Spanish Inquisition would be setting up shop.
So, the noisy left/right-wingers get a lot of the attention, and the rest of us carry on because we're busy, and hold our noses to vote for the people that we think will steer the boat a couple of degrees one way or the other more to our liking. I tend to vote very differently (party-wise) at the national and local levels. All depends on what's on the agenda. Of course, living in Maryland, any vote for a more conservative/libertarian-ish candidate or cause is pretty much a waste! But it reminds the Never-Saw-A-New-Tax-I-Didn't-Like local legislatures that we don't all just love them to pieces.
Basically, I refer to the "right" and "left" as influences upon the useful middle. I do understand that we're dealing with actual, practical politics that are neither as left as full-on socialists in, say, Scandinavia, or full-on right-wing parties in places like Austria.
Sadly, I think this puts you in the minority as a Republican, at least a minority among Republicans that control things
It is sad. I'm not registered as a Republican, but often vote that direction. Not because of (really, more despite) the positions inspired by relgiosity (which I abhor), but because of at least a stronger inclination towards a more hands-off functioning of the markets, businesses, and personal lives. Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts. I suppose I'm a little more red-statey about illegal immigration, law-and-order type stuff (they say it only takes a being mugged or having your house robbed a couple of times to make you a Republican on some issues - and there's a grain of truth to that, if you ask around).
I also like to grab a shotgun and tromp around in farm fields with my bird dogs. Hell, sometimes I like to use an auto-loading shotgun that actually lets me be sure to knock down that pair of pheasants. But despite the "we don't think hunters should be penalized" rhetoric, much of the left that's "in control" (as you put it) of their agenda in that area would see even hunting weapons confiscated. So, I vote for people that push that argument back the other direction. I'm no Republican partisan, but I find much of the shrill carping and contradictory twittering from the Democrats to be non-productive to the point of losing my vote on many issues/candidates.
But more to your point: I think there are many, many more people like me out there than you'd guess. Leaning Republican on many fiscal/justice/defense type issues, and just rolling our eyes on the noisy social issues. Of course, my opinions of the social stuff are not driven by religion, but frequently overlap with some of those that are (i.e., I think there are objectively right and wrong things that humans can do or permit/correct). I find many Republicans' morality to be flawed (especially on the issues of marriage, creationism, and whatnot), but I find many Democrats' moral relativism to be dangerously self-destructive, too. In other words, I'm as likely to call an evil bastard an evil bastard as a religious-minded Republican is, but for different reasons. But I'm never going to get caught up in the "we all have our own truth" and "who are we to judge?" drivel that oozes up from the left - especially when life and limb are at stake.
Wow, a Monday morning rant. Sorry about that! I was cut off in traffic and given the finger by a guy with a "Hate Is Not The Answer" bumper sticker, so it sort of set the tone. On the other hand, I parked next to a guy with a "Stop Global Whining" sticker, so there's hope.
All network admins know that the damage caused by attackers is insignificant compared to the damage caused by upper management and government meddling.
All admins do not necessarily agree with this. Most of messes I have to clean up are from malware, fraud, "traditional" crime (and attempts at such) that have taken on a 'net communications component, and the usual tsunami of noise and bot blather that lands on every public-facing port I have open.
Tiered internet? That's a misnomer, I think. Big internet users pay for the bandwidth they (or their visitors) use. More traffic means higher costs. I don't care if some Comcast user has already paid for "his" bandwidth... serving up a streaming video to him isn't only using his bandwidth. I don't know where people get that idea. But regardless, if SBC or Verizon or any other carrier wants to screw with per-site or per-visitor metering or biasing, they're welcome to. Other ISPs will just set a price that's easier to predict and work with, and win the business away from the people trying to make it more complicated. But how much time do I have to give "upper management" or "government meddling" vs. attempted attacks, fraud killing, malware, etc? It's not even close. The bad guys are much more of an issue.
Oh, boo hoo. Just because the money I earn comes from charging for my time doesn't mean everything I do carries a cash price. I create, host, and maintain web apps for a wide range of non-profits and small operations completely pro bono. Even at India prices, what I do would be worth many thousands of dollars a year for those people, and the time I spend doing it could produce many times more than that if I were to apply those hours to my traditional customers. But I have no expectation of collecting fees from the people I take of for free, whereas when I set out to produce and distribute a product with a price tag, I have every reason to expect that someone else (with no agreement in place) isn't going to take what I've spent time producing, pirate copies, and then sell it to other people. That arrangement ultimately screws the people who "paid" the pirate for my work, because those users are now deprived of a meaningful support arrangement with the author, too. Not to mention the erosion of my ability to create more such work if I have to stop doing so because I can't afford to spend 1000 hours working on things like that if I can no longer afford the servers to run it on, or the coffee I need to stay awake for three weeks adding new features.
Despite your complaints about Medicare and acceptance of the it-just-goes-the-way-it-goes life with medical billing, you do have some expectation that your week's work is, on balance, going to produce your week's income. If someone else ran over to your healthcare customers and offered them a swell price them for everything you did that week, and actually collected most of the cash those customers would be willing to put out for what they received (instead of you), I don't think you'd be too pleased, either.
I too have projects that I'm too busy to do, but I'm not experienced enough to draft a legal document which can protect my ideas from developers.
Wow, get ready for a truckload of slashdot-powered, super-duper-mixed-premises, philosophically tangled up, utterly nonsensical batch of responses to that. Can't wait to see the smoke coming out of it!
You make a good point, of course. Which is why you'll get flamed.
Why not use <strong> instead? <strong> and <em> are structural tags that perform similarly to the <b> and <i> style tags.
Laziness (the efficient kind), combined with ejoying the elegence of shorter strings, fewer keystrokes, and easier-to-human-parse code. I know, storage and bandwidth mean, at this point, that a large document peppered with hundreds (or thousands) of more characters in tags that basicially do the same thing as a "b" isn't as painful as it used to be, but I'm a throwback. I like small source code. Yes, I'll have to give in eventually.
"I've done all this work and you owe me." Maybe he still thinks that way
Do you feel that way after you do work? I know I do. Until that check clears, somebody definitely owes me for making computers do things for them that they themselves couldn't or didn't do. Like Bill, I'd be especially tweeked if someone else was cashing in on it (my work) instead.
I'm glad for you that you can do the work you want with your waking hours, and not worry about exchanging that time for the value (cash) with which you put a roof over your head or eat, but that's not how it is for most people. Not most artists, writers, architects, engineers, or software developers. Congratulations on whatever you did do to become financially independent from having to exchange work for money. Um, unless you just inherited it, in which case, congratulations for just being lucky.
But really, there is no need to choose. I use the deprecated b tag all the time, because it is SIMPLE, love to use tables, because they WORK for displaying on various screen sizes, plus (gasp) deploy the font tag from time to time for quick prototypes
I agree. They can take my <B> tag when they pry it from my cold, dead text editor.
Really... a few nested tables work just FINE. And, if you happen to build e-commerce sites catering to a large cross-section of humanity, you'll find yourself serving pages up to people with a four-versions-ago copy of the AOL client, or Netscape 4.1, etc. They're still out there. Nice as some fancy-pants AJAX-ish stuff is for portally things or specific audiences, even some fundamental CSS things are beyond a lot of visitors' platforms, depending on your demographics.
I've been planning to build an advertisement free network for public access and am not clear on how Google's concept improves the experience for anyone but them.
But you are clear on how they managed to rack up the billions and billions of dollars they have to work on this sort of project, right? By not running a charity or a non-profit. You've been planning, they've been doing (because they can afford to, even if it's a miserable failure). And their work will reach hundreds of millions of people (like everything else they do).
What is the benefit of such a network?
Why do you care (unless you're a shareholder)? They have an interest in doing it, and that's all that matters. If it's a poor gamble, then it's a poor gamble. They're not dumb, and clearly see something in this (like their own backbone? like avoiding the tiered-net issues we've been talking about recently?) and can act, so they have. If they were worried that the billions of investors' dollars that they're playing with might piss off investors, they'd probably not do it.
Their arrogance and egos are growing even faster than their revenues.
Out of curiosity, how is this "arrogant?" If you had the talented staff, plenty of resources (financial, social, temporal, etc) and knew you had an approach to serving up vast amount of networked stuff while (I'm guessing here) truly dealing with some security issues, spam/noise problems, etc., and knew that you'd have a potential audience in the tens or hundreds of millions... wouldn't you pursue it? "Ego," in this sense, translates to "awareness of one's self and one's capabilities." They've got a definite self, and the horsepower to try thing like this. You don't have to do squat, or care, and they know it. That's not arrogance, that's them having the ability to try some things. Relax.
Note in the article that "Congressmen" are condemning Microsoft and Google. A fair number of them also condemn the so-called spying operations. They are mutually exclusive.
It would help a little to be more clear about this.
China wants to actually prevent broad, freedom-related pieces/flavors of information from being seen, uttered, or referred to in either private or public communications.
Tracking down phone calls to/from known Al Queda members/financiers/taffickers overseas, the other end of which calls terminate in the US in no way causes communications (on Google or otherwise) to be disrupted. Rather, it illuminates calling patterns that help the spooks and domestic law enforcement/intel types actually know who to go after, including actual taps/monitoring of the type FISA is all about (though FISA didn't really contemplate dozens of one-time use calls made from a bag of 50 disposable cell phones bought at conveinence stores from every exit on some highway... no phone use repeated, no ability to level a tapping warrant on any of those phones... but the calls all going to/from consistent numbers in Syria, or Jordan, etc).
Trying to figure out which forms of communication add up to regular enough pattern to track down someone to actually FISA-tap is completely unrelated to filtering words like "freedom" out of your Google searches. Performing one and condemning the other are not mutually exclusive any more than your typical neighborhood watch program is mutually exclusive with condemning Chinese human rights violations. Trying to tie the two together, rhetorically, is nonsense.
I think the real goal would be to dump the animal's viscera and use the large rib cage and fat/hide as a sort of shelter or smelly windbreak. The damp gutsy stuff in an opened-up belly would very quickly be a big old heatsink in the sort of wind and temps portrayed in the movie.
If you really a fun portrayal of this sort of thing, watch the evade-the-British-captors scene in the 1995 version of Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson. That's a great movie, even without light sabers. Ye Old Ferrous Cutlery does just fine for those Baroque combatants. Tim Roth does a particularly slimy job as the primary villain. Highly recommended.
It seems that these companies are using our geek tendencies (must...play...new...game!) against us.
To the extent that a DRM mechanism destabilizes your machine, or makes you vulnerable to some other malware, it might be better to say "these companies are simply doing a bad job of executing that part of the product I just decided to buy." They're not using it "against" you, they're trying to preserve the cashflow that allows them to keep making games in the first place. If you like a title enough to buy it, surely you'd want the people who make the game to stay in business.
Is this the beginning of the end of our freedom on the net?
Since we've just made the distinction between clumsy DRM and otherwise, let's talk about freedom. How does actually paying the people who created the game what they've asked you to pay (if you want their stuff) infringe on your freedom? If you don't like the game, or don't like the security measures a company has taken in order to protect you and other people from the higher prices that piracy causes, you have total freedom to vote with your wallet and go play something else.
If you think it's a drag that the creative people who labor for years to make a game are having to resort to DRM in order to help them recoup the huge pile of cash they just spent in development... then eliminate the need for the DRM by focusing your energy on the people who think that "freedom on the net" means "freedom from having to look the cool game dev guys in the eye and pay them the equivalent of a couple of pizzas for all of their hard work."
In-character consistency in voice chat?
on
Masks in the Woods
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· Score: 3, Funny
Certainly the number of people playing as Trolls should make for lots of completely believable communication.
White: Not having a copy of obviously stolen and very sensitive proprietary information belonging to someone else, whether you jokingly offer it up for sale or not.
While some external influence (viral) might worsen matters by wretchedly increasing fat uptake at the cellular level in some people, I don't think it's any mystery why most of us reading this right now have a couple of pounds we'd like to get rid of.
Sure, wash your hands and reduce your random virus exposure. But get up and move around a little without the bag of chips. That's what I say. Also, will someone come and help me out of this chair?
Slashdot Mirror
This should be especially important when the military is fighting an immoral, unnecessary and imperialistic war.
Right! Especially when most of the casualties, day-in and day-out, are the result of other medeival-minded religious zealots people from neighboring countries blowing up civilians with car bombs paid for by Syrians and Iranians. Maybe we'll finally get that imperialism right though. We keep letting whole countries like France, Japan, Germany, Kuwait and more slip through our clumsy imperialist fingers.
You sure spend a lot of time defending them!
Identifying them is not the same as defending them.
Most of the subsidies don't even lower the cost of production: they are paid to _prevent_ production!
The rationale is to prevent the need for farmers to, in a bad year, permanently sell off part of their capacity to produce. But the reason I don't like that sort of maneuvering is that it's usually mis-applied and ceases to be strategically wise... and just turns into welfare. There are some special considerations with farming, howerver. The CRP program, for example. There is only so much land, period. To the extent that we all want some healthy bands of trees, flourishing wildlife, and the esthetic intangibles of something other than completely utilized ditch-to-ditch farming for hundreds of miles at a time, the feds have a program that allowed farmers to set aside X percentage of their property and let it return to native (for example, prairie) conditions. They don't get paid for this, but it allows them some tax considerations if they commit to letting that land shelter species that are under pressure, or let it help a disturbed watershed regain some vegitation, etc. The reduction in what a farmer in South Dakota pays on some of his taxes while putting land aside under CRP is going to go right into your "subsidies" column... but do you think the same way when a crowded suburb in Massachussetts pays to develop a local park? Yes, CRP is paying farmers not to farm. But it buys a commitment to growing back some precious strips of semi-wilderness for the long haul. Those are issues that simply don't come up in most blue states, or not with the same regularity. Not trying to split hairs, here, but trying to point out that this stuff is a little more nuanced than the talking points would have you believe. Now, should ADM get paid with your tax dollars to fiddle with their processing yields? No.
Exurbs of the city don't really count, since they are so city-focused
What's an exurb, to you? I think that people who live 2-4 hours from Baltimore (say, in western MD, or across the bay and south another hundred miles) can rightly feel that they're not sub- or ex-urbs of that blighted urban mess. I live in a DC-area suburb. The "city," for us, is DC, not Baltimore. Residents of Annapolis feel the same way. But over half of my tax dollars (state-wise) are spent on Baltimore social programs, or are as high as they are because of tax breaks given to people living in that area. That's the sort of thing I'm referring to.
You seem to be the one filled with all these hateful descriptions. I wonder why that is?
Um, mostly because of how often I hear them bandied about right here. I (critically, and rhetorically) trot them out in a slashdot thread because the audience/commenters here are so quick to remind us of their condescending posture towards everyone that hasn't memorized the IP address that their Starbucks hotspot's WiFi DHCP handed them this morning. Most of the "OMG republicats are teh nazis!" crowd follow up those shrewd observations with reminders about how the only reason that their candidates didn't get elected was because of the addled-brained actions of witless red-state rubes, blah blah blah. You can't be as engaged in this thread as you are without clearly following a lot of the chatter here, so I know you know what I'm referring to. This is not to say that you hold such a position... I meant my point pretty literally: that I'm amazed how often such an attitude is exhibited.
If you put quotes around something, is it then magically no longer locally profitable?
I'm using "spent" in quotes to point out that the people who are employed by a large rurally located Air Force base (as an example) are providing a service that nation has decided to buy (rather than simply sending that cash to the rural town and hoping they all enjoy their leisure time). The benefits of havin
Keeping the price of food artificially high with government money is not exactly a winner from someone that claims that the government is too big and spends too much
First, you're misunderstanding me. I do not like or want subsidies (to farmers or to Indian reservations, or to New Jersey casino operators, or to long-dead Pittsburgh-area steel towns). To the extent that subsidies impact food prices though, they lower the price to consumers (raising them back up, again, indirectly through their taxes, of course - but only well-off people pay any federal taxes of consequence, so that seems to be fine with most income-redistribution fans). The difference between subsidizing a farmer, though, and subsidizing, say, a family living in town in Pennsylvania that will never again have a working steel mill... is that we (as a country) want to be absolutely sure that we have the farmer in place and functioning and able to respond to shifting food production requirements. The people living where what used to be work is now long gone, and who are not going to be asked, in their older line of work, to jump back up and do that same thing for a living in six months... well, paying them to stay in that condition is bad for everyone, especially them. But a farmer who has 10,000 acres and only has a market at the moment for what he can grow (because of drought, say) on half of it, is going to be vital to his region's, and to the nation's economy and well being 6 months later, with all of his land in use. Seeing him go bankrupt isn't very helpful.
That being said, he (the farmer) would be in better shape if his competition (for beef, for example) coming in from South America wasn't able to keep prices low by using their land in horrific, ruinous ways. It's not a level playing field that standard market economics (globally speaking) can sort out and still leave us with a stable agro-sector. I find it frustrating.
Yes, there are _less_ people in most red states, and they still get more total federal spending (probably in part because Senators are the ultimate porkmasters, and every state gets two of em, regardless of population).
I think you're thinking more in per-capita terms, not totals. Surely you don't think that federal spending in New York is, in aggregate, lower than in places like Montana or North Dakota? I takes a lot more dollars to put big highways across giant states like Wyoming than it does in, say, Connecticut... and since CT has over six times the population of WY, but WY is 175 times the size of CT, some comparisons aren't as obvious as you might think. How are you measuring federal spending, specifically? Are you comparing what gets spent on things like Air Force bases? Most dense coastal "blue state" urban populations wouldn't put up with having the huge military facilities that you see across the midwest - but that's many billions of dollars that get "spent" in those areas. Or, are you thinking strictly in terms of medicare and wellfare spending? Those are all per-capita things that depend on population. If you're really just complaining about farm subsidies, that's a pretty specialized conversation.
Incidentally, I live in Maryland. The largest population center is Baltimore. They also collect the least taxes, and all of the counties in Maryland run at a tax deficit, with money being shipped out of those parts of the state to subsidize the Baltimore population's huge burden. They have high unemployment, huge per-student educational costs, and lots of state-run projects to try to breath some life into the city's infrastructure. From a local political demographics point of view, you should note that the "red" counties in rural MD are the ones subsidizing the "blue" urban areas (in terms of simple cash flow, a la your red/blue state comment). I suspect you'll find that many states have similar internal per-capita issues, but are counted as "blue" states because of the large urban populations. The notion that all rural residents are ju
The only laws I've seen Dems support have no effect at all on hunting or hunting weapons or even home protection weapons (i.e. barring guns from public schools, trying to rduce unliscenced bulk gun sales, etc.) that are so disant from the scare rhetoric of the NRA that's hard to imagine.
I suppose that when I think of Democrats and gun control, I think of things like the "only fingerprint/bracelet-sensing 'smart gun' sales allowed" legislation that the Dem-controlled state legislature and Dem governor pushed through in my state. An unworkable, technically nonsensical bit of feel-goodism with only one purpose and outcome: the effective elimination of the sale of "standard" items to residents in the state. Happily, the more recently elected Republican governor has acted to undo that which executive orders allow him to undo.
Or, I think of John Kerry's vocal backing of a law that would ban the sale of a certain types of (among other things) repeating shotguns. Of course, during the fall campaign, he was careful to do a photo op shooting clay pigeons (no ear or eye protection!) with some midwest hunters, and used a shotgun that would have been banned by the legislation he was endorsing. Or, you could think through his refusal to protect businesses from nuisance lawsuits brought by people who were the victims of criminals mis-using perfectly legal, functional products. The only, only purpose of such suits is to put manufacturers out of business. Hell, he's even voted to ban most flavors of center-fire ammunition - an act that would indeed leave hunters without usable hunting rifles. There's more, but you get the idea... and he's the guy that the Dems put forward as the primary face and voice of their party in a presidential election. Is that closer to the reality you're thinking of?
far more federal tax money come FROM blue states and go INTO red states
Probably most due to the overwhelmingly out of balance populations in the two. That, and the fact that because of entanglements with overseas transactions, a lot of subsidies get aimed at farming - which, of all the pork I hate, is the least porky. Our food supply, and the stability of that piece of the economy in our day-to-day lives and subsistence, is strategically vital. And, when I say "red-staters," I'm talking about the person politics of the people I know living in those states. Most of them are the most self-sufficient, accountable, and tax/spending adverse people I know.
Are you insane?
No. Are you actually getting my point? No.
I'm not a partisan. I pick and choose for whom I vote, usually on more than one variable. Some Republicans are deficit hawks, and some are not. Some Democrats are Income-Redistribution-Loons, some are not.
The current administration is out-spending any othe post WWII one by an enormous margin
How about during WWII? You know, when the entire purpose of the defense department, and the very nature of the economy and driving technologies, was being completely altered by the nature of the world? FDR wasn't exactly pinching pennies. And if Carter had spent some money in stimulative ways (and on the right things), we'd probably be sitting, right now, in a much better position.
I fail to understand how people can continue to support the Republican party on fiscal grounds
Why preach at me? I didn't say that I do. I said that some of the people I vote for are Republicans. Can you really tell me that the ocean of Democrats that voted for Reagan (twice) were suddenly Republican partisans? Despite all of the whining from the leftier part of the Democratic party a few years ago, that they still couldn't muster the votes they just knew they'd have for Kerry. That wasn't because a whole bunch suddenly supported "the Republican Party," but because (perhaps?) they just couldn't stomach Kerry's fantasic lack of an articulated purpose of any kind? Happily, people don't only vote on party lines.
Republicans hands off on personal lives?!? That is complete insanity. Hands off on markets and businesses?!? The Republicans are number one on corporate welfare.
Let's see. Here in my state, the Democrats are the absolute worst when it comes to giving away state land to corporate developers so that they can get the long-term tax revenue from the businesses and residents that will live/work in the developed areas. They raise other people's property taxes to pay for the roads and facilities into the newly developed areas, and give huge tax incentives to lure in new developers. In other words, they reach into my pocket to pay for the bait they're using to give a big company an almost zero-cost shot at developing what dwindling land we have left in the area and making a bundle off of selling million dollar homes and pricey office parks. Not Republicans, Democrats. Unanimously, and without fail. And of course, those same developers fund the re-election campaigns for those same council and legislature perennials. The Republican minority screams from the rooftops to make the businesses fund their own developments and the cost to the rest of us, but they're voices in the wilderness.
As for who gets into whose personal lives: again, in my state, we have increasingly busy-bodied local and state government layers that are tackling things like whether you can smoke in (or even outside) your own house (I don't smoke and wouldn't but it still grates). The prevailing theory behind nearly every new bit of legislation impacting my life is: "nothing is your fault, everything is someone else's responsibility." Which would be easy to tolerate if I was a lazy dumbass, but instead I'm on the side of the equation that pays more into that engine than comes back out. Substantially so, even taking into account the services I expect my state and local governments to provide. But rather than hiring more law enforcement to deal with the decaying quality of life in the DC suburbs (my town has a looming gang crime problem - MS13 are not nice guys), they're pitching for some new taxes (on local service businesses!) to pay for free services to illegal immigrants who provide under-the-table (and non-taxed) services that shortcut the local taxpaying businesses. Incredible.
The governor in our state (a Republican, which is unusual) has proposed all sorts of measures to keep businesses from fleeing to cheaper areas in neighboring states, the better to retain the economic activity that they generate. His political opponents look at these large employers as cash cows, and see only tax hikes as the means by which to pay for more discretionary spending. They crafted a law last month designed to levy a colossal per-employee tax ("fee," they're calling it) against only one (and the second largest) employer in the state. If I were looking at the political climate in the surrounding states, trying to decide where to settle down and employ people in my growing business, the needle-like intrusiveness and graspiness of those lawmakers would accomplish exactly the opposite of bringing more truly productive jobs and services to the state. Astounding, and only offset by the favors they do for the real estate development companies.
You can also look at how the Democrat-run state board of education has handled things like high school graduation requirements. Students must, like convicted criminals, satisfy significant 'community service' hours to show that they are academically intact. In a fantastic display of irony, our local school has decided that they will help their students "earn" their diplomas by assigning them to clean up the trash left around the areas (two infamous local parking lots) used by illegal immigrants waiting for pick-up landscaping and construction work. I love how it all comes together.
So, you disagree with their theocratic issues, but vote for them nonetheless because once upon a time they actually believed in other things which you agree with even though it's been decades since th
That people continue to trot out this incredible statement that the Republicans are less likely to run up a huge deficit and Democrats are less likely to balance the budget, when for the past twenty years exactly the opposite has been true, is a measure of how alien and anomalous science is in human experience.
Please don't confuse my embrace of the position that government should tax and spend less with confusion over what actually happens in Congress. Depending on which way the pendulum is swinging or the wind is blowing, you may be right that the party that's talking the loudest, this week, about balancing the budget are the Democrats. It serves them, politically, to do so. But their ongoing proposition isn't to spend less, it's to tax more. That's not the way to grow the economy. The budget deficit is an artifact of overall economic growth vs. the burdens placed upon (or grabbed by) the government. Taking my own state as an example, we were facing a big budget problem, including a large defecit. Both parties (the very democrat legislature, and the - for us - unusually republican executive branch) talked a lot about how they'd solve the problem... but the boost in the overall level of local economic activity solved it regardless, before too many changes could have been made or taken effect either way. But jacking up taxes, especially on local employers, is a guaranteed way to chase that economic activity into the next state. Or out of the country.
I have to vote for somebody. There are (I think) far, far more important issues than just the degree to which one party or the next spends pork dollars in congress. Paying interest on it sucks, but not even having the economic activity sucks even more. The happy budget position that Clinton got to enjoy had more to do with post-tax-cut inertia from years before than it did anything else. The recession that got under way before he left office, and which had a role in kicking off the current defecit as much as many other factors, was partly cyclical, and partly owing to policies that took shape during those 8 years. It's already correcting itself, and more people - substantially more - are working now than they were then. I'm not seeing all of this through rose-colored glasses, but my point is that it's not as simple "this year, the Republicans are spending more, so it's their fault." It all hinges on the larger economy, and that's as impacted by weather, energy costs, baby boomer aging demographics, and jillion other factors as anything else. But taxing the activities (and invesments/investors) that keep things moving/growing doesn't help, and the urge to do so (or not) is a pretty clear philosophical distinction between the two political camps.
You need lots of money to reach an office and you can get that money (and office) if you crawl in bed with corporations
It's worth mentioning that "corporations" can't donate more than a little cash to a particular candidate's campaign, and can't instruct their employees to each pony up, either. But you're also glossing over the enormous impact of the money thrown around by individuals (like George Soros - willing to spend millions to impact elections his way) and non-profits (like labor unions, trial lawyer associations, trade groups, environmental organizations... the moveon.org types, etc). You sound like you'd prefer maybe that a retired person to have a stronger voice in the election, but when they join a group that donates just as much money as a corporation does, what then? Is that better? Worse?
I certainly don't want my tax dollars to support every candidate that fills in the right forms. I'd rather put my money behind campaigns that actually represent what I think. As for your point about the more parlimentary approach to things - I'm not sure that the squabbling that takes place (look at the last election in Germany) allows the country to actually do anything when it really has to. There's no pleasing everybody, but certain actions (or choices not to act) are all the more frustrating when the party actually making the decision only really got 12% of the vote.
This is one of the reasons why USA is so hated around the world, their simplistic worldview does not coincide with the rest of the world's worldview.
You're right. We should be more like Denmark. See? They're only hated around the world because they allow freedom of the press. Hell, those embassies needed to be rebuilt anyway.
I understand your point. The main, functioning aspects of the two big parties certainly would appear to be more similar than disimilar from, say (picking an obvious example), a German point of view.
But I'm not talking about whether the Democrats (as a functioning party) are truly "left" in the outright-practicing-socialists way, or whether the Republicans are "right" in the "OMG Bush is teh Nazis!" way. I'm referring to which world views push and nudge policy decisions this-a-way or that-a-way, more or less, over the longer time frame. The Big Boat of US Culture/Politics is going more or less right down the middle, listing a little too much to the side where the religious crazies have their quarters. And, to extend the metaphor, all of on the boat have to talk a little louder to be heard because of the endless shrieking from people that happen to have nice, shiny, entertainment/celebrity-empowered microphones and audiences with softer intellects. I mean really... policy isn't being set by Barbara Streisand or Oprah, but if you didn't know better you might think so. Likewise, you might (if you listen to the bloggers) think that any minute the Spanish Inquisition would be setting up shop.
So, the noisy left/right-wingers get a lot of the attention, and the rest of us carry on because we're busy, and hold our noses to vote for the people that we think will steer the boat a couple of degrees one way or the other more to our liking. I tend to vote very differently (party-wise) at the national and local levels. All depends on what's on the agenda. Of course, living in Maryland, any vote for a more conservative/libertarian-ish candidate or cause is pretty much a waste! But it reminds the Never-Saw-A-New-Tax-I-Didn't-Like local legislatures that we don't all just love them to pieces.
Basically, I refer to the "right" and "left" as influences upon the useful middle. I do understand that we're dealing with actual, practical politics that are neither as left as full-on socialists in, say, Scandinavia, or full-on right-wing parties in places like Austria.
Sadly, I think this puts you in the minority as a Republican, at least a minority among Republicans that control things
It is sad. I'm not registered as a Republican, but often vote that direction. Not because of (really, more despite) the positions inspired by relgiosity (which I abhor), but because of at least a stronger inclination towards a more hands-off functioning of the markets, businesses, and personal lives. Yes, both parties love spending tax dollars... but at least the red-staters are at least a little more squeamish about it than their more lefty-socialist counterparts. I suppose I'm a little more red-statey about illegal immigration, law-and-order type stuff (they say it only takes a being mugged or having your house robbed a couple of times to make you a Republican on some issues - and there's a grain of truth to that, if you ask around).
I also like to grab a shotgun and tromp around in farm fields with my bird dogs. Hell, sometimes I like to use an auto-loading shotgun that actually lets me be sure to knock down that pair of pheasants. But despite the "we don't think hunters should be penalized" rhetoric, much of the left that's "in control" (as you put it) of their agenda in that area would see even hunting weapons confiscated. So, I vote for people that push that argument back the other direction. I'm no Republican partisan, but I find much of the shrill carping and contradictory twittering from the Democrats to be non-productive to the point of losing my vote on many issues/candidates.
But more to your point: I think there are many, many more people like me out there than you'd guess. Leaning Republican on many fiscal/justice/defense type issues, and just rolling our eyes on the noisy social issues. Of course, my opinions of the social stuff are not driven by religion, but frequently overlap with some of those that are (i.e., I think there are objectively right and wrong things that humans can do or permit/correct). I find many Republicans' morality to be flawed (especially on the issues of marriage, creationism, and whatnot), but I find many Democrats' moral relativism to be dangerously self-destructive, too. In other words, I'm as likely to call an evil bastard an evil bastard as a religious-minded Republican is, but for different reasons. But I'm never going to get caught up in the "we all have our own truth" and "who are we to judge?" drivel that oozes up from the left - especially when life and limb are at stake.
Wow, a Monday morning rant. Sorry about that! I was cut off in traffic and given the finger by a guy with a "Hate Is Not The Answer" bumper sticker, so it sort of set the tone. On the other hand, I parked next to a guy with a "Stop Global Whining" sticker, so there's hope.
All network admins know that the damage caused by attackers is insignificant compared to the damage caused by upper management and government meddling.
All admins do not necessarily agree with this. Most of messes I have to clean up are from malware, fraud, "traditional" crime (and attempts at such) that have taken on a 'net communications component, and the usual tsunami of noise and bot blather that lands on every public-facing port I have open.
Tiered internet? That's a misnomer, I think. Big internet users pay for the bandwidth they (or their visitors) use. More traffic means higher costs. I don't care if some Comcast user has already paid for "his" bandwidth... serving up a streaming video to him isn't only using his bandwidth. I don't know where people get that idea. But regardless, if SBC or Verizon or any other carrier wants to screw with per-site or per-visitor metering or biasing, they're welcome to. Other ISPs will just set a price that's easier to predict and work with, and win the business away from the people trying to make it more complicated. But how much time do I have to give "upper management" or "government meddling" vs. attempted attacks, fraud killing, malware, etc? It's not even close. The bad guys are much more of an issue.
Oh, boo hoo. Just because the money I earn comes from charging for my time doesn't mean everything I do carries a cash price. I create, host, and maintain web apps for a wide range of non-profits and small operations completely pro bono. Even at India prices, what I do would be worth many thousands of dollars a year for those people, and the time I spend doing it could produce many times more than that if I were to apply those hours to my traditional customers. But I have no expectation of collecting fees from the people I take of for free, whereas when I set out to produce and distribute a product with a price tag, I have every reason to expect that someone else (with no agreement in place) isn't going to take what I've spent time producing, pirate copies, and then sell it to other people. That arrangement ultimately screws the people who "paid" the pirate for my work, because those users are now deprived of a meaningful support arrangement with the author, too. Not to mention the erosion of my ability to create more such work if I have to stop doing so because I can't afford to spend 1000 hours working on things like that if I can no longer afford the servers to run it on, or the coffee I need to stay awake for three weeks adding new features.
Despite your complaints about Medicare and acceptance of the it-just-goes-the-way-it-goes life with medical billing, you do have some expectation that your week's work is, on balance, going to produce your week's income. If someone else ran over to your healthcare customers and offered them a swell price them for everything you did that week, and actually collected most of the cash those customers would be willing to put out for what they received (instead of you), I don't think you'd be too pleased, either.
I too have projects that I'm too busy to do, but I'm not experienced enough to draft a legal document which can protect my ideas from developers.
Wow, get ready for a truckload of slashdot-powered, super-duper-mixed-premises, philosophically tangled up, utterly nonsensical batch of responses to that. Can't wait to see the smoke coming out of it!
You make a good point, of course. Which is why you'll get flamed.
Why not use <strong> instead? <strong> and <em> are structural tags that perform similarly to the <b> and <i> style tags.
Laziness (the efficient kind), combined with ejoying the elegence of shorter strings, fewer keystrokes, and easier-to-human-parse code. I know, storage and bandwidth mean, at this point, that a large document peppered with hundreds (or thousands) of more characters in tags that basicially do the same thing as a "b" isn't as painful as it used to be, but I'm a throwback. I like small source code. Yes, I'll have to give in eventually.
"I've done all this work and you owe me." Maybe he still thinks that way
Do you feel that way after you do work? I know I do. Until that check clears, somebody definitely owes me for making computers do things for them that they themselves couldn't or didn't do. Like Bill, I'd be especially tweeked if someone else was cashing in on it (my work) instead.
I'm glad for you that you can do the work you want with your waking hours, and not worry about exchanging that time for the value (cash) with which you put a roof over your head or eat, but that's not how it is for most people. Not most artists, writers, architects, engineers, or software developers. Congratulations on whatever you did do to become financially independent from having to exchange work for money. Um, unless you just inherited it, in which case, congratulations for just being lucky.
But really, there is no need to choose. I use the deprecated b tag all the time, because it is SIMPLE, love to use tables, because they WORK for displaying on various screen sizes, plus (gasp) deploy the font tag from time to time for quick prototypes
I agree. They can take my <B> tag when they pry it from my cold, dead text editor.
Really... a few nested tables work just FINE. And, if you happen to build e-commerce sites catering to a large cross-section of humanity, you'll find yourself serving pages up to people with a four-versions-ago copy of the AOL client, or Netscape 4.1, etc. They're still out there. Nice as some fancy-pants AJAX-ish stuff is for portally things or specific audiences, even some fundamental CSS things are beyond a lot of visitors' platforms, depending on your demographics.
I've been planning to build an advertisement free network for public access and am not clear on how Google's concept improves the experience for anyone but them.
But you are clear on how they managed to rack up the billions and billions of dollars they have to work on this sort of project, right? By not running a charity or a non-profit. You've been planning, they've been doing (because they can afford to, even if it's a miserable failure). And their work will reach hundreds of millions of people (like everything else they do).
What is the benefit of such a network?
Why do you care (unless you're a shareholder)? They have an interest in doing it, and that's all that matters. If it's a poor gamble, then it's a poor gamble. They're not dumb, and clearly see something in this (like their own backbone? like avoiding the tiered-net issues we've been talking about recently?) and can act, so they have. If they were worried that the billions of investors' dollars that they're playing with might piss off investors, they'd probably not do it.
Their arrogance and egos are growing even faster than their revenues.
Out of curiosity, how is this "arrogant?" If you had the talented staff, plenty of resources (financial, social, temporal, etc) and knew you had an approach to serving up vast amount of networked stuff while (I'm guessing here) truly dealing with some security issues, spam/noise problems, etc., and knew that you'd have a potential audience in the tens or hundreds of millions... wouldn't you pursue it? "Ego," in this sense, translates to "awareness of one's self and one's capabilities." They've got a definite self, and the horsepower to try thing like this. You don't have to do squat, or care, and they know it. That's not arrogance, that's them having the ability to try some things. Relax.
Note in the article that "Congressmen" are condemning Microsoft and Google. A fair number of them also condemn the so-called spying operations. They are mutually exclusive.
It would help a little to be more clear about this.
China wants to actually prevent broad, freedom-related pieces/flavors of information from being seen, uttered, or referred to in either private or public communications.
Tracking down phone calls to/from known Al Queda members/financiers/taffickers overseas, the other end of which calls terminate in the US in no way causes communications (on Google or otherwise) to be disrupted. Rather, it illuminates calling patterns that help the spooks and domestic law enforcement/intel types actually know who to go after, including actual taps/monitoring of the type FISA is all about (though FISA didn't really contemplate dozens of one-time use calls made from a bag of 50 disposable cell phones bought at conveinence stores from every exit on some highway... no phone use repeated, no ability to level a tapping warrant on any of those phones... but the calls all going to/from consistent numbers in Syria, or Jordan, etc).
Trying to figure out which forms of communication add up to regular enough pattern to track down someone to actually FISA-tap is completely unrelated to filtering words like "freedom" out of your Google searches. Performing one and condemning the other are not mutually exclusive any more than your typical neighborhood watch program is mutually exclusive with condemning Chinese human rights violations. Trying to tie the two together, rhetorically, is nonsense.
I think the real goal would be to dump the animal's viscera and use the large rib cage and fat/hide as a sort of shelter or smelly windbreak. The damp gutsy stuff in an opened-up belly would very quickly be a big old heatsink in the sort of wind and temps portrayed in the movie.
If you really a fun portrayal of this sort of thing, watch the evade-the-British-captors scene in the 1995 version of Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson. That's a great movie, even without light sabers. Ye Old Ferrous Cutlery does just fine for those Baroque combatants. Tim Roth does a particularly slimy job as the primary villain. Highly recommended.
It seems that these companies are using our geek tendencies (must...play...new...game!) against us.
To the extent that a DRM mechanism destabilizes your machine, or makes you vulnerable to some other malware, it might be better to say "these companies are simply doing a bad job of executing that part of the product I just decided to buy." They're not using it "against" you, they're trying to preserve the cashflow that allows them to keep making games in the first place. If you like a title enough to buy it, surely you'd want the people who make the game to stay in business.
Is this the beginning of the end of our freedom on the net?
Since we've just made the distinction between clumsy DRM and otherwise, let's talk about freedom. How does actually paying the people who created the game what they've asked you to pay (if you want their stuff) infringe on your freedom? If you don't like the game, or don't like the security measures a company has taken in order to protect you and other people from the higher prices that piracy causes, you have total freedom to vote with your wallet and go play something else.
If you think it's a drag that the creative people who labor for years to make a game are having to resort to DRM in order to help them recoup the huge pile of cash they just spent in development... then eliminate the need for the DRM by focusing your energy on the people who think that "freedom on the net" means "freedom from having to look the cool game dev guys in the eye and pay them the equivalent of a couple of pizzas for all of their hard work."
Certainly the number of people playing as Trolls should make for lots of completely believable communication.
This thing is not as black and white as it seems
White: Not having a copy of obviously stolen and very sensitive proprietary information belonging to someone else, whether you jokingly offer it up for sale or not.
Black: Having it.
While some external influence (viral) might worsen matters by wretchedly increasing fat uptake at the cellular level in some people, I don't think it's any mystery why most of us reading this right now have a couple of pounds we'd like to get rid of.
Sure, wash your hands and reduce your random virus exposure. But get up and move around a little without the bag of chips. That's what I say. Also, will someone come and help me out of this chair?
And in her husband's case, not without some unique anatomical features.
See? You're being all analytical on us. Careful with whom you reproduce!