I take my role in a participatory democracy very seriously, which is why I strongly advocate smaller government, less government spending, and more liberties, and I will vote for and support candidates that take our country in that direction.
And I'm telling you that simply voting for candidates that you like is simply not enough.
You think of government as an animal that you can reward and punish and that will learn and improve over time, but that's ridiculously naive.
That's funny... I think you are the one being ridiculously naive. You think government is a monolithic entity defined by a single parameter -- incompetence. You make your perception reality by giving up any expectation of competence and leaving it all in the hands of those who wish to use it for the worst purposes. When you abdicate your role in a participatory democracy, of course you are going to get worst possible version of governance.
"Good governance" sounds nice, but it's not working.
That's because few people are actually pushing for it. It's that sort of casual dismissal of ineffective governance as being the best available governance that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
it is really easy to be for "small government" because it is so superficial. The superficiality leads to government being made small only in areas that benefit the powerful.
Cue the highly emotional, belligerent, ignorant people who think anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are exactly the same thing.
While that's technically true, one of the problems is that in practice they are conflated by the people who call themselves libertarians. Especially in the tea party movement. For any political group there is an ever present risk that the difference between who they say they are and what they actually do is in contradiction.
I have absolute and complete faith that there are are lots of true blue Libertarians in the group. The problem is all the others who are either wolves in sheep's clothing or just unprincipled "useful idiots" who simply don't have intellectual rigor to push back on the self-interested and well-monied anarcho-capitalist types who are working hard to co-opt the tea party groups.
FWIW, I've come to the conclusion that the norquist "starve the beast" approach is a bad idea. It is too simplistic - it is the stick without the carrot. It needs a complementary "good governance" movement too. Else we get things like privatization of government services where any initial cost savings evaporates as the business owners end up with a practical monopoly on state contracts and jack the prices back up in a couple of years.
Don't worry. The TSA has this all under control. They are now requiring the drivers of these transports to take their shoes off when they get into the cab. So, problem solved!
> Chattanooga's fiber requires massive taxpayer subsidies as well as cross-subsidy from utility ratepayers.
That is incorrect. They took the federal stimulus for rural isp money in order to accelerate roll-out to rural areas, but they were on track to do it without the money at a slower rate. As for cross-subsidy, it is the other way, the ISP service is subsidizing the electric ratepayers by about 20 million a year.
No, they were deploying well ahead of google. They were upgrading their electricity command-and-control system to fiber and realized they could also be an ISP for only marginally more money since they were running fiber on all the electric poles anyway.
There pricing is directly inspired by google, the gig price used to be around $300/month until about 6 months ago. But they are probably making more money with the lower price level because practically no one paid for 1 gig anyway. Bringing the price down has made it a much smaller leap to go from 100mbps at ~$55 to 1gbps at $70 so, I expect a lot more people have decided to pay the extra $15/month for the top-tier now,
Let this be the beginning of the end of centralized social networks like facebook and g+. The biggest value they provided was photo hosting. Now you can do it at home on your own personal server. Its just going to take some smart decentralized (p2p?) software to handle it.
FWIW, Seoul and Hong Kong are probably the two cities with the cheapest high-speed internet. I recall seeing something on the order of 1gbps for the rough equivalent of $25/month in those cities in news articles past.
Chattanooga has symmetric 1gbps internet available to the entire city and suburbs for the same price as google fiber (but no "zero-cost" option for low speed). And, as a plus, it isn't google, it is the local electricity co-op.
Last time I checked, Russia's continual asylum was conditional on not releasing more information,
Easy for him to live up to since he gave the entire trove to Greenwald, et al. Snowden hasn't released anything since, because he doesn't have anything left. Same reason all the talk about the FSB getting access to the files is also baseless speculation.
Just in case you'd forgotten that Snowden still exists, here's Slashdot to stir up all that nice outrage.
So what? Snowden is "one of us" - I dunno if he had a slashdot account or not, he did post regularly on ars technica's forums. A great many of us here can identify with him - technical, libertarian, etc.
Of all the places on the net, slashdot is one of the few where snowden's personal story is just as relevant as role in the surveillance state debate.
Based on what you are saying, I can run all sorts of media stories denying the holocaust for whatever purpose and it's a completely legitimate use of satire?
Correct. Your attempt at sarcasm suggests you don't understand satire - public approval is not a requirement, in fact it may even indicate that the satire missed its mark.
You might think they are satire, but depending on what you do or say, you might just get charged with a hate crime.
Yet another uncited claim about the law, but at least this time you recognized your own bullshit and decided to make it so vague as to have complete deniability. Too bad that complete deniability also makes it utterly meaningless - "charged" not convicted and expanding the parameters beyond "say" to include "do." You show me one case where a person in the US was convicted of a hate crime for pure speech and you'll have a point, until then shut the fuck up.
If you weren't an ac I would have spent the 5 minutes it woiuld take to dig up the article posted to slashdot in the last 6 months benchmarking javascript on mobile that showed just how abysmal performance really is there.
As I stated, I'm not sure of the EU rules, so it was intentionally broad, because in most jurisdictions,
Saying "it happens lots of places" is not a citation.
he defendant admitted to intentionally doing this for a stated purpose (which was not satire)
Just because he did (or didn't) call it satire himself doesn't stop it from being satire. His purpose was to troll idiots, that's a completely legitimate use of satire.
. BTW, even satirical speech with the intent to harm another group is usually called defamation.
Bullshit. His target was not some dead monk, his target was the people all too willing to believe excessively positive stories about a dead monk. He did not tell a single falsehood about those people.
JavaScript performance on mobile is terrible - like 10x slower than desktop. If you make your website dependent on javascript, prepare to lose a lot of mobile customers who won't have the patience to wait it out.
You are using page 1 of the global warming denier's handbook -- cherry-pick local minima to deny the trends. Yes, there is more arctic ice this year than last year, but last year was an extremely low point. The US has had one week of record cold, but not sustained record cold.
Next up you'll be saying that there hasn't been any increase in average temperatures since 1998 - ignoring the fact that 1998 was a massive outlier and that if you were to start witih 1997 or 1999 the trend of increasing temps is still, unfortunately, intact.
Slashdot Mirror
I take my role in a participatory democracy very seriously, which is why I strongly advocate smaller government, less government spending, and more liberties, and I will vote for and support candidates that take our country in that direction.
And I'm telling you that simply voting for candidates that you like is simply not enough.
You think of government as an animal that you can reward and punish and that will learn and improve over time, but that's ridiculously naive.
That's funny ... I think you are the one being ridiculously naive. You think government is a monolithic entity defined by a single parameter -- incompetence. You make your perception reality by giving up any expectation of competence and leaving it all in the hands of those who wish to use it for the worst purposes. When you abdicate your role in a participatory democracy, of course you are going to get worst possible version of governance.
"Good governance" sounds nice, but it's not working.
That's because few people are actually pushing for it. It's that sort of casual dismissal of ineffective governance as being the best available governance that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
it is really easy to be for "small government" because it is so superficial. The superficiality leads to government being made small only in areas that benefit the powerful.
Actually, The vote passed the senate 98-1-1 and only 64 members of the house voted no. The patriot act was bipartisian.
So the AC should have said, "From one of the parties that brought us the PATRIOT act," It's still ironic,
Cue the highly emotional, belligerent, ignorant people who think anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are exactly the same thing.
While that's technically true, one of the problems is that in practice they are conflated by the people who call themselves libertarians. Especially in the tea party movement. For any political group there is an ever present risk that the difference between who they say they are and what they actually do is in contradiction.
I have absolute and complete faith that there are are lots of true blue Libertarians in the group. The problem is all the others who are either wolves in sheep's clothing or just unprincipled "useful idiots" who simply don't have intellectual rigor to push back on the self-interested and well-monied anarcho-capitalist types who are working hard to co-opt the tea party groups.
FWIW, I've come to the conclusion that the norquist "starve the beast" approach is a bad idea. It is too simplistic - it is the stick without the carrot. It needs a complementary "good governance" movement too. Else we get things like privatization of government services where any initial cost savings evaporates as the business owners end up with a practical monopoly on state contracts and jack the prices back up in a couple of years.
. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. So they're just covering their asses, like any employee
So, you are saying the road to hell is paved with covered asses?
Don't worry. The TSA has this all under control. They are now requiring the drivers of these transports to take their shoes off when they get into the cab. So, problem solved!
> Chattanooga's fiber requires massive taxpayer subsidies as well as cross-subsidy from utility ratepayers.
That is incorrect. They took the federal stimulus for rural isp money in order to accelerate roll-out to rural areas, but they were on track to do it without the money at a slower rate. As for cross-subsidy, it is the other way, the ISP service is subsidizing the electric ratepayers by about 20 million a year.
No, they were deploying well ahead of google. They were upgrading their electricity command-and-control system to fiber and realized they could also be an ISP for only marginally more money since they were running fiber on all the electric poles anyway.
There pricing is directly inspired by google, the gig price used to be around $300/month until about 6 months ago. But they are probably making more money with the lower price level because practically no one paid for 1 gig anyway. Bringing the price down has made it a much smaller leap to go from 100mbps at ~$55 to 1gbps at $70 so, I expect a lot more people have decided to pay the extra $15/month for the top-tier now,
Let this be the beginning of the end of centralized social networks like facebook and g+.
The biggest value they provided was photo hosting. Now you can do it at home on your own personal server. Its just going to take some smart decentralized (p2p?) software to handle it.
New Yor City has 27,532 people per square mile.
FWIW, Seoul and Hong Kong are probably the two cities with the cheapest high-speed internet. I recall seeing something on the order of 1gbps for the rough equivalent of $25/month in those cities in news articles past.
Seoul's population density is 45,000 per sq mile
Hong Kong is 67,000 per sq mile
Chattanooga has symmetric 1gbps internet available to the entire city and suburbs for the same price as google fiber (but no "zero-cost" option for low speed). And, as a plus, it isn't google, it is the local electricity co-op.
https://epbfi.com/internet/
Last time I checked, Russia's continual asylum was conditional on not releasing more information,
Easy for him to live up to since he gave the entire trove to Greenwald, et al. Snowden hasn't released anything since, because he doesn't have anything left. Same reason all the talk about the FSB getting access to the files is also baseless speculation.
Just in case you'd forgotten that Snowden still exists, here's Slashdot to stir up all that nice outrage.
So what? Snowden is "one of us" - I dunno if he had a slashdot account or not, he did post regularly on ars technica's forums. A great many of us here can identify with him - technical, libertarian, etc.
Of all the places on the net, slashdot is one of the few where snowden's personal story is just as relevant as role in the surveillance state debate.
And that is tonight's joke for the greybeards.
Based on what you are saying, I can run all sorts of media stories denying the holocaust for whatever purpose and it's a completely legitimate use of satire?
Correct. Your attempt at sarcasm suggests you don't understand satire - public approval is not a requirement, in fact it may even indicate that the satire missed its mark.
You might think they are satire, but depending on what you do or say, you might just get charged with a hate crime.
Yet another uncited claim about the law, but at least this time you recognized your own bullshit and decided to make it so vague as to have complete deniability. Too bad that complete deniability also makes it utterly meaningless - "charged" not convicted and expanding the parameters beyond "say" to include "do." You show me one case where a person in the US was convicted of a hate crime for pure speech and you'll have a point, until then shut the fuck up.
If you weren't an ac I would have spent the 5 minutes it woiuld take to dig up the article posted to slashdot in the last 6 months benchmarking javascript on mobile that showed just how abysmal performance really is there.
As I stated, I'm not sure of the EU rules, so it was intentionally broad, because in most jurisdictions,
Saying "it happens lots of places" is not a citation.
he defendant admitted to intentionally doing this for a stated purpose (which was not satire)
Just because he did (or didn't) call it satire himself doesn't stop it from being satire. His purpose was to troll idiots, that's a completely legitimate use of satire.
. BTW, even satirical speech with the intent to harm another group is usually called defamation.
Bullshit. His target was not some dead monk, his target was the people all too willing to believe excessively positive stories about a dead monk. He did not tell a single falsehood about those people.
Your version of fraud (completely uncited by the way) is so broad as to effectively eliminate any satirical speech.
It may not be obvious to the /. crowd, but nobody uses ad blockers. Of the people I know, I am the only one who does.
So wait, you are telling us that the collective wisdom here is wrong because of your personal anecdotes?
Adblock is the #1 downloaded extension to firefox. 18 million users which is 3x times the #2 most popular extension.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=users
JavaScript performance on mobile is terrible - like 10x slower than desktop. If you make your website dependent on javascript, prepare to lose a lot of mobile customers who won't have the patience to wait it out.
Anyone know of one these ad-blocker-blocked websites? I'd like to see what it looks like in the face of adblock plus + noscript + requestpolicy.
You are using page 1 of the global warming denier's handbook -- cherry-pick local minima to deny the trends. Yes, there is more arctic ice this year than last year, but last year was an extremely low point. The US has had one week of record cold, but not sustained record cold.
Next up you'll be saying that there hasn't been any increase in average temperatures since 1998 - ignoring the fact that 1998 was a massive outlier and that if you were to start witih 1997 or 1999 the trend of increasing temps is still, unfortunately, intact.
That's called cognitive dissonance, and it's not restricted to Americans.
Yes it totally is!!!
One of the reasons for that was some IDIOT in the CIA apparently using a polio vaccination program as a cover for a covert operation in Pakistan.
It was actually hep-b vax and it was specifically intended to get info on bin laden in abbotobad. Not clear if it was helpful or not.
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/the_fake_vaccination_scheme_absent_from_the_bin_laden_hunt_debates/