because some people need to make money on what they built on things created from accumulated knowledge of mankind.
see, you take freely from public - anything - then put something on top of it, and then demand stuff from the public for your addition.
and suddenly, because you just added a small piece of crap COMPARED TO what you have built that on (start from fire and end it with electricity), you end up fulfilled your obligation to the public, and just and fair in your demands.
that is despite if, you had to actually pay for what you were taking back from public, you would have to work for hundreds of lifetimes to even come close.
but its ok to take freely and not give freely. ironically, you will see that same thing in the right-wing mindset of the fiscal conservatives ; they make use of ANYthing in public domain exceedingly freely, but, they start demanding a lot of things in return while trying to hold everything off from the public.
Dumb rant. "and then demand stuff from the public for your addition"
We aren't "demanding" anything, it's being offered in the free market. This isn't some TAX situation where you're forced to pay money, regardless of whether you like it. It's a situation where you pay if you want it, don't pay if you don't want it.
More importantly, if you're going to be logically consistent in your argument, then:
* Open-Source has no right to demand anything from users (demanding that they roll their changes back into the code, attaching source-code, etc) - is just unwarranted demands. Who are they to build on human knowledge, but then make demands on us for adding this or that little tidbit?
* Doctors have no right to charge money for their services since their profession is based on centuries of accumulated knowledge that they could never have acquired on their own.
* Farmers have no right to charge money for their food since it's built on millenia of plant and animal breeding. If you've ever seen some of the natural versions of these plants, you'd know that most of our crops and animals are close to being completely inedible. Thus, they're benefiting from millenia of human work, but they charge us - the human beings, from which they draw their knowledge - money!
* There are lots and lots of other examples - from construction to metallurgy to writing to literally *everything* human beings do - here we are benefiting from centuries or millenia of accumulated human knowledge where we get paid.
The average person in Cambodia earns one dollar a day. Some kids collect scrape metal and if they collect $0.25 worth of them, they can go to school the next day (they are not only happy about it, but work to get to school!). Do you really think they're going to spend it on entertainment than costs more than they make in a month?
It's true that prices have to be adjusted to the local economy. And, that does raise some problems when you're selling for cheap in third-world countries, since it creates an incentive for "entrepreneurs" to buy in third-world countries and resell in first-world countries (where they can sell it for more), but your choice of examples is poor. Afterall, people who collect $0.25 a day in earnings probably don't have the money to buy the TVs, Stereos, and computers that are prerequisites for pirated goods in the first place.
Doesn't this disprove the theory that getting movies and music free gets people to buy more?
I think that was shot-down a while ago, but people don't really want to hear it. In 1999, the music industry was getting $16.4 billion in sales revenue from CDs. By 2008, that had declined to $5.4 billion in CD sales, $1.5 billion in digital music sales, and another $1.0 billion in mobile ringtones sales. That works out to a gain of about $1 in digital music sales (not including mobile ringtones) for every $7 lost in CD sales. I've seen some studies claim that music pirates buy lots more music than non-pirates (one source claimed 12x as much music), but assuming this was causal (and not a symptom of big music fans being the first to become pirates), it's really hard to explain why the music industry got completely hammered in the past ten years - seeing over a fifty percent decline in sales revenue at the exact time that piracy was on the rise. Oh well, at least they might be making a little more money from music streaming services.
My guess is that the radio station selection is rather limited. Hence, consumers were forced to buy music to listen to stuff they really wanted to hear when the radio got repetitious. Certainly, that's what I used to do: bounce back and forth between the regular radio (which gets old quickly) and my music collection every month or so (while buying new music to fill-out my music collection). Now, with pandora, I just type in the name of a band I kinda like and listen to that. It seems less necessary to buy music anymore because I have unlimited variety with pandora. At least they make ad-revenue from that, though. I kinda figured that might be where music is going: towards ad-based revenue.
"It means you're technically adept (because FOSS software usually tends to be better than proprietary) and/or a cheap bastard."
Nonsense. FOSS suffers from one major problem that has always plagued it - it's hard to make a business model out of it, and without a business model, you end up with a bunch of volunteer contributions. Volunteers can be flakey, lack long-term interest or a host of other problems. There's a lot of benefits to having software built by payed developers. By in large, I can almost always find proprietary software that is superior to open source software. The only reason I even use open source is not because it's better (because it's not), but because it's cheaper. In the few cases where I'd actually say that open-source is good it either: was a commercial product that was released as open-soource, or managed to find one of the few business models available to open-source software (for example, in the case of Linux: RedHat makes money from training and support, Firefox gets hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, or in the case of Nokia: making money selling hardware). I could easily come up with a long list of proprietary software that beats out open-source versions -- and I can do that even if I ignore the terrible competition of open-source games and 3d engines against their stunningly good proprietary counterparts.
Go ahead and vote me down. It won't solve the number one problem plaguing open-source software. Maybe you should think about creating durable business models for open-source instead of saying the problem doesn't exist.
Funny, you could've spun the Apple situation in a lot of different directions. Of course, the slashdot crowd tends towards wanting features and complexity over simplicity and ease of use, so I guess I'm not surprised to see your comment and the upvotes. I think it's silly to suggest some kind of "complexity is better than simplicity" type of argument when society is made up of millions of different consumers with different needs and desires. And let's not forget that it's not just Apple; the Flip camera sells pretty darn well. Reducing it down to "it's just hype" is missing the reality of the market. "I know what all fifty buttons on my TV remote does, I don't know why people are too dumb or lazy to figure it out too. It's obviously superior to the five-button TV remote." isn't the correct answer for all consumers. Somewhere there's a guy who knows what every extra charge on your phone bill is for, and since you don't know, he thinks you're too dumb or lazy to figure out. Is he right? No, we all have a limited amount of time and patience to figure out what this or that thing is for. Technophiles are willing to spend the time. Most people aren't technophiles.
Perhaps that's the problem. Engineers are designing the devices, and engineers have spent thousands of hours pouring over the features. So, there's a tendency towards feature-creep and complexity as the devices are increasingly aimed at technophiles willing to spend lots of hours learning the device. I worry that Apple will move that direction like every other computer company has a tendency to do, unless there is someone at the helm steering away from the engineer's predisposition. (And, no, I'm not an Apple user. But, I happen to respect what they do and understand why it's a useful approach for them to take. I also don't look down on my friends who have little time or desire to learn the details of their electronic devices.)
All it seems to be doing is routing your traffic through someone else's ISP connection (more specifically: another user who is also using the box). Additionally, the inability to track users (which may or may not be true) seems like a playground for all kinds of nefarious acts - hacking, viruses, spam, child porn, etc.
I can imagine a couple reasons why BitTorrent might be throttled. First, I'd bet BitTorrent users are sending and receiving a lot more traffic than the average user. Second, BitTorrent is essentially the lawless wild-west. This is why it's the first choice for warez. If BitTorrent users want faster speeds, I'd recommend finding ways to make the BitTorrent landscape less populated by illegal warez. Perhaps companies who want to distribute Linux or World of Warcraft patches via BitTorrent should find ways to edge-out the illegal BitTorrent traffic by creating certificates. I understand most BitTorrent users won't be happy with that, of course, because illegal warez is the major reason people use BitTorrent. But, until that happens, I really don't care if ISP throttle or cut BitTorrent traffic entirely. (Sorry, illegal bit-torrent users: you can come in from the rain when you behave on the internet.)
When the messenger doesn't tell you what you want, question the messenger? Please. The fact of the matter is that the video was a two minute clip with no commentary and you complain about bias? I also watched a longer clip of the same segment and it isn't much different ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxDAt4PpZs ).
It's not like they selectively edited it like FOX News did with Obama and healthcare a few years ago. Here's the clip FOX News used in a news report:
Obama: "Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries?"
Here's what Obama said:
"Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries? I actually want a universal health care system; that is our goal. I think we should be able to provide health insurance to every American that they can afford and that provides them high quality. So I think we can accomplish it. Now, whether we do it exactly the way European countries do or Canada does is a different question, because there are a variety of ways to get to universal health care coverage."
FOX News cut their clip to make it look like he was advocating a european-style system. The lying bastards.
Let's face the fact that conservatives cry foul in any circumstance when it makes them look bad - even uncommentated two-minute video clips made by their own guys. It must be really easy to never have your views questioned when you get to throw around the "bias" card with no need for evidence, thereby wall-off any possibility of anyone questioning your views of the world.
The Bush administration demanded in court documents this week that Google Inc. turn over information about its users’ Internet search requests.
Google has refused to comply with a Justice Department subpoena filed last year, which the agency hopes to use to resurrect the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which the Supreme Court struck down in 2004.
The subpoena requested that Google provide a random sample of 1 million Web addresses and “the text of each search string entered into Google’s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query),” according to the motion filed Wednesday in San Jose, Calif., by Justice Department lawyers.
“Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and their demand for information overreaches,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s associate general counsel. “We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to, and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.”
....
Wow. After Beck's paranoid-boogieman diatribe, your only conclusion is that the left has found their boogieman? Sounds to me like someone's trying to flip the script.
Stuff like that happens all the time. Another example is the case of Jack Abramoff, a political lobbyist in the US. The casinos hired him to promote their interests. When some new laws were being voted on, Abramoff used contacts in the Christian right-wing to promote the idea that the new laws didn't go far enough and churches should vote against the casino-restricting laws. They did exactly as they were told and helped vote-down the laws. Of course, this is exactly what Abramoff and the casinos wanted them to do.
Well, it is kindof true. Google is very big brother in the way they gather data about their users. For that matter, just about any large internet company is going to be in bed with whatever governments whose jurisdiction they operate within. It's called "compliance with law enforcement".
Remember this?
Google refuses to give up data
The Bush administration demanded in court documents this week that Google Inc. turn over information about its users’ Internet search requests.
Google has refused to comply with a Justice Department subpoena filed last year, which the agency hopes to use to resurrect the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which the Supreme Court struck down in 2004.
The subpoena requested that Google provide a random sample of 1 million Web addresses and “the text of each search string entered into Google’s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query),” according to the motion filed Wednesday in San Jose, Calif., by Justice Department lawyers.
“Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and their demand for information overreaches,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s associate general counsel. “We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to, and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.”
...
"The device must protect the user, protect itself, and obey the user, in that order."
In that order? Really? So, if you try to upgrade your phone, your existing phone will (in accordance with "protect itself") attempt to sabotage your purchase? "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that."
Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property. The author isn't for, say, a 20-year or a 10-year copyright, but is against copyright at all. Suggestions about how Napster would some how result in great if the law hadn't shut them down seems like a pretty odd argument to make. Sorry, but I can't get on board with that. I'm fine with much shorter copyrights, but why in the world does anyone think that eliminating copyright leads to innovation (other than the fact that they're judgment is being swayed by the desire for endless free stuff on the internet)? The fact of the matter is that people aren't that generous, which means creators will have to get by on 1/10th of what they currently earn. There are plenty of examples of the fact that people aren't that generous. The most recent example is the fact that in 1990, Encyclopedia Britannica reached $650 million in revenue in a single year*. Now, wikipedia in 2010 is struggling to get $12 million in donations. Sure, that might be fine if someone's bringing down a million dollars a year, and now they'll earn $100,000 a year, but most creators are earning a lot less than that and it ultimately results in gutting the industry of people.
If this ever happened to the consumer software industry, the only thing we could do in defense is put everything on servers behind a paywall. In other words: create a techical barrier to prevent people from getting our work for free when "free" means going bankrupt.
Further, the article is completely off base when it argues that somehow peer-to-peer offers all these increased opportunities for small creators who can't afford a webserver. There's plenty of places that will host your music for free (like MySpace, Rapidshare, Grooveshark, etc), and bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper. It seems like it would be a lot more effective to put your music on a website (with band pictures, videos, tour dates, etc) than to put it up on Napster or a torrent or something.
Many of the author's examples didn't seem that solid. For example: "Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The US’ Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony) Or: "Here's an example of what one successful company, Google, does about hackers -- it puts them to work and pays them to tell them what to fix" (Gee, you mean a company that gives away its software doesn't worry about hackers/pirates?)
"I'm trying to answer the question asked -- what is blocking innovation in the US -- and the answer is that all the energy has been going into locking everything down, with the law tilting away from users and innovation, and that's not creating a fertile field for innovation. " When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation. Things like DRM and paywalls are a defense against those pirates. Complaining about companies "locking things down" is a bit like complaining about the money society spends on locks and alarm systems for their houses and cars. Yes, in some sense, it's a waste of money, but the problem isn't with spending the money on locks and security it's with the people who won't treat you fairly - i.e. the thieves. In the context of intellectual property, those are the pirates. Throw the blame at them for their degrading effect on innovation.
Considering that Modern Warfare 2 had piracy rates of 94% on the PC vs 16% on the XBox 360, I can't blame console makers from trying to stop their consoles from devolving into the PC-situation. (My guess at to why the XBox 360 has low piracy is because it's more difficult and riskier to pirate than on a PC -- it requires a mod-chip, and even if you do that, you might get banned from the network, as Micorsoft did to a million+ pirates right before the launch of Modern Warfare 2.)
As soon as I saw "techdirt", I knew it was Mike Masnick spouting off another dumb opinion. I swear that guy is getting paychecks from known pirate websites because he can never rush to their defense quickly enough. I don't think he's ever seen a case of piracy he didn't love.
"When a bank robber drives to the bank he is going to stick up no one suggests banning driving or suing the road designer; how is this any different?"
I just want to say that I'm sooooooooo sick and tired of people on the internet making whatever sketchy analogy supports whatever view they want to advance. Considering how often analogies are used to re-write the situation into something different, I propose making analogies the equivalent of invoking Nazis.
"Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement."
What nonsense. That's like saying everyone who lives under a dictatorship approves of the leadership because they could've emmigrated elsewhere. Corporations reflect the attitudes and desires of the upper management and the stockholders. If corporations were merely an agreement between equals then there should be no such thing as unions. Unions exist to protect the 'common employee' against the upper management, which is another way of saying that they know their interests are not always aligned.
"New Hampshire actually still has the highest business tax rate in the nation [watchdog.org], which is what's keeping it from being the wealthiest place in the world"
So, what you're saying is that New Hampshire has the highest business tax in the US, and the fact that it's the 6th richest state in the US is a complete mystery to you because it "should be" the 50th richest state based on having the highest corporate tax?
* Source: http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/28/real_estate/wealthiest_states/index.htm
> "Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know."
Yes, and nations ruled by dictators are made up of people, too, but that doesn't mean the "decisions" of the nation reflect what the common people want.
Corporations are not organizations of equal members. Their decisions are made by upper management. This means they reflect the business interests of the rich and serve to perpetuate the corporation. In fact, the whole reason unions exist is so that the common employee can protect itself against the corporation that they work for. Which is another way of saying that the interests of the corporation and upper management are often at odds with the interests of the common employee. Acting like corporations are "just people" ends up turning our democracy into a plutocracy.
"Rush Limbaugh once said that should the "gay gene" ever be found, that group could quickly turn pro-life in the abortion debate." Why? First: they're already born. Second: the people who would abort a gay baby tend to be the same people who are currently pro-life. Is Limbaugh accidentally suggesting that pro-lifers would start aborting babies once there's a prenatal test for being gay?
First, I'll agree with you that the phrase (from the news article, but not necessarily from the scientist) "the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion" should be "if there are genetic components that predispose a person toward religion..."
Second, the word is "predispose". You twisted this around into "dictates your behavior, preferences, or predisposition". Being "predisposed" to something is different than "dictating" your behavior. Besides, if you had read the article, you'd see this: "Genes are not destiny. Many people who are genetically predisposed towards religion may in fact lead secular lives because of the cultural influences they have been exposed to.... Having the religiosity allele does not make a person religious, but it makes a person more likely to have characteristics that make them religiously inclined; the converse is also true. ”
"Not to forget that this article also assumes that there is absolutely nothing positive to be gained from religion". Really? I must've misssed that part. Of course, there are plenty of Slashdotters who think the trend towards religion is a bad one. I can certainly see some problems with it in some cases. For example, if we assume children get their religious views from their parents (even if we assume there is no genetic tendency towards religion), then the high fertility rates of highly conservative Jews in Israel will only exacerbate the problems between Israel and the Palestinians, since the most religious Jews are the least willing to compromise.
"So there's an evolutionary advantage to not believing in evolution?"
Yes, if and only if "not believing in evolution" is correlated with having more children. On the other hand, if "not believing in evolution" is correlated with self-castration, vows of chastity (nuns and priests), or killing yourself (e.g. Waco Texas, Jonestown, Heavens Gate, or the astrological suicide pacts in Europe) then not believing in evolution is an evolutionary disadvantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Dumb rant.
"and then demand stuff from the public for your addition"
We aren't "demanding" anything, it's being offered in the free market. This isn't some TAX situation where you're forced to pay money, regardless of whether you like it. It's a situation where you pay if you want it, don't pay if you don't want it.
More importantly, if you're going to be logically consistent in your argument, then:
* Open-Source has no right to demand anything from users (demanding that they roll their changes back into the code, attaching source-code, etc) - is just unwarranted demands. Who are they to build on human knowledge, but then make demands on us for adding this or that little tidbit?
* Doctors have no right to charge money for their services since their profession is based on centuries of accumulated knowledge that they could never have acquired on their own.
* Farmers have no right to charge money for their food since it's built on millenia of plant and animal breeding. If you've ever seen some of the natural versions of these plants, you'd know that most of our crops and animals are close to being completely inedible. Thus, they're benefiting from millenia of human work, but they charge us - the human beings, from which they draw their knowledge - money!
* There are lots and lots of other examples - from construction to metallurgy to writing to literally *everything* human beings do - here we are benefiting from centuries or millenia of accumulated human knowledge where we get paid.
The average person in Cambodia earns one dollar a day. Some kids collect scrape metal and if they collect $0.25 worth of them, they can go to school the next day (they are not only happy about it, but work to get to school!). Do you really think they're going to spend it on entertainment than costs more than they make in a month?
It's true that prices have to be adjusted to the local economy. And, that does raise some problems when you're selling for cheap in third-world countries, since it creates an incentive for "entrepreneurs" to buy in third-world countries and resell in first-world countries (where they can sell it for more), but your choice of examples is poor. Afterall, people who collect $0.25 a day in earnings probably don't have the money to buy the TVs, Stereos, and computers that are prerequisites for pirated goods in the first place.
Doesn't this disprove the theory that getting movies and music free gets people to buy more?
I think that was shot-down a while ago, but people don't really want to hear it. In 1999, the music industry was getting $16.4 billion in sales revenue from CDs. By 2008, that had declined to $5.4 billion in CD sales, $1.5 billion in digital music sales, and another $1.0 billion in mobile ringtones sales. That works out to a gain of about $1 in digital music sales (not including mobile ringtones) for every $7 lost in CD sales. I've seen some studies claim that music pirates buy lots more music than non-pirates (one source claimed 12x as much music), but assuming this was causal (and not a symptom of big music fans being the first to become pirates), it's really hard to explain why the music industry got completely hammered in the past ten years - seeing over a fifty percent decline in sales revenue at the exact time that piracy was on the rise. Oh well, at least they might be making a little more money from music streaming services.
My guess is that the radio station selection is rather limited. Hence, consumers were forced to buy music to listen to stuff they really wanted to hear when the radio got repetitious. Certainly, that's what I used to do: bounce back and forth between the regular radio (which gets old quickly) and my music collection every month or so (while buying new music to fill-out my music collection). Now, with pandora, I just type in the name of a band I kinda like and listen to that. It seems less necessary to buy music anymore because I have unlimited variety with pandora. At least they make ad-revenue from that, though. I kinda figured that might be where music is going: towards ad-based revenue.
"It means you're technically adept (because FOSS software usually tends to be better than proprietary) and/or a cheap bastard."
Nonsense. FOSS suffers from one major problem that has always plagued it - it's hard to make a business model out of it, and without a business model, you end up with a bunch of volunteer contributions. Volunteers can be flakey, lack long-term interest or a host of other problems. There's a lot of benefits to having software built by payed developers. By in large, I can almost always find proprietary software that is superior to open source software. The only reason I even use open source is not because it's better (because it's not), but because it's cheaper. In the few cases where I'd actually say that open-source is good it either: was a commercial product that was released as open-soource, or managed to find one of the few business models available to open-source software (for example, in the case of Linux: RedHat makes money from training and support, Firefox gets hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, or in the case of Nokia: making money selling hardware). I could easily come up with a long list of proprietary software that beats out open-source versions -- and I can do that even if I ignore the terrible competition of open-source games and 3d engines against their stunningly good proprietary counterparts.
Go ahead and vote me down. It won't solve the number one problem plaguing open-source software. Maybe you should think about creating durable business models for open-source instead of saying the problem doesn't exist.
Funny, you could've spun the Apple situation in a lot of different directions. Of course, the slashdot crowd tends towards wanting features and complexity over simplicity and ease of use, so I guess I'm not surprised to see your comment and the upvotes. I think it's silly to suggest some kind of "complexity is better than simplicity" type of argument when society is made up of millions of different consumers with different needs and desires. And let's not forget that it's not just Apple; the Flip camera sells pretty darn well. Reducing it down to "it's just hype" is missing the reality of the market. "I know what all fifty buttons on my TV remote does, I don't know why people are too dumb or lazy to figure it out too. It's obviously superior to the five-button TV remote." isn't the correct answer for all consumers. Somewhere there's a guy who knows what every extra charge on your phone bill is for, and since you don't know, he thinks you're too dumb or lazy to figure out. Is he right? No, we all have a limited amount of time and patience to figure out what this or that thing is for. Technophiles are willing to spend the time. Most people aren't technophiles.
Perhaps that's the problem. Engineers are designing the devices, and engineers have spent thousands of hours pouring over the features. So, there's a tendency towards feature-creep and complexity as the devices are increasingly aimed at technophiles willing to spend lots of hours learning the device. I worry that Apple will move that direction like every other computer company has a tendency to do, unless there is someone at the helm steering away from the engineer's predisposition. (And, no, I'm not an Apple user. But, I happen to respect what they do and understand why it's a useful approach for them to take. I also don't look down on my friends who have little time or desire to learn the details of their electronic devices.)
All it seems to be doing is routing your traffic through someone else's ISP connection (more specifically: another user who is also using the box). Additionally, the inability to track users (which may or may not be true) seems like a playground for all kinds of nefarious acts - hacking, viruses, spam, child porn, etc.
I can imagine a couple reasons why BitTorrent might be throttled. First, I'd bet BitTorrent users are sending and receiving a lot more traffic than the average user. Second, BitTorrent is essentially the lawless wild-west. This is why it's the first choice for warez. If BitTorrent users want faster speeds, I'd recommend finding ways to make the BitTorrent landscape less populated by illegal warez. Perhaps companies who want to distribute Linux or World of Warcraft patches via BitTorrent should find ways to edge-out the illegal BitTorrent traffic by creating certificates. I understand most BitTorrent users won't be happy with that, of course, because illegal warez is the major reason people use BitTorrent. But, until that happens, I really don't care if ISP throttle or cut BitTorrent traffic entirely. (Sorry, illegal bit-torrent users: you can come in from the rain when you behave on the internet.)
When the messenger doesn't tell you what you want, question the messenger? Please. The fact of the matter is that the video was a two minute clip with no commentary and you complain about bias? I also watched a longer clip of the same segment and it isn't much different ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxDAt4PpZs ).
It's not like they selectively edited it like FOX News did with Obama and healthcare a few years ago. Here's the clip FOX News used in a news report:
Obama: "Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries?"
Here's what Obama said:
"Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries? I actually want a universal health care system; that is our goal. I think we should be able to provide health insurance to every American that they can afford and that provides them high quality. So I think we can accomplish it. Now, whether we do it exactly the way European countries do or Canada does is a different question, because there are a variety of ways to get to universal health care coverage."
FOX News cut their clip to make it look like he was advocating a european-style system. The lying bastards.
Let's face the fact that conservatives cry foul in any circumstance when it makes them look bad - even uncommentated two-minute video clips made by their own guys. It must be really easy to never have your views questioned when you get to throw around the "bias" card with no need for evidence, thereby wall-off any possibility of anyone questioning your views of the world.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/jan/19/20060119-105801-2649r/
Wow. After Beck's paranoid-boogieman diatribe, your only conclusion is that the left has found their boogieman? Sounds to me like someone's trying to flip the script.
Stuff like that happens all the time. Another example is the case of Jack Abramoff, a political lobbyist in the US. The casinos hired him to promote their interests. When some new laws were being voted on, Abramoff used contacts in the Christian right-wing to promote the idea that the new laws didn't go far enough and churches should vote against the casino-restricting laws. They did exactly as they were told and helped vote-down the laws. Of course, this is exactly what Abramoff and the casinos wanted them to do.
Remember this?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/jan/19/20060119-105801-2649r/
"The device must protect the user, protect itself, and obey the user, in that order."
In that order? Really? So, if you try to upgrade your phone, your existing phone will (in accordance with "protect itself") attempt to sabotage your purchase? "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that."
Assuming you think there's anything to libertarianism. I certainly think libertarians have started from a flawed position, and their logic goes off the rails because of their bad starting point.
I was interested when the article mentioned "overbearing intellectual property laws" and "reform", but the article is less about "reform" and more about gutting Intellectual Property. The author isn't for, say, a 20-year or a 10-year copyright, but is against copyright at all. Suggestions about how Napster would some how result in great if the law hadn't shut them down seems like a pretty odd argument to make. Sorry, but I can't get on board with that. I'm fine with much shorter copyrights, but why in the world does anyone think that eliminating copyright leads to innovation (other than the fact that they're judgment is being swayed by the desire for endless free stuff on the internet)? The fact of the matter is that people aren't that generous, which means creators will have to get by on 1/10th of what they currently earn. There are plenty of examples of the fact that people aren't that generous. The most recent example is the fact that in 1990, Encyclopedia Britannica reached $650 million in revenue in a single year*. Now, wikipedia in 2010 is struggling to get $12 million in donations. Sure, that might be fine if someone's bringing down a million dollars a year, and now they'll earn $100,000 a year, but most creators are earning a lot less than that and it ultimately results in gutting the industry of people.
If this ever happened to the consumer software industry, the only thing we could do in defense is put everything on servers behind a paywall. In other words: create a techical barrier to prevent people from getting our work for free when "free" means going bankrupt.
Further, the article is completely off base when it argues that somehow peer-to-peer offers all these increased opportunities for small creators who can't afford a webserver. There's plenty of places that will host your music for free (like MySpace, Rapidshare, Grooveshark, etc), and bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper. It seems like it would be a lot more effective to put your music on a website (with band pictures, videos, tour dates, etc) than to put it up on Napster or a torrent or something.
Many of the author's examples didn't seem that solid. For example: "Here's something wonderfully innovative that OtherOS on a Playstation made possible before Sony shut it down: The US’ Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently unveiled a supercomputer made out of 1,760 PlayStation 3 consoles" (I'm pretty sure the US Air Force can work out something with Sony) Or: "Here's an example of what one successful company, Google, does about hackers -- it puts them to work and pays them to tell them what to fix" (Gee, you mean a company that gives away its software doesn't worry about hackers/pirates?)
"I'm trying to answer the question asked -- what is blocking innovation in the US -- and the answer is that all the energy has been going into locking everything down, with the law tilting away from users and innovation, and that's not creating a fertile field for innovation. " When pirates harm a creator's profitability, then pirates are undermining innovation. Things like DRM and paywalls are a defense against those pirates. Complaining about companies "locking things down" is a bit like complaining about the money society spends on locks and alarm systems for their houses and cars. Yes, in some sense, it's a waste of money, but the problem isn't with spending the money on locks and security it's with the people who won't treat you fairly - i.e. the thieves. In the context of intellectual property, those are the pirates. Throw the blame at them for their degrading effect on innovation.
* "By 1990, sales of Britannica's multivolume sets had reached an all-time peak of about $650 million." http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/books-non-fiction/807-how-encyclopedia-britannica-was-blown-to-bits.html
Considering that Modern Warfare 2 had piracy rates of 94% on the PC vs 16% on the XBox 360, I can't blame console makers from trying to stop their consoles from devolving into the PC-situation. (My guess at to why the XBox 360 has low piracy is because it's more difficult and riskier to pirate than on a PC -- it requires a mod-chip, and even if you do that, you might get banned from the network, as Micorsoft did to a million+ pirates right before the launch of Modern Warfare 2.)
As soon as I saw "techdirt", I knew it was Mike Masnick spouting off another dumb opinion. I swear that guy is getting paychecks from known pirate websites because he can never rush to their defense quickly enough. I don't think he's ever seen a case of piracy he didn't love.
I just want to say that I'm sooooooooo sick and tired of people on the internet making whatever sketchy analogy supports whatever view they want to advance. Considering how often analogies are used to re-write the situation into something different, I propose making analogies the equivalent of invoking Nazis.
"Corporations are simply groups of individuals who freely enter into an agreement."
What nonsense. That's like saying everyone who lives under a dictatorship approves of the leadership because they could've emmigrated elsewhere. Corporations reflect the attitudes and desires of the upper management and the stockholders. If corporations were merely an agreement between equals then there should be no such thing as unions. Unions exist to protect the 'common employee' against the upper management, which is another way of saying that they know their interests are not always aligned.
"New Hampshire actually still has the highest business tax rate in the nation [watchdog.org], which is what's keeping it from being the wealthiest place in the world"
So, what you're saying is that New Hampshire has the highest business tax in the US, and the fact that it's the 6th richest state in the US is a complete mystery to you because it "should be" the 50th richest state based on having the highest corporate tax?
* Source: http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/28/real_estate/wealthiest_states/index.htm
> "Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know."
Yes, and nations ruled by dictators are made up of people, too, but that doesn't mean the "decisions" of the nation reflect what the common people want.
Corporations are not organizations of equal members. Their decisions are made by upper management. This means they reflect the business interests of the rich and serve to perpetuate the corporation. In fact, the whole reason unions exist is so that the common employee can protect itself against the corporation that they work for. Which is another way of saying that the interests of the corporation and upper management are often at odds with the interests of the common employee. Acting like corporations are "just people" ends up turning our democracy into a plutocracy.
"Rush Limbaugh once said that should the "gay gene" ever be found, that group could quickly turn pro-life in the abortion debate." Why? First: they're already born. Second: the people who would abort a gay baby tend to be the same people who are currently pro-life. Is Limbaugh accidentally suggesting that pro-lifers would start aborting babies once there's a prenatal test for being gay?
In science, you don't trust people at their word and you don't participate in Ad Hominems.. You check their math, you raise questions and criticisms.
Read carefully before criticizing.
First, I'll agree with you that the phrase (from the news article, but not necessarily from the scientist) "the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion" should be "if there are genetic components that predispose a person toward religion..."
Second, the word is "predispose". You twisted this around into "dictates your behavior, preferences, or predisposition". Being "predisposed" to something is different than "dictating" your behavior. Besides, if you had read the article, you'd see this: "Genes are not destiny. Many people who are genetically predisposed towards religion may in fact lead secular lives because of the cultural influences they have been exposed to.... Having the religiosity allele does not make a person religious, but it makes a person more likely to have characteristics that make them religiously inclined; the converse is also true. ”
"Not to forget that this article also assumes that there is absolutely nothing positive to be gained from religion". Really? I must've misssed that part. Of course, there are plenty of Slashdotters who think the trend towards religion is a bad one. I can certainly see some problems with it in some cases. For example, if we assume children get their religious views from their parents (even if we assume there is no genetic tendency towards religion), then the high fertility rates of highly conservative Jews in Israel will only exacerbate the problems between Israel and the Palestinians, since the most religious Jews are the least willing to compromise.
"So there's an evolutionary advantage to not believing in evolution?"
Yes, if and only if "not believing in evolution" is correlated with having more children. On the other hand, if "not believing in evolution" is correlated with self-castration, vows of chastity (nuns and priests), or killing yourself (e.g. Waco Texas, Jonestown, Heavens Gate, or the astrological suicide pacts in Europe) then not believing in evolution is an evolutionary disadvantage.