I don't know what's worse, having a web SSO service offered by a for-profit, or having one operated by the government.
Government outsourcing it to the lowest bidding for-profit company, who then makes up the profit margins by advertising and selling your personal info?
It won't become the internet's SSO, simply because it requires way too many companies to willingly put way too much power into the hands of a partner that probably does not have their interests at heart.
So, what happens when all those Facebook junkies (basically everybody under 25yo) are running the companies? I think they'd be more than happy to give too much power to their best friend, Facebook. Just as companies are more than willing to give to much power to their best friend today, Google, as they did in the past with their old best friend Microsoft (and before that IBM and so forth).
The fact that you cite Microsoft is hilarious - because "too many companies putting way too much power into the hands of a partner who doesn't have their best interests at heart" is exactly how Microsoft grew to be so big in the first place. Don't think it can't happen again. In fact, the corporate-driven world we live in basically guarantees it will happen repeatedly.
If they can give their kit a mid-life kicker with some more memory or swapping in some faster CPUs,
That's just stupid. Simply "dropping in" a faster CPU doesn't do all that much, because you keep the same bus speeds on the motherboard that limit bandwidth. As for memory, haven't you noticed that buying older, slower memory tends to be more expensive than buying the new faster memory, because the old stuff is no longer in production?
Aside from those factors, there's the added labor in installing those components and testing them. On top of all that, most mass-market desktops that are used in this space aren't particularly upgrade-friendly when it comes to internal components.
"BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet
Why would ISPs have to pay to use Bittorrent? Isn't it free and Open Source?
And yet, of the flower childs running around the west scream give China a chance.
Who are you talking about here? The "flower children" are pretty much screaming at China in the name of a Free Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The "give China a chance" crowd are the über corporatist/capitalists.
If DUI checks are such an horrible imposition on liberty, then isn't having to have a driver's license to drive on the roads equally offensive to freedom? After all, shouldn't you be allowed to drive whatever vehicle you like, anywhere you like, without any kind of licensing? To believe otherwise would be sacrificing freedom for safety.
If it was effective, drunk driving deaths would no longer - as you put it - still be killing about a 9/11 worth of Americans every couple months since the 1960's.
If what was effective? The almost complete lack of enforcement of road laws in the US? You're right, that hasn't worked. Which is why we should start enforcing the laws more thoroughly.
If there is no physical constraint on providing health care supply, then why, with such high prices, are there not massive numbers of people flocking to provide new health care services?
I never said there weren't physical constraints on health care. You were the one who claimed that roads did not exhibit scarcity, despite all evidence to the contrary.
There are, however, other constraints that prevent health care supply from increasing.
As there are with roads, but for some reason, you think that roads are not constrained by supply.
Simply changing the laws so that the existing supply must service more people without providing a means to increase the available supply will not increase quality of service or reduce prices; it will instead decrease the quality and/or increase prices.
Well, then take measures to increase supply. This is much easier to do with health care than it is with roads. The whole idea of health care reform is to increase supply, so I'm not sure what your problem is.
WTF? I started with nothing in a 3rd world country, don't tell me about "privileged". I have earned every cent I've ever made by working for it.
You say that, but how do we know that's true?
You people can call me a sociopath, but stealing is wrong no matter how you spin it.
How is receiving emergency care in a hospital equivalent to "stealing"? Is a 12-year-old child a thief because she skips along a footpath paid for by taxes, even though she has never paid a cent in taxes in her entire life?
A real man pays his own way and stands on his own two feet.
So, what do women and children do?
I'm not "letting" anyone die.
But you said in your post that anybody who is uninsured should be turned away from hospitals. This necessarily results in people dying. Or did you not mean what you wrote?
You're making the mistake of presuming that if government doesn't provide, everyone will just die.
I never said that, nor did anybody else in this thread.
There's no reason modern consoles couldn't have those controls, as they have USB inputs that support keyboards, joystickes, cameras, etc. But you answered your own question: it's a niche genre, so Flight Sims tends to only be made for more specialized platforms.
Unfortunately most of the gamer press is mostly oblivious/uninterested in sims, which means the punters are so poorly informed they still think the one console or the other is the bees knees (understandable if you have the gaming budget of a teen).
This is just a non-sequitur. "Most of the gamer press" is not interested in flight simulators, because most gamers are not interested in flight simulators. Shocking News at 11.
Why would the "punters" care if consoles don't do flight sims if they aren't interested in flight simulators in the first place? They aren't really games to begin with.
Personally, flight simulators are one of my favourite genres of electronic occupation, but I don't understand your argument. Why should we be worried about console gamers caring about niche non-gaming activities?
He never suggested we let people die in the street. He just said that he believes charities do a much better job than the government.
Well, what other conclusion could one draw from saying that all uninsured people should be turned away from hospitals?
Who else is going to deal with them? Some fantasy charity with the medical resources of a hospital is going to be waiting outside every hospital to take them in? I don't think so.
Most people dying in the street do so willingly because they refuse to give up drinking and drugs (which private charities refuse to support).
I don't think you understand what the word "willingly" means. In any case, why should we just discard people who have substance abuse problems?
Now, even accepting the argument that the homeless and drug addicts are worthless people who don;t deserve emergency care - the argument was that ALL non-insured should be turned away. What about a hard-working non-addict who doesn't happen to have insurance, but gets shot or stabbed during a mugging? Tough shit for them?
The argument being made is that people without health insurance don't deserve emergency care. How is that not malicious and lacking in compassion? How does it not imply letting people die in the streets?
What good is a system that is "available to everyone" if there is simply insufficient resource to provide all the desired services?
You mean like roads? Never seen the traffic jams in major cities like New York or Los Angeles?
Roads exhibit scarcity every day, and it's a problem that'e even harder to solve. Because of the limitations of physical space vs. human labor, it's much easier to provide all the health care everybody wants than it is all the roads that everybody wants.
He does pay his way because the people who make the roads have set an amount that he should contribute each year in the form of taxes and he pays that in order to use the roads. So he is paying exactly what the road makers tell him he should pay.
So, why is that OK for roads, but not for hospitals and health care?
No they shouldn't. It isn't his fault that they chose a different job that pays or is worth less than what he gets paid to do.
They chose? People at the bottom of the socio-economic scale don't have a lot of choice in jobs. And in fact, it might be partly his fault for people's lack of job opportunities depending on how he votes, etc.
Not everything is even or the same. People are not the same. I don't know where this idea came from that somehow everyone has to be made the same.
I never suggested everybody needs to be made the same. Just that we shouldn't be so cruel as to let people die in the street if they can't afford insurance. I'm not sure where you are getting this idea that I think people should be "made the same" from.
You are not entitled to pull the rich down and steal from them because you think they make too much. They took huge risks that you wouldn't take.
Bullshit. Many rich people have never taken a risk in their lives. Did Paris Hilton work really hard and take risks to get all of her money? Also, it's generally the poorer workers who help make the rich people's fortune.
We should hold the parents of the kid responsible who decided to have a kid and couldn't afford all the costs of actually having a kid.
So what do we do when the parent is dead or otherwise can't take responsibility? Pointing fingers and blaming people isn't going to save the problem.
Orphans have insurance or get medical care from private charities and doctors who donate their services to charity run orphanages.
So, that's going to solve all the problem, private charities? It doesn't appear to be working very well.
It is not compassion when you steal from me by threat of violence, forcing me to pay for you or your kids when I may or may not want to do that.
Oh, threat of violence. That's funny. You live quite comfortably isolated from the actual threat of violence, while the poor deal with it as a daily threat. By "threat of violence" you actually mean "a few dollars of my taxes."
The government has never been able to do anything better than what the private sector does.
Except for the roads, the fire departments, health services, etc? Do you know what happened when fire departments were privately-run? They went around starting fires to get business. Public health services seem to do quite well outside the US, lowering costs for everybody.
We can take care of ourselves and each other, if the government would just get out of the way.
So, how is government stopping people from doing that now? It's pretty clear that people don't always take care of themselves or others. How is eliminating government services going to magically change that?
Instead the government wants to inject itself in to every aspect of our lives. We have allowed a giant nanny state to develop.
I never said anything about supporting a giant nanny state, or government in all aspects of our lives. I just suggested that we shouldn't let people die in the street, or deny them care when in desperate need. Hardly a radical Statist proposition.
We absolutely can take care of ourselves and do it far better than the government ever possibly could. We don't need the government to do charity or tell us to do charity
There's your problem - the government is supposed to be of the people and for the people. It is supposed to be a part of the "we" you are referring to. But people have become so distanced from the ideas of governance that they have allowed it to become an alien entity.
Ultimately, you're just being selfish and whining about money. But even that is counter-productive, because it would cost a lot more if we did let society fall apart and people die in the streets. Wouldn't you rather pay a lower amount in preventative action to avoid the collapse of society? It's going to be hard to run that business when there's death, disease and looting in the streets.
The summary does not state that this is what the listed companies are doing; it states that this is what OSI is worried they're doing. It's a small but critical difference. And the linked OSI statement explains quite succinctly why they're worried about this.
Except that it doesn't state any actual basis for worrying that the group would be used to "attack open source." And even then, that is not said in the linked article, you have to link back to the original statement from OSI to read anything about that - which raises the question; why did slashdot link to an intermediary, rather than the statement itself?
So, the children of people who make this mistake, should be just thrown in the trash, because of the mistakes of their parents?
Notice also that I mentioned orphans. Rich people can die and leave behind children too. Aside from death, people who currently can afford kids may run into financial misfortune.
Call me heartless, but if you want cover, work hard for it like I do.
What evidence do we have that you actually "work hard"? You might have just been lucky and/or privileged. I'd wager that there are people who work much harder than you do, but don't get paid enough to afford decent insurance. By your logic, shouldn't they be more entitled to insurance, because they work harder than you?
Or what about children who belong to parents who can't afford insurance (or are orphans). Should we just let them die and suffer because a 12-year-old didn't save enough money from their paper route to pay for insurance?
I guess the moral of your story is that we should all just worship the insurance companies, and let them control people's lives. Screw compassion or human dignity, it's all about making a buck.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what's worse, having a web SSO service offered by a for-profit, or having one operated by the government.
Government outsourcing it to the lowest bidding for-profit company, who then makes up the profit margins by advertising and selling your personal info?
Microsoft issued me a Passport [passport.net] in about 1995.
Oh, so you were the one who signed up for that service! Give this man a complimentary lei and a beverage in a coconut.
It won't become the internet's SSO, simply because it requires way too many companies to willingly put way too much power into the hands of a partner that probably does not have their interests at heart.
So, what happens when all those Facebook junkies (basically everybody under 25yo) are running the companies? I think they'd be more than happy to give too much power to their best friend, Facebook. Just as companies are more than willing to give to much power to their best friend today, Google, as they did in the past with their old best friend Microsoft (and before that IBM and so forth).
The fact that you cite Microsoft is hilarious - because "too many companies putting way too much power into the hands of a partner who doesn't have their best interests at heart" is exactly how Microsoft grew to be so big in the first place. Don't think it can't happen again. In fact, the corporate-driven world we live in basically guarantees it will happen repeatedly.
what is wrong for facebook.
I, for one am happy that pictures from my teenage years will be archived.
And yes I am a teenager.. yeah typical facebook user... suck on that.
Ahh, the wisdom, careful planning and immaculate grammar of youth.
If they can give their kit a mid-life kicker with some more memory or swapping in some faster CPUs,
That's just stupid. Simply "dropping in" a faster CPU doesn't do all that much, because you keep the same bus speeds on the motherboard that limit bandwidth. As for memory, haven't you noticed that buying older, slower memory tends to be more expensive than buying the new faster memory, because the old stuff is no longer in production?
Aside from those factors, there's the added labor in installing those components and testing them. On top of all that, most mass-market desktops that are used in this space aren't particularly upgrade-friendly when it comes to internal components.
She denies that their service creates a two-tier internet, then goes on to describe their service which, is to create a two-tier internet. Nice.
Your problem is that you're mistakenly thinking of them as "tiers." That's not the case. It's more like two different levels of service.
"BT's Content Connect, a service which many have accused of threatening net neutrality, has apparently launched, although it is unknown whether or not any ISPs have bought or are planning to buy it yet
Why would ISPs have to pay to use Bittorrent? Isn't it free and Open Source?
This just isn't a plausible claim. As if "anonymous reader" has a girlfriend. Now I've heard everything.
Read through a number of postings here. You will find loads of ppl defending China's actions
OK, so what makes them like flower children? I'm not sure you know what you mean by the term. Who do you think they represent?
And yet, of the flower childs running around the west scream give China a chance.
Who are you talking about here? The "flower children" are pretty much screaming at China in the name of a Free Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The "give China a chance" crowd are the über corporatist/capitalists.
If DUI checks are such an horrible imposition on liberty, then isn't having to have a driver's license to drive on the roads equally offensive to freedom? After all, shouldn't you be allowed to drive whatever vehicle you like, anywhere you like, without any kind of licensing? To believe otherwise would be sacrificing freedom for safety.
If it was effective, drunk driving deaths would no longer - as you put it - still be killing about a 9/11 worth of Americans every couple months since the 1960's.
If what was effective? The almost complete lack of enforcement of road laws in the US? You're right, that hasn't worked. Which is why we should start enforcing the laws more thoroughly.
If there is no physical constraint on providing health care supply, then why, with such high prices, are there not massive numbers of people flocking to provide new health care services?
I never said there weren't physical constraints on health care. You were the one who claimed that roads did not exhibit scarcity, despite all evidence to the contrary.
There are, however, other constraints that prevent health care supply from increasing.
As there are with roads, but for some reason, you think that roads are not constrained by supply.
Simply changing the laws so that the existing supply must service more people without providing a means to increase the available supply will not increase quality of service or reduce prices; it will instead decrease the quality and/or increase prices.
Well, then take measures to increase supply. This is much easier to do with health care than it is with roads. The whole idea of health care reform is to increase supply, so I'm not sure what your problem is.
WTF? I started with nothing in a 3rd world country, don't tell me about "privileged". I have earned every cent I've ever made by working for it.
You say that, but how do we know that's true?
You people can call me a sociopath, but stealing is wrong no matter how you spin it.
How is receiving emergency care in a hospital equivalent to "stealing"? Is a 12-year-old child a thief because she skips along a footpath paid for by taxes, even though she has never paid a cent in taxes in her entire life?
A real man pays his own way and stands on his own two feet.
So, what do women and children do?
I'm not "letting" anyone die.
But you said in your post that anybody who is uninsured should be turned away from hospitals. This necessarily results in people dying. Or did you not mean what you wrote?
You're making the mistake of presuming that if government doesn't provide, everyone will just die.
I never said that, nor did anybody else in this thread.
Most gamers don't know about flight simulators because the press doesn't report it thinking people aren't interested
Flight Simulators aren't games, so why would the gaming press report on them?
which is why all the great flight sims are written by Russian companies rather than US ones.
Umm, X-Plane? A 100% American product.
There's no reason modern consoles couldn't have those controls, as they have USB inputs that support keyboards, joystickes, cameras, etc. But you answered your own question: it's a niche genre, so Flight Sims tends to only be made for more specialized platforms.
Unfortunately most of the gamer press is mostly oblivious/uninterested in sims, which means the punters are so poorly informed they still think the one console or the other is the bees knees (understandable if you have the gaming budget of a teen).
This is just a non-sequitur. "Most of the gamer press" is not interested in flight simulators, because most gamers are not interested in flight simulators. Shocking News at 11.
Why would the "punters" care if consoles don't do flight sims if they aren't interested in flight simulators in the first place? They aren't really games to begin with.
Personally, flight simulators are one of my favourite genres of electronic occupation, but I don't understand your argument. Why should we be worried about console gamers caring about niche non-gaming activities?
Which is the lessor evil depends on your needs,
Well, since neither Quicktime or iTunes is leased to you, I guess that means neither is a lessor evil.
He never suggested we let people die in the street. He just said that he believes charities do a much better job than the government.
Well, what other conclusion could one draw from saying that all uninsured people should be turned away from hospitals?
Who else is going to deal with them? Some fantasy charity with the medical resources of a hospital is going to be waiting outside every hospital to take them in? I don't think so.
Most people dying in the street do so willingly because they refuse to give up drinking and drugs (which private charities refuse to support).
I don't think you understand what the word "willingly" means. In any case, why should we just discard people who have substance abuse problems?
Now, even accepting the argument that the homeless and drug addicts are worthless people who don;t deserve emergency care - the argument was that ALL non-insured should be turned away. What about a hard-working non-addict who doesn't happen to have insurance, but gets shot or stabbed during a mugging? Tough shit for them?
The argument being made is that people without health insurance don't deserve emergency care. How is that not malicious and lacking in compassion? How does it not imply letting people die in the streets?
What good is a system that is "available to everyone" if there is simply insufficient resource to provide all the desired services?
You mean like roads? Never seen the traffic jams in major cities like New York or Los Angeles?
Roads exhibit scarcity every day, and it's a problem that'e even harder to solve. Because of the limitations of physical space vs. human labor, it's much easier to provide all the health care everybody wants than it is all the roads that everybody wants.
He does pay his way because the people who make the roads have set an amount that he should contribute each year in the form of taxes and he pays that in order to use the roads. So he is paying exactly what the road makers tell him he should pay.
So, why is that OK for roads, but not for hospitals and health care?
No they shouldn't. It isn't his fault that they chose a different job that pays or is worth less than what he gets paid to do.
They chose? People at the bottom of the socio-economic scale don't have a lot of choice in jobs. And in fact, it might be partly his fault for people's lack of job opportunities depending on how he votes, etc.
Not everything is even or the same. People are not the same. I don't know where this idea came from that somehow everyone has to be made the same.
I never suggested everybody needs to be made the same. Just that we shouldn't be so cruel as to let people die in the street if they can't afford insurance. I'm not sure where you are getting this idea that I think people should be "made the same" from.
You are not entitled to pull the rich down and steal from them because you think they make too much. They took huge risks that you wouldn't take.
Bullshit. Many rich people have never taken a risk in their lives. Did Paris Hilton work really hard and take risks to get all of her money? Also, it's generally the poorer workers who help make the rich people's fortune.
We should hold the parents of the kid responsible who decided to have a kid and couldn't afford all the costs of actually having a kid.
So what do we do when the parent is dead or otherwise can't take responsibility? Pointing fingers and blaming people isn't going to save the problem.
Orphans have insurance or get medical care from private charities and doctors who donate their services to charity run orphanages.
So, that's going to solve all the problem, private charities? It doesn't appear to be working very well.
It is not compassion when you steal from me by threat of violence, forcing me to pay for you or your kids when I may or may not want to do that.
Oh, threat of violence. That's funny. You live quite comfortably isolated from the actual threat of violence, while the poor deal with it as a daily threat. By "threat of violence" you actually mean "a few dollars of my taxes."
The government has never been able to do anything better than what the private sector does.
Except for the roads, the fire departments, health services, etc? Do you know what happened when fire departments were privately-run? They went around starting fires to get business. Public health services seem to do quite well outside the US, lowering costs for everybody.
We can take care of ourselves and each other, if the government would just get out of the way.
So, how is government stopping people from doing that now? It's pretty clear that people don't always take care of themselves or others. How is eliminating government services going to magically change that?
Instead the government wants to inject itself in to every aspect of our lives. We have allowed a giant nanny state to develop.
I never said anything about supporting a giant nanny state, or government in all aspects of our lives. I just suggested that we shouldn't let people die in the street, or deny them care when in desperate need. Hardly a radical Statist proposition.
We absolutely can take care of ourselves and do it far better than the government ever possibly could. We don't need the government to do charity or tell us to do charity
There's your problem - the government is supposed to be of the people and for the people. It is supposed to be a part of the "we" you are referring to. But people have become so distanced from the ideas of governance that they have allowed it to become an alien entity.
Ultimately, you're just being selfish and whining about money. But even that is counter-productive, because it would cost a lot more if we did let society fall apart and people die in the streets. Wouldn't you rather pay a lower amount in preventative action to avoid the collapse of society? It's going to be hard to run that business when there's death, disease and looting in the streets.
The summary does not state that this is what the listed companies are doing; it states that this is what OSI is worried they're doing. It's a small but critical difference. And the linked OSI statement explains quite succinctly why they're worried about this.
Except that it doesn't state any actual basis for worrying that the group would be used to "attack open source." And even then, that is not said in the linked article, you have to link back to the original statement from OSI to read anything about that - which raises the question; why did slashdot link to an intermediary, rather than the statement itself?
"...is establishing a patent troll called CPTN to attack open source software..."
As they say in the fact verification industry, [citation needed].
So, the children of people who make this mistake, should be just thrown in the trash, because of the mistakes of their parents?
Notice also that I mentioned orphans. Rich people can die and leave behind children too. Aside from death, people who currently can afford kids may run into financial misfortune.
Call me heartless, but if you want cover, work hard for it like I do.
What evidence do we have that you actually "work hard"? You might have just been lucky and/or privileged. I'd wager that there are people who work much harder than you do, but don't get paid enough to afford decent insurance. By your logic, shouldn't they be more entitled to insurance, because they work harder than you?
Or what about children who belong to parents who can't afford insurance (or are orphans). Should we just let them die and suffer because a 12-year-old didn't save enough money from their paper route to pay for insurance?
I guess the moral of your story is that we should all just worship the insurance companies, and let them control people's lives. Screw compassion or human dignity, it's all about making a buck.