Perhaps the framers of the U.S. constitution should have used the approach of the British, namely: Rather than enumerating your rights, everything is considered legal except for when a law makes something illegal.
They did. The bill of rights was merely a list of rights that the founders deemed so important that even the government couldn't make them illegal.
You have to be careful with the attitude that we have rights that aren't innumerated in the constitution because pragmatically anyone can misconstrue anything into a right (ie, I have a right to kill my kids because, as my father used to say, "I brought you into this world and I can take you out!"). The vehicle that was supposed to prevent congress from making laws against rights was voting them out of office. If a majority of people want everyone to have a right to a certain amount of privacy, than they shouldn't vote for people that would vote for those kinds of laws. Now you can argue how effective this vehicle is, but it doesn't change how the system was set up to work.
1. Requires line-of-sight to control them. This requires that a man often has to be in enemy territory in order for it to be useful.
2. Too small for larger payloads. This restricts their use to low-end optical cameras.
3. Fly close to the ground. This increases the likelyhood of them being seen by the enemy though being invisible would help in this case.
4. As mentioned above, getting a real-time feed of the cameras.
While it's a lot easier and cheaper for smaller companies to get into the micro-uav industry, it's the large UAVs that are the most practical. They can be controlled by sat links from anywhere in the world. They can broadcast the imagery over the same links to anywhere in the world from a small groundstation or the President's desk. They can carry large payloads allowing multi-spectrum cameras with super high resolution or Synthetic Aperature Radars (SAR) or even hell-fire missiles. They also can fly for 24 hours at a time from heights of 30,000 feet which essentially make them every bit as invisible as this micro-uav. In the end, it's the large UAVs like the Predator that are making the biggest difference in military actions as well as law enforcement and border control.
After being rear-ended on I-5 in San Diego, the crumple zone in the rear of my car saved my kids from any harm. The trunk was completely destroyed, yet the rear passenger seat where my 2 toddlers were sitting in car seats was completely unchanged. I have to assume that there's a little more to it all than "propaganda of a Safety-Certification coporations profitting from advertising and increasin (sic) the value of a vessel for participating in their 'tests.'"
Spain has recently voted in compulsory copyright licensing, levying a tax on all blank media. This includes cd-r, dvd-r, flash media, printers, scanners, cell phones, everything. The tax will be collected by the government and 'given to the copyright holder.
Fine, then you can't hassle me when I copy media. If I copy a CD to a taxed blank then my obligation to the content provider has been satisfied. You can't have it both ways.
Any story mentioning Microsoft that gets posted on Slashdot:).
Seriously, when this sites front page has several stories about companies abusing their power every single day, isn't it a bit pointless to ask for links to examples of such abuses ?
I was looking for a link where the "invisible hand" has been proven wrong so many times. I realize that companies abuse power but this in no way "proves" the invisible hand has been proven wrong. I can point to whole economies in the world based on free market ideas and their success as indication that the "invisible hand" has a lot of support for it.
It simply is not true - time and again the most immoral, sociopathic and disruptive behavior will yield most personal gain. Don't forget that one purpose - perhaps the most important one - of a corporation is to shield its owners from liability; surely there would be no reason for such a shield if moral behavior would be the most effective way of making money on a free market ?
I can entertain arguments that the structure and the laws concerning corporations is detrimental to society. But this has nothing to do with the free market. Corporations are merely a legal construct. If the current form of this legal construct is bad for the economy and society as a whole, then it needs to be changed but, again, it has nothing to do with "free market" theories in general, just specific applications of them.
You need government to stop people from killing each other and looting the corpses, first and foremost. Then you need the government to provide the level of cooperation required to build the infrastructure to support a large enough population that an economy beyond simple tribal gift system can evolve. Thirdly, you need the government to keep any other governments from killing you and looting the corpse. Fourthly, you need the government to stop guilds, local influential people and such from regulating all commerce. And finally you need the government to make money, since without it the logistics of trading become a nightmare - and no, you can't simply say "I accept only gold", since you'll be spending too much time verifying that the customer isn't paying with painted rocks; you need a central agency that can (forcibly) stop people from counterfeiting whatever it is you're using as tokens of exchange.
Agreed. Government has a lot of roles including law and order and facilitating or simplifying trade. I was just giving a couple of examples of very important things the government does to enable a free market. You gave some more.
The whole concept of "free market" is artificial. In no way is it "natural" to humankind; a mixture of gift economy and communism is (in the sense that that's what you get in a society without a central government of any kind). "Free market" is an artificial construct meant to handle logistics of distribution and production of non-critical goods so the government can concentrate to securing the production and distribution of critical ones; every point of it that isn't regulated and therefore supported (forced to stay in proper alignment) by laws is a failure point; there is no "natural free market" that would be protected by laws, it is entirely constructed by them. Somehow, it has become a substitute for religion for this age. Consequently, we have people chanting "the market will take care of it" and closing their eyes from the possibility that it won't; ironically, some of these same people will then turn around and laugh at religious people for believing in an invisible force.
You could be right that lacking a strong central government, other kinds of economies are more natural. But that doesn't negate that a free market is a natural way to do things when you do have a strong central government keeping law and order as well as enforcing contracts and regulating public resources and facilitating trad
The whole concept of an "invisible hand" has been proven wrong so many times that it's absurd how many people still seem to cling to it like a poor substitute for a religion.
Links?
The free market has its problems and the free market can't exist without a government in place. Economics 101 says that you at least need a government to enforce contracts or else a free market can not exist. There are also certain market failures that require government regulation such as natural monopolies and the regulation of public resources (ie open water fishing).
The fact of the matter is, if AOL treats customers badly, there are too many other choices (for a lot less money) that people will naturally move to. It's as simple as that. This isn't about the invisible hand. This is about competition and alternatives. As long as there are lots of alternatives, there is no need for the government to come in with their guns and force the matter. People will just choose other alternatives until AOL gets a clue and changes its ways or goes out of business. It's not rocket surgery.
The free market does have several potential failure points where it is appropriate for government to step in. Monopolies are one of them. Utilities are a prime example of this and they're heavily regulated by the government. Then there are companies that gain their monopoly by running their business and/or having a better product than their competitors. These companies have special rules they have to play by that regular companies don't with potential serious consequences if they don't. That's also a form of government regulation.
The point is, even a monopoly can be toppled by a competitor. In fact, the more money a monopolistic company makes, the more incentive there is for a competitor to break down the barriers to entry and compete in the space. That's a natural market force. We can see that in areas that were traditionally considered monopolies. Cable and telephone have become competitors of each other and other technologies have entered the market to compete in certain spaces like sattelite and cellular. WiMax also has a huge potential to compete within this space as well. Why do they bother trying to compete in these markets? Because there's money to be made there.
But this is beside the point of my original post. The fact is AOL is not a monopoly and are subject to market forces. There is no need for the government at gun point (because, indirectly, every time the government forces anyone to do anything, it's at gunpoint) to make AOL's customer service agents to be nicer because regular people will just decide that they'd rather get their internet from some other company. Who in their right mind would prefer an organization to use brute force when a much more natural process will take care of it anyway?
The difference is that governments have guns to make you do things. Corporations do not. As for forcing companies to behave: How is AOL doing financially right now? I think the market will make them behave just fine.
he should have cooperated with the AOL rep and had his account settled in less than 5 minutes
I had an AOL account for a short time (I was trying to get a free iPod, of course). I went to cancel it after the free trial. I'm a nice guy and don't like to cause problems so I cooperated with the AOL rep. Let me tell you, it didn't take less than 5 minutes. They give you countless offers and reasons to remain a customer and you have to have a dang good reason to tell them why don't want to take advantage of all the "benefits" of remaining a customer because they'll try to convince you that you're wrong. It really wasn't until I started taking a firm tone about cancelling the account that the rep actually started down the path of cancelling it.
The trouble I had can't be a coincidence. I think they're trained to do this very thing. The real crock is that the poor rep got fired for probably doing exactly what he was trained to do just because of the press coverage.
My AV has never found a virus as long as I've had it and it didn't find anything on the computer the first time it scanned after years of not having anything. No I didn't have a firewall (router or software) until recently either. The easiest AV is simple common sense.
I hadn't run an anti-virus for years. Finally a couple of years ago I broke down and got it just for the off chance I miss something. The first time it scanned, it didn't find a thing. No Firewall. Nothing.
It's easy. Don't open executables in e-mails. Don't view attachments from people you don't know. Don't go to shady sites.
What would you do if you went into work one day, opened your browswer and/. was down because they couldn't afford their ISP bill this month because everyone blocked all the ads and they had no income?
In TFA it didn't say he thought innovation was dead. He was merely thinking that innovation is much more incremental now than it was in the past. He may be right or he may be wrong but he has a point. Innovation always becomes more incremental as the knowledge matures. That's the trouble with predictions. You don't know if they're true until later and people will either say a) What a visionary person or b) What a crackpot.
1. Do you want to pay $199 for an operating system or you prefer to pay $0?
2. Do you want to have control over your computer or do you want your computer to control you?
3. Do you want to depend on a company (if it goes bankrupt or just is not interested to upgrade the *program: example Internet Exploder)?
4. Do you want a system that doesn't get slower in time if you install and remove programs?
5. Do you want a system that's virtualy virus/worm free?
If it's harder or more inconvenient to use, they don't want these things. They'd much prefer the computer to control them if it meant that they could do it more easily.
I have family that have spent a long time just learning what they currently know how to do now (which is not much). The thought of having to start over would send them over the edge. These are the average users that Linux would have to appeal to.
If you say so. Star Office was unusable on my Celeron 350 (~400 MB RAM) when I first tried it out in 2001. I immediately went back to Office 2000. I'm glad I have a much better computer now or else Open Office 2 would be unusable now.
RTFA. O'Reilly does more than just throw out buzzwords. The article actually goes point by point explaining what is meant. This was just the summary at the end of the article. I know it's a lot to ask to actually read before comment, but it might help.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to be careful with the attitude that we have rights that aren't innumerated in the constitution because pragmatically anyone can misconstrue anything into a right (ie, I have a right to kill my kids because, as my father used to say, "I brought you into this world and I can take you out!"). The vehicle that was supposed to prevent congress from making laws against rights was voting them out of office. If a majority of people want everyone to have a right to a certain amount of privacy, than they shouldn't vote for people that would vote for those kinds of laws. Now you can argue how effective this vehicle is, but it doesn't change how the system was set up to work.
The biggest problems of small and micro-UAVs are:
1. Requires line-of-sight to control them. This requires that a man often has to be in enemy territory in order for it to be useful.
2. Too small for larger payloads. This restricts their use to low-end optical cameras.
3. Fly close to the ground. This increases the likelyhood of them being seen by the enemy though being invisible would help in this case.
4. As mentioned above, getting a real-time feed of the cameras.
While it's a lot easier and cheaper for smaller companies to get into the micro-uav industry, it's the large UAVs that are the most practical. They can be controlled by sat links from anywhere in the world. They can broadcast the imagery over the same links to anywhere in the world from a small groundstation or the President's desk. They can carry large payloads allowing multi-spectrum cameras with super high resolution or Synthetic Aperature Radars (SAR) or even hell-fire missiles. They also can fly for 24 hours at a time from heights of 30,000 feet which essentially make them every bit as invisible as this micro-uav. In the end, it's the large UAVs like the Predator that are making the biggest difference in military actions as well as law enforcement and border control.
After being rear-ended on I-5 in San Diego, the crumple zone in the rear of my car saved my kids from any harm. The trunk was completely destroyed, yet the rear passenger seat where my 2 toddlers were sitting in car seats was completely unchanged. I have to assume that there's a little more to it all than "propaganda of a Safety-Certification coporations profitting from advertising and increasin (sic) the value of a vessel for participating in their 'tests.'"
On /. leaning to the right is definately not encouraged.
Right On! But sorry, no mod points today.
Kinda like .NET several years ago. Things were tagged with the .NET in the name when it had nothing to do with .NET framework.
I was looking for a link where the "invisible hand" has been proven wrong so many times. I realize that companies abuse power but this in no way "proves" the invisible hand has been proven wrong. I can point to whole economies in the world based on free market ideas and their success as indication that the "invisible hand" has a lot of support for it.
I can entertain arguments that the structure and the laws concerning corporations is detrimental to society. But this has nothing to do with the free market. Corporations are merely a legal construct. If the current form of this legal construct is bad for the economy and society as a whole, then it needs to be changed but, again, it has nothing to do with "free market" theories in general, just specific applications of them.
Agreed. Government has a lot of roles including law and order and facilitating or simplifying trade. I was just giving a couple of examples of very important things the government does to enable a free market. You gave some more.
You could be right that lacking a strong central government, other kinds of economies are more natural. But that doesn't negate that a free market is a natural way to do things when you do have a strong central government keeping law and order as well as enforcing contracts and regulating public resources and facilitating trad
The free market has its problems and the free market can't exist without a government in place. Economics 101 says that you at least need a government to enforce contracts or else a free market can not exist. There are also certain market failures that require government regulation such as natural monopolies and the regulation of public resources (ie open water fishing).
The fact of the matter is, if AOL treats customers badly, there are too many other choices (for a lot less money) that people will naturally move to. It's as simple as that. This isn't about the invisible hand. This is about competition and alternatives. As long as there are lots of alternatives, there is no need for the government to come in with their guns and force the matter. People will just choose other alternatives until AOL gets a clue and changes its ways or goes out of business. It's not rocket surgery.
The free market does have several potential failure points where it is appropriate for government to step in. Monopolies are one of them. Utilities are a prime example of this and they're heavily regulated by the government. Then there are companies that gain their monopoly by running their business and/or having a better product than their competitors. These companies have special rules they have to play by that regular companies don't with potential serious consequences if they don't. That's also a form of government regulation.
The point is, even a monopoly can be toppled by a competitor. In fact, the more money a monopolistic company makes, the more incentive there is for a competitor to break down the barriers to entry and compete in the space. That's a natural market force. We can see that in areas that were traditionally considered monopolies. Cable and telephone have become competitors of each other and other technologies have entered the market to compete in certain spaces like sattelite and cellular. WiMax also has a huge potential to compete within this space as well. Why do they bother trying to compete in these markets? Because there's money to be made there.
But this is beside the point of my original post. The fact is AOL is not a monopoly and are subject to market forces. There is no need for the government at gun point (because, indirectly, every time the government forces anyone to do anything, it's at gunpoint) to make AOL's customer service agents to be nicer because regular people will just decide that they'd rather get their internet from some other company. Who in their right mind would prefer an organization to use brute force when a much more natural process will take care of it anyway?
The difference is that governments have guns to make you do things. Corporations do not. As for forcing companies to behave: How is AOL doing financially right now? I think the market will make them behave just fine.
The trouble I had can't be a coincidence. I think they're trained to do this very thing. The real crock is that the poor rep got fired for probably doing exactly what he was trained to do just because of the press coverage.
My AV has never found a virus as long as I've had it and it didn't find anything on the computer the first time it scanned after years of not having anything. No I didn't have a firewall (router or software) until recently either. The easiest AV is simple common sense.
I hadn't run an anti-virus for years. Finally a couple of years ago I broke down and got it just for the off chance I miss something. The first time it scanned, it didn't find a thing. No Firewall. Nothing.
It's easy. Don't open executables in e-mails. Don't view attachments from people you don't know. Don't go to shady sites.
I'd mod you up funny! Some people must not know their Pink Floyd lyrics.
I-gor, is that you?
In TFA it didn't say he thought innovation was dead. He was merely thinking that innovation is much more incremental now than it was in the past. He may be right or he may be wrong but he has a point. Innovation always becomes more incremental as the knowledge matures. That's the trouble with predictions. You don't know if they're true until later and people will either say a) What a visionary person or b) What a crackpot.
Oddly, it's in Cuba.
1. Do you want to pay $199 for an operating system or you prefer to pay $0?
2. Do you want to have control over your computer or do you want your computer to control you?
3. Do you want to depend on a company (if it goes bankrupt or just is not interested to upgrade the *program: example Internet Exploder)?
4. Do you want a system that doesn't get slower in time if you install and remove programs?
5. Do you want a system that's virtualy virus/worm free?
If it's harder or more inconvenient to use, they don't want these things. They'd much prefer the computer to control them if it meant that they could do it more easily.
I have family that have spent a long time just learning what they currently know how to do now (which is not much). The thought of having to start over would send them over the edge. These are the average users that Linux would have to appeal to.
If you say so. Star Office was unusable on my Celeron 350 (~400 MB RAM) when I first tried it out in 2001. I immediately went back to Office 2000. I'm glad I have a much better computer now or else Open Office 2 would be unusable now.
RTFA. O'Reilly does more than just throw out buzzwords. The article actually goes point by point explaining what is meant. This was just the summary at the end of the article. I know it's a lot to ask to actually read before comment, but it might help.
RTFA. Each point is explained.