This is an often repeated lie. The easiest way to add more bidirectional infrastructure is to just scale it up the way it was designed to be scaled. It's actually cheaper to add bandwidth than to implement all these throttling and traffic shaping technologies. I wish people didn't believe this stuff.
I bet you think a responsible budget looks like more tax cuts for those who already don't pay much in taxes - guys that sit on the corporate board of Enron and AIG.
... well Congress and the judicial branch - that's the whole idea behind checks and balances. The Executive branch is expected to step too far, and the other branches are supposed to check it. Same for the other branches. That's kind of how it works.
This is a more overt (and therefor testable) claim than Bush ever made. I hope it does get tested in court (and from what I understand, EFF is on the job), and gets smacked down. That could actually be a way to pass judgment on the idea of the the unitary executive and smack that down without dredging up all the garbage from the Bush years - which Obama's team is on record for not wanting to do.
I think they are wrong to pursue this course, regardless of their intentions (which could be hostile to the constitution for all I know, though I do doubt that at this point), and also for not holding Bush's team accountable - even if it is more appropriate for Congress to do it. In a way, it's asking for the unitary executive, to expect the administration to fix everything, I suppose. It isn't really their job in this case, it's Congress./stream of thought.
How about those supporters (like me) who feel no need to rationalize. Who really thinks Obama is a leftist? Maybe the hippie generation, but they can't tell their asses from their elbows.
I for one, got exactly what I wanted. I thoughtful man who will make hard desicions based on the actual evidence, and then leadn on those decisions - even when he disagrees with me on one or two things.
I can't see how that's anything like Bush.
On the particular issue - some CEO at a company decided it was better to go along with a request from the President of the United States, because the President of the United States said it was a security matter, and we might be attacked. That CEO basically fell for the same crap that all those voters fell for when they elected Bush the second time (raise your hand if you think a CEO is more intelligent than the average voter - if you raised your hand, punch yourself in the face). And you all want to just punish the "corporation" (a legal document) for it.
I don't get this lack of consideration. Everyone needs to grow a little.
And for the record, I think most American CEOs are piles of overpaid crap - but in the one instance where the company did something because they were asked by the sitting president to do so, I don't think we should be punishing him for that (punish him for ripping off share holders instead, that's probably better). I'd be happy to throw the Bush administration in Gitmo though. For damn sure.
It was Bush's (et al) leadership that lead to this garbage. Hold him accountable.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy do have a common thread - the rules of the world, which both are usually and ultimately about, are consistent. Whether the rules try to adhere to current scientific theory (regardless of whether it does turn out to be possible in real life) or some magical rule set, the world is judged on how well the characters play by the rule set.
Of course it's also possible to use Sci-Fi or Fantasy as a setting to do drama, instead of as a genre. Battlestar Galactica did character driven drama story archs in a Sci-Fi setting. It did ultimately fail the Sci-Fi test with it's abysmal "because God said so" ending. *grumbles*
Bankruptcy was not an option for these companies, like AIG, because the pose a risk to the entire system if they go down so fast. That's what happens when you let a company get too big (especially one in the financial markets). They should be allowed to fail, lose all their money, and then many of them should go to jail. The problem is, most of what they did was legal, because they lobbied the government in the late 90s, to get rules removed that kept them from getting "too big to fail" - and when those rules were removed, they did in fact create the mess we have now. The markets as it turns out, don't self correct, until it's too late, and huge companies can actually be in a position to threaten the entire system, and the individuals in it (like you and me - who had nothing to do with any of this).
If you think that Washington put up barriers to competitors, you really have reread your recent history - they used to have rules to keep these guys in check (keep them from getting too big to become a systemic risk), and they took those rules out (based yes on lobbying) - that lead directly to their uncontrolled growth, which caused this crisis - and there were people at the time who predicted it.
The idea that markets self correct has turned out to be incorrect, despite how strongly you cling to that idea. Heck even Allan Greenspan (previously a hero, now a crook?), has admitted that. It's a dead idea, let it go.
BTW, you'll never get rid of the social problem that results from concentrated wealth, and more than anything that's the piece that freemarket ideology misses - the guys that have enough money to bend the system that got them that money, will attempt to stack the rules in their favor (after all, they won the game, so they are entitled to remake the rules). It'll happen every time. It's predictable, and markets can only be manipulated by that, they cannot control that - the rules of the economy come from the social political side of things, not from within the markets.
On efficiency, democracy is the least efficient form of government, but I will not trade it for even a benevolent dictatorship. What I'm after is a fairer, more just form of distribution of goods and services. Efficiency is only one consideration.
Also, in the face of all these numbers, it would cost 900 billion to insure every american, if we can get the cost per captita down to 3000 instead of the current 6000 we spend now (1.8 trillion). I can't see why that's a problem - it would be half as expensive (or maybe twice as efficient?).
Wow, so angry. What I want is for the federal government to take over these banks and insurance companies, clean their books, then break them up into dozens of smaller companies that don't create a systemic risk to the rest of us. But all the crazies scream socialism when anyone suggests doing what has been the only solution in the past to this exact kind of problem.
Your preference for allowing private players to control the banks is suggested by your asserted preference to allow markets to work - is that an unreasonable conclusion? That if you want markets to do their thing, then the government should get out of the way? You'll always get the same result when you do that - one or very few players will control the market (thus defeating market forces). Now you don't have to start from a regulated position, but you do need to deal with the problem, selectively, when it arrises - like in healthcare right now (though the problem with healthcare is that we have laws that force hospitals to treat everyone that needs care, but don't say how to pay for it, which creates a lot of opportunity for abuse - the market can't fix that, and in fact, the purest market based solution would simply get rid of the requirement that hospitals treat everyone, and instead require them to treat only those who can afford it - market forces).
I have found that those who try to offer markets as the solutions to everything are the same people who appose any kind of government intervention, and scream socialism. I think I have correctly identified you as one of those people, though I could be wrong. I doubt it though, after reading parts of your response which include weird phrases like, "Tyranny means you'll get your fucking health care after I beat a confession out of you." I'm not sure where to even begin with a sentence like that.
Are you an old person? You used phrases like "class warfare", that's an odd phrase. I think "struggle for economic fairness" would be better. My sense of entitlement pales in comparison to the sense of entitlement that the guys who ran Enron, and who currently took so much federal bonus money at AIG - what kind of entitlement must these guys feel to think that that was ok. Why do you compare my sense of fairness to their sense of entitlement? Maybe you are one of those guys, I'm not, I know which side of that line I sit on.
The problem with the rest is that you are selectively quoting sources of information, and skewing your numbers - Bush's bailout deal was for more than $700, and if you really don't know that, then I am forced to question your powers of perception.
I don't have much time, but it sounds like you like for the guys that won the last round of economic competition (and their children) to be charge of everything. You seem to like to let the very wealth few families that run the banks to be in charge of your money. And you seem to enjoy the fact that in America, the richest country on Earth, you can only have healthcare if you can afford it. Is that not a form of tyranny?
I just don't get guys like you. You are so concerned with the rich guys' money and their wealth that you can't even see how they take advantage of every benefit of society, while avoiding all responsibility to actually pay for it - shoving their burden to pay down on the rest of us, and then turn around and deny those benefits to those that need it most.
Please help me understand why you want to help those guys, by giving them every advantage - and this isn't disputed, in a market based system, the guy who starts with the most has the most advantage. The game is so unbalanced now, that they do have almost unimpeachable advantage.
Maybe you can't see the suffering going on in this country? Do you live in a nice neighborhood? Are you one of those rich guys, that have rigged the system, and taken all the wealth for themselves?
None of those countries that top the ranks, in terms of quality of "health" (which you conveniently, and bizarrely separate from the quality of care), has a market based system to pay for healthcare. For the record, my employer recently did shop for healthcare by price and we chose the cheapest that still offers decent coverage - guess how much it cost. The state of Massachusetts, recently obligated employers to buy healthcare, and they did - specing out coverage primarily by price, and it covers not much.
You seem to look at a lot of information, but somehow can't see it. I'm not sure what the problem is. Maybe it's the fear you mentioned of some bogeyman form of government for which progressives don't advocate. I tell you though, when I watch these guys that run the banks you stated you favor, take huge bonuses, while Americans die in the street because they got kicked from the ER in cities around the country, I can't see why you think that's better than a system with a fairer set of rules.
I was using the term as it is commonly understood in that lexicon you mentioned. The origins of that phrase doesn't actually matter if the the meaning I intended came across (and it did). An example, tragedy originally meant "goat song" but now means something entirely different. So nice try.
Your idea of what "progressive" is seems to be fear based, and is largely incorrect. The idea of community property is not a new one, and does not belong solely to the communist ideal (in their ideal - everything - is community property, no one in the United States suggests going that way).
As far as I can tell, progressive is another word for use the best system for the case that comes up. In healthcare, some kind of baseline publicly funded system is the only one that makes sense. We currently pay the most per capita for healthcare out of every nation, and we rank 38th in terms of quality of care. There is no way to defend that.
On the internet, I see very little that needs to be regulated - of those things that do need it, they tend to be related to the infrastructure, and those old media companies that run that infrastructure - regulation of the highways, not what you drive on them. Real highways have more regulation than that, and I think that's fine - the net doesn't (yet) need very much government intervention. There's nothing even vaguely communist about that.
BTW, you may also be interested in the US Constitution - so few actually read that marvelous document (it's an easy, short read).
Is it left-biased, or reality biased? It seems a lot of people that smear the current American left, have been living in the right wing bubble for the last few decades, and can't fess up to the reality bias that reality has.
Only in American can I consider myself, a centrist progressive. The state of politics here is severely depressing, so anything that pulls us out of the childish, conservative, backward looking rut we've been in, is a plus in my book.
It's especially perplexing, since their newest successfully marketed innovations - solid state hard drives - open them up to a whole new area of competition where neither AMD or nVidia are even trying to compete.
I don't get why they don't spend all that legal money on innovation there, instead of suing everyone under the sun.
Exactly. Many companies work similar deals for their employees by utilizing public funds for medicare and housing, by simply paying their employees very little above the minimum wage. This seems unrelated, but it's the same problem. The company doesn't want to pay for what is clearly a benefit to themselves, so they get the government to pay for it, then whine about high taxes. I'm so tired of this rotten behavior.
I did look into using it a few times. The main barrior has been the garbage tool that you need to use to create the.eot file format, and the lack of crossplatform support.
The alternative file format that Firefox et al are starting to support (raw.otf files) will never be legal for professional font licenses - and they are also technically impractical because they are ginourmous.
The best thing for us all would be for the other browser makers to support.eot files, since those are the only ones likely to be supported by font makers (though they are a stubborn bunch, it'll still take convincing - one or two of them making a boat load selling.eot fonts would do it) - and are the only ones MS will ever support.
It would be easy for manufacturers (such as TomTom) to include some modified version of this on their install CDs: http://www.fs-driver.org/ to allow Windows users to access their ext2/3 formatted discs.
I don't see why that would be a problem. This is the right solution here.
I develop on the browser platform for a living, and I have to tell you, there are some important improvements to the status quo in ACID3, like the ability to finally use a font face - and Kudos to MS for having supported that particular feature for like ever.
I can't see how having more browsers pass that test is not important. It's so important, that it should have been done a long time ago now.
When (and if - in the case of IE) enough browsers support the technology tested in ACID3, every web developers life will become easier - and thus development cheaper. I can't really see how that isn't important.
BTW, why does MS hate their web developers enough to drag their feet on this stuff the way they do? Is support for addEventListener really too much to ask for? At least they are giving us css query support, that's something big. I guess a lot of the rest of us will just spend a lot of our time (and our money) fixing the rest of Microsoft's missing features.
If you can't see inside the machine to see what it's doing (impossible with computer chips) - you can't trust it. I don't understand why anyone thinks a computerized voting machines (and especially vote counting machines) can ever work. The incentives are all in the wrong place to make these accurate - it's just too important to win.
The best, most accurate, hardest to cheat system, is a hand counted (the emphasis belongs on the hand counted part) paper ballots (stuffed randomly into a cardboard box to solve the "secret" part). It takes a lot of resources to get enough operatives in enough places to sway the vote by cheating hand counted paper ballots - and the more you have, the more visibility there is, and the more loose lips there are. With electronically tallied votes, you just have to have the one guy (even the grunt who sets up the machine) put in code that counts incorrectly in one candidates favor. Can voting booth personel verify that the code they are installing was compiled from a particular source (or even know what that means)? The answer here is _no_.
These things are far too easy to mess with, and should never be trusted.
By the way, listen to the way politicians talk about this issue. Usually it's in terms of the right to a "fair" but not "accurate" vote. Come on, why do you think these guys want to spend all this money on a more expensive, more problematic system than hand counted paper ballots. There are not a lot of good reasons (I can't think of even one good reason).
I thought the criticism was that the way they are reducing the popup frequency, is by "auto-escalating" applications to higher access levels. From and engineering standpoint, that sounds like a huge glaring security hole. I would think that's why this is getting "spun".
Think of it this way. I install some app that accesses a file in program files. In order to do that I have to grand access privs, so it's now been escalated. Now that program has a browser component, that can be exploited. The exploit can take advantage of parent app's auto-escalation to gain access to the program files directory.
That is not a secure design. And it should be pointed out more often, that Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, these have all had better models for decades. MS really has no excuse for not having this fixed by now.
They only panned UAC, because of it's incredibly flawed implementation. All of it was justified.
Before SP1 (which did quiet it down a bit) it came up way more frequently than it should have, and even after SP1 usually you had to click two dialog boxes with no password (and sometimes 3 or 4), instead of just one with a password, like on Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
On report (with a quote) even suggested that MS made it annoying on purpose, to get devs to fix it. That's a horribly disrespectful way to treat people who are developing on your platform - as well as your paying users.
It's even easy to deal with legacy apps - put old apps in a sandbox, and new apps must implement the new security APIs to get out. Other companies have done this masterfully, why is it so hard for the billion dollar Microsoft? It's easy for anyone (including those stubborn people in Redmond) to see how flawed UAC is, by simply using Mac OS X or Ubuntu. This really should not be that hard.
The fix from the anti-DRM crowd, is to bitch at the companies that use DRM until they figure out how to provide a product with enough value, that they'll want to pay money for it.
Woolworth figured this problem out with five-and-dime stores, well over a century ago, when he opened the cases and allowed customers to actually touch merchandise. You set prices to the point where people are willing to pay ($60 per game isn't it) - and build into the cost of doing business, a certain over head for theft (in the case of digital content - there is no cost to piracy - only a false perception of cost - but still, it can be accounted for).
If companies can't figure out how to sell games that cost too much to make, then there is no market for those games.
Most importantly, draconian DRM can't work - ever. It simply isn't and can't be affective, because it'll always be circumvented, and then the "pirates" will have a superior product to the paying customers. It's just a wasted cost for developers and publishers. It provides no benefit (except to enrich DRM companies), and only pisses off paying customers, who don't like being treated like criminals by default.
In modern life, the proponents of DRM are actually violating the most sacredly held American intolerances - DRM is stupid. We don't like stupid, and will not tolerate it (G.W. was a blip, but we're past that now).
BTW, the guys at Valve have the answer, so hopefully these really stupid, ineffective, childish DRM schemes will just disappear.
I don't know how directly this relates to you personally (probably not much), but there are some up and coming organizations that I think are doing better reporting than most dead tree presses I'm aware of - arstechnica.com is my prime example. They usually provide context, and aren't afraid to draw obvious conclusions - both of which are sorely lacking in "old" media like newspapers, tv and radio (Bill Moyers is an exception to that statement - the only one I can think of).
At Ars the writers actually seem to understand the topics they write about. How many paper writers out there could you say that about?
(Note: I don't have any affiliation with Ars, I've just been very impressed with them as of late - and I hope they make a boat load of money.)
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This is an often repeated lie. The easiest way to add more bidirectional infrastructure is to just scale it up the way it was designed to be scaled. It's actually cheaper to add bandwidth than to implement all these throttling and traffic shaping technologies. I wish people didn't believe this stuff.
I bet you think a responsible budget looks like more tax cuts for those who already don't pay much in taxes - guys that sit on the corporate board of Enron and AIG.
... well Congress and the judicial branch - that's the whole idea behind checks and balances. The Executive branch is expected to step too far, and the other branches are supposed to check it. Same for the other branches. That's kind of how it works.
This is a more overt (and therefor testable) claim than Bush ever made. I hope it does get tested in court (and from what I understand, EFF is on the job), and gets smacked down. That could actually be a way to pass judgment on the idea of the the unitary executive and smack that down without dredging up all the garbage from the Bush years - which Obama's team is on record for not wanting to do.
I think they are wrong to pursue this course, regardless of their intentions (which could be hostile to the constitution for all I know, though I do doubt that at this point), and also for not holding Bush's team accountable - even if it is more appropriate for Congress to do it. In a way, it's asking for the unitary executive, to expect the administration to fix everything, I suppose. It isn't really their job in this case, it's Congress. /stream of thought.
How about those supporters (like me) who feel no need to rationalize. Who really thinks Obama is a leftist? Maybe the hippie generation, but they can't tell their asses from their elbows.
I for one, got exactly what I wanted. I thoughtful man who will make hard desicions based on the actual evidence, and then leadn on those decisions - even when he disagrees with me on one or two things.
I can't see how that's anything like Bush.
On the particular issue - some CEO at a company decided it was better to go along with a request from the President of the United States, because the President of the United States said it was a security matter, and we might be attacked. That CEO basically fell for the same crap that all those voters fell for when they elected Bush the second time (raise your hand if you think a CEO is more intelligent than the average voter - if you raised your hand, punch yourself in the face). And you all want to just punish the "corporation" (a legal document) for it.
I don't get this lack of consideration. Everyone needs to grow a little.
And for the record, I think most American CEOs are piles of overpaid crap - but in the one instance where the company did something because they were asked by the sitting president to do so, I don't think we should be punishing him for that (punish him for ripping off share holders instead, that's probably better). I'd be happy to throw the Bush administration in Gitmo though. For damn sure.
It was Bush's (et al) leadership that lead to this garbage. Hold him accountable.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy do have a common thread - the rules of the world, which both are usually and ultimately about, are consistent. Whether the rules try to adhere to current scientific theory (regardless of whether it does turn out to be possible in real life) or some magical rule set, the world is judged on how well the characters play by the rule set.
Of course it's also possible to use Sci-Fi or Fantasy as a setting to do drama, instead of as a genre. Battlestar Galactica did character driven drama story archs in a Sci-Fi setting. It did ultimately fail the Sci-Fi test with it's abysmal "because God said so" ending. *grumbles*
Gah, these are getting too long. :-)
Bankruptcy was not an option for these companies, like AIG, because the pose a risk to the entire system if they go down so fast. That's what happens when you let a company get too big (especially one in the financial markets). They should be allowed to fail, lose all their money, and then many of them should go to jail. The problem is, most of what they did was legal, because they lobbied the government in the late 90s, to get rules removed that kept them from getting "too big to fail" - and when those rules were removed, they did in fact create the mess we have now. The markets as it turns out, don't self correct, until it's too late, and huge companies can actually be in a position to threaten the entire system, and the individuals in it (like you and me - who had nothing to do with any of this).
If you think that Washington put up barriers to competitors, you really have reread your recent history - they used to have rules to keep these guys in check (keep them from getting too big to become a systemic risk), and they took those rules out (based yes on lobbying) - that lead directly to their uncontrolled growth, which caused this crisis - and there were people at the time who predicted it.
The idea that markets self correct has turned out to be incorrect, despite how strongly you cling to that idea. Heck even Allan Greenspan (previously a hero, now a crook?), has admitted that. It's a dead idea, let it go.
BTW, you'll never get rid of the social problem that results from concentrated wealth, and more than anything that's the piece that freemarket ideology misses - the guys that have enough money to bend the system that got them that money, will attempt to stack the rules in their favor (after all, they won the game, so they are entitled to remake the rules). It'll happen every time. It's predictable, and markets can only be manipulated by that, they cannot control that - the rules of the economy come from the social political side of things, not from within the markets.
On efficiency, democracy is the least efficient form of government, but I will not trade it for even a benevolent dictatorship. What I'm after is a fairer, more just form of distribution of goods and services. Efficiency is only one consideration.
Also, in the face of all these numbers, it would cost 900 billion to insure every american, if we can get the cost per captita down to 3000 instead of the current 6000 we spend now (1.8 trillion). I can't see why that's a problem - it would be half as expensive (or maybe twice as efficient?).
Wow, so angry. What I want is for the federal government to take over these banks and insurance companies, clean their books, then break them up into dozens of smaller companies that don't create a systemic risk to the rest of us. But all the crazies scream socialism when anyone suggests doing what has been the only solution in the past to this exact kind of problem.
Your preference for allowing private players to control the banks is suggested by your asserted preference to allow markets to work - is that an unreasonable conclusion? That if you want markets to do their thing, then the government should get out of the way? You'll always get the same result when you do that - one or very few players will control the market (thus defeating market forces). Now you don't have to start from a regulated position, but you do need to deal with the problem, selectively, when it arrises - like in healthcare right now (though the problem with healthcare is that we have laws that force hospitals to treat everyone that needs care, but don't say how to pay for it, which creates a lot of opportunity for abuse - the market can't fix that, and in fact, the purest market based solution would simply get rid of the requirement that hospitals treat everyone, and instead require them to treat only those who can afford it - market forces).
I have found that those who try to offer markets as the solutions to everything are the same people who appose any kind of government intervention, and scream socialism. I think I have correctly identified you as one of those people, though I could be wrong. I doubt it though, after reading parts of your response which include weird phrases like, "Tyranny means you'll get your fucking health care after I beat a confession out of you." I'm not sure where to even begin with a sentence like that.
Are you an old person? You used phrases like "class warfare", that's an odd phrase. I think "struggle for economic fairness" would be better. My sense of entitlement pales in comparison to the sense of entitlement that the guys who ran Enron, and who currently took so much federal bonus money at AIG - what kind of entitlement must these guys feel to think that that was ok. Why do you compare my sense of fairness to their sense of entitlement? Maybe you are one of those guys, I'm not, I know which side of that line I sit on.
The problem with the rest is that you are selectively quoting sources of information, and skewing your numbers - Bush's bailout deal was for more than $700, and if you really don't know that, then I am forced to question your powers of perception.
Have a great day! :-)
It is fear based.
I don't have much time, but it sounds like you like for the guys that won the last round of economic competition (and their children) to be charge of everything. You seem to like to let the very wealth few families that run the banks to be in charge of your money. And you seem to enjoy the fact that in America, the richest country on Earth, you can only have healthcare if you can afford it. Is that not a form of tyranny?
I just don't get guys like you. You are so concerned with the rich guys' money and their wealth that you can't even see how they take advantage of every benefit of society, while avoiding all responsibility to actually pay for it - shoving their burden to pay down on the rest of us, and then turn around and deny those benefits to those that need it most.
Please help me understand why you want to help those guys, by giving them every advantage - and this isn't disputed, in a market based system, the guy who starts with the most has the most advantage. The game is so unbalanced now, that they do have almost unimpeachable advantage.
Maybe you can't see the suffering going on in this country? Do you live in a nice neighborhood? Are you one of those rich guys, that have rigged the system, and taken all the wealth for themselves?
None of those countries that top the ranks, in terms of quality of "health" (which you conveniently, and bizarrely separate from the quality of care), has a market based system to pay for healthcare. For the record, my employer recently did shop for healthcare by price and we chose the cheapest that still offers decent coverage - guess how much it cost. The state of Massachusetts, recently obligated employers to buy healthcare, and they did - specing out coverage primarily by price, and it covers not much.
You seem to look at a lot of information, but somehow can't see it. I'm not sure what the problem is. Maybe it's the fear you mentioned of some bogeyman form of government for which progressives don't advocate. I tell you though, when I watch these guys that run the banks you stated you favor, take huge bonuses, while Americans die in the street because they got kicked from the ER in cities around the country, I can't see why you think that's better than a system with a fairer set of rules.
I was using the term as it is commonly understood in that lexicon you mentioned. The origins of that phrase doesn't actually matter if the the meaning I intended came across (and it did). An example, tragedy originally meant "goat song" but now means something entirely different. So nice try.
Read up on the American school of economics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)
Your idea of what "progressive" is seems to be fear based, and is largely incorrect. The idea of community property is not a new one, and does not belong solely to the communist ideal (in their ideal - everything - is community property, no one in the United States suggests going that way).
As far as I can tell, progressive is another word for use the best system for the case that comes up. In healthcare, some kind of baseline publicly funded system is the only one that makes sense. We currently pay the most per capita for healthcare out of every nation, and we rank 38th in terms of quality of care. There is no way to defend that.
On the internet, I see very little that needs to be regulated - of those things that do need it, they tend to be related to the infrastructure, and those old media companies that run that infrastructure - regulation of the highways, not what you drive on them. Real highways have more regulation than that, and I think that's fine - the net doesn't (yet) need very much government intervention. There's nothing even vaguely communist about that.
BTW, you may also be interested in the US Constitution - so few actually read that marvelous document (it's an easy, short read).
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html
Is it left-biased, or reality biased? It seems a lot of people that smear the current American left, have been living in the right wing bubble for the last few decades, and can't fess up to the reality bias that reality has.
Only in American can I consider myself, a centrist progressive. The state of politics here is severely depressing, so anything that pulls us out of the childish, conservative, backward looking rut we've been in, is a plus in my book.
It's especially perplexing, since their newest successfully marketed innovations - solid state hard drives - open them up to a whole new area of competition where neither AMD or nVidia are even trying to compete.
I don't get why they don't spend all that legal money on innovation there, instead of suing everyone under the sun.
Exactly. Many companies work similar deals for their employees by utilizing public funds for medicare and housing, by simply paying their employees very little above the minimum wage. This seems unrelated, but it's the same problem. The company doesn't want to pay for what is clearly a benefit to themselves, so they get the government to pay for it, then whine about high taxes. I'm so tired of this rotten behavior.
fs-driver only supports ext2 anyway, so I guess that's bonus. :-)
I did look into using it a few times. The main barrior has been the garbage tool that you need to use to create the .eot file format, and the lack of crossplatform support.
The alternative file format that Firefox et al are starting to support (raw .otf files) will never be legal for professional font licenses - and they are also technically impractical because they are ginourmous.
The best thing for us all would be for the other browser makers to support .eot files, since those are the only ones likely to be supported by font makers (though they are a stubborn bunch, it'll still take convincing - one or two of them making a boat load selling .eot fonts would do it) - and are the only ones MS will ever support.
It would be easy for manufacturers (such as TomTom) to include some modified version of this on their install CDs: http://www.fs-driver.org/ to allow Windows users to access their ext2/3 formatted discs.
I don't see why that would be a problem. This is the right solution here.
I develop on the browser platform for a living, and I have to tell you, there are some important improvements to the status quo in ACID3, like the ability to finally use a font face - and Kudos to MS for having supported that particular feature for like ever.
I can't see how having more browsers pass that test is not important. It's so important, that it should have been done a long time ago now.
When (and if - in the case of IE) enough browsers support the technology tested in ACID3, every web developers life will become easier - and thus development cheaper. I can't really see how that isn't important.
BTW, why does MS hate their web developers enough to drag their feet on this stuff the way they do? Is support for addEventListener really too much to ask for? At least they are giving us css query support, that's something big. I guess a lot of the rest of us will just spend a lot of our time (and our money) fixing the rest of Microsoft's missing features.
If you can't see inside the machine to see what it's doing (impossible with computer chips) - you can't trust it. I don't understand why anyone thinks a computerized voting machines (and especially vote counting machines) can ever work. The incentives are all in the wrong place to make these accurate - it's just too important to win.
The best, most accurate, hardest to cheat system, is a hand counted (the emphasis belongs on the hand counted part) paper ballots (stuffed randomly into a cardboard box to solve the "secret" part). It takes a lot of resources to get enough operatives in enough places to sway the vote by cheating hand counted paper ballots - and the more you have, the more visibility there is, and the more loose lips there are. With electronically tallied votes, you just have to have the one guy (even the grunt who sets up the machine) put in code that counts incorrectly in one candidates favor. Can voting booth personel verify that the code they are installing was compiled from a particular source (or even know what that means)? The answer here is _no_.
These things are far too easy to mess with, and should never be trusted.
By the way, listen to the way politicians talk about this issue. Usually it's in terms of the right to a "fair" but not "accurate" vote. Come on, why do you think these guys want to spend all this money on a more expensive, more problematic system than hand counted paper ballots. There are not a lot of good reasons (I can't think of even one good reason).
I thought the criticism was that the way they are reducing the popup frequency, is by "auto-escalating" applications to higher access levels. From and engineering standpoint, that sounds like a huge glaring security hole. I would think that's why this is getting "spun".
Think of it this way. I install some app that accesses a file in program files. In order to do that I have to grand access privs, so it's now been escalated. Now that program has a browser component, that can be exploited. The exploit can take advantage of parent app's auto-escalation to gain access to the program files directory.
That is not a secure design. And it should be pointed out more often, that Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, these have all had better models for decades. MS really has no excuse for not having this fixed by now.
They only panned UAC, because of it's incredibly flawed implementation. All of it was justified.
Before SP1 (which did quiet it down a bit) it came up way more frequently than it should have, and even after SP1 usually you had to click two dialog boxes with no password (and sometimes 3 or 4), instead of just one with a password, like on Ubuntu and Mac OS X.
On report (with a quote) even suggested that MS made it annoying on purpose, to get devs to fix it. That's a horribly disrespectful way to treat people who are developing on your platform - as well as your paying users.
It's even easy to deal with legacy apps - put old apps in a sandbox, and new apps must implement the new security APIs to get out. Other companies have done this masterfully, why is it so hard for the billion dollar Microsoft? It's easy for anyone (including those stubborn people in Redmond) to see how flawed UAC is, by simply using Mac OS X or Ubuntu. This really should not be that hard.
Don't go to websites that annoy you.
Problem solved.
The fix from the anti-DRM crowd, is to bitch at the companies that use DRM until they figure out how to provide a product with enough value, that they'll want to pay money for it.
Woolworth figured this problem out with five-and-dime stores, well over a century ago, when he opened the cases and allowed customers to actually touch merchandise. You set prices to the point where people are willing to pay ($60 per game isn't it) - and build into the cost of doing business, a certain over head for theft (in the case of digital content - there is no cost to piracy - only a false perception of cost - but still, it can be accounted for).
If companies can't figure out how to sell games that cost too much to make, then there is no market for those games.
Most importantly, draconian DRM can't work - ever. It simply isn't and can't be affective, because it'll always be circumvented, and then the "pirates" will have a superior product to the paying customers. It's just a wasted cost for developers and publishers. It provides no benefit (except to enrich DRM companies), and only pisses off paying customers, who don't like being treated like criminals by default.
In modern life, the proponents of DRM are actually violating the most sacredly held American intolerances - DRM is stupid. We don't like stupid, and will not tolerate it (G.W. was a blip, but we're past that now).
BTW, the guys at Valve have the answer, so hopefully these really stupid, ineffective, childish DRM schemes will just disappear.
exactly :-)
I don't know how directly this relates to you personally (probably not much), but there are some up and coming organizations that I think are doing better reporting than most dead tree presses I'm aware of - arstechnica.com is my prime example. They usually provide context, and aren't afraid to draw obvious conclusions - both of which are sorely lacking in "old" media like newspapers, tv and radio (Bill Moyers is an exception to that statement - the only one I can think of).
At Ars the writers actually seem to understand the topics they write about. How many paper writers out there could you say that about?
(Note: I don't have any affiliation with Ars, I've just been very impressed with them as of late - and I hope they make a boat load of money.)