So how many are actually DOING any of those things? And did you notice they were good little capitalist consumption-enhancing options? Buy this, buy that. The idea is to *reduce* consumption.
Look how fat America is. We're not a people who naturally cut back on anything.
I believe it when I see the first SUV manufacturer file for bankruptcy.
This is a monumentally stupid statement for reasons that I'm not even going to bother to get into. You know nothing about economics, sir.
There are practical things that *could* be done, like increasing tax on fuel to promote efficient usage
Which won't solve anything. It'll just cause the poorest people in the nation to have even less discretionary income. It's not the nation's $18,000/year citizens who are buying H2's. They're driving pickups and old cars with shitty gas mileage. You're screwing them, not the idealized rich shithead in your head that's tooling around the suburbs in a Hummer dumping motor oil on puppies on his way to the RNC convention. When gas prices go up, consumption is reduced slightly but most people just bitch about it. Sometimes Congress has hearings in their unceasing search for the guy who sets the oil price so they can tell him to lower it again. Again, you don't seem to understand much about economics, particularly how fuel is purchased and distributed.
setting real requirements for home insulation
This one has some merit.
reducing coal burning.
Driving up general energy costs. Again, we're just going to hammer the poor with this shit. I know, I know, what good does it do to help the poor when we've all got melanoma and are racing Kevin Costner around on Ski-Doo's because we melted the ice caps. Fine. Go try to sell that to the poor. "I know you only make $23k/year, but we'd like to jack another 25 cents a gallon on your gas taxes and raise your home heating and electricity costs by about 18%. It might force you to sell your home and move somewhere cheaper, but it's for the environment!" Good luck with your next election, Congressman.
However its much easier to say you'll maybe think about buying a new SUV with 2mpg better economy, some point in the future.
I hate to urinate in your Kashi Go-Lean, but SUVs are not destroying the environment, and their contribution to global warming, if any, is statistically insignificant.
Changing mindsets takes much more positive action than this - and I see no sign of a change there.
Nor do I. Because no matter what a poll sponsored by an environmentalist group says, people aren't willing to change their lifestyles until it's clear that it's unsustainable. Given how frequently we are wrong in our scientific consensus, I can't blame a skeptical nation for being hesitant to abandon their lifestyle because a bunch of government scientists think the temperature is going to go up 2 degrees in 200 years, long after we're all dead, and that it might cause a famine. It's a battle that can't be won. I fully expect extreme environmentalists to begin engaging in increasingly destructive, deadly, and dangerous stunts and demonstrations to give people something to think about. And that'll also fail.
Insulted all voters, and totally missed what is going on in corporate america in the last 20 years. Well done.
I did no such thing. Voters can and do react to things out of biggotry and fear. That's a fact, not an insult. Politicians respond to voter sentiment, whether it's right or wrong, because they live and die by, not positive results that give us a better America, but their next election campaign. So when the voters turn out in mass on a given issue, whether they're on the right side or the wrong side, whether they're acting out of righteous indignation over an injustice or wrongheaded biggotry, the politicians can have their strings pulled.
The other side is the election itself and the amount of involvement that corporate interests have in political elections. This is why I say that there's no difference between them and corporations, except the corporation doesn't also have the stigma of an election. As long as it generates revenue, it continues. Politicians have to generate revenue and satisfy a fickle block of individuals who share only one thing in common: they live near each other. With district manipulation, House districts often share far more in common, but those seats aren't really competitive and those reps don't really have to respond to the voters, their careers are completely secure.
As to what is "going on in corporate america" for the last 20 years that I've missed, you'll have to be more detailed if you expect any kind of real response. Or maybe you just like insulting people without having to provide any specific logic or argumentation for your victims to respond to. Well done. You should look into running for office!
If you have to resort to corporations, who almost by definition are out to make money short-term, instead of politicians, who are there to build a better society long-term (that's why you voted for'em right? right?) there is something seriously, seriously wrong with your society.
There's no difference between a politician and a corporation in the United States, except this: politicians pass legislation based on the impulsive instincts of their voters, no matter how malinformed, misguided, bigoted, or wrongheaded. Corporations are ultimately accountable to people who have a long-term vested interest in its managers making good decisions. I trust corporations with my money far more than any politician. Corporations take my money and try to turn it into MORE money. Politicians take it and try to hand it out to people who produce nothing.
Budget woes? Budget woes?? NASA has what, 13 BILLION dollars? Roll that number around in your head -- THIRTEEN BILLION DOLLARS. Per year. EVERY YEAR.
And a huge chunk of it is spent on bureaucractic bullshit. Paying admistrators, and their secretaries, and their benefits, and their health insurance, and remimbursing transportation costs, and federal audits, and enviromental impact surveys, and nasa.gov, and PR, and...
Another chunk of it goes into funding existing missions. We STILL have to keep paying for Voyager if we want anybody listening to it. For every probe that's out there, we have to pay for the earthbound hardware that listens to and talks to it, the talent that knows how it works and can troubleshoot problems, and the scientists on the publi dole who analyze what we get back.
That leaves some money leftover for NEW missions. Some that money goes into paying private contractors to build parts, some goes into research into new technology, some goes into upgrading and maintaining he shuttle fleet, some goes into the ISS. Some goes to foreign governments. Russia doesn't launch our astronauts for free.
How many probes could we launch with all that money? We could have probes flying all over the solar system. We could have fundamental research into remote robotics.
I imagine that with $13 billion we could launch thousands. There'd be no money leftover for building the ones we launch next year, though. Or paying for the crews to maintain the ones we launched last year.
There is no reason that through mass production, NASA couldn't be launching thousands of probes a year. If you're launching that many, they don't have to perfect. Launch 10 of them at every target, hoping five will end up working.
Sure there is. A probe costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Even at a mere $100 million, $13 billion is enough to build only 130 probes, to say nothing of paying for launch, maintainance, and scientific analysis.
NASA needs to completely change their culture and use some intelligence for a change.
I suggest that it is your intelligence, in this case, that needs some looking into.
People see shuttle launches on TV. And most will, at least, not protest the money being spent. But they might get pissy about billions vanishing into a black hole of government science whose results they cannot watch on TV. NASA's prioritization is, at least to some small degree, a slave to public opinion. Yet another reason why privitization of the emerging space industries will be helpful. Then, at least, informed people with money can set priorities as opposed to politicians who just want to get elected.
Shouldn't we expect at least as much from the recordkeepers of democracy as we expect from a gambling house?
When people gamble, they're putting their money on the line.
When they vote, they're putting legislation and the future of democracy on the line.
Most people care far more about the first situation. If I lose due to cheating, I'm out my own money. But if fradulent politicians vote themselves into office and raise my taxes to confiscate more of my income, I just don't care. Out of mind, out of sight. The same people who call down fire and brimstone when gas prices go up a dime shrug when their property taxes are jacked up another 18% to further fund a failing public educational system in which we spend over $15,000 per student in some states and graduate about 1/3 of them from primary school who actually can read and write at an 8th grade level.
CBS's entire network is an utter disaster except for their sports division. Their news desk has been shamed and discredited, their mainstream programming is garbage. CBS Sports is a competant division with some decent sports journalists. The rest of the network is garbage. I'm sure there's some redeeming shows that some of you watch but I can't remember the last I time I even noticed CBS except when it was in the news for various journalistic integrity scandals.
I bought into the Alienware hype and gave them a shot. The box looks cool but I don't really CARE how it looks, as long as it works. The machine has been sufficient. Their customer support has been ok. They did send me the wrong drivers on my CD, however, so when I had to re-install Windows while troubleshooting some problems, I had no drivers for anything. Turns out the problem was a faulty on-board NIC, which meant I couldn't even get on the net to download the drivers. I had to download them on my laptop, burn them to a CD, and then copy them. Also, ever since the re-install, iTunes randomly will cause my entire machine to spontaneously reboot itself while updating my iPod. Maybe 1 out of every 10 times. Also, sometimes when starting a new game of Civ IV this happens. Again, maybe 1 out of every 10 times. I had been chalking this up to the beta version of my Audigy driver but they released a final cut in January and it still does it sometimes. This probably isn't Alienware's fault, I undoubtedly have the wrong driver version somewhere, but had they just provided the right drivers on the disc in the first place...
The machine did have one problem. Windows was convined that the "Add Hardware Wizard" was already running. ALWAYS. Thus, no USB devices worked on it. No cameras, no printers, no scanners, nothing. There were some sloppy workarounds to this, but no amount of rebooting fixed it. The re-install is what eventually did fix it.
My overall experience with Alienware is neutral. My overall experience with Dell is fantastic. I bought a monitor from Dell and the green light gun went out when I was moving out of my college apartment. I called customer service at 5:30pm to find out if the warranty covered it. They had a replacement at my door at 7:30 the next morning, and they packaged up and hauled away the old one. When I moved a year later, the same thing happened again, but it was the red gun this time. Same thing. They had a replacement at my door the next morning. It does beg the question of why their monitors blow out so easily but they were Johnny-on-the-spot about replacing them.
My only negative was a laptop. My sister got a new Dell laptop for college, and it had a dead pixel on the LCD. We called and complained, and they had us ship it back. It came back with even MORE dead pixels, and we called and complained. They said ship it back and they'd send us a refurbished machine. We said bullshit, we paid for a new one, and they siad that's tough shit, that's the policy. I said, can we cancel this order and just start a new order and get a whole new machine? Well sure, yeah, that would work. So in other words, this stupid policy means nothing because I can ship this faulty machine back, cancel the order, and then just go order the exact same thing again and get a brand new one. Yeah. We said fuck it and bought her a Gateway.
I actually met Michael Dell a few months ago, he was giving a talk at our office. He struck me as smart, savvy, and VERY aware of who his customers are. He flat out said, "We sell more machines for World of Warcraft than probably any other single application right now."
Overall this deal may or may not suck for Alienware, but I wasn't super-impressed with Alienware's value for the price. The next time I want a new machine I'll probably buy a medium-power Dell and upgrade it. I hate putting boxes together, I'll gladly pay somebody else to do it. But I don't mind swapping out components once it's done.
Then I've met terribly few honest left-wing liberals, I'm sorry to say.... and I lived in the SF Bay Area for over two years, too.
I wish I could say differently...:-(
I've met very few honest people on either end of the political spectrum. Very few who actually listen to the argument of the opposition and either rebut it with facts and logic or, if they cannot do that, accept it as valid until they can. But when you get away from the mainstream media and politicians and armchair pundits and start digging into the real think tanks on each side, you find people engaged in honest intellectual analysis of the issues. You find a true debate. The CATO Instutute would qualify as being a part of this on the right. I honestly don't know who I'd put in that category on the left, but there are a lot of fair and honest left-wing liberals, even in the mainstream media. I'd put Tim Russert in that category. He doesn't always ask the questions I wish he'd ask, but his hardball-to-softball ratio for liberals vs conservatives is more even than most. I'd put John Stewart in that category as well. I've seen him ask questions of liberal guests that nobody else asks. There are plenty out there who want an honest debate and look across the spectrum of opinion and say, "who is there on the right that cares about ideas?"
But if you're looking for an honest intellectual engagement at The Daily Kos, you're not going to find it.
The CATO institute is a libertarian think tank. Libertarianism falls into the left wing of the traditional classification of politial thought in some ways and right wing in others.
The libertarians, on balance, have far more in common with the Republican part of the mid 1990's than any other major American political idealogy. The only major thinks they have in common with Democrats is they oppose having our military involved overseas and are generally pro-choice. And frankly the Democrats are only anti-Iraq because they're the opposition party and the opposition party traditionally opposes the leadership party's foreign policy. Foreign policies are almost necessarily interventionalist, even the most hands-off of foreign policies must sometimes be interventionalist (e.g., President Clinton), and such manuevers are easy targets for the opposition party. So you can take that one away and you're basically left with the pro-choice issue. Libertarians are also more likely to support gay marriage, but neither party wants to go anywhere near that one, uncharacteristically deferring it to state courts.
If you do a run-down on the issues you get a group of people who are intensely dedicated to private property and individual freedom issues, and other than gay marriage and abortion, Republicans overwhelming want the government out of people's lives and everyday decision making as much as possible. Well, in theory anyway. In practice they spend just as much money on pointless and worthless government programs that don't solve anything.
Exactlty how important is CATO in the scheme of things. Will this report reach the ears of politicians / mass media, or will it go largely unnoticed except by slashdot? I don't think we are going to see the DMCA revoked unless the public cares enough to put pressure on their representatives, and honestly the public isn't informed enough to care. So will this report help mobize people or are they just preaching to the choir?
The CATO institute is a libertarian think-tank that is largely embraced by the American right wing-conservative movement. Although I doubt the likes of President Bush cares what CATO says, the true intellectuals of that branch give much credit and respect to the CATO institute, and will take them seriously. The CATO institute has very little credibility with the mainstream of the Democratic party, but honest left wing-liberals will also give this report due consideration because they give EVERYTHING due consideration no matter how meritless (or merited).
McCallum said there would be 'a whole bunch of new characters' and the series would be 'much more dramatic and darker.'"
Yeah, whatever. When the prequels were in the queue, this is what they said about them. They'd be more dramatic. Darker. Lucas was even going to pitch the familiar theme music and do something different. It all sounded wonderfully original and artistic until somebody said, "George, nobody wants that. People want the same score, the same movies all over again." So George, 20 years older and basically living off the technology royalties from ILM, having not written anything worth watching (note that Indiana Jones is basically a really awful movie that is saved by an enchanting combination of a fun score, the kinetic influence of Spielberg, and chemistry among the actors), writes Episode 1. I don't want to rehash the myriad complaints about Star Wars, but Episodes 1-3 were supposed to be "much darker". Well, the watered-down scene where Anakin kills the Tusken raiders elicited a yawn from me. I still get uneasy watching the scene of Han Solo of being tortured for no reason other than the Empire delights in torture. "They never even asked me any questions." Yeah, they do'nt care, they just enjoy inflicting pain and suffering. Then Lando walks through the corridors of his city arguing with Vader with the sounds of Solo screaming in inhumane pain behind him... that's dark. Nothing about Anakin's fall from grace was dark. It barely even made sense, nor did Padme's perplexing passion for him. The films were written by a guy in his 60's who has clearly forgotten whatever he once knew about the passionate love of youth.
So now they're going to make a "darker" TV series. Well, bullshit. Sorry. Their last attempt at "darker" gave us the slapstick antics of Jar Jar Binks flopping around a virtual soundstage and spouting sentence fragments and stepping in crap and tripping over shit and basically irritating the hell out of everybody.
There's also a tendancy among bad writers to assume that "dark = deep". If I'm really depressing and dark and morbid and whatever, it means I'm deep and insightful and consumed by the pain that wracks our world in shuddering convulsions, blah blah. This misattribution of insight to misery is probably what fuels the Goth kids. Easy to sit around hating the world and thinking you're above it all simply because you're unhappy. Anyway, when I read, "this is goign to be dark" I hear, "weighty subject matter is going to substitute for insightful writing."
Software development costs money... Unfortunately, they know that the best value they can give to the tools they provide is to make them free.
In order words, we're discovering that handing out quality products and begging for money in return doesn't work. Is anybody really surprised?
When was the last time YOU gave money to OpenBSD?
When I bought OpenBSD 3.2 and it took them 4 months to ship it to me, and it arrived in broken jewel cases and the source CD was scratched beyond readability. That's why they aren't getting any more money out of me.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them that critical free software is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the OpenBSD and GNU teams to support you with the software you need in your life but that if cheapskates keep refusing to contribute to the projects, ensuring people like Theo are not forced to hold down proper jobs, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a lack of money for Free Software harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on funding Free Software.
Are you kidding? You want me to encourage my congressman to publically fund open source software? You want the state to get involved in software development? Because you do you realize that the government doesn't just write blank checks. Not even Halliburton gets a blank check, there's strings attached to all this shit. Do you really, seriously think it's a good idea to turn open source software funding over to the government? Because you know what's goign to happen. We get fat sucking off the public teat and when the government wishes to change something in how that software works because our reps are getting lobbied by the RIAA, they threaten to cut that funding out unless we incorporate (or don't incorporate, or stop development on) some specific feature or package that a lobbyist finds to be inconvenient. Like p2p technology.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
No, sir, you can shove your socialized software up your ass. I want my government staying as far away from OSS as possible.
After my Linux box got hacked for the 3rd time, I switched to OpenBSD. Here's about how it went.
(1) Go to web site, pay for CDs
(2) Wait 2 weeks
(3) Wait 3 more weeks
(4) Contact webmaster, ask what's going on, receive no response
(5) Wait another month
(6) Try again to contact somebody at OpenBSD, receive no response
(7) Wait two more months, give up on trying to contact anybody, write off OpenBSD as a bust
(8) CDs arrive in mail almost 4 months after I ordered them in cracked, broken jewel cases with one CD scratched beyond the ability of my drive to read it. Luckily it was the source CD and I didn't need it.
(9) Write to OpenBSD people to say I got my CDs but the quality was god-awful, the delay was ridiculous, and one of them was busted. Receive no response.
Regardless, my OpenBSD box is going on 3 years hack-free with minimal effort on my part to keep it that way. Regardless, I'm unlikely to go through OpenBSD again. When I order a product, waiting over a quarter of the year is unreasonable, and it could at least arrive NOT broken and all screwed up. And they could at least acknowledge that they receive my email, even if only to tell me to piss off.
This drumbeat of White House fascism is becoming old. Clearly Bush is not silencing anybody since the guy can go on 60 Minutes and accuse him of doing exactly that. That is the very definition of the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press. It's beginning to wear on me, these pundits and scholars and journalists bitching ad nasuem about the stiffling restrictions being placed on them, apparantly blissfully unaware that their freedom is obviously intact since they still have the right to go on national television and speak their opinion to the world. Well, most of the world. While we're busy accusing George Satan Bush of destroying everybody's freedoms (on TV), people in China aren't allowed to see it.
Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says: "Or they're censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I'm allowed to say it."
Uhhh... well you're on TV right now. The White House can't censor 60 Minutes, dude. Fucking say it.
"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.
What restrictions? Dude! You're on 60 Minutes as you say this complaining that the White House won't let you say exactly what you're saying. How in the fuck are you being restricted?
How does it escape all these people that they are on a national television program and not only are they saying all the things that they claim the White House won't let them say, they're able to EXPOSE the White House for doing this. I just don't get it. The official White House press releases can say whatever the hell Bush wants, he claim the world is made of pink elephant shit if he wants, that's his administration and its business. But clearly nobody is being forbidden from making their opinion known and getting the truth out there. This guy isn't going to be locked up and thrown in prison for publically disagreeing with the president. That's the kind of shit that happens in Iran. And, until recently, Iraq. The irony is lost on these people, that they sit around bitching about how their freedoms are being eroded while simultaneously combating our efforts to secure those freedoms for anybody else.
What's it going to take to get them to listen to the fans again?
Advertising revenue. When you're dealing with the people who watch nerdy niche programming, you're dealing with an uncommonly tech-savvy crowd that owns TiVos, refuses to watch commercials and never pays for anything anyway. You've got a fan base of freeloading music and software and movie pirates. Just look at the ads that run during reruns of Star Trek. It's all penis enlargement and debt relief. It's pretty obvious that this isn't a crowd that has much disposable income to squeeze out of it.
There's a lot of demand for the 18-35 male population, because it spends a lot of money. But our niche, for whatever reason, is VERY undesirable. The above reasons are probably why.
Note: I am not suggesting that everything in the first paragraph is TRUE, and certainly not of every single person who watches Futurama. But look at the commercials that run on Spike and during Next Gen rebroadcasts... it's obvious what their advertisers think of us, and they hate us. Hence, you can run Battlestar Galactica at 10:00pm on a Friday and get record numbers of us to tune in - they know we're not doing anything else on Friday night from 10-11 pm.
Anyway... there's some assumptions being made about their demographics and those assumptions fuel the types of advertisers they get and thus their revenue off broadcasting. I think some of those assumptions can be borne out, as uncomfortable as that may make some of you.
This is one of those tricky intersections of "rights" and "law." Note that "rights" are things we have whether the law recognizes it or not. That's the classic liberal "natural law" version, and it's what most modernized democracies found their legal system on. Among those rights are speech, especially the right to speech of a political nature.
The law protects IP because such laws ultimately benefit everybody (in theory), but this guy MIGHT be breaking IP laws to make a political statement.
My take would be that his political statement isn't being silenced, just this particular method of making it. The guy could probably re-package or re-do the web site to make it more clearly a parody and get around the IP laws on this. What pisses me off is that it was just SHUT DOWN rather than trying this very reasonable intermediate step.
I'm wary of giving the Brits that code. This is the same government that bought Westinghouse, the private storehouse for American nuclear technology, and then turned around and sold it to Toshiba which is going to leverage the technology in China.
According to CNS News Service, the Democrat Party will have an agenda that guarantees every American will have affordable access to broadband within five years as part of their 2006 election year agenda, according to Nancy Pelosi, House minority leader. Absent, of course, are any details as to how they will accomplish it when they are the party out of power in Congress.
Since when have the Democrats had a clear plan on how to accomplish any of their goals when they are in power?
Here's what'll happen. They'll levy a new tax on Internet usage on both customers and providers. The telcos and ISPs will increase prices to compensate. The money will then get sucked out of the economy and into the government, where 75% of it is pissed away on paying yet more federal and state employees to file papers and process applications for vouchers and what not. The remaining 25% will be wrung back into the economy in the form of vouchers to those who have no "affordable" access, and the price of Internet service will jump up. Because that's how Democrats solve almost every social problem. Tax and spend, tax and spend. And frankly, I could live with it if any of their programs were working. I'm sure I'll now be inundated with anecdotes about how Program X saved your family or whatever, and that's fine. But our poverty rate hasn't changed much. Homelessess hasn't changed much.
And lest you think I'm picking on Democrats, the Republicans are no better. Look at any major government program that has been implemented by the Republicans. What has the return been on our enormous investment in the "war on drugs"? More gun violence, more gang activity, no meaningful improvement.
The government is not the solution to problems. Its solution is usually worse than the problem. Aegrescit medendo. "The cure is worse than the malady." Prices are being driven down by market forces, competition, and technological innovation. If broadband isn't available in your area yet, it will be. And if you're one of those people who lives 15 miles away from the nearest human being on a ranch in Wyoming, why on earth should tax money pay for the inconveniences you impose upon yourself by your choice of living area?
I challenge the notion that anybody who can't afford the $22/mo for cable broadband really needs it. If you can't scrounge up $22/mo you've got far more pressing issues than fast access to email.
Asimov's "laws" are a thing of fiction. Slashdot violates my First Superior Law of Nerd Containment which states that ignorant dorks shouldn't be allowed to run blogs about technology that are really just places where pathetic geeks gather to romanticize their great fight against the evil system that expects them to actually pay for other people's property if they want it.
Respect of the human dignity and free will of a Chineese person is just as important as the respect of human dignity and free will of an American one. The notion that rights are opinions and mutual agreements worked out with a government died over 200 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Look how fat America is. We're not a people who naturally cut back on anything.
I believe it when I see the first SUV manufacturer file for bankruptcy.
This is a monumentally stupid statement for reasons that I'm not even going to bother to get into. You know nothing about economics, sir.
There are practical things that *could* be done, like increasing tax on fuel to promote efficient usage
Which won't solve anything. It'll just cause the poorest people in the nation to have even less discretionary income. It's not the nation's $18,000/year citizens who are buying H2's. They're driving pickups and old cars with shitty gas mileage. You're screwing them, not the idealized rich shithead in your head that's tooling around the suburbs in a Hummer dumping motor oil on puppies on his way to the RNC convention. When gas prices go up, consumption is reduced slightly but most people just bitch about it. Sometimes Congress has hearings in their unceasing search for the guy who sets the oil price so they can tell him to lower it again. Again, you don't seem to understand much about economics, particularly how fuel is purchased and distributed.
setting real requirements for home insulation
This one has some merit.
reducing coal burning.
Driving up general energy costs. Again, we're just going to hammer the poor with this shit. I know, I know, what good does it do to help the poor when we've all got melanoma and are racing Kevin Costner around on Ski-Doo's because we melted the ice caps. Fine. Go try to sell that to the poor. "I know you only make $23k/year, but we'd like to jack another 25 cents a gallon on your gas taxes and raise your home heating and electricity costs by about 18%. It might force you to sell your home and move somewhere cheaper, but it's for the environment!" Good luck with your next election, Congressman.
However its much easier to say you'll maybe think about buying a new SUV with 2mpg better economy, some point in the future.
I hate to urinate in your Kashi Go-Lean, but SUVs are not destroying the environment, and their contribution to global warming, if any, is statistically insignificant.
Changing mindsets takes much more positive action than this - and I see no sign of a change there.
Nor do I. Because no matter what a poll sponsored by an environmentalist group says, people aren't willing to change their lifestyles until it's clear that it's unsustainable. Given how frequently we are wrong in our scientific consensus, I can't blame a skeptical nation for being hesitant to abandon their lifestyle because a bunch of government scientists think the temperature is going to go up 2 degrees in 200 years, long after we're all dead, and that it might cause a famine. It's a battle that can't be won. I fully expect extreme environmentalists to begin engaging in increasingly destructive, deadly, and dangerous stunts and demonstrations to give people something to think about. And that'll also fail.
I did no such thing. Voters can and do react to things out of biggotry and fear. That's a fact, not an insult. Politicians respond to voter sentiment, whether it's right or wrong, because they live and die by, not positive results that give us a better America, but their next election campaign. So when the voters turn out in mass on a given issue, whether they're on the right side or the wrong side, whether they're acting out of righteous indignation over an injustice or wrongheaded biggotry, the politicians can have their strings pulled.
The other side is the election itself and the amount of involvement that corporate interests have in political elections. This is why I say that there's no difference between them and corporations, except the corporation doesn't also have the stigma of an election. As long as it generates revenue, it continues. Politicians have to generate revenue and satisfy a fickle block of individuals who share only one thing in common: they live near each other. With district manipulation, House districts often share far more in common, but those seats aren't really competitive and those reps don't really have to respond to the voters, their careers are completely secure.
As to what is "going on in corporate america" for the last 20 years that I've missed, you'll have to be more detailed if you expect any kind of real response. Or maybe you just like insulting people without having to provide any specific logic or argumentation for your victims to respond to. Well done. You should look into running for office!
There's no difference between a politician and a corporation in the United States, except this: politicians pass legislation based on the impulsive instincts of their voters, no matter how malinformed, misguided, bigoted, or wrongheaded. Corporations are ultimately accountable to people who have a long-term vested interest in its managers making good decisions. I trust corporations with my money far more than any politician. Corporations take my money and try to turn it into MORE money. Politicians take it and try to hand it out to people who produce nothing.
And a huge chunk of it is spent on bureaucractic bullshit. Paying admistrators, and their secretaries, and their benefits, and their health insurance, and remimbursing transportation costs, and federal audits, and enviromental impact surveys, and nasa.gov, and PR, and ...
Another chunk of it goes into funding existing missions. We STILL have to keep paying for Voyager if we want anybody listening to it. For every probe that's out there, we have to pay for the earthbound hardware that listens to and talks to it, the talent that knows how it works and can troubleshoot problems, and the scientists on the publi dole who analyze what we get back.
That leaves some money leftover for NEW missions. Some that money goes into paying private contractors to build parts, some goes into research into new technology, some goes into upgrading and maintaining he shuttle fleet, some goes into the ISS. Some goes to foreign governments. Russia doesn't launch our astronauts for free.
How many probes could we launch with all that money? We could have probes flying all over the solar system. We could have fundamental research into remote robotics.
I imagine that with $13 billion we could launch thousands. There'd be no money leftover for building the ones we launch next year, though. Or paying for the crews to maintain the ones we launched last year.
There is no reason that through mass production, NASA couldn't be launching thousands of probes a year. If you're launching that many, they don't have to perfect. Launch 10 of them at every target, hoping five will end up working.
Sure there is. A probe costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build. Even at a mere $100 million, $13 billion is enough to build only 130 probes, to say nothing of paying for launch, maintainance, and scientific analysis.
NASA needs to completely change their culture and use some intelligence for a change.
I suggest that it is your intelligence, in this case, that needs some looking into.
People see shuttle launches on TV. And most will, at least, not protest the money being spent. But they might get pissy about billions vanishing into a black hole of government science whose results they cannot watch on TV. NASA's prioritization is, at least to some small degree, a slave to public opinion. Yet another reason why privitization of the emerging space industries will be helpful. Then, at least, informed people with money can set priorities as opposed to politicians who just want to get elected.
When people gamble, they're putting their money on the line.
When they vote, they're putting legislation and the future of democracy on the line.
Most people care far more about the first situation. If I lose due to cheating, I'm out my own money. But if fradulent politicians vote themselves into office and raise my taxes to confiscate more of my income, I just don't care. Out of mind, out of sight. The same people who call down fire and brimstone when gas prices go up a dime shrug when their property taxes are jacked up another 18% to further fund a failing public educational system in which we spend over $15,000 per student in some states and graduate about 1/3 of them from primary school who actually can read and write at an 8th grade level.
CBS's entire network is an utter disaster except for their sports division. Their news desk has been shamed and discredited, their mainstream programming is garbage. CBS Sports is a competant division with some decent sports journalists. The rest of the network is garbage. I'm sure there's some redeeming shows that some of you watch but I can't remember the last I time I even noticed CBS except when it was in the news for various journalistic integrity scandals.
The machine did have one problem. Windows was convined that the "Add Hardware Wizard" was already running. ALWAYS. Thus, no USB devices worked on it. No cameras, no printers, no scanners, nothing. There were some sloppy workarounds to this, but no amount of rebooting fixed it. The re-install is what eventually did fix it.
My overall experience with Alienware is neutral. My overall experience with Dell is fantastic. I bought a monitor from Dell and the green light gun went out when I was moving out of my college apartment. I called customer service at 5:30pm to find out if the warranty covered it. They had a replacement at my door at 7:30 the next morning, and they packaged up and hauled away the old one. When I moved a year later, the same thing happened again, but it was the red gun this time. Same thing. They had a replacement at my door the next morning. It does beg the question of why their monitors blow out so easily but they were Johnny-on-the-spot about replacing them.
My only negative was a laptop. My sister got a new Dell laptop for college, and it had a dead pixel on the LCD. We called and complained, and they had us ship it back. It came back with even MORE dead pixels, and we called and complained. They said ship it back and they'd send us a refurbished machine. We said bullshit, we paid for a new one, and they siad that's tough shit, that's the policy. I said, can we cancel this order and just start a new order and get a whole new machine? Well sure, yeah, that would work. So in other words, this stupid policy means nothing because I can ship this faulty machine back, cancel the order, and then just go order the exact same thing again and get a brand new one. Yeah. We said fuck it and bought her a Gateway.
I actually met Michael Dell a few months ago, he was giving a talk at our office. He struck me as smart, savvy, and VERY aware of who his customers are. He flat out said, "We sell more machines for World of Warcraft than probably any other single application right now."
Overall this deal may or may not suck for Alienware, but I wasn't super-impressed with Alienware's value for the price. The next time I want a new machine I'll probably buy a medium-power Dell and upgrade it. I hate putting boxes together, I'll gladly pay somebody else to do it. But I don't mind swapping out components once it's done.
I would. It'll last longer and retain its value. :)
The screenplay.
I wish I could say differently... :-(
I've met very few honest people on either end of the political spectrum. Very few who actually listen to the argument of the opposition and either rebut it with facts and logic or, if they cannot do that, accept it as valid until they can. But when you get away from the mainstream media and politicians and armchair pundits and start digging into the real think tanks on each side, you find people engaged in honest intellectual analysis of the issues. You find a true debate. The CATO Instutute would qualify as being a part of this on the right. I honestly don't know who I'd put in that category on the left, but there are a lot of fair and honest left-wing liberals, even in the mainstream media. I'd put Tim Russert in that category. He doesn't always ask the questions I wish he'd ask, but his hardball-to-softball ratio for liberals vs conservatives is more even than most. I'd put John Stewart in that category as well. I've seen him ask questions of liberal guests that nobody else asks. There are plenty out there who want an honest debate and look across the spectrum of opinion and say, "who is there on the right that cares about ideas?"
But if you're looking for an honest intellectual engagement at The Daily Kos, you're not going to find it.
The libertarians, on balance, have far more in common with the Republican part of the mid 1990's than any other major American political idealogy. The only major thinks they have in common with Democrats is they oppose having our military involved overseas and are generally pro-choice. And frankly the Democrats are only anti-Iraq because they're the opposition party and the opposition party traditionally opposes the leadership party's foreign policy. Foreign policies are almost necessarily interventionalist, even the most hands-off of foreign policies must sometimes be interventionalist (e.g., President Clinton), and such manuevers are easy targets for the opposition party. So you can take that one away and you're basically left with the pro-choice issue. Libertarians are also more likely to support gay marriage, but neither party wants to go anywhere near that one, uncharacteristically deferring it to state courts.
If you do a run-down on the issues you get a group of people who are intensely dedicated to private property and individual freedom issues, and other than gay marriage and abortion, Republicans overwhelming want the government out of people's lives and everyday decision making as much as possible. Well, in theory anyway. In practice they spend just as much money on pointless and worthless government programs that don't solve anything.
The CATO institute is a libertarian think-tank that is largely embraced by the American right wing-conservative movement. Although I doubt the likes of President Bush cares what CATO says, the true intellectuals of that branch give much credit and respect to the CATO institute, and will take them seriously. The CATO institute has very little credibility with the mainstream of the Democratic party, but honest left wing-liberals will also give this report due consideration because they give EVERYTHING due consideration no matter how meritless (or merited).
In other words, this does matter.
Yeah, whatever. When the prequels were in the queue, this is what they said about them. They'd be more dramatic. Darker. Lucas was even going to pitch the familiar theme music and do something different. It all sounded wonderfully original and artistic until somebody said, "George, nobody wants that. People want the same score, the same movies all over again." So George, 20 years older and basically living off the technology royalties from ILM, having not written anything worth watching (note that Indiana Jones is basically a really awful movie that is saved by an enchanting combination of a fun score, the kinetic influence of Spielberg, and chemistry among the actors), writes Episode 1. I don't want to rehash the myriad complaints about Star Wars, but Episodes 1-3 were supposed to be "much darker". Well, the watered-down scene where Anakin kills the Tusken raiders elicited a yawn from me. I still get uneasy watching the scene of Han Solo of being tortured for no reason other than the Empire delights in torture. "They never even asked me any questions." Yeah, they do'nt care, they just enjoy inflicting pain and suffering. Then Lando walks through the corridors of his city arguing with Vader with the sounds of Solo screaming in inhumane pain behind him ... that's dark. Nothing about Anakin's fall from grace was dark. It barely even made sense, nor did Padme's perplexing passion for him. The films were written by a guy in his 60's who has clearly forgotten whatever he once knew about the passionate love of youth.
So now they're going to make a "darker" TV series. Well, bullshit. Sorry. Their last attempt at "darker" gave us the slapstick antics of Jar Jar Binks flopping around a virtual soundstage and spouting sentence fragments and stepping in crap and tripping over shit and basically irritating the hell out of everybody.
There's also a tendancy among bad writers to assume that "dark = deep". If I'm really depressing and dark and morbid and whatever, it means I'm deep and insightful and consumed by the pain that wracks our world in shuddering convulsions, blah blah. This misattribution of insight to misery is probably what fuels the Goth kids. Easy to sit around hating the world and thinking you're above it all simply because you're unhappy. Anyway, when I read, "this is goign to be dark" I hear, "weighty subject matter is going to substitute for insightful writing."
But I'm cynical.
In order words, we're discovering that handing out quality products and begging for money in return doesn't work. Is anybody really surprised?
When was the last time YOU gave money to OpenBSD?
When I bought OpenBSD 3.2 and it took them 4 months to ship it to me, and it arrived in broken jewel cases and the source CD was scratched beyond readability. That's why they aren't getting any more money out of me.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them that critical free software is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the OpenBSD and GNU teams to support you with the software you need in your life but that if cheapskates keep refusing to contribute to the projects, ensuring people like Theo are not forced to hold down proper jobs, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how a lack of money for Free Software harms all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on funding Free Software.
Are you kidding? You want me to encourage my congressman to publically fund open source software? You want the state to get involved in software development? Because you do you realize that the government doesn't just write blank checks. Not even Halliburton gets a blank check, there's strings attached to all this shit. Do you really, seriously think it's a good idea to turn open source software funding over to the government? Because you know what's goign to happen. We get fat sucking off the public teat and when the government wishes to change something in how that software works because our reps are getting lobbied by the RIAA, they threaten to cut that funding out unless we incorporate (or don't incorporate, or stop development on) some specific feature or package that a lobbyist finds to be inconvenient. Like p2p technology.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Remember, it was thanks to ordinary people like YOU that we are now seeing such innovations as SMP in OpenBSD. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
No, sir, you can shove your socialized software up your ass. I want my government staying as far away from OSS as possible.
Two days later, I saw Theo with a new iPod and he was not despondant at all.
After my Linux box got hacked for the 3rd time, I switched to OpenBSD. Here's about how it went. (1) Go to web site, pay for CDs (2) Wait 2 weeks (3) Wait 3 more weeks (4) Contact webmaster, ask what's going on, receive no response (5) Wait another month (6) Try again to contact somebody at OpenBSD, receive no response (7) Wait two more months, give up on trying to contact anybody, write off OpenBSD as a bust (8) CDs arrive in mail almost 4 months after I ordered them in cracked, broken jewel cases with one CD scratched beyond the ability of my drive to read it. Luckily it was the source CD and I didn't need it. (9) Write to OpenBSD people to say I got my CDs but the quality was god-awful, the delay was ridiculous, and one of them was busted. Receive no response. Regardless, my OpenBSD box is going on 3 years hack-free with minimal effort on my part to keep it that way. Regardless, I'm unlikely to go through OpenBSD again. When I order a product, waiting over a quarter of the year is unreasonable, and it could at least arrive NOT broken and all screwed up. And they could at least acknowledge that they receive my email, even if only to tell me to piss off.
Asked if he believes the administration is censoring what he can say to the public, Hansen says: "Or they're censoring whether or not I can say it. I mean, I say what I believe if I'm allowed to say it."
Uhhh... well you're on TV right now. The White House can't censor 60 Minutes, dude. Fucking say it.
"In my more than three decades in the government I've never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public," says Hansen.
What restrictions? Dude! You're on 60 Minutes as you say this complaining that the White House won't let you say exactly what you're saying. How in the fuck are you being restricted?
How does it escape all these people that they are on a national television program and not only are they saying all the things that they claim the White House won't let them say, they're able to EXPOSE the White House for doing this. I just don't get it. The official White House press releases can say whatever the hell Bush wants, he claim the world is made of pink elephant shit if he wants, that's his administration and its business. But clearly nobody is being forbidden from making their opinion known and getting the truth out there. This guy isn't going to be locked up and thrown in prison for publically disagreeing with the president. That's the kind of shit that happens in Iran. And, until recently, Iraq. The irony is lost on these people, that they sit around bitching about how their freedoms are being eroded while simultaneously combating our efforts to secure those freedoms for anybody else.
Advertising revenue. When you're dealing with the people who watch nerdy niche programming, you're dealing with an uncommonly tech-savvy crowd that owns TiVos, refuses to watch commercials and never pays for anything anyway. You've got a fan base of freeloading music and software and movie pirates. Just look at the ads that run during reruns of Star Trek. It's all penis enlargement and debt relief. It's pretty obvious that this isn't a crowd that has much disposable income to squeeze out of it.
There's a lot of demand for the 18-35 male population, because it spends a lot of money. But our niche, for whatever reason, is VERY undesirable. The above reasons are probably why.
Note: I am not suggesting that everything in the first paragraph is TRUE, and certainly not of every single person who watches Futurama. But look at the commercials that run on Spike and during Next Gen rebroadcasts... it's obvious what their advertisers think of us, and they hate us. Hence, you can run Battlestar Galactica at 10:00pm on a Friday and get record numbers of us to tune in - they know we're not doing anything else on Friday night from 10-11 pm.
Anyway ... there's some assumptions being made about their demographics and those assumptions fuel the types of advertisers they get and thus their revenue off broadcasting. I think some of those assumptions can be borne out, as uncomfortable as that may make some of you.
This just in - two plus two equals four.
Breaking news - fish lack opposable thumbs, and thus cannot take up quilting.
Hot off the wire - water is wet.
This is one of those tricky intersections of "rights" and "law." Note that "rights" are things we have whether the law recognizes it or not. That's the classic liberal "natural law" version, and it's what most modernized democracies found their legal system on. Among those rights are speech, especially the right to speech of a political nature. The law protects IP because such laws ultimately benefit everybody (in theory), but this guy MIGHT be breaking IP laws to make a political statement. My take would be that his political statement isn't being silenced, just this particular method of making it. The guy could probably re-package or re-do the web site to make it more clearly a parody and get around the IP laws on this. What pisses me off is that it was just SHUT DOWN rather than trying this very reasonable intermediate step.
I'm wary of giving the Brits that code. This is the same government that bought Westinghouse, the private storehouse for American nuclear technology, and then turned around and sold it to Toshiba which is going to leverage the technology in China.
Since when have the Democrats had a clear plan on how to accomplish any of their goals when they are in power?
Here's what'll happen. They'll levy a new tax on Internet usage on both customers and providers. The telcos and ISPs will increase prices to compensate. The money will then get sucked out of the economy and into the government, where 75% of it is pissed away on paying yet more federal and state employees to file papers and process applications for vouchers and what not. The remaining 25% will be wrung back into the economy in the form of vouchers to those who have no "affordable" access, and the price of Internet service will jump up. Because that's how Democrats solve almost every social problem. Tax and spend, tax and spend. And frankly, I could live with it if any of their programs were working. I'm sure I'll now be inundated with anecdotes about how Program X saved your family or whatever, and that's fine. But our poverty rate hasn't changed much. Homelessess hasn't changed much.
And lest you think I'm picking on Democrats, the Republicans are no better. Look at any major government program that has been implemented by the Republicans. What has the return been on our enormous investment in the "war on drugs"? More gun violence, more gang activity, no meaningful improvement.
The government is not the solution to problems. Its solution is usually worse than the problem. Aegrescit medendo. "The cure is worse than the malady." Prices are being driven down by market forces, competition, and technological innovation. If broadband isn't available in your area yet, it will be. And if you're one of those people who lives 15 miles away from the nearest human being on a ranch in Wyoming, why on earth should tax money pay for the inconveniences you impose upon yourself by your choice of living area?
I challenge the notion that anybody who can't afford the $22/mo for cable broadband really needs it. If you can't scrounge up $22/mo you've got far more pressing issues than fast access to email.
What a bunch of bullshit.
Now if only we can sort that out in Iraq.