The Federal Reserve now holds about double that amount. Think about that a minute - the private bank in control of the money supply now holds $3 Trillion in debt, AND have the ability to raise the interest rate at any time.
The Federal Reserve is still a federal institution politically, regardless of how it is incorporated. As such it is influenced by public opinion and by all the nomination mechanisms that make up its board.
The Fed does not hold $3 trillion of debt. It holds 3 trillion dollars of treasuries and other bonds, against which it emitted 3 trillion dollars - most of those dollars in forms of federal reserves held by the biggest banks. How did those banks get those treasuries? They were largely existing bonds (the economy held about 1 trillion in excess savings) - which was monetized.
So one arm of the government sold short-term debt (money) in exchange for longer term debt (treasuries) from another arm of the government, which treasuries mature gradually and orderly - eliminating the 'debt' automatically (unless the Fed decides to sell those treasuries sooner).
These two sums net out largely, the difference is miniscule compared to the size of the economy. What the Fed did during QE was mainly not to create new debt, but to convert existing debt into shorter-term (and hopefully more stimulating to the economy) forms of debt.
So your '3 trillion dollars debt' phrase is highly misleading and you should know that.
Do you really think US citizens are losing any sleep over US policymakers addressing the debt problem the obvious way: by weakening the dollar which helps US exports (creates jobs) and which also devalues chinese debt as a side effect?
If you ask me the US made a pretty good deal there.
They may not lose any sleep now, but once they realize that their 401Ks only have 30% of the purchasing power they had before the dollar devaluation began, it may not look like such a good idea. The dollar really has to crash before this obvious trick will save us.
The USD exchange rate and commodities make up less than 10% of the domestic price level so it matters a lot less than you think.
Furthermore, why do you only consider the negative effects of a currency devaluation while ignoring the positive effects? Devaluation driven export booms are happening all the time and it can be pulled off by any country that is indebted in its own currency. (not an option for Ireland or Greece - but it is clearly an option for the US.)
Policy-wise it's a no-brainer to do, if a country can do it. Deflation is a much bigger danger.
Furthermore, in the Reagan years and in the Bush years the dollar lost 3 times as much of value as it did in the current crisis... yet the world did not end.
What does "reducing the size and scope of the Federal Government" have to do with making the government work for us? If anything, a small government is less able to work for us - it either does nothing, or is more easily captured by the rich and powerful.
A small, relatively-weak Federal Government, by it's very nature of being weak, removes itself almost completely from corporate targeting for control, as there is relatively little a weak Federal Government can do to tilt economic and other factors to any great effect.
No, historic precedent is overwhelming in that regard: weak governments get owned, entirely, and everyone suffers except the select few. Think of medieval Germany with literally dozens of weak governments. It was one of the most destructive periods of Germany.
But you do not have to look that far back in time: just consider the weak central governments in Africa today. Western corporations are essentially owning those governments lock, stock and barrel. Look at the human (and economic and environmental...) cost and weep.
Is this really what you want to see in the US as well?
Which, of course, is *why* corporations and others spend so much money and go to such lengths to influence those in positions of power in the Federal Government.
Not really: lobbying for more influence is only a second preference to the primary option, which is to own a weak the government.
Lobbying balances out in the long run so for every Microsoft force there's a Google counter-force. For every NRA there's an ACLU, etc. Yes, it ebbs and flows, and you never really like the status quo, but that is what you get from democracy: if you (collectively) do not like how lobbying is handled in Washington do not elect the politicians you do.
If you are in a minority voting power wise you'll have to suck it up.
With a weak central government everyone has to suck it up...
To prove your point you'd have to show how the many examples of disastrous weak government precedents do not count and you'd also have to show successful weak government models. I submit that you cannot meet either of those requirements and I submit that much of your argument is just wishful thinking not supported by historic facts or by common sense logic.
If somebody builds on your work and doesn't release it back to you, you don't lose anything.
Of course you (the project) loses something: you lose an opportunity for the project to go forward.
It's not a contradiction: you can increase freedom by removing the 'freedom to steal other people's work'.
A "quid pro quo" license like the GPL is a bit like a voluntary insurance fee: if you find the project useful enough to extend it, and if you find that extension so useful that you redistribute it, you need to contribute it back to the original project which you found so useful.
It's a bit like personal income taxes for immigrants: if you decide to migrate to and live in a country and reap the benefits of infrastructure and advanced civilization there (both socially and economically), then you are required to share back a small proportion of the profits you won from that deal.
So the GPL is optimistic altruism with a guarantee of reciprocity built in. This can increase freedom by taking away the freedom to steal.
If you do not like the conditions, you are not required to enter that deal.
The current world may have the tech but also the legacy of pollution and rampant debt to contend with.
Most of the debt is owed to a vast communist country thousands of miles away, which shipped hundreds of millions of metric tons of products to the US, in exchange for the US printing the pictures of dead presidents on a few dozen tons of green paper.
Do you really think US citizens are losing any sleep over US policymakers addressing the debt problem the obvious way: by weakening the dollar which helps US exports (creates jobs) and which also devalues chinese debt as a side effect?
If you ask me the US made a pretty good deal there.
Bingo. They're holding more than a trillion of our debt, so it's not just that they'll cease buying more of our debt when their economy implodes, but that they'll sell the reserves they hold. The US Treasury will have to offer higher rates to attract financing, and this will rapidly balloon the deficit. Any vestigial hope that US public financing is feasible will vanish.
US Treasuries have an expiration date. $15+ trillion dollars will go to money heaven, hand in hand with the `full faith and credit' of the United States.
It's hardly a problem - the US is a 15 trillion economy per year, it is also very rich in natural resources and it also prints its own currency so it cannot ever run into our-money-is-printed-elsewhere problems like Ireland or Greece. How do you fancy could the US possibly default on its debt - the ink running out of printers? All in one, internationally the US is considered a very good creditor and that is part of the reason why treasuries are trading at very low yields right now.
The problem is too low US treasury yields right now (it is keeping growth and investment depressed) - so increased inflation would actually be good for the US economy.
In your hypothetical scenario the milliseconds game (well, these days it's a nanoseconds game really) will simply move to another venue. There will be even larger secondary shadow/derivative markets that allows real-time trading anytime, and which markets propagate their inventory to the underlying regulated market every 5 seconds.
You would have to outlaw a timely, real-time market in every jurisdiction of this planet, and you'd have to effectively prosecute and bust every secondary market on this planet for your plan to have any effect. Include game servers with virtual money and with lower than 5 seconds network lag in that list of places to bust...
So, how did you get to work today? On a public road by any chance?
Would you like to pay 'rent' to some road tycoon instead for the privilege? After having paid rent to some warlord for not killing you this week?
You have not answered the core argument of the grandparent post either: that most of the 400 rich people in the US who own 60% of the wealth got rich because a vast country with 300 million citizens gave them the tools, the marketplace, the safe business environment to do so.
people will still pay for high quality photographers to take high quality pictures, you just wont be able to make as much money from once off work by ad hearing to artificial scarcity.
That is what is scaring content industry fat cats: creative artists getting a much better deal by eliminating expensive (and control freak) middlemen that stand between their works and the public who enjoys those works.
The hottest major in big marketing organizations is a hard science: Stats. The analytics revolution means that marketing is now about precisely targeting your demographic and producing quantifiable results on a lots of fine-grained metrics.
Wow, the scientific method is now used in an area that used to be dominated by liberal arts graduates, and they are getting better results, less annoying ads and more revenue?
They have one thing in common. They are both keeping PhD's from doing more valuable research (medicine, fundamental physics, etc.), just to sell some ads and marginally improve joe sixpack's user experience. How are they doing it? Well, I think these companies are playing psychological tricks (through the media) to make their employees work for them, for example by making them feel like rockstar programmers, while they could be true heroes in different fields.
No, it's done by a few hundred million Joe sixpack's preferring a slightly improved user experience and shinier ads over 'valuable research'.
They give their dollars to the Apple's and Google's of this world and with that economy of scale it ends up being tens of billions of dollars per quarter. Compare that with all of NASA not even getting $20 billion per year and with government funded scientists having bible-thumping republican AGs breathing down their neck and wanting to search their personal emails to look for the even slightest infraction.
That will easily sway the brilliant programmers away from 'valuable research'.
Agreed. What I don't understand, though, is why these execs make so much money. They clearly don't need it and aren't motivated by it.
Because they can, because nobody stops them and because they have no problem with collecting it. They sit at highly central nodes of a very complex graph of humans (called modern society) and just the pure act of being there and collecting a 0.001% tax gives them immense wealth and if they have even a shimmer of talent they can collect unimaginable wealth.
Obviously such nodes/positions are very vulnerable to sociopaths.
You need a citation for the application of elementary logic? Wow!
People in power playing out their subordinates against each other, to maximize only their own survival and not the survival of the group is the quintessential definition of a 'parasite'. In nature parasites are useful sometimes and tolerated, but not in leadership positions.
Sociopaths are a bug in the human genome which didn't matter much in the jungle (which had a large number of small groups/tribes of humans, and small groups are very good at isolating sociopaths) but it matters a lot in today's highly interconnected societies and is a lot more harmful. It's also a lot harder to get rid of them: the "We all know each other so who are you kidding Steve?" social defense which worked in the jungle does not work in today's society where millions of people do not know their 'leaders' in person.
It will take some time for this bug to be fixed, and the period leading to it will be marred by inefficiencies.
They'd probably sue them for interfering with customers' ability to find legal copies of their movie.
Search engines could point to several past legal battles questioning the legal ownership of various high-profile movies. Every single big studio had such episodes in the past. If search engines are supposed to unindex sources of movies with questionable legality then they have to unindex all big movie studios as well, not just (alleged) pirate sites.
If a movie studio can present a (final) court ruling against a pirate site then search engines have proper legal basis to unindex that site.
No need to understand technology when in addition to having piles of money, you understand that buying law makers will keep your current system safe. This way you don't have to do anything different and you still make money.
You got it wrong:
The RIAA/MPAA and big content studio executives understand the business effects of technology, perfectly. They probably understand it better than most of you.
They know that digital distribution of creative works means the end of their distribution monopoly, they know that digital distribution means the end of their profitable middle-man status, they know that digital distribution will end their private, unelected tax on most of our creative society and they know that digital distribution means an end to their undeservedly lavish life-style of a parasite.
They understand technology perfectly, and they use every trick in the book to stop/delay it, in the hope of even newer technology changing the balance of powers somehow, or barring a break-through technology, allowing them to squeeze the last drop of profit out of it, while it still lasts.
They only need to watch what is happening with E-books and book publishing houses to foresee their own future, or the lack of it.
Those who do not understand technology are not the RIAA/MPAA, but the artists whom these parasites are still feeding off of.
Am I the only one to suspect that DNT is mainly aimed at the market participant which does the most tracking and which has the highest online ad revenue: Google/DoubleClick?
Groklaw has its own biases whenever IBM comes into the picture.
Is Groklaw somewhat scared about SCO/Microsoft and does that show in the articles? Sure.
Is Groklaw generally wrong or misleading? Not at all: it is possible to keep fact separated from opinion. Journalists understand that and are able to do that just fine - unless their salary depends on not understanding it.
Furthermore, PJ's paranoia about SCO/Microsoft seems to be rather well founded .
So as far as journalistic integrity goes, Groklaw is top notch.
*This is where Net Neutrality gets interesting; it's not really freeloading, as consumers have already paid TW for that bandwidth. Personally, if I was a cable provider, I'd make it part of my contract with the vendors that they do not try to undercut my rates by providing the same content directly to my customers. at a price higher than the contract stipulates but lower than a 20% markup on that rate.
That would be one of: pricing cartel, unfair competition, abuse of monopoly power - or all of them.
The WoW addict's "real world" is the WoW community itself.
Problem is, gaining accomplishments is really hard grunt work in those worlds - some battles take hours of sitting in front of the computer. So these addicts have to sink a ton of time into WoW to gain an ego boost.
So it's WoW addicts admiring each other - and some of them cheating to gain WoW cred faster.
There are much more mundane examples beyond spies and spooks.
Think everyday police footwork. Do you really want the identities of all informants exposed publicly? Do you really want the list of all current investigations and suspects exposed publicly? Do you really want the list of sex crime victims exposed publicly? Do you really want the list of protected witnesses exposed publicly?
Until there's human dishonesty and crime, there will be a need for honest people to keep secrets - and that includes honest, law abiding people working for governments.
Obviously the problem is dishonest people working for governments (and other organizations) keeping secrets to further their crimes. But you should not expect to be able to solve that particular problem by removing one of the main weapons of those who are hunting them...
Full employment runs contrary to capitalism. The more efficient capitalism gets, the less workable the socialist idea of full employment becomes.
Conversely, the fewer jobs there are, the less granted the capitalist idea of a free and safe country to run business becomes. (Eventually the risk and cost of tribes of unemployed pariahs roaming the wilderness will become a problem for business as well.)
What is at risk here is not really the 'socialist idea of full employment' - 'full employment' is not the sign of a 'socialist' economy in any case but the sign of a 'stable' economy.
At risk here is the fundamental force driving capitalism: that of trading scarce labor against capital. Computers are replacing humans at a very quick pace and it's not clear that the 'middle class' will be able to compete with that. Societies will have to (and will) change.
The process has already begun a decade ago: right now the main structural and educational mistake a middle class US unemployed person has committed is that she does not speak Mandarin Chinese, is not willing to work for $2 per day and is not willing to live in China.
Slashdot Mirror
The Federal Reserve now holds about double that amount. Think about that a minute - the private bank in control of the money supply now holds $3 Trillion in debt, AND have the ability to raise the interest rate at any time.
The Federal Reserve is still a federal institution politically, regardless of how it is incorporated. As such it is influenced by public opinion and by all the nomination mechanisms that make up its board.
The Fed does not hold $3 trillion of debt. It holds 3 trillion dollars of treasuries and other bonds, against which it emitted 3 trillion dollars - most of those dollars in forms of federal reserves held by the biggest banks. How did those banks get those treasuries? They were largely existing bonds (the economy held about 1 trillion in excess savings) - which was monetized.
So one arm of the government sold short-term debt (money) in exchange for longer term debt (treasuries) from another arm of the government, which treasuries mature gradually and orderly - eliminating the 'debt' automatically (unless the Fed decides to sell those treasuries sooner).
These two sums net out largely, the difference is miniscule compared to the size of the economy. What the Fed did during QE was mainly not to create new debt, but to convert existing debt into shorter-term (and hopefully more stimulating to the economy) forms of debt.
So your '3 trillion dollars debt' phrase is highly misleading and you should know that.
Do you really think US citizens are losing any sleep over US policymakers addressing the debt problem the obvious way: by weakening the dollar which helps US exports (creates jobs) and which also devalues chinese debt as a side effect?
If you ask me the US made a pretty good deal there.
They may not lose any sleep now, but once they realize that their 401Ks only have 30% of the purchasing power they had before the dollar devaluation began, it may not look like such a good idea. The dollar really has to crash before this obvious trick will save us.
The USD exchange rate and commodities make up less than 10% of the domestic price level so it matters a lot less than you think.
Furthermore, why do you only consider the negative effects of a currency devaluation while ignoring the positive effects? Devaluation driven export booms are happening all the time and it can be pulled off by any country that is indebted in its own currency. (not an option for Ireland or Greece - but it is clearly an option for the US.)
Policy-wise it's a no-brainer to do, if a country can do it. Deflation is a much bigger danger.
Furthermore, in the Reagan years and in the Bush years the dollar lost 3 times as much of value as it did in the current crisis ... yet the world did not end.
What does "reducing the size and scope of the Federal Government" have to do with making the government work for us? If anything, a small government is less able to work for us - it either does nothing, or is more easily captured by the rich and powerful.
A small, relatively-weak Federal Government, by it's very nature of being weak, removes itself almost completely from corporate targeting for control, as there is relatively little a weak Federal Government can do to tilt economic and other factors to any great effect.
No, historic precedent is overwhelming in that regard: weak governments get owned , entirely, and everyone suffers except the select few. Think of medieval Germany with literally dozens of weak governments. It was one of the most destructive periods of Germany.
But you do not have to look that far back in time: just consider the weak central governments in Africa today. Western corporations are essentially owning those governments lock, stock and barrel. Look at the human (and economic and environmental ...) cost and weep.
Is this really what you want to see in the US as well?
Which, of course, is *why* corporations and others spend so much money and go to such lengths to influence those in positions of power in the Federal Government.
Not really: lobbying for more influence is only a second preference to the primary option, which is to own a weak the government.
Lobbying balances out in the long run so for every Microsoft force there's a Google counter-force. For every NRA there's an ACLU, etc. Yes, it ebbs and flows, and you never really like the status quo, but that is what you get from democracy: if you (collectively) do not like how lobbying is handled in Washington do not elect the politicians you do.
If you are in a minority voting power wise you'll have to suck it up.
With a weak central government everyone has to suck it up ...
To prove your point you'd have to show how the many examples of disastrous weak government precedents do not count and you'd also have to show successful weak government models. I submit that you cannot meet either of those requirements and I submit that much of your argument is just wishful thinking not supported by historic facts or by common sense logic.
Here's where your logic fails:
If somebody builds on your work and doesn't release it back to you, you don't lose anything.
Of course you (the project) loses something: you lose an opportunity for the project to go forward.
It's not a contradiction: you can increase freedom by removing the 'freedom to steal other people's work'.
A "quid pro quo" license like the GPL is a bit like a voluntary insurance fee: if you find the project useful enough to extend it, and if you find that extension so useful that you redistribute it, you need to contribute it back to the original project which you found so useful.
It's a bit like personal income taxes for immigrants: if you decide to migrate to and live in a country and reap the benefits of infrastructure and advanced civilization there (both socially and economically), then you are required to share back a small proportion of the profits you won from that deal.
So the GPL is optimistic altruism with a guarantee of reciprocity built in. This can increase freedom by taking away the freedom to steal.
If you do not like the conditions, you are not required to enter that deal.
The current world may have the tech but also the legacy of pollution and rampant debt to contend with.
Most of the debt is owed to a vast communist country thousands of miles away, which shipped hundreds of millions of metric tons of products to the US, in exchange for the US printing the pictures of dead presidents on a few dozen tons of green paper.
Do you really think US citizens are losing any sleep over US policymakers addressing the debt problem the obvious way: by weakening the dollar which helps US exports (creates jobs) and which also devalues chinese debt as a side effect?
If you ask me the US made a pretty good deal there.
Bingo. They're holding more than a trillion of our debt, so it's not just that they'll cease buying more of our debt when their economy implodes, but that they'll sell the reserves they hold. The US Treasury will have to offer higher rates to attract financing, and this will rapidly balloon the deficit. Any vestigial hope that US public financing is feasible will vanish.
US Treasuries have an expiration date. $15+ trillion dollars will go to money heaven, hand in hand with the `full faith and credit' of the United States.
It's hardly a problem - the US is a 15 trillion economy per year , it is also very rich in natural resources and it also prints its own currency so it cannot ever run into our-money-is-printed-elsewhere problems like Ireland or Greece. How do you fancy could the US possibly default on its debt - the ink running out of printers? All in one, internationally the US is considered a very good creditor and that is part of the reason why treasuries are trading at very low yields right now.
The problem is too low US treasury yields right now (it is keeping growth and investment depressed) - so increased inflation would actually be good for the US economy.
In your hypothetical scenario the milliseconds game (well, these days it's a nanoseconds game really) will simply move to another venue. There will be even larger secondary shadow/derivative markets that allows real-time trading anytime, and which markets propagate their inventory to the underlying regulated market every 5 seconds.
You would have to outlaw a timely, real-time market in every jurisdiction of this planet, and you'd have to effectively prosecute and bust every secondary market on this planet for your plan to have any effect. Include game servers with virtual money and with lower than 5 seconds network lag in that list of places to bust ...
Good luck with that.
taxes kill infrastructure
So, how did you get to work today? On a public road by any chance?
Would you like to pay 'rent' to some road tycoon instead for the privilege? After having paid rent to some warlord for not killing you this week?
You have not answered the core argument of the grandparent post either: that most of the 400 rich people in the US who own 60% of the wealth got rich because a vast country with 300 million citizens gave them the tools, the marketplace, the safe business environment to do so.
people will still pay for high quality photographers to take high quality pictures, you just wont be able to make as much money from once off work by ad hearing to artificial scarcity.
Actually, hard economic data shows the exact opposite effect on artist income: once the (very) expensive copyright middlemen have been eliminated, once distribution has turned into a commodity, there's significantly more money left for real creative artists like the grandparent poster.
That is what is scaring content industry fat cats: creative artists getting a much better deal by eliminating expensive (and control freak) middlemen that stand between their works and the public who enjoys those works.
The hottest major in big marketing organizations is a hard science: Stats. The analytics revolution means that marketing is now about precisely targeting your demographic and producing quantifiable results on a lots of fine-grained metrics.
Wow, the scientific method is now used in an area that used to be dominated by liberal arts graduates, and they are getting better results, less annoying ads and more revenue?
News at 11.
They have one thing in common. They are both keeping PhD's from doing more valuable research (medicine, fundamental physics, etc.), just to sell some ads and marginally improve joe sixpack's user experience. How are they doing it? Well, I think these companies are playing psychological tricks (through the media) to make their employees work for them, for example by making them feel like rockstar programmers, while they could be true heroes in different fields.
No, it's done by a few hundred million Joe sixpack's preferring a slightly improved user experience and shinier ads over 'valuable research'.
They give their dollars to the Apple's and Google's of this world and with that economy of scale it ends up being tens of billions of dollars per quarter. Compare that with all of NASA not even getting $20 billion per year and with government funded scientists having bible-thumping republican AGs breathing down their neck and wanting to search their personal emails to look for the even slightest infraction.
That will easily sway the brilliant programmers away from 'valuable research'.
Agreed.
What I don't understand, though, is why these execs make so much money. They clearly don't need it and aren't motivated by it.
Because they can, because nobody stops them and because they have no problem with collecting it. They sit at highly central nodes of a very complex graph of humans (called modern society) and just the pure act of being there and collecting a 0.001% tax gives them immense wealth and if they have even a shimmer of talent they can collect unimaginable wealth.
Obviously such nodes/positions are very vulnerable to sociopaths.
[citation needed]
You need a citation for the application of elementary logic? Wow!
People in power playing out their subordinates against each other, to maximize only their own survival and not the survival of the group is the quintessential definition of a 'parasite'. In nature parasites are useful sometimes and tolerated, but not in leadership positions.
Sociopaths are a bug in the human genome which didn't matter much in the jungle (which had a large number of small groups/tribes of humans, and small groups are very good at isolating sociopaths) but it matters a lot in today's highly interconnected societies and is a lot more harmful. It's also a lot harder to get rid of them: the "We all know each other so who are you kidding Steve?" social defense which worked in the jungle does not work in today's society where millions of people do not know their 'leaders' in person.
It will take some time for this bug to be fixed, and the period leading to it will be marred by inefficiencies.
They'd probably sue them for interfering with customers' ability to find legal copies of their movie.
Search engines could point to several past legal battles questioning the legal ownership of various high-profile movies. Every single big studio had such episodes in the past. If search engines are supposed to unindex sources of movies with questionable legality then they have to unindex all big movie studios as well, not just (alleged) pirate sites.
If a movie studio can present a (final) court ruling against a pirate site then search engines have proper legal basis to unindex that site.
No need to understand technology when in addition to having piles of money, you understand that buying law makers will keep your current system safe. This way you don't have to do anything different and you still make money.
You got it wrong:
The RIAA/MPAA and big content studio executives understand the business effects of technology, perfectly. They probably understand it better than most of you.
They know that digital distribution of creative works means the end of their distribution monopoly, they know that digital distribution means the end of their profitable middle-man status, they know that digital distribution will end their private, unelected tax on most of our creative society and they know that digital distribution means an end to their undeservedly lavish life-style of a parasite.
They understand technology perfectly, and they use every trick in the book to stop/delay it, in the hope of even newer technology changing the balance of powers somehow, or barring a break-through technology, allowing them to squeeze the last drop of profit out of it, while it still lasts.
They only need to watch what is happening with E-books and book publishing houses to foresee their own future, or the lack of it.
Those who do not understand technology are not the RIAA/MPAA, but the artists whom these parasites are still feeding off of.
Am I the only one to suspect that DNT is mainly aimed at the market participant which does the most tracking and which has the highest online ad revenue: Google/DoubleClick?
What did he steal ?
Gates stole intellectual property the same way Microsoft is accusing Android (and Linux) using companies of having "stolen" intellectual property.
His double standard is mind-boggling and it's nice to see it documented by someone who was right there with Gates in the very beginning.
Spoiler: the rover blog is 5 years delayed :-)
Spirit is doing just fine on Sol 792. Just four days ago one of the rover drivers blogged this:
"The good news is, we have data from Spirit at last! And a lot of it, too -- a whopping 110 Mbits!"
Here are some pictures Spirit has taken recently.
Is this sloppy Slashdot reporting, or an early April's Fool joke?
Groklaw has its own biases whenever IBM comes into the picture.
Is Groklaw somewhat scared about SCO/Microsoft and does that show in the articles? Sure.
Is Groklaw generally wrong or misleading? Not at all: it is possible to keep fact separated from opinion. Journalists understand that and are able to do that just fine - unless their salary depends on not understanding it.
Furthermore, PJ's paranoia about SCO/Microsoft seems to be rather well founded .
So as far as journalistic integrity goes, Groklaw is top notch.
Do they only target the market of Manhattan Martini drinkers?
*This is where Net Neutrality gets interesting; it's not really freeloading, as consumers have already paid TW for that bandwidth. Personally, if I was a cable provider, I'd make it part of my contract with the vendors that they do not try to undercut my rates by providing the same content directly to my customers. at a price higher than the contract stipulates but lower than a 20% markup on that rate.
That would be one of: pricing cartel, unfair competition, abuse of monopoly power - or all of them.
The WoW addict's "real world" is the WoW community itself.
Problem is, gaining accomplishments is really hard grunt work in those worlds - some battles take hours of sitting in front of the computer. So these addicts have to sink a ton of time into WoW to gain an ego boost.
So it's WoW addicts admiring each other - and some of them cheating to gain WoW cred faster.
There are much more mundane examples beyond spies and spooks.
Think everyday police footwork. Do you really want the identities of all informants exposed publicly? Do you really want the list of all current investigations and suspects exposed publicly? Do you really want the list of sex crime victims exposed publicly? Do you really want the list of protected witnesses exposed publicly?
Until there's human dishonesty and crime, there will be a need for honest people to keep secrets - and that includes honest, law abiding people working for governments.
Obviously the problem is dishonest people working for governments (and other organizations) keeping secrets to further their crimes. But you should not expect to be able to solve that particular problem by removing one of the main weapons of those who are hunting them ...
Full employment runs contrary to capitalism. The more efficient capitalism gets, the less workable the socialist idea of full employment becomes.
Conversely, the fewer jobs there are, the less granted the capitalist idea of a free and safe country to run business becomes. (Eventually the risk and cost of tribes of unemployed pariahs roaming the wilderness will become a problem for business as well.)
What is at risk here is not really the 'socialist idea of full employment' - 'full employment' is not the sign of a 'socialist' economy in any case but the sign of a 'stable' economy.
At risk here is the fundamental force driving capitalism: that of trading scarce labor against capital. Computers are replacing humans at a very quick pace and it's not clear that the 'middle class' will be able to compete with that. Societies will have to (and will) change.
The process has already begun a decade ago: right now the main structural and educational mistake a middle class US unemployed person has committed is that she does not speak Mandarin Chinese, is not willing to work for $2 per day and is not willing to live in China.