If that is what they actually spent the money on, everyone would agree with you.
Unfortunately, we are paying for mistresses being flown around the world. We are paying for studies of studies of studies by former professors that have an in with someone in the government. We are paying for regulators that admittedly do no regulation. We are paying for latinum-plated health care benefits for all levels of government when the same benefits will be taxed at high rates if they are offered to non-union members.
If it was just a few expensive hammers or toilet seats, we could stomach that. But the problem with the US government today is that you will often find they are spending money to promote a nuclear power plant while at the same time funding people objecting to it. They government is so large that it is impossible to keep track of all of the different departments and agencies that are spending taxpayer money on stuff.
And the legislators are passing laws so volumnous that they can't be read. They are written by staffers and lobbyists with the understanding that the people voting on them will never read them. It is then acknowledged that the courts will spend a decade figuring out what these laws actually meant. Look at the history of COPPA, for example. They couldn't get it right with three different sets of laws that were actually passed but then struck down.
It sure is expensive to run a government that way.
The only real solution is for the government to actually employ everyone in the US. Then health care wouldn't be an issue and neither would anything else.
Integration into American society? Surely you jest! These folks do not want to become "Americans" - they want to stick with Spanish and live in "Little Mexico" enclaves. They are not interested in joining American culture in the least little bit. There is no integration going to happen.
What there will be, citizen or not, is a general recognition that they can make 20-30 times what they could in Mexico here being paid half of minimum wage. This will destroy any unskilled labor market in the US, as it has pretty much done already.
The manufacturing jobs will not be coming back and the people that were earning $25,000 a year at them are going to have to find somewhere else to get paid - probably from the Government. What little else there is for unskilled workers goes to the Mexican immigrants, legal or not.
A path to citizenship doesn't fix the problem that in their minds they are rich beyond their wildest dreams getting half of minimum wage. It might make it easier for them to complain, but they will soon figure out that
if they complain too much there are 100 guys right outside waiting for their job - and they will take less in wages. Companies love it because they can hire 50 landscapers for what they would have to pay 20 non-immigrants. And wages aren't going up, if anything they are going down because of competition from newer immigrants.
This has happened before with immigrants from Europe. The problem solved itself because the new European immigrants did not want to live in foreign-language-speaking enclaves. They wanted to be Americans and they wanted to fully participate. The new immigrants (legal and illegal) do not want any part of America other than wages to send to their starving families back where they came from. This will not solve itself and is the basis of a permanent underclass of unskilled labor. It is like 1900 in Alabama for black people with the civil rights movement 60 years away.
It is the US Government's responsibility to its own citizens to protect and defend their livelihood. By including everyone that has walked across the border as part of the US Government's responsibility (as they have) it means that only the skilled and those with the resources to become skilled can escape the declining wage competition. The government isn't doing their job, clearly.
Some idiots in Washington seem to have decided to make walking across the border de-facto legal. So we are now pretty much stuck with it.
No other country on the face of the planet tolerates the volume of "undocumented workers" because it would crash their economy. It is pretty much working that way here now. England has a huge problem with illegals because they are trying to be nice about it just like the US.
Mexico has a very simple policy - they use the Mexican Army to defend the border. Cross from the US into Mexico at anywhere but an official border crossing and you will find rifles pointed at you.
Today, if you make more than minimum wage in a job that does not absolutely require good English skills, you are overpaid. You can be replaced by someone willing to work for 10x what they were getting in Mexico, which is about $1.25 a hour. Yes, our minimum wage is like 50x what they can get in Mexico which means they will die to try to get here. And plenty of them do exactly that.
The problem is land reform in Mexico and it has been for the last 400 years. We're not going to solve that problem - they have already had two revolutions over it. More money will not help. Getting all Mexican citizens equal rights and equal standing in the courts might help for starters. Maybe we should start a third revolution?
No employee anywhere is allowed to publicly express an opinion contrary to official policy. I don't care if the employee works for the US Government or Ford. Public statements and statements that might tend to be public better be along official lines or the employee is playing with fire.
That isn't to say that employees can't have opinions, but they better be careful about where they are expressed. The problem here is that now any document from the US government, anywhere, no matter what its classification is now likely to become public. So that means expression opinions in internal, secret communications can't be done safely.
The model for the US election system is a horse race. There are those that cheer for the furthest back horse but more importantly there are those that will switch to backing the "front runner" simply because they are likely to win.
Backing the apparent winner appeals to people because of the vicarious win they get.
So, what if through various machinations Sarah Palin appears to be leading the Republican primary it would not be totally unexpected for other people to get behind her as the leading candidate.
So certainly it is a very dangerous strategy if the objective is to get someone for Obama to beat.
Yes, but where most of these devices are made (China) there is no possible enforcement of US law. Now, there may be a possibility that the US subsidary of a Japanese company using a Chinese-built device could be sued but I suspect if push came to shove they would point at the Chinese contractor and say they have no source code, it is all in China.
The US does not presently enforce patents or trademarks at the border. Would they block import because of a copyright violation? Perhaps, because pirated software and such is often blocked. But counterfeit purses and such are certainly not blocked. So it is completely open to question if any sort of lawsuit might be effective against a Chinese manufacturer.
Most companies with a substantial US presence aren't going to mind complying with this but they are unlikely to provide a package that will actually be of much value. So you get 90% of the source for a device and no build environment and no signing keys.
The cases where the device is manufactured in China and there is no substantial US presence are unlikely to ever come into compliance and there really aren't any penalties except a huge PR nightmare in a very tiny geek community.
I was utterly unaware that there was anything close to "democracy" in Zimbabwe. I thought the reason they had a dictator and tyrant in charge was because there was no democracy in the country.
So how can anything be considered "democracy" where voting is controlled by the tyrant in power?
I'd say that if Tsvangirai believed that sanctions would lead to a better outcome in the end he was doing the only thing possible. To say in public that he supported the sanctions and why would have simply resulted in his no longer having any input into the process.
People, as a general rule, are extremely unwilling to put up with any temporary discomfort for some long-term gain. For example, in the US it is not politically possible to take a stand saying "tax the heck out of everyone because it will reduce the deficit". Such a stand would immediately isolate someone taking it and they would be ignored from that moment on, regardless of the fact that that might actually be the right thing to do. There is no political way to tell people "We're going to make you suffer for a while but things will be much better in the end."
Ignoring that reality and saying someone that cannot take actions out of the public eye that may be better in the end for everyone is really, really ignorant.
Could it possibly be that these titles aren't selling well, which accounts for the apparent discrepancies between apparently similar titles? The ones left are selling well?
Would that be considered censorship?
I suppose if the objective is to eliminate gay rape manuals from their book collection that you could consider this to be censorship of the foulest form. How are prisons supposed to operate under those conditions? Similarly, if incest fantasy books are being eliminated because they are incest fantasy books that would be censorship as well. The problem is, if their objective is to remove all such titles they are doing a piss-poor job at it.
I can certainly buy all of the incest books I want from Amazon. There are plenty of them that seem to represent the various genres of incest still available. So considering this censorship is somewhat suspect in that if that is the objective it is being done ineffectually and pathetically.
Now, if it is simply eliminating titles that aren't selling at all I don't see how that could be considered censorship - unless of course you believe it is required of Amazon to carry everything.
They are not removing anything from Kindles. They are removing it from the store and the list of titles purchased.
Removing it from the store, OK.
Removing it from the list of titles purchased and not allowing further downloads is a bit of a problem. The number one problem is that Kindles are rather fragile and have a lifespan of maybe 12 months. So you get your nice new Kindle under warranty replacement and discover that content you backed up isn't working on your new device. And it cannot be downloaded to the new device. That is a problem.
What you are implying is there is no difference between censorship and any other sort of discrimination or selection.
You see, discrimination isn't necessarily a bad word. Calling the action censorship certainly makes it into one. A person discriminates when they choose between McDonalds and a deli for lunch. A company discriminates when they remove something from being sold when it doesn't sell well.
Calling either action censorship is an offensive notion.
I suggest getting a rifle and beginning to assist Mother Nature.
If you are of moderate skill you should be able to take out a large number of people in cities with strong gun laws. Stay away from Arizona and other places with CCW as you will find your shooting cut short quickly.
There are two wildly divergent ideas on how to teach a child to drive.
1) The Ford Focus (or Mini Cooper) technique. This is essentially at its base "Hit something and die", or "If something hits you, you die". This can be extremely effective in keeping children off the highways until the absolutely can prove to themselves they can handle it.
2) The Monster Truck technique. This can be restated as "It doesn't matter what you hit." It is far, far safer for the child but can be rather damaging on the environment around the child.
Getting a large SUV or pickup truck with a brush guard on it is an implementation of the "Monster Truck technique" and should be respected as a viable driver training tool. A few signs may be sacrificed along the training course but in a few years the student will be able to successfully navigate through the streets and highways of the US.
Contrast this with the Ford Focus technique where the student gives up and moves to New York City and never, ever drives anything ever again.
The net effect is the same: a safe child. The parents will have succeeded in fostering another generation.
You can't win by fighting popular culture. Today science and technology are very, very low on the pop culture totem pole. Drug dealers aren't that great, but they score better than scientists. Hip-hop rappers are way, way up. Rock stars are out. Supermodels aren't cool, but pseudo-idol teens are in.
And none of them are getting A's in school.
Avatar is a horrible examine of a pro-science movie. The scientists for the most part got kicked off the planet in the end. The chief scientist for the Navi cause died. No, I don't think it is inspirational to present the idea of dying on a far off planet in a feud with a paramilitary force.
Face it, in the US today isn't respected to be a scientist. It is respected to be a drug-addicted rap singer that can't use the word "woman" but instead says bitch constantly. It hasn't been respected to get good grades in high school and to spend time studying. There are popular songs with phrases like "Should I be a straight A student? If you are then you think too much." This is the culture we have created and what we are going to have to live with for the next 20 or 30 years.
Look at Asian families where if the kid brings home a B they are beaten. The kid knows it, studys and doesn't get the beating so there is no awful social stigma. In the 1950s white middle class families did the same thing which is why we have science and technology companies in the US today. As a society we have lost that motivation and it is going to hurt.
The problem is that there is a scale where the perception of the value of a single life is zero in Islamabad, 5 in London and 1000 in New York City.
Until that changes you have a health care system focused on putting off dying for two weeks at a cost of $500,000 and airport security focused on preventing any incident from happening at any cost.
If someone were to come out and openly say it isn't worth the trouble and cost to the American people to have the TSA and if a terrorist succeeds in crashing a plane... well, that's too bad the result would be a riot. Certainly they would be thrown out of whatever office they held.
No, this is not a point of rationality in the US. And it goes way, way deeper than simply the TSA.
Sorry but the US will not put up with the only proven solution that Israel has been using for around 40 years. They have never had a terrorist incident while over the last 40 years the rest of the world has had plenty. They don't really talk about their successes at preventing folks from blowing up planes, but they are there.
Anything else short of that will come up short and you will lose lives and planes. It is just a matter of time until this is proven to the TSA and American people.
In reality, the fondling is to drive you back to the machine. The machines cost billions and it would be very embarassing if they were scrapped because nobody wants to walk through them. So the TSA has to encourage people to walk through them. Without complaining. Because it is so very much better than the alternative.
We can't have government agencies spending billions on technology that is scrapped. So we have to show how everyone is happily walking through the machines.
I guess the other alternative would be a bunch of guys with guns helping Granny into the machine.
I cannot imagine a bunch of people on an airplane with three or four people with knives who are prepared to (a) use them and (b) aren't afraid of being hurt.
There is nowhere to run on an airplane. People would panic and trample each other trying to get away. A few courageous (or foolish) people might think about trying to counter-attack the knife-wielders, but they would likely be prevented from doing much by the other screaming people.
Ever been in a theater stampede? That is exactly what it would be like, only worse.
I guess this is just so there can be some jobs in a few places in the country. We would do much better paying 1000 people to dig holes in random places and another 1000 to fill them in. Replicate that all over the country and we could have millions of government jobs and zero unemployment.
The jobs aren't coming back. The jobs were based on making stuff in the US which isn't financially responsible to do anymore. The jobs were also because more and more stuff was needed because people were spending money they really didn't have. End result is that there aren't as many jobs as there used to be. Come back in 30 years and maybe, just maybe there will be unemployment down to 5% again.
If you look at the real numbers you will discover that there are a few more jobless people than anyone wants to admit. It is like 30% of the population today. The unemployment numbers are only those people still (after three years) collecting unemployment and still trying to find a job. Anyone over 40 can basically forget it - they will never have a job again. Anyone without real skills can forget it - an undocumented illegal can do their job for less than half of what they were making. And we still haven't made it attractive for the illegals to leave.
Funniest thing I saw the other day was that Arizona was trying to criminalize undocumented workers with SB1070. Excuse me, they are already criminals. The moment they crossed the border they were a criminal.
The problem for people not working is there is no more welfare program that someone can get government assistance for 20 years on. So what does a 50-year-old person that will never work again do until they are 65 and eligible for Social Security? Live with their parents?
Think of NASA as a government jobs program because it certainly isn't a space program anymore. We've been there and found out that it isn't popular enough with people. So, we're not going there anymore except with other people's hardware. I give that five years before we give up on using other people's hardware as well.
The problem is in the US the government has had a really bad record of regulating stuff that might need regulating but doing it in the worst way possible and combining it with things that make no sense at all.
One of the best ones was the assault weapon ban. There may have been an attempt to figure out what an "assault weapon" was, but evidently they couldn't do that. There was already a ban (since around 1934) on full auto weapons, so that wasn't needed. They decided somehow that what they wanted to ban was large clips for semiautomatic rifles. Only they didn't actually do that. Instead they picked out a list of "assault weapons" some of which would take large clips and some that would not. Other semiautomatic rifles which would take large clips were not included, possibly because they are made in the USA. Or were obsure foreign brands.
The end result was that buying of large-capacity semiautomatic rifles shifted over to other unlisted models. And manufacturers discontinued the banned models and introduced nearly identical rifles that were not listed.
If the objective was to ban large clips, they didn't do that. If the objective was to ban the importation of semiautomatic rifles, they didn't do that. Nobody really understands what the point of the regulation was because it had virtually no effect on the number of bullets being sprayed from semiautomatic rifles on the streets of the US. However, it was a really nice piece of legislation that everyone could point to as a being an "Assault Weapons Ban".
Any Net Neutrality legislation is likely to be structured just like this and have similar effects. Some behavior will be prohibited, some other things will be required. End result will be confusion and lots of lawyer time figuring out how something must be done and still conform to the new regulations. End result for the consumer will be no real change but there will certainly be some regulation. Meaningless, pointless regulation.
Look, we have had Internet access to residential customers priced at a market-building level for around 15 years now. Low, low prices especially for DSL access - sometimes as low as $15 a month. This has been great for the consumer.
Unfortunately for the consumer the market-building phase is ending. Just about everyone that can afford the $15 a month has the Internet now in their home and the are unlikely to give up easy access to free music, movies, heavily biased blogs and shopping at Amazon. But if the prices go up people are going to complain and perhaps set off a war between providers.
So the answer is to charge the heck out of the folks really making money on the Internet. Why would anyone complain about Google getting dinged instead of the guy living in a trailer with a 384K DSL connection? Oh, wait. That might affect access to those heavily biased blogs that consume 0.0001% of the bandwidth.
Let's get real here. The issue is going to be a war between big bandwidth consumers. The structure of the Internet access in the US isn't going to allow for real, dedicated bandwidth over 300K to every home with an Internet connection. So when IPTV moves beyond the nerdy early-adopter stage there are going to be some major issues. It isn't going to be the cable provider vs. Netflix because the cable provider has dedicated bandwidth to the consumers. Netflix doesn't. Hulu doesn't. The bandwidth competition will be between Netflix and Hulu, for example. Amazon's video service vs. Apple vs. Google TV. Anybody out there trying to get bits to the consumer in large quantities.
Why don't they just increase capacity? Unfortunately, that is a lot easier concept to articulate than to actually accomplish. With cable there is a fiber connection to the "neighborhood node" that serves maybe 1000 homes. One. Fiber. Connection. Divided up across all 1000 homes. When they are reading email and shopping at Amazon this is plenty. Vast overkill. When everyone wants to watch IPTV it is a small fraction of what is required. We are talking about rewiring the neighborhoods with more nodes and more dedicated fiber.
Yeah, that is going to happen at some point, but probably not for a long time. If the cable companies start today they might get it done in five years. Or ten. And right now, with only a small percentage of people actually using things like Netflix it isn't justified to even start the project. Also, there is a serious question what kind of capacity is really going to be needed. Build too much and you waste money. Build too little and it doesn't work any better than what there is today.
So a serious question is what is going to be needed 10 years? Because they need to start building it in five.
All of this noise about control is just that. Noise. Sure, it is a bad idea for the government to regulate bandwidth allocation because they will do it badly for everyone involved. It is equally a bad idea to have Google or Comcast regulating Netflix's bandwidth allocation. We have had "plenty" of bandwidth for all applications for the last 15 years or so. We are about to not have enough by a very large percentage. I don't see how anyone is going to be happy, but government regulation of what is available sounds like a really bad idea.
At least we can look forward to some creative methods from one or two smaller ISPs to deal with this. The big ones are likely to be very uncreative, probably about like the government would be. It is highly likely the next 10 years or so will be difficult until this is (a) sorted out and (b) 100x current capacity is available to the consumer.
No, there does not have to be any middle ground. The consumers want it for free and for the last 25 years or so they have been getting it in bigger and bigger chunks.
Today there is no need to ever pay for music or movies because there are people very happy to supply you. And part of their motivation is for you to say you got it from them and the rest is making sure that nobody, ever gets a dime from anything digital. Ever.
iTunes is perhaps the best known digital music distribution service and it accounts for maybe 2% of music downloads. The rest are free.
No, I don't think there is any middle ground left. We now train children to pirate in schools where they learn from both other students and the teachers about pirating. There is no way out of this other than a collapse.
But we will have 70's music "classics" for the next hundred years. And 80's slasher films.
Once you separate "creative" from "distribution" you have entered the zero-revenue zone. In today's world there can be no revenue gathered from distributing.
That means it is all free, all the time. Period.
Sure, some creative person might be able to get paid once for a single copy to a rich guy. Or some foundation that is really interested in preserving art or movies or something. But there is no revenue past that because then it enters the area of distribution. And distribution is free on the Internet.
This means that if a business is based on collecting money for distribution, they can just hand that over to the pirates. They will make absolutely certain there is no more revenue. Just like with music today and shortly to be movies.
Slashdot Mirror
If that is what they actually spent the money on, everyone would agree with you.
Unfortunately, we are paying for mistresses being flown around the world. We are paying for studies of studies of studies by former professors that have an in with someone in the government. We are paying for regulators that admittedly do no regulation. We are paying for latinum-plated health care benefits for all levels of government when the same benefits will be taxed at high rates if they are offered to non-union members.
If it was just a few expensive hammers or toilet seats, we could stomach that. But the problem with the US government today is that you will often find they are spending money to promote a nuclear power plant while at the same time funding people objecting to it. They government is so large that it is impossible to keep track of all of the different departments and agencies that are spending taxpayer money on stuff.
And the legislators are passing laws so volumnous that they can't be read. They are written by staffers and lobbyists with the understanding that the people voting on them will never read them. It is then acknowledged that the courts will spend a decade figuring out what these laws actually meant. Look at the history of COPPA, for example. They couldn't get it right with three different sets of laws that were actually passed but then struck down.
It sure is expensive to run a government that way.
The only real solution is for the government to actually employ everyone in the US. Then health care wouldn't be an issue and neither would anything else.
Integration into American society? Surely you jest! These folks do not want to become "Americans" - they want to stick with Spanish and live in "Little Mexico" enclaves. They are not interested in joining American culture in the least little bit. There is no integration going to happen.
What there will be, citizen or not, is a general recognition that they can make 20-30 times what they could in Mexico here being paid half of minimum wage. This will destroy any unskilled labor market in the US, as it has pretty much done already.
The manufacturing jobs will not be coming back and the people that were earning $25,000 a year at them are going to have to find somewhere else to get paid - probably from the Government. What little else there is for unskilled workers goes to the Mexican immigrants, legal or not.
A path to citizenship doesn't fix the problem that in their minds they are rich beyond their wildest dreams getting half of minimum wage. It might make it easier for them to complain, but they will soon figure out that
if they complain too much there are 100 guys right outside waiting for their job - and they will take less in wages. Companies love it because they can hire 50 landscapers for what they would have to pay 20 non-immigrants. And wages aren't going up, if anything they are going down because of competition from newer immigrants.
This has happened before with immigrants from Europe. The problem solved itself because the new European immigrants did not want to live in foreign-language-speaking enclaves. They wanted to be Americans and they wanted to fully participate. The new immigrants (legal and illegal) do not want any part of America other than wages to send to their starving families back where they came from. This will not solve itself and is the basis of a permanent underclass of unskilled labor. It is like 1900 in Alabama for black people with the civil rights movement 60 years away.
It is the US Government's responsibility to its own citizens to protect and defend their livelihood. By including everyone that has walked across the border as part of the US Government's responsibility (as they have) it means that only the skilled and those with the resources to become skilled can escape the declining wage competition. The government isn't doing their job, clearly.
Some idiots in Washington seem to have decided to make walking across the border de-facto legal. So we are now pretty much stuck with it.
No other country on the face of the planet tolerates the volume of "undocumented workers" because it would crash their economy. It is pretty much working that way here now. England has a huge problem with illegals because they are trying to be nice about it just like the US.
Mexico has a very simple policy - they use the Mexican Army to defend the border. Cross from the US into Mexico at anywhere but an official border crossing and you will find rifles pointed at you.
Today, if you make more than minimum wage in a job that does not absolutely require good English skills, you are overpaid. You can be replaced by someone willing to work for 10x what they were getting in Mexico, which is about $1.25 a hour. Yes, our minimum wage is like 50x what they can get in Mexico which means they will die to try to get here. And plenty of them do exactly that.
The problem is land reform in Mexico and it has been for the last 400 years. We're not going to solve that problem - they have already had two revolutions over it. More money will not help. Getting all Mexican citizens equal rights and equal standing in the courts might help for starters. Maybe we should start a third revolution?
No employee anywhere is allowed to publicly express an opinion contrary to official policy. I don't care if the employee works for the US Government or Ford. Public statements and statements that might tend to be public better be along official lines or the employee is playing with fire.
That isn't to say that employees can't have opinions, but they better be careful about where they are expressed. The problem here is that now any document from the US government, anywhere, no matter what its classification is now likely to become public. So that means expression opinions in internal, secret communications can't be done safely.
Western software industry is going to go down with the rest of Western civilization, so I wouldn't be cheering for that any time soon.
Unfortunately, with 20-30% real unemployment and bankrupt governments I don't think we will have to wait for 2012 to put an end to things.
I'd be thinking real serious about what sort of crop you might grow if you and your family survive the riots next year.
The model for the US election system is a horse race. There are those that cheer for the furthest back horse but more importantly there are those that will switch to backing the "front runner" simply because they are likely to win.
Backing the apparent winner appeals to people because of the vicarious win they get.
So, what if through various machinations Sarah Palin appears to be leading the Republican primary it would not be totally unexpected for other people to get behind her as the leading candidate.
So certainly it is a very dangerous strategy if the objective is to get someone for Obama to beat.
Yes, but where most of these devices are made (China) there is no possible enforcement of US law. Now, there may be a possibility that the US subsidary of a Japanese company using a Chinese-built device could be sued but I suspect if push came to shove they would point at the Chinese contractor and say they have no source code, it is all in China.
The US does not presently enforce patents or trademarks at the border. Would they block import because of a copyright violation? Perhaps, because pirated software and such is often blocked. But counterfeit purses and such are certainly not blocked. So it is completely open to question if any sort of lawsuit might be effective against a Chinese manufacturer.
Most companies with a substantial US presence aren't going to mind complying with this but they are unlikely to provide a package that will actually be of much value. So you get 90% of the source for a device and no build environment and no signing keys.
The cases where the device is manufactured in China and there is no substantial US presence are unlikely to ever come into compliance and there really aren't any penalties except a huge PR nightmare in a very tiny geek community.
I was utterly unaware that there was anything close to "democracy" in Zimbabwe. I thought the reason they had a dictator and tyrant in charge was because there was no democracy in the country.
So how can anything be considered "democracy" where voting is controlled by the tyrant in power?
I'd say that if Tsvangirai believed that sanctions would lead to a better outcome in the end he was doing the only thing possible. To say in public that he supported the sanctions and why would have simply resulted in his no longer having any input into the process.
People, as a general rule, are extremely unwilling to put up with any temporary discomfort for some long-term gain. For example, in the US it is not politically possible to take a stand saying "tax the heck out of everyone because it will reduce the deficit". Such a stand would immediately isolate someone taking it and they would be ignored from that moment on, regardless of the fact that that might actually be the right thing to do. There is no political way to tell people "We're going to make you suffer for a while but things will be much better in the end."
Ignoring that reality and saying someone that cannot take actions out of the public eye that may be better in the end for everyone is really, really ignorant.
My vote is for Kings II where a bear is sent to kill children for making fun of a prophet. Always seemed to be an act of a kind and loving God.
Could it possibly be that these titles aren't selling well, which accounts for the apparent discrepancies between apparently similar titles? The ones left are selling well?
Would that be considered censorship?
I suppose if the objective is to eliminate gay rape manuals from their book collection that you could consider this to be censorship of the foulest form. How are prisons supposed to operate under those conditions? Similarly, if incest fantasy books are being eliminated because they are incest fantasy books that would be censorship as well. The problem is, if their objective is to remove all such titles they are doing a piss-poor job at it.
I can certainly buy all of the incest books I want from Amazon. There are plenty of them that seem to represent the various genres of incest still available. So considering this censorship is somewhat suspect in that if that is the objective it is being done ineffectually and pathetically.
Now, if it is simply eliminating titles that aren't selling at all I don't see how that could be considered censorship - unless of course you believe it is required of Amazon to carry everything.
They are not removing anything from Kindles. They are removing it from the store and the list of titles purchased.
Removing it from the store, OK.
Removing it from the list of titles purchased and not allowing further downloads is a bit of a problem. The number one problem is that Kindles are rather fragile and have a lifespan of maybe 12 months. So you get your nice new Kindle under warranty replacement and discover that content you backed up isn't working on your new device. And it cannot be downloaded to the new device. That is a problem.
What you are implying is there is no difference between censorship and any other sort of discrimination or selection.
You see, discrimination isn't necessarily a bad word. Calling the action censorship certainly makes it into one. A person discriminates when they choose between McDonalds and a deli for lunch. A company discriminates when they remove something from being sold when it doesn't sell well.
Calling either action censorship is an offensive notion.
I suggest getting a rifle and beginning to assist Mother Nature.
If you are of moderate skill you should be able to take out a large number of people in cities with strong gun laws. Stay away from Arizona and other places with CCW as you will find your shooting cut short quickly.
There are two wildly divergent ideas on how to teach a child to drive.
1) The Ford Focus (or Mini Cooper) technique. This is essentially at its base "Hit something and die", or "If something hits you, you die". This can be extremely effective in keeping children off the highways until the absolutely can prove to themselves they can handle it.
2) The Monster Truck technique. This can be restated as "It doesn't matter what you hit." It is far, far safer for the child but can be rather damaging on the environment around the child.
Getting a large SUV or pickup truck with a brush guard on it is an implementation of the "Monster Truck technique" and should be respected as a viable driver training tool. A few signs may be sacrificed along the training course but in a few years the student will be able to successfully navigate through the streets and highways of the US.
Contrast this with the Ford Focus technique where the student gives up and moves to New York City and never, ever drives anything ever again.
The net effect is the same: a safe child. The parents will have succeeded in fostering another generation.
You can't win by fighting popular culture. Today science and technology are very, very low on the pop culture totem pole. Drug dealers aren't that great, but they score better than scientists. Hip-hop rappers are way, way up. Rock stars are out. Supermodels aren't cool, but pseudo-idol teens are in.
And none of them are getting A's in school.
Avatar is a horrible examine of a pro-science movie. The scientists for the most part got kicked off the planet in the end. The chief scientist for the Navi cause died. No, I don't think it is inspirational to present the idea of dying on a far off planet in a feud with a paramilitary force.
Face it, in the US today isn't respected to be a scientist. It is respected to be a drug-addicted rap singer that can't use the word "woman" but instead says bitch constantly. It hasn't been respected to get good grades in high school and to spend time studying. There are popular songs with phrases like "Should I be a straight A student? If you are then you think too much." This is the culture we have created and what we are going to have to live with for the next 20 or 30 years.
Look at Asian families where if the kid brings home a B they are beaten. The kid knows it, studys and doesn't get the beating so there is no awful social stigma. In the 1950s white middle class families did the same thing which is why we have science and technology companies in the US today. As a society we have lost that motivation and it is going to hurt.
The problem is that there is a scale where the perception of the value of a single life is zero in Islamabad, 5 in London and 1000 in New York City.
Until that changes you have a health care system focused on putting off dying for two weeks at a cost of $500,000 and airport security focused on preventing any incident from happening at any cost.
If someone were to come out and openly say it isn't worth the trouble and cost to the American people to have the TSA and if a terrorist succeeds in crashing a plane ... well, that's too bad the result would be a riot. Certainly they would be thrown out of whatever office they held.
No, this is not a point of rationality in the US. And it goes way, way deeper than simply the TSA.
Sorry but the US will not put up with the only proven solution that Israel has been using for around 40 years. They have never had a terrorist incident while over the last 40 years the rest of the world has had plenty. They don't really talk about their successes at preventing folks from blowing up planes, but they are there.
Anything else short of that will come up short and you will lose lives and planes. It is just a matter of time until this is proven to the TSA and American people.
In reality, the fondling is to drive you back to the machine. The machines cost billions and it would be very embarassing if they were scrapped because nobody wants to walk through them. So the TSA has to encourage people to walk through them. Without complaining. Because it is so very much better than the alternative.
We can't have government agencies spending billions on technology that is scrapped. So we have to show how everyone is happily walking through the machines.
I guess the other alternative would be a bunch of guys with guns helping Granny into the machine.
I cannot imagine a bunch of people on an airplane with three or four people with knives who are prepared to (a) use them and (b) aren't afraid of being hurt.
There is nowhere to run on an airplane. People would panic and trample each other trying to get away. A few courageous (or foolish) people might think about trying to counter-attack the knife-wielders, but they would likely be prevented from doing much by the other screaming people.
Ever been in a theater stampede? That is exactly what it would be like, only worse.
I guess this is just so there can be some jobs in a few places in the country. We would do much better paying 1000 people to dig holes in random places and another 1000 to fill them in. Replicate that all over the country and we could have millions of government jobs and zero unemployment.
The jobs aren't coming back. The jobs were based on making stuff in the US which isn't financially responsible to do anymore. The jobs were also because more and more stuff was needed because people were spending money they really didn't have. End result is that there aren't as many jobs as there used to be. Come back in 30 years and maybe, just maybe there will be unemployment down to 5% again.
If you look at the real numbers you will discover that there are a few more jobless people than anyone wants to admit. It is like 30% of the population today. The unemployment numbers are only those people still (after three years) collecting unemployment and still trying to find a job. Anyone over 40 can basically forget it - they will never have a job again. Anyone without real skills can forget it - an undocumented illegal can do their job for less than half of what they were making. And we still haven't made it attractive for the illegals to leave.
Funniest thing I saw the other day was that Arizona was trying to criminalize undocumented workers with SB1070. Excuse me, they are already criminals. The moment they crossed the border they were a criminal.
The problem for people not working is there is no more welfare program that someone can get government assistance for 20 years on. So what does a 50-year-old person that will never work again do until they are 65 and eligible for Social Security? Live with their parents?
Think of NASA as a government jobs program because it certainly isn't a space program anymore. We've been there and found out that it isn't popular enough with people. So, we're not going there anymore except with other people's hardware. I give that five years before we give up on using other people's hardware as well.
The problem is in the US the government has had a really bad record of regulating stuff that might need regulating but doing it in the worst way possible and combining it with things that make no sense at all.
One of the best ones was the assault weapon ban. There may have been an attempt to figure out what an "assault weapon" was, but evidently they couldn't do that. There was already a ban (since around 1934) on full auto weapons, so that wasn't needed. They decided somehow that what they wanted to ban was large clips for semiautomatic rifles. Only they didn't actually do that. Instead they picked out a list of "assault weapons" some of which would take large clips and some that would not. Other semiautomatic rifles which would take large clips were not included, possibly because they are made in the USA. Or were obsure foreign brands.
The end result was that buying of large-capacity semiautomatic rifles shifted over to other unlisted models. And manufacturers discontinued the banned models and introduced nearly identical rifles that were not listed.
If the objective was to ban large clips, they didn't do that. If the objective was to ban the importation of semiautomatic rifles, they didn't do that. Nobody really understands what the point of the regulation was because it had virtually no effect on the number of bullets being sprayed from semiautomatic rifles on the streets of the US. However, it was a really nice piece of legislation that everyone could point to as a being an "Assault Weapons Ban".
Any Net Neutrality legislation is likely to be structured just like this and have similar effects. Some behavior will be prohibited, some other things will be required. End result will be confusion and lots of lawyer time figuring out how something must be done and still conform to the new regulations. End result for the consumer will be no real change but there will certainly be some regulation. Meaningless, pointless regulation.
That is certainly what I am concerned about.
Look, we have had Internet access to residential customers priced at a market-building level for around 15 years now. Low, low prices especially for DSL access - sometimes as low as $15 a month. This has been great for the consumer.
Unfortunately for the consumer the market-building phase is ending. Just about everyone that can afford the $15 a month has the Internet now in their home and the are unlikely to give up easy access to free music, movies, heavily biased blogs and shopping at Amazon. But if the prices go up people are going to complain and perhaps set off a war between providers.
So the answer is to charge the heck out of the folks really making money on the Internet. Why would anyone complain about Google getting dinged instead of the guy living in a trailer with a 384K DSL connection? Oh, wait. That might affect access to those heavily biased blogs that consume 0.0001% of the bandwidth.
Let's get real here. The issue is going to be a war between big bandwidth consumers. The structure of the Internet access in the US isn't going to allow for real, dedicated bandwidth over 300K to every home with an Internet connection. So when IPTV moves beyond the nerdy early-adopter stage there are going to be some major issues. It isn't going to be the cable provider vs. Netflix because the cable provider has dedicated bandwidth to the consumers. Netflix doesn't. Hulu doesn't. The bandwidth competition will be between Netflix and Hulu, for example. Amazon's video service vs. Apple vs. Google TV. Anybody out there trying to get bits to the consumer in large quantities.
Why don't they just increase capacity? Unfortunately, that is a lot easier concept to articulate than to actually accomplish. With cable there is a fiber connection to the "neighborhood node" that serves maybe 1000 homes. One. Fiber. Connection. Divided up across all 1000 homes. When they are reading email and shopping at Amazon this is plenty. Vast overkill. When everyone wants to watch IPTV it is a small fraction of what is required. We are talking about rewiring the neighborhoods with more nodes and more dedicated fiber.
Yeah, that is going to happen at some point, but probably not for a long time. If the cable companies start today they might get it done in five years. Or ten. And right now, with only a small percentage of people actually using things like Netflix it isn't justified to even start the project. Also, there is a serious question what kind of capacity is really going to be needed. Build too much and you waste money. Build too little and it doesn't work any better than what there is today.
So a serious question is what is going to be needed 10 years? Because they need to start building it in five.
All of this noise about control is just that. Noise. Sure, it is a bad idea for the government to regulate bandwidth allocation because they will do it badly for everyone involved. It is equally a bad idea to have Google or Comcast regulating Netflix's bandwidth allocation. We have had "plenty" of bandwidth for all applications for the last 15 years or so. We are about to not have enough by a very large percentage. I don't see how anyone is going to be happy, but government regulation of what is available sounds like a really bad idea.
At least we can look forward to some creative methods from one or two smaller ISPs to deal with this. The big ones are likely to be very uncreative, probably about like the government would be. It is highly likely the next 10 years or so will be difficult until this is (a) sorted out and (b) 100x current capacity is available to the consumer.
No, there does not have to be any middle ground. The consumers want it for free and for the last 25 years or so they have been getting it in bigger and bigger chunks.
Today there is no need to ever pay for music or movies because there are people very happy to supply you. And part of their motivation is for you to say you got it from them and the rest is making sure that nobody, ever gets a dime from anything digital. Ever.
iTunes is perhaps the best known digital music distribution service and it accounts for maybe 2% of music downloads. The rest are free.
No, I don't think there is any middle ground left. We now train children to pirate in schools where they learn from both other students and the teachers about pirating. There is no way out of this other than a collapse.
But we will have 70's music "classics" for the next hundred years. And 80's slasher films.
Once you separate "creative" from "distribution" you have entered the zero-revenue zone. In today's world there can be no revenue gathered from distributing.
That means it is all free, all the time. Period.
Sure, some creative person might be able to get paid once for a single copy to a rich guy. Or some foundation that is really interested in preserving art or movies or something. But there is no revenue past that because then it enters the area of distribution. And distribution is free on the Internet.
This means that if a business is based on collecting money for distribution, they can just hand that over to the pirates. They will make absolutely certain there is no more revenue. Just like with music today and shortly to be movies.