Bullshit. It is illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened. It is perfectly legal to criticize the jewish faith. Two very different things.
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content
Just because you cannot imagine what someone is "saying" by whacking off in front of you doesn't mean he isn't trying to express some constitutionally protected concept, just as I cannot imagine any significant statement being made by someone who pisses on a flag doesn't seem to mean they aren't trying to make one.
Personally, I find whacking off in public more of a sanitary problem. I'm also willing to trade not being able to watch hot chicks masturbate in public with not having to watch fat guys masturbate in public. There isn't much lost there in terms of speech, and the compromise is adequate. If enough people disagree, I'm willing to just shrug and move on. Is it a moral or aesthetic problem? Sure is. Fortunately, it's a pretty obvious line that doesn't include much in terms of actual speech being made.
However, determining what people can watch on a screen has no sanitary component to it, and, if the screen is adequately private, has absolutely no bearing on others. As a result, the problem of determining what is morally just and aesthetically pleasing to watch on a screen comes at great cost and no benefit to the rest of society.
Lots of insinuations about my understanding of the Citizens United case, my political leanings and my mother's pedigree
What you're missing is that people who join a corporation are ALREADY able to speak, and CONTINUE being able to do so while part of a corporation - no matter what kind of restrictions are applied to the corporation itself. This argument that somehow putting restrictions on corporations is tantamount to putting restrictions on people is ludicrous.
And yes, I'm perfectly aware what the ban actually was for. And yes, that's perfectly fine by me. Corporations are not people, and have no right to free speech. That's a right reserved to individuals, who can continue to do so on their own time.
Now, if you want to argue that there's an unresolved problem about how much an individual can spend on engaging in their right to free speech - yes, that is correct. Technically, taking the bus to hold up a banner at a rally or at the town square constitutes money spent for advertising. Do we want to ban that? Probably not. But to pretend that somehow Citizens United was rectifying an undue restrictions on corporate speech is... well, you can blame yourself for the current mess that is political spending. Everyone knew that was coming. And it's not going to stop.
In 1848-1855 it brought inflationary pressures to the United States after the discovery of gold in Sutter's Mill, California, and then again after 1887 when John Steward MacArthur of Scotland discovered the cyanide process for gold.
Absolutely. I wasn't arguing that it always did, but that the gold standard can cause deflationary pressures under specific circumstances.
The term used to describe an economy that is receding is recession or, if it's major, depression.
Point taken.
Recession cannot be the effect of an advance in the expansion of the economy (our original topic) together with static levels of gold while on a gold standard.
True. However, you are assuming that the economy is advancing, and that therefore, it cannot contract. What I am arguing is that any trends that would normally lead to an expansion of the economy (improvements in productivity, for example) immediately lead to deflationary pressures that counteract the expansion of the economy. In case of economy-wide productivity improvements, you're left with only a few scenarios: * the value of a gold coin increases, to reflect the increase in value being added to the overall economy. This is deflationary pressure. * the value of a gold coin stays stable, thereby not increasing the overall money supply. This constrains the value of the improved productivity, and leads to a zero-sum economic game theory.
Because choking the chicken isn't speech. I know that speech has been stretched to the point of breaking by the Citizens United case, but that doesn't mean it was right.
Holy shit, is it "I refuse to understand the point being made and will continue to whip out completely irrelevant analogies" day?
No one is fucking on the tables. This is about what people are allowed to look at on the computer. That's it. Now, if someone wants to file indecency complaints against the patron in question for showing them or a child some people doing dirty deeds, then fine. But that's not what anyone is complaining about - they're all complaining that the library isn't playing morality cop, and for that, they can all go DIAF.
The concept of government is about 5000 years old. Look for the old Mesopotamian civilizations like the Sumerians and the Assyrians. Even at the onset of civilization, people understood that there basic needs for government, that government doesn't work for free, and that the only question about government is what we want the resources to be used for that we provide said government. For the last 5000 years, the need for government to exist, and to include a supporting infrastructure necessary for providing even basic government services, has been unquestioned. Not because no one questioned it, but because the answers were as blindingly obvious as in the Life of Brian skit.
For some reason, Ron Paul type Libertarians think that society can exist without government. Well, it can. But no one wants to return to those times.
And my point is that as soon as you allow for the fact that basic regulation and taxation is required for any semblance of a government, you're right back in a system that differs from ours only by the priorities of the voting public. I'm happy to discuss what should be a government priority and what shouldn't, but these calls of "government IS the problem" and "government is ALWAYS worse than free markets" are idiotic, completely short-sighted and ignorant of about the last 5000 years of civilization. To me, they're no different than the tantrums of a child that didn't get a pony.
That's not correct. In general, prices would fall (the price of gold would rise in terms of the amount of goods and services it could buy) and more could then be bought with the same mass of gold.
I said shackled. I'm very well aware of the deflationary pressure that a gold standard brings, and so is every current economist, and so was everybody at the Bretton-Woods convention when the world decided to move away from the gold standard. And that deflationary pressure - and it's deflationary impact on the overall economy - is exactly part of the set of reasons why the Gold standard was abandoned.
No, this is exactly how it is done. I work with some of the largest data centers in the world (not on the scale of Google or Facebook, but close behind it), and the only difficulty with scale is that moving the data takes a whole lot more planning. Especially if you're planning to keep writing to the old db for almost the entire time of the move. It took us a while, but we now move massive data clusters between geographically disparate data centers in what appears to be a 5 minute window. The reality on the backend is of course very different - but that's the point. Our customers don't give a rat's ass about how difficult the move is - all they care about is that they're paying us to make that problem go away. And therefore, we do.
What Ubisoft essentially did was the cheapest, dumbest way of moving a data center: switch of the database(s), replicate for a few days, start it back up.
Failure in implementation of DRM, failure in how to build the DR portion of the datacenter, failure on how to do the transition, failure on how to provide some measure of compensation for intentionally breaking your customers' games.
Hello Ubisoft. Meet Sony. They'll show you around my shitlist.
What do you think is the result of productivity times man-hours? That's EXACTLY the reason why the Gold standard was abandoned: with it, you'd never be able to expand the economy through more productivity. The size of the economy would be shackled by how much gold is in circulation.
And fund the court system to litigate this kind of behavior. And have some kind of fund to allow poor people to file lawsuits, lest it turns into a might makes right system. And have a system to create, collect and enforce the taxes necessary for this... Kinda like what we have now.
You actually missed the more troublesome buy in your list: that of flight data company ITA. Because of the way that airlines set up access to their flight and pricing information, it becomes difficult to figure out what you actually get when you search Google for fares.
While you're correct that Microsoft did that to secure their dominant position, it is also what every company does to get a competitive edge. The only time that the acquisitions becomes troublesome is when they are used to gain monopoly power in a market. The only time you could potentially argue that is with the acquisition of ITA. Interestingly, few people seem to worry about it.
Interesting point. Who are we in the western world to talk about working conditions in factories like these, when we barely have manufacturing of this type around, and are buying products from these companies?
Don't know how I feel about having this pointed out, but it's certainly food for thought.
It's so odd to me because this state is rife with environmental problems left over from just this mining and when there was no EPA and no regulations on the state level, chemical companies ran rampant in West Virginia.
The most interesting analogy for me are the communists in Russia: a lot of the people voting for the communists now have actually first-hand experience of what the old-school communists were like, and what life was like under them. To them, that life was better than what they have now. The only way that is possible is if they focus on only the good parts, and completely forget the bad parts. There's a lot of research going into why people are making these sorts of decisions. It's not entirely surprising that people behave this way. It still doesn't make right, optimal or even in their own self-interest.
Maybe you should stop being a child and trying to insinuate that the only way someone can have a monopoly is by being the only actor. That's not true, and hasn't been for a long time.
And maybe you should get some reading skills. I have the sneaking suspicion I know more about what it takes to be declared a monopoly, and what is actually a crime when it comes monopoly behavior than you. I provided a handy link a bit above in case you are interested.
And now that they are the dominant player in the space, and one could easily say they got there because they were free, they are raising their prices. That is the very definition of anti-competitive.
How does it differ from new companies offering a deal to anyone who tries them? Furthermore, you still haven't demonstrated that Google Maps is the dominant player in the space of online map services, or how Bottin somehow is affected by them.
Because they're the ones with the legal monopoly.
Utter fail. Look up "legal monopoly", "monopoly", "natural monopoly", and "monopolistics behavior". There are some subtle differences there that you are clearly utterly unaware of. Why are you talking again?
Why should Google Maps get to survive by subsidies from other Google divisions? Why can't they compete on their own?
You haven't demonstrated that Google Maps survives by subsidies from other Google divisions. Furthermore, demonstrate that that behavior is driving other online map services out of the business of providing said service. Finally, please demonstrate that given all these conditions, Google Maps differs from a product that is merely making a loss, being a loss leader, or somehow falls under the definition of monopolization or even leveraging of monopolies - at which point, please start the process all over for Google Search.
Yeah, legal definitions matter. Might want to learn them.
Please show me how Google has the ability to fix prices in the Search market, AND how they grow their market share in that market through means other than normal business operation. Finally, show that Bottin is somehow active in the online map market. Actually, I'll save you the trouble: they are a terrible knock-off of the original Yahoo, but aimed at businesses. Google has little to do with their market.
Note that being dominant in an area has very little to do with being a monopoly, and even less to do with monopolization of your market position.
Monopoly is a control or advantage obtained by one entity over the commercial market in a specific area. Monopolization is an offense under federal anti trust law. The two elements of monopolization are (1) the power to fix prices and exclude competitors within the relevant market. (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen or historical accident.
I have no idea how Google Search has the ability to either fix prices or exclude competitors through anything but offering a better product. Feel free to provide your argument, but at this point I see no evidence that Google is in a position where it either has a monopoly (control of or advantage in the search market), or that it is using monopoly power to advance that position.
Not so much hypocritical, as keenly protective of its local industries. France is big on the concept of national industrial champions, and will protect them at great cost to the treasury. This is par for the coruse.
Still trolling, I see. A few quick notes: * Google doesn't have a monopoly anywhere, even in search. * Google Maps is not given away, it sports ads, and the API costs money to access * You fail to mention Mapquest, or MS maps. Why just sue Google for its maps? Because it is the best one out there? * Why should Bottin be kept alive? Why not Garmin?
In short, you're wrong on two fundamental counts: that this is anything but protectionism of the most basic nature, and that somehow Google Maps is both special, and not, in the world of online map services.
Wow. There's some bitter people on Slashdot. I guess I should have known that someone admitting to a mistake would get excoriated even more so than someone who just keeps arguing that they were right all along. I guess that explains why people like Newt are actually being voted for - there are more people out there who will swallow someone's story about how they were right all along than who will forgive someone who admits to a mistake.
Interesting. Did the lawsuit somehow pay money to the people affected by the sewage dump? How much? What about the people farther downstream than the town that sued?
Also, note that it took a town to sue, not individuals. Are you saying that only those wealthy enough to afford a lawsuit should be able to sue? What if the town administration would just have been paid a lump sum by the town upstream, and the town administration downstream just said "Keep on dumping!"?
What good is a court to address grievances when your kids were already born deformed, you've been burned by the agent, and your crops have all failed due to some careless disposal of toxic chemicals? Will you have the money to pay for the court fees before judgment is handed down? Will your kids ever be supported enough by the company to make up for the fact that they were born fully disabled and in permanent pain? If the company is liquidated, who pays for the medicals bills?
Libertarians never think these things through. To them, a check in the mail is the most that they see necessary to right a wrong. Somehow, I'm convinced that behind every hardcore libertarian is a white male who hasn't had a debilitating accident happen to them, or hasn't gotten shafted hard by someone more powerful than them.
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Bullshit. It is illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened. It is perfectly legal to criticize the jewish faith. Two very different things.
Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content
Just because you cannot imagine what someone is "saying" by whacking off in front of you doesn't mean he isn't trying to express some constitutionally protected concept, just as I cannot imagine any significant statement being made by someone who pisses on a flag doesn't seem to mean they aren't trying to make one.
Personally, I find whacking off in public more of a sanitary problem. I'm also willing to trade not being able to watch hot chicks masturbate in public with not having to watch fat guys masturbate in public. There isn't much lost there in terms of speech, and the compromise is adequate. If enough people disagree, I'm willing to just shrug and move on. Is it a moral or aesthetic problem? Sure is. Fortunately, it's a pretty obvious line that doesn't include much in terms of actual speech being made.
However, determining what people can watch on a screen has no sanitary component to it, and, if the screen is adequately private, has absolutely no bearing on others. As a result, the problem of determining what is morally just and aesthetically pleasing to watch on a screen comes at great cost and no benefit to the rest of society.
Lots of insinuations about my understanding of the Citizens United case, my political leanings and my mother's pedigree
What you're missing is that people who join a corporation are ALREADY able to speak, and CONTINUE being able to do so while part of a corporation - no matter what kind of restrictions are applied to the corporation itself. This argument that somehow putting restrictions on corporations is tantamount to putting restrictions on people is ludicrous.
And yes, I'm perfectly aware what the ban actually was for. And yes, that's perfectly fine by me. Corporations are not people, and have no right to free speech. That's a right reserved to individuals, who can continue to do so on their own time.
Now, if you want to argue that there's an unresolved problem about how much an individual can spend on engaging in their right to free speech - yes, that is correct. Technically, taking the bus to hold up a banner at a rally or at the town square constitutes money spent for advertising. Do we want to ban that? Probably not. But to pretend that somehow Citizens United was rectifying an undue restrictions on corporate speech is... well, you can blame yourself for the current mess that is political spending. Everyone knew that was coming. And it's not going to stop.
In 1848-1855 it brought inflationary pressures to the United States after the discovery of gold in Sutter's Mill, California, and then again after 1887 when John Steward MacArthur of Scotland discovered the cyanide process for gold.
Absolutely. I wasn't arguing that it always did, but that the gold standard can cause deflationary pressures under specific circumstances.
The term used to describe an economy that is receding is recession or, if it's major, depression.
Point taken.
Recession cannot be the effect of an advance in the expansion of the economy (our original topic) together with static levels of gold while on a gold standard.
True. However, you are assuming that the economy is advancing, and that therefore, it cannot contract. What I am arguing is that any trends that would normally lead to an expansion of the economy (improvements in productivity, for example) immediately lead to deflationary pressures that counteract the expansion of the economy. In case of economy-wide productivity improvements, you're left with only a few scenarios:
* the value of a gold coin increases, to reflect the increase in value being added to the overall economy. This is deflationary pressure.
* the value of a gold coin stays stable, thereby not increasing the overall money supply. This constrains the value of the improved productivity, and leads to a zero-sum economic game theory.
Because choking the chicken isn't speech. I know that speech has been stretched to the point of breaking by the Citizens United case, but that doesn't mean it was right.
Holy shit, is it "I refuse to understand the point being made and will continue to whip out completely irrelevant analogies" day?
No one is fucking on the tables. This is about what people are allowed to look at on the computer. That's it. Now, if someone wants to file indecency complaints against the patron in question for showing them or a child some people doing dirty deeds, then fine. But that's not what anyone is complaining about - they're all complaining that the library isn't playing morality cop, and for that, they can all go DIAF.
The concept of government is about 5000 years old. Look for the old Mesopotamian civilizations like the Sumerians and the Assyrians. Even at the onset of civilization, people understood that there basic needs for government, that government doesn't work for free, and that the only question about government is what we want the resources to be used for that we provide said government. For the last 5000 years, the need for government to exist, and to include a supporting infrastructure necessary for providing even basic government services, has been unquestioned. Not because no one questioned it, but because the answers were as blindingly obvious as in the Life of Brian skit.
For some reason, Ron Paul type Libertarians think that society can exist without government. Well, it can. But no one wants to return to those times.
And my point is that as soon as you allow for the fact that basic regulation and taxation is required for any semblance of a government, you're right back in a system that differs from ours only by the priorities of the voting public. I'm happy to discuss what should be a government priority and what shouldn't, but these calls of "government IS the problem" and "government is ALWAYS worse than free markets" are idiotic, completely short-sighted and ignorant of about the last 5000 years of civilization. To me, they're no different than the tantrums of a child that didn't get a pony.
That's not correct. In general, prices would fall (the price of gold would rise in terms of the amount of goods and services it could buy) and more could then be bought with the same mass of gold.
I said shackled. I'm very well aware of the deflationary pressure that a gold standard brings, and so is every current economist, and so was everybody at the Bretton-Woods convention when the world decided to move away from the gold standard. And that deflationary pressure - and it's deflationary impact on the overall economy - is exactly part of the set of reasons why the Gold standard was abandoned.
No, this is exactly how it is done. I work with some of the largest data centers in the world (not on the scale of Google or Facebook, but close behind it), and the only difficulty with scale is that moving the data takes a whole lot more planning. Especially if you're planning to keep writing to the old db for almost the entire time of the move. It took us a while, but we now move massive data clusters between geographically disparate data centers in what appears to be a 5 minute window. The reality on the backend is of course very different - but that's the point. Our customers don't give a rat's ass about how difficult the move is - all they care about is that they're paying us to make that problem go away. And therefore, we do.
What Ubisoft essentially did was the cheapest, dumbest way of moving a data center: switch of the database(s), replicate for a few days, start it back up.
Failure in implementation of DRM, failure in how to build the DR portion of the datacenter, failure on how to do the transition, failure on how to provide some measure of compensation for intentionally breaking your customers' games.
Hello Ubisoft. Meet Sony. They'll show you around my shitlist.
or man-hours
What do you think is the result of productivity times man-hours? That's EXACTLY the reason why the Gold standard was abandoned: with it, you'd never be able to expand the economy through more productivity. The size of the economy would be shackled by how much gold is in circulation.
And fund the court system to litigate this kind of behavior. And have some kind of fund to allow poor people to file lawsuits, lest it turns into a might makes right system. And have a system to create, collect and enforce the taxes necessary for this... Kinda like what we have now.
Interesting post. Thanks for the clarification.
They've pretty much cornered the advertising market with their dominate share of the search engine market and web applications.
Actually, that's pretty far from the truth. If you want the leader of online advertising, you want Facebook. There's some discrepancy in how the numbers pan out, but they all agree: Facebook beats Google fairly handily in the online advertising market.
http://www.allfacebook.com/report-facebook-leads-2011-online-display-ad-sales-2011-06
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/facebook-one-third-online-ads/
You actually missed the more troublesome buy in your list: that of flight data company ITA. Because of the way that airlines set up access to their flight and pricing information, it becomes difficult to figure out what you actually get when you search Google for fares.
While you're correct that Microsoft did that to secure their dominant position, it is also what every company does to get a competitive edge. The only time that the acquisitions becomes troublesome is when they are used to gain monopoly power in a market. The only time you could potentially argue that is with the acquisition of ITA. Interestingly, few people seem to worry about it.
Interesting point. Who are we in the western world to talk about working conditions in factories like these, when we barely have manufacturing of this type around, and are buying products from these companies?
Don't know how I feel about having this pointed out, but it's certainly food for thought.
It's so odd to me because this state is rife with environmental problems left over from just this mining and when there was no EPA and no regulations on the state level, chemical companies ran rampant in West Virginia.
The most interesting analogy for me are the communists in Russia: a lot of the people voting for the communists now have actually first-hand experience of what the old-school communists were like, and what life was like under them. To them, that life was better than what they have now. The only way that is possible is if they focus on only the good parts, and completely forget the bad parts. There's a lot of research going into why people are making these sorts of decisions. It's not entirely surprising that people behave this way. It still doesn't make right, optimal or even in their own self-interest.
Maybe you should stop being a child and trying to insinuate that the only way someone can have a monopoly is by being the only actor. That's not true, and hasn't been for a long time.
And maybe you should get some reading skills. I have the sneaking suspicion I know more about what it takes to be declared a monopoly, and what is actually a crime when it comes monopoly behavior than you. I provided a handy link a bit above in case you are interested.
And now that they are the dominant player in the space, and one could easily say they got there because they were free, they are raising their prices. That is the very definition of anti-competitive.
How does it differ from new companies offering a deal to anyone who tries them? Furthermore, you still haven't demonstrated that Google Maps is the dominant player in the space of online map services, or how Bottin somehow is affected by them.
Because they're the ones with the legal monopoly.
Utter fail. Look up "legal monopoly", "monopoly", "natural monopoly", and "monopolistics behavior". There are some subtle differences there that you are clearly utterly unaware of. Why are you talking again?
Why should Google Maps get to survive by subsidies from other Google divisions? Why can't they compete on their own?
You haven't demonstrated that Google Maps survives by subsidies from other Google divisions. Furthermore, demonstrate that that behavior is driving other online map services out of the business of providing said service. Finally, please demonstrate that given all these conditions, Google Maps differs from a product that is merely making a loss, being a loss leader, or somehow falls under the definition of monopolization or even leveraging of monopolies - at which point, please start the process all over for Google Search.
Yeah, legal definitions matter. Might want to learn them.
Please show me how Google has the ability to fix prices in the Search market, AND how they grow their market share in that market through means other than normal business operation. Finally, show that Bottin is somehow active in the online map market. Actually, I'll save you the trouble: they are a terrible knock-off of the original Yahoo, but aimed at businesses. Google has little to do with their market.
Note that being dominant in an area has very little to do with being a monopoly, and even less to do with monopolization of your market position.
By what definition? From http://definitions.uslegal.com/m/monopoly/:
Monopoly is a control or advantage obtained by one entity over the commercial market in a specific area. Monopolization is an offense under federal anti trust law. The two elements of monopolization are (1) the power to fix prices and exclude competitors within the relevant market. (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen or historical accident.
I have no idea how Google Search has the ability to either fix prices or exclude competitors through anything but offering a better product. Feel free to provide your argument, but at this point I see no evidence that Google is in a position where it either has a monopoly (control of or advantage in the search market), or that it is using monopoly power to advance that position.
Not so much hypocritical, as keenly protective of its local industries. France is big on the concept of national industrial champions, and will protect them at great cost to the treasury. This is par for the coruse.
Still trolling, I see. A few quick notes:
* Google doesn't have a monopoly anywhere, even in search.
* Google Maps is not given away, it sports ads, and the API costs money to access
* You fail to mention Mapquest, or MS maps. Why just sue Google for its maps? Because it is the best one out there?
* Why should Bottin be kept alive? Why not Garmin?
In short, you're wrong on two fundamental counts: that this is anything but protectionism of the most basic nature, and that somehow Google Maps is both special, and not, in the world of online map services.
Wow. There's some bitter people on Slashdot. I guess I should have known that someone admitting to a mistake would get excoriated even more so than someone who just keeps arguing that they were right all along. I guess that explains why people like Newt are actually being voted for - there are more people out there who will swallow someone's story about how they were right all along than who will forgive someone who admits to a mistake.
Interesting. Did the lawsuit somehow pay money to the people affected by the sewage dump? How much? What about the people farther downstream than the town that sued?
Also, note that it took a town to sue, not individuals. Are you saying that only those wealthy enough to afford a lawsuit should be able to sue? What if the town administration would just have been paid a lump sum by the town upstream, and the town administration downstream just said "Keep on dumping!"?
Lots of questions, few answers.
What good is a court to address grievances when your kids were already born deformed, you've been burned by the agent, and your crops have all failed due to some careless disposal of toxic chemicals? Will you have the money to pay for the court fees before judgment is handed down? Will your kids ever be supported enough by the company to make up for the fact that they were born fully disabled and in permanent pain? If the company is liquidated, who pays for the medicals bills?
Libertarians never think these things through. To them, a check in the mail is the most that they see necessary to right a wrong. Somehow, I'm convinced that behind every hardcore libertarian is a white male who hasn't had a debilitating accident happen to them, or hasn't gotten shafted hard by someone more powerful than them.