You people ought to really read the Federalist papers, instead of repeating what someone else said. A republic is a form of government where the head of state is not an inherited position. You're actually comparing a direct democracy (the federalist papers never mention a pure democracy) to a representative democracy (the republic in the federalist papers).
Furthermore, the Federalist Papers actually warn explicitly about having too many representatives (which leads to its own form of herd mentality) and having too few representatives per voter (which leads to a distant representative and a clustering of votes around special interests). Yes, we're fucked, but the Founders knew we were going to be fucked no matter what they set up, and merely tried to set things up in such a way that it minimizes the amount of stupid that goes around.
But the emails stem from a time when she was in government. Just because of that, I say that they are fair game. Now.... if people would stop reporting on her every waking minute (and don't watch it, for god's sake!), she would disappear into the night. She is nothing without publicity.
Market rates? First, you're going to have to define what the market is. Oh, there is only one private company, one state-born and one state-supported company around? Gee, not much of a market there. Then, you're going to have to define service. What uptime? What up/download speeds? What caps? What times? What support? Finally - and this is especially important given we are talking about university access to Internet - what is the cost to research and public education when switching to ATT's version of service? You might very well end-up trying to save pennies, and having to spend dollars to make up for the drop in research and public education.
I wish you were being sarcastic. But at least one GOP candidate has made that his official election platform: Pawlenty, through his "Google test", wants to eliminate all government services that are offered by private company. And since everything under the sun is being offered by a private company, even national defense would be outsourced under that platform. I'm sure he'll backpedal on that so quickly he'll appear to walk on air, but still - Republicans are the only ones who offer up such insanity.
In a supply/demand environment, resources (eg, people) are only worth more when there is a shortage of them. There is no shortage of them.
Correct.
What happens though to your 6-figure admin job when more people train for it and become qualified to take it? Oh, right, price paid for that particular resource goes down. You might want to be careful about what kind of advice you give.
Furthermore, there's a good reason to have lots of people with a living wage. That nice house of yours? It's only nice if every house around it is nice too. Otherwise, you'd move out. That nice community you live in? Only nice if people aren't rummaging through dumpsters for food. Otherwise, it'll get so tense that you'd move out.
It's easy to say "just study more, prole", when you are in a good position that took a good chunk of luck to attain and retain (never got t-boned by a drunk-driver? Count yourself lucky).
You mean an article explains what some esoteric new thing is that not everyone might have heard of? It even puts the explanation after the description of the covered event, so that seasoned readers can skip that part without missing anything? You mean, it's like a real article written by a real journalist?
I mean, yes, there's always a risk of astroturfing. But at least understand what you complain about. The alternative is articles that never mention what that new thingamajigg is they are talking about... oh, like most Slashdot articles. I suggest you go out more.
As far as I can tell, the Senators decided to write Apple precisely because there was nothing illegal about those apps. Reporting on police activity isn't illegal - yet, I guess. I'm not entirely surprised that those apps specifically were banned from the app store, because Apple has an interest in keeping legislators off its back and keep up the image of offering a wholesome version of the Internet. At the same time, I'm curious what other apps would fall under this, or if Apple is going to keep this little bit of TOS around only to remove apps that generate too much bad publicity. My guess is it's going to be the latter.
I read Friedman's book "The World is flat". I stopped reading it because there was nothing in it that was really new: it was a summary of what we all already know: the Internet is making the world even smaller than before. There's nothing really wrong in the book - there's also not much ground-breaking in it.
I actually find Taibbi's article worse than Friedman's book. For one, there are plenty of herd animals that hunt. Lions, orcas, chimpanzees... there's a very long list of social animals that hunt. Do they hunt in herds of 100s of thousands? No. But that's just because there are no prey animals out there that number billions in one spot that need sophisticated hunting tactics to take down. The rest of the complaints really sound petty, and I'm vaguely reminded of various commentators who can't comprehend why someone else is famous. I'm surprised Taibbi didn't mention that Friedman wears a toupee, or something similar.
Two billion in red the first year. Which, coincidentally, is right about the same number as Sony's loss. Furthermore, MS came out of the red actually earlier than Sony. So either that makes the PS3 the mother of all failures, or the XBox360 did vastly better than expected.
Lessig answered in abstract terms because it is very, very difficult to quantify the cost of removing something from the public domain. It's easy to see the benefit: just count the revenue generated by the IP for the rights holder. I suspect that Golan is going to run into the problem of "I see that it is too expensive for you to play Prokovief. Why is that more important than Rightholder A making money off of his sheet music?" Damage might be there, but it is always put into the context of the benefit derived from the existence of the copyright. And he's going to lose that battle every time: because music in general is a big market, and therefore there is no need to play a particular piece - but an individual rightsholder derives direct benefits from the royalties of a particular piece that he/she can't derive from any other piece.
Sometimes, in the rush to quantify everything, we forget that part of what makes us a civilization is the culture that we have in common. What is the value of that? I don't know. What price is a life? I don't know either. Sometimes, abstract considerations are necessary to work around the morass that is the monetary valuation of a moral position.
And it failed pretty miserably, because no one wanted to use a controller that weighed about a pound.
I have no idea what Nintendo was thinking with this. It looks completely impossible to play any game comfortably, or to even use this thing for more than 2 minutes. Either make the controller entirely touchscreen, or make it ergonomic. It can't be both.
Maybe we'll see some offshoring back to the US with shipping costs being what they are.
It's already happening. I unfortunately don't remember which company exactly, but quite a few US manufacturing companies are heading back to the US for their manufacturing facilities. Guess where they're relocating though? The South, which has few to no unions and state governments falling over each other to provide tax breaks.
Unless you're the military, you still upload via some hardline - generally dial-up. The ability to download stuff via satellite means nothing if you don't have the means to send the download request.
Activision is/was built on 6 games: Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft, Diablo, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk. Notice two that were killed off? There are two replacements in the works for them: a new Blizzard MMO and the new Bungie thing. I'm pretty sure Kotick isn't worried right now. But the new Bungie IP is far from a sure shot, Blizzard's new MMO will compete against WoW for gamer time, Diablo is still not out and Activision is doing its damnedest to kill off Call of Duty. As far as I can tell, Activision's cash flow consists of Wow, Starcraft and whatever it can come up with from Call of Duty. Once Call of Duty goes, Activision will essentially be a money sink for Blizzard. I'm wondering if Blizzard can just split off and look for a new publisher. If that ever happens.... Activision and Kotick are dea.
blah blah scientific theory blah blah taking two different planet Earths blah blah reproducable manner blah blah scientific method blah blah
You don't have a clue. You don't need a different planet to figure out that increasing CO2 concentrations in an air sample increases its absorption of IR wavelengths. Plenty of tests that can verify that.
Your standard of what constitutes science is so ridiculously far out there that it would be impossible to figure anything out about anything that is bigger than a science lab. Thankfully, most scientists have figured out that lab experiments provide a nice basis with which to predict larger phenomena.
And if you really think that that's the only way that discoveries can be made about planet-wide phenomena, please ignore weather reports, tsunami warnings, volcano warnings, earthquake reports, oil discovered through seismic evidence.... yeah, scientists who don't have a second earth to work with have really not contributed anything to society.
Something I'll never understand: people's obsession to be everything to all people. It doesn't work with cars, it doesn't work in politics, and it doesn't work in software projects. What's wrong with being the browser for the computer literate? The extensible browser? Those are all things you can design into a product. You can't design something to be "the browser with 100% market share". Any attempts to do so will be met by total failure.
Civilization actually got it right: the Internet is a wonder. Wikipedia is merely an interesting project piggy-backing on the wonder that is the Internet.
No kidding. This smells like nothing more than Jimmy trying to stroke his ego in one more delusional way. For the record: I think Wikipedia is awesome. It is, however, also significantly less awesome than the Internet, without which Wikipedia would not even exist. Furthermore, and that's a pretty common complaint, Wikipedia is at least partially an exercise in ego-stroking. As such, it is probably the largest example of mass ego-stroking in history. That's noteworthy, but not exactly something that needs to be preserved.
Have fun arguing that in court. Even if you win, you'll still be out lawyer money and time spent in court and the lawyer's office. Being right has no bearing on how much this kind of activity can cost you.
Wait wait wait. 2 out of the 3 possibilities you list involve an untrustworthy government
I have no clue what you're talking about here.
Which is the problem.
A corporation can be reigned in with regulation
Option 1 of reigning in a corporation. Requires a government, which by your definition is untrustworthy. Ergo, it can't be trusted to do this right.
with laws,
Option 2. See above.
and by people not using their services.
Option 3. The only one that doesn't involve government.
So what is it? Is government trustworthy enough to rein in corporations, or so untrustworthy that only revolution can get rid of it? And if there's a continuum of governments and trustworthiness, why do you assume that governments are invariably worse than corporations?
A corporation can be reigned in with regulation, with laws, and by people not using their services.
Wait wait wait. 2 out of the 3 possibilities you list involve an untrustworthy government. Which means that if the government is out of control, the corporations are only checked by people not using their services. Which, in case of things like energy generation and infrastructure provisioning, is not an option. Which, in turn, means that only violence can stop them. Why do you think the labor movement during the turn of the last century was so violent? Your position requires you to assume simultaneously that government works (to reign in corporate power) and that government fails (requiring revolution). It's... an interesting mental feat.
The greatest tragedies of the last hundred years were perpetrated by governments, not corporations.
True. That's also because there was no corporation in the last hundred years that rivaled the power of the national governments. For some examples of private power resulting in wars and all kinds of fun, check out the Medicis.
Anyone who hated the Iraq war should not trust government.
True. The Iraq war also showed how little corporations could be trusted to work in the absence of a free market or proper government oversight.
The end result is really this: it's (still) far more likely that I can influence government via voting than it is that I can influence a corporation through my spending habits. I don't trust either, and I find it irritating that people assume not trusting corporations means automatically trusting governments - or that not trusting governments requires trusting corporations.
There are many different microclimes, and major mountain ranges generate their own winds throughout the course of a day.
Have you seen the ridge lines? The ones that are easily accessible are generally devoted to skiing areas. The ones that aren't easily accessible... Do you know how expensive it is to fly in a helicopter crew to a mountain ridge, heli-lift in all the equipment, and then try to build everything out before the first snow hits? Not to mention that snow is bad news for wind turbines. You could potentially build wind turbines in the valleys, but then you're blocking the place where you want to build roads and trains. You could build them in areas that are off the center of valleys, but then you're not getting optimal windpower.
As for hydropower, someone else explained it already: the warmer temperatures mean less mountain run off in the summer, and water is becoming an issue. Finally, in a country where a lot of valleys have already been settled, building major dams means uprooting a lot of people, and significant loss of tourism for the area.
Switzerland has some major issues generating energy from anything but coal, nuclear and solar.
The stipulations make it impossible to run broadband as a government service.Instead, it would be a for profit corporation run by government bureaucrats. If it is run as a for profit corporation, why does it need voter approval?
This bill destroys the independence of local governments and their ability to offer services they think their community needs. Furthermore, it turns a representative democracy (what people often confuse with a republic) into a direct democracy. Where's the outcry over the overreach of big government? Where's the outcry over the evils of a direct democracy? What's that? Government is bad only if it offers services you disagree with? Representative democracy is bad if the choices the representatives make make you unhappy? Yeah, I thought so.
Slashdot Mirror
You people ought to really read the Federalist papers, instead of repeating what someone else said. A republic is a form of government where the head of state is not an inherited position. You're actually comparing a direct democracy (the federalist papers never mention a pure democracy) to a representative democracy (the republic in the federalist papers).
Furthermore, the Federalist Papers actually warn explicitly about having too many representatives (which leads to its own form of herd mentality) and having too few representatives per voter (which leads to a distant representative and a clustering of votes around special interests). Yes, we're fucked, but the Founders knew we were going to be fucked no matter what they set up, and merely tried to set things up in such a way that it minimizes the amount of stupid that goes around.
But the emails stem from a time when she was in government. Just because of that, I say that they are fair game. Now.... if people would stop reporting on her every waking minute (and don't watch it, for god's sake!), she would disappear into the night. She is nothing without publicity.
Market rates? First, you're going to have to define what the market is. Oh, there is only one private company, one state-born and one state-supported company around? Gee, not much of a market there. Then, you're going to have to define service. What uptime? What up/download speeds? What caps? What times? What support? Finally - and this is especially important given we are talking about university access to Internet - what is the cost to research and public education when switching to ATT's version of service? You might very well end-up trying to save pennies, and having to spend dollars to make up for the drop in research and public education.
I wish you were being sarcastic. But at least one GOP candidate has made that his official election platform: Pawlenty, through his "Google test", wants to eliminate all government services that are offered by private company. And since everything under the sun is being offered by a private company, even national defense would be outsourced under that platform. I'm sure he'll backpedal on that so quickly he'll appear to walk on air, but still - Republicans are the only ones who offer up such insanity.
In a supply/demand environment, resources (eg, people) are only worth more when there is a shortage of them. There is no shortage of them.
Correct.
What happens though to your 6-figure admin job when more people train for it and become qualified to take it? Oh, right, price paid for that particular resource goes down. You might want to be careful about what kind of advice you give.
Furthermore, there's a good reason to have lots of people with a living wage. That nice house of yours? It's only nice if every house around it is nice too. Otherwise, you'd move out. That nice community you live in? Only nice if people aren't rummaging through dumpsters for food. Otherwise, it'll get so tense that you'd move out.
It's easy to say "just study more, prole", when you are in a good position that took a good chunk of luck to attain and retain (never got t-boned by a drunk-driver? Count yourself lucky).
You mean an article explains what some esoteric new thing is that not everyone might have heard of? It even puts the explanation after the description of the covered event, so that seasoned readers can skip that part without missing anything? You mean, it's like a real article written by a real journalist?
I mean, yes, there's always a risk of astroturfing. But at least understand what you complain about. The alternative is articles that never mention what that new thingamajigg is they are talking about... oh, like most Slashdot articles. I suggest you go out more.
As far as I can tell, the Senators decided to write Apple precisely because there was nothing illegal about those apps. Reporting on police activity isn't illegal - yet, I guess. I'm not entirely surprised that those apps specifically were banned from the app store, because Apple has an interest in keeping legislators off its back and keep up the image of offering a wholesome version of the Internet. At the same time, I'm curious what other apps would fall under this, or if Apple is going to keep this little bit of TOS around only to remove apps that generate too much bad publicity. My guess is it's going to be the latter.
I read Friedman's book "The World is flat". I stopped reading it because there was nothing in it that was really new: it was a summary of what we all already know: the Internet is making the world even smaller than before. There's nothing really wrong in the book - there's also not much ground-breaking in it.
I actually find Taibbi's article worse than Friedman's book. For one, there are plenty of herd animals that hunt. Lions, orcas, chimpanzees... there's a very long list of social animals that hunt. Do they hunt in herds of 100s of thousands? No. But that's just because there are no prey animals out there that number billions in one spot that need sophisticated hunting tactics to take down. The rest of the complaints really sound petty, and I'm vaguely reminded of various commentators who can't comprehend why someone else is famous. I'm surprised Taibbi didn't mention that Friedman wears a toupee, or something similar.
Two billion in red the first year. Which, coincidentally, is right about the same number as Sony's loss. Furthermore, MS came out of the red actually earlier than Sony. So either that makes the PS3 the mother of all failures, or the XBox360 did vastly better than expected.
Lessig answered in abstract terms because it is very, very difficult to quantify the cost of removing something from the public domain. It's easy to see the benefit: just count the revenue generated by the IP for the rights holder. I suspect that Golan is going to run into the problem of "I see that it is too expensive for you to play Prokovief. Why is that more important than Rightholder A making money off of his sheet music?" Damage might be there, but it is always put into the context of the benefit derived from the existence of the copyright. And he's going to lose that battle every time: because music in general is a big market, and therefore there is no need to play a particular piece - but an individual rightsholder derives direct benefits from the royalties of a particular piece that he/she can't derive from any other piece.
Sometimes, in the rush to quantify everything, we forget that part of what makes us a civilization is the culture that we have in common. What is the value of that? I don't know. What price is a life? I don't know either. Sometimes, abstract considerations are necessary to work around the morass that is the monetary valuation of a moral position.
And it failed pretty miserably, because no one wanted to use a controller that weighed about a pound.
I have no idea what Nintendo was thinking with this. It looks completely impossible to play any game comfortably, or to even use this thing for more than 2 minutes. Either make the controller entirely touchscreen, or make it ergonomic. It can't be both.
I think it's time to sell Nintendo stock.
Maybe we'll see some offshoring back to the US with shipping costs being what they are.
It's already happening. I unfortunately don't remember which company exactly, but quite a few US manufacturing companies are heading back to the US for their manufacturing facilities. Guess where they're relocating though? The South, which has few to no unions and state governments falling over each other to provide tax breaks.
That's noscript blocking addthis.com.
Unless you're the military, you still upload via some hardline - generally dial-up. The ability to download stuff via satellite means nothing if you don't have the means to send the download request.
Activision is/was built on 6 games: Call of Duty, WoW, Starcraft, Diablo, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk. Notice two that were killed off? There are two replacements in the works for them: a new Blizzard MMO and the new Bungie thing. I'm pretty sure Kotick isn't worried right now. But the new Bungie IP is far from a sure shot, Blizzard's new MMO will compete against WoW for gamer time, Diablo is still not out and Activision is doing its damnedest to kill off Call of Duty. As far as I can tell, Activision's cash flow consists of Wow, Starcraft and whatever it can come up with from Call of Duty. Once Call of Duty goes, Activision will essentially be a money sink for Blizzard. I'm wondering if Blizzard can just split off and look for a new publisher. If that ever happens.... Activision and Kotick are dea.
blah blah scientific theory blah blah taking two different planet Earths blah blah reproducable manner blah blah scientific method blah blah
You don't have a clue. You don't need a different planet to figure out that increasing CO2 concentrations in an air sample increases its absorption of IR wavelengths. Plenty of tests that can verify that.
Your standard of what constitutes science is so ridiculously far out there that it would be impossible to figure anything out about anything that is bigger than a science lab. Thankfully, most scientists have figured out that lab experiments provide a nice basis with which to predict larger phenomena.
And if you really think that that's the only way that discoveries can be made about planet-wide phenomena, please ignore weather reports, tsunami warnings, volcano warnings, earthquake reports, oil discovered through seismic evidence.... yeah, scientists who don't have a second earth to work with have really not contributed anything to society.
Something I'll never understand: people's obsession to be everything to all people. It doesn't work with cars, it doesn't work in politics, and it doesn't work in software projects. What's wrong with being the browser for the computer literate? The extensible browser? Those are all things you can design into a product. You can't design something to be "the browser with 100% market share". Any attempts to do so will be met by total failure.
Civilization actually got it right: the Internet is a wonder. Wikipedia is merely an interesting project piggy-backing on the wonder that is the Internet.
No kidding. This smells like nothing more than Jimmy trying to stroke his ego in one more delusional way. For the record: I think Wikipedia is awesome. It is, however, also significantly less awesome than the Internet, without which Wikipedia would not even exist. Furthermore, and that's a pretty common complaint, Wikipedia is at least partially an exercise in ego-stroking. As such, it is probably the largest example of mass ego-stroking in history. That's noteworthy, but not exactly something that needs to be preserved.
Have fun arguing that in court. Even if you win, you'll still be out lawyer money and time spent in court and the lawyer's office. Being right has no bearing on how much this kind of activity can cost you.
Including Marine Le Pen? That's how we got her dad into the second round, you know....
Wait wait wait. 2 out of the 3 possibilities you list involve an untrustworthy government
I have no clue what you're talking about here.
Which is the problem.
A corporation can be reigned in with regulation
Option 1 of reigning in a corporation. Requires a government, which by your definition is untrustworthy. Ergo, it can't be trusted to do this right.
with laws,
Option 2. See above.
and by people not using their services.
Option 3. The only one that doesn't involve government.
So what is it? Is government trustworthy enough to rein in corporations, or so untrustworthy that only revolution can get rid of it? And if there's a continuum of governments and trustworthiness, why do you assume that governments are invariably worse than corporations?
A corporation can be reigned in with regulation, with laws, and by people not using their services.
Wait wait wait. 2 out of the 3 possibilities you list involve an untrustworthy government. Which means that if the government is out of control, the corporations are only checked by people not using their services. Which, in case of things like energy generation and infrastructure provisioning, is not an option. Which, in turn, means that only violence can stop them. Why do you think the labor movement during the turn of the last century was so violent?
Your position requires you to assume simultaneously that government works (to reign in corporate power) and that government fails (requiring revolution). It's... an interesting mental feat.
The greatest tragedies of the last hundred years were perpetrated by governments, not corporations.
True. That's also because there was no corporation in the last hundred years that rivaled the power of the national governments. For some examples of private power resulting in wars and all kinds of fun, check out the Medicis.
Anyone who hated the Iraq war should not trust government.
True. The Iraq war also showed how little corporations could be trusted to work in the absence of a free market or proper government oversight.
The end result is really this: it's (still) far more likely that I can influence government via voting than it is that I can influence a corporation through my spending habits. I don't trust either, and I find it irritating that people assume not trusting corporations means automatically trusting governments - or that not trusting governments requires trusting corporations.
There are many different microclimes, and major mountain ranges generate their own winds throughout the course of a day.
Have you seen the ridge lines? The ones that are easily accessible are generally devoted to skiing areas. The ones that aren't easily accessible... Do you know how expensive it is to fly in a helicopter crew to a mountain ridge, heli-lift in all the equipment, and then try to build everything out before the first snow hits? Not to mention that snow is bad news for wind turbines. You could potentially build wind turbines in the valleys, but then you're blocking the place where you want to build roads and trains. You could build them in areas that are off the center of valleys, but then you're not getting optimal windpower.
As for hydropower, someone else explained it already: the warmer temperatures mean less mountain run off in the summer, and water is becoming an issue. Finally, in a country where a lot of valleys have already been settled, building major dams means uprooting a lot of people, and significant loss of tourism for the area.
Switzerland has some major issues generating energy from anything but coal, nuclear and solar.
The stipulations make it impossible to run broadband as a government service.Instead, it would be a for profit corporation run by government bureaucrats. If it is run as a for profit corporation, why does it need voter approval?
This bill destroys the independence of local governments and their ability to offer services they think their community needs. Furthermore, it turns a representative democracy (what people often confuse with a republic) into a direct democracy. Where's the outcry over the overreach of big government? Where's the outcry over the evils of a direct democracy? What's that? Government is bad only if it offers services you disagree with? Representative democracy is bad if the choices the representatives make make you unhappy? Yeah, I thought so.