Of course random, unknown people are not trustworthy. While it's trendy to criticize the "MSM" and 'old' media, they do have one essential advantage over crowd-sourced information: MSM publications have a reputation to protect:
The MSM does such a great job reporting fairly ad honestly, even when corrected right?
Since when has any election coverage involved any in-depth policy comparison, any coverage beyond "rumors say"?
Since when has anything of consequence been put above video-game style smart-bomb footage?
Do you really think hillary clinton or orrin hatch would be around if the news had reported they co-sponsored a bill which would have made every media widget everyone uses illegal?
What about actual, in-depth coverage of protests with interviews on both sides and analysts digging through the nitty-gritty to help the public decide if they're right?
The only difference between MSM and individual commentary is the amount of money the MSM makes.
Since when has a fact checker been placed on hannity or oreilly.
Regulations aren't the same thing as consensus. Regulations are often rammed down the throats of an unwilling and uncooperative populace by a self-interested minority seeking to use those regulations to benefit themselves a bit more than everyone else.
that would be because the regulation known as "fairness doctrine" was removed from news organizations, meaning they no longer have to provide both sides of a story. This has turned the news into a propaganda mouthpiece for whoever has the most money or power in a given argument.
Regulation and yet more laws in a binder already full to bursting is not the solution.
you're absolutely right, optimization is required: get rid of the bloat. You, however, are proposing anarchy--the same anarchy which led to the collapse of our financial system.
Without "cops", the criminals run free. With too many cops, you have no privacy and no self-determination. The street moves in both ways, not just one.
Trying to legislate socialistic values leads to something that history has already told us will fail: Communism.
I guess its time to repeal those laws against fraud, murder, theft.. after all, it's your responsibility to make informed decisions and protect your own property.
Oh man, I worked in a company that did this all the time - positive reviews submitted by employees of the company on various sites, posing as customers of the company. It is a successful and respected online company.
The culture of a place can go a long way to convincing employees that this is the normal thing to do, and that it's just a part of doing business in this competitive world. Brings to mind Stanley Milgram's obediance experiments.
The ending was a massive digression and the premise, while dark, was not brought to the levels of, say, elfen lied, which did a much better job of portraying a dark, dissociated view of human corruption.
> So.. how many people were bought new cars because the government screwed over everyone who had horses?
No one, because the government didn't. Ask anyone who lives near the Amish; horses are still perfectly legal on the roads. They are banned from limited access highways by not being able to meet the minimum speed (40 MPH), but that is it. The most that they mandated was turn signals and maybe brake lights.
Check your laws. Or are you going to buy a giant pooper scooper?
If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".
If you actually knew your history rather than assuming that things then were as things now, you'd know that the public transit system in New York was not built by the government, but by private enterprise looking to make a buck. The move to put it underground was funded by city bonds, but it the elevated train system was already there. Furthermore, "auto-centric" laws came as result of the mass adoption of automobiles by the public at large, not the other way around.
If only your assertions were true. watch the history channel once in a while.
It's nice to see the libertarian groups have a large enough array of sock puppets to spam you with mod points though.
When the GOVERNMENT passes a law that obsoletes your hardware because the GOVERNMENT wants to sell that spectrum for billions of dollars, the GOVERNMENT needs to reimburse those citizens it fucked in the process. Thanks for being such a corporate shill, though.
If the government decides to sell off the 2.4/5 GHZ 802.11 A/B/G spectrum for a couple billion dollars and move consumers to a new band, leaving the old wireless gear (laptops, access points, etc.) obsolete (and jammed by the new owner of this spectrum) you don't think you should be compensated in some measure for the new stuff they force you to buy??
This isn't technology becoming naturally obsolete...this is technology being disabled with malice aforethought by the government.
So.. how many people were bought new cars because the government screwed over everyone who had horses?
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train. They did nothing to solve the problem. They threw up their hands and gave up because the problem was entirely beyond them
If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".
the world today would be a better place if more governments would follow their lead in that.
If by "better" you mean stuck in the middle ages without electricity (rural electrificaiton initiative), railroads (transcontinental railroad project, and similar projects by european counterparts), sewers, municipal water, rampant disease, and the list goes on and on.
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally in conjunction with guidance and aid of committees of busybodies trying to save the world.
There, fixed that piece of libertarian propaganda to reflect reality. Do you really think there were not think-tanks, policy analysts, and government activists since the first city-state arose?
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure. [...] The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit":)
Note that this conference did not go unnoticed.
one of the biggest appeals of those developing the auto was the fact it was a "green" technology in the SANE definition of green: it's pollutants were far less hazardous than the alternative (horse crap).
And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan. According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7. These professional pessimists have always underestimated mankind's ability to change, adapt, and solve problems. They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.
These people have their value though.
Without their strong caveats who knows whether enough of us would feel compelled to actually solve those problems before they blindsided us like a stealth missile.
All optimists, progressives, and risk-takers express this kind of dismissiveness about such dire predictions, but without them, and those who act on them, our decisions would become reckless very quickly.
For instance, if nobody started raising severe alarms about energy use, we probably would have all died in a third world war caused by people fighting over oil for their 10 gallon per mile cars.
"Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing.
Because LVNMPRSLP doesn't make such a catchy algorithm.
It does with the SHAC loonies. They've bombed people, harrassed people who had the most tenuous of links (like the cleaner of a manager of a company that supplied Huntingdon Life Sciences) and carried out a campaign of harassment, violence and intimidation that many terrorist organisations would've been proud of.
The importance of freedom of speech is enhanced, not diminished, when that speech is unpopular.
It's important to differentiate between speech and action.
Freedom of the press does not apply to "journalists" only, because once you start applying it only to an arbitrary and subjective definition of "journalism", you now have a loophole the size of a galactic cluster.
It doesn't matter if it's CNN or little timmy's html experiments, if you kill people's websites and jail them for what they SAY, you are a tyrant!
From the details available, it appears this may relate to information that could be used to threaten the judge in the SHAC trial, the trial of some pretty unpleasant and violent people http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7837064.stm.
Information does not equate to action.
There is "information" in local us libraries which would show you how to assemble a bomb a-la oklahoma city. I suppose we should seize and burn all books in the local libraries and send the librarians and library officials to prison for 50 years.
"those that are hirable you don't want" -- everyone looking for work doesn't know shit.
Oh really?!
How about a novel idea: train your labor
Nobody can learn "shit" when nobody wants to hire and train them, and people who are new entrants to the workforce are, for the most part, competent and diligent.
That's right, there are hundreds of new grads with adaptable minds hungry for experience, hungry to pay off their loans and used to eating cardboard and living in a closet.
Hire them for 30k, train them, and allow them to earn raises as they pick up the ins and outs of your specific firm.
Your wife's mentality is one of the major reasons we're having so many problems. When nobody wants to train their workforce and demands 'canned' labor, you end up with TONS of capable people left out.
Actually, the result of this is being reflected in our economy RIGHT NOW.
Deflation is a real risk because of the downward pressure on wages caused by offshoring.
Offshoring is a reflection on the quarterly mentality. Short-term gains are the only thing accomplished. When you start chopping away at wages, it eventually comes to bite you in the ass when people's capacity to hold debt (to maintain their standard of living) gives out.
This is what's happening now. Companies killed wages, people took on more and more debt trying to keep their standard of living, thinking some relief would eventually come. It did not, of course, and now they have no money to buy anything.
Something has to give now. Either there will be deflation, screwing everyone, main street and wall street alike, or these companies will HAVE to provide proper wages.
Without some seriously hard-ball government regulation there is no reason any company would voluntarily offer greater wages, so deflation seems the inevitable result.
The basic lesson is this.. In an economy with fixed resources you can't lower the real cost of goods. If you lower wages, people will have less to spend, and sooner or later you will be compelled to charge less.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course random, unknown people are not trustworthy. While it's trendy to criticize the "MSM" and 'old' media, they do have one essential advantage over crowd-sourced information: MSM publications have a reputation to protect:
The MSM does such a great job reporting fairly ad honestly, even when corrected right?
Since when has any election coverage involved any in-depth policy comparison, any coverage beyond "rumors say"?
Since when has anything of consequence been put above video-game style smart-bomb footage?
Do you really think hillary clinton or orrin hatch would be around if the news had reported they co-sponsored a bill which would have made every media widget everyone uses illegal?
What about actual, in-depth coverage of protests with interviews on both sides and analysts digging through the nitty-gritty to help the public decide if they're right?
The only difference between MSM and individual commentary is the amount of money the MSM makes.
Since when has a fact checker been placed on hannity or oreilly.
Regulations aren't the same thing as consensus. Regulations are often rammed down the throats of an unwilling and uncooperative populace by a self-interested minority seeking to use those regulations to benefit themselves a bit more than everyone else.
that would be because the regulation known as "fairness doctrine" was removed from news organizations, meaning they no longer have to provide both sides of a story. This has turned the news into a propaganda mouthpiece for whoever has the most money or power in a given argument.
Regulation and yet more laws in a binder already full to bursting is not the solution.
you're absolutely right, optimization is required: get rid of the bloat. You, however, are proposing anarchy--the same anarchy which led to the collapse of our financial system.
Without "cops", the criminals run free. With too many cops, you have no privacy and no self-determination. The street moves in both ways, not just one.
Trying to legislate socialistic values leads to something that history has already told us will fail: Communism.
I guess its time to repeal those laws against fraud, murder, theft.. after all, it's your responsibility to make informed decisions and protect your own property.
this trollish dreck gets moded up? shame on you!
Oh man, I worked in a company that did this all the time - positive reviews submitted by employees of the company on various sites, posing as customers of the company. It is a successful and respected online company.
The culture of a place can go a long way to convincing employees that this is the normal thing to do, and that it's just a part of doing business in this competitive world. Brings to mind Stanley Milgram's obediance experiments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
So which company was it? is AC not enough?
but A.I. did suck.
The ending was a massive digression and the premise, while dark, was not brought to the levels of, say, elfen lied, which did a much better job of portraying a dark, dissociated view of human corruption.
Right, I said that:
The government made it easy, to be sure, but mostly only by giving away that which wasn't theirs to give in the first place.
The thing to note, however, is that the land they gave didn't cost the government anything.
Apparently you never read the "purchase" part of "louisiana purchase"
I'm sorry hollywood, but the tanking economy and your new-low in cowardice do not excuse you going on an all out rampage against scifi classics.
Sequel = BAD,
actually, the government handed them the land, free of charge, for several miles on each side of the track they laid down.
You don't even have to read it, just watch history channel when they roll their documentaries.
> So.. how many people were bought new cars because the government screwed over everyone who had horses?
No one, because the government didn't. Ask anyone who lives near the Amish; horses are still perfectly legal on the roads. They are banned from limited access highways by not being able to meet the minimum speed (40 MPH), but that is it. The most that they mandated was turn signals and maybe brake lights.
Check your laws. Or are you going to buy a giant pooper scooper?
If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".
If you actually knew your history rather than assuming that things then were as things now, you'd know that the public transit system in New York was not built by the government, but by private enterprise looking to make a buck. The move to put it underground was funded by city bonds, but it the elevated train system was already there. Furthermore, "auto-centric" laws came as result of the mass adoption of automobiles by the public at large, not the other way around.
If only your assertions were true.
watch the history channel once in a while.
It's nice to see the libertarian groups have a large enough array of sock puppets to spam you with mod points though.
its not a new invention.
Touch screens have been operating in this manner for upwards of 15 years (at least when I started noticing them)
When the GOVERNMENT passes a law that obsoletes your hardware because the GOVERNMENT wants to sell that spectrum for billions of dollars, the GOVERNMENT needs to reimburse those citizens it fucked in the process. Thanks for being such a corporate shill, though.
If the government decides to sell off the 2.4/5 GHZ 802.11 A/B/G spectrum for a couple billion dollars and move consumers to a new band, leaving the old wireless gear (laptops, access points, etc.) obsolete (and jammed by the new owner of this spectrum) you don't think you should be compensated in some measure for the new stuff they force you to buy??
This isn't technology becoming naturally obsolete...this is technology being disabled with malice aforethought by the government.
So.. how many people were bought new cars because the government screwed over everyone who had horses?
"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train. They did nothing to solve the problem. They threw up their hands and gave up because the problem was entirely beyond them
If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".
the world today would be a better place if more governments would follow their lead in that.
If by "better" you mean stuck in the middle ages without electricity (rural electrificaiton initiative), railroads (transcontinental railroad project, and similar projects by european counterparts), sewers, municipal water, rampant disease, and the list goes on and on.
The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally in conjunction with guidance and aid of committees of busybodies trying to save the world.
There, fixed that piece of libertarian propaganda to reflect reality. Do you really think there were not think-tanks, policy analysts, and government activists since the first city-state arose?
In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
[...]
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.
All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit" :)
Note that this conference did not go unnoticed.
one of the biggest appeals of those developing the auto was the fact it was a "green" technology in the SANE definition of green: it's pollutants were far less hazardous than the alternative (horse crap).
And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan. According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7. These professional pessimists have always underestimated mankind's ability to change, adapt, and solve problems. They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.
These people have their value though.
Without their strong caveats who knows whether enough of us would feel compelled to actually solve those problems before they blindsided us like a stealth missile.
All optimists, progressives, and risk-takers express this kind of dismissiveness about such dire predictions, but without them, and those who act on them, our decisions would become reckless very quickly.
For instance, if nobody started raising severe alarms about energy use, we probably would have all died in a third world war caused by people fighting over oil for their 10 gallon per mile cars.
I agree.
Save a massive, pan-global disaster involving EMP emissions, we are not going to have any trouble finding historical data from the past 25 years.
Heck, even ephemeral memes don't really die out.
"Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing.
Because LVNMPRSLP doesn't make such a catchy algorithm.
Technology moves on. Did the government give people who owned horses coupons to buy fords?
its TELEVISION, not national defense or health care.
Government spending is fine on a good cause, but I don't call the coffers of converter box manufacturers a good cause.
Information does not equate to action.
It does with the SHAC loonies. They've bombed people, harrassed people who had the most tenuous of links (like the cleaner of a manager of a company that supplied Huntingdon Life Sciences) and carried out a campaign of harassment, violence and intimidation that many terrorist organisations would've been proud of.
The importance of freedom of speech is enhanced, not diminished, when that speech is unpopular.
It's important to differentiate between speech and action.
Freedom of the press does not apply to "journalists" only, because once you start applying it only to an arbitrary and subjective definition of "journalism", you now have a loophole the size of a galactic cluster.
It doesn't matter if it's CNN or little timmy's html experiments, if you kill people's websites and jail them for what they SAY, you are a tyrant!
From the details available, it appears this may relate to information that could be used to threaten the judge in the SHAC trial, the trial of some pretty unpleasant and violent people http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7837064.stm.
Information does not equate to action.
There is "information" in local us libraries which would show you how to assemble a bomb a-la oklahoma city. I suppose we should seize and burn all books in the local libraries and send the librarians and library officials to prison for 50 years.
Mark this day, the day when the charade of the "war on terror" ended, and with it "the free world".
Its sad to see the chinese propaganda is correct, and that the only difference between a democracy and an autocracy is the number of parties involved.
"those that are hirable you don't want" -- everyone looking for work doesn't know shit.
Oh really?!
How about a novel idea: train your labor
Nobody can learn "shit" when nobody wants to hire and train them, and people who are new entrants to the workforce are, for the most part, competent and diligent.
That's right, there are hundreds of new grads with adaptable minds hungry for experience, hungry to pay off their loans and used to eating cardboard and living in a closet.
Hire them for 30k, train them, and allow them to earn raises as they pick up the ins and outs of your specific firm.
Your wife's mentality is one of the major reasons we're having so many problems. When nobody wants to train their workforce and demands 'canned' labor, you end up with TONS of capable people left out.
Let me know when H1B holders have to pay american tuition costs!
When my student debts suddenly shrink from 100k to 10k, then we can talk about equal treatment to cheap foreign labor.
Actually, the result of this is being reflected in our economy RIGHT NOW.
Deflation is a real risk because of the downward pressure on wages caused by offshoring.
Offshoring is a reflection on the quarterly mentality. Short-term gains are the only thing accomplished. When you start chopping away at wages, it eventually comes to bite you in the ass when people's capacity to hold debt (to maintain their standard of living) gives out.
This is what's happening now. Companies killed wages, people took on more and more debt trying to keep their standard of living, thinking some relief would eventually come. It did not, of course, and now they have no money to buy anything.
Something has to give now. Either there will be deflation, screwing everyone, main street and wall street alike, or these companies will HAVE to provide proper wages.
Without some seriously hard-ball government regulation there is no reason any company would voluntarily offer greater wages, so deflation seems the inevitable result.
The basic lesson is this..
In an economy with fixed resources you can't lower the real cost of goods. If you lower wages, people will have less to spend, and sooner or later you will be compelled to charge less.
I have comcast, and I've noticed as of a few weeks ago that any HTTP download greater than 100 mb will simply die halfway through.
newsgroup downloads will slow to 20kbs if the pieces are greater than 100 mb as well
I use perhaps 20gb a month.
Perhaps they wouldn't experience congestion if they UPGRADED THEIR INFRASTRUCTURE.