They are nothing more than restraints on trade that protect incumbents. Why should Cox need a "by your leave, sire" from Detroit to wire up its own infrastructure and compete against Comcast? Why can't AT&T just make its own agreements with property owners and wire up a competitor to FiOS?
Oh right, because some asshat thinks that he can regulate these businesses "in the public interest" to get concessions "for the community" like the freebies to local government and schools.
It's not worth it. Break it all up and open up the market so these companies will have no excuse to not compete with each other.
Crushing racism and sexism are more important to most American leftists than freedom of speech today. The ACLU, which is a left-wing organization, is in the minority of American leftists today in that it actually does still take a fairly left-libertarian stance. If it weren't for the first amendment, we'd long have had an official federal censorship system aimed at finding and prosecuting "hate speech" and pornography because both sides would've come together "in the spirit of bipartisanship."
The only people who actually give a rat's ass consistently about these things and want to leave people alone are libertarians. Right or left-wing, it's only the libertarian elements of the left and right that care about freedom today.
I lost all sympathy for him when I found out that he went on Colbert and admitted that Wikileaks went far beyond simply leaking the video and edited for "political impact." Don't believe me? Watch 3:00 to about 3:40.
Furthermore, I have no sympathy for Reuters' guys because Reuters has a history of being embarrassed in that region by having its "correspondents" not only embed themselves with guerrilla forces, but often hires people who are working both sides (ex: the egg on Reuters' face when it came out that its subcontractors in Lebanon were actually members of Hezbollah).
The monopoly status of cable providers, and the power it gives them over the internet in the age of broadband, is a problem which clearly is not going to be resolved at the municipal or state level, nor is the free market going to invisible-hand it away.
Local and state franchising laws make it virtually impossible for the market to break these monopolies. The best thing the FCC could do would be to lobby Congress for authority under the interstate commerce clause to declare that these laws violate that by disrupting the ability of infrastructure companies to enter new markets.
One of the things that I find really unjust about our system, taken as a whole (which is dangerous in a federal system, I know, but bear with me) is that when a normal person is robbed, the state gets to fine the robber and keep the money. The victim of the theft is left with some abstract "justice" in the form of an imprisoned thief and the state pockets the fine instead of transferring it, tax free, to the victim of the theft.
No government, not in the even the feds, turn over the fine directly to the victim of a real theft, but they want to enable $150k in damages for a copy of a song that retails for a $0.99?
The average man gets, at best, a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that "justice is served." He cannot beat or shoot the guy robbing him blind unless the robber is also menacing him, so in many cases, common citizens cannot even use force to defend their property as they see it being stolen. Yet, the feds hand over a court room nuclear weapon to big corporations...
Yeah, that'll end well for the system's legitimacy.
A lot of the waste is a matter of opportunity
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Employee Monitoring
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How many workers really need an Internet connection at their desktop? Probably not nearly as many as corporate America thinks. In many offices, I'd wager that having a few, very public Internet machines for work-related research would solve most of the problems without a loss of privacy on a daily basis to workers.
For most workers, I bet it's not only a bad temptation on their desk, but not even necessary. A lot of offices would probably be better off if communications had to be done more infrequently and more thought-out instead of as fast as someone can write up an email and add recipients.
The music and movie industries earn somewhere around $35B/year in revenue, last I heard. Let's up that, with inflation, to $50B/year. How do they expect anyone to believe that Limewire alone has denied them 30 years worth of revenues in a span of about a decade?
Claims like this only serve to make normal people think they're pathological liars that deserve to be robbed blind.
In the end, it's all about context. And I don't know about you, but I haven't read through those 250,000 documents to determine if any of them are sufficiently egregious to justify his actions.
I would sooner believe that every member of Congress memorized Obamacare from top to bottom than believe that a typical 22 year old enlistee would read 250,000 documents before pulling a stunt like this...
You talk about transparency and democracy, but you blithely dismiss the fact that the asshole who "declassified" this data violated the laws and policies established by his own democratically elected government and the bureaucracy that the same democratically elected government put in place to prosecute this war. Furthermore, when he thought he found criminal conduct, he had an alphabet soup of agencies that could independently investigate and prosecute the people he turned in. The FBI, Army CID and DoD Inspector General, to name a few.
Did he contact agents from any of them? No. Did he even contact a member of Congress to try to hold an official investigation? No.
He decided that he and he alone was the authority to make that call.
A lot of the material he leaked was Top Secret. To be classified as Top Secret, the release of that information must cause imminent, serious harm to the United States and/or its allies and assets. Would he have the stones to take personal responsibility when the insurgents find US and Iraqi Government collaborators through that data and start murdering them and their families?
Of course not. Guys like this virtually never want to be judged by the entire scope of the consequences of their actions. He'll feel smug that he exposed data like that helicopter footage, but when some collaborator's children are raped and murdered because of him, he'll deny that he's culpable for that.
Calling someone a criminal (pedophile who actively preys on children in this case) without any proof and with what appears to be great malice of forethought is not a parody. None of the definitions of parody fit the bill for what she did. It is libel. Pure, unadulterated, libel. The girl and her family should have been sued into the ground by the principle instead of her getting suspended.
This is not a cat-dog or a flying gerbil, but a cross between a sentient being and another animal. If you can't get over the "gee, wouldn't it be cool to create anime-style cat girls" and see what you're really doing, you are morally stunted at the level of a small child. In the best case scenario, you end up with a mostly human (in appearance) hybrid that has some chance of a normal life. In the more likely scenario, you are purposefully creating a deformed, damaged sentient life form that has no hope of a normal life, including no mate of its own kind.
But, it's done in the name of science, so somehow that makes it more noble than it really is and automatically negates the arguments of those who call it playing God...
The problem with vice is that liberals don't want to punish people for acting out and conservatives don't want to give people the choice to even take the vice (and often then, like liberals, don't punish the person for harming others). For example, the fastest way to make people shape up in their use of intoxicants is to pass a law that says "no state of intoxication brought on by willing consumption or or exposure to intoxicating substances shall be a mitigating factor in the assessment of guilt for any felony offense or be used as a basis for reducing the sentence upon conviction." Likewise, if compulsive gamblers knew that the state government would send them to prison under a modern "debtor's prison" that applies only to those people who are in unmanagable debt because of vice consumption would think twice.
Is that it goes out the window when your opponents are crackpots like the Iranian regime or North Korea. These regimes wouldn't hesitate to play Russian Roulette with their populations if they had a good chance of hitting us very hard, and one day they will. What's ironic about this talk is that many of the same individuals who sneer at the hawks for investing in "outdated doctrines and weapons" are themselves guilty of propping up MAD which is an outdated doctrine that has no meaning in a world in which ownership of WMDs is increasingly democratic.
If we can work toward eliminating a means for WMDs to be delivered to US soil, then the cost is worth it. Period. Even if it takes 20 more years to make ICBMs and cruise missiles obsolete.
is that it often comes down to a failure to do right and a need to blame someone. If someone steals a gun and commits a crime with it, they should be 100% civilly responsible. Allowing the victim of the theft to be sued is nothing more than indulging the blood lust of the victim and their family who want anyone connected with it to pay dearly.
The XBox 360 has already been successfully used for scientific computing. Microsoft should move in for the kill with a modified 360 that includes a complete tool chain and a new clustering API.
Using the federal government as an example, Ranum pointed out that many, if not most, of the internal software development groups that used to exist in federal agencies are now largely gone. In their place now is an army of contractors doing much the same job, but with a couple of important differences. Because the internal development teams no longer exist, the contractors are reporting to program managers instead of managers who were developers themselves.
As a result, there are fewer and fewer people inside the agencies who understand what it takes to write and deploy good software. And the software they're getting is costing several times what it used to because it's coming from contractors rather than internal employees.
Contractors are favored by the federal government mainly because they can be hired and fired more easily than employees. Big commercial contractors are favored because they are the ones most capable of jumping through the flaming hurdles that the feds put up to keep up the appearance of saving tax money. The solution is simple: change the damn laws and regulations so that they can be easily hired and fired, and any 1099 can big on a small project without being an expert in government processes.
Yeah, it's so onerous to have the power to send automated C&D letters that carry full legal weight if ignored, but carry no practical threat of legal reprisal if machine error caused them to be sent to an innocent party's ISP.
Despite the fact that the science has not been proved in favor of anthropogenic global warming, that hasn't stopped many scientists from (successfully) getting Congress to act.
You're not so much naive as just ignorant of what the laws and precedents actually say. Nudity is not enough to make it a form of obscenity (in the US, at least). The SCOTUS and actual letter of the law are clear on this, the former, in part because obscenities by their very nature have "no artistic or scientific merit" as recognized by the federal judiciary and must appeal the to the "prurient nature." That means it must lack any independent merit AND be aimed at appealing to the lustful side of humanity. Simply taking pictures of every bath your kids take is not enough to get you convicted under the letter of the law or precedents, but it's enough to make you a target for a prosecutor who will (with some good reason) argue that you are a pervert.
The challenge for open source is that, while it's a fun hobby, how can we make it sustainable?
There is tried and proven set of options: get a paying user to underwrite the work, get a paying user to buy customization services from individuals, form a company around it or form a non-profit which accepts tax deductible donations to fund development. There really isn't much of a difference here between this form of labor and all other forms of labor.
Slashdot Mirror
because THAT would be a "come to Jesus moment" for Congress about how FUBAR our copyright laws are.
May the federal judge rip Reid a new one so big she can hold a Tea Party rally inside him...
They are nothing more than restraints on trade that protect incumbents. Why should Cox need a "by your leave, sire" from Detroit to wire up its own infrastructure and compete against Comcast? Why can't AT&T just make its own agreements with property owners and wire up a competitor to FiOS?
Oh right, because some asshat thinks that he can regulate these businesses "in the public interest" to get concessions "for the community" like the freebies to local government and schools.
It's not worth it. Break it all up and open up the market so these companies will have no excuse to not compete with each other.
Crushing racism and sexism are more important to most American leftists than freedom of speech today. The ACLU, which is a left-wing organization, is in the minority of American leftists today in that it actually does still take a fairly left-libertarian stance. If it weren't for the first amendment, we'd long have had an official federal censorship system aimed at finding and prosecuting "hate speech" and pornography because both sides would've come together "in the spirit of bipartisanship."
The only people who actually give a rat's ass consistently about these things and want to leave people alone are libertarians. Right or left-wing, it's only the libertarian elements of the left and right that care about freedom today.
I lost all sympathy for him when I found out that he went on Colbert and admitted that Wikileaks went far beyond simply leaking the video and edited for "political impact." Don't believe me? Watch 3:00 to about 3:40.
Furthermore, I have no sympathy for Reuters' guys because Reuters has a history of being embarrassed in that region by having its "correspondents" not only embed themselves with guerrilla forces, but often hires people who are working both sides (ex: the egg on Reuters' face when it came out that its subcontractors in Lebanon were actually members of Hezbollah).
Johnson was the first President to raid Social Security for money for the general treasury.
Guess where this oh so enlightened liberal spent it?
Vietnam...
You don't have "dialog" with people like this because you have no common ground on which to compromise.
Local and state franchising laws make it virtually impossible for the market to break these monopolies. The best thing the FCC could do would be to lobby Congress for authority under the interstate commerce clause to declare that these laws violate that by disrupting the ability of infrastructure companies to enter new markets.
One of the things that I find really unjust about our system, taken as a whole (which is dangerous in a federal system, I know, but bear with me) is that when a normal person is robbed, the state gets to fine the robber and keep the money. The victim of the theft is left with some abstract "justice" in the form of an imprisoned thief and the state pockets the fine instead of transferring it, tax free, to the victim of the theft.
No government, not in the even the feds, turn over the fine directly to the victim of a real theft, but they want to enable $150k in damages for a copy of a song that retails for a $0.99?
The average man gets, at best, a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that "justice is served." He cannot beat or shoot the guy robbing him blind unless the robber is also menacing him, so in many cases, common citizens cannot even use force to defend their property as they see it being stolen. Yet, the feds hand over a court room nuclear weapon to big corporations...
Yeah, that'll end well for the system's legitimacy.
How many workers really need an Internet connection at their desktop? Probably not nearly as many as corporate America thinks. In many offices, I'd wager that having a few, very public Internet machines for work-related research would solve most of the problems without a loss of privacy on a daily basis to workers.
For most workers, I bet it's not only a bad temptation on their desk, but not even necessary. A lot of offices would probably be better off if communications had to be done more infrequently and more thought-out instead of as fast as someone can write up an email and add recipients.
The music and movie industries earn somewhere around $35B/year in revenue, last I heard. Let's up that, with inflation, to $50B/year. How do they expect anyone to believe that Limewire alone has denied them 30 years worth of revenues in a span of about a decade?
Claims like this only serve to make normal people think they're pathological liars that deserve to be robbed blind.
I would sooner believe that every member of Congress memorized Obamacare from top to bottom than believe that a typical 22 year old enlistee would read 250,000 documents before pulling a stunt like this...
You talk about transparency and democracy, but you blithely dismiss the fact that the asshole who "declassified" this data violated the laws and policies established by his own democratically elected government and the bureaucracy that the same democratically elected government put in place to prosecute this war. Furthermore, when he thought he found criminal conduct, he had an alphabet soup of agencies that could independently investigate and prosecute the people he turned in. The FBI, Army CID and DoD Inspector General, to name a few.
Did he contact agents from any of them? No. Did he even contact a member of Congress to try to hold an official investigation? No.
He decided that he and he alone was the authority to make that call.
A lot of the material he leaked was Top Secret. To be classified as Top Secret, the release of that information must cause imminent, serious harm to the United States and/or its allies and assets. Would he have the stones to take personal responsibility when the insurgents find US and Iraqi Government collaborators through that data and start murdering them and their families?
Of course not. Guys like this virtually never want to be judged by the entire scope of the consequences of their actions. He'll feel smug that he exposed data like that helicopter footage, but when some collaborator's children are raped and murdered because of him, he'll deny that he's culpable for that.
Calling someone a criminal (pedophile who actively preys on children in this case) without any proof and with what appears to be great malice of forethought is not a parody. None of the definitions of parody fit the bill for what she did. It is libel. Pure, unadulterated, libel. The girl and her family should have been sued into the ground by the principle instead of her getting suspended.
This is not a cat-dog or a flying gerbil, but a cross between a sentient being and another animal. If you can't get over the "gee, wouldn't it be cool to create anime-style cat girls" and see what you're really doing, you are morally stunted at the level of a small child. In the best case scenario, you end up with a mostly human (in appearance) hybrid that has some chance of a normal life. In the more likely scenario, you are purposefully creating a deformed, damaged sentient life form that has no hope of a normal life, including no mate of its own kind.
But, it's done in the name of science, so somehow that makes it more noble than it really is and automatically negates the arguments of those who call it playing God...
The problem with vice is that liberals don't want to punish people for acting out and conservatives don't want to give people the choice to even take the vice (and often then, like liberals, don't punish the person for harming others). For example, the fastest way to make people shape up in their use of intoxicants is to pass a law that says "no state of intoxication brought on by willing consumption or or exposure to intoxicating substances shall be a mitigating factor in the assessment of guilt for any felony offense or be used as a basis for reducing the sentence upon conviction." Likewise, if compulsive gamblers knew that the state government would send them to prison under a modern "debtor's prison" that applies only to those people who are in unmanagable debt because of vice consumption would think twice.
Is that it goes out the window when your opponents are crackpots like the Iranian regime or North Korea. These regimes wouldn't hesitate to play Russian Roulette with their populations if they had a good chance of hitting us very hard, and one day they will. What's ironic about this talk is that many of the same individuals who sneer at the hawks for investing in "outdated doctrines and weapons" are themselves guilty of propping up MAD which is an outdated doctrine that has no meaning in a world in which ownership of WMDs is increasingly democratic.
If we can work toward eliminating a means for WMDs to be delivered to US soil, then the cost is worth it. Period. Even if it takes 20 more years to make ICBMs and cruise missiles obsolete.
is that it often comes down to a failure to do right and a need to blame someone. If someone steals a gun and commits a crime with it, they should be 100% civilly responsible. Allowing the victim of the theft to be sued is nothing more than indulging the blood lust of the victim and their family who want anyone connected with it to pay dearly.
The XBox 360 has already been successfully used for scientific computing. Microsoft should move in for the kill with a modified 360 that includes a complete tool chain and a new clustering API.
Contractors are favored by the federal government mainly because they can be hired and fired more easily than employees. Big commercial contractors are favored because they are the ones most capable of jumping through the flaming hurdles that the feds put up to keep up the appearance of saving tax money. The solution is simple: change the damn laws and regulations so that they can be easily hired and fired, and any 1099 can big on a small project without being an expert in government processes.
Yeah, it's so onerous to have the power to send automated C&D letters that carry full legal weight if ignored, but carry no practical threat of legal reprisal if machine error caused them to be sent to an innocent party's ISP.
You're right, that's too much to ask of you...
The more we socialize responsibility for health care, the more power the government needs to control costs...
Despite the fact that the science has not been proved in favor of anthropogenic global warming, that hasn't stopped many scientists from (successfully) getting Congress to act.
You're not so much naive as just ignorant of what the laws and precedents actually say. Nudity is not enough to make it a form of obscenity (in the US, at least). The SCOTUS and actual letter of the law are clear on this, the former, in part because obscenities by their very nature have "no artistic or scientific merit" as recognized by the federal judiciary and must appeal the to the "prurient nature." That means it must lack any independent merit AND be aimed at appealing to the lustful side of humanity. Simply taking pictures of every bath your kids take is not enough to get you convicted under the letter of the law or precedents, but it's enough to make you a target for a prosecutor who will (with some good reason) argue that you are a pervert.
There is tried and proven set of options: get a paying user to underwrite the work, get a paying user to buy customization services from individuals, form a company around it or form a non-profit which accepts tax deductible donations to fund development. There really isn't much of a difference here between this form of labor and all other forms of labor.