This guy is a public figure. In order to successfully claim libel, he must prove malice. An algorithm can't have malice against him in particular. This guy is out of his depth. To paraphrase an old saying in the legal profession, a lawyer who represents himself is an idiot.
Nothing indicates this "company" is anything more than a single guy putting up a website on a lark, either purely for Slashdot hits or to make a point about the patent system.
I agree. That there is no information about the people involved is the first tip off that this is either a gag or something put together by unscrupulous folks who are looking to obtain security vulnerabilities from nitwits. This is certainly not a legitimate law firm.
"We actively market the IP" is not language a law firm is allowed to use in the US, because law firms are not allowed to obtain legal business from a client then perform marketing services for that same client. "You share in the profits" is also prohibited language, because it implies a guaranteed result, which is prohibited in legal advertising. Discussion of distribution of "profits" from legal activity is also prohibited in US legal advertising.
Combining the technical fix and the legal work under one marketing vehicle is also forbidden under US law. Also, if "Intellectual Weapons" is going to provide services in a variety of countries, where are they licensed? The list of gaping holes in this site goes on. This is a joke, even if it is actually intended to be serious.
Read the fucking paper before commenting on the methodology.
I stand corrected. The article led me to believe that the study was flawed, and I did not read the paper. A better article would have made this more clear, but I was reading into it I suppose.
I've seen over and over again that when you place Internet users in an environment where they are being watched, and know they're being watched, their behavior changes. If you were participating in a study conducted by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Lab, using their own "Privacy Finder" search engine, don't you think your behavior would be a bit skewed?
I'm all for privacy, and for giving consumers a choice about whether they want to let companies have their personal information. But this study, at least as it is presented in the article, doesn't seem very rigorous in its methodology.
let's face it. just about anyone posting on the web and, even moreso, on slashdot has absolutely no knowledge about the iphone aside from a handful of press releases, fanboi bigotry and fud.
News Flash! Lot's of people *like* pop. Hard to believe, but true none the less.
There is only a limited spectrum for use, and it is licensed out by the government for the good of the public. The people own the airwaves. The radio stations in effect rent use of the spectrum from the people.
So while plenty of people love pop music, payola distorts what is available for us to hear on the radio. When people's listening habits are not only reinforced but also created by radio, payola limits choice and turns the airwaves into a monoculture.
SciFi has really shot themselves in the foot by letting this series go.
Keeping a good series on too long can turn it to crap. I like Galactica, but I'm not as excited about it as I was in seasons 1 and 2. As an example, the long, overdone Starbuck/Apollo melodrama has worn thin for me. With a finite time span, the series will likely tighten up and regain some of the focus I feel it lost in season 3.
Also, hanging on to an idea after it has outlived its usefulness is what makes so many viewers disgusted with the studios in the first place. Instead of churning out more of the same thing ("Hey, the Die Hard movies raked in dough, so let's make another one!"), studios need to keep experimenting. If SciFi takes the HBO approach, and isn't afraid to kill off shows *before* they get crappy, they'll be doing the smart thing, rather than shooting themselves in the foot.
But the entire idea of "scarcity of digital assets" is nuts because things can be copied and transferred so easily in the digital world. What this means is that the actual value of what they provide is lower than what it was, say, 20 years ago.
Artificial scarcity has been with us since the beginnings of civilization. There is always someone acting as the gatekeeper, the middleman, the person who keeps the system from working at maximum efficiency, so they can skim off the top. In an ideal world, I suppose we'd have no middlemen.
But what about the idea that while artificial scarcity has always been with us, unnatural abundance has not. Digital files are by their nature capable of being perfectly copied. Coupled with the Internet, they can be distributed globally. What other thing that can be bought or sold has these characteristics? Digital files over the Internet really are unnatural, in the sense that they go against thousands of years of human economic experience.
So what is the value of something that has the characteristics of unnatural abundance? Based on what I've seen in the university, a huge number of my peers think the value is zero, as they are unwilling to pay for music. The value of something that is so readily available is not determined by the traditional constraints of supply and demand, because in no other realm of economic activity can something be copied so perfectly and distributed so broadly and rapidly. This is not a trivial problem for individuals and companies that spend a lot of time and money to create digital goods, which is why the content industries are so freaked out about digital distribution.
Sorting this out will take time - probably a lot more time than we'd like. Also, I suspect that some of that "society will agreee on what the right value is" will involve legal, rather than economic constraints. People may agree that if left to their own devices, they will simply take digital content for free, so they will enact laws in order to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation.
Solution: Run off elections. Open a general election to candidates from ANY political party, and people will be able to truly vote their conscience. Your hot button is the environment? Vote for the green party. Your big thing is free trade? Vote libertarian. Your one plank is abortion? Vote for the evangelical. Then, we take the top two plurality winners and run them off in a national election.
I like it. The big problem is that everyone would be too afraid to pass the necessary Constitutional Amendment to make it happen. The mystique of our existing system, with its bizarre Electoral College, has proven remarkably difficult to dislodge, despite its obviously antiquated nature.
Don't like a company's privacy policy? Don't patronize them.
This libertarian idea is wonderful in theory, but not so easy in practice. If all of the companies in a given market have economic incentives to make use of your private data, they will all err on the side of making more revenue, not protecting your privacy. In a publicly-owned company, the profit motive will always beat out any concerns that are considered secondary. Even where a company knows that privacy is important to users, they also know it is not *the* most important determining factor for customers. Therefore, even though it might be high on the list of customer concerns, all the companies in the market will still ignore it.
For an example of this in action, look at those obnoxious watermarks all American TV channels now display. Nobody likes it, but it's not enough of a detriment that people won't watch whatever ABC, CBS, NBC, et al, is showing. The fact that they all do it makes it impossible to show your displeasure by switching channels anyway.
Your example of the landscaping company records is a red herring. These sorts of customer service businesses only gather information related to the work they do for you, while search engines gather a much broader range of information. The fact that small service businesses get audited is irrelevant as well. Nothing in the audit records is going to provide anything beyond transaction dates and amounts. Generally speaking, Mom & Pop's Garden Service doesn't get routinely attacked by ambitious hacker networks, either.
I understand that you enjoy the benefits of companies using your personal information to provide better service. So do I. So do the vast majority of people. But I think it's a gross simplification to say that as a practical matter we really have much choice in the matter.
Like most from the Democrat side of the spectrum, he wants to take the nerd money (and everyone else's money) and spend it on pork.
Middle america will elect Yet Another Corporate Hack from one of the two Corporate Sets of Well Financed Hacks, and nothing will change. It'll be just like the Democrats "taking over congress". Tons of promises, but are we out of Iraq? No. Are there *any* legislative signs we're going to be? No. Do we have any relief from Bush's illegal wiretapping and "signing statements" and pandering to Haliburton and crew? No.
You're using an interesting technique to tar the Democrats.
First, haul out the old canard that the Democrats are less fiscally responsible than the Republicans. That may have been true when Walter Mondale was running for President, but those times are long gone. The White House and Congress have presided over an enormous porkfest over the last six years. Instead of inefficient social welfare programs, it's being spent on Halliburton and Blackwater. The party of small government has disappeared, and has been replaced by the new and improved "Spend & Spend" Republican Party. As long as you spend it on war, somehow it's not as wasteful as spending it on social programs. The Democrats have become more fiscally responsible than the Republicans, at least at the national level.
Next, blame the Democrats for the failures of the Republican Party. Ohmigosh! The Democrats haven't suddenly extracated us from Iraq! You seem to think that the Democrats have been doing nothing, but there has been a heated battle on Capitol Hill over funding the war. The budget is the only weapon the Democrats have in this situation, and everyone knows that if they go nuclear with the budget, they'll lose their leverage. It is Bush's complete refusal to listen to the will of the public, to budge even one inch, that is keeping us in Iraq. Let's put the blame where it really lies, with the self-proclaimed "War President."
the Democrats have just shown us, there are no differences between mainstream moneyed candidates
There are differences. Look at where our national priorities were under two terms of Clinton and compare that to two terms of Bush. Look at the issues that are most important to Republican voters (Guns & God), and the issues that are most important to Democratic voters (Jobs & Environment). The fact that both parties have money behind them doesn't mean that there are no differences between them.
That said, I think we need more choices. A choice between two parties doesn't adequately represent the range of views in the American electorate. Paul certainly looks more credible than any third-party candidate in recent memory. Unfortunately, the sort of government Paul wants is a radical return to a prewar ideal that may be impossible to achieve, given the fact that government is the largest employer in the United States.
You missed an even bigger point. The guy's objection applies (if to anything) to Free Software, not Open Source Software, between which there is an entire universe's worth of difference.
Absolutely right, of course. His Stallman-bashing makes it obvious that he conflates the FSF with OSI.
Open source is not a movement; it's a religion. It is a set of principles and practices that let everyone share nonexistent or semi-existent intellectual property.
Any article about whether enterprise users really want to use Open Source software that starts of like this isn't worth reading any further. The guy isn't a cynic. He's someone with an axe to grind.
I think that misses the point that this issue highlights - that all lawyers should be put in a shuttle and sent directly into the centre of the sun.
Because of course, the actual companies involved had nothing to do with filing the lawsuits. Everyone knows that without lawyers, there would be no conflict between individuals or between companies.
Also, lawyers have never done anything useful. If they hadn't gotten involved, we'd still be able to keep minorities from voting, and companies would be able to pollute with abandon. I long for the good old days, when all disputes were settled with spears and clubs.
the point is, it's probably not official, it's probably by an independent group of weakly organized russian hackers upset due to nationalistic pride
Given that it is now Putin's Russia, I'm not so sure. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were some winking and nodding coming from the Russian security apparatus.
I'm confused. The article makes it sound like there are no alternatives to the products he mentions. I hate to play the, "Dude, get a Mac" card, but he's begging for it.
And despite all that the American public will still elect another Republican president in 2008 if the Democrats choose Hillary as their candidate, because she will take action on her policy goals. It is not a coincidence that we elected three very weak (when they came onto the scene) presidents in a row.
I'm going to agree to disagree with you on the Republicans doing nothing but a lot of posturing. I'm also not sure you're right about Hillary being unelectable. In fact, I've been thinking lately that she's more and more likely to win. But we'll have to wait to see who is right on that one.
I think your idea about the election of three weak-seeming presidents is intriguing. I take it that your underlying premise is that the American electorate is fearful of letting the president actually get anything done? You may have it right. Perhaps in spite of all the rhetoric, and the media jawing about which candidate was more hard-core, ultimately people were enticed by Bush primarily because they thought he would be a nice figurehead, incapable of doing much real damage. That jives with what I've heard from friends of mine who voted for Bush in both elections. Neither one cared for him, but they said they were more comfortable with him than with the opposition. At the time I couldn't imagine why they would think that, but if your theory is correct, that may be part of why they disliked him less; they figured he would do a lot of posturing without changing much.
Frankly I was surprised when the Republicans took the Congress and the White House, because I'd grown up in the era of split control. Perhaps we've learned our lesson and we'll go back the old way, but I'm not sure that will happen. I'm only slightly less fearful of a Democratic Party in full control than I am of a Republican Party in full control. Things seemed to go best when one party controlled Congress and a skillful President held the White House.
soldiers blowing up robots with landmines is inhumane, but soldiers killing people on their own land with no cause isn't?
Nobody said that killing people is somehow more humane than blowing up robots. Also, training soldiers to kill other humans is actually more difficult than you might think. Study after study has shown this, from WW II to Korea and Vietnam. Killing is not a natural impulse, which is why soldiers who have been involved in killing often come out of it with deep psychological scars. Most of what soldiers do is motivated from a desire to defend themselves and their cohorts, so it makes sense that the robot that saves soldiers from getting blown up by landmines would become dear to them.
You're making a couple of mistakes. First of all you're conflating conservatives with the Republican Party. But Republicans in Congress range over fairly wide ideological grounds from moderate to deeply conservative. So it's a false equivalence.
While trying to explain why someone else was being overly simplistic, I oversimplified. D'oh! Thanks for pointing that out.
This is the trouble with using terms like "liberal" and "conservative" because they really do mean different things to different people. For example, you mention "moderate, businesss-friendly Republicans" but I tak that to actually mean Republicans who are moderate on social issues. I don't know any Republicans who aren't business-friendly, but I do know some Republicans who are moderate on social issues and others who are rather intolerant on those issues.
The conservative camp is in disarray because it encompasses fiscally-conservative small-government people, big-spending church+state socially reactionary people, "We can reshape the world in our image" foreign policy zealots, and "I just want to feel good about America" people. That's quite a mix.
The same thing is true of "liberals" - a term that includes union supporters, believers in government's ability to shape domestic life, foreign policy doves, believers in realpolitik, Bill of Rights oriented voters, eco-warriors, and urbanites. That's also quite a mix.
While I agree that socially conservative Republicans were not all powerful, I still think that the conservative movement in general hasn't put immigration at the top of its priority list. Perhaps that is why more rank and file conservatives have been steadily pushing it higher up the list; they're frustrated by the Republican Party's fixation on other matters.
In real life there's a big-ass metal wall along the border in places where there are abutting communities that wasn't there before. Just long enough to look like they're doing something, and just short enough so that people can go around it.
Which amounts to no real change in policy. That was exactly my point.
They want to keep divisive issues on the table so they can use them to hold/gain power. You better re-check you 'iron law of politics'. This is a new age. The new law is "if you use it you lose it", so you may as well angle for the fat Washington paycheck and be a whore for the spotlight instead.
The Republicans have definitely been using their power. Look at Iraq for an obvious example. Look at wholesale rollback of environmental protection laws. Look at the merging of church and state. Look at the radical shift in priorities at the Justice Department. Look at massive government spending coupled with tax cuts. They've kept abortion in limbo because they know once they win that battle they'll lose the war. They're simply torn on immigration, because big business wants more of it, and the social conservatives want less of it. That's just party politics. Other than those couple of exceptions, I'd say the Republicans have been doing an excellent job of spending their political capital. Now they're starting to find out what the payback on hubris is like.
You seem to be saying that politics is utterly content-free, and that there are no differences between Democrats and Republicans. Of course each party wants to have power. But that doesn't mean they have the same policy goals once they achieve power. It's been that way since the dawn of politics. Party machines have been around since the early days of the Republic, and power has always motivated politicians. The way I look at it, how they use that power is what counts.
How do we know Jobs verbally stated that he'd drop the 99 cent pricing restriction? There's no attribution in the article to such a statement. Is this from an anonymous source? Was the writer there when the statement was made? The AP usually does better than this.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy is a public figure. In order to successfully claim libel, he must prove malice. An algorithm can't have malice against him in particular. This guy is out of his depth. To paraphrase an old saying in the legal profession, a lawyer who represents himself is an idiot.
Sorry. Someone had to put in an obscure pencil-and-paper RPG reference into this thread, or this wouldn't be Slashdot.
Nothing indicates this "company" is anything more than a single guy putting up a website on a lark, either purely for Slashdot hits or to make a point about the patent system.
I agree. That there is no information about the people involved is the first tip off that this is either a gag or something put together by unscrupulous folks who are looking to obtain security vulnerabilities from nitwits. This is certainly not a legitimate law firm.
"We actively market the IP" is not language a law firm is allowed to use in the US, because law firms are not allowed to obtain legal business from a client then perform marketing services for that same client. "You share in the profits" is also prohibited language, because it implies a guaranteed result, which is prohibited in legal advertising. Discussion of distribution of "profits" from legal activity is also prohibited in US legal advertising.
Combining the technical fix and the legal work under one marketing vehicle is also forbidden under US law. Also, if "Intellectual Weapons" is going to provide services in a variety of countries, where are they licensed? The list of gaping holes in this site goes on. This is a joke, even if it is actually intended to be serious.
Read the fucking paper before commenting on the methodology.
I stand corrected. The article led me to believe that the study was flawed, and I did not read the paper. A better article would have made this more clear, but I was reading into it I suppose.
From TFA: Participants in the laboratory study...
I've seen over and over again that when you place Internet users in an environment where they are being watched, and know they're being watched, their behavior changes. If you were participating in a study conducted by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Lab, using their own "Privacy Finder" search engine, don't you think your behavior would be a bit skewed?
I'm all for privacy, and for giving consumers a choice about whether they want to let companies have their personal information. But this study, at least as it is presented in the article, doesn't seem very rigorous in its methodology.
... are e.e. cummings fanbois.
let's face it. just about anyone posting on the web and, even moreso, on slashdot has absolutely no knowledge about the iphone aside from a handful of press releases, fanboi bigotry and fud.
News Flash! Lot's of people *like* pop. Hard to believe, but true none the less.
There is only a limited spectrum for use, and it is licensed out by the government for the good of the public. The people own the airwaves. The radio stations in effect rent use of the spectrum from the people.
So while plenty of people love pop music, payola distorts what is available for us to hear on the radio. When people's listening habits are not only reinforced but also created by radio, payola limits choice and turns the airwaves into a monoculture.
SciFi has really shot themselves in the foot by letting this series go.
Keeping a good series on too long can turn it to crap. I like Galactica, but I'm not as excited about it as I was in seasons 1 and 2. As an example, the long, overdone Starbuck/Apollo melodrama has worn thin for me. With a finite time span, the series will likely tighten up and regain some of the focus I feel it lost in season 3.
Also, hanging on to an idea after it has outlived its usefulness is what makes so many viewers disgusted with the studios in the first place. Instead of churning out more of the same thing ("Hey, the Die Hard movies raked in dough, so let's make another one!"), studios need to keep experimenting. If SciFi takes the HBO approach, and isn't afraid to kill off shows *before* they get crappy, they'll be doing the smart thing, rather than shooting themselves in the foot.
But the entire idea of "scarcity of digital assets" is nuts because things can be copied and transferred so easily in the digital world. What this means is that the actual value of what they provide is lower than what it was, say, 20 years ago.
Artificial scarcity has been with us since the beginnings of civilization. There is always someone acting as the gatekeeper, the middleman, the person who keeps the system from working at maximum efficiency, so they can skim off the top. In an ideal world, I suppose we'd have no middlemen.
But what about the idea that while artificial scarcity has always been with us, unnatural abundance has not. Digital files are by their nature capable of being perfectly copied. Coupled with the Internet, they can be distributed globally. What other thing that can be bought or sold has these characteristics? Digital files over the Internet really are unnatural, in the sense that they go against thousands of years of human economic experience.
So what is the value of something that has the characteristics of unnatural abundance? Based on what I've seen in the university, a huge number of my peers think the value is zero, as they are unwilling to pay for music. The value of something that is so readily available is not determined by the traditional constraints of supply and demand, because in no other realm of economic activity can something be copied so perfectly and distributed so broadly and rapidly. This is not a trivial problem for individuals and companies that spend a lot of time and money to create digital goods, which is why the content industries are so freaked out about digital distribution.
Sorting this out will take time - probably a lot more time than we'd like. Also, I suspect that some of that "society will agreee on what the right value is" will involve legal, rather than economic constraints. People may agree that if left to their own devices, they will simply take digital content for free, so they will enact laws in order to prevent a tragedy of the commons situation.
Solution: Run off elections. Open a general election to candidates from ANY political party, and people will be able to truly vote their conscience. Your hot button is the environment? Vote for the green party. Your big thing is free trade? Vote libertarian. Your one plank is abortion? Vote for the evangelical. Then, we take the top two plurality winners and run them off in a national election.
I like it. The big problem is that everyone would be too afraid to pass the necessary Constitutional Amendment to make it happen. The mystique of our existing system, with its bizarre Electoral College, has proven remarkably difficult to dislodge, despite its obviously antiquated nature.
Don't like a company's privacy policy? Don't patronize them.
This libertarian idea is wonderful in theory, but not so easy in practice. If all of the companies in a given market have economic incentives to make use of your private data, they will all err on the side of making more revenue, not protecting your privacy. In a publicly-owned company, the profit motive will always beat out any concerns that are considered secondary. Even where a company knows that privacy is important to users, they also know it is not *the* most important determining factor for customers. Therefore, even though it might be high on the list of customer concerns, all the companies in the market will still ignore it.
For an example of this in action, look at those obnoxious watermarks all American TV channels now display. Nobody likes it, but it's not enough of a detriment that people won't watch whatever ABC, CBS, NBC, et al, is showing. The fact that they all do it makes it impossible to show your displeasure by switching channels anyway.
Your example of the landscaping company records is a red herring. These sorts of customer service businesses only gather information related to the work they do for you, while search engines gather a much broader range of information. The fact that small service businesses get audited is irrelevant as well. Nothing in the audit records is going to provide anything beyond transaction dates and amounts. Generally speaking, Mom & Pop's Garden Service doesn't get routinely attacked by ambitious hacker networks, either.
I understand that you enjoy the benefits of companies using your personal information to provide better service. So do I. So do the vast majority of people. But I think it's a gross simplification to say that as a practical matter we really have much choice in the matter.
Like most from the Democrat side of the spectrum, he wants to take the nerd money (and everyone else's money) and spend it on pork.
Middle america will elect Yet Another Corporate Hack from one of the two Corporate Sets of Well Financed Hacks, and nothing will change. It'll be just like the Democrats "taking over congress". Tons of promises, but are we out of Iraq? No. Are there *any* legislative signs we're going to be? No. Do we have any relief from Bush's illegal wiretapping and "signing statements" and pandering to Haliburton and crew? No.
You're using an interesting technique to tar the Democrats.
First, haul out the old canard that the Democrats are less fiscally responsible than the Republicans. That may have been true when Walter Mondale was running for President, but those times are long gone. The White House and Congress have presided over an enormous porkfest over the last six years. Instead of inefficient social welfare programs, it's being spent on Halliburton and Blackwater. The party of small government has disappeared, and has been replaced by the new and improved "Spend & Spend" Republican Party. As long as you spend it on war, somehow it's not as wasteful as spending it on social programs. The Democrats have become more fiscally responsible than the Republicans, at least at the national level.
Next, blame the Democrats for the failures of the Republican Party. Ohmigosh! The Democrats haven't suddenly extracated us from Iraq! You seem to think that the Democrats have been doing nothing, but there has been a heated battle on Capitol Hill over funding the war. The budget is the only weapon the Democrats have in this situation, and everyone knows that if they go nuclear with the budget, they'll lose their leverage. It is Bush's complete refusal to listen to the will of the public, to budge even one inch, that is keeping us in Iraq. Let's put the blame where it really lies, with the self-proclaimed "War President."
the Democrats have just shown us, there are no differences between mainstream moneyed candidates
There are differences. Look at where our national priorities were under two terms of Clinton and compare that to two terms of Bush. Look at the issues that are most important to Republican voters (Guns & God), and the issues that are most important to Democratic voters (Jobs & Environment). The fact that both parties have money behind them doesn't mean that there are no differences between them.
That said, I think we need more choices. A choice between two parties doesn't adequately represent the range of views in the American electorate. Paul certainly looks more credible than any third-party candidate in recent memory. Unfortunately, the sort of government Paul wants is a radical return to a prewar ideal that may be impossible to achieve, given the fact that government is the largest employer in the United States.
just remember this:
I hope he sues, gets a huge pay-day, and the school board and the town feel the budget pinch for years to come.
Laywers serve their clients. A client can decide to go for massive damages, or can refrain from doing so.
A: Will Microsoft step up to the plate...
B: or are they just continuing a scare campaign with no real ability to leverage the patents they claim open source is infringing?
I'll take B for all the money in the world, Bob.
You missed an even bigger point. The guy's objection applies (if to anything) to Free Software, not Open Source Software, between which there is an entire universe's worth of difference.
Absolutely right, of course. His Stallman-bashing makes it obvious that he conflates the FSF with OSI.
From TFA:
Open source is not a movement; it's a religion. It is a set of principles and practices that let everyone share nonexistent or semi-existent intellectual property.
Nonexistent intellectual property? Semi-existent intellectual property? WTF?
Any article about whether enterprise users really want to use Open Source software that starts of like this isn't worth reading any further. The guy isn't a cynic. He's someone with an axe to grind.
I think that misses the point that this issue highlights - that all lawyers should be put in a shuttle and sent directly into the centre of the sun.
Because of course, the actual companies involved had nothing to do with filing the lawsuits. Everyone knows that without lawyers, there would be no conflict between individuals or between companies.
Also, lawyers have never done anything useful. If they hadn't gotten involved, we'd still be able to keep minorities from voting, and companies would be able to pollute with abandon. I long for the good old days, when all disputes were settled with spears and clubs.
the point is, it's probably not official, it's probably by an independent group of weakly organized russian hackers upset due to nationalistic pride
Given that it is now Putin's Russia, I'm not so sure. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were some winking and nodding coming from the Russian security apparatus.
Listen up pinheads, people have the right to be wrong.
*swoon*
You had me at hello, you charmer, you!
I'm confused. The article makes it sound like there are no alternatives to the products he mentions. I hate to play the, "Dude, get a Mac" card, but he's begging for it.
And despite all that the American public will still elect another Republican president in 2008 if the Democrats choose Hillary as their candidate, because she will take action on her policy goals. It is not a coincidence that we elected three very weak (when they came onto the scene) presidents in a row.
I'm going to agree to disagree with you on the Republicans doing nothing but a lot of posturing. I'm also not sure you're right about Hillary being unelectable. In fact, I've been thinking lately that she's more and more likely to win. But we'll have to wait to see who is right on that one.
I think your idea about the election of three weak-seeming presidents is intriguing. I take it that your underlying premise is that the American electorate is fearful of letting the president actually get anything done? You may have it right. Perhaps in spite of all the rhetoric, and the media jawing about which candidate was more hard-core, ultimately people were enticed by Bush primarily because they thought he would be a nice figurehead, incapable of doing much real damage. That jives with what I've heard from friends of mine who voted for Bush in both elections. Neither one cared for him, but they said they were more comfortable with him than with the opposition. At the time I couldn't imagine why they would think that, but if your theory is correct, that may be part of why they disliked him less; they figured he would do a lot of posturing without changing much.
Frankly I was surprised when the Republicans took the Congress and the White House, because I'd grown up in the era of split control. Perhaps we've learned our lesson and we'll go back the old way, but I'm not sure that will happen. I'm only slightly less fearful of a Democratic Party in full control than I am of a Republican Party in full control. Things seemed to go best when one party controlled Congress and a skillful President held the White House.
soldiers blowing up robots with landmines is inhumane, but soldiers killing people on their own land with no cause isn't?
Nobody said that killing people is somehow more humane than blowing up robots. Also, training soldiers to kill other humans is actually more difficult than you might think. Study after study has shown this, from WW II to Korea and Vietnam. Killing is not a natural impulse, which is why soldiers who have been involved in killing often come out of it with deep psychological scars. Most of what soldiers do is motivated from a desire to defend themselves and their cohorts, so it makes sense that the robot that saves soldiers from getting blown up by landmines would become dear to them.
You're making a couple of mistakes. First of all you're conflating conservatives with the Republican Party. But Republicans in Congress range over fairly wide ideological grounds from moderate to deeply conservative. So it's a false equivalence.
While trying to explain why someone else was being overly simplistic, I oversimplified. D'oh! Thanks for pointing that out.
This is the trouble with using terms like "liberal" and "conservative" because they really do mean different things to different people. For example, you mention "moderate, businesss-friendly Republicans" but I tak that to actually mean Republicans who are moderate on social issues. I don't know any Republicans who aren't business-friendly, but I do know some Republicans who are moderate on social issues and others who are rather intolerant on those issues.
The conservative camp is in disarray because it encompasses fiscally-conservative small-government people, big-spending church+state socially reactionary people, "We can reshape the world in our image" foreign policy zealots, and "I just want to feel good about America" people. That's quite a mix.
The same thing is true of "liberals" - a term that includes union supporters, believers in government's ability to shape domestic life, foreign policy doves, believers in realpolitik, Bill of Rights oriented voters, eco-warriors, and urbanites. That's also quite a mix.
While I agree that socially conservative Republicans were not all powerful, I still think that the conservative movement in general hasn't put immigration at the top of its priority list. Perhaps that is why more rank and file conservatives have been steadily pushing it higher up the list; they're frustrated by the Republican Party's fixation on other matters.
In real life there's a big-ass metal wall along the border in places where there are abutting communities that wasn't there before. Just long enough to look like they're doing something, and just short enough so that people can go around it.
Which amounts to no real change in policy. That was exactly my point.
They want to keep divisive issues on the table so they can use them to hold/gain power. You better re-check you 'iron law of politics'. This is a new age. The new law is "if you use it you lose it", so you may as well angle for the fat Washington paycheck and be a whore for the spotlight instead.
The Republicans have definitely been using their power. Look at Iraq for an obvious example. Look at wholesale rollback of environmental protection laws. Look at the merging of church and state. Look at the radical shift in priorities at the Justice Department. Look at massive government spending coupled with tax cuts. They've kept abortion in limbo because they know once they win that battle they'll lose the war. They're simply torn on immigration, because big business wants more of it, and the social conservatives want less of it. That's just party politics. Other than those couple of exceptions, I'd say the Republicans have been doing an excellent job of spending their political capital. Now they're starting to find out what the payback on hubris is like.
You seem to be saying that politics is utterly content-free, and that there are no differences between Democrats and Republicans. Of course each party wants to have power. But that doesn't mean they have the same policy goals once they achieve power. It's been that way since the dawn of politics. Party machines have been around since the early days of the Republic, and power has always motivated politicians. The way I look at it, how they use that power is what counts.
How do we know Jobs verbally stated that he'd drop the 99 cent pricing restriction? There's no attribution in the article to such a statement. Is this from an anonymous source? Was the writer there when the statement was made? The AP usually does better than this.