The blog/post/whatever-that-was implies a false dichotomy. Yes the original flood control dams were designed to control flooding (hence the name), yes subsequent environmental understanding caused the release cycle to be more pulsed than continuous. The solution isn't to choose between the two, the solution is to re-invest and rebuild portions to accommodate both.
The mass funding of infrastructure improvements (bridges, interstates, dams, power) from the 1930's to 1960's was a good thing but we can't view them as a one and done process. They not only take maintenance they also need to be redone as they age and new understanding of their effects arise.
We must start taking a longer view, if the replacement infrastructure cost of all of those things is 10 trillion dollars (or some other number) and their average life cycle due to aging or other factors is 50 years then we need to start replacing them on that cycle of 200 billion/year. Part of the problem is that so much infrastructure was placed in so little time (10 to 20 years) it's all coming due at once.
Sadly we take a short term, one and done approach, we have a dam, why would we ever need to rebuilt it.
I drifted through the various referenced links and don't really see where they came to that conclusion. The links appear to be mostly self referential to other TechDirt articles. I did scan through what I took to be the relevant WIPO section but I didn't get what they got out of it, admittedly I didn't get much out of it at all.
I certainly agree with the point that this would be a Bad Thing(TM).
It's not change is bad, it's needless change is bad.
If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.
We use firefox for everything, random websites with new versions of dancing cat videos, personnel apps like timecards, purchasing etc and monitor and control for instrumentation.
Don't really care if the new dancing cat video works, don't even really care if the craptastic PeopleSoft works, do care that monitor and control stuff works.
No disagreement on the points you raised, I guess it's a function of how you count, number of people imprisoned or number of freedoms eroded. The former is almost entirely due to drug laws.
If we just legalized most drugs our prison population would drop precipitously. Pot legalization has been espoused for decades but we're only now finally seeing a slow relaxation of those rules (various medicinal use laws) and actual discussion at the federal level rather than in smoke filled living rooms of decriminalizing in general. I'd argue we're more likely to legalize or relax criminal penalties for drug use over the next 10 years than we were 10 years ago.
I agree with the points made in the sibling post about illegal search and seizure by corporations needing to be curtailed but I'd still argue it's not as as bad as it has been in other periods of US history, particularly where rail, mines etc were concerned.
I'm in no way condoning any of the government level stupidity or suggesting since it used to be worse we should be happy with now, just arguing against the hyperbole that we're heading to hell in a hand basket, it's some sort of lost cause or we're actually losing ground. Don't buy it, particularly the latter.
While I have my doubts about this program but this drum beat of 'America has really gone downhill' is pretty much nonsense. Every decade we have more not less personal freedoms, try being gay, black, Irish, communist, female, etc etc etc in various parts of the past 100+ years. Watch South Park and then envision watching it 15 years ago or even when it first came out.
The biggest change I can see in the past 20 years is increased awareness by the public, largely helped by the internet, of limits to freedom. The limits don't come into being when you become aware of them, they are/were there all along. The net effect is a (granted miserably) slow erosion of those limits.
If you're idea of freedom is perfect anarchy then you're pretty much humped.
The points above are not in defense of the alphabet soup agency plans in the article, just refuting that it's evidence of a net downward slide, it's really just the step back in the 1.1 step forward 1 step back dance.
I feel fairly confident that if we hadn't doubled the military budget in the past decade we could probably still post on/.
If you think the only thing between the US and "loss of American way of life as we know it"(TM) is 300B why the hell aren't we spending 2T. Seems kind of risky to live that close to the edge.
Apologies to all you non-US folks with no military, it's sad you can no longer post on/., we'll keep the light on until the hordes finally over run us.
That conclusion is supported by the extremely poor posters summary of an equally poor LA Times article. It is almost entirely counter to what the actual FCC report had to say.
Mostly the report was about how to encourage and facilitate alternative outlets and non profits (including ones like Britebart[sic] and Drudge). I listed the conclusions from the actual report in a different post. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2232180&cid=36417376
Most of the posts above seem to be individual extrapolations based on the short summary of an LA Times article. The word internet appears exactly once in the LA Times article, "the government regulatory agency, which has oversight over television and radio as well as certain aspects of the Internet." but since the post headline claims "The Internet is Killing Local News, Says the FCC" that must be what the FCC says right.
I'd suggest glancing through the actual report it's actually not bad for a government report. Skip to the conclusions, if there's part that seems problematic go back and read the supporting section. Here's an abbreviated version of the conclusions:
FCC rules 1) Encourage online disclosure by broadcasters. The report (by the FCC) claims the punitive oversight model of the FCC is broken, online disclosure would help consumers do their own oversight and reduce the overhead placed on both the broadcasters and FCC in the current model. 2) Relax quarterly paper report requirements and finish repealing the Fairness Doctrine, it's still within the procedural requirements. 3) Strengthen pay for play rules, corporations, hospitals are increasingly dictating local news coverage in exchange for donations (not advertising) 4) Give greater consideration to local news during next media ownership rules review (the rules that coverage how much of a market a company can own). Government rules 1) Make it easier for citizens to monitor government by putting more proceedings and documents online. 2) Target local media more for government advertising programs, perceived as money saving and generally more effective 3) Make nonprofit media easier (AP, NPR, Consumer reports etc) by simplifying non-profit tax code 4) Semi lame suggestion to create a non-profit media database by zip code to make it easier for the public to donate as well as listing journalism schools for philanthropists to donate to. 6) Relax FCC rules which limit advertising and fund raising on air by non-profit media 7) Remove obstacles/rules for funding of local media forced on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which is currently stuck in a 75% TV, 25% radio and ignores other outlets 8) Encourage collaboration between non-profit and profit, particularly non-profit investigators and for profit media 9) Various recommendations for making LPFM (low power fm), PEG (public access tv) and SPAN (X-satellite public affairs network) type media more effective Consumers 1) Make universal broadband more available and open. 2) Include libraries in broadband rollout plans 3) Improve digital literacy programs (ie programs to help seniors and others to adapt to using the internet) 4) Recommend but not require that media outlets, cell phones (web browsing) do more to support visually and hearing impaired 5) Consider programs (spectrum access, tax incentives etc) to encourage small and minority businesses
Despite all the nonsense above they're not recommending the gubment take away your internets. In fact they are pretty clear that the internet is only one factor. They're merely documenting reality and making (some pretty good in my opinion) suggestions.
It's a board based on Samsung's beefy Exynos 4210 dual core, designed to speed up Linux development by a bunch of fun loving chums. All right there in the summary conveniently cut and pasted from the Engadget article lest something be lost in translation.
I took the liberty of assuming linux was synonymous with fun in this context. Apologies if the chums in question love linux but not fun.
That appears to be a document written by a creationist who claims to be an Evolutionary Biologist from Ball State. I looked him up and while he did get a PHD from Ball State it was in Education. His dissertation was "Relationship of programmed instruction to test and discussion performance among beginning college biology students".
He quotes Gould and then clearly misinterprets what Gould says about micro vs macro Evolution. He quotes Pierre Grasse as if he were a modern Evolutionary Biologist rather than the last Lamarckist (a 19th century competing theory to Darwin) to hold the Chair of Evolutionary Biology in Paris.
He then quotes the frequently misquoted Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and his theory of syntropy and external force as proof of Creationism and goes so far to imply that Gyorgyi developed the model due to some discomfort with Evolution and Genetics. Gyorgyi developed that theory by first postulating a connection with quantum mechanics and then free radicals leading to his 1974 syntropy model for causes of cancer.
I particularly liked this bit:
Grasse’ is not (yet) a creationist. But he does say that his knowledge of the living world convinces him that there must be some “internal force” involved in the history of life.
Grasse was born in 1895 and died in 1985, he stopped being scientifically active in the 70's, yet Parker seems to imply that he's having some ongoing debate.
It's not a terribly rigorous document to begin with which would be fine but taking quotes out of context or intentionally misinterpreting the quotes so he can say 'see even these esteemed biologists knew evolution was wrong' is pretty pathetic.
See my post further down. I actually read the criticism section and other articles on PISA before I posted. Treating the report as some sort of commendation of China is obviously problematic, ignoring what it has to say about the US based on China's results is even more problematic.
We should strive to be the best, if we don't make it so be it, other countries are trying to be as well, but we should at least try. Currently we're playing political and social ping pong with education, the goal seems 'get elected' not 'fix education'. If the non-politicians (us) react to reports like this defensively and break into chants of USA USA USA we're not really helping.
Part of the problem though is this is viewed as a China vs US issue and creates arguments (see other posts here) about China's political flaws or the test's flaws. The US scored below the average of all countries, whether China was 1st, 4th or dead last is somewhat immaterial.
We can't improve as long as our gut reaction is to take any criticism, either internally or externally generated, as a personal affront.
Thirty-four countries were assessed in all by the PISA test, considered to be the most comprehensive of its type. Out of those 34 the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.
China’s 15-year olds also took the test. They ranked 1st, 1st, and 1st.
Is your point that the PISA test is either a useless measure or intentionally slanted to favor China ?
Your signature seems to imply a view that anything that casts the US in an unfavorable light in comparison with the rest of the world, including self introspection as to how we could be better, is suspect.
They don't prevent, they dissuade. As I said, laws have no bearing on your ability to commit a crime. A metal detector is a form of prevention, a law that says you can't carry a gun into an airport does not actually prevent you from doing it.
The rest of your post seems to be restating what I said, you somehow misread my point by misconstruing the nuance about prevent. The GP was saying the injunction would have no effect because it didn't actually prevent the transmission via Twitter. My point was it would because like any law it acts to dissuade.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a reason it's called Anonymous Coward.
Whether intentional or not I really like the use of demigod there (demagogue).
The blog/post/whatever-that-was implies a false dichotomy. Yes the original flood control dams were designed to control flooding (hence the name), yes subsequent environmental understanding caused the release cycle to be more pulsed than continuous. The solution isn't to choose between the two, the solution is to re-invest and rebuild portions to accommodate both.
The mass funding of infrastructure improvements (bridges, interstates, dams, power) from the 1930's to 1960's was a good thing but we can't view them as a one and done process. They not only take maintenance they also need to be redone as they age and new understanding of their effects arise.
We must start taking a longer view, if the replacement infrastructure cost of all of those things is 10 trillion dollars (or some other number) and their average life cycle due to aging or other factors is 50 years then we need to start replacing them on that cycle of 200 billion/year. Part of the problem is that so much infrastructure was placed in so little time (10 to 20 years) it's all coming due at once.
Sadly we take a short term, one and done approach, we have a dam, why would we ever need to rebuilt it.
What kind of insurance and antibiotics results in a $758 co-pay. Amoxicillan costs like $70 for a 30 day 125Mg tablets.
I drifted through the various referenced links and don't really see where they came to that conclusion. The links appear to be mostly self referential to other TechDirt articles. I did scan through what I took to be the relevant WIPO section but I didn't get what they got out of it, admittedly I didn't get much out of it at all.
I certainly agree with the point that this would be a Bad Thing(TM).
Agreed. I might bitch at Firefox but just because they're mental doesn't make IE all the sudden attractive.
In terms of missing features, not working at all under Linux is a pretty important one. Besides Firefox + retardation still trumps IE under windows.
It's not change is bad, it's needless change is bad.
If Firefox wants to be a cutting edge testing environment for whizbangs great, make that clear. If it wants to be used in production environments where long term stability and available time for internal test cycles trump access to whizbangs then this is bad.
We use firefox for everything, random websites with new versions of dancing cat videos, personnel apps like timecards, purchasing etc and monitor and control for instrumentation.
Don't really care if the new dancing cat video works, don't even really care if the craptastic PeopleSoft works, do care that monitor and control stuff works.
Says the prolific AC, taking time from his busy schedule to post a random thought on a news aggregation site.
Nope, it was growing on the *inside*. Outside would be stunning, inside is interesting.
If we all gave them our money maybe they'll go away, it'd almost be worth it.
No disagreement on the points you raised, I guess it's a function of how you count, number of people imprisoned or number of freedoms eroded. The former is almost entirely due to drug laws.
If we just legalized most drugs our prison population would drop precipitously. Pot legalization has been espoused for decades but we're only now finally seeing a slow relaxation of those rules (various medicinal use laws) and actual discussion at the federal level rather than in smoke filled living rooms of decriminalizing in general. I'd argue we're more likely to legalize or relax criminal penalties for drug use over the next 10 years than we were 10 years ago.
I agree with the points made in the sibling post about illegal search and seizure by corporations needing to be curtailed but I'd still argue it's not as as bad as it has been in other periods of US history, particularly where rail, mines etc were concerned.
I'm in no way condoning any of the government level stupidity or suggesting since it used to be worse we should be happy with now, just arguing against the hyperbole that we're heading to hell in a hand basket, it's some sort of lost cause or we're actually losing ground. Don't buy it, particularly the latter.
While I have my doubts about this program but this drum beat of 'America has really gone downhill' is pretty much nonsense. Every decade we have more not less personal freedoms, try being gay, black, Irish, communist, female, etc etc etc in various parts of the past 100+ years. Watch South Park and then envision watching it 15 years ago or even when it first came out.
The biggest change I can see in the past 20 years is increased awareness by the public, largely helped by the internet, of limits to freedom. The limits don't come into being when you become aware of them, they are/were there all along. The net effect is a (granted miserably) slow erosion of those limits.
If you're idea of freedom is perfect anarchy then you're pretty much humped.
The points above are not in defense of the alphabet soup agency plans in the article, just refuting that it's evidence of a net downward slide, it's really just the step back in the 1.1 step forward 1 step back dance.
Says the guy with the freedom to post as AC.
I feel fairly confident that if we hadn't doubled the military budget in the past decade we could probably still post on /.
If you think the only thing between the US and "loss of American way of life as we know it"(TM) is 300B why the hell aren't we spending 2T. Seems kind of risky to live that close to the edge.
Apologies to all you non-US folks with no military, it's sad you can no longer post on /., we'll keep the light on until the hordes finally over run us.
That conclusion is supported by the extremely poor posters summary of an equally poor LA Times article. It is almost entirely counter to what the actual FCC report had to say.
Mostly the report was about how to encourage and facilitate alternative outlets and non profits (including ones like Britebart[sic] and Drudge). I listed the conclusions from the actual report in a different post. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2232180&cid=36417376
Most of the posts above seem to be individual extrapolations based on the short summary of an LA Times article. The word internet appears exactly once in the LA Times article, "the government regulatory agency, which has oversight over television and radio as well as certain aspects of the Internet." but since the post headline claims "The Internet is Killing Local News, Says the FCC" that must be what the FCC says right.
I'd suggest glancing through the actual report it's actually not bad for a government report. Skip to the conclusions, if there's part that seems problematic go back and read the supporting section. Here's an abbreviated version of the conclusions:
FCC rules
1) Encourage online disclosure by broadcasters. The report (by the FCC) claims the punitive oversight model of the FCC is broken, online disclosure would help consumers do their own oversight and reduce the overhead placed on both the broadcasters and FCC in the current model.
2) Relax quarterly paper report requirements and finish repealing the Fairness Doctrine, it's still within the procedural requirements.
3) Strengthen pay for play rules, corporations, hospitals are increasingly dictating local news coverage in exchange for donations (not advertising)
4) Give greater consideration to local news during next media ownership rules review (the rules that coverage how much of a market a company can own).
Government rules
1) Make it easier for citizens to monitor government by putting more proceedings and documents online.
2) Target local media more for government advertising programs, perceived as money saving and generally more effective
3) Make nonprofit media easier (AP, NPR, Consumer reports etc) by simplifying non-profit tax code
4) Semi lame suggestion to create a non-profit media database by zip code to make it easier for the public to donate as well as listing journalism schools for philanthropists to donate to.
6) Relax FCC rules which limit advertising and fund raising on air by non-profit media
7) Remove obstacles/rules for funding of local media forced on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which is currently stuck in a 75% TV, 25% radio and ignores other outlets
8) Encourage collaboration between non-profit and profit, particularly non-profit investigators and for profit media
9) Various recommendations for making LPFM (low power fm), PEG (public access tv) and SPAN (X-satellite public affairs network) type media more effective
Consumers
1) Make universal broadband more available and open.
2) Include libraries in broadband rollout plans
3) Improve digital literacy programs (ie programs to help seniors and others to adapt to using the internet)
4) Recommend but not require that media outlets, cell phones (web browsing) do more to support visually and hearing impaired
5) Consider programs (spectrum access, tax incentives etc) to encourage small and minority businesses
Despite all the nonsense above they're not recommending the gubment take away your internets. In fact they are pretty clear that the internet is only one factor. They're merely documenting reality and making (some pretty good in my opinion) suggestions.
The mice have been doing this for ages.
It's a board based on Samsung's beefy Exynos 4210 dual core, designed to speed up Linux development by a bunch of fun loving chums. All right there in the summary conveniently cut and pasted from the Engadget article lest something be lost in translation.
I took the liberty of assuming linux was synonymous with fun in this context. Apologies if the chums in question love linux but not fun.
I'm sure this board differs from other boards of similar use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeagleBoard#Similar_products
I was going to link to the Origen wikipedia article as a reference rather than the BeagleBoard but was a bit confused by it's relevance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origen
Kind of like long range scans playing Star Trek on a line printer.
They mention that form of approach in the introduction and reference Hqx specifically in Section 2: Previous work.
As mentioned two posts up there's an image of the paper (so text search blows) here: http://imgur.com/a/gRXPJ
Agreed, if you're looking for a good hosing environment The Cloud(TM) is likely a good choice.
That appears to be a document written by a creationist who claims to be an Evolutionary Biologist from Ball State. I looked him up and while he did get a PHD from Ball State it was in Education. His dissertation was "Relationship of programmed instruction to test and discussion performance among beginning college biology students".
He quotes Gould and then clearly misinterprets what Gould says about micro vs macro Evolution. He quotes Pierre Grasse as if he were a modern Evolutionary Biologist rather than the last Lamarckist (a 19th century competing theory to Darwin) to hold the Chair of Evolutionary Biology in Paris.
He then quotes the frequently misquoted Albert Szent-Gyorgyi and his theory of syntropy and external force as proof of Creationism and goes so far to imply that Gyorgyi developed the model due to some discomfort with Evolution and Genetics. Gyorgyi developed that theory by first postulating a connection with quantum mechanics and then free radicals leading to his 1974 syntropy model for causes of cancer.
I particularly liked this bit:
Grasse’ is not (yet) a creationist. But he does say that his knowledge of the living world convinces him that there must be some “internal force” involved in the history of life.
Grasse was born in 1895 and died in 1985, he stopped being scientifically active in the 70's, yet Parker seems to imply that he's having some ongoing debate.
It's not a terribly rigorous document to begin with which would be fine but taking quotes out of context or intentionally misinterpreting the quotes so he can say 'see even these esteemed biologists knew evolution was wrong' is pretty pathetic.
See my post further down. I actually read the criticism section and other articles on PISA before I posted. Treating the report as some sort of commendation of China is obviously problematic, ignoring what it has to say about the US based on China's results is even more problematic.
We should strive to be the best, if we don't make it so be it, other countries are trying to be as well, but we should at least try. Currently we're playing political and social ping pong with education, the goal seems 'get elected' not 'fix education'. If the non-politicians (us) react to reports like this defensively and break into chants of USA USA USA we're not really helping.
Part of the problem though is this is viewed as a China vs US issue and creates arguments (see other posts here) about China's political flaws or the test's flaws. The US scored below the average of all countries, whether China was 1st, 4th or dead last is somewhat immaterial.
We can't improve as long as our gut reaction is to take any criticism, either internally or externally generated, as a personal affront.
From the article:
Thirty-four countries were assessed in all by the PISA test, considered to be the most comprehensive of its type. Out of those 34 the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.
China’s 15-year olds also took the test. They ranked 1st, 1st, and 1st.
Is your point that the PISA test is either a useless measure or intentionally slanted to favor China ?
Your signature seems to imply a view that anything that casts the US in an unfavorable light in comparison with the rest of the world, including self introspection as to how we could be better, is suspect.
They don't prevent, they dissuade. As I said, laws have no bearing on your ability to commit a crime. A metal detector is a form of prevention, a law that says you can't carry a gun into an airport does not actually prevent you from doing it.
The rest of your post seems to be restating what I said, you somehow misread my point by misconstruing the nuance about prevent. The GP was saying the injunction would have no effect because it didn't actually prevent the transmission via Twitter. My point was it would because like any law it acts to dissuade.