Seriously, go talk to your doctor. You need those prescription dosages adjusted.
Presidential assassinations are not funny, and that is what you're leading to. Obama nationalizing the telcos/ISPs? "They've cum tuh take are intartubes!"
It's also silly. You need to get rid of all the crap which leads to mono/duopoly, that's all. Make the buggers compete, or go out of business! That will take care of the Cxx-level moochers you'd love to get back at. Leave that to competitive market forces.
Then again, Squeaky Fromm and Gerald Ford was pretty comical, but still, don't go there. The last one was ugly and went on ugly for years afterward.
But I have yet to see a TV show (or movie) that even comes close to being as stimulating and entertaining as a good book.
And the bad ones, you can fling at the wall, or even (ie. L. Ron Hubbard) destroy it so it'll never be read again. Try that with a TV, especially an old CRT one, and you may find yourself in the hospital, or staring at your neighbor who'll be wondering if the zombie apocalypse has finally arrived.
I don't get spoiler freaks, or suspense addicts. Tell a sports fan who won the game before they get to watch it, and they won't bother to watch the game. What? Don't you enjoy the sport, or is it all just chauvinistic your team vs. others?
Thanks for that. Interesting read. I originally suspected it had something to do with pendulums swinging too far, yada yada. However, tort reform? Yeah, I can get behind that.
Your premise is correct. Not all patent trolls deserve the epithet. RIM and Microsoft are thieves, and it's a *good thing* they were forced to pay for their malicious greed. IV is just milking broken law for whatever it can get. Don't blame the predator for wanting to eat.
As for "patent reform", no surprise that's a dog's breakfast that isn't going to help anyone that it should. US' law is broken, and becoming more broken every day.
You're right about that. Germany was harboring Nazis long after the war ended, some of them even in gov't, and we're still finding them. I blame it on flawed implementation. They shouldn't have outlawed Nazis and Nazi symbolism. The way to counter hate speech is more speech, not censorship.
It's very frustrating that crap like this can take so damned long to get past. Star Trek did it in the '60s! What's our problem?!? :-|
I take that to mean you can't be bothered to see it fixed. It's not something you have any personal control over, so you wash your hands of the problem. Martin Luther King knew people like you well; the silent majority. Nixon and Johnson relied on your willing compliance.
None of those Africans asked to be brought here and enslaved. White crackers' resentment of them still being here is wholly misplaced.
Given a choice between the cop coming home, and the fat turd resisting arrest ...
You do realize you're defending an incompetent cop, one who doesn't even know how to apply a choke hold without killing the subject? What an altogether charming individual you are. :-P
I'd rather have people obey the law.
I don't think the law on selling untaxed tobacco cigarettes says anything about capital punishment. What part of serve and protect don't you understand?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Types of resident in the US
Democracy gives individuals and groups a voice.
They already have a voice just by being, or being made up of, humans. Does a layer on top of that (gov't) amplify that voice, or throttle or muddy those voices?
Gov't does have a quality of equalizing between the many competing voices, but it's so easily corruptible, that quality is easily lost, or minimized.
What we need to do is promote third parties until they're considered a viable option.
Or, we need to get back to where we aren't limited by parties. We need those individual or group voices to be heard again, not institutionalized election machines (parties).
I often wonder what it would be like if we made it illegal for news orgs to report on elections and candidates. Imagine if all discussion of politics had to be done face to face, either one on one or in a town meeting hall. Limit individual candidates to stating their positions, then shut up while we discuss amongst ourselves.
Re: These days we speak of the "American Dream" only ironically.
I thought the American Dream as it were was an honest day's pay for an honest day's work.
I thought it was a la Horatio Alger, as in no matter your humble beginnings, with hard work and initiative, anyone can be the next Carnegie, Hearst, Jobs, or Gates.
Of course, as recent events show quite clearly, it's never been more than a pipe dream for many, specifically certain minorities at that moment (which changes over time). Wops, spics, kikes, polacks, niggers, Catholics, Irish, women, LGBT, ...
People are asking why police are killing at a rate 20 or 30 or more times the rate they are being killed.
Not for long, I don't think. These cops are well on their way to provoking a race war. Cops are going to get shot on sight in self defense by otherwise innocent people trying to protect themselves from, look at the record, homicidal cops, and the judicial system backs them up.
How long is USA's racism epidemic going to go on? You'd all better start dealing with it, soon.
... there may be problems with the Patent Office granting patents it shouldn't or with some form of "litigation abuse," but that patent trolls aren't the "problem." That's... questionable at best. While it may be true that patent trolls aren't doing anything "illegal," it doesn't take any special economic skills to recognize that what they are doing is a deadweight economic loss.
Intellectual Ventures' shareholders disagree, and the so called "free market" disagrees. Apparently, society disagrees too, or it would get fixed.
If we're unwilling to outlaw predatory behavior, some of us will get eaten from time to time. You can't blame the predator for wanting to eat. If we make it impossible to eat us, they'll go eat something else. With patent law as it is, we're the easy meal.
I don't understand why anyone thinks this is complicated. We created the patent trolls by wandering around looking like an easy meal.
I think granting patents is just asking for trouble, but what do I know? If we must have patent law, make it a *good* patent law.
The mouse as an individual has no advantages on the cat.
Tom & Jerry taught us that cats can't fit into mouseholes. However, I agree, but the bolded part is what's important. Mice by nature don't value the individual. They choose a different path, the same one as fish in a school. Cats aren't pack animals. They're individual predators. Different strokes, for different folks, and it's worked out fairly well for both. They value different outcomes based on their nature.
To say that we deserve the government we have is to condemn us as a species ...
Not true. I'm sure we can do better than our present iteration of democracy. *It* doesn't work. Perhaps given the chance to refine it, we could improve it and make democracy work. Or, if we try hard enough perhaps something out there as yet undiscovered would be better than democracy.
If we can keep from killing us all, or getting ourselves all killed, there's still hope. We're not all stupid, we're not all lazy, and we're not all excessively greedy, and if enough of us keep our eyes on the prize, we may yet come up with a solution that works for everyone.
What we're doing now doesn't work for anyone, rich and poor, powerful or weak. I think we are capable of figuring out what we're doing wrong. We've plenty of indications in many areas. Discovering our errors, then successfully implementing the fixed solution won't be easy, but that's what needs to be done.
I'll start it off. Authoritarianism doesn't work. We're too much like cats. Communism and socialism don't work for the same reason. Elected representational government doesn't work for the same reason. Free market economies don't appear to work, or we as a species can't figure out how to make them work, or we don't want them to work.
My response to that argument is a logical one: no effort to make a difference has zero impact.
To which I reply, no effort to make a difference in that area has zero impact in that area.
Lines of riflemen slowly marching towards each other is one way to fight a battle, but it's certainly not the best way. There are many other ways, and some are much better than others. I've been aware of gerrymandering for at least forty years, I'd say. It's grown worse over time. I've been aware of oppressive voting rights laws for just as long, and watching the news reported during the last go round, I see it's grown worse over time. That's just two facets of the problem and I can think of *many* just as significant ones. Present day elections are very much a rigged game, controlled by the insiders, and nobody but the insiders have any control over the situation.
I'm well aware of how unpopular the following is today, however, I believe there's a lot of truth to it:
The significance of this reference appears in a conversation between the characters Francisco d'Anconia and Hank Rearden, in which d'Anconia asks Rearden what advice he would give Atlas upon seeing that "the greater [the titan's] effort, the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders". With Rearden unable to answer, d'Anconia gives his own response: "To shrug".
Or, in this case, give up that battlefield, and go find one upon which you have at least a chance of winning.
I'm not greatly fond of democracy, but I thought it was at least passably tolerable and functional while backed (or limited) by a strong constitution. For the longest time, I thought the USA was that combination, the only one on the planet! But in my lifetime, I've seen it proven false, over and over and over again. Not only that, but the rot is accelerating.
The Forces of Darkness aren't even trying to hide their malevolence any more. The press has been co-opted in service of the insider establishment. The police may as well be considered little better than Gestapo, KGB, Savak, or Stasi. We lost.
I'm not sure it's significant (yet), but my favorite character from that book was Ragnar Danneskjold, the terrorist, yet you hardly ever even saw or heard of him. I thought it tragic that he was driven to such extraordinary lengths. I like Socrates a lot too, and look what happened to him.
I'm not campaigning to sell my position to anyone else. We all have a responsibility to do what we can to come up with a solution. I don't believe the ballot box is the answer at this stage, nor do I know what is.
Bon chance, to all. I hope we can fix this mess before too many people get hurt.
I don't know how good NK's hackers are, but that may be irrelevant. Richard Clarke classifies the current state of computing security into two groups: those who've been hacked, and those who don't yet know they've been hacked (NY Times).
Add the scare stories about all the non-airgapped and net accessible micro-controllers on critical infrastructure, and you've got the bar to potential disaster set dangerously low.
A few days ago, I clicked onto a site that's displaying realtime CCTV output from thousands of security cameras whose owners hadn't bothered to secure them. There are plenty of professionals who tell stories about egregiously vulnerably implemented micro-controllers hooked up to potential Bhopal scary disaster situations.
Any number of "bad guys" out there could be biding their time, accumulating access to controller after controller, just waiting for their perfect moment to spring the trap.
... and there is no chance of anything else until true electoral reform occurs.
That constitutes no. 10 on the list: the game's rigged, so no matter how much you care and want to do your bit to change things, it's little more than spitting into the wind, a complete waste of time and effort, and too depressing to even care enough to bother with going along with the charade.
I'm sympathetic to that argument, but not quite there yet. Close, but not quite.
I vote against incumbents, I vote to shake things up trying to make it difficult for anyone to make sense of the current situation, and I expend my efforts on other things which might have more of a chance to make *something* happen for better or worse. Better would be good, but worse might be better if it hastens the collapse of the house of cards. The sooner it collapses, the sooner we can begin to start over.
USA should take a look at what's happening in Canada recently. The elected reps in parliament and provincial legislatures (a la state houses) are fighting their leadership, telling them their first duty is to represent those who elected them, not the party leaders.
Can parties in the US impeach their own caucus leaders? Wouldn't that be fun to watch?
I look forward to reading the news articles reporting on the results of the impending pitchfork and torch bearing mobs Zenefits' business customers are currently organizing with their employees. As if health insurance wasn't a mess already, this crony-anticapitalist prat wants to penalize a new outfit which is making sense of it, and adding value, and lowering costs, and excluding middlemen?
Assuming there is still a functioning fourth estate in Utah, this guy is in for the flame-fest of a lifetime. What an astonishingly stupid move.
American citizens are the only ones not benefiting from all of these idiotic actions by corporations, lobbyists, and the politicians.
Sure they are! You've got massive spending on security theatre, patriotic whistleblowers running for their lives, seventeen overlapping anti-terror spy agencies, and you're starting to look as bad as the Soviets and ChiComs (and Savak and Stasi) on their worst day. You've got cops harassing people walking down the street with their hands in their pockets. Your military has never been as potentially destructive, and you're almost constantly at war with somebody. The war on drugs has never been as fever pitched. Prohibition was a drop in the bucket compared to what you have now.
American (USA) citizens are the only ones who can stop this too, as well being the ones to blame for it all. Apparently, they don't care to. We get the gov't we deserve.
If that's not entertainment, I don't know what is.
On the post: Yet Another Study Proclaims U.S. Broadband Awesome If You Intentionally Ignore All The Warts
Re: Re: How do we improve broadband outcomes?
Seriously, go talk to your doctor. You need those prescription dosages adjusted.
Presidential assassinations are not funny, and that is what you're leading to. Obama nationalizing the telcos/ISPs? "They've cum tuh take are intartubes!"
It's also silly. You need to get rid of all the crap which leads to mono/duopoly, that's all. Make the buggers compete, or go out of business! That will take care of the Cxx-level moochers you'd love to get back at. Leave that to competitive market forces.
Then again, Squeaky Fromm and Gerald Ford was pretty comical, but still, don't go there. The last one was ugly and went on ugly for years afterward.
On the post: AMC Forgets Time Zones Exist, Spoils Walking Dead Midseason Finale
Re: Re: Re:
And the bad ones, you can fling at the wall, or even (ie. L. Ron Hubbard) destroy it so it'll never be read again. Try that with a TV, especially an old CRT one, and you may find yourself in the hospital, or staring at your neighbor who'll be wondering if the zombie apocalypse has finally arrived.
I don't get spoiler freaks, or suspense addicts. Tell a sports fan who won the game before they get to watch it, and they won't bother to watch the game. What? Don't you enjoy the sport, or is it all just chauvinistic your team vs. others?
On the post: Defining The Patent Troll
Re: The Truth About Patent Trolls
Your premise is correct. Not all patent trolls deserve the epithet. RIM and Microsoft are thieves, and it's a *good thing* they were forced to pay for their malicious greed. IV is just milking broken law for whatever it can get. Don't blame the predator for wanting to eat.
As for "patent reform", no surprise that's a dog's breakfast that isn't going to help anyone that it should. US' law is broken, and becoming more broken every day.
On the post: The Homicide No One Committed: Eric Garner's Death At The Hands Of An NYPD Officer No-Billed By Grand Jury
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Self-fulfilling prophecy
It's very frustrating that crap like this can take so damned long to get past. Star Trek did it in the '60s! What's our problem?!? :-|
On the post: The Homicide No One Committed: Eric Garner's Death At The Hands Of An NYPD Officer No-Billed By Grand Jury
Re: Re: Re: Re: Self-fulfilling prophecy
None of those Africans asked to be brought here and enslaved. White crackers' resentment of them still being here is wholly misplaced.
On the post: The Homicide No One Committed: Eric Garner's Death At The Hands Of An NYPD Officer No-Billed By Grand Jury
Re: Don't resist arrest, don't die.
You do realize you're defending an incompetent cop, one who doesn't even know how to apply a choke hold without killing the subject? What an altogether charming individual you are. :-P
I don't think the law on selling untaxed tobacco cigarettes says anything about capital punishment. What part of serve and protect don't you understand?
On the post: Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Types of resident in the US
They already have a voice just by being, or being made up of, humans. Does a layer on top of that (gov't) amplify that voice, or throttle or muddy those voices?
Gov't does have a quality of equalizing between the many competing voices, but it's so easily corruptible, that quality is easily lost, or minimized.
Or, we need to get back to where we aren't limited by parties. We need those individual or group voices to be heard again, not institutionalized election machines (parties).
I often wonder what it would be like if we made it illegal for news orgs to report on elections and candidates. Imagine if all discussion of politics had to be done face to face, either one on one or in a town meeting hall. Limit individual candidates to stating their positions, then shut up while we discuss amongst ourselves.
On the post: The OTHER Government Revolving Door: Sheriff's Departments, State Troopers Provide New Homes For Bad Cops
Re: These days we speak of the "American Dream" only ironically.
I thought it was a la Horatio Alger, as in no matter your humble beginnings, with hard work and initiative, anyone can be the next Carnegie, Hearst, Jobs, or Gates.
Of course, as recent events show quite clearly, it's never been more than a pipe dream for many, specifically certain minorities at that moment (which changes over time). Wops, spics, kikes, polacks, niggers, Catholics, Irish, women, LGBT, ...
On the post: The Homicide No One Committed: Eric Garner's Death At The Hands Of An NYPD Officer No-Billed By Grand Jury
Re: Re: Self-fulfilling prophecy
Not for long, I don't think. These cops are well on their way to provoking a race war. Cops are going to get shot on sight in self defense by otherwise innocent people trying to protect themselves from, look at the record, homicidal cops, and the judicial system backs them up.
How long is USA's racism epidemic going to go on? You'd all better start dealing with it, soon.
On the post: Defining The Patent Troll
Fix the law.
Intellectual Ventures' shareholders disagree, and the so called "free market" disagrees. Apparently, society disagrees too, or it would get fixed.
If we're unwilling to outlaw predatory behavior, some of us will get eaten from time to time. You can't blame the predator for wanting to eat. If we make it impossible to eat us, they'll go eat something else. With patent law as it is, we're the easy meal.
I don't understand why anyone thinks this is complicated. We created the patent trolls by wandering around looking like an easy meal.
I think granting patents is just asking for trouble, but what do I know? If we must have patent law, make it a *good* patent law.
On the post: Defining The Patent Troll
Re: About trolls
How can they do that with a workable patent law situation?
Patent trolling is a symptom, not the disease we should be concerning ourselves with. The law is being an ass, as usual. Why? Because we allow it.
Fix the law, and the problem disappears.
On the post: The Repeated Failure Of The US And UK Governments' 'Add More Hay' Approach To Surveillance
Re: The government we deserve.
Tom & Jerry taught us that cats can't fit into mouseholes. However, I agree, but the bolded part is what's important. Mice by nature don't value the individual. They choose a different path, the same one as fish in a school. Cats aren't pack animals. They're individual predators. Different strokes, for different folks, and it's worked out fairly well for both. They value different outcomes based on their nature.
Not true. I'm sure we can do better than our present iteration of democracy. *It* doesn't work. Perhaps given the chance to refine it, we could improve it and make democracy work. Or, if we try hard enough perhaps something out there as yet undiscovered would be better than democracy.
If we can keep from killing us all, or getting ourselves all killed, there's still hope. We're not all stupid, we're not all lazy, and we're not all excessively greedy, and if enough of us keep our eyes on the prize, we may yet come up with a solution that works for everyone.
What we're doing now doesn't work for anyone, rich and poor, powerful or weak. I think we are capable of figuring out what we're doing wrong. We've plenty of indications in many areas. Discovering our errors, then successfully implementing the fixed solution won't be easy, but that's what needs to be done.
I'll start it off. Authoritarianism doesn't work. We're too much like cats. Communism and socialism don't work for the same reason. Elected representational government doesn't work for the same reason. Free market economies don't appear to work, or we as a species can't figure out how to make them work, or we don't want them to work.
Where do we go from there?
On the post: Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Types of resident in the US
To which I reply, no effort to make a difference in that area has zero impact in that area.
Lines of riflemen slowly marching towards each other is one way to fight a battle, but it's certainly not the best way. There are many other ways, and some are much better than others. I've been aware of gerrymandering for at least forty years, I'd say. It's grown worse over time. I've been aware of oppressive voting rights laws for just as long, and watching the news reported during the last go round, I see it's grown worse over time. That's just two facets of the problem and I can think of *many* just as significant ones. Present day elections are very much a rigged game, controlled by the insiders, and nobody but the insiders have any control over the situation.
I'm well aware of how unpopular the following is today, however, I believe there's a lot of truth to it:
Or, in this case, give up that battlefield, and go find one upon which you have at least a chance of winning.
I'm not greatly fond of democracy, but I thought it was at least passably tolerable and functional while backed (or limited) by a strong constitution. For the longest time, I thought the USA was that combination, the only one on the planet! But in my lifetime, I've seen it proven false, over and over and over again. Not only that, but the rot is accelerating.
The Forces of Darkness aren't even trying to hide their malevolence any more. The press has been co-opted in service of the insider establishment. The police may as well be considered little better than Gestapo, KGB, Savak, or Stasi. We lost.
I'm not sure it's significant (yet), but my favorite character from that book was Ragnar Danneskjold, the terrorist, yet you hardly ever even saw or heard of him. I thought it tragic that he was driven to such extraordinary lengths. I like Socrates a lot too, and look what happened to him.
I'm not campaigning to sell my position to anyone else. We all have a responsibility to do what we can to come up with a solution. I don't believe the ballot box is the answer at this stage, nor do I know what is.
Bon chance, to all. I hope we can fix this mess before too many people get hurt.
On the post: That Huge Sony Hack May Have Been North Korea Retaliating Against James Franco And Seth Rogen
Re: Re: Re: North Korea? Really?
Add the scare stories about all the non-airgapped and net accessible micro-controllers on critical infrastructure, and you've got the bar to potential disaster set dangerously low.
A few days ago, I clicked onto a site that's displaying realtime CCTV output from thousands of security cameras whose owners hadn't bothered to secure them. There are plenty of professionals who tell stories about egregiously vulnerably implemented micro-controllers hooked up to potential Bhopal scary disaster situations.
Any number of "bad guys" out there could be biding their time, accumulating access to controller after controller, just waiting for their perfect moment to spring the trap.
On the post: Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement
Re: Re: Re: Types of resident in the US
That constitutes no. 10 on the list: the game's rigged, so no matter how much you care and want to do your bit to change things, it's little more than spitting into the wind, a complete waste of time and effort, and too depressing to even care enough to bother with going along with the charade.
I'm sympathetic to that argument, but not quite there yet. Close, but not quite.
I vote against incumbents, I vote to shake things up trying to make it difficult for anyone to make sense of the current situation, and I expend my efforts on other things which might have more of a chance to make *something* happen for better or worse. Better would be good, but worse might be better if it hastens the collapse of the house of cards. The sooner it collapses, the sooner we can begin to start over.
On the post: Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement
Re:
On the post: The Repeated Failure Of The US And UK Governments' 'Add More Hay' Approach To Surveillance
Re: Re: Re: It is all about their image
Can parties in the US impeach their own caucus leaders? Wouldn't that be fun to watch?
On the post: Utah Wants To Kill Zenefits For Giving Away HR Software For Free
Can haz tar & feathers?
Assuming there is still a functioning fourth estate in Utah, this guy is in for the flame-fest of a lifetime. What an astonishingly stupid move.
On the post: The Repeated Failure Of The US And UK Governments' 'Add More Hay' Approach To Surveillance
Re: It is all about their image
Sure they are! You've got massive spending on security theatre, patriotic whistleblowers running for their lives, seventeen overlapping anti-terror spy agencies, and you're starting to look as bad as the Soviets and ChiComs (and Savak and Stasi) on their worst day. You've got cops harassing people walking down the street with their hands in their pockets. Your military has never been as potentially destructive, and you're almost constantly at war with somebody. The war on drugs has never been as fever pitched. Prohibition was a drop in the bucket compared to what you have now.
American (USA) citizens are the only ones who can stop this too, as well being the ones to blame for it all. Apparently, they don't care to. We get the gov't we deserve.
If that's not entertainment, I don't know what is.
On the post: Apparently We Need Porn Filters To Safeguard The Healthy Erections Of Young Men
Re: Re: Re: The Real Cause Of Erectile Dysfunction
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