I'm waiting for the undead cat.

The Bill of Rights (and Constitution) is not what I'd call regulation. It is the supreme law of the land and meant to bind the government itself. The mistake most people make is assume that the power of law (sovereingty) lies in the government. It does not, force of law is rooted in the people of the United States.

Yes, it is a guideline by which the government should be kept in check... But that is by *you* the people of the United states. You've let it grow into a monster and now most of you just cower in fear of it thinking they can't do anything about or even worse, assume it's someone else's job. It's your job, it's your government, it's your country. Take what authority you can muster and change it. Sure you likely won't become president, but you don't have to. What you have to do is do everything you can and don't answer 'nothing' because that's bullshit.

"how can we make more money from our customers without driving most of them away?"

For the big guys, the answer typically reads: "Have the government (who has a monopoly on force) force them out of that money and give us a cut."

This happens typicall through regulations, grants and bailouts: They'll force you to buy a product, prevent you from buying a competing one or just hand the money they cofiscated from you directly over.

Actually, if it's like Canada, they actually get paid for listing you. I think the idea here is to make it cost prohibitive to unlist yourself so as to not see that revenue stream drain away. They do not get paid 5 bucks a month to list you, mind you. It's probably a cent or two if not fractions of that. At least that's what we get paid for listing phone numbers.

The government already interferes with the producers. Other than that I agree with you.

I'm entirely with you with respect to enforcing existing law (heck, just making bankers accountable for fraud would obsolete most of the planned regulation) is a major part of the solution. All the other points you bring however are fairly substantial wealth redistribution or price control schemes, all they do is shuffle the power and influence to entities which haven't had a chance to be as evil yet and gives them a free pass to become so.

This happens anytime you centalize authority which, to me, is the real focal point. As I like to say, giving monopoly to government, especially these days is probably worse than giving it to a corp. At least a corp isn't able just demand your money unless you buy what they're selling. The government can and will. There's arguing that the government is accountable but I think we both know just how far government accountability goes, especially on the federal level.

Of course the divide between the poor and the rich is growing at an alarming rate, but this isn't for lack of accountability. The economic asset pump is unchecked capital creation (without a matched production of wealth). It's a monetary issue, everything else derrives from it, be it social problems, government abuse, wealth concentration, debt epidemics.

As a simplistic example: When the bank lends you 10 bucks (capital), it pretty much creates it out of thin air, when you pay it back with interest, you're paying it with your real productive output (wealth), not money you just created out of thin air. Thus the bank drained a little over 10 bucks of real wealth out of the economy.

I used to think exactly like you, but then I started pondering this: Who's going to be the grand equalizer? What sort of incorruptible angel is going to come in and make everything fair again? Who is going to decide how much money this guy deserves versus this guy?

There are only two approaches, either you make becoming wealthy illegal and completely ignore the consequences of that (who's going to bother going the extra mile if that doesn't mean more for them?) or you appoint some sort of super-human committee that decides who's allowed to get rich and whose wealth gets shipped back down to the needy, which is pretty much what is happening now except that (surprize surprize) they aren't super-human and therefore have a strong tendency to favour their friends or pet causes.

Giving more power to an arbitrator is a sure-fire way to rig the game unless you can be 100% certain that the arbitrator will be entirely selfless and immune to all forms of bias, ie: not human.

Do the mental exercise yourself (if you're fairly decent at economics) and picture yourself grandmaster king of the US. You'll either run out of wealth to distribute or end up oppressing your people: They might not go sick or hungry but they won't be willing to work unless you force them to because they'll gain nothing from it. You can try to cheat and print money rather than rely on local production and exports, but that's been tried before too. Study what happened in the Weimar republic.

I assure you that it was no less about the money back then too. The major difference between then and now is people's willingness to stand for what they believe and lack of fear for the consequences of doing so. Most have it way too easy nowadays to consider the kind of rebelion and associated consequences required to change things. Plus, for the most part, principles are lacking to make an eventual rebelion more than an angry mob. All that established power needs to do to quell any genuine uprising is insert a few agents provocateurs and the protesters' case falls appart.

On Frank Dodd... Large corporations aren't afraid of regulations and rules, they write pretty much all of those. What they're afraid of is competition. Thankfully for them, the regulatory costs in industries that matter is way to high to let any of that happen.

The content industry is not engaged in capitalism. They have a competitor in the distribution sector that they cannot beat on merits, so they are trying to legislate it away. Capitalism would demand that they compete rather than go home and cry to mommy.

It would explain why they bought linksys in the first place too. Just before they got bought, you could get stuff off of linksys 'pro' hardware that would cost about 10 times more for the equivalent cisco product. They quickly discontinued/crippled those.

They'll probably buy Netgear any day now, some of their switches have some pretty nice 'pro' features and are very cheap.

Sure, you might not want them in a datacenter, but the small/medium business has no use for a cisco support contract, can't justify cisco prices, and have needs that fit right in the offered feature set.

I'm pretty sure the UN works very hard and with some measure of success to grant itself enforcement powers in countries that matter and that typically, it suits the local government to enforce their resolutions. Using the US as an example, congress may be reluctant if enough people make a fuss about it, but would the executive even give them a say in it? It's been (sadly) demonstrated that executive orders bypass congress nowadays.

Now everybody can be accused of terrorism: We caught this man attempting a global warming attack by emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. In fact, we had to put him down as he would not stop even after being caught, threatening the security of our agents.

April Fools or not, I guess I fell for it. I was thinking: Oh cool, he's re-making Starflight 2!

Ok, now I've shown how old I am. I'll go back to sipping my Geritol.

Bug aside, from reading the rest of these threads, it seems to me like GNOME devs are getting quite a bad reputation these days. Sure, there's no way to make everyone happy and I wouldn't expect anyone to undertake this sort of impossible challenge. This being said, all the scorn must come from somewhere. My humble opinion is that once you reach a critical mass of users, enforcing a new grand-vision that the majority of those users (the ones who acutally chose to use GNOME, not those who don't know what a DE is) do not agree with is very likely to cause quite a bit of backlash... Case in point, GNOME developers as a whole being bashed for what essentially is one bug in one lib by one person.

Sure, there's a large portion of users who aren't technical whom one might think they are catering to when they remove features considered 'too complex'. The fact is though that these are the people who don't even care what DE they're using, they're not loyal customers, they're just not interested in what you've done so long as it works for them. The only base GNOME has truly alienated is the base that had made a very conscious and educated choice to use that DE on its technical merits, the ones who felt that the DE allowed them to work the way they want to work. Sure you can change all that but only at the cost of those users. They don't take kindly to what pretty much amounts to: Look, the way you used your computer is stupid, we'll force our alternative on you.

So, as the flames rage on and you feel the burn, remember that the GNOME team doused itself in gasoline prior to this.

He's not talking about running the g-code, he's talking about generating it from a model. Most CAM software are very CPU intensive for toolpath generation.