Republicans in charge of NASA's budget. What could go wrong?

Ya know, I'm not so sure about that. The whole premise of democracy is that we are, collectively, smarter than any of us individually. Somehow, the average of the guesses comes out as closer to the truth than any of the guesses. Uninformed voters on one side of the issue cancel out uninformed voters on the other side of the issue.

There's a lot of reason to be dubious about that, but to be frank, the vast majority of voters are very uninformed about practically every issue. Any significant topic requires years or decades of study to be really expert on. And most voters will go in with nothing more than they've read in the newspaper, or worse, on TV. Take any topic you actually know in detail; do you think that any reporter has ever understood it? Here on Slashdot we regularly complain about how science and technology are misrepresented and misunderstood. Do you really think that reporting on energy issues, the economy, or foreign affairs is any better?

I'm always glad for people to want to know more, but practically everybody goes into the voting booth with a massive case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, convinced that they know the topic far better than they actually do. The whole point of democracy is to try to take that into account. Usually, we're actually voting for people to represent us, and they often know it a bit better than we do (or at least, they have advisers who do), but in the end we're really just hoping that the representative on the side of the truth will have slightly more followers than the representative who has it wrong. Democracy is designed to expose a slight bias towards reality, even if few of the individuals involved can actually justify that bias.

I'd love to live in a meritocracy where only the best experts are making decisions... but who's going to pick those experts? I'd be happy if it were me, but I bet you wouldn't be. Democracy is the closest thing I've ever seen to a fair way to pick. And if so, it only works because everybody gets to take their best guess. I suspect that the ones who know enough to know that they don't know very much are better qualified to take their guess than those who don't even know that they don't know.

Especially when you've got a news media which gets its best viewership by telling them how smart they are and that all of the smart people agree with them. They're the most dangerous voters of them all, and they vote in droves. And I can't think of any fair way to keep them out of the polls. So everybody might as well go out and vote.

What they accomplished was absolutely amazing. Anyone who doesn't get how astonishing just getting that close really was doesn't understand the problem.

There has to be a test range on land somewhere they can try putting one down instead of a pitching platform in the middle of the ocean.

Obama, by himself, can't do anything legislatively. As I explained above, the Democrats couldn't do anything by themselves except during a brief period in 2009, during which time they managed to produce one epoch-making piece of legislation.

It's true that Democrats don't work well together, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The Democratic party represents a number of different points of view. The health care bill that we did get is driven by the fact that a number of Democrats are genuinely uncomfortable with single-payer legislation. You can call that "in the pockets of big business" but they were genuinely reflecting their constituents desires (as demonstrated by the fact that most of them got creamed anyway by accusations of "soshulizm" in the next election). The Democrats' big-tent mentality is what wins them the Presidency; Republican insistence on ideology is keeping them from scoring a national majority.

The Republicans have been seen as highly effective, but only in banding together as the "party of no". You're going to see them produce little to no real legislation over the next two years, unless they radically change. The few positive ideas they have are not broadly acceptable (lowering taxes on the wealthy, eliminating social safety nets). You'll notice that they haven't been touting any alternative to the ACA, and if they try to repeal without replacing they'll find that a lot of people like actual provisions of the act. (The one they don't like is the one that pays for it, and I'd be tickled to see them eliminate *just* the coverage requirement, which would be hilarious.)

Now the Democrats get to spend two years filibustering everything the Republicans try to do (primarily eliminating environmental and safety regulations) and look more or less unified in the process. They still won't look unified, because they've got more than enough votes for the filibuster, which means that some Senators who imagine their seats are vulnerable will cross lines, but they'll be there when they need to be. And that's as the Democrats come into what should be a strong 2016, as they take back some seats that they shouldn't have lost in the 2010 wave election (just as the Republicans last year took back some seats they shouldn't have lost in 2008).

Which returns us to a Democratic Senate, probably a Democratic President, and probably a Republican House come 2017. At which point the Democrats will again fail to push a liberal agenda because they're not really a liberal party, and haven't been for a very long time. They're the party of everybody driven away by the batshit right-wing agenda of the Republicans.

If Netflix is paying Comcast for priority, they're not getting their money's worth. Lately we've had Netflix stalling and taking forever to load. If Netflix is paying for priority, they're getting ripped off. But, then again, why would Comcast treat Netflix any different than they treat any of their other customers?

When Netflix calls to complain Comcast would try to upsell them on subscription channels after hanging up on them three times.

Jobs was truly innovative - but he thought in terms of applications, not basic technology. It's true that he didn't make any original technical inventions (AFAIK), but he was brilliant at finding attractive ways to market what others had invented.

That sort of creativity is extremely valuable, but it is slightly different from what I think we were discussing. To put it very simply, someone like Jobs could not succeed unless other people (mostly unsung heroes of technology) had previously done the spadework. On the other hand, their work would not have been nearly as fruitful without Jobs' clever marketing touch.

To my way of thinking, he could be compared (in a sense) with a brilliant Web site designer who produces a wonderful interactive site using the standard ingredients of HTML, CSS, scripting, etc. Everyone has access to the same palette of technology, but most designers do routine uninspired work, while some make a dreadful mess. And a select few have the talent to leave out whatever isn't essential, thus creating a work of art.

Wanting to make a ton of money is necessary, but of course not sufficient.

Well... there is the competition from the other TV suppliers, who will try to undercut them in order to get the business for a slightly reduced profit margin.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sniff. I kill me.

No, seriously... I don't expect that this is going to dramatically cut bills on average. Some people will pay less; some will pay more. The total amount of money that consumers are willing to spend on their TV won't change, and this doesn't alter either the supply or the demand.

The cable and satellite companies do compete with each other, a little. Customers who do watch a lot of channels are going to want to continue their package deals, and won't want to pay higher prices. The customers who want individual channels will probably find that that prices are pretty high, and while they can threaten to switch to their competitor, they too will be willing to sacrifice their bottom line only so far to attract that customer. So expect it to be pretty high from both providers.

When was that, exactly? The Democrats haven't had control of the House since 2010. They did have a brief period where they had a veto-proof majority, back in 2009, but that only lasted a couple of months (after the Minnesota election was finally resolved, and before Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by a Republican). They devoted that time to health care. They didn't expect to maintain that advantage long, though they didn't expect it to end quite so soon.

Since then, there has been no chance of anything passing. Nothing has passed since then, aside from naming a few post offices and re-authorizing existing laws. I agree that the Democrats don't expect this bill to pass, and that this is more publicity stunt than serious attempt at legislation, but they might well be willing to pass it (or something like it) if they could. But they can't; the last Congress was the least productive in history and this Congress may manage to be even worse.

It's short only because it's telling the FCC to do the real work. The key bit is:

A lot of major laws are like that. The law itself grants some kind of authority to an executive branch department, and they come up with the regulations that implement that authority. That can often run into many thousands of pages, and they can change literally every single day. Regulated industries often have employees whose sole job it is to ensure that they're in compliance with the regulations.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Congress aren't experts in the domain. The executive branch employees are (or at least, are supposed to be). They work with the industry experts to clarify all of the corner cases and vaguenesses that make up any complex issue. And the issues are complex; they often seem simple to outsiders but only because they don't know what they're looking at. The same thing probably happens in your job.

The departments aren't completely unsupervised. They report, ultimately, to Presidential appointees, who have to be approved by Congress and produce regular reports to the Congress. And when things go wrong, they get hauled in front of Congress to explain themselves.

Er, digression aside... what would have happened were the bill to pass (it won't) is that the FCC would produce a lengthy set of regulations, which would surely provoke all kinds of outrage as the actual nitty-gritty details are less pleasant than the overall sentiment. In fact, I'd say that they're aware that it won't pass, which is why they get to make it so vague. Real bills, the kind where they want to strictly limit the authority of the departments to get exactly what they want, are the result of compromises within the legislature and are usually much more detailed. You can get the details in legislation or in regulation; the former is more permanent and the latter is more flexible, which can be good or bad depending on your point of view of the matter at hand. But there will be details, and they're going to be voluminous.

The summary and the Ars article are wrong. Or rather, they might well be capable of such things, but that's not what the FBI is arguing for in this case. If you click through to the original article that Ars is basing this on, they are not making a claim that it's legal to do so. They're claiming that the envelope information is legal for them to record.

Thanks, lazarus. My comment was heartfelt and I deeply believe that it is correct. As they say, "you get what you measure"; or, perhaps more accurately, "you get what you reward". Earning profit is rewarded and respected; making creative or technical breakthroughs is not, except sporadically in places such as /.

"Anything where the designers have cared more about making something amazing than making a ton of money".

Unfortunately, in our particular system those who care about making something amazing tend to go bankrupt or, at best, be acquired. Whereas those who consciously and deliberately set out to make a ton of money - by any and all means, and without caring how - often wind up running giant corporations.

This isn't just a casual complaint. I have observed the software industry professionally for about 30 years, and earned a living by writing about software vendors and their ways for over 10 years. I couldn't count the wonderful creative, innovative, dedicated companies founded and staffed by really, really smart people that I saw appear, flourish briefly, and then wink out. Meanwhile people like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison steadily built up immense fortunes by making absolutely sure that everything their corporations did was directly geared to support continuous long-term profit growth. They may have done some good things along the way, but that was purely coincidental.

Strictly, this is recording only the fact of a conversation, rather than the content. It's "envelope information", the kind of thing that would also be visible in public on a letter, recording timestamp, location, and addresses (though technically a letter doesn't require a return address the way a phone call does.) It's more akin to a record of everybody you've spoken to, rather than a record of everything you've said.

Not saying that there isn't still a qualitative difference, am I'm in no position to make a legal judgment. I'm just clarifying that they're not arguing for the right to actually record the conversation.

I agree that it *needs* to be changed, but the idea of it actually being changed strikes me as unlikely. The law of the land, as defined by the Supreme Court (which has the sole power to decide what the Second Amendment means), is basically, "Yay, guns".

And enough people agree with them on that that it is effectively impossible to get any law passed. There is a pretty high bar to passing legislation (half the House PLUS 60% of the Senate PLUS the President, plus a review by the Supreme Court). Altering the Second Amendment sets an even higher bar. A fairly trivial and widely popular bit of gun legislation failed a few years ago, and I don't think anything has changed since then.

So while I'd love to see basically any new kind of legislation passed to cope with the fact that a gun is a very different thing in 2015 than in 1791, I just don't see it happening. Maybe if these guys took their newly-printed guns and started popping off shots at the Capitol itself, but I honestly don't believe that even that would suffice.