Well, at least now we both have sticky keyboards...

Anonymous v. Cloud...

Round Three...

FIGHT!

L. O. Fucking. L.

I don't know if that was meant to be a joke, but you owe me a new keyboard. Now excuse me, I have to go wash coffee out of my eyebrows.

The Fairness Doctrine is being leveraged to ensure that there are only two viable political parties.

If you're worried about an entrenched party duoarchy, any content-focused "Fairness Doctrine" should be the least of your concerns. Even if it were still operating (it's not, and it's pretty easy to verify both by pointing at examples of broadcast outlets that violate its principles as well as checking history), any effects it has are an order of magnitude lower than the plurality voting system.

Then when new regulations are passed that give more power to the corporations, you blame the people who told you that was going to happen if you kept pushing for more regulations.

Naw, I blame the people who talk about about "regulation" vaguely and as if it's some monolithic thing, of course. Always easier rhetorically, particularly when you're preaching to a choir of fellow conservatives who've repeated the "regulation bad" mantra for so long it's become their own personal lobotomy and they are no longer even *capable* of actually thinking about policy specifics.

So here's the question: can you describe the mechanics of how a regulation that, say, prohibited tolls or discrimination based on packet source/destination would create barriers that favor existing big companies?

The ONLY way to stop corporate control of something by a small group of companies with lobbying power is not to regulate it. End of story.

Either that, or write regulations that are a matter of condition rather than favor.

It's really not that hard to stipulate something to the effect that carriers aren't allowed to bill by source or destination of a packet.

You're drawing a false distinction between a poorly understood electrochemical process (human memory) and a well understood method of simulating the same with silicon.

It's the end result that matters. In this case, since human language and logic are inherently fuzzy, the computer will be at a disadvantage in many cases.

What they're claiming they own is a specific written version of an event, which is also supported by a wide body of copyright law protecting written works.

Not that I agree with them, but their argument isn't wholly ridiculous.

Maybe two wrongs DO make a right!

Smart of them to pick on Drudge. Deep pockets, widely despised.

This flaw of being "human" seems amazingly similar to the how animals fight and posture over one another to ensure the ongoing survival of their groups and themselves. The only difference is that humans try to justify their motives, where animals simply act. So, are the animals better or worse than us because they don't carry a concept of right and wrong?

And more to the point, why do we care about whether our actions and motives are justified, when we already know our actions are probably going to harm others, anyway? If it really mattered one way or the other, we simply wouldn't act to begin with... right?

The only reason we even bother with such trivial matters as self-justification is due to our fear of the unknown. The big question of what happens after we die... RELIGION!

And you know what? Practically every major war fought here on earth has been over religion!

So, it's no longer simply us trying to console ourselves that our own wrong-doing to wards others is justified... but now we harm one another because one side believes their justifications are greater than the justifications of those on the other side... and as a result, either side's attempt to back down before the blood has been spilled would be interpretted as a weakness of that side's justifications for fighting in the first place.

In other words, both sides must fight because not fighting is far more unjustified than the act of fighting in itself. Most likely, the side that eventually did refuse to fight would probably end up being seen as such a disgrace that they aren't even deserving of life... either to themselves or to their enemy. Those who don't die will probably end up wishing they had... as failing to fight means they abandoned their values to survive.

But while we're entertaining ourselves on this... what's the ultimate solution where no one fights, no one loses, etc.... aka, the path where the utopia is at the end? Do we all network our brains together into one massive hive mind, allowing our individuality to give way to a shared mind that''s been artificially "normalized" by a massive machine that literally polls every human mind on earth over every conflict of interest, and having the majority favored interest become the single interest of every person on earth in one fell swoop, then repeated again and again until we all end up being the exact same person as the guy standing next to us, recurrsively?

Packets are speech, after all. Is a DDOS really so different from too many people trying to use a telephone system at the same time?

</diabolicaladvocacy>

Phineas and Ferb.

I can't stand the rest of Disney's lineup, but that show is one of my favorite pieces of television ever. A light and pleasantly self-aware show where the protagonists build fantastic things to enjoy and play with? All the fun of Family Guy without the grossness and empty cynicism? Yes, more please.

Man, none of you guys have a clue. Have you read Rand or are you just regurgitating what you read on Wikipedia?

I've read The Fountainhead, Anthem, and a number of Rand's essays, as well as Wikipedia and other biographic articles. I also, of course, know who John Galt is. I think some of her work has some depth it's not given credit for (unfortunately, as much by her apparent followers as her critics).

But I don't think her critics here have no clue. They might be ignoring how noble the protagonists in her fiction are, but they're not incorrect that her philosophy as policy would lead to as many (if not more) James Taggarts and Ellsworth Tooheys as Reardens and Roarks (not to mention the problems with Roark, however romantic a character he is -- sure, he had a contract with Keating that enabled him to blow up the building, but did Keating have a contract with the land owners/developers/ect that gave him property rights that he could transfer to Roark?). And as has been pointed out, when it's come to practical recognition of real-world individuals, Rand has endorsed some individuals and behavior that resembles psychopathy.

On the other hand, the Karl Marx philosophy is about theft. Those who need take precedent over those who produce.

So, speaking of "Have you even read _____" criticisms.... how much Marx have you read? Because while needs are part of the philosophy (and the fact that this is a target of criticism says something about the critics, I'd say), there's a hell of a lot more to Marx than that -- it is, in fact highly concerned with "a fair reward for [the] inspiration and sweat" of laborers and craftsmen. I'd recommend, for starters, this slashdot comment about the implications of a competitive market for labor-as-commodity.

This isn't about PCs disappearing. This is about the bulk of personal "computing" moving onto devices other than PCs*. And even if it's overstated in the article, it's essentially sound as a trend. For people who aren't authoring (and even some who are), PCs are more or less overkill.

None of this means PCs won't be produced or used. They'll just likely become a minority in a larger sea of devices. Or, as his Steveness says, PCs will be like trucks. That's the end of the PC-centric Era, and it's not a particularly controversial idea.

* Where PC means the desktop/workstation form factor that terms has come to signify. Yes, I know, technically it means "personal computer" and you could grandfather anything with a CPU into that; doesn't change the fact the term PC has come to mean something more specific and it's this usage the article is running with.

Nothing will ever be worse than the first day of the release of WoW classic. There weren't queues yet, so people would mob a server, crash it, then mob the next open server, crash it, etc.

It took them 6 months to deploy enough server capacity.