You think I'm joking - there has been a baffling increase in the amount of "Russia had it better" posts around here lately.

I bet you could link to some of those posts to add impact to your statement, if you wanted to.

Very perceptive that highly evolved alien life forms would dig Bill Evans, since he was one of them.

A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Isn't that the place jazz was invented?"

A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Wasn't that a country on the planet that humans made inhabitable, but only after turning it into a vast work prison for virtual entities knows as "corporations"?

"And why didn't those stupid sonsabitches in the 20th century do something about it? Humans...maybe we're better off with them extinct."

Yep, that's what they'll say.

Hey, that's Sherlock Holmes!

Your typical slashdotter probably sits closer to their router than the plants. And is about as likely to germinate.

Good thing, too, or we'd see a rash of siamese sextuplets.

Though, to be fair, I'd thought that all the hallucinogens I took back in college had messed up my genes royally, but my daughter turned out perfect. Better than perfect. She can type like a banshee with those twelve fingers.

You'd think that with all the federal money that Amtrak gets that they would already have better services available.

The federal money is to make sure there are not better services available. One of the strings tied to the federal subsidy is that many of the most useful national rail lines had to be abandoned to the private freight lines. This has been going on for decades now. Strangely, the private freight carriers don't seem to be the ones who worked so hard to kill the American passenger railroads.

Rail service in the US did not die because people didn't want it. It died because some very powerful interests didn't want people to have it. The corporatists and the political Right in America hate passenger trains with a passion. They actually get angry about it for some reason.

I took Joe_Dragon's comment to mean that the vast majority of rail service outside Boswash [wikipedia.org] is freight, not commuter service.

By design.

What's surprising is that passenger rail continues in the US despite the efforts of some very powerful lobbying groups to kill it.

People just like trains, and if they had just left more lines intact, the number of riders annually would be a lot more than the current 35 million. It boggles my mind that I cannot ride the train from Chicago to Memphis and back without some ridiculous routing.

rest of the country has lots of freight

Wait, are you calling me fat?

Unfortunately you only get two weeks to appeal

You can appeal online. Take a picture with your phone, upload it with a two sentence explanation, and the fine goes away. Most parking and traffic citations allow for online appeal these days.

I've noticed that municipalities that have this over-aggressive enforcement also seem to have quite sensible people involved in the appeals process.

You found a ticket on your car, "called them up" and didn't appeal even though you had two weeks to do so? Even if you didn't have a smartphone, you could have walked over to the Santa Cruz public library and done it on one of their computers.

I hate that local governments are so starved for cash that they have to resort to this stuff. It pisses everyone off and it's bad for business. But you could have easily gotten out of it, assuming your story is true and this bothers me. I'm not accusing you, but there are people who would rather have a problem to complain about than a solution.

By the way, the ticket that was place on your car almost certainly has a URL to the website where you appeal online. There are no penalties for appealing (unless you demand a hearing, in which case their might be). I recommend that anyone who gets ANY parking citation appeal it immediately. Don't make it easy for them to get your money, it just encourages them.

If Google modified the Chrome browser to strip out ads on/from Microsoft owned properties, Microsoft would have a fit. Anti-trust complaints in multiple jurisdiction, legal threats, political lobbying, chair throwing, the works.

I guess I'm confused. Why aren't the apps and extensions that strip out ads guilty of the same issues?

If this is just a pissing contest between two behemoths, neither of whom is one bit less than 50% evil, then I just don't care. Let them burn each other to the ground.

The world will continue apace without Google and Microsoft. In fact, an argument could be made that the world would be better off.

If one starts with the premise that patents and copyrights are detrimental to progress, then Congress does not have that authority.

Ah, I agree on both counts. However, roman_mir didn't say "The government doesn't have the authority to establish copyright and patents" he said "The government doesn't have the authority to promote or protect a particular business or business sector".

My disagreement was not about patents and copyright being wrong, but about the notion that the US government does not have constitutional authority to promote certain businesses or sectors. Historically and constitutionally, it does have that power.

That was slave labor

The US didn't become a superpower until the better part of a century after slavery was abolished.

I do think there's a difference.

You're absolutely right there is a difference. Still, the issue is having one company control the ecosystem. While they have every right to design their systems that way, we have to be more active consumers and refuse to use such locked-down, 1-company systems, because they always come back to bite us.

I'm more than willing to give up a little slickness in the name of openness. Everything doesn't have to "just work" if it means I lose choice and control.

Your implication is that Google is being evil because they're preventing Microsoft from taking market share from Google by using Google's services. It's hard to imagine a more one-sided and asinine analysis.

Well, wait a minute now. If it was some bunch of open source geeks making an app that download's YouTube videos and strips the advertisements, and Google came down as hard, I think we'd hear squeals of outrage and demands for Google not to be "evil".

But because it's Microsoft, fuck them, right?

Now, I can understand this sentiment completely, but let's not pretend that this same "one-sided and asinine analysis" has not been used by everybody on every side of these issues.

At the bottom, this is why having a company control the ecosystem for any platform is a very bad idea. Because we want little companies trying to make things more useful by breaking big companies' models. That's how progress works. The notion that we have to create some protected reserve where the biggest companies can enjoy guaranteed success forever without having to face any competition is really what's asinine.

Judge: And my grand-daughter wants a pony. I find you in violation of the TOS, your app must be pulled until you can show it complies.

You forgot to add, "...and may God have mercy on your souls."