So you can't get animal porn and violent porn. Are you missing anything important?

If anything, this act is pure sanity by defining "free speech" not as any speech, but as political speech, which was most likely the original intent.

Pornography isn't speech.

Well, I could have said "granted by a constitutional clause that is widely interpreted to mean that Congress can allow a monopoly and for practical reasons must implement a monopoly in order to provide service to all citizens, thereby making this distinct from the derisive-sounding 'government-granted monopoly' mentioned in the slightly trollish parent post", but that would have been a bit wordy.

You call his post trollish because you disagree with it, not that it's any different from the tone in this thread.

Also, most natural monopolies are made into government-subsidized monopolies, and whether that's done by constitutional interpretation or statute is irrelevant for the end-user (or the business dynamics that make those monopolies fail).

In that sense, we should look at the post office as being no different from any other utility. How are other utilities succeeding while the post office fails?

imagine that, a corporate whoring teabagger repeating the same old lies in an attempt at blaming the victims, yet again.

Which victims are being blamed, and what are they victims of?

The Chinese postal system is inexpensive because your packages are delivered by dissidents, who are then executed with a bullet at the base to the skull, and made into delivery food for clueless Westerners.

Try the pork. It's definitely tender. Just watch for fragments of 7.65mm projectiles.

And you know it's not on 'letters', it's on post boxes. The same ones that fall under the universal service obligation.

But, those would be adult arguments, and your tone suggests you want to have a different type of discussion.

The details of the monopoly matter less than that it exists, but it's interesting how it was implemented.

I think this whole thread is a non-adult argument. I raised legitimate business concerns, and then the chattering busybodies out there had a tantrum about it because it offended their sacred cows.

Slashdot is a few leaders, and a lot of nobodies who follow around demanding that we keep their illusions intact so they feel good about themselves. If such people died, society would be much healthier.

If they're that good, then it makes me wonder why they have to have a government-granted monopoly on letters.

It's this same monopoly that got them in trouble. Figuring they were Too Big To Fail, they built their business on an inefficient model that required people literally throwing money in the door. Now that this situation has changed, they're unable to do what any functional business would do, which is lower costs.

It's not that they aren't competitive. It's that the demand for their entire industry has dropped, and their bosses are actively trying to screw them up.

There's more package traffic than ever. What has dropped is the sending of junk mail (in letter and catalog form). What has increased is the sending of packages. USPS has now upped its rates on those, and can't even do that right. Amazon just changed our local delivery from USPS to Fedex, and according to the user support person I talked to, they'd had a lot of issues with USPS. Packages go missing on a routine basis, where they don't with UPS and FedEx.

In the meantime, let's go down to our local post office. At any hour of the day, there is one person on duty at the desk. Laughter, music and conversation flow from the back room. Checking my PO box, I refile yet another two misdirected envelopes.

The problem with USPS is that it can't reduce its cost. There are many anti-business factors here, but the two biggest are (a) unions and (b) feelgood government regulation.

Here are mainstream published sources that agree with me and which would be voted -1, Troll here on Slashdot by the feelgood social emotions hive mind:

Free the Post Office!, by Joe Nocera

Postal Service To Default On $5.5 Billion Payment As Congress Heads Into Recess, by Dave Jamieson

Notice how these are both consistent with what I posted.

I realize that unions and affirmative action are sacred cows around here, but from a business standpoint, that's nonsense. Unions raise costs and make it impossible to fire employees who need to go. Affirmative action makes it impossible to fire employees who are from any protected group, which includes homosexuals, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, gender minorities (women/trans), and probably many more. Attacking affirmative action does not say "these people are incompetent," which would require all of them to be incompetent, but by the same token it says that neither are they all competent, and we need the ability to drop the incompetent ones.

This society does itself a disfavor by producing myths and illusions that are then viewed as an attack on The People if they are broached. This makes us just as much lock-step conformist as a totalitarian regime, and makes us unable to view the realistic solutions we need to in order to save things like our Postal Service.

Imagine that: unions, affirmative action and compliance with well-intentioned government programs do make you anti-competitive after all.

Gosh.

I used to try to participate in online forums. I consider Slashdot one of the better ones, and even so, I'd say that at most 25% of the commentary here is necessary.

The problem with online forums is that they follow the rules of behavior for a carnival. Those who create drama are most popular and so the attention focuses on them, while the more interesting comments are buried.

There are relatively few people who can understand much of anything, and they get buried under the flood of people quoting TV shows, images of cats with clever sayings, pornography and general shenanigans.

Even worse is that there are groups of people out there who have lots of time who tend to destroy discussion. Teenage cluelessness is bad, but so are the people who are on mental disability whose only entertainment is posting to the internet.

Maybe this can be regulated by software, but only if it doesn't rely on voting. Voting just amplifies the problem, with all the people voting up what they recognize, which is the same old stuff, while ignoring or voting down the outliers (which is where the interesting stuff is).

The only forums I've seen that "work" are ones which are based around technical Q&A of some kind. That way, there's a clear mission and an answer, and chatter is seen as annoying by the participants.

Only to then get a big fat "NO" from management because "it already works fine".

This is where your department head or intermediate manager needs to raise the following issues:

* Security
* Expandability
* The ability to sell the code to others

For reasons like the above, I support extending liability to software. If it drops your data, it's an error in the code, and someone should pay. Watch management change their tune after that!

Also, to the parent comment:

In the real world, almost everything is a prototype because the demands were too unimportant to be written down in the rush to get something coded that was clickable

This is why many experienced coders eventually migrate into management. Their job becomes managing their employees' time so that management's demands are met, but also so that behind the scenes, the job can get done right.

Brogramming is prototyping.

In the ideal project, you gather the spec in advance, carefully design, and then implement.

In the real world, almost everything is a prototype because the demands are not known. Your product may succeed for entirely different reasons than you expected. At that point, you're going to be re-coding. Once you present a prototype, people will have changes that are more than cosmetic. You're going to "hack" -- literally kludge around the expected design -- and force it to work.

At that point, you have a prototype. The correct response then is to go back and refactor everything to make rev2.0 a solid and powerful piece of software.

This doesn't apply in every case. If you've got a clear task that's more technical than business/social, you can draw it all up on paper and build it the way L. Lamport suggests.

But for the rest of us, 'brogramming' is just another way of saying "getting to rev1.0"

You raise an interesting point:

The conscious brain seems a little underformed in some, but our subconscious abilities are incredible and near-perfect. We can all judge speed and distance with enough practice, recognise people, navigate based on landmarks, remember and recite music, and dream.

What do you think is obstructing this subconscious mind?

What more do you think we would know if we were more in touch with it?

Fascinating!

The popularity of TV shows like "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" and "The Housewives of _______", not to mention the people actually *on* those shows, would seem to support your thesis.

Those people vote.

There is nothing special about biological chemistry. It is a substrate on which intelligence and sentience can function. There are likely others, and likely more efficient substrates as well.

Then in your view, the nature of intelligence lies in the informational nature that is common to all of these substrates? Sounds like an argument for a priori models of cognition.

I think we should be open-minded to such things, even if we think both Plato and Jiddu Krishnamurti were off their rockers.