Because they want to see this product/vision brought to market with an actual purchasable thing?

Traditionally, start-up funding would be by wealthy entrepreneurs, investors/venture capitalists, or maybe just the founders running up credit cards and loans at their bank. This way, they have a vehicle for funding new ideas to make them real. Sounds good to me, especially because it's completely self-contained to the people who directly choose to involve themselves.

You, sir, hit the nail on the head.

Mod parent up, please.

I don't want this to turn into an ideologue battle, but do not throw libertarianism in with conservatives' mad rush to convict everyone of everything even remotely "immoral"... if anything, libertarians have been calling for decades for the decriminalization (or outright legalization) of many currently illegal activities, especially drug use and other "victimless crimes". Libertarians have also been crowing about neo-con appeals to small government despite having had 8 years of the most massive expansion in government surpassed only by the current administration.

Your ire is understandable and valid, but be careful of wholesale condemnation. Rarely are things ever so black and white.

I would argue that a right to trial is really a positive right created by government, in this case a government that imposes laws and penalties for breaking them. This right is promised to you as a citizen as part of its promise to enforce said laws. Like the earlier poster commented, it serves to legitimate the whole process. Without this, we could (and should) reject the system as unjust.

What you're knocking on is the difference between positive and negative rights. The things you list as not being rights would in fact fall under the positive rights category. Positive rights are things that might be really nice to have (or even vital, like food and water) but oblige others and thus go against freedom.

You, sir, are dead on. Mod parent up like a mofo.

As much as we all can (and should) praise and admire Mr. Burners-Lee for his great contributions to IT, he's absolutely wrong about this. In fact, it sounds just like garden variety "progressive" thought except coming from someone who's probably not very well studied in politics, philosophy, etc. (that's not a slam on him, since he's mostly focused on technology and computers and individual specialization is perfectly normal and encouraged).

I humbly suggest Mr. Burners-Lee continue innovating in computer science and technology but otherwise shut his pie hole.

iloveericaalbright

You don't get to 200 million dollars without exposing a few clues.

Exactly. Every time we give them an inch they take a mile.

"If only those poor dim-witted neanderthals knew what they were talking about, then we could actually make progress!"

Boy, I haven't ever heard this sort of elitist condescension in politics before! Shall I kneel and give praise before or after you enlighten us unwashed masses?

Hear, hear. I'd totally be looking into getting one if it were on Verizon. I was shocked when I learned it would be only AT&T at launch. Way to put it out on only ONE carrier and worse the one carrier that is already super-saturated with competitors (and, in specific, the other major smartphone on a single carrier --- iPhone). I mean, when iPhone did it, they made a splash and it worked and it continues to work today based on that momentum. But now we're several years later and there are a ton of smartphones and you can't do what Apple did and expect it to work the same way. Brilliant, Microsoft. Probably should have focused on CDMA first and delayed GSM instead.

...to me this announcement does nothing but highlight the overwhelming need to get rid of what was once only a possibly legitimate agency but, in a world of vastly different technology than when it was created, now is definitely unnecessary.

"Overbearing control-freaks vow to allow more competition in area of economy they enjoy tight control over."

Seriously, does no one else think competition (or, rather, the lack-there-of) in the telecommunications market would be so abysmal if the FCC weren't in the business of protecting the monopolistic status quo? And don't think I'll spare the Comcasts of the nation; they are just as guilty, though who can blame them? As a company you'd be stupid not to collude with the feds on minimizing the chance of competition.

Obviously we need to prevent these greedy fire departments from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions!

Is yours a Gateway too? Prescott FTW

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to work for any place that turned me down because of some brief Google image search. That kind of shallow screening tells me all I need to know about them. "Unfortunate reality" be damned, I'm allowed to have a private life outside of work, thankyouverymuch.

At any rate, it sounds like this guy needs to smother this one little bad brief mention from years ago with a ton of really good, awesome stuff. What exactly are you doing now? Nothing? Is a law enforcement interview really the most exciting and noteworthy thing you've done in the last few years? If so, then maybe that should be on the first page of results when they Google your name.

Actually, Space Channel 5 was ported to PS2 later on. But you're totally right otherwise, including its great lineup.