There's no excess after 2016 if we stupidly leave social security the way it is.
But that would be idiotic.
There are essentially two things we need to do. Firstly, raise eligible taxable income to 90% of your income. Right now, people only pay social security on the first...$35,000 (?) of their income.
Change that, we're 40% of the way to fixing the problem.
Then add a 1.5% increase of SS taxes, and that should be enough to carry us past the baby boomers.
Although the idea that we'll run into trouble in 2037 is an interesting one. Do we really think things will be the same in 2037? I don't think we can possibly extrapolate that far.
And while we're be at 76% in 2037, we'll be at 74% in 2083, pretending we could actually know this in advance, so it's not like this is some decline...it's just, right now, SS taxes are not high enough, and will make us pay less benefits if we don't fix them when the trust runs out.
Like I said, this is essentially extrapolating that post offices will only be able to be open one day a week in 2030. Well, yes...if we don't raise stamp prices! Seriously. This is an imaginary problem.
What I'm really worried about, the actual problem, is the less and less we can borrow from SS, and hence the more and more interest we're going to have to pay on our debt. We really need to balance the budget before we get to 2016 and have to stop relying on social security, and we've going to have a lot of trouble doing that thanks to crazy spending.
You know, I keep running into more and more people who seem to be operate out of some 4th grade civics textbooks about what the branches of government 'are for' instead of, you know, what they actually do.
The president writes the budget and gives it to Congress. That is not the Constitution, that just is. It is the actual facts of the matter. It just needs a Congressional sponsor to get up for a vote, usually the president's party leader in Congress.
Congress, of course, can fight over it, and often does. Gingrich shut down the government over Clinton's budget.
But, in the end, it was still Clinton that wrote the barely-not-balanced budgets.
The best year of the Clinton administration (the last one) the national debt increase by $17b.
Well, okay, I'll accept that correction. I was looking at the actual budget, but there's always 'let's pretend this spending doesn't count' off-budget spending.
17b is essentially a drop in the bucket, though. Too bad he didn't get it under.
What I think is an interesting thing to look at is how much spending was minus interest payments on the debt as of the president getting in office. I.e, you count the interest on any debt he runs up while in office, but not any pre-existing debt, or debt from interest on that debt, etc. As if each president had started with a clean slate.
You can really see what's going on when you look at it that way. I wish I could find the chart that showed that.
So the Bush administration was the one who forced banks to give out loans to people who couldn't pay them back
Hey, moron. Banks were not forced to do any such thing. Less than 25% of all loans in this country were subject to the rule you're talking about, which means maybe 1% of loans were loans banks wouldn't give out normally. Most subprime lending (Which I'm sure you claim was the problem) were done by lending institutions not subject to those rules.
Banks gave out loans to people who couldn't pay them back because they could sell the loan to other banks who invented money out of thin air using them.
I'm wondering how all the people who blame it on 'subprime' lending (Aka, those poor people) are going to feel when the wave of commercial foreclosures becomes visible.
Here's a hint: 'Subprime lending' had jackshit to do with this. The FHA had jackshit to do with this.
Fannie and Freddie had almost nothing to do with this, and, strangely enough, in the opposite direction you seem to think. They 'caused' the problem by accepting most of the good loans, so that banks traded them all their good loans, and kept the bad ones.
However, it turns out banks were lying to everyone, and enough of the loans they accepted were bad enough that they had to be bailed out, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the crisis at all. If it did, the crisis would have been over when they were bailed out.
The problem was banks inventing ways to loan money to each other by propping the money on imaginary financial instrument that were made up of risky investments (That happened to be mortgages), that were mathmatically hallucinated to be sound.
It has nothing to do with what the instruments contained. They could have contained lottery tickets for all anyone cared. It was how banks made 'safe bonds' out of taking a billion risky investments and slicing them up, and not only selling them to people, but selling them to each other. (So they could then turn around and loan each other money based on them.)
Subprime mortages are risky investments, and absolutely no bank is required to make them, ever. Or any loan. (Certain banks have to make a certain percentage of loans to certain areas, at whatever level they're willing to make loans to everyone else, but at this point that's not relevant, as the banks subject to that rule make up maybe 25% of all actual home lending, and thus maybe 1% of all total loans were required like that.)
Subprime loans are fine things for banks to issue and treat like subprime loans. They are not fine things to be converted to pretend bonds and magically creating 10x the amount of the loan out of thin air.
I don't even know why Plame would be a 'conspiracy'. I mean, someone was actually convicted of obstructing justice into the investigation of that, and her identity was, in fact, leaked.
If someone commits a crime, and someone else obstructs justice to keep the first person from going to jail, you ipso facto have criminal conspiracy somewhere. I mean, is there really any sort of way that couldn't be a conspiracy, legally speaking? (I guess if Libby himself leaked her name...)
Likewise, conspiracy theories about these emails being lost on purpose would sound crazy...if, you know, members of the Bush administration hadn't gone to jail for obstructing justice. So yeah.
I actually have a conspiracy theory about the right I can't prove: They keep floating crazy theories so that the actual demonstrable criminal conspiracies they engage in sound like 'the normal crazy stuff you hear in politics'.
There was the appearance of a budget surplus. Why? B/c they fudged the numbers by including Social Security when they shouldn't have. It was purely a numbers game.
All budgets borrow from Social Security. That's the way the program is set up. If there is excess in the SS trust fund, and there has always been, and will be for the next several decades, it gets loaned to the general budget, which is a hell of a lot better than borrowing from the Chinese.
Acting like Clinton just randomly decided to borrow from there is lying.
And whether or not we actually hit total parity is not the point. Clinton actually got the deficit low enough to reduce the external debt.
Now, he didn't manage to reduce it far enough to let us stop borrowing from social security...which wouldn't happen anyway, we would have just started converting external debt (You know, what we actually pay interest on.) into SS IOUs. But what he did would get us far enough to start paying back our external debt, for the first time in quite a long time.
We, of course, continued to raise our internal debt owed social security the maximum amount, like we have done for every single year we've had social security and a debt.
People are standing there arguing if Clinton really ran a five minute mile, because it was downhill. Well, maybe he didn't, maybe it should count as 5:15 or something, but he did a fuckload better than the right.
Of course, we now also realize how bankrupt the Social Security program is.
Social security is not slightest bit bankrupt, you moron. It will, like all taxes with actual dollar amounts written into it, require adjustments due to inflation. The fact we hadn't adjusted it every year while updating tax rates was stupid to start with.
I swear, you're like someone who claims the postal service is bankrupt because in a decade there's no way they'll afford being able to move those letter for what they're charging for stamps.
Ok let's not count the fact that that a cell phone could easily have hidden weapons/means of escape (http://www.google.com/search?q=cell+phone+gun)
Which would be a valid reason to search the body of a cell phone. I have no problem with that.
or the previously mentioned fact about the crimes that could be committed while the person was in jail.
Better stop them from making any phone calls or speaking to a lawyer, then.
The people are charged with a crime and they get their rights/freedoms taken away unless they post bail. They don't get to leave, they don't get to have their phone, they don't get to tivo american idol. That's the point.
See, I've got you here arguing that the point is to punish them, and I've got the other guy arguing that it is, in fact, not punishment. Interesting.
What, exactly, gives the police the right to punish you because you've been charged with a crime. (Or, heck, just detained 24 hours without being charged?)
They certainly have the right to restrict someone's movement, I don't dispute that at all. That's the power of 'arrest'. I'm just having trouble seeing how they have the right to restrict the rights of people in custody that isn't towards that end.
Granted, there are plenty of very dangerous people who, a case can be made, should not have access to the outside world at all, or destruction of evidence or even murder of witnesses will happen. And I'm fine for the police making that case when they get the arrest warrant.
Likewise, where are plenty of things that are too dangerous to allow in jails, like weapons, and everything should be searched to make sure it does not contain those.
But taking away everything as a matter of policy for all the innocent people in jail is absurd and shouldn't be allowed. (And if the problem is they might pass stuff off to convicted people, who do have their right to possess random items restricted, the solution is to have separate areas for those two groups, not restrict everyone.)
Nobody has a right to a phone, or a laptop, or a sandwich, etc.
Um, yes, people do in fact have the right to their own property. Check the 4th amendment.
However, I was not disputing that police are allowed to hold property. They are. I'm disputing the idea they're allowed to punish people.
By, for example, requiring them to use the jail's absurdly expensive phone system to make calls instead of the cellphone they had on their person when arrested. That serves absolutely no purpose but to punish people who have been detained.
I'd also like one that is, in fact, cheaper than the Nook.:)
Less features but higher price isn't particularly useful. I don't know what's going on with Sony, how a hardware company can't produce cheaper products than others, but there you go.
Granted, there is the new smaller Sony Reader Pocket Edition, which is cheaper and I've been looking into. But I suspect the cheaper price is entirely due to the smaller screen.
Well, allowing police to look for weapons is reasonable.
And if someone taken into custody is holding a 'container', that container should certainly be taken away. Who knows what is in there? There could be a weapon.
But they should not be searched.
And I'm failing to see why cell phone should be taken away at all, unless the officer is going to get a warrant and search it. Which, I believe, allows them to withhold it from the person so they can't destroy data.
Likewise, there might be cases where a phone call might allow them to get someone else to destroy evidence, or warn them off, so i can see a case being made there...but a case has to, in fact, actually be made.
If neither of those are true, people should be allowed to keep their cell phones while in custody of the police. Or, at least, have access to their cell phones. (It's absurd how much calls from jail cost.)
I don't really understand why anyone gets to take them away. From actual convicted people, fine. For when the phone is actual evidence, fine. From a mafia boss that the police can make a compelling argument that he could use code to order a hit on someone, fine. (Such a claim should be part of the arrest warrant.)
Anything else, no. I've never understood why the police are allowed to punish people who've been detained and possibly not charged with a crime, and certainly not convicted of one.
It could be a generational thing, but I've never understood why so many folks using the internet (mostly younger generations) feel that everything should be free to them no matter what.
Don't blame them.
This society used to have an tacit agreement between companies and people, where everyone would behave responsibly and ethically.
Companies started breaking it first. Really badly breaking it. With their employees, with their customers, with everyone.
For a few decades, normal people were shat upon by corporations only out for their bottom line.
The younger generation is just the people who grew up with this, and have no problem acting unethically in return.
Even when the companies don't actually deserve it, like Barnes and Noble, which, as far as I am aware, have no history of unethical behavior at all. They actually sell things to people who want to buy those things, making a small profit on each one, like companies are supposed to do. They know their customers can go elsewhere, and they don't attempt to misrepresent their products or trick people into contracts, or assert that customers can only sue them in arbitration, or any of the hundreds of other unethical ways that corporations behave. (Except see below.)
AT&T, OTOH....the less said there the better. Cellular companies are basically the definition of this behavior.
Oh, and attempting to control what customers can do with stuff they purchase from you is one of the warning sights of this massive profit-at-all-cost sickness infecting a company. Legitimate companies don't care.
We will see if B&N goes crazy in response, or if they just get some sort of lock on the cellular service to only contact them.
I, OTOH would like a eInk screen without a damn cellular modem, or wifi, or anything that increases the by 100 dollars costs for the dubious ability to instantly download books. Give me a damn USB connection.
I survived decades during which I had to go to the library or bookstore to get books, I think I can continue to exist while not having the ability to instantly buy them. So don't talk to me about 'niche' markets. Mine doesn't exist yet, for some reason.
However, what we're talking about here is the fact the product has the technical capacity to do something (Surf the internet, run random programs), which it won't do, apparently. That's not the same thing.
'Niche' products that are sold from cheaper that are deliberately crippled is a failure of the free market. They should not exist in any sort of competitive marketplace, from which we can conclude the eReader market is not competitive yet. If the market was competitive, the manufacturers would be screaming from the rooftops about the ability to run whatever you want on the device.
Of course, if this catches on, expect the people here actually bothered by the free data plan (AT&T) to put some sort of cap on. No one promised free unlimited data when you purchased the devices, you were promised that you could download books via the cellular network, and AT&T could, entirely reasonably, limit you to about a meg a day...no one could possibly read more than that. Or, even easier, just lock access to the right servers.
But, even so, there's no real reason to stop people from running random programs on the devices.Yes, yes, there's DRM, but if you can make mostly working DRM work on computers, you can sure as heck make it mostly work on eReaders. (Heck, you could make it almost perfectly work via something like Trusted Computing, with a hardware private key.)
I'm not one of those people super concerned about privacy, but I actually went into Facebook a while back and turned most stuff to Friend or at least Friend of a Friend. No, you can't see my political or religious views, or posts by friends on my wall, unless you're at least a foaf.
And, yes, I'm smart enough to expose enough information that you can actually identify me in search results.
And then Facebook, the other day, actually prompted me with a popup page. All well and good, except everything had two options (Instead of the actual three settings each privacy option has), with some of them not letting me set the option as strict as I already had it. Only people I've friended can see or comment on my wall, damnit.
I had to go back into the privacy settings and reset to where I had it. I don't remember which ones, when I realized the screen didn't let me do everything, I just went with the defaults and immediately leaped over to the actual privacy page.
It's very poor planning on the part of Facebook. It's a great idea to actually throw privacy settings in people's faces and recommend stricter settings, and presumably new accounts will have those by default. But they could have bothered to think 'Hey, what if guy already set his privacy settings?'
No, UFS have to be flying (It's in the name), which still leaves an open question of if this was a UFO.
It looks like some sort of projected effect to me, hence not a UFO, although I'll be damned if I can figure out how you do that in the open sky like that.
Everyone seems to be going with 'rocket', but that's one damn weird spinning rocket. Usually, they get blown up when they start going like that, and I've never heard of one that loops perfectly. (I mean, gravity should be making the loop an oval, even if the flight path is perfectly curved.)
And that totally ignores the blue light in the middle.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no excess after 2016 if we stupidly leave social security the way it is.
But that would be idiotic.
There are essentially two things we need to do. Firstly, raise eligible taxable income to 90% of your income. Right now, people only pay social security on the first...$35,000 (?) of their income.
Change that, we're 40% of the way to fixing the problem.
Then add a 1.5% increase of SS taxes, and that should be enough to carry us past the baby boomers.
Although the idea that we'll run into trouble in 2037 is an interesting one. Do we really think things will be the same in 2037? I don't think we can possibly extrapolate that far.
And while we're be at 76% in 2037, we'll be at 74% in 2083, pretending we could actually know this in advance, so it's not like this is some decline...it's just, right now, SS taxes are not high enough, and will make us pay less benefits if we don't fix them when the trust runs out.
Like I said, this is essentially extrapolating that post offices will only be able to be open one day a week in 2030. Well, yes...if we don't raise stamp prices! Seriously. This is an imaginary problem.
What I'm really worried about, the actual problem, is the less and less we can borrow from SS, and hence the more and more interest we're going to have to pay on our debt. We really need to balance the budget before we get to 2016 and have to stop relying on social security, and we've going to have a lot of trouble doing that thanks to crazy spending.
You know, I keep running into more and more people who seem to be operate out of some 4th grade civics textbooks about what the branches of government 'are for' instead of, you know, what they actually do.
The president writes the budget and gives it to Congress. That is not the Constitution, that just is. It is the actual facts of the matter. It just needs a Congressional sponsor to get up for a vote, usually the president's party leader in Congress.
Congress, of course, can fight over it, and often does. Gingrich shut down the government over Clinton's budget.
But, in the end, it was still Clinton that wrote the barely-not-balanced budgets.
The answer is Karl Rove.
You know, the guy in the 'administration that didn't leak the name'?
The best year of the Clinton administration (the last one) the national debt increase by $17b.
Well, okay, I'll accept that correction. I was looking at the actual budget, but there's always 'let's pretend this spending doesn't count' off-budget spending.
17b is essentially a drop in the bucket, though. Too bad he didn't get it under.
What I think is an interesting thing to look at is how much spending was minus interest payments on the debt as of the president getting in office. I.e, you count the interest on any debt he runs up while in office, but not any pre-existing debt, or debt from interest on that debt, etc. As if each president had started with a clean slate.
You can really see what's going on when you look at it that way. I wish I could find the chart that showed that.
And if no one checks to see that people aren't selling you products with lead in them?
So who leaked to Matt Cooper?
It's a simply question. Go ahead. Answer it.
Yes, but any backup administrator working for the government would also understand that being asked to delete emails was probably illegal.
But what was asserted here is that they weren't backing up email in compliance with the law, not that the backups were deleted.
Apparently, the systems were still being backed up, in some other way.
So the Bush administration was the one who forced banks to give out loans to people who couldn't pay them back
Hey, moron. Banks were not forced to do any such thing. Less than 25% of all loans in this country were subject to the rule you're talking about, which means maybe 1% of loans were loans banks wouldn't give out normally. Most subprime lending (Which I'm sure you claim was the problem) were done by lending institutions not subject to those rules.
Banks gave out loans to people who couldn't pay them back because they could sell the loan to other banks who invented money out of thin air using them.
I'm wondering how all the people who blame it on 'subprime' lending (Aka, those poor people) are going to feel when the wave of commercial foreclosures becomes visible.
Here's a hint: 'Subprime lending' had jackshit to do with this. The FHA had jackshit to do with this.
Fannie and Freddie had almost nothing to do with this, and, strangely enough, in the opposite direction you seem to think. They 'caused' the problem by accepting most of the good loans, so that banks traded them all their good loans, and kept the bad ones.
However, it turns out banks were lying to everyone, and enough of the loans they accepted were bad enough that they had to be bailed out, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the crisis at all. If it did, the crisis would have been over when they were bailed out.
The problem was banks inventing ways to loan money to each other by propping the money on imaginary financial instrument that were made up of risky investments (That happened to be mortgages), that were mathmatically hallucinated to be sound.
It has nothing to do with what the instruments contained. They could have contained lottery tickets for all anyone cared. It was how banks made 'safe bonds' out of taking a billion risky investments and slicing them up, and not only selling them to people, but selling them to each other. (So they could then turn around and loan each other money based on them.)
Subprime mortages are risky investments, and absolutely no bank is required to make them, ever. Or any loan. (Certain banks have to make a certain percentage of loans to certain areas, at whatever level they're willing to make loans to everyone else, but at this point that's not relevant, as the banks subject to that rule make up maybe 25% of all actual home lending, and thus maybe 1% of all total loans were required like that.)
Subprime loans are fine things for banks to issue and treat like subprime loans. They are not fine things to be converted to pretend bonds and magically creating 10x the amount of the loan out of thin air.
I don't even know why Plame would be a 'conspiracy'. I mean, someone was actually convicted of obstructing justice into the investigation of that, and her identity was, in fact, leaked.
If someone commits a crime, and someone else obstructs justice to keep the first person from going to jail, you ipso facto have criminal conspiracy somewhere. I mean, is there really any sort of way that couldn't be a conspiracy, legally speaking? (I guess if Libby himself leaked her name...)
Likewise, conspiracy theories about these emails being lost on purpose would sound crazy...if, you know, members of the Bush administration hadn't gone to jail for obstructing justice. So yeah.
I actually have a conspiracy theory about the right I can't prove: They keep floating crazy theories so that the actual demonstrable criminal conspiracies they engage in sound like 'the normal crazy stuff you hear in politics'.
There was the appearance of a budget surplus. Why? B/c they fudged the numbers by including Social Security when they shouldn't have. It was purely a numbers game.
All budgets borrow from Social Security. That's the way the program is set up. If there is excess in the SS trust fund, and there has always been, and will be for the next several decades, it gets loaned to the general budget, which is a hell of a lot better than borrowing from the Chinese.
Acting like Clinton just randomly decided to borrow from there is lying.
And whether or not we actually hit total parity is not the point. Clinton actually got the deficit low enough to reduce the external debt.
Now, he didn't manage to reduce it far enough to let us stop borrowing from social security...which wouldn't happen anyway, we would have just started converting external debt (You know, what we actually pay interest on.) into SS IOUs. But what he did would get us far enough to start paying back our external debt, for the first time in quite a long time.
We, of course, continued to raise our internal debt owed social security the maximum amount, like we have done for every single year we've had social security and a debt.
People are standing there arguing if Clinton really ran a five minute mile, because it was downhill. Well, maybe he didn't, maybe it should count as 5:15 or something, but he did a fuckload better than the right.
Of course, we now also realize how bankrupt the Social Security program is.
Social security is not slightest bit bankrupt, you moron. It will, like all taxes with actual dollar amounts written into it, require adjustments due to inflation. The fact we hadn't adjusted it every year while updating tax rates was stupid to start with.
I swear, you're like someone who claims the postal service is bankrupt because in a decade there's no way they'll afford being able to move those letter for what they're charging for stamps.
What do you mean? Pretty much everyone even slightly intelligent and knowledgeable noticed he was ruining the US economy.
It's just no one listened to them.
Ok let's not count the fact that that a cell phone could easily have hidden weapons/means of escape (http://www.google.com/search?q=cell+phone+gun)
Which would be a valid reason to search the body of a cell phone. I have no problem with that.
or the previously mentioned fact about the crimes that could be committed while the person was in jail.
Better stop them from making any phone calls or speaking to a lawyer, then.
The people are charged with a crime and they get their rights/freedoms taken away unless they post bail. They don't get to leave, they don't get to have their phone, they don't get to tivo american idol. That's the point.
See, I've got you here arguing that the point is to punish them, and I've got the other guy arguing that it is, in fact, not punishment. Interesting.
What, exactly, gives the police the right to punish you because you've been charged with a crime. (Or, heck, just detained 24 hours without being charged?)
They certainly have the right to restrict someone's movement, I don't dispute that at all. That's the power of 'arrest'. I'm just having trouble seeing how they have the right to restrict the rights of people in custody that isn't towards that end.
Granted, there are plenty of very dangerous people who, a case can be made, should not have access to the outside world at all, or destruction of evidence or even murder of witnesses will happen. And I'm fine for the police making that case when they get the arrest warrant.
Likewise, where are plenty of things that are too dangerous to allow in jails, like weapons, and everything should be searched to make sure it does not contain those.
But taking away everything as a matter of policy for all the innocent people in jail is absurd and shouldn't be allowed. (And if the problem is they might pass stuff off to convicted people, who do have their right to possess random items restricted, the solution is to have separate areas for those two groups, not restrict everyone.)
Nobody has a right to a phone, or a laptop, or a sandwich, etc.
Um, yes, people do in fact have the right to their own property. Check the 4th amendment.
However, I was not disputing that police are allowed to hold property. They are. I'm disputing the idea they're allowed to punish people.
By, for example, requiring them to use the jail's absurdly expensive phone system to make calls instead of the cellphone they had on their person when arrested. That serves absolutely no purpose but to punish people who have been detained.
I'd also like one that is, in fact, cheaper than the Nook. :)
Less features but higher price isn't particularly useful. I don't know what's going on with Sony, how a hardware company can't produce cheaper products than others, but there you go.
Granted, there is the new smaller Sony Reader Pocket Edition, which is cheaper and I've been looking into. But I suspect the cheaper price is entirely due to the smaller screen.
Well, allowing police to look for weapons is reasonable.
And if someone taken into custody is holding a 'container', that container should certainly be taken away. Who knows what is in there? There could be a weapon.
But they should not be searched.
And I'm failing to see why cell phone should be taken away at all, unless the officer is going to get a warrant and search it. Which, I believe, allows them to withhold it from the person so they can't destroy data.
Likewise, there might be cases where a phone call might allow them to get someone else to destroy evidence, or warn them off, so i can see a case being made there...but a case has to, in fact, actually be made.
If neither of those are true, people should be allowed to keep their cell phones while in custody of the police. Or, at least, have access to their cell phones. (It's absurd how much calls from jail cost.)
I don't really understand why anyone gets to take them away. From actual convicted people, fine. For when the phone is actual evidence, fine. From a mafia boss that the police can make a compelling argument that he could use code to order a hit on someone, fine. (Such a claim should be part of the arrest warrant.)
Anything else, no. I've never understood why the police are allowed to punish people who've been detained and possibly not charged with a crime, and certainly not convicted of one.
Which would work if you could submit things that way, but sadly there's a Preview required.
It could be a generational thing, but I've never understood why so many folks using the internet (mostly younger generations) feel that everything should be free to them no matter what.
Don't blame them.
This society used to have an tacit agreement between companies and people, where everyone would behave responsibly and ethically.
Companies started breaking it first. Really badly breaking it. With their employees, with their customers, with everyone.
For a few decades, normal people were shat upon by corporations only out for their bottom line.
The younger generation is just the people who grew up with this, and have no problem acting unethically in return.
Even when the companies don't actually deserve it, like Barnes and Noble, which, as far as I am aware, have no history of unethical behavior at all. They actually sell things to people who want to buy those things, making a small profit on each one, like companies are supposed to do. They know their customers can go elsewhere, and they don't attempt to misrepresent their products or trick people into contracts, or assert that customers can only sue them in arbitration, or any of the hundreds of other unethical ways that corporations behave. (Except see below.)
AT&T, OTOH....the less said there the better. Cellular companies are basically the definition of this behavior.
Oh, and attempting to control what customers can do with stuff they purchase from you is one of the warning sights of this massive profit-at-all-cost sickness infecting a company. Legitimate companies don't care.
We will see if B&N goes crazy in response, or if they just get some sort of lock on the cellular service to only contact them.
I, OTOH would like a eInk screen without a damn cellular modem, or wifi, or anything that increases the by 100 dollars costs for the dubious ability to instantly download books. Give me a damn USB connection.
I survived decades during which I had to go to the library or bookstore to get books, I think I can continue to exist while not having the ability to instantly buy them. So don't talk to me about 'niche' markets. Mine doesn't exist yet, for some reason.
However, what we're talking about here is the fact the product has the technical capacity to do something (Surf the internet, run random programs), which it won't do, apparently. That's not the same thing.
'Niche' products that are sold from cheaper that are deliberately crippled is a failure of the free market. They should not exist in any sort of competitive marketplace, from which we can conclude the eReader market is not competitive yet. If the market was competitive, the manufacturers would be screaming from the rooftops about the ability to run whatever you want on the device.
Of course, if this catches on, expect the people here actually bothered by the free data plan (AT&T) to put some sort of cap on. No one promised free unlimited data when you purchased the devices, you were promised that you could download books via the cellular network, and AT&T could, entirely reasonably, limit you to about a meg a day...no one could possibly read more than that. Or, even easier, just lock access to the right servers.
But, even so, there's no real reason to stop people from running random programs on the devices.Yes, yes, there's DRM, but if you can make mostly working DRM work on computers, you can sure as heck make it mostly work on eReaders. (Heck, you could make it almost perfectly work via something like Trusted Computing, with a hardware private key.)
Also, of course, they operate the Stargate.
I'm not one of those people super concerned about privacy, but I actually went into Facebook a while back and turned most stuff to Friend or at least Friend of a Friend. No, you can't see my political or religious views, or posts by friends on my wall, unless you're at least a foaf.
And, yes, I'm smart enough to expose enough information that you can actually identify me in search results.
And then Facebook, the other day, actually prompted me with a popup page. All well and good, except everything had two options (Instead of the actual three settings each privacy option has), with some of them not letting me set the option as strict as I already had it. Only people I've friended can see or comment on my wall, damnit.
I had to go back into the privacy settings and reset to where I had it. I don't remember which ones, when I realized the screen didn't let me do everything, I just went with the defaults and immediately leaped over to the actual privacy page.
It's very poor planning on the part of Facebook. It's a great idea to actually throw privacy settings in people's faces and recommend stricter settings, and presumably new accounts will have those by default. But they could have bothered to think 'Hey, what if guy already set his privacy settings?'
Well, that's not the only reason I'm waiting. I do have a game budget that has to fill back up, too.
Yeah, I've seen that, but five years is a bit much.
Hell, with five years, you end up playing games on the wrong OS! (Unless you lag there, also.)
Lights, either projected onto the sky or naturally occurring, are not 'flying'.
No, UFS have to be flying (It's in the name), which still leaves an open question of if this was a UFO.
It looks like some sort of projected effect to me, hence not a UFO, although I'll be damned if I can figure out how you do that in the open sky like that.
Everyone seems to be going with 'rocket', but that's one damn weird spinning rocket. Usually, they get blown up when they start going like that, and I've never heard of one that loops perfectly. (I mean, gravity should be making the loop an oval, even if the flight path is perfectly curved.)
And that totally ignores the blue light in the middle.