The problem was PNG was not that it was omitted from the spec. It didn't even exist at the time of the spec.
The problem with PNG is that everyone was using GIF and JPEG, and if the HTML 4 spec had been written to include image formats, it would have only include JPEG and GIF. Unisys had just threatened to sue GIF creators a short six months previous, and no one supported PNG yet.
And when IE6 'implemented' PNG poorly, two years after the patent issue had come up, almost no one else had it, or had it correct. Mozilla was still struggling with transparency as much as IE was, or even more. PNG support was crap at that time, on every browser and platform.
Then we hit the actual problem, that MS sat on their ass forever instead of releasing any sort of updates to IE. That is what crippled PNG use. It had nothing to do with specs or anything like that.
It was solely because of a monopoly that had driven competitors into ruin and thus saw absolutely no need to improve their products at all, for five very long years, so their product was left at exactly whatever shitty state it had been at the moment Netscape imploded. As PNG support was only halfway completed at that moment, it was only halfway completed for five years.
The w3c states what image formats are widely recognized. This is a statement of fact WRT modern web browsers, it is not any sort of requirement. The w3c does not just exist to define standards, it also does things like list products that follow its standards and other stuff said products do, so it is entirely reasonable to provide a summary of that.
And I have no idea where you get the idea that PNG is 'recommended'. The PNG format itself is a 'recommendation', which means 'if you use PNG, here is how we think you should do it'. It does not mean 'use PNG'.
At various points they have recommended the use of PNG over GIF, but that doesn't mean 'use PNG' either, it means 'don't use GIF, and here's an alternative'. And they stopped doing that when the patent expired.
At no point does the w3c say what formats are allowed or even required to be supported by browsers.
It's perfectly possible to build a 100% HTML 4.0 compliant web browser that will only display BMP image files and not JPEG, GIF, or PNG.
I think that it's entirely reasonable to have a <video> tag with a few specified codecs, but also to allow new codecs to be added.
The problem here is that including a video codec in an HTML spec is rather silly, and was a silly idea to start with.
You'll notice that no image specs are included in HTML, and you can use, for example, the TIFFs image format in a <img> if you feel like it. Of course, no browsers actually support TIFFs, so that won't display, but there's nothing stopping browsers from adding such support, and there already exist plug-ins that will display them.).
Just like images, the video tag should have a 'base' codec or two on it. (And, let's not make the same mistake we made with images, and make sure it's a patent-less codec.)
And let's also, while we're there, include a way of specifying different video, audio, and mux formats so that browser manufacturers can add new ones. (In fact, let's require these labels, in the HTML, for anything but the required defaults.)
The patent only covers a way to make write long file names in a way they are unnoticed by devices that can't understand them, and short file names that are read instead.
There aren't any patents on reading at all, and hence there would be no patent issues with reading an existing file system and writing it somewhere else.
FAT32 doesn't deserved a patent, as it's MS's workaround to a damn problem they created in the first place.
'Oh, look, the crappy system we created and got the world to adopt via our monopoly power is no long as horrible crappy as it used to be! We should get a patent for that!'
Actually, you don't even do that. Ubuntu found my NTFS partition without any help from me, and stuck it right on my 'Places' menu, mounting it in/media/disk when I open it, I think.
Alternately, during the installation, I could have selected a path to have it permanently mounted to if I wanted to use it as part of the computer's regular file system, instead of just needing to sometimes copy file to or from Windows.
And significant disadvantage to support it, what with more expensive parts and licensing fees.
So there's actually incentive to not support it on the smaller players.
Which means people will buy the DVD players and then continue to buy DVDs, because the player in their car, and in their SD bedroom TV, and their PC, requires them. And then they'll buy a DVD player because all they have is DVD, etc.
Compared to the VCR to DVD transition, it will take forever. DVDs actually had large advantages over VCRs, and the one disadvantage, that people couldn't record to them, (at least not during the transition), just meant that people left one VCR hooked up to record TV, but purchased DVDs.
No one had portable devices that could only play tapes, very few people had them built into their TVs, and every TV showed an increase in quality and the ability to navigate through extra features and skip and whatnot.
Frankly, I'll be surprised if Blueray catches on in 25 years. Which means I'll be surprised if they catch on at all, because I think the 'physical media selling' aspect of movies is going to go away in that time.
These businesses that Amazon stopped accepting referrals mostly existed solely for the purpose of getting paid for referrals.
They have no actual customers or goods or orders whatsoever.
And Amazon doesn't really mind paying sales tax on their operations. They pay sales tax when shipping to people in states they have warehouses.
What this bill tried to do is apparently require sales tax on orders referred to from NC. Which would be, apparently, in addition to any sales tax Amazon would collect (or wouldn't collect if they didn't have a physical presence there) for buyers.
Aka, North Carolina was trying to double-dip. States only deserve sales tax when the buyer is in their state, not additionally when the 'affiliate' is in their state. An affiliate commission is not a 'sale' that is taxable via sales tax, and, even if it were, it would only be on the amount paid to the affiliate, not the entire purchase. (OTOH, is it entirely taxable via income tax, and is already taxed there.)
This isn't to be confused with the state having the ability to force companies to collect sales tax, which is, as we've been talking about, allowed when the company has a 'physical presence' in the state. The state, in theory, imposes sales taxes on all purchases with buyers in their state, it's just that they can't force businesses out of state to collect it for them.
I'm not sure why you think the outrageous cost of labs is a reason to require hospitals to state the cost in advance, and has anything to do with anything. As you point out, labs shouldn't cost anywhere near as much as they do.
I really don't see how a lot of people, you included, think that people get more medical treatment than they need thanks to insurance. They often pay a lot more than the treatment would rationally cost, because they don't actually pay it, but it does not follow that said treatment was unneeded.
A lot of insurance has moral hazard. But I'm not sure that medical insurance is one of them, simply because I've never known a single person who gets any sort of medical treatment they don't need, at all, ever. And doctors wouldn't give them out.
There is one very simple way to fix all of this, but you probably hate the idea:
Drop the insurance model entirely. The government pays for all medical care. It just pays. Not via insurance. Procedures have prices set by medical boards, and the government sends hospitals and doctors checks for that amount for doing them.
If the Whitehouse actually wishes to use 'new media' for communication, the thing to do is to set up a moderated forum.
Of course, you'd need some sort of honest moderator, and you'd need a lot of clearly defined topics. (Otherwise, every topic would quickly turn into a libertarian rant about taxes and pot.)
He certainly also makes the US much more likable in the rest of the world.
No shit.
I've found myself constantly disappointed in Obama for failing to do all sorts of things. If he signs a health care bill without a public plan, that's it, it's over. He was just another liar we elected.
But one way in which he actually seems to be doing a useful job is to not fucking randomly antagonize countries.
And after six months in office, Al Qaeda is having recruitment problems, having to call Obama a 'house Negro'. Seriously.
And Iran has broken out in revolution because a 'reformer', or at least a non-crazy moderate person, won an election because crazy leader guy couldn't use the threat of the US randomly bombing Iran anymore.
Part of the neocon philosophy seems to be to piss off as many countries as possible, because their entire concept needs 'villains' to work. We have to have crazy Saddam, we have to have crazy Ahmadinejad, we have to have the USSR, we have to have something to fight.
No, not terrorists, which are useful for restricting civil liberties and linking to the people we want to antagonize, but terrorists don't let us use multi-million dollars rockets and bombs on them, then spend billions of government dollars paying big business to rebuild their country while 'buying' the oil and other natural resources from the government we set up. (Although we will bomb rebels and call them terrorists.) Hell, the terrorists made us invade Afghanistan, and who wants anything there?
I'm glad we got those fucking loons out of office, and, no, I mean the neocons, not Saddam. Because otherwise, one day, a country we decide to invade will be smart enough to use asymmetrical warfare against us, and us Americans will be treated to people wandering around the countryside blowing up power plants and bridges. (And that's assuming they follow the rules of war.)
At least we've gone back to traditional 'completely ignoring what the people want' politics, instead of 'taunt other countries until we claim they touch us, and then wail on them' politics.
Like the fact that, um, your numbers are actually wrong. 92% of black Democrats voted for Obama, and 7% for Hillary. I don't know in what system of math you can round that to 95%.
Secondly, Republicans and conservatives voted for Hillary by a huge 30+ majority, and independents near equal. Actual Democrats voted for Obama by 60%. (What the hell Republicans were doing voting in the Democratic primary I do not know.)
Once you actually remove Republican screwing around in the Democratic primary, Obama came out much farther ahead, and would have won that state even if the
Thirdly, all you've actually demonstrated that white people in North Carolina like Hillary more than black people do, which does not actually prove anything. An equally likely explanation is that Democrats in NC did not like Obama.
In fact, even if your assertions is true with regard to North Carolina, that does not mean he won the election due to that. It just means he won North Carolina because of that.
Go and look at, oh, New York. Hey, look at that. Both races voted for their person matching theirs by about 65%.
Or let's look at California. A bit more interesting, in that 78% black voted for Obama, vs. a split for Clinton...but approx 70% of Latinos and Asians voted for Clinton. Oh, and 60% of women voted for her, vs. an even split with men. I can look at California and make the assertions, just as supported as yours, that Clinton won that thanks to sexist women and racist Latinos and Asians.
Except this is all stupid, as there is an actual reason that Obama's numbers were the way they were in North Carolina. Obama was seen as the more liberal candidate, and the left and the poor, especially the urban poor, voted for him by a massive 30+ bias. (Along with the young which isn't that relevant here.) And in North Carolina, 'urban poor' translates to 'black'. In places where it doesn't translate as such, he did not have such a massive black majority.
To simplify: Poor urban voters voted for Obama in the primary. In North Carolina, poor urban voters are, in fact, black. Ergo, in North Carolina, black voters voted for Obama by a huge majority. In other places they did not.
Meanwhile, in the general election, black voters have voted for Democrats by huge huge massive 95% majorities in the last 4 elections, regardless of their skin color.
Yea, and it would have been horrible if Bush had been demonized for anything. I mean, imagine if the American public hadn't liked his policies!
Bush and Clinton both pushed the absolutely corrosive 'home ownership investment' meme that is still floating around and is absolutely idiotic. Investing in houses is like investing in cars...if you have a lot of money, it might be a good idea to buy ones other than the one you use, refurbish and store them, and then sell them when the price goes up. Or Ming vases, or expensive art, or whatever.
It is, however, completely idiotic to pretend your actual home, or your actual car, is an investment. It is not. It is a purchase, one you can probably resell for roughly the same amount of money, but that's not an investment. Only in crazy-land does the value of houses necessarily increase. (The value of housing, relative to average income, has stayed roughly the same throughout human history, varying only slightly usually with advances in technology or new frontier. It has never just randomly risen and kept rising.)
That said, Clinton's push arguably made sense to push more people who could buy houses to buy houses. It's only when we got into 2002 or so and people who could not buy houses started buying houses because banks had invented loans to disguise the cost. (And, as the laws of supply and demand dictate, as demand went up, so did the cost.)
Which was not the 'fault' of Bush except in the general deregulation environment he'd set up, but where he actually should have stepped in was the whole 'massive reselling of loans so that originating banks no longer held the fucking risk, which gave them no inventive to actually make good loans', which is what blew everything up.
Stopping that would have stopped banks from making loans they suspected wouldn't get paid off. In fact, the #1 way to stop this from every happening again is to forbid, by law, banks making home loans (Or any sort of loans) that they intend to resell. Because that gives them a profit incentive to make dubious loans.
I don't actually have any problem with doing something else with paper, even recycling it, although I'm fairly certain that is not useful, energy-wise. High temp incineration sounds like a fine idea. (Good luck getting that past the environmentalists.)
Although I'm not sure why we need a high-temperature incinerator.
I was just complaining about getting people to 'separate out your recyclables' before getting them to 'separate out your batteries'.
Indeed. The environmental movement often pisses me off in talking about shit that is incredibly stupid and ignoring actually important stuff.
My current pet peeve is the billions of dollars we spend on nonsensical 'recycling' of shit like paper, which, duh, grows on trees we specifically plant to grow damn paper. Oh, heaven forbid we throw that away. Let's spend more energy to 'recycle' it then to grow more trees. (And, hell, while we're at it, it's a carbon sink. A short-term one, to be sure, as paper rots in landfills and the CO2 escapes, but whatever.)
You want to save fucking trees, stop eating at places that cut down rain forests to raise cattle, and stop worrying about forests that paper companies plant and harvest. It's paper from a paper farm, you loons. They've got so much of it they aren't even using the extra from lumber mills anymore.
Meanwhile, let's not spend a fucking dime to get people to separate out their toxic batteries and paint and actual stuff we shouldn't be putting in landfills. Let's not actually collect that separately from the trash, so 95% of the people just throw them away, and they end up in landfills and toxic chemicals leech out.
Even if you disagree with me about paper recycling, I want you to sit there and think to yourself if you'd rather have a ton of paper in the local landfill, or a quart of mercury? And then ask yourself, if we're only going to collect one, which one we should set up bins for next to garbage? Which should we be teaching kids to separate from their garbage in school?
</rant>
Oh, and yes, 'In hundreds of years, the cities will be under several feet of water' is stupid as an argument. That is not the problem with global climate change. The problem with global climate change is that, during global climate changes, lots of stuff dies. Randomly, haphazardly. Entire ecosystems. Plants, animals, humans, human-like beings such as congresspeople, all randomly die. Often en mass.
For all sorts of crazy reasons. Sometime directly from climate change, sometimes because predators and food move around, sometimes because their breeding is shot to hell, sometimes because the ocean is full of carbonic acid, whatever.
And, then, thousands of years later, new stuff is all over the place, and no one even knows it happened. Which is fine for the distant past, and fine for the future, because humans are very adaptable and we live in any environment on earth that can grow animals and plants we can eat, and we can eat a hell of a lot of different kinds. Skip forward 1000 years, and, no matter what global warming does, humans will be living fine, with a nice standard of living.
It's, however, incredibly annoying if you're actually attempting to live through the damn climate change.
A lot of assholes who think they can wreck the planet for profit need to be lined up and shot, but sometimes I think we'd be a lot better off, if we had the choice to instead turn around and start shooting the assholes who are on 'the side of good' doing just as much damage because of their irrational behavior.
Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor.
The 'many' British who have any sort of private insurance at all is 15%, and almost all that is complimentary insurance that covers where NHS does not. (Like long-term hospice care, and medical disability insurance that covers lost wages.)
The amount of British who 'pay twice', who are actually paying for insurance to cover the cost of things that are covered under the NHS, is something like 5%.
I noticed you actually phrased it as 'many of us' instead of actually including yourself as one of those people. That is because not only do you not pay for private insurance, but you probably don't even know anyone who does.
The fact that the very rich fly around in helicopters is not a valid reason to argue we should not pave roads.
An American may lose his house to pay for an operation, but at least he gets the operation
And then dies because he can't afford antibiotics.
Oh, and of course, half the time he can't get the operation in the first place. Hospitals are only requires to stabilize people. If you have, for example, cancer, they are not required to do surgery if you can't afford it. (As the other responder said, the number of people with preventable blindness is absurd. Hospitals are not required to treat you to stop you from going blind, or losing a limb, just dying.)
Now, the first time you go to the hospital, they obviously don't know you're not going to pay your bill. So anyone can, shall we say, get medical treatment once from any random hospital. And the law requires them to keep you from bleeding to death in their waiting room, but that's it.
while the Brits die from MRSA, waiting months for urgent surgery in a dirty ward, paying more (on average) for the privilege.
If you have been informed that Brits pay more for surgery than Americans, you have been lied to.
In fact, the British pay no money, on average, for surgery, so I'm not even entirely sure what you're talking about.
Question for you: Why do these expire? If I bought the "Right to Pollute" and didn't use it all, why can't I use it at a later time?
When it's pointed out they do expire, and, moreover, essentially all sales would take place at the start of each quarter, you somehow assert people should be free to hoard them, despite you already pointing out the exact problem with that.
This hasn't even passed yet, and these "regulatory industries" (interesting term -- industry implying a profit motive) don't even exist yet.
Industries does not actually imply 'profit' in anyone's book. Industry implies manufacturing. However, I meant 'regulators of industries'.
And I can't even address your idea that you think that companies will be getting carbon credits from some private firm with 'quantities defined by the the edicts of the seller'. You really don't have any idea how this system works, do you?
Who will monitor the output of every industry in the country?
You know, I'm just going to have explain this damn law, aren't I? Because you appear to have a lot of misconceptions about it.
The basis of it is that each year, various industries that produce large amounts of CO2 will have their equipment evaluated by the EPA, like it already is for all sorts of things. They will simply start including CO2 output. If you have find a single industry covered under carbon credits that isn't inspected by the EPA anyway to make sure they aren't dumping mercury and whatnot into the air, please inform me. (So that answers your 'who will do the inspecting' question. The government agency that's already doing the inspecting anyway.) Total and averages will be figured out.
And, based on that, each business in that industry will be given some sort of credits based on how much 'product' they produce. It's easiest to use electric companies as an example, they'd get a certain amount for each kW of electricity they make. (Most industries that are covered are manufacturers of raw material, so are easy to compare.)
If they are producing less CO2 per 'unit' of whatever they're making than the average (Or wherever the line is drawn.), they will have carbon credits to turn over to a market, operated by a specific company named in the law. (They can, of course, choose to not do this.) There are not a bunch of people trading, there are people handing their credit to one company, who holds it until someone buys it.
Likewise, companies that haven't been given enough carbon credits (Because they're using inefficient processes that cost more per 'unit'.) will then have to go to that market and buy them.
It's important to note individual trades do not normally happen. Everyone buys 'unlabeled' credits from the market. I believe individual trades were left legal, so that different business entities within the same corporate umbrella could trade easily, but it is not something that anyone would expect. This essentially makes all your 'corner the market' ideas nonsense. No one's going to be selling to other people. They'll be handing them to the market to sell.
It's also important to note that, as this market is full of imaginary things, if something did happen and the market actually was empty because some private individual was hoarding credits, the government could, of course, just invent a bunch more credits and dump it in to stave off this hypothetical 'everyone dies cause of hoarders' scenario you've invented.
I didn't say that randomness was a good way to detect encryption. Someone else said that. It is trivially easy to pad encryption with non-random stuff. (It is trivially easy to make anything easily compressible by padding it with junk.)
I said that lack of compressibility was a good way to detect, is in fact the definition, of randomness. Your XML file is not very random at all.
America's presence in Afghanistan is not an invading force.
If we did not invade, but instead provided troubles to help the legitimate government of Afghanistan fight off some rebels....surely, at the end, we would have been given medals by the legit government of Afghanistan, who would have walked back into their offices and started running the country. Right?
Oh, wait, you say for a while, we ourselves were the government under the 'occupied nation' rules of the Geneva Convention? We were required to provide public services and whatnot to the population of the country we, apparently, were occupying, like governments have to?
And then, as dictated under those rules, we then set up a government to run the place and turned it over to the locals? Where they then had constitutional voting and elections of their government?
Where was the 'legitimate government' of Afghanistan, aka, the Northern Alliance, during this? Didn't they have anything to say about the fact that, after we'd kicked out the illegitimate pretenders, we'd then ignored the actual government and occupied the country, setting up our own government and replacing them?
You can sit there and pretend that the Northern Alliance was the legitimate government of Afghanistan all you want, but the Northern Alliance is not the current government there, or even the heir to the current government there...we are.
Hence we invaded and overthrew the government of Afghanistan even if the Northern Alliance was the legit government. Heh. We just invaded and overthrew them while they were weak from fighting the Taliban, and also apparently lied and said we were on their side in their civil war, when in reality we going to take the country from them and the Taliban.
When I refer to the government of Afghanistan, I mean the real one, not the Taliban pretending he's in charge.
So you think Iran's shouldn't be worried because you apparently think we 'technically' didn't invade Afghanistan? So you think they are total morons?
Um, no. The fact is that we sent troops into and wrestled control away from the de facto government of a neighboring nation. Iran's not going to say 'Oh, that doesn't count, because you were able to get a tiny government-in-exile to legitimize it.'.
Incidentally, you're wrong. Failing to recognize the government of a country and going to war with them on behalf of another government that claims it's the legitimate one, is, in fact, an 'invasion' under any international law. Quite a lot of countries that invade each other do not recognize the other as legitimate...failing to recognize the other government as legit is, in fact, halfway to war.
But international law has no concept of 'recognized' countries. Anyone in control of an area of land, as long as they can hold that land and, in general, exercise the functions of government, and calling themselves a government, is a government, period. Of course, if they stole that land from an existing country, that country is automatically already at war with them and should feel free to take it back in self defense. (Now, to get into the UN you have to recognized by enough countries, but that's not the same thing as actually being a country.)
But where you are confused, I think, is that you believe a country getting involved in a 'civil war' and taking over the entire country is not an invasion. It really really is. Our military was not operating under the command of the Northern Alliance, we were not assisting them, we were invading the country, nominally for them, although you'll notice we did not, in fact, turn the country over to them at the end. We, instead, set up an 'occupation force', as defined under the Geneva convention, and ran their government for them until they could take control.
Which doesn't matter, as the invasion of Afghanistan was legal under various legal theories and the UN supported it. But it was, nevertheless, an invasion. If it had not been an invasion, if we had just be 'helping out' against a rebellion, our troops would have been under the control of the NA, and at the end, the NA would have been in charge.
That doesn't really have anything to do with moral relativism.
As long as we've decided that, objectively, killing US citizens is less evil than trafficking in drugs.
And, I look around at swat home invasions and the death of innocent people in the US, and, think, hey, we actually have decided that.
It's not 'moral relativism' at all. It's the exact opposite of it. It is 'Drugs are more immoral than causing the deaths of people. In all circumstances'.
Granted, it's totally fucked up objective morality, but it is objective morality. Killing people==somewhat evil. Drug trafficking==very evil.
Embassies may be involute foreign soil, but but that doesn't mean the host country has to let you keep operating them. They can say 'You have 24 hours until this embassy stops being an embassy. We will expect you gone by then.'
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The problem was PNG was not that it was omitted from the spec. It didn't even exist at the time of the spec.
The problem with PNG is that everyone was using GIF and JPEG, and if the HTML 4 spec had been written to include image formats, it would have only include JPEG and GIF. Unisys had just threatened to sue GIF creators a short six months previous, and no one supported PNG yet.
And when IE6 'implemented' PNG poorly, two years after the patent issue had come up, almost no one else had it, or had it correct. Mozilla was still struggling with transparency as much as IE was, or even more. PNG support was crap at that time, on every browser and platform.
Then we hit the actual problem, that MS sat on their ass forever instead of releasing any sort of updates to IE. That is what crippled PNG use. It had nothing to do with specs or anything like that.
It was solely because of a monopoly that had driven competitors into ruin and thus saw absolutely no need to improve their products at all, for five very long years, so their product was left at exactly whatever shitty state it had been at the moment Netscape imploded. As PNG support was only halfway completed at that moment, it was only halfway completed for five years.
The w3c states what image formats are widely recognized. This is a statement of fact WRT modern web browsers, it is not any sort of requirement. The w3c does not just exist to define standards, it also does things like list products that follow its standards and other stuff said products do, so it is entirely reasonable to provide a summary of that.
And I have no idea where you get the idea that PNG is 'recommended'. The PNG format itself is a 'recommendation', which means 'if you use PNG, here is how we think you should do it'. It does not mean 'use PNG'.
At various points they have recommended the use of PNG over GIF, but that doesn't mean 'use PNG' either, it means 'don't use GIF, and here's an alternative'. And they stopped doing that when the patent expired.
At no point does the w3c say what formats are allowed or even required to be supported by browsers.
It's perfectly possible to build a 100% HTML 4.0 compliant web browser that will only display BMP image files and not JPEG, GIF, or PNG.
I think that it's entirely reasonable to have a <video> tag with a few specified codecs, but also to allow new codecs to be added.
The problem here is that including a video codec in an HTML spec is rather silly, and was a silly idea to start with.
You'll notice that no image specs are included in HTML, and you can use, for example, the TIFFs image format in a <img> if you feel like it. Of course, no browsers actually support TIFFs, so that won't display, but there's nothing stopping browsers from adding such support, and there already exist plug-ins that will display them.).
Just like images, the video tag should have a 'base' codec or two on it. (And, let's not make the same mistake we made with images, and make sure it's a patent-less codec.)
And let's also, while we're there, include a way of specifying different video, audio, and mux formats so that browser manufacturers can add new ones. (In fact, let's require these labels, in the HTML, for anything but the required defaults.)
Um, the 'shift' from Java to Javascript would be considered 'porting into another language'.
The patent only covers a way to make write long file names in a way they are unnoticed by devices that can't understand them, and short file names that are read instead.
There aren't any patents on reading at all, and hence there would be no patent issues with reading an existing file system and writing it somewhere else.
FAT32 doesn't deserved a patent, as it's MS's workaround to a damn problem they created in the first place.
'Oh, look, the crappy system we created and got the world to adopt via our monopoly power is no long as horrible crappy as it used to be! We should get a patent for that!'
Actually, you don't even do that. Ubuntu found my NTFS partition without any help from me, and stuck it right on my 'Places' menu, mounting it in /media/disk when I open it, I think.
Alternately, during the installation, I could have selected a path to have it permanently mounted to if I wanted to use it as part of the computer's regular file system, instead of just needing to sometimes copy file to or from Windows.
And significant disadvantage to support it, what with more expensive parts and licensing fees.
So there's actually incentive to not support it on the smaller players.
Which means people will buy the DVD players and then continue to buy DVDs, because the player in their car, and in their SD bedroom TV, and their PC, requires them. And then they'll buy a DVD player because all they have is DVD, etc.
Compared to the VCR to DVD transition, it will take forever. DVDs actually had large advantages over VCRs, and the one disadvantage, that people couldn't record to them, (at least not during the transition), just meant that people left one VCR hooked up to record TV, but purchased DVDs.
No one had portable devices that could only play tapes, very few people had them built into their TVs, and every TV showed an increase in quality and the ability to navigate through extra features and skip and whatnot.
Frankly, I'll be surprised if Blueray catches on in 25 years. Which means I'll be surprised if they catch on at all, because I think the 'physical media selling' aspect of movies is going to go away in that time.
They aren't fulfilling orders at all. Amazon is.
These businesses that Amazon stopped accepting referrals mostly existed solely for the purpose of getting paid for referrals.
They have no actual customers or goods or orders whatsoever.
And Amazon doesn't really mind paying sales tax on their operations. They pay sales tax when shipping to people in states they have warehouses.
What this bill tried to do is apparently require sales tax on orders referred to from NC. Which would be, apparently, in addition to any sales tax Amazon would collect (or wouldn't collect if they didn't have a physical presence there) for buyers.
Aka, North Carolina was trying to double-dip. States only deserve sales tax when the buyer is in their state, not additionally when the 'affiliate' is in their state. An affiliate commission is not a 'sale' that is taxable via sales tax, and, even if it were, it would only be on the amount paid to the affiliate, not the entire purchase. (OTOH, is it entirely taxable via income tax, and is already taxed there.)
This isn't to be confused with the state having the ability to force companies to collect sales tax, which is, as we've been talking about, allowed when the company has a 'physical presence' in the state. The state, in theory, imposes sales taxes on all purchases with buyers in their state, it's just that they can't force businesses out of state to collect it for them.
I'm not sure why you think the outrageous cost of labs is a reason to require hospitals to state the cost in advance, and has anything to do with anything. As you point out, labs shouldn't cost anywhere near as much as they do.
I really don't see how a lot of people, you included, think that people get more medical treatment than they need thanks to insurance. They often pay a lot more than the treatment would rationally cost, because they don't actually pay it, but it does not follow that said treatment was unneeded.
A lot of insurance has moral hazard. But I'm not sure that medical insurance is one of them, simply because I've never known a single person who gets any sort of medical treatment they don't need, at all, ever. And doctors wouldn't give them out.
There is one very simple way to fix all of this, but you probably hate the idea:
Drop the insurance model entirely. The government pays for all medical care. It just pays. Not via insurance. Procedures have prices set by medical boards, and the government sends hospitals and doctors checks for that amount for doing them.
You are exactly right. This is a stunt.
If the Whitehouse actually wishes to use 'new media' for communication, the thing to do is to set up a moderated forum.
Of course, you'd need some sort of honest moderator, and you'd need a lot of clearly defined topics. (Otherwise, every topic would quickly turn into a libertarian rant about taxes and pot.)
He certainly also makes the US much more likable in the rest of the world.
No shit.
I've found myself constantly disappointed in Obama for failing to do all sorts of things. If he signs a health care bill without a public plan, that's it, it's over. He was just another liar we elected.
But one way in which he actually seems to be doing a useful job is to not fucking randomly antagonize countries.
And after six months in office, Al Qaeda is having recruitment problems, having to call Obama a 'house Negro'. Seriously.
And Iran has broken out in revolution because a 'reformer', or at least a non-crazy moderate person, won an election because crazy leader guy couldn't use the threat of the US randomly bombing Iran anymore.
Part of the neocon philosophy seems to be to piss off as many countries as possible, because their entire concept needs 'villains' to work. We have to have crazy Saddam, we have to have crazy Ahmadinejad, we have to have the USSR, we have to have something to fight.
No, not terrorists, which are useful for restricting civil liberties and linking to the people we want to antagonize, but terrorists don't let us use multi-million dollars rockets and bombs on them, then spend billions of government dollars paying big business to rebuild their country while 'buying' the oil and other natural resources from the government we set up. (Although we will bomb rebels and call them terrorists.) Hell, the terrorists made us invade Afghanistan, and who wants anything there?
I'm glad we got those fucking loons out of office, and, no, I mean the neocons, not Saddam. Because otherwise, one day, a country we decide to invade will be smart enough to use asymmetrical warfare against us, and us Americans will be treated to people wandering around the countryside blowing up power plants and bridges. (And that's assuming they follow the rules of war.)
At least we've gone back to traditional 'completely ignoring what the people want' politics, instead of 'taunt other countries until we claim they touch us, and then wail on them' politics.
That polling has lots of interesting facts.
Like the fact that, um, your numbers are actually wrong. 92% of black Democrats voted for Obama, and 7% for Hillary. I don't know in what system of math you can round that to 95%.
Secondly, Republicans and conservatives voted for Hillary by a huge 30+ majority, and independents near equal. Actual Democrats voted for Obama by 60%. (What the hell Republicans were doing voting in the Democratic primary I do not know.)
Once you actually remove Republican screwing around in the Democratic primary, Obama came out much farther ahead, and would have won that state even if the
Thirdly, all you've actually demonstrated that white people in North Carolina like Hillary more than black people do, which does not actually prove anything. An equally likely explanation is that Democrats in NC did not like Obama.
In fact, even if your assertions is true with regard to North Carolina, that does not mean he won the election due to that. It just means he won North Carolina because of that.
Go and look at, oh, New York. Hey, look at that. Both races voted for their person matching theirs by about 65%.
Or let's look at California. A bit more interesting, in that 78% black voted for Obama, vs. a split for Clinton...but approx 70% of Latinos and Asians voted for Clinton. Oh, and 60% of women voted for her, vs. an even split with men. I can look at California and make the assertions, just as supported as yours, that Clinton won that thanks to sexist women and racist Latinos and Asians.
Except this is all stupid, as there is an actual reason that Obama's numbers were the way they were in North Carolina. Obama was seen as the more liberal candidate, and the left and the poor, especially the urban poor, voted for him by a massive 30+ bias. (Along with the young which isn't that relevant here.) And in North Carolina, 'urban poor' translates to 'black'. In places where it doesn't translate as such, he did not have such a massive black majority.
To simplify: Poor urban voters voted for Obama in the primary. In North Carolina, poor urban voters are, in fact, black. Ergo, in North Carolina, black voters voted for Obama by a huge majority. In other places they did not.
Meanwhile, in the general election, black voters have voted for Democrats by huge huge massive 95% majorities in the last 4 elections, regardless of their skin color.
Yea, and it would have been horrible if Bush had been demonized for anything. I mean, imagine if the American public hadn't liked his policies!
Bush and Clinton both pushed the absolutely corrosive 'home ownership investment' meme that is still floating around and is absolutely idiotic. Investing in houses is like investing in cars...if you have a lot of money, it might be a good idea to buy ones other than the one you use, refurbish and store them, and then sell them when the price goes up. Or Ming vases, or expensive art, or whatever.
It is, however, completely idiotic to pretend your actual home, or your actual car, is an investment. It is not. It is a purchase, one you can probably resell for roughly the same amount of money, but that's not an investment. Only in crazy-land does the value of houses necessarily increase. (The value of housing, relative to average income, has stayed roughly the same throughout human history, varying only slightly usually with advances in technology or new frontier. It has never just randomly risen and kept rising.)
That said, Clinton's push arguably made sense to push more people who could buy houses to buy houses. It's only when we got into 2002 or so and people who could not buy houses started buying houses because banks had invented loans to disguise the cost. (And, as the laws of supply and demand dictate, as demand went up, so did the cost.)
Which was not the 'fault' of Bush except in the general deregulation environment he'd set up, but where he actually should have stepped in was the whole 'massive reselling of loans so that originating banks no longer held the fucking risk, which gave them no inventive to actually make good loans', which is what blew everything up.
Stopping that would have stopped banks from making loans they suspected wouldn't get paid off. In fact, the #1 way to stop this from every happening again is to forbid, by law, banks making home loans (Or any sort of loans) that they intend to resell. Because that gives them a profit incentive to make dubious loans.
I don't actually have any problem with doing something else with paper, even recycling it, although I'm fairly certain that is not useful, energy-wise. High temp incineration sounds like a fine idea. (Good luck getting that past the environmentalists.)
Although I'm not sure why we need a high-temperature incinerator.
I was just complaining about getting people to 'separate out your recyclables' before getting them to 'separate out your batteries'.
Indeed. The environmental movement often pisses me off in talking about shit that is incredibly stupid and ignoring actually important stuff.
My current pet peeve is the billions of dollars we spend on nonsensical 'recycling' of shit like paper, which, duh, grows on trees we specifically plant to grow damn paper. Oh, heaven forbid we throw that away. Let's spend more energy to 'recycle' it then to grow more trees. (And, hell, while we're at it, it's a carbon sink. A short-term one, to be sure, as paper rots in landfills and the CO2 escapes, but whatever.)
You want to save fucking trees, stop eating at places that cut down rain forests to raise cattle, and stop worrying about forests that paper companies plant and harvest. It's paper from a paper farm, you loons. They've got so much of it they aren't even using the extra from lumber mills anymore.
Meanwhile, let's not spend a fucking dime to get people to separate out their toxic batteries and paint and actual stuff we shouldn't be putting in landfills. Let's not actually collect that separately from the trash, so 95% of the people just throw them away, and they end up in landfills and toxic chemicals leech out.
Even if you disagree with me about paper recycling, I want you to sit there and think to yourself if you'd rather have a ton of paper in the local landfill, or a quart of mercury? And then ask yourself, if we're only going to collect one, which one we should set up bins for next to garbage? Which should we be teaching kids to separate from their garbage in school?
</rant>
Oh, and yes, 'In hundreds of years, the cities will be under several feet of water' is stupid as an argument. That is not the problem with global climate change. The problem with global climate change is that, during global climate changes, lots of stuff dies. Randomly, haphazardly. Entire ecosystems. Plants, animals, humans, human-like beings such as congresspeople, all randomly die. Often en mass. For all sorts of crazy reasons. Sometime directly from climate change, sometimes because predators and food move around, sometimes because their breeding is shot to hell, sometimes because the ocean is full of carbonic acid, whatever.
And, then, thousands of years later, new stuff is all over the place, and no one even knows it happened. Which is fine for the distant past, and fine for the future, because humans are very adaptable and we live in any environment on earth that can grow animals and plants we can eat, and we can eat a hell of a lot of different kinds. Skip forward 1000 years, and, no matter what global warming does, humans will be living fine, with a nice standard of living.
It's, however, incredibly annoying if you're actually attempting to live through the damn climate change.
A lot of assholes who think they can wreck the planet for profit need to be lined up and shot, but sometimes I think we'd be a lot better off, if we had the choice to instead turn around and start shooting the assholes who are on 'the side of good' doing just as much damage because of their irrational behavior.
Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor.
The 'many' British who have any sort of private insurance at all is 15%, and almost all that is complimentary insurance that covers where NHS does not. (Like long-term hospice care, and medical disability insurance that covers lost wages.)
The amount of British who 'pay twice', who are actually paying for insurance to cover the cost of things that are covered under the NHS, is something like 5%.
I noticed you actually phrased it as 'many of us' instead of actually including yourself as one of those people. That is because not only do you not pay for private insurance, but you probably don't even know anyone who does.
The fact that the very rich fly around in helicopters is not a valid reason to argue we should not pave roads.
An American may lose his house to pay for an operation, but at least he gets the operation
And then dies because he can't afford antibiotics.
Oh, and of course, half the time he can't get the operation in the first place. Hospitals are only requires to stabilize people. If you have, for example, cancer, they are not required to do surgery if you can't afford it. (As the other responder said, the number of people with preventable blindness is absurd. Hospitals are not required to treat you to stop you from going blind, or losing a limb, just dying.)
Now, the first time you go to the hospital, they obviously don't know you're not going to pay your bill. So anyone can, shall we say, get medical treatment once from any random hospital. And the law requires them to keep you from bleeding to death in their waiting room, but that's it.
while the Brits die from MRSA, waiting months for urgent surgery in a dirty ward, paying more (on average) for the privilege.
If you have been informed that Brits pay more for surgery than Americans, you have been lied to.
In fact, the British pay no money, on average, for surgery, so I'm not even entirely sure what you're talking about.
Question for you: Why do these expire? If I bought the "Right to Pollute" and didn't use it all, why can't I use it at a later time?
When it's pointed out they do expire, and, moreover, essentially all sales would take place at the start of each quarter, you somehow assert people should be free to hoard them, despite you already pointing out the exact problem with that.
This hasn't even passed yet, and these "regulatory industries" (interesting term -- industry implying a profit motive) don't even exist yet.
Industries does not actually imply 'profit' in anyone's book. Industry implies manufacturing. However, I meant 'regulators of industries'.
And I can't even address your idea that you think that companies will be getting carbon credits from some private firm with 'quantities defined by the the edicts of the seller'. You really don't have any idea how this system works, do you?
Who will monitor the output of every industry in the country?
You know, I'm just going to have explain this damn law, aren't I? Because you appear to have a lot of misconceptions about it.
The basis of it is that each year, various industries that produce large amounts of CO2 will have their equipment evaluated by the EPA, like it already is for all sorts of things. They will simply start including CO2 output. If you have find a single industry covered under carbon credits that isn't inspected by the EPA anyway to make sure they aren't dumping mercury and whatnot into the air, please inform me. (So that answers your 'who will do the inspecting' question. The government agency that's already doing the inspecting anyway.) Total and averages will be figured out.
And, based on that, each business in that industry will be given some sort of credits based on how much 'product' they produce. It's easiest to use electric companies as an example, they'd get a certain amount for each kW of electricity they make. (Most industries that are covered are manufacturers of raw material, so are easy to compare.)
If they are producing less CO2 per 'unit' of whatever they're making than the average (Or wherever the line is drawn.), they will have carbon credits to turn over to a market, operated by a specific company named in the law. (They can, of course, choose to not do this.) There are not a bunch of people trading, there are people handing their credit to one company, who holds it until someone buys it.
Likewise, companies that haven't been given enough carbon credits (Because they're using inefficient processes that cost more per 'unit'.) will then have to go to that market and buy them.
It's important to note individual trades do not normally happen. Everyone buys 'unlabeled' credits from the market. I believe individual trades were left legal, so that different business entities within the same corporate umbrella could trade easily, but it is not something that anyone would expect. This essentially makes all your 'corner the market' ideas nonsense. No one's going to be selling to other people. They'll be handing them to the market to sell.
It's also important to note that, as this market is full of imaginary things, if something did happen and the market actually was empty because some private individual was hoarding credits, the government could, of course, just invent a bunch more credits and dump it in to stave off this hypothetical 'everyone dies cause of hoarders' scenario you've invented.
I wonder how you speak with such certainty about a system that doesn't even exist yet.
Because our system is based on the system in other countries that do exist. Because the law itself sets up the system to trade them.
It's like you've done no research at all.
I didn't say that randomness was a good way to detect encryption. Someone else said that. It is trivially easy to pad encryption with non-random stuff. (It is trivially easy to make anything easily compressible by padding it with junk.)
I said that lack of compressibility was a good way to detect, is in fact the definition, of randomness. Your XML file is not very random at all.
America's presence in Afghanistan is not an invading force.
If we did not invade, but instead provided troubles to help the legitimate government of Afghanistan fight off some rebels....surely, at the end, we would have been given medals by the legit government of Afghanistan, who would have walked back into their offices and started running the country. Right?
Oh, wait, you say for a while, we ourselves were the government under the 'occupied nation' rules of the Geneva Convention? We were required to provide public services and whatnot to the population of the country we, apparently, were occupying, like governments have to?
And then, as dictated under those rules, we then set up a government to run the place and turned it over to the locals? Where they then had constitutional voting and elections of their government?
Where was the 'legitimate government' of Afghanistan, aka, the Northern Alliance, during this? Didn't they have anything to say about the fact that, after we'd kicked out the illegitimate pretenders, we'd then ignored the actual government and occupied the country, setting up our own government and replacing them?
You can sit there and pretend that the Northern Alliance was the legitimate government of Afghanistan all you want, but the Northern Alliance is not the current government there, or even the heir to the current government there...we are.
Hence we invaded and overthrew the government of Afghanistan even if the Northern Alliance was the legit government. Heh. We just invaded and overthrew them while they were weak from fighting the Taliban, and also apparently lied and said we were on their side in their civil war, when in reality we going to take the country from them and the Taliban.
You fail logic forever.
When I refer to the government of Afghanistan, I mean the real one, not the Taliban pretending he's in charge.
So you think Iran's shouldn't be worried because you apparently think we 'technically' didn't invade Afghanistan? So you think they are total morons?
Um, no. The fact is that we sent troops into and wrestled control away from the de facto government of a neighboring nation. Iran's not going to say 'Oh, that doesn't count, because you were able to get a tiny government-in-exile to legitimize it.'.
Incidentally, you're wrong. Failing to recognize the government of a country and going to war with them on behalf of another government that claims it's the legitimate one, is, in fact, an 'invasion' under any international law. Quite a lot of countries that invade each other do not recognize the other as legitimate...failing to recognize the other government as legit is, in fact, halfway to war.
But international law has no concept of 'recognized' countries. Anyone in control of an area of land, as long as they can hold that land and, in general, exercise the functions of government, and calling themselves a government, is a government, period. Of course, if they stole that land from an existing country, that country is automatically already at war with them and should feel free to take it back in self defense. (Now, to get into the UN you have to recognized by enough countries, but that's not the same thing as actually being a country.)
But where you are confused, I think, is that you believe a country getting involved in a 'civil war' and taking over the entire country is not an invasion. It really really is. Our military was not operating under the command of the Northern Alliance, we were not assisting them, we were invading the country, nominally for them, although you'll notice we did not, in fact, turn the country over to them at the end. We, instead, set up an 'occupation force', as defined under the Geneva convention, and ran their government for them until they could take control.
Which doesn't matter, as the invasion of Afghanistan was legal under various legal theories and the UN supported it. But it was, nevertheless, an invasion. If it had not been an invasion, if we had just be 'helping out' against a rebellion, our troops would have been under the control of the NA, and at the end, the NA would have been in charge.
That doesn't really have anything to do with moral relativism.
As long as we've decided that, objectively, killing US citizens is less evil than trafficking in drugs.
And, I look around at swat home invasions and the death of innocent people in the US, and, think, hey, we actually have decided that.
It's not 'moral relativism' at all. It's the exact opposite of it. It is 'Drugs are more immoral than causing the deaths of people. In all circumstances'.
Granted, it's totally fucked up objective morality, but it is objective morality. Killing people==somewhat evil. Drug trafficking==very evil.
I have no idea what you're talking about. We're there with the current government's support, just like Iraq's. (Well, mostly.)
That doesn't change the fact we invaded them.
Which would get them kicked out of the country.
Embassies may be involute foreign soil, but but that doesn't mean the host country has to let you keep operating them. They can say 'You have 24 hours until this embassy stops being an embassy. We will expect you gone by then.'
Although in reality they'd just jam the signal.