I get why vendors want this feature, I just don't see what is in it for the people who actually buy the TVs. I remember having the same feeling when Microsoft was touting how VIsta would have this stuff in it that would make it harder for people to copy copyrighted material.
I don't know if you have noticed, but there are, apparently, over 22 million people already living in Australia. It would seem that one or more of them could take advantage of this business opportunity.
The summary makes it seem as if it was not in their spare time. I have now actually read the article and the second article linked seems to imply that this was done in their spare time. It is just that they published a non-scientific paper in a semi-scientific journal. There is no science in this paper and the fact that the authors are scientists is irrelevant.
I'm sorry, the audience cheered when she said that she thought about doing nothing for the white farmer because he was white. That is racist. It doesn't matter that she continued to say that she realized that such behavior was wrong. Breitbart did not include that video in order to demonstrate that Shirley Sherrod was racist, but to illustrate that the audience was, which even when you watch the entire video still comes through.
As for the ACORN videos, there were enough videos of enough ACORN offices providing advice for how someone importing underage illegal immigrants in order to have them work as prostitutes could get around laws to demonstrate that it was not against ACORN policy to do so. Especially when combined with the number of accounts from all over the country of ACORN fraudently registering voters.
Yes it does. Apple has calculated that at a price comparable to what they charge in Australia, they would not get the market share that they want in the U.S.. Additionally, if they fail to get that market share in the U.S., they will not sell as many worldwide (even if they do not inflate the price in certain countries). This second calculation may or may not be accurate, but it is certainly part of their pricing strategy.
You do realize that the poster you responded to was not implying that Apple's costs were higher, just that if you don't like Apple's prices in Australia why don't you buy it somewhere where it is sold cheaper and have it shipped? His explanation was that shipping costs ate up the difference. Based on responses from other posters, this is apparently not the case.
If Australian prices for electronic goods are routinely higher than the combination of the retail cost elsewhere plus the cost of shipping to Australia, the Australian government needs to look into what about its laws has kept anyone from trying to capitalize on this discrepancy to make money. From what other posters have posted about the retail prices of electronics in Australia, it sounds like there should be a business opportunity there for someone. If there isn't, that suggests that there are laws/regulations that allow businesses to get away with charging inflated prices in Australia.
You know what is funny is that Andrew Breitbart's posting of the video that got that "innocent woman"* in trouble was not about that woman. It was about the reaction of her audience to her revelation that her initial reaction to a request for help from a white farmer when she was in a government job was to not help. The point of the video segment that Andrew Breitbat posted was that the NAACP was hypocritical to call for others to condemn racist statements when their own members cheered a clearly racist behavior before she explained that she went ahead and did the right thing even though she was tempted to behave in a racist manner. It was the reaction of others without ever looking into what actually happened that led to the problems for Shirley Sherrod. As for ACORN, what was the lie?
* I use the quotes around innocent woman because of Sherrod's involvement in the Pigford settlement which has elements that suggest impropriety. I have not followed the Pigford settlement story cloesly enough to have a clear opinion on whether or not improprieties actually occurred or whether or not Sherrod was involved in such improprieties.
The thing is, the thought experiments described in that article are actually related to the science that the scientists in question actually did. I am unaware of any repeatable experiments that have involved extraterrestials. Both of the thought experiments that are used as examples in your link (Schrodinger's Cat and Maxwell's Demon) are used to illustrate a conclusion that these scientists had come to as a result of repeatable experiments.
I would be hard pressed to come up with a repeatable experiment that would give us a basis to draw conclusions about how extraterrestials would interact with humans. If, on the other hand, they had asked historians I could see them getting two scenarios: First scenario, the aleins exterminate humans in order to colonize the Earth. Second scenario, the aliens enslave humans in order to colonize the Earth and use humans as slave labor. There are almost certainly a couple more scenarios that historians could come up with based on human interactions in the past, however, I am pretty sure we have no examples of one human civilization wiping out another one because of what the latter did to the environment.
Do you remember when the term "scientist" applied to people who did science? We used to reserve the title "scientist" for people who did repeatable experiments. People like the ones referred to in this article were called "science fiction writers" with the key word being "fiction".
I don't know what the scaling up issues would be from trying to apply the Estonian solution to Canada. I am just pointing out that there would be such issues. The fact that there would be such issues suggests that changing a system that has no obvious failings at accomplishing its purpose (selecting national office holders in a way that people trust to be honest) because we would like to add some features (being able to know the outcome faster) is not a good idea.
I think that if the primaries were paid for by the parties rather than by the states, the problems we see with states like Iowa and New Hampshire having undue influence on the eventual nominee would be eliminated. However, I think the press makes too much of the influence that those early states have. While it is true that issues that are specific to those states influence to some degree which candidates come out of them strong, I believe that for the most part the outcomes would be similar if different states were the first to hold primaries. That is, while the "challengers" would have been different, most of the time the nominee would have been the same.
As far as campaign financing goes, so far the only real impact that "campaign finance reform" has had is to make it harder to unseat an incumbent. If we got rid of all of our current "campaign finance reform" laws, PACs would go away. The problem with requiring ads to state who paid for the ad is that it is often misleading. "This Ad is paid for by Citizens United Against Fraud" Then if you investigate, you discover that "Citizens United Against Fraud" is a corporation formed by a group of corporations or individuals who have been repeatedly accused of fraud. There is no way to avoid this that does not involve the government making judgement calls about the motivations of groups that band together to influence public policy. And when the government is making judgement calls about who is allowed to speak out on political issues, you will soon discover that the people who are found to be in the wrong are those who effectively oppose the position favored by those government officials making the judgement.
It is not population density. It is scale. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. Just because a system works for Estonia does not mean that it would work for Canada. As a general rule, the best solution to a problem on a small scale will not work (or will work badly) on the large scale. While a solution that will work on a large scale, will usually work on a smale scale, it is generally a poor solution.
I am amazed that the people on this board have such a problem understanding the difficulty of scaling up a solution.
It is not population density per se. The problem is population size and geographic size. A solution that works for a small group of people concentrated in a small area will likely not work as well for a large group of people spread out over a large area. Think about a group of 3 or 4 people deciding to go out to eat together. Now think about a group of 20 people deciding to go out to eat together. Would the same method for deciding where and when to go work for the larger group?
Now think about how that decision making process changes if the 3 or 4 people were all at the same place, while the group of 20 were scattered over several miles. The problems of elections are much more complicated than even that.
On your points, I think that having the primaries held in all states on the same day would make the problems worse (it would make it easier for someone to win a Party's nomination on superficial appeal). Instead, I would do away with the taxpayer paying for and the government running elections designed to decide who represents a political party. The primaries serve no purpose that is legitimately the governments business. If the political parties want to hold primaries (and I see them as a good idea), they should pay the costs themselves.
I would not make tax day and election day the same day. Tax day should be about two weeks before election day. The exact amount of time is debatable, but the purpose of having tax day some, short period of time before election day is to give people time to think about what is wrong with the way taxes are and talk about how to fix it. To go along with that, I would do away with automatic withholding of taxes and make people pay how much they owe on tax day.
Elections are currently publicly financed. What you probably mean is that the election campaigns should be publicly financed. There are several problems with that. First, how do you decide who is eligible to get government money to campaign? Second, if candidates cannot spend their own (or their supporters) money to run their campaign, the official campaign efforts will be dwarfed by third party efforts. If you say that you will do away with third party efforts, how do you square that with freedom of speech. What happens if I believe that my take on the issues in the campaign is not represented by any of the official campaigns? Am I not allowed to go out and make my position known?
Requiring IDs is a great idea. Not requiring IDs is inviting fraud (which of course is why certain politicians oppose requiring ID).
I don't see any reason to change the way ballots are done now (or at least the way they were done up until 2000, I haven't kept up to date on all of the election law changes since then). The problems in Flordia were the result of a ballot designed by a member of the Democratic Party and the candidate that was harmed by it was the Democratic Party candidate. Additionally, while the ballot was badly designed, the people who had trouble properly voting using it were the sorts that I would be just as happy not having their votes count anyway (too stupid/lazy to understand/take the time to make sure their vote was cast correctly).
I would have no objection to local/state governments deciding to use your preferred ballot, but I think the decision on how to set up the ballots should remain a local/state one.
Let's see, Estonia is around 45,000 square kilometers with a population of less than 1.5 million, while Canada is around 10 million square kilometers with a population of over 33 million. Yeah, I don't see any reason why a solution that works great in Estonia can't just be ported over to Canada. The two countries are so similar in size, population and culture.
For problem #2, you are also talking about people who are too lazy to actually know what any of the people running are actually like. I'm sorry, but low voter turnout for elections is a manufactured problem. People who talk about increasing voter turnout generally mean increasing the number of easily manipulated voters so that politicians are less answerable to the voters for their actions because a larger percentage of the voters are only paying attention for, at most, a week or two before the elections. By increasing voter turnout without actually increasing the number of people who pay attention, politicians can get away with doing unpopular things by doing them early in their term.
No, the person I was replying to clearly referred to "grammar" (although to be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure what grammar has to do with incorrect use of a word). By using the word grammar, the poster was clearly referring to common usage, not legal profession specific usage. By common usage, one of the definitions of the word "steal" is making unauthorized copies of copyrighted material (and has been for several centuries).
however libertarianism only concentrates more wealth to the top.
You mean as opposed to the way our over-regulated system run by someone who says he wants to "spread the wealth around" concentrates wealth at the top? A look at world history suggests that the more powerful and all-encompassing the government is, the more wealth gets concentrated at the top.
I know that this a meme among many people here on slashdot, but it is wrong. The use of the words "steal" and "theft" to apply to making copies of copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright owner goes back as far as I can track. I found a contemporary record mentioning someone "stealing" Shakespeare's work (which I believe predates all copyright law).
I am confused. How would you select judges?
However, your perception of how American judges are selected seems to be distorted. The first thing to realize is that there are two completely separate categories of judges in the American judicial system. The first two groups are state judges and federal judges (this particular judge is a federal judge). Federal judges are appointed by the President, subject to approval or rejection by the Senate. Once they are approved, they hold that seat for life unless they resign it (either to retire, or to accept another position) or are impeached by Congress. How state judges get their jobs is more complicated, as that depends on the laws and constitution of the individual state. Some states hold elections for judges. Some states have the governor appoint the judges subject to approval by the state legislature. I believe one or two states have some sort of commission that selects judges. Additionally, some states where the governor appoints judges require that they stand for re-election after a period of time.
Well, obviously, you are hearing a different tea party than I am. I would really like to know who it is you are hearing.
Of course somebody like Warren Buffett thinks the rich should be taxed more, he makes a significant portion of his money from selling tax shelter investments. You know George Soros said that hedge funds should be more heavily regulated. Of course, as soon as the new regulations went into effect he closed his hedge fund to outside investors so that it was not subject to the new regulations that he had called for.
When someone like George Soros or Warren Buffett calls for higher taxes on "the rich", they don't mean themselves, they mean other people. There are two reasons that people like Warren Buffett call for higher taxes. The first is because they make money from helping people avoid those taxes. The second is because it makes it harder for other people to become as wealthy as they are. If Warren Buffett feels that he is not paying enough taxes, he is welcome to pay more by not taking all of the deductions he is entitled to, or even just writing the government a check. He doesn't do that which suggests that he does not feel that he isn't paying enough taxes, but that other people aren't paying enough taxes. President Obama did the same thing. He said that he could afford to pay more, yet he took the maximum deductions he was eligible for when he filed his income taxes.
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I get why vendors want this feature, I just don't see what is in it for the people who actually buy the TVs. I remember having the same feeling when Microsoft was touting how VIsta would have this stuff in it that would make it harder for people to copy copyrighted material.
I don't know if you have noticed, but there are, apparently, over 22 million people already living in Australia. It would seem that one or more of them could take advantage of this business opportunity.
The summary makes it seem as if it was not in their spare time. I have now actually read the article and the second article linked seems to imply that this was done in their spare time. It is just that they published a non-scientific paper in a semi-scientific journal. There is no science in this paper and the fact that the authors are scientists is irrelevant.
I'm sorry, the audience cheered when she said that she thought about doing nothing for the white farmer because he was white. That is racist. It doesn't matter that she continued to say that she realized that such behavior was wrong. Breitbart did not include that video in order to demonstrate that Shirley Sherrod was racist, but to illustrate that the audience was, which even when you watch the entire video still comes through.
As for the ACORN videos, there were enough videos of enough ACORN offices providing advice for how someone importing underage illegal immigrants in order to have them work as prostitutes could get around laws to demonstrate that it was not against ACORN policy to do so. Especially when combined with the number of accounts from all over the country of ACORN fraudently registering voters.
That's right, blacks can't be racists, so those who point out racist behaviors by them must be racist.
Yes it does. Apple has calculated that at a price comparable to what they charge in Australia, they would not get the market share that they want in the U.S.. Additionally, if they fail to get that market share in the U.S., they will not sell as many worldwide (even if they do not inflate the price in certain countries). This second calculation may or may not be accurate, but it is certainly part of their pricing strategy.
You do realize that the poster you responded to was not implying that Apple's costs were higher, just that if you don't like Apple's prices in Australia why don't you buy it somewhere where it is sold cheaper and have it shipped? His explanation was that shipping costs ate up the difference. Based on responses from other posters, this is apparently not the case.
If Australian prices for electronic goods are routinely higher than the combination of the retail cost elsewhere plus the cost of shipping to Australia, the Australian government needs to look into what about its laws has kept anyone from trying to capitalize on this discrepancy to make money. From what other posters have posted about the retail prices of electronics in Australia, it sounds like there should be a business opportunity there for someone. If there isn't, that suggests that there are laws/regulations that allow businesses to get away with charging inflated prices in Australia.
You know what is funny is that Andrew Breitbart's posting of the video that got that "innocent woman"* in trouble was not about that woman. It was about the reaction of her audience to her revelation that her initial reaction to a request for help from a white farmer when she was in a government job was to not help. The point of the video segment that Andrew Breitbat posted was that the NAACP was hypocritical to call for others to condemn racist statements when their own members cheered a clearly racist behavior before she explained that she went ahead and did the right thing even though she was tempted to behave in a racist manner. It was the reaction of others without ever looking into what actually happened that led to the problems for Shirley Sherrod. As for ACORN, what was the lie?
* I use the quotes around innocent woman because of Sherrod's involvement in the Pigford settlement which has elements that suggest impropriety. I have not followed the Pigford settlement story cloesly enough to have a clear opinion on whether or not improprieties actually occurred or whether or not Sherrod was involved in such improprieties.
The thing is, the thought experiments described in that article are actually related to the science that the scientists in question actually did. I am unaware of any repeatable experiments that have involved extraterrestials. Both of the thought experiments that are used as examples in your link (Schrodinger's Cat and Maxwell's Demon) are used to illustrate a conclusion that these scientists had come to as a result of repeatable experiments.
I would be hard pressed to come up with a repeatable experiment that would give us a basis to draw conclusions about how extraterrestials would interact with humans. If, on the other hand, they had asked historians I could see them getting two scenarios: First scenario, the aleins exterminate humans in order to colonize the Earth. Second scenario, the aliens enslave humans in order to colonize the Earth and use humans as slave labor. There are almost certainly a couple more scenarios that historians could come up with based on human interactions in the past, however, I am pretty sure we have no examples of one human civilization wiping out another one because of what the latter did to the environment.
Do you remember when the term "scientist" applied to people who did science? We used to reserve the title "scientist" for people who did repeatable experiments. People like the ones referred to in this article were called "science fiction writers" with the key word being "fiction".
I don't know what the scaling up issues would be from trying to apply the Estonian solution to Canada. I am just pointing out that there would be such issues. The fact that there would be such issues suggests that changing a system that has no obvious failings at accomplishing its purpose (selecting national office holders in a way that people trust to be honest) because we would like to add some features (being able to know the outcome faster) is not a good idea.
I think that if the primaries were paid for by the parties rather than by the states, the problems we see with states like Iowa and New Hampshire having undue influence on the eventual nominee would be eliminated. However, I think the press makes too much of the influence that those early states have. While it is true that issues that are specific to those states influence to some degree which candidates come out of them strong, I believe that for the most part the outcomes would be similar if different states were the first to hold primaries. That is, while the "challengers" would have been different, most of the time the nominee would have been the same.
As far as campaign financing goes, so far the only real impact that "campaign finance reform" has had is to make it harder to unseat an incumbent. If we got rid of all of our current "campaign finance reform" laws, PACs would go away. The problem with requiring ads to state who paid for the ad is that it is often misleading. "This Ad is paid for by Citizens United Against Fraud" Then if you investigate, you discover that "Citizens United Against Fraud" is a corporation formed by a group of corporations or individuals who have been repeatedly accused of fraud. There is no way to avoid this that does not involve the government making judgement calls about the motivations of groups that band together to influence public policy. And when the government is making judgement calls about who is allowed to speak out on political issues, you will soon discover that the people who are found to be in the wrong are those who effectively oppose the position favored by those government officials making the judgement.
It is not population density. It is scale. What works on a small scale does not necessarily work on a large scale. Just because a system works for Estonia does not mean that it would work for Canada. As a general rule, the best solution to a problem on a small scale will not work (or will work badly) on the large scale. While a solution that will work on a large scale, will usually work on a smale scale, it is generally a poor solution.
I am amazed that the people on this board have such a problem understanding the difficulty of scaling up a solution.
It is not an analogy. It is an illustration about how a system that works for a small group of people does not work for a larger group of people.
It is not population density per se. The problem is population size and geographic size. A solution that works for a small group of people concentrated in a small area will likely not work as well for a large group of people spread out over a large area. Think about a group of 3 or 4 people deciding to go out to eat together. Now think about a group of 20 people deciding to go out to eat together. Would the same method for deciding where and when to go work for the larger group?
Now think about how that decision making process changes if the 3 or 4 people were all at the same place, while the group of 20 were scattered over several miles. The problems of elections are much more complicated than even that.
On your points, I think that having the primaries held in all states on the same day would make the problems worse (it would make it easier for someone to win a Party's nomination on superficial appeal). Instead, I would do away with the taxpayer paying for and the government running elections designed to decide who represents a political party. The primaries serve no purpose that is legitimately the governments business. If the political parties want to hold primaries (and I see them as a good idea), they should pay the costs themselves.
I would not make tax day and election day the same day. Tax day should be about two weeks before election day. The exact amount of time is debatable, but the purpose of having tax day some, short period of time before election day is to give people time to think about what is wrong with the way taxes are and talk about how to fix it. To go along with that, I would do away with automatic withholding of taxes and make people pay how much they owe on tax day.
Elections are currently publicly financed. What you probably mean is that the election campaigns should be publicly financed. There are several problems with that. First, how do you decide who is eligible to get government money to campaign? Second, if candidates cannot spend their own (or their supporters) money to run their campaign, the official campaign efforts will be dwarfed by third party efforts. If you say that you will do away with third party efforts, how do you square that with freedom of speech. What happens if I believe that my take on the issues in the campaign is not represented by any of the official campaigns? Am I not allowed to go out and make my position known?
Requiring IDs is a great idea. Not requiring IDs is inviting fraud (which of course is why certain politicians oppose requiring ID).
I don't see any reason to change the way ballots are done now (or at least the way they were done up until 2000, I haven't kept up to date on all of the election law changes since then). The problems in Flordia were the result of a ballot designed by a member of the Democratic Party and the candidate that was harmed by it was the Democratic Party candidate. Additionally, while the ballot was badly designed, the people who had trouble properly voting using it were the sorts that I would be just as happy not having their votes count anyway (too stupid/lazy to understand/take the time to make sure their vote was cast correctly).
I would have no objection to local/state governments deciding to use your preferred ballot, but I think the decision on how to set up the ballots should remain a local/state one.
Let's see, Estonia is around 45,000 square kilometers with a population of less than 1.5 million, while Canada is around 10 million square kilometers with a population of over 33 million. Yeah, I don't see any reason why a solution that works great in Estonia can't just be ported over to Canada. The two countries are so similar in size, population and culture.
For problem #2, you are also talking about people who are too lazy to actually know what any of the people running are actually like. I'm sorry, but low voter turnout for elections is a manufactured problem. People who talk about increasing voter turnout generally mean increasing the number of easily manipulated voters so that politicians are less answerable to the voters for their actions because a larger percentage of the voters are only paying attention for, at most, a week or two before the elections. By increasing voter turnout without actually increasing the number of people who pay attention, politicians can get away with doing unpopular things by doing them early in their term.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/steal
Definition 2
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
No, the person I was replying to clearly referred to "grammar" (although to be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure what grammar has to do with incorrect use of a word). By using the word grammar, the poster was clearly referring to common usage, not legal profession specific usage. By common usage, one of the definitions of the word "steal" is making unauthorized copies of copyrighted material (and has been for several centuries).
however libertarianism only concentrates more wealth to the top.
You mean as opposed to the way our over-regulated system run by someone who says he wants to "spread the wealth around" concentrates wealth at the top? A look at world history suggests that the more powerful and all-encompassing the government is, the more wealth gets concentrated at the top.
I know that this a meme among many people here on slashdot, but it is wrong. The use of the words "steal" and "theft" to apply to making copies of copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright owner goes back as far as I can track. I found a contemporary record mentioning someone "stealing" Shakespeare's work (which I believe predates all copyright law).
I am confused. How would you select judges?
However, your perception of how American judges are selected seems to be distorted. The first thing to realize is that there are two completely separate categories of judges in the American judicial system. The first two groups are state judges and federal judges (this particular judge is a federal judge). Federal judges are appointed by the President, subject to approval or rejection by the Senate. Once they are approved, they hold that seat for life unless they resign it (either to retire, or to accept another position) or are impeached by Congress. How state judges get their jobs is more complicated, as that depends on the laws and constitution of the individual state. Some states hold elections for judges. Some states have the governor appoint the judges subject to approval by the state legislature. I believe one or two states have some sort of commission that selects judges. Additionally, some states where the governor appoints judges require that they stand for re-election after a period of time.
Well, obviously, you are hearing a different tea party than I am. I would really like to know who it is you are hearing.
Of course somebody like Warren Buffett thinks the rich should be taxed more, he makes a significant portion of his money from selling tax shelter investments. You know George Soros said that hedge funds should be more heavily regulated. Of course, as soon as the new regulations went into effect he closed his hedge fund to outside investors so that it was not subject to the new regulations that he had called for.
When someone like George Soros or Warren Buffett calls for higher taxes on "the rich", they don't mean themselves, they mean other people. There are two reasons that people like Warren Buffett call for higher taxes. The first is because they make money from helping people avoid those taxes. The second is because it makes it harder for other people to become as wealthy as they are. If Warren Buffett feels that he is not paying enough taxes, he is welcome to pay more by not taking all of the deductions he is entitled to, or even just writing the government a check. He doesn't do that which suggests that he does not feel that he isn't paying enough taxes, but that other people aren't paying enough taxes. President Obama did the same thing. He said that he could afford to pay more, yet he took the maximum deductions he was eligible for when he filed his income taxes.
Really? How many tea party events have you been to?