See, you had a serious misunderstanding, spying on citizens is only bad when Republicans do it. When Democrats do it it is good. Just like not paying taxes is bad when Republicans do it and is reason to not get confirmed to a Cabinet post, but when a Democrat does it, "No big deal".
gah, if you have nothing to hide then you shouldnt have any problem with the government seeing what your doing on the internet. The only people who want to hide what their doing are the ones who have something to hide
My problem isn't with the government "seeing" what I am doing on the Internet, it is with them looking for no particular reason.
Suppose the government starts looking at your online posts and discovers that you said unflattering things about a member of Congress and now you get an IRS audit. You didn't do anything wrong either in your post or in filing your taxes, but a tax audit is still a royal pain.
At the time that David Weber wrote the book that contained the idea that gravity waves were FTL, there was debate in the scientific community as to whether or not gravity waves had the same limit as light. At the time there were philosophical reasons why different scientists took different positions, but no data to support one or the other. Within two years of publication, new data was acquired and the scientifically established position was that gravity waves were also limited by the speed of light.
David Weber chose to continue his Honor series as an alternate universe, instead of an imaginary future universe.
okay so that is a terribly smart thing to say. but actually trained professionals are highly educated and responsible citizens. they are much less likely to be biased than a layman.
Citation please. I'm sorry but I have seen no evidence that "trained professionals" are any less biased than anybody else. I have even seen studies that suggest that "trained professionals" actually have stronger biases than the general populace.
Really, that saying was a saying? The old saying was "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM." I don't know if it is still true, but it had the advantage of being true for longer than Microsoft has been a company.
Actually, the problem is that sometime in the 90's (I think I remember the start point correctly), dividends became incidental. It was all about increasing stock price. It was a result of the tax rate on capital gains being lower than the tax rate on dividends. Investors preferred to receive the profits on their investments in the form of increased stock price instead of dividends.
After Enron, I saw an article written by an economist/investment adviser (I forget his exact credentials), that explained that the Enron scam would not have been possible for a company paying dividends. He linked to several articles he had published about investing in companies that paid dividends over the long haul. I am pretty sure that his logic would apply to this situation as well, companies that pay dividends could not have gotten over leveraged in the manner that caused this economic crisis. The logic is that to pay dividends you have to have real profits to distribute, not just paper profits.
Really, you have never seen articles about "We found out how you can prevent yourself from getting"? You have never read about how smoking causes health problems? You have never read about how increasing dietary fiber reduces the risk of colon cancer? There are more, but I think this shows that your premise is bunk.
The problem is that the "diseases of old age" have many possible causes and it takes a long time to identify them.
People forget that in 1900 greater than 3 out of 100 children died between the ages of 2 and 20, in 2000 that rate was less than 2 out of 1000.
I say "Horseshit" to you. The reason that no cure for "cancer" has been found is because "cancer" is not one thing, it is many things. Some cancer has been cured. Here is a list of curable cancers:
* Childhood Acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL)
* Hodgkin's disease
* Large cell lymphoma
* APL
* Testicular cancer
* Choriocarcinoma http://www.fhcrc.org/science/education/courses/cancer_course/clinical/treatment/curable.html
So your whole premise is crap. Modern medicine is making major strides at improving the health of humans.
Sorry, it was Big Bang vs Atheists. The strongest opposition to the Big Bang theory came from atheists, because if the Universe had a beginning that implies that it had a Creator. One of the philosophical ideas that led to the development of the scientific method is that everything that has a beginning has a cause.
By that philosophy, if the Universe had a beginning, it must have had a cause. If the Universe had a cause it is very hard to dismiss the idea of God. By that philosophy God does not need a cause because He had no beginning.
There's an easy way to prevent you from doing this. They will have you sit in the waiting room for 48+ hours, and you won't have the right to leave it until seen by a doctor. You'll learn fast enough not to come back until you really need it;)
It also is a great way to save costs, a fair number of people will die before they get to see the doctor so the government won't have to pay for their treatment. Win/win.
The Authors Guild is not the book equivalent of the RIAA, As far as I can tell, there are no publishers that are members of the Authors Guild. The membership of the Authors Guild appears to be exclusively published authors.
If the Authors Guild were to go to court (at this point, they do not appear to have done so), they would only represent their members. And even there, they would probably have to actually get their members to opt-in to be represented in this manner.
Under copyright law at the time it was copyrighted it would have entered the public domain in 1991. However, the Copyright Act of 1976 extended it to 75 years from the date of publication and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added 20 more years. It is now due to enter the public domain in 2030. http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
So, he is saying that the Kindle (a product developed and marketed by Amazon) makes an author's product more valuable, so Amazon should pay the author more money. The author didn't make his book more valuable, Amazon did. Why should the author get a cut of that added value?
Document your contacts with them on this issue. If in the future, you fail to receive a job from a company that contacts them for a reference sue them. They told you that if you leave after a three week notice, they would black ball you. If you have this well documented, they can't afford to black ball you. Lawsuits are why most companies won't give out any more information on former employees than, "Yes, they worked here. They are eligible/ineligible for rehire," when asked for information about a former employee. If it is well documented they might give out information regarding attendance.
So, if the English hadn't built guns but had instead listened to the "voices of the people", the Spanish Armada would have sunk all on its own?
Of course, Queen Elizabeth could have given peace a chance and married King Phillip of Spain, forced the English to convert back to Catholicism and imported the Inquisition. If she had done that Phillip probably wouldn't have attempted to invade England.
Because BBC is a news service and slashdot is a news aggregator. Slashdot doesn't "report" anything, they merely provide links to stories and a place to discuss said stories. Until someone else reports on a story, it won't appear on slashdot.
However, in fifty years, the "New York Times" will still exist as a news organization.
What do you mean "still"? The "New York Times" hasn't been a news organization since at least the 30's (when it won a Pulitzer Prize for an article which denied the Ukrainian famine).
This tax would only violate the Interstate Commerce Clause if they tried to force companies with no physical presence in their state to collect it. As other posters have noted this is merely an extension of the existing use tax to internet downloads. The real question is, how do they intend to collect it?
Then you have been wasting your money. I have a good friend whose family I like to use in this type of discussion because it is such a good analog to the one I grew up in. The father is a very bright guy who is mechanically inclined but with no college degree (very similar to my father). The mother is an RN (similar to my mother who was an LPN). They have 8 children, I am the youngest of 6 children. They have a house that is comparable to the one I grew up in but on three times as much land. Overall, they are better off than the family I grew up in even though the father has spent significantly more of his life unemployed than my father.
However, I take objection with: "Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money."
Please note the very important qualification in that statement: "generally".
I agree that government spending on infrastructure is a good thing. However, when did the U.S. government undertake its most successful infrastructure spending (the Interstate Highway system)? For the most part the Interstate Highway System was put into place during the 1950's. a time when the U.S. economy was going strong.
Overall, I think we are in close agreement, with slight disagreements over emphasis. I think this spending bill was atrocious. I think the economy would be better off if the government would stop trying to "fix" it.
Sorry to have misunderstood you, there is a large segment of the population(even here on Slashdot) who thinks that the correct response to an economic problem is some form of protectionism.
All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.
This is patently false. Not all economists agree that government spending is a "good thing" in times of contraction. Here is an economist who argues that it is a bad thing: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5408
He is by the way a staunch conservative/libertarian who tends to support Republican politics (although I have seen him write columns condemning "spend, spend" Republican policies).
If the U.S. government starts a policy of "Buy American", it will start a trade war. A trade war at this time will start the Great Depression II. A trade war is what started the Great Depression the first time (Smoot-Hawley Act).
This error relates to Jan/Feb 2009 only. The problem has been identified quickly. It will be fixed quickly. No big deal.
For the climate change deniers among you, this is how science is supposed to work. Scientist A says something, scientist B says "hang on my experiment gives different results", scientist A checks and says "sorry, yes, we goofed" and it gets fixed.
In this case, Scientist A said "Yes, we knew that, but that data shows that our historical data is flawed, so we decided not to use it."
At least two studies have shown that free trade policies are beneficial to the importing country.
That is if country A imports goods from country B and does not charge a tariff its economy gets to take advantage of the efficiencies of country B's economy. Country B on the other hand charges a tariff on goods imported from country A and suffers from having goods produced more efficiently in country A priced at the rates of producing them in country B.
Slashdot Mirror
See, you had a serious misunderstanding, spying on citizens is only bad when Republicans do it. When Democrats do it it is good. Just like not paying taxes is bad when Republicans do it and is reason to not get confirmed to a Cabinet post, but when a Democrat does it, "No big deal".
gah, if you have nothing to hide then you shouldnt have any problem with the government seeing what your doing on the internet. The only people who want to hide what their doing are the ones who have something to hide
My problem isn't with the government "seeing" what I am doing on the Internet, it is with them looking for no particular reason. Suppose the government starts looking at your online posts and discovers that you said unflattering things about a member of Congress and now you get an IRS audit. You didn't do anything wrong either in your post or in filing your taxes, but a tax audit is still a royal pain.
At the time that David Weber wrote the book that contained the idea that gravity waves were FTL, there was debate in the scientific community as to whether or not gravity waves had the same limit as light. At the time there were philosophical reasons why different scientists took different positions, but no data to support one or the other. Within two years of publication, new data was acquired and the scientifically established position was that gravity waves were also limited by the speed of light.
David Weber chose to continue his Honor series as an alternate universe, instead of an imaginary future universe.
okay so that is a terribly smart thing to say. but actually trained professionals are highly educated and responsible citizens. they are much less likely to be biased than a layman.
Citation please. I'm sorry but I have seen no evidence that "trained professionals" are any less biased than anybody else. I have even seen studies that suggest that "trained professionals" actually have stronger biases than the general populace.
Really, that saying was a saying? The old saying was "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM." I don't know if it is still true, but it had the advantage of being true for longer than Microsoft has been a company.
Actually, the problem is that sometime in the 90's (I think I remember the start point correctly), dividends became incidental. It was all about increasing stock price. It was a result of the tax rate on capital gains being lower than the tax rate on dividends. Investors preferred to receive the profits on their investments in the form of increased stock price instead of dividends.
After Enron, I saw an article written by an economist/investment adviser (I forget his exact credentials), that explained that the Enron scam would not have been possible for a company paying dividends. He linked to several articles he had published about investing in companies that paid dividends over the long haul. I am pretty sure that his logic would apply to this situation as well, companies that pay dividends could not have gotten over leveraged in the manner that caused this economic crisis. The logic is that to pay dividends you have to have real profits to distribute, not just paper profits.
Really, you have never seen articles about "We found out how you can prevent yourself from getting"? You have never read about how smoking causes health problems? You have never read about how increasing dietary fiber reduces the risk of colon cancer? There are more, but I think this shows that your premise is bunk.
The problem is that the "diseases of old age" have many possible causes and it takes a long time to identify them.
People forget that in 1900 greater than 3 out of 100 children died between the ages of 2 and 20, in 2000 that rate was less than 2 out of 1000.
I say "Horseshit" to you. The reason that no cure for "cancer" has been found is because "cancer" is not one thing, it is many things. Some cancer has been cured. Here is a list of curable cancers:
* Childhood Acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL)
* Hodgkin's disease
* Large cell lymphoma
* APL
* Testicular cancer
* Choriocarcinoma
http://www.fhcrc.org/science/education/courses/cancer_course/clinical/treatment/curable.html
So your whole premise is crap. Modern medicine is making major strides at improving the health of humans.
Sorry, it was Big Bang vs Atheists. The strongest opposition to the Big Bang theory came from atheists, because if the Universe had a beginning that implies that it had a Creator. One of the philosophical ideas that led to the development of the scientific method is that everything that has a beginning has a cause.
By that philosophy, if the Universe had a beginning, it must have had a cause. If the Universe had a cause it is very hard to dismiss the idea of God. By that philosophy God does not need a cause because He had no beginning.
There's an easy way to prevent you from doing this. They will have you sit in the waiting room for 48+ hours, and you won't have the right to leave it until seen by a doctor. You'll learn fast enough not to come back until you really need it ;)
It also is a great way to save costs, a fair number of people will die before they get to see the doctor so the government won't have to pay for their treatment. Win/win.
The Authors Guild is not the book equivalent of the RIAA, As far as I can tell, there are no publishers that are members of the Authors Guild. The membership of the Authors Guild appears to be exclusively published authors.
If the Authors Guild were to go to court (at this point, they do not appear to have done so), they would only represent their members. And even there, they would probably have to actually get their members to opt-in to be represented in this manner.
Under copyright law at the time it was copyrighted it would have entered the public domain in 1991. However, the Copyright Act of 1976 extended it to 75 years from the date of publication and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 added 20 more years. It is now due to enter the public domain in 2030. http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
So, he is saying that the Kindle (a product developed and marketed by Amazon) makes an author's product more valuable, so Amazon should pay the author more money. The author didn't make his book more valuable, Amazon did. Why should the author get a cut of that added value?
Document your contacts with them on this issue. If in the future, you fail to receive a job from a company that contacts them for a reference sue them. They told you that if you leave after a three week notice, they would black ball you. If you have this well documented, they can't afford to black ball you. Lawsuits are why most companies won't give out any more information on former employees than, "Yes, they worked here. They are eligible/ineligible for rehire," when asked for information about a former employee. If it is well documented they might give out information regarding attendance.
So, if the English hadn't built guns but had instead listened to the "voices of the people", the Spanish Armada would have sunk all on its own?
Of course, Queen Elizabeth could have given peace a chance and married King Phillip of Spain, forced the English to convert back to Catholicism and imported the Inquisition. If she had done that Phillip probably wouldn't have attempted to invade England.
Because BBC is a news service and slashdot is a news aggregator. Slashdot doesn't "report" anything, they merely provide links to stories and a place to discuss said stories. Until someone else reports on a story, it won't appear on slashdot.
However, in fifty years, the "New York Times" will still exist as a news organization.
What do you mean "still"? The "New York Times" hasn't been a news organization since at least the 30's (when it won a Pulitzer Prize for an article which denied the Ukrainian famine).
This tax would only violate the Interstate Commerce Clause if they tried to force companies with no physical presence in their state to collect it. As other posters have noted this is merely an extension of the existing use tax to internet downloads.
The real question is, how do they intend to collect it?
Then you have been wasting your money. I have a good friend whose family I like to use in this type of discussion because it is such a good analog to the one I grew up in. The father is a very bright guy who is mechanically inclined but with no college degree (very similar to my father). The mother is an RN (similar to my mother who was an LPN). They have 8 children, I am the youngest of 6 children. They have a house that is comparable to the one I grew up in but on three times as much land. Overall, they are better off than the family I grew up in even though the father has spent significantly more of his life unemployed than my father.
.
However, I take objection with: "Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money."
Please note the very important qualification in that statement: "generally".
I agree that government spending on infrastructure is a good thing. However, when did the U.S. government undertake its most successful infrastructure spending (the Interstate Highway system)? For the most part the Interstate Highway System was put into place during the 1950's. a time when the U.S. economy was going strong.
Overall, I think we are in close agreement, with slight disagreements over emphasis. I think this spending bill was atrocious. I think the economy would be better off if the government would stop trying to "fix" it.
Sorry to have misunderstood you, there is a large segment of the population(even here on Slashdot) who thinks that the correct response to an economic problem is some form of protectionism.
All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.
This is patently false. Not all economists agree that government spending is a "good thing" in times of contraction. Here is an economist who argues that it is a bad thing: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5408 He is by the way a staunch conservative/libertarian who tends to support Republican politics (although I have seen him write columns condemning "spend, spend" Republican policies).
If the U.S. government starts a policy of "Buy American", it will start a trade war. A trade war at this time will start the Great Depression II. A trade war is what started the Great Depression the first time (Smoot-Hawley Act).
This error relates to Jan/Feb 2009 only. The problem has been identified quickly. It will be fixed quickly. No big deal.
For the climate change deniers among you, this is how science is supposed to work. Scientist A says something, scientist B says "hang on my experiment gives different results", scientist A checks and says "sorry, yes, we goofed" and it gets fixed.
In this case, Scientist A said "Yes, we knew that, but that data shows that our historical data is flawed, so we decided not to use it."
At least two studies have shown that free trade policies are beneficial to the importing country.
That is if country A imports goods from country B and does not charge a tariff its economy gets to take advantage of the efficiencies of country B's economy. Country B on the other hand charges a tariff on goods imported from country A and suffers from having goods produced more efficiently in country A priced at the rates of producing them in country B.