It was a horrible forced invasion of personal space and having to listen to someone blabber on and on "Like I know she does not like me because, like, she totally gave me a bitchy look yesterday and I was so like, peeved you know? because like, I think she is just so.... like not on top of it...... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
When other people force me into their conversations in public, where I cannot really move away without significant inconvience, and the conversations are that inane, I generally join in. For instance, you could have said something like, "Oh, you know I hate when I get bitchy looks. You always know that... [I'm not going to continue, but if you talked for five minutes, they'll get off the phone." Alternatively, instead of talking for a long time, you could be uncouth; "She was probably bitchy because she was getting her period. After she's bled out her vagina for a few days, I'm sure she'll be fine."
The important thing is to entertain yourself as you interfer.
This is the broken window fallacy in action. You might as well suggest that companies hire men to dig ditches all day and fill them back up, just so they can get a paycheck. Rewriting the same code all the time is just as pointless.
Actually, Keynes suggested just that during the great depression. Well, technically builduing giant pyramids, but same principle. It is just as much a fallacy to claim that all meaningless costs do not help as that all meaningless costs do help. They certainly help force money to circulate, which may be a good thing.
Also, you assume that more stuff is better. A natural entropy slowly forcing the farmer to continue to work to maintain his status quo may be good.
Of course. If they didn't smoke they could take the carcinogin of WiFi, but, since they do, they cannot let that be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Which violates the Constitutional Law guaranteeing every person has a right to own at least SOME kind of gun (even if it's just a pistol).
You'll find it's easier to get people to agree to shotguns/rifles before pistols. The primary fear most people have about guns only apply to those that are a) fully-automatic b) concealable by criminals as they commit their crimes.
I hear that residents of the District currently enjoy all of the rights acknowledged under the US Constitution.
Well, the tenth amendment does not apply, as they are not a state. Under a view that claims the second amendment relates to militia, then the second would also not apply (not a state- no militia).
If you pass something in by reference, you need to know it goes in there by reference, it's not visible in the calling code. If something's not visible - well, that's a bug just waiting to crawl in there. If you pass something by pointer, the calling code shows it clearly and you know that whatever was passed is likely to be changed by the called function. That's the rationale used by Trolltech and it is quite convincing to me.
I agree that output should always be passed by pointers, as that makes things explicit. I like passing in by reference when the variables are read-only however. It makes things clean, and makes it less likely that input/output will be confused.
If there's a particular law which seems outdated (example: "two-thirds of other persons"), then it should be removed using the procedures provided (i.e. amendment or constitutional convention) not just randomly ignored in hopes it will go away.
I agree laws should not be ignored. However, laws should be written in a way so that they apply to new situations. For instance, fraud over the internet fit into other fraud over telephone lines (IANAL, so I may be incorrect), and thus didn't require a new law. API's are designed to be applied in many situations and so should the law.
By saying, freedom of speech shall not be restricted, and nothing else, the law allows protects a lot more than if you tried to explain exactly how to do that. One is administration, the other explination.
The D.C. Gun Ban is another obvious case. I can not lay my hand upon any part of the U.S. Constitution that allows ALL guns to be banned from residents of the District, and yet for the laat ~30 years the courts chose to pretend that such a law exists within the document.
Article 4 Section 3, Clause 2. We'll leave aside the fact that, as far as I am aware, you are overstating the extent of the ban.
No it ain't, unless you're defining that market as the subset of the real console market focused on games that could as easily by played on a PC. Probably the real center of the market (in unit sales) is the Nintendo Wii with its innovative controller. (Just checked online; February '08 sales for Wii were 432,000 vs Xbox 360's 254,600).
That same source lists the top ten games, and their sales. The 360 games sold more copies than the combination of all other consoles & handhelds listed.
Yes, the Wii is a cool product. But it really is the veer-off of the console world, not the 360. I personally thought I would love the Wii, but found out I have more experience using a controller to swinging a sword/throwing a fastball/etc. so for me it is more of an occassional fun thing.
I disagree. Microsoft has consistently been late to the game.
You are conflating technologically looking to the future, and business-wise looking to the future. From a business point of view, they take the long term view. I have to say that I think your conflation was intentional, as it was obvious to which I was refering.
Laptops may see SSDs sooner due to power, but I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives.
I think you miss the best reason for SSD on laptops. That means with the exception of my fans, the laptop is all solid state. Which means I don't worry as much about moving it around while reading data, or gyroscopic forces. I worry about these things because I don't know excatly how they work, but I 'm sure shaking a spinning disk based drive is bad. And if I don't know, than I will arrogantly (but accurately) say that most people don't know. Hence, selling point.
Profit is profit is profit is profit, so why would they not take the opportunity to have an overpriced blueray disc player accessory for the 360? Doesn't seem like sensible business practices to me.
Because one thing that Microsoft does better than almost any other company is look to the future. They seem more than willing to sacrifice $1 billion today (or $20b for Yahoo!) if they think there is a good chance of $2 billion in a few years. For example, I believe last year their video game department finally broke even (don't quote me on that). So, for 7 years, they lost money to develop a new market.*
Selling a blu-ray player means conceding the format wars. So, even though though the optical media they were using lost, they care more about the format on the discs. So, theypass one the quick buck and hope to get their information recognized a different way.
*Although the XBox didn't come out until 2002, implying it was only 4 years of losses, development occured in 1999, and possibly earlier.
As for "selectively interpreting" the Constitution?
Well, the Supreme Court looks at the same issues again. For instance, Plessy v. Fergison and then Brown v. Board of Education. That's because the 9th, 10th and 14th amendments are intentionally vauge and catch-alls. At the same time, the 14th amendment, and, due to changing conditions concerning interstate commerce, the commerce clause, give the federal government growing power over the states.
I think it's a good thing that in some cases the constitution states concepts like "people should be treated equally under the law" and lets society modify the details over time.
We had no records of our staff NOT informing them that a contractual obligation came with the account changes, so we can only assume that they were told.
Fortunately Sprint is not the final arbiter of the facts, a jury is. And fortunately, in the case a civil action, those training methods, retention rate, and , I assume, even polling employees would all be admissible (the person would have to prove it was more likely than not he was not warned.)
IANAL, so maybe it is not that easy. But I think most times the blatant disregard for the law is playing the odds that no one will a) sue and b) not settle.
Also, if you incorporate, you can write stuff off (cell phone, mileage, internet connectivity)...and best of all, with an "S" corp, you can save a good deal of money spent on employment taxes (SS, Medicare).
IANAAccountant, but I believe you can deduct cell phone, mileage, internet connectivity without incorporating. But, as friendly warning, I have heard that paying yourself a token salary while totally owning the S-corp is illegal. You might want to check that out.
you mean, selecting only non torrents is totally fine?
Yup. They can block/throttle protocols/ports/etc. They cannot block/throttle based on the content (which I would imagine means URLs, but IANAL). So, they cannot say "no communist propoganda" or "no Linux distros" but they can say not FTP or torrents or even HTTP.
I only pay a monthly fee for broadband, which allows me unfettered access to ANY song I could ever hope to have... I have yet to see any DRM on it either!
I for one like private companies owning the lines as it is one more barrier to improper spying by the government. Well, in theory anyway.
As far as I am aware (IANAL), government whistleblowers are more protected under the law than corporate whistleblowers. And I would rather have b'crats with their job security and motivated to make one party look bad, as opposed to a unified desire for money.
1a) Since you don't own all the fiber in between most computers, still send the data over Comcast or ATT backbone lines, and have filtering applied above you.
... or were historically done by private organizations. In particular are all the safety examples (fire departments, flood insurance, unemployment insurance, drug safety testing, witness protection, etc), for which an individual paid an individual freely paid an insurance company.
I know that, and that's explicitly why I chose those examples. Private fire departments were a miserable failure (look into how well they worked in New York, for instance.) Flood insurance caused a market failure. I question witness protection greatly. As for unemployment insurance or drug safety testing, where's the private analog?
And because there are multiple competing insurance companies (provided government does not intervene and create a monopoly),
Really? ADM's internal motto is rumored to be "the competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy." Insurance companies, by definition, have to be fairly big, and there cannot be many of them. Oligopolies are almost as bad as monopolies.
And, as I mentioned, flood insurance produced a market failure.
Why do you believe a government can do these things better?
As I explained before, all of these require a large actor, have trajedy of the commons problems, have a natural monopoly, market failure, actually, read my earlier post.
Why do you believe it is alright to steal others' productivity (aka money) simply because you have this belief that the government can do it better?
The answers are many. First I contend it is not stealing. As I mentioned earlier, all libertarians concede there is some need for taxation, so there cannot be a moral distinction. Property is granted by the government (your wages are only worth anything because the governement doesn't produce trillions of dollars and spend it as opposed to taxing you a small degree). Aside from the money supply, the government is the arbiter of who gets what property. And, I would say an easy case could be made that taxes are a natural entropy on your wealth.
Leaving aside why I won't think you have any right not to have your money taken, there are good reasons to take your money. The veil of ignornace, which states part of the governement's job is to lift up people who got the shaft through bad luck makes me feel okay about it, as 'better' does not just include efficency, but also fairness (who wants to live in a country where black people are denied fire department protection?) The other is that the government is often more efficent. They lack marketing budgets, etc. Medicare spends an order of magnitude less (according to the numbers that most favor your position) on administrative costs than private insurers.
What's worst of all is that social security simply involves setting aside a portion of your earnings for retirement. But because of how the government works, you are actually giving your money to the currently retired and getting an IOU in return
That's a fairly new way of looking at Social Security. The first person to recieve Social Security was an 87-year-old woman who never paid into the system. It's not a retirement plan, else you would be correct that you could get better returns elsewhere. It's a caring for the elderly/disabled plan. There is no IOU (well, the government borrows the surplus from the social security trust, but that's a different story.) If the government cancelled social secuirty tomorrow there would be no promise broken.
Can you be more specific about what benefits you are referring to, and how the government is able to provide these benefits while private organizations are not?
Heres a short list of things. Tell me where you think free enterprise can hold a candle. I'll even leave out the standard police/army examples.
Fire departments
Road construction
Park maintence
Libraries
FDIC
Rural electification
Unemployment insurance
Flood insurance
Food and drug safety testing
Welfare
Social security
Farm price supports
Witness protection
EPA
Net Neutrality (coming soon?)
Postal Service
In all those cases there is a natural monopoly, a trajedy of the commons, an issue of ensuring fairness, or just the small size of private organizations.
Excellent comment. I'm currently looking at expanding into functional languages. I fail to understand the difference between functional languages and logic languages. Would you help enable my laziness by expounding a bit more on that?
Also, if you have a sciency-type application, could someone recommend a functional language to represent laws of physics (for example) in?
Also, how will you prevent universal health care from being abused - IOW, how would you prevent the fat, lazy, and stupid from running the health bills up that the rest of us would have to pay for?
These are two different questions. I would imagine you would stop abuse by putting people who commit fraud, or get extra drugs, or doctors who perform unnecessary surgeries in jail. Much like the options currently available to HMOs. There may even be some kind of oversight.
As for some people having higher health care costs, you seem to be misinterperting several things. First off, since there is guaranteed emergency room care, the status quo is that people who are fat, lazy and stupid go there, taking time away from real emergencies, getting more costly care (whose costs are passed on to you) instead of local doctor care, and preventing a 'stitch int time'. So, those people would actually cost less.
Secondly, the whole point of insurance is that some people are going to have higher costs than others. Because we don't know who is going to be whom, we all chip in. And, I would say that the slight (see point three) increase in costs is worth the freedom of not having the governement try to make us eat healthily. The current status quo still, because most health insurance is in mass by employeers, lumps the fatties in with everyone else.
Thirdly, the highest costs in health care, as well as those most easily identified as preexisting conditions, are chronic diseases/conditions. Most of these are not due to being overweight, but instead an inherited or acquired condition that the person cannot change (think: cancer, AIDS, alzhimers, etc.) The diseases associated with weight are much smaller in cost than those not. So, it seems like being unable to distingish the "fat and lazy" from the "already sick" is a necessary condition of handling those with other preexisting conditions.
advancing laws violating human rights - whether through increased regulation of the economy, privacy violations, taxation, etc.
Come on. You may oppose taxes or want a lazzie-faire system, but to put those concerns as the same level as human rights is pretty insulting.
There are valid disagreements about the optimum role of taxation and government regulation (there cannot be none of either, even at the minimal contractual enforcement level of uber-libertarians). Whereas, I would say that human rights are things that are pretty universally agreed upon within the western world.
namely, increasing budget sizes - whether for the war, healthcare, public schools, or other state-run programs
I actually care a lot about which of these he wants to spend money on.
Slashdot Mirror
When other people force me into their conversations in public, where I cannot really move away without significant inconvience, and the conversations are that inane, I generally join in. For instance, you could have said something like, "Oh, you know I hate when I get bitchy looks. You always know that... [I'm not going to continue, but if you talked for five minutes, they'll get off the phone." Alternatively, instead of talking for a long time, you could be uncouth; "She was probably bitchy because she was getting her period. After she's bled out her vagina for a few days, I'm sure she'll be fine."
The important thing is to entertain yourself as you interfer.
Actually, Keynes suggested just that during the great depression. Well, technically builduing giant pyramids, but same principle. It is just as much a fallacy to claim that all meaningless costs do not help as that all meaningless costs do help. They certainly help force money to circulate, which may be a good thing.
Also, you assume that more stuff is better. A natural entropy slowly forcing the farmer to continue to work to maintain his status quo may be good.
Of course. If they didn't smoke they could take the carcinogin of WiFi, but, since they do, they cannot let that be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
You'll find it's easier to get people to agree to shotguns/rifles before pistols. The primary fear most people have about guns only apply to those that are a) fully-automatic b) concealable by criminals as they commit their crimes.
Well, the tenth amendment does not apply, as they are not a state. Under a view that claims the second amendment relates to militia, then the second would also not apply (not a state- no militia).
I agree that output should always be passed by pointers, as that makes things explicit. I like passing in by reference when the variables are read-only however. It makes things clean, and makes it less likely that input/output will be confused.
I agree laws should not be ignored. However, laws should be written in a way so that they apply to new situations. For instance, fraud over the internet fit into other fraud over telephone lines (IANAL, so I may be incorrect), and thus didn't require a new law. API's are designed to be applied in many situations and so should the law.
By saying, freedom of speech shall not be restricted, and nothing else, the law allows protects a lot more than if you tried to explain exactly how to do that. One is administration, the other explination.
Article 4 Section 3, Clause 2. We'll leave aside the fact that, as far as I am aware, you are overstating the extent of the ban.
That same source lists the top ten games, and their sales. The 360 games sold more copies than the combination of all other consoles & handhelds listed.
Yes, the Wii is a cool product. But it really is the veer-off of the console world, not the 360. I personally thought I would love the Wii, but found out I have more experience using a controller to swinging a sword/throwing a fastball/etc. so for me it is more of an occassional fun thing.
You are conflating technologically looking to the future, and business-wise looking to the future. From a business point of view, they take the long term view. I have to say that I think your conflation was intentional, as it was obvious to which I was refering.
I think you miss the best reason for SSD on laptops. That means with the exception of my fans, the laptop is all solid state. Which means I don't worry as much about moving it around while reading data, or gyroscopic forces. I worry about these things because I don't know excatly how they work, but I 'm sure shaking a spinning disk based drive is bad. And if I don't know, than I will arrogantly (but accurately) say that most people don't know. Hence, selling point.
Because one thing that Microsoft does better than almost any other company is look to the future. They seem more than willing to sacrifice $1 billion today (or $20b for Yahoo!) if they think there is a good chance of $2 billion in a few years. For example, I believe last year their video game department finally broke even (don't quote me on that). So, for 7 years, they lost money to develop a new market.*
Selling a blu-ray player means conceding the format wars. So, even though though the optical media they were using lost, they care more about the format on the discs. So, theypass one the quick buck and hope to get their information recognized a different way.
*Although the XBox didn't come out until 2002, implying it was only 4 years of losses, development occured in 1999, and possibly earlier.
Well, the Supreme Court looks at the same issues again. For instance, Plessy v. Fergison and then Brown v. Board of Education. That's because the 9th, 10th and 14th amendments are intentionally vauge and catch-alls. At the same time, the 14th amendment, and, due to changing conditions concerning interstate commerce, the commerce clause, give the federal government growing power over the states.
I think it's a good thing that in some cases the constitution states concepts like "people should be treated equally under the law" and lets society modify the details over time.
Fortunately Sprint is not the final arbiter of the facts, a jury is. And fortunately, in the case a civil action, those training methods, retention rate, and , I assume, even polling employees would all be admissible (the person would have to prove it was more likely than not he was not warned.)
IANAL, so maybe it is not that easy. But I think most times the blatant disregard for the law is playing the odds that no one will a) sue and b) not settle.
I did RTFA, and I have no clue how Comcast's implementation works. The whole article is about as informative and not-overreactionary as the summary.
IANAAccountant, but I believe you can deduct cell phone, mileage, internet connectivity without incorporating. But, as friendly warning, I have heard that paying yourself a token salary while totally owning the S-corp is illegal. You might want to check that out.
Yes. 0.999... is equal to 3/3 which is equal to 1.
Yup. They can block/throttle protocols/ports/etc. They cannot block/throttle based on the content (which I would imagine means URLs, but IANAL). So, they cannot say "no communist propoganda" or "no Linux distros" but they can say not FTP or torrents or even HTTP.
So, you don't have Comcast?
As far as I am aware (IANAL), government whistleblowers are more protected under the law than corporate whistleblowers. And I would rather have b'crats with their job security and motivated to make one party look bad, as opposed to a unified desire for money.
1a) Since you don't own all the fiber in between most computers, still send the data over Comcast or ATT backbone lines, and have filtering applied above you.
I know that, and that's explicitly why I chose those examples. Private fire departments were a miserable failure (look into how well they worked in New York, for instance.) Flood insurance caused a market failure. I question witness protection greatly. As for unemployment insurance or drug safety testing, where's the private analog?
Really? ADM's internal motto is rumored to be "the competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy." Insurance companies, by definition, have to be fairly big, and there cannot be many of them. Oligopolies are almost as bad as monopolies.
And, as I mentioned, flood insurance produced a market failure.
As I explained before, all of these require a large actor, have trajedy of the commons problems, have a natural monopoly, market failure, actually, read my earlier post.
The answers are many. First I contend it is not stealing. As I mentioned earlier, all libertarians concede there is some need for taxation, so there cannot be a moral distinction. Property is granted by the government (your wages are only worth anything because the governement doesn't produce trillions of dollars and spend it as opposed to taxing you a small degree). Aside from the money supply, the government is the arbiter of who gets what property. And, I would say an easy case could be made that taxes are a natural entropy on your wealth.
Leaving aside why I won't think you have any right not to have your money taken, there are good reasons to take your money. The veil of ignornace, which states part of the governement's job is to lift up people who got the shaft through bad luck makes me feel okay about it, as 'better' does not just include efficency, but also fairness (who wants to live in a country where black people are denied fire department protection?) The other is that the government is often more efficent. They lack marketing budgets, etc. Medicare spends an order of magnitude less (according to the numbers that most favor your position) on administrative costs than private insurers.
That's a fairly new way of looking at Social Security. The first person to recieve Social Security was an 87-year-old woman who never paid into the system. It's not a retirement plan, else you would be correct that you could get better returns elsewhere. It's a caring for the elderly/disabled plan. There is no IOU (well, the government borrows the surplus from the social security trust, but that's a different story.) If the government cancelled social secuirty tomorrow there would be no promise broken.
Heres a short list of things. Tell me where you think free enterprise can hold a candle. I'll even leave out the standard police/army examples.
In all those cases there is a natural monopoly, a trajedy of the commons, an issue of ensuring fairness, or just the small size of private organizations.
Excellent comment. I'm currently looking at expanding into functional languages. I fail to understand the difference between functional languages and logic languages. Would you help enable my laziness by expounding a bit more on that?
Also, if you have a sciency-type application, could someone recommend a functional language to represent laws of physics (for example) in?
These are two different questions. I would imagine you would stop abuse by putting people who commit fraud, or get extra drugs, or doctors who perform unnecessary surgeries in jail. Much like the options currently available to HMOs. There may even be some kind of oversight.
As for some people having higher health care costs, you seem to be misinterperting several things. First off, since there is guaranteed emergency room care, the status quo is that people who are fat, lazy and stupid go there, taking time away from real emergencies, getting more costly care (whose costs are passed on to you) instead of local doctor care, and preventing a 'stitch int time'. So, those people would actually cost less.
Secondly, the whole point of insurance is that some people are going to have higher costs than others. Because we don't know who is going to be whom, we all chip in. And, I would say that the slight (see point three) increase in costs is worth the freedom of not having the governement try to make us eat healthily. The current status quo still, because most health insurance is in mass by employeers, lumps the fatties in with everyone else.
Thirdly, the highest costs in health care, as well as those most easily identified as preexisting conditions, are chronic diseases/conditions. Most of these are not due to being overweight, but instead an inherited or acquired condition that the person cannot change (think: cancer, AIDS, alzhimers, etc.) The diseases associated with weight are much smaller in cost than those not. So, it seems like being unable to distingish the "fat and lazy" from the "already sick" is a necessary condition of handling those with other preexisting conditions.
Come on. You may oppose taxes or want a lazzie-faire system, but to put those concerns as the same level as human rights is pretty insulting.
There are valid disagreements about the optimum role of taxation and government regulation (there cannot be none of either, even at the minimal contractual enforcement level of uber-libertarians). Whereas, I would say that human rights are things that are pretty universally agreed upon within the western world.
I actually care a lot about which of these he wants to spend money on.
Again, a distinction that I care about greatly.