Self defense. First rule of natural law is not just keeping your rights intact, but it is also about survival. You do not have to wait to be attacked to attack so long as their is a credible threat to your survival. Doing away with any form of organized defense and ignoring the truth that geographical dominance is integral to being able to defend yourself against large scale threats such as war or invasion (even peacable) is suicide.
In other words our government is presumably our mechanism by which we secure protection of our rights. (Granted, this is changing and badly so, but that is another matter.) One requirement for this to happen is that we be able to defend ourselves. Now, it's nice to imagine that a bunch of independent and scattered people living on their land in an Anarcho-Capitalist utopia could do this, but I don't buy it. Once a large enough group of people who don't hold to your ideals have moved in and they have sufficient numbers and are scattered through your 'nation' and they decide to change things, you don't have a say anymore. Let alone what happens if you face an actual invasion by an organized army when you've gotten rid of such things in pursuit of utopia.
I'll embrace concepts like Anarcho-Capitalism and borderless states when technology exists that allows a man to be an island onto himself. When I can guard myself and my plot of land against an organized force many, many times more massive and well funded. Until that time comes and geographical mastery is no longer an aspect of armed conflict, I'll live with nation states protecting their borders as a necessity to survival.
I believe that philosophy exists to serve man, not vice-versa. Natural Law can lead us to a much better place the Positivism. But like all abstractions, it leaks. This is one place where it leaks. Getting rid of borders, at least in todays world (and maybe forever), leads to likely death and slavery. If most of the world embraced the ideals of Natural Law then it wouldn't be an issue. But it doesn't and it is. Allowing yourself to be surrounded and intersected many times over by people who think Natural Law is a bunch of BS or who have never even ran into the concept before and then expecting they will leave you alone instead of forcing their own philosophy on you is naive.
In short, I'll not embrace a philosohy to an extent that it leads to my destruction. I am not a zealot willing to martyr myself for the cause. In any event, I do believe that an argument can be made with Natural Law that when faced with credible threat, seizing the means to defend yourself is justified. Borders are a regrettable necessity. Maybe one day they won't be.
I'm all for Natural Law as well and I'm against Positivism as the groundwork for a system of justice. The rights of man are intrinsic, not from law. However the idea that a people and a nation governed by representative means cannot then define and control the borders of that nation (so long as it does not involve invasion of other people's nations) is just silly. It's extreme stances like this that lead people to write libertarians off as nut-jobs. Like it or not, protecting the borders of the nation is one of the few legitimate purposes that a government has. Allowing a large group of people to move into your nation and then not allowing them the rights of citizens is even worse. You wind up with a caste society, the exact opposite of what anybody concerned about human rights should want.
Reduce the social security burden by giving federal land to recipients as a partial one-time buy-out. Then I would phase out social security over time.
Pass the Fair Tax amendment. Ammend the 16th amendment to say this is the only way the Federal Goverment can collect taxes, and set a hard limit of 15%.
Ammend the interstate commerce clause so that it is spelled out that the federal government only has the authority to make regular instead of regulate interstate commerce.
Phase out over time all programs that the federal government is involved in that do not fit under it's enumerated powers. Which is most of them. This would also mean an end to the war on drugs, since drug legalization is a state level issue. Ditto for abortion and a number of other things the Federal government has decided is in it's pervue.
Change our voting system to use range voting. Bring back the ammendment that only allowed land owners to vote for Senators.
Pass an amendment that all states must have easy to meet and uniform guidelines for different parties and peoples to be on their ballots. No more allowing the Dems and Reps to raise the bar for competition.
Get rid of the McCain-Feingold act (spelling?). Ditto for Sarnes-Boxley.
Require that any entity with more than 100x the assets of a target it is sueing pay that target's court costs. Target is only liable to pay these back if the target loses. This would prevent large corporations from destroying freedom of individuals by simply threatening to sue them. If the case is bogus or weak, the individual is much more likely to fight it.
If an individual or entity engages in 3+ frivolous lawsuits in a 10 year period, they lose the right to sue anybody for any reason for five years.
Require that Jury Nullification be brought back as something that the jury is instructed on and allowed to do as per the Constitution. Prosecutors are allowed right now to plea bargain - that needs to stop since it is also unconstitutional. Finally, the jury would not be allowed to be questioned by the defense and prosecution. You get what you get.
Formalize the right of the states to secede from the union.
Extricate ourselves from the vast number of overseas military entanglements. Basically pull out of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Go back to a Monroe doctrine approach.
Close the borders with Mexico, but I would make it easy for Mexicans and their families to emmigrate and become citizens. I would require that one or two in the family learn some English, and they would need to learn a little bit about the Constitution and their rights. An Ellis Island approach basically.
Get rid of the 'qualified investor' laws. Those are unconstitutional and bad for our economy anyway.
Scale copyright law back to a sane level term and usage wise. Require that patents come with a working prototype like they used to. Get rid of software patents and business process patents. Disallow gene and other 'discovery' patents.
Come up with a more formalized approach to dealing with large scale negative externalities. That is one thing government should be involved in. This would require a constitutional amendment as it would be an expansion of powers, and it would have to be limited to dealing with large scale externalities that had significant impact out of the individual states. (Large scale pollution of the air, water, etc.)
Well, I gotta get back to work, but that is a partial list. I'm sure lots of people will think I'm nuts, but basically I just want a return to a more Federalist nation with fewer foreign entanglements and a limited government.
What gormless fool modded the parent offtopic? You might not agree with him, but he was not off topic. His post could be paraphrased down to 'Ford is losing money, and actions like this can only help contribute to that'. Seems on topic to me.
A $2000 one-time capital investment is not very much. It wouldn't take long even for 'cheap' labor to eat up that much in wages. Also I bet that Japan is like the USA and there are regulations, paperwork, insurance, and various other hidden costs when it comes to hiring workers. 'Cheap' labor is never cheap in 1st world countries unless you cheat and pay undocumented workers under the table. Also, FYI, the Japanese version of the IRS is famous for being effecient and very ruthless. You don't want to get caught in tax-evasion in Japan.
Some nice innuendo and name-calling from you guys. You had some good points to make much as I hate to admit it, and I had some good responses to some of them and would have had to agree with some others. However I'm not going to bother posting these responses because polite discourse is beyond your ken. That you attack me for being par for the course on./ is rather funny, given your own atrocious attitudes.
Once Capitalism is married to government like you describe, it is no longer Capitalism but is instead Fascism. That is the problem with Capitalism. Since it is effective at concentrating capital in the hands of people best able to use it to improve the economy, eventually you have enough power in the hands of a few that they can begin corrupting the system for their own ends. Enough of this and they have destroyed the system that allowed them to become successful and instead you have a system not based on a free market and free trade among free men, but instead that modern version of Feudalism that is Fascism.
Yes, organizations should usually dissolve if their purpose has been met. The exception is if their mission statement and structure is properly set up to tackle a new mission that is of an appropriate size and purpose.
That usually does not happen of course, and organizations usually seek to perpetuate themselves, often at odds to their stated purpose. This behavior is sometimes intentional (fradulent) and many times emergent (the nature of the beast), IMO.
While corruption of purpose is common, even prevalant, in most organizations, that does not nullify the analogy I made. I was simply pointing out that the argument that GPL promoters should fight the idea of a much smaller and more limited approach to copyright is nonsensical. If they did do that then, based on the stated goals of the GPL, it would be tantamount to admitting that the stated goals are lies. Also remember that even if the leadership of an organization may not believe in the stated goals, most rank and file people in the organization or movement will, and if enough of them decide that it is all lies then that is the beginning of the end for that organization. At the minimum it will not be able to keep people and it's operational effectiveness will greatly diminish.
Just as people can become more unstable and deranged by indulging in self deceit and growing cognitive dissonance to avoid reality that contradicts their lies, so to do organizations become more schizophrenic and bizarre as their stated and actual goals diverge further and further apart. Eventually such organizations are deadlocked by contradictory policies, demolished morale and turnover, and ever larger and more complex but less effecient management structures to manage the problems caused by the contradictions. Eventually the organization will collapse due to paralysis and corruption or simply be overtaken by a competitor. In the long run (somtimes very long) an organization that follow greatly divergent stated and actual goals cannot prosper no matter how good the short term advantages may be. Eventually the only way the organization can continue past it's normal life expetancy is through the use of force. That is one of the problems with Fascism - corporate welfare keeps dysfunctional entities around for much longer than they would otherwise survive, and the body politic is poisoned with the same disease of corruption as the moribund corporations it marries itself to.
Of course leaders in these organization may benefit greatly, especially if they bail out before the ship sinks and take their winnings with them. Crime often does pay. It represents a negative externality IMO. They perform a taking from the system itself and then leave everyone else holding the bag.
The term 'steal your stuff' shows you don't understand the different between copyright law, which is about licenses, and property law, which is about stuff.
As for the GPL, it was created as a response to the current insane copyright and 'IP' laws, to help ensure freedom of software and computing. It leverages copyright to do this, fighting fire with fire so to speak. A reasonable copyright system would obviate the need for the GPL. I suggest you read up on the the philosophy behind the GPL if you're going to comment on it.
Your argument is analogous to saying that if racial equality were reached then the need for organizations like the NAACP would be gone, so members of the NAACP should fight against racial equality.
Option 1 under this theory, you are training with how to deal with situations where you are greatly outmatched and/or powerless. In other words it is training for keeping you head in times of terror.
Option 2 under this theory, you are training with how to deal with injury to your legs or otherwise not being able to rely on them.
Personally I think there is some validity to the theory, but that it is just one facet of why we dream.
You just repeated a few of the many things this guy said were great about these machines and completely mis-characterized the article. I know not reading the article is a Slashdot tradition, but it's a bad one. Don't follow it.
I've got no problem with government helping to make sure that the Tragedy of the Commons and externalities are addressed so long as it is done legally and morally, which in this case it is not.
Leaving that aside, in this case you are flat out wrong because the market was ALREADY taking care of it. Without this law the fluorescents were already beginning to do very well. I know many people who are switching to them and you find them on the store shelves everywhere in large quantities. Sam's Club for example has them in giant palettes. I even see them taking over in the grocery store aisles. They are also flat out selling in every larger quantities. TFA mentioned that they are becoming popular.
In any event, an incandescent may or may not be a taking of significance. If I'm getting my power from my own solar cells or other 'green' source for example, I'm not doing a taking from you by powering a inefficient incandescent. Just the opposite, the flourscent with it's mercury can become more of a taking. Do you think that the costs of the mercury disposal are built into the cost of the bulbs and that said money (if it is) is really being set aside for reclamation? Personally I don't think you can every totally escape some level of takings happening. It's an asymptotic problem and you can only get so close to a solution before the costs of eliminating the externalities becomes greater than the harm from the externalities themselves.
I believe the externalities issue should have been addressed with taxes based on how power companies produce energy (higher tax rates based on the amount of pollution produced per unit of energy) and possibly higher price premiums on electricity on households that consume more than a certain amount per month.
Just because I'm against HOW something is done does not mean I am against the goal. And FYI, I already knew about externalities before you told me about them.
That you and other that think like you believe 'beneficial' justifies everything is the problem. It's good if everyone ate right and exercised too, so why not mandate what people eat and do by law by your reasoning? After all, the ends justifies the means, right?
As to how I got to soft fascism, it's pretty cut and dry. The marriage of corporate and governmental power is the definition of fascism as defined by Mussolini. So, it's fascism because we have passed the point where Congress is bound by law (the Constitution) and it's ties to industry are too intertwined. It is soft, not hard, fascism because the relationships (both ways) are via lobbyists and regulations, not by directives and law.
In other words, Congress is doing things outside of it's legal authority. When a government is not controlled or bound in what it can do then by definition you have some form of tyranny. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship, and eventually it will cease to be a benevolent dictatorship and just become a dictatorship.
I can only guess that yet another variation of the mis-reading of the Commerce Clause is used to justify Congress somehow having the power to ban the sale of certain classes of incandescent light bulbs. Why don't we just get it over with and repeal the whole Constitution? No one's paying attention to it anyway.
I wonder what the profit margins for the fluorescents are? I bet they're higher. Congress rarely does anything unless money changed hands somewhere. Personally I've been buying the fluorescents becuase they are supposed to last a lot longer and I hate having bulbs burn out on me, and I've found them ok for the most part anyway. However I have not bought them to replace all of my light bulbs. There are a few places where the incandescents are better suited such as my dimmer lights and in the bathroom.
The market would have sorted this all out eventually and we would have wound up with better bulbs of both types. Instead now the game has been called off and we'll wind up with more expensive crappier products. Eventually they'll ban all incandescents except for speciality applications and the pressure for the fluorescents to have to compete and improve and become cheaper to displace incandescents will be gone.
*Sigh* Once again it is shown that we (in America) are all now living under a regime of soft fascism.
Toyota hybrids use a strange thing called an E-CVT. Ford hybrids are supposed to have something similar. My experience with a Prius is that it's transmission does a far better job than a regular automautic transmission, but you'll have to decide for yourself.
4 WD truck hybrids do exist. They are even planning on hemi-hybrids next year. Personally I'd wait a few years before looking at a truck hybrid.
Aptera has two innovative models that are almost production-ready at $30,000 and below: for next year, the all-electric, 120-mile-range Typ-1 e that we drove; and, by 2009, the range-extended series gasoline Typ-1 h, which Aptera says will hit 300 mpg.
You don't plug in the 300 mpg model. You put gas into it.
Your basic premise is wrong. They are simpler, not more complicated. Yes, the technology is more advanced, but for that matter the technology for a simple modern shotgun is far higher than that of a musket. Guess which is more reliable and easier to maintain?
More advanced or newer technology != more complicated or more expensive or use or maintain. Also most of the components in a hybrid are not new technology. Electric motors and IC engines are very old hat, and the battery technology has been around some time as well.
The fact is that there is simply a lot less moving pieces and less stress and less use on the pieces that do move. This guy was the first hybrid taxicab driver (in Canada anyway) and gives his reasons for why he thinks his maintenance costs were less with a hybrid.
Personally I think that the big one is that the IC engine in a hybrid simply doesn't run as much as a conventional IC does. It's off a lot of the time, and when it is on it is usually running at a rate that is optimal for that engine, not at a rate required to push your car at the speed you want to go. Everything else being equal, if you run your engine half as much (or whatever) and you ran it at a rpm that the engine was optimally geared for, it should last a lot longer and need less maintenance.
WHen I use the term 'IC' in my post I am referring to straight internal combustion cars.
Gas is going up in price. You can expect $4 or even $5 per gallon in the not too distant future. As this climbs, standard vehicles will become more and more expensive relative to hybrids. In addition you mention 100,000 miles, but that is low. Most modern cars are good for 200,000 miles or more. There are Priuses that have over 300,000 miles on them on the road today.
A $25,000 50 MPG Prius, run for 200,000 miles at $3 per gallon will cost you $12,000 in gas. Your $15,000 30 MPG Corolla will cost you $20,000 in gas. The Prius would cost you only a net $2,000 more in this scenario, and that does not include the unscheduled maintenance cost penalties you pay (see below).
If gas goes to $4 per gallon it is about $17K vs. $27K, making the Prius a wash. If it goes over $4 per gallon, the Prius is cheaper.
As hybrids become more effecient and cheaper, these numbers will dramatically swing against owning a regular car. A 300 mpg hybrid like the article mentions that costs $30,000 will only cost $2,000 to $4,000 in gas over the lifetime of the car even at $5 per gallon. Such a car is free in comparison to the cost of the Corolla. You would literally save in the low tens of thousands of dollars by buying the 'more expensive' hybrid.
There is another big factor. Scheduled maintenance costs on hybrids are about in line with regular cars, but their unscheduled maintenance costs tend to be much lower. Cab companies and fleets like this one are starting to publish the reliability and maintenace results of using hybrids. The data is still sketchy, but even with the early hybrids (2001 models or so) that these sets of data apply to, the data indicates that you can save from $1 to $2 per 50 miles (very rough estimate) or so in unscheduled maintenance costs (ie, unexpected repair costs) over the life of the vehicle for a good hybrid vs. a regular IC vehicle. In other words, if you drive 200,000 miles you, statistically speaking, save about (200,000/50)*(1 to 2) = $4,000 to $8,000 over the lifetime of the car. Now that is a statistical average of course, and you might get a car that costs you almost nothing over that time. But that again you might not.
Hybrids are also holding their value much better than regular cars. You don't take a huge hit to the value of a hybrid just becuase you drove it off the lot. Go look around you'll find used Priuses going for almost as much as new ones.
Finally, I'll point out that Toyota (since we compared Corolla to Prius) no longer makes or sells regular IC cars in Japan. It's hybrid only. They are only making their older cars for America and some other markets, but they have already shown that they consider all non-hybrid lines to be end-lined soon.
In short I would not buy a high-end new IC car today. If you're not ready for a hybrid or you don't drive enough for it to make economic sense to you, then do your best to buy a cheaper used regular car and wait. In the next few years you will see IC cars fall out of favor. For a period of time IC cars will become dirt cheap as demand for them drops through the floor, making the greatest buyers market in history for IC cars. Then IC cars will all but disappear. It's a pretty standard model for technology that has reached the end of the line.
I'm so going to have to try this. The software isn't complex and with some work I'll finally have a giant digital canvas with the infrared pen acting as pen/airbrush.
Computer chips are now commodities. Back in the day they weren't, but the times moved on. Trying to ban computer chips from reaching anyone who wants to buy them is like trying to ban corn, oil, gas, rice, or soybeans. It's just not going to happen. These computer chips are sold around the world in bulk quantities at low prices. In addition most of these things aren't even manufactured on US soil anymore.
The idea that you can somehow 'ban' a country from getting ahold of a commodity is ludicrious and stupid. The only way you could really do that would be to effectively seal and close their borders militarily and embargo them to the point that you controlled all of their travel and trade outside of their borders. Good luck with that.
A lot of people posted solutions to this. Thank you and I'll give them a try. Of course, this still leave me wondering what is wrong with Adobe that they could not make a decent reader.
I hate PDFs. Every time I wind up having to open one of these things in a browser it just sucks. They load up slow. If they're large then I often times cannot even page forward. They're very laggy, and sometimes just plain lock up. The frustration with trying to read a PDF is already huge for me. I see this behavior on Windows and Mac boxes, and with various browsers as well, and it's not like I'm using ancient machines. Maybe other people have had different experiences? What am I missing here? PDF just seems broken to me already.
Anyway, now they want to add ads to these things? I really don't know what to say. I already consider PDFs to be on the verge of being totally unusable. This should push them right over the edge.
Apple wins becuase iTunes exists mainly to help drive the sales of their hardware, as opposed to the Microsoft strategy of using hardware to drive sales. With the Apple approace the buyer, user, and customer are all the same individual. With the Microsoft model the buyer/user is the same, but the customer is someone else, namely content produces and/or content resellers such as record companies and advertisers.
I think it is axiomatic that if your buyer/user and customer are not the same person, then you are in trouble. In Microsoft's case, without hardware sales there will be no advertisements or add sales either, and since they're selling the zunes at a loss, they lose on all counts.
I bet you did have expectations. If the new movies had been a remake of the Vagina Dialoges for example I bet you would have found that certain expectations of yours were not met. At minimum you had expectations that it would have Jedi, that it would be set in the Star Wars universe, that space ships, light saber duels, and some form of pulp style action in space would be going on.
In any event, enjoying your entertainment regardles of the content or quality of that entertainment does not make you stupid. It makes you undiscerning.
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In other words our government is presumably our mechanism by which we secure protection of our rights. (Granted, this is changing and badly so, but that is another matter.) One requirement for this to happen is that we be able to defend ourselves. Now, it's nice to imagine that a bunch of independent and scattered people living on their land in an Anarcho-Capitalist utopia could do this, but I don't buy it. Once a large enough group of people who don't hold to your ideals have moved in and they have sufficient numbers and are scattered through your 'nation' and they decide to change things, you don't have a say anymore. Let alone what happens if you face an actual invasion by an organized army when you've gotten rid of such things in pursuit of utopia.
I'll embrace concepts like Anarcho-Capitalism and borderless states when technology exists that allows a man to be an island onto himself. When I can guard myself and my plot of land against an organized force many, many times more massive and well funded. Until that time comes and geographical mastery is no longer an aspect of armed conflict, I'll live with nation states protecting their borders as a necessity to survival.
I believe that philosophy exists to serve man, not vice-versa. Natural Law can lead us to a much better place the Positivism. But like all abstractions, it leaks. This is one place where it leaks. Getting rid of borders, at least in todays world (and maybe forever), leads to likely death and slavery. If most of the world embraced the ideals of Natural Law then it wouldn't be an issue. But it doesn't and it is. Allowing yourself to be surrounded and intersected many times over by people who think Natural Law is a bunch of BS or who have never even ran into the concept before and then expecting they will leave you alone instead of forcing their own philosophy on you is naive.
In short, I'll not embrace a philosohy to an extent that it leads to my destruction. I am not a zealot willing to martyr myself for the cause. In any event, I do believe that an argument can be made with Natural Law that when faced with credible threat, seizing the means to defend yourself is justified. Borders are a regrettable necessity. Maybe one day they won't be.
I'm all for Natural Law as well and I'm against Positivism as the groundwork for a system of justice. The rights of man are intrinsic, not from law. However the idea that a people and a nation governed by representative means cannot then define and control the borders of that nation (so long as it does not involve invasion of other people's nations) is just silly. It's extreme stances like this that lead people to write libertarians off as nut-jobs. Like it or not, protecting the borders of the nation is one of the few legitimate purposes that a government has. Allowing a large group of people to move into your nation and then not allowing them the rights of citizens is even worse. You wind up with a caste society, the exact opposite of what anybody concerned about human rights should want.
Pass the Fair Tax amendment. Ammend the 16th amendment to say this is the only way the Federal Goverment can collect taxes, and set a hard limit of 15%.
Ammend the interstate commerce clause so that it is spelled out that the federal government only has the authority to make regular instead of regulate interstate commerce.
Phase out over time all programs that the federal government is involved in that do not fit under it's enumerated powers. Which is most of them. This would also mean an end to the war on drugs, since drug legalization is a state level issue. Ditto for abortion and a number of other things the Federal government has decided is in it's pervue.
Change our voting system to use range voting. Bring back the ammendment that only allowed land owners to vote for Senators.
Pass an amendment that all states must have easy to meet and uniform guidelines for different parties and peoples to be on their ballots. No more allowing the Dems and Reps to raise the bar for competition.
Get rid of the McCain-Feingold act (spelling?). Ditto for Sarnes-Boxley.
Require that any entity with more than 100x the assets of a target it is sueing pay that target's court costs. Target is only liable to pay these back if the target loses. This would prevent large corporations from destroying freedom of individuals by simply threatening to sue them. If the case is bogus or weak, the individual is much more likely to fight it.
If an individual or entity engages in 3+ frivolous lawsuits in a 10 year period, they lose the right to sue anybody for any reason for five years.
Require that Jury Nullification be brought back as something that the jury is instructed on and allowed to do as per the Constitution. Prosecutors are allowed right now to plea bargain - that needs to stop since it is also unconstitutional. Finally, the jury would not be allowed to be questioned by the defense and prosecution. You get what you get.
Formalize the right of the states to secede from the union.
Extricate ourselves from the vast number of overseas military entanglements. Basically pull out of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Go back to a Monroe doctrine approach.
Close the borders with Mexico, but I would make it easy for Mexicans and their families to emmigrate and become citizens. I would require that one or two in the family learn some English, and they would need to learn a little bit about the Constitution and their rights. An Ellis Island approach basically.
Get rid of the 'qualified investor' laws. Those are unconstitutional and bad for our economy anyway.
Scale copyright law back to a sane level term and usage wise. Require that patents come with a working prototype like they used to. Get rid of software patents and business process patents. Disallow gene and other 'discovery' patents.
Come up with a more formalized approach to dealing with large scale negative externalities. That is one thing government should be involved in. This would require a constitutional amendment as it would be an expansion of powers, and it would have to be limited to dealing with large scale externalities that had significant impact out of the individual states. (Large scale pollution of the air, water, etc.)
Well, I gotta get back to work, but that is a partial list. I'm sure lots of people will think I'm nuts, but basically I just want a return to a more Federalist nation with fewer foreign entanglements and a limited government.
What gormless fool modded the parent offtopic? You might not agree with him, but he was not off topic. His post could be paraphrased down to 'Ford is losing money, and actions like this can only help contribute to that'. Seems on topic to me.
A $2000 one-time capital investment is not very much. It wouldn't take long even for 'cheap' labor to eat up that much in wages. Also I bet that Japan is like the USA and there are regulations, paperwork, insurance, and various other hidden costs when it comes to hiring workers. 'Cheap' labor is never cheap in 1st world countries unless you cheat and pay undocumented workers under the table. Also, FYI, the Japanese version of the IRS is famous for being effecient and very ruthless. You don't want to get caught in tax-evasion in Japan.
And that has what bearing on the availability of child labor?
Some nice innuendo and name-calling from you guys. You had some good points to make much as I hate to admit it, and I had some good responses to some of them and would have had to agree with some others. However I'm not going to bother posting these responses because polite discourse is beyond your ken. That you attack me for being par for the course on ./ is rather funny, given your own atrocious attitudes.
Once Capitalism is married to government like you describe, it is no longer Capitalism but is instead Fascism. That is the problem with Capitalism. Since it is effective at concentrating capital in the hands of people best able to use it to improve the economy, eventually you have enough power in the hands of a few that they can begin corrupting the system for their own ends. Enough of this and they have destroyed the system that allowed them to become successful and instead you have a system not based on a free market and free trade among free men, but instead that modern version of Feudalism that is Fascism.
That usually does not happen of course, and organizations usually seek to perpetuate themselves, often at odds to their stated purpose. This behavior is sometimes intentional (fradulent) and many times emergent (the nature of the beast), IMO.
While corruption of purpose is common, even prevalant, in most organizations, that does not nullify the analogy I made. I was simply pointing out that the argument that GPL promoters should fight the idea of a much smaller and more limited approach to copyright is nonsensical. If they did do that then, based on the stated goals of the GPL, it would be tantamount to admitting that the stated goals are lies. Also remember that even if the leadership of an organization may not believe in the stated goals, most rank and file people in the organization or movement will, and if enough of them decide that it is all lies then that is the beginning of the end for that organization. At the minimum it will not be able to keep people and it's operational effectiveness will greatly diminish.
Just as people can become more unstable and deranged by indulging in self deceit and growing cognitive dissonance to avoid reality that contradicts their lies, so to do organizations become more schizophrenic and bizarre as their stated and actual goals diverge further and further apart. Eventually such organizations are deadlocked by contradictory policies, demolished morale and turnover, and ever larger and more complex but less effecient management structures to manage the problems caused by the contradictions. Eventually the organization will collapse due to paralysis and corruption or simply be overtaken by a competitor. In the long run (somtimes very long) an organization that follow greatly divergent stated and actual goals cannot prosper no matter how good the short term advantages may be. Eventually the only way the organization can continue past it's normal life expetancy is through the use of force. That is one of the problems with Fascism - corporate welfare keeps dysfunctional entities around for much longer than they would otherwise survive, and the body politic is poisoned with the same disease of corruption as the moribund corporations it marries itself to.
Of course leaders in these organization may benefit greatly, especially if they bail out before the ship sinks and take their winnings with them. Crime often does pay. It represents a negative externality IMO. They perform a taking from the system itself and then leave everyone else holding the bag.
As for the GPL, it was created as a response to the current insane copyright and 'IP' laws, to help ensure freedom of software and computing. It leverages copyright to do this, fighting fire with fire so to speak. A reasonable copyright system would obviate the need for the GPL. I suggest you read up on the the philosophy behind the GPL if you're going to comment on it.
Your argument is analogous to saying that if racial equality were reached then the need for organizations like the NAACP would be gone, so members of the NAACP should fight against racial equality.
Option 2 under this theory, you are training with how to deal with injury to your legs or otherwise not being able to rely on them.
Personally I think there is some validity to the theory, but that it is just one facet of why we dream.
You just repeated a few of the many things this guy said were great about these machines and completely mis-characterized the article. I know not reading the article is a Slashdot tradition, but it's a bad one. Don't follow it.
Leaving that aside, in this case you are flat out wrong because the market was ALREADY taking care of it. Without this law the fluorescents were already beginning to do very well. I know many people who are switching to them and you find them on the store shelves everywhere in large quantities. Sam's Club for example has them in giant palettes. I even see them taking over in the grocery store aisles. They are also flat out selling in every larger quantities. TFA mentioned that they are becoming popular.
In any event, an incandescent may or may not be a taking of significance. If I'm getting my power from my own solar cells or other 'green' source for example, I'm not doing a taking from you by powering a inefficient incandescent. Just the opposite, the flourscent with it's mercury can become more of a taking. Do you think that the costs of the mercury disposal are built into the cost of the bulbs and that said money (if it is) is really being set aside for reclamation? Personally I don't think you can every totally escape some level of takings happening. It's an asymptotic problem and you can only get so close to a solution before the costs of eliminating the externalities becomes greater than the harm from the externalities themselves.
I believe the externalities issue should have been addressed with taxes based on how power companies produce energy (higher tax rates based on the amount of pollution produced per unit of energy) and possibly higher price premiums on electricity on households that consume more than a certain amount per month.
Just because I'm against HOW something is done does not mean I am against the goal. And FYI, I already knew about externalities before you told me about them.
As to how I got to soft fascism, it's pretty cut and dry. The marriage of corporate and governmental power is the definition of fascism as defined by Mussolini. So, it's fascism because we have passed the point where Congress is bound by law (the Constitution) and it's ties to industry are too intertwined. It is soft, not hard, fascism because the relationships (both ways) are via lobbyists and regulations, not by directives and law.
In other words, Congress is doing things outside of it's legal authority. When a government is not controlled or bound in what it can do then by definition you have some form of tyranny. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship, and eventually it will cease to be a benevolent dictatorship and just become a dictatorship.
I wonder what the profit margins for the fluorescents are? I bet they're higher. Congress rarely does anything unless money changed hands somewhere. Personally I've been buying the fluorescents becuase they are supposed to last a lot longer and I hate having bulbs burn out on me, and I've found them ok for the most part anyway. However I have not bought them to replace all of my light bulbs. There are a few places where the incandescents are better suited such as my dimmer lights and in the bathroom.
The market would have sorted this all out eventually and we would have wound up with better bulbs of both types. Instead now the game has been called off and we'll wind up with more expensive crappier products. Eventually they'll ban all incandescents except for speciality applications and the pressure for the fluorescents to have to compete and improve and become cheaper to displace incandescents will be gone.
*Sigh* Once again it is shown that we (in America) are all now living under a regime of soft fascism.
Toyota hybrids use a strange thing called an E-CVT. Ford hybrids are supposed to have something similar. My experience with a Prius is that it's transmission does a far better job than a regular automautic transmission, but you'll have to decide for yourself.
4 WD truck hybrids do exist. They are even planning on hemi-hybrids next year. Personally I'd wait a few years before looking at a truck hybrid.
More advanced or newer technology != more complicated or more expensive or use or maintain. Also most of the components in a hybrid are not new technology. Electric motors and IC engines are very old hat, and the battery technology has been around some time as well.
The fact is that there is simply a lot less moving pieces and less stress and less use on the pieces that do move. This guy was the first hybrid taxicab driver (in Canada anyway) and gives his reasons for why he thinks his maintenance costs were less with a hybrid.
Personally I think that the big one is that the IC engine in a hybrid simply doesn't run as much as a conventional IC does. It's off a lot of the time, and when it is on it is usually running at a rate that is optimal for that engine, not at a rate required to push your car at the speed you want to go. Everything else being equal, if you run your engine half as much (or whatever) and you ran it at a rpm that the engine was optimally geared for, it should last a lot longer and need less maintenance.
Gas is going up in price. You can expect $4 or even $5 per gallon in the not too distant future. As this climbs, standard vehicles will become more and more expensive relative to hybrids. In addition you mention 100,000 miles, but that is low. Most modern cars are good for 200,000 miles or more. There are Priuses that have over 300,000 miles on them on the road today.
A $25,000 50 MPG Prius, run for 200,000 miles at $3 per gallon will cost you $12,000 in gas. Your $15,000 30 MPG Corolla will cost you $20,000 in gas. The Prius would cost you only a net $2,000 more in this scenario, and that does not include the unscheduled maintenance cost penalties you pay (see below).
If gas goes to $4 per gallon it is about $17K vs. $27K, making the Prius a wash. If it goes over $4 per gallon, the Prius is cheaper.
As hybrids become more effecient and cheaper, these numbers will dramatically swing against owning a regular car. A 300 mpg hybrid like the article mentions that costs $30,000 will only cost $2,000 to $4,000 in gas over the lifetime of the car even at $5 per gallon. Such a car is free in comparison to the cost of the Corolla. You would literally save in the low tens of thousands of dollars by buying the 'more expensive' hybrid.
There is another big factor. Scheduled maintenance costs on hybrids are about in line with regular cars, but their unscheduled maintenance costs tend to be much lower. Cab companies and fleets like this one are starting to publish the reliability and maintenace results of using hybrids. The data is still sketchy, but even with the early hybrids (2001 models or so) that these sets of data apply to, the data indicates that you can save from $1 to $2 per 50 miles (very rough estimate) or so in unscheduled maintenance costs (ie, unexpected repair costs) over the life of the vehicle for a good hybrid vs. a regular IC vehicle. In other words, if you drive 200,000 miles you, statistically speaking, save about (200,000/50)*(1 to 2) = $4,000 to $8,000 over the lifetime of the car. Now that is a statistical average of course, and you might get a car that costs you almost nothing over that time. But that again you might not.
Hybrids are also holding their value much better than regular cars. You don't take a huge hit to the value of a hybrid just becuase you drove it off the lot. Go look around you'll find used Priuses going for almost as much as new ones.
Finally, I'll point out that Toyota (since we compared Corolla to Prius) no longer makes or sells regular IC cars in Japan. It's hybrid only. They are only making their older cars for America and some other markets, but they have already shown that they consider all non-hybrid lines to be end-lined soon.
In short I would not buy a high-end new IC car today. If you're not ready for a hybrid or you don't drive enough for it to make economic sense to you, then do your best to buy a cheaper used regular car and wait. In the next few years you will see IC cars fall out of favor. For a period of time IC cars will become dirt cheap as demand for them drops through the floor, making the greatest buyers market in history for IC cars. Then IC cars will all but disappear. It's a pretty standard model for technology that has reached the end of the line.
I'm so going to have to try this. The software isn't complex and with some work I'll finally have a giant digital canvas with the infrared pen acting as pen/airbrush.
The idea that you can somehow 'ban' a country from getting ahold of a commodity is ludicrious and stupid. The only way you could really do that would be to effectively seal and close their borders militarily and embargo them to the point that you controlled all of their travel and trade outside of their borders. Good luck with that.
A lot of people posted solutions to this. Thank you and I'll give them a try. Of course, this still leave me wondering what is wrong with Adobe that they could not make a decent reader.
Anyway, now they want to add ads to these things? I really don't know what to say. I already consider PDFs to be on the verge of being totally unusable. This should push them right over the edge.
I think it is axiomatic that if your buyer/user and customer are not the same person, then you are in trouble. In Microsoft's case, without hardware sales there will be no advertisements or add sales either, and since they're selling the zunes at a loss, they lose on all counts.
In any event, enjoying your entertainment regardles of the content or quality of that entertainment does not make you stupid. It makes you undiscerning.