88% of college professors support increasing environmental protection even at the expense of jobs, and 65% support guaranteed jobs for all Americans. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html) So the norm for professors is pretty damn far left-wing. Nobody blinks at any of the ultra-left wing shenanigans that professors get up to unless they get caught red-handed engaged in outright academic misconduct, like Ward Churchill.
Depending on how the questions were phrased, it's likely that none of those things are far left.
Far left is not believing that everyone should have a fundamental right to basic medical care, food, shelter, and other necessities, nor believing that there should be enough jobs out there that anyone who wants a job can find one. Far left is believing that everyone should have the right to a high paying job, even without doing the work, without learning the things you need to learn to get such a job, and that it should be illegal to discriminate based on lack of education, intellect, or responsibility. Far left is supporting systems that make it difficult or impossible to fire someone even with cause. Far left is claiming that you should have to put up with the laziest, most incompetent workers in the world simply because someone decided to define being a pothead as a disability or medical condition.... Yeah. Those people are far left.
Far left isn't just believing that it's okay for environmental protection to cost jobs. Far right is believing that it is unacceptable. Anyone anywhere remotely close to the middle understands that any regulation on business inevitably costs jobs, and what matters is to strike the right balance between the extra cost of doing business and the damage those businesses do to the environment. Far right gets you an environment like that of China in just a few years. Far left, by contrast, is believing that saving some obscure species that will probably go extinct anyway despite our efforts is worth a moratorium on construction in a third of the state for five years.
And so on. The fact that you think these middle-of-the-road positions are actually far left is a rather striking demonstration of just how far to the right our country has slid, as it is an indication that you have never been exposed to anyone whose ideas are truly leftist. Hint: they're usually going on about the virtues of socialism, raging about how evil Monsanto and GM crops are, staging topless protest rallies to save the spotted newt, etc.
Out of curiosity, where did you go to college?
Undergrad at a branch campus of the University of TN, grad at UC Santa Cruz. There's a huge difference between the two. Still, outside of the social sciences, most of the folks even at UCSC were fairly close to the center, with only a handful of the folks I've met being far enough to the left that I would classify them as loons. (I was in grad school, though, so I was mostly exposed to the engineering side of the house, plus many of the music faculty.)
That said, California is also a lot more liberal as a state than the rest of the country on average. Treating a UC school as being characteristic of institutions of higher learning across the U.S. is like assuming Beavis and Butt-head are archetypical high school students....
Also, the social sciences tend to be dominated by people pretty far to the left, but then again, that's pretty much why people go into a field in social sciences. After all, other than social work, there's not much else you can do with a degree in those fields besides teaching. Much like the Peace Corps, the entire field is kind of self selecting for liberals and ultra-liberals.:-)
What's depressing is that stupid tricks like this are even still possible in this day and age.
Helpful tip: In Mac OS X's Finder, if you choose "Preferences..." from the "Finder" menu, you'll find a checkbox that says, "Show all filename extensions". Check it. You will never again be at risk from these sorts of malware attacks (unless you or someone else goes back in and unchecks it).
I'm strongly of the opinion that this checkbox should be enabled on every computer in the world, and that a checkbox to hide those extensions should not even exist. The only thing that "feature" does is make trojans like this one possible.
In the paragraph quoted above, you state that conservativism is essentially nothing more than close-minded intolerance bred through insular cultural groups, obviously a defect that doesn't survive contact with other people.
I neither said nor implied any such thing. I live my life in a relatively conservative fashion. I have no objection to anyone else who does so. What makes me socially liberal is that I don't demand that everyone else live their lives the way I live mine. The social conservatives generally do. That, by definition, is intolerance in its purest form, and in my experience, those sorts of attitudes do not survive very long except in relative isolation.
Modern conservatism is nothing more than a belief in smaller governments and lower taxes.
What you talk about as "modern" conservatism is nothing of the sort. What you are describing there is classic conservatism, which is the "fiscal" conservatism that I was speaking about in the other part of my previous post. Those attitudes have about as much to do with the people I was talking about in that paragraph as your interpretation of my post did with what I actually said.
More to the point, the Republican Party is generally even more fiscally wasteful than the Democratic Party. They will never rein in spending because their buddies in industry who give generous campaign contributions are the ones making money off of that spending. The only real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats pay for their expenditures with taxes, whereas the Republicans pay for it by borrowing money. Both parties are utterly fiscally irresponsible at a level that is just mind-blowing. There are no true conservatives by your definition in politics anywhere except possibly at the municipal level, and probably not even there.
... hatred and intolerance are much more predominant in liberal thinking. Radical liberal professors will hunt down and fire anyone that doesn't buy in to their groupthink - conservative professors, by contrast, are much more live and let live people, which is why there's so few of them left in the liberal arts.
Sure, there are a few radical leftist professors out there—mostly in places like U.C. Berkeley—but they are few and far between. Most college professors are nowhere near that far left of center, and the ones who are generally don't last long.
For top line accountants, productive has risen massively in the past 30 years. Thank you computers! Where once one needed 4 accountants â" you only need 1. As a result, salaries for those in public practice have doubled or tripled. This can be temping.
Accountants are a little different because they set their own rates to a large degree; accountants are usually partners rather than line-level employees. There's a well-understood phenomenon that (at least to a point) people tend to see higher prices as an indication of quality. Thus, businesses (including accountants) who set high prices get more business. More importantly, the fact that people need fewer accountants means that they have to charge more money in order to make a living because they are each getting less work. Thus, what you're seeing is pure supply-and-demand economics.
However, this pattern only applies to people in fields where the worker sets the wage and customers pay them directly. For the vast majority of fields, the employer makes the offer, and the worker either takes it or leaves it. In those situations, salaries depend mainly on the imbalance between graduates and available positions. If an employer can do the same job with one person instead of four, there are now four people competing for one job. Therefore, salaries go down because the employers can get away with paying less.
In pretty much every field, as employers find ways to reduce headcount, worker salaries get squeezed. The exceptions are so few and far between that they are basically a statistical anomaly.
Productivity: Productive of professors have been rising slower than the average employee. The same professor teaches about the same number of students as they did 20 or even 100 years ago.
Matters not. That just means that the cost per student should be the same as it was 100 years ago after adjusting for salary inflation. If you need to teach twice as many kids, you hire twice as many teachers, and when you divide it by the number of students, your cost is the same. Therefore, if salaries aren't also skyrocketing, then flat teacher productivity has no bearing on the cost of education, and even if they are skyrocketing, the root cause is the salary increases, not the flat productivity.
Research: Professors & Universities are judged by the original research that they do â" teaching at most are secondary. Undergraduates tend to subsides this research â" at least indirectly. They get grad students instead of professors for teachers. I think research is very important â" I just dislike the ungrads subsides it.
This is certainly a problem at larger state schools, although they will tell you that the grants they bring in more than offset the reduced faculty workload. I suspect that this impacts the quality of education (being educated by more junior instructors rather than full professors) more than the cost.
Either way, the cost of small state schools is skyrocketing, too, and they don't do much research at all. So I don't think this one covers it, either, though I won't argue that it doesn't contribute.
Worth: The value of a college degree has gone up. One used to have a lot of good paying [careers] open to you if one did not have a college degree. Today, less so. Why [subsidize] something that people are willing to go deeply into debt when budgets are tight? (I know the answer, alas the public and politicians do not. California, which once had the best state university system, now spends more on prisons. Sigh.)
That only covers the decrease in the state's portion, which doesn't account for the increases we're seeing.
No, the problems we're seeing now have several causes:
1. Universities used to skate along by underpaying a bunch of part-time faculty, and they're having a harder and harder time doing this because people want to make a living. Thus, fewer (competent) people are going into education. With fewer (competent) people willing to fill those instructor positions, they have to hire more full-time faculty, which costs more money.
And those underpaid instructors are unionizing to demand fair wages and benefits. This also drives the cost up. Don't get me wrong; the notion of permanent instructors is an abuse of the system, so I think it is reasonable for them to expect better treatment than they get. That does not, however, come without a cost.
2. Universities operate on a government budget model in which every dollar in the budget must be spent or it is forfeited, and more to the point, their budget is usually cut by that amount in the following year as well. This actively discourages department heads from saying, "I think we can get by without this for a year because times are tough for the university right now". The result is massive overspending on things that they really don't need.
Also, there are large portions of their budgets that are earmarked for specific expenditures (and thus are unavailable to repurpose for other things). This means that the universities are not able to trim and reallocate those portions of their budgets as state budgets contract.
Worse, the universities are often contractually obligated to pay some portion of those earmarked expenditures. For example, the state might give two million dollars to build a building, but the university might be obligated to pay the remaining million dollars of their own funds. This magnifies the impact of the state's budget cuts by making a disproportionate impact on the day-to-day operations budget that must be countered by a disproportionate increase in tuition.
There are probably some other causes, but those are the two big ones that I'm aware of.
It's not that education draws more liberals so much that education turns off conservatives—not in principle, but in practice. As far as I can tell, the conservative movement in the U.S. (in the bastardized incarnation that is the Republican party) largely consists of two groups of people: people who are fiscally conservative, and people who are socially conservative.
Socially conservative people have two choices: attend a socially conservative school (mostly religious schools) or attend a public school.
If they attend a public school, they tend to become less socially conservative. The very nature of a melting pot institution of higher learning inherently increases tolerance because it exposes you to a wide range of cultures and perspectives. Being in an environment where you encounter people who are different from you makes it harder to dehumanize people who disagree with you. This has nothing to do with the teachers or the institution, and everything to do with the fact that it is a microcosm of the world rather than a homogeneous group.
If they attend a homogeneous private school, their conservative ideologies may be reinforced (depending on the university), in which case they will continue to see public education as a hotbed of liberalism, and if they decide to become teachers, they will generally choose to teach at similarly homogeneous schools.
Thus, socially conservative people tend to either learn tolerance or segregate themselves, which is why you rarely see social conservatives teaching in public higher education.
The other big group in the Republican party are the fiscally conservative. These people presumably have at least a passing understanding of economics (at least enough to know that you don't spend every penny you have coming in), which means that they won't put up with a job that pays them peanuts, working long hours to teach a bunch of kids who don't really want to be there. And the "new conservatives"—the folks who are fiscally conservative because they became rich and now want to keep that money rather than supporting the social programs that helped them get there—have an attitude that doesn't exactly match up with a desire to help others by teaching. You won't see any of those sorts of people in higher education, private or otherwise.
So it's really no surprise that there are few conservatives (of either type) in public education. Want more conservatives in public education? Tell your conservative bureaucrats to triple higher ed salaries so that they can compete with private enterprise and private homogeneous schools. Until you do that, conservative views cannot possibly balance out the liberal voices in higher ed, precisely because the liberals—those who care more about others than their own well being— are the only ones who will take the job... that and people who aren't smart enough to get a job doing something else... and some people who are both....
Ah, but you're not seeing the whole picture. The benefit of the breakup was that AT&T (the long distance carrier) was separate from the wire carriers for a very long time, and that to this day, the wire services are required to allow competitors to use their lines for other services.
An ideal breakup of AT&T and Verizon would be similar: the towers would be owned by two nationwide companies that are both forbidden to lease access to individual customers, and the customer base would be divided among a crapload of companies that initially own the customer base from a particular region (divided up so that each covers the entire country in small, alternating pockets).
This would create dozens of cell provider companies that would immediately compete with one another on a nationwide basis, and two tower providers that could compete for those cell providers' business alongside Sprint and T-Mobile.
Follow a link intended for end users, even though I was looking for information targeted at authors and publishers (and, as expected, not find that information because it isn't there).
Either guess or magically already know that OverDrive is a company and not the name of this new Amazon service (which can't easily be guessed from context).
Look up that company to find out how they operate.
Assume that Amazon will work with them in some specific way.
All because Amazon couldn't be bothered to put even one single sentence in their press release targeted at anyone other than end users.
My concerns are also pretty unique among authors in that I'm anti-DRM. For most folks, this would be a non-issue because by authorizing Amazon to use DRM on the title, the rental model would, at least to some extent, "just work". So it's not that I suspected Amazon would jeopardize all of their sales, but rather that this was a stealthy attempt to get publishers and authors to publish content in a locked-in-to-Kindle DRMed format.
And this is why most companies have dozens of people reading over their press releases before they go out. A press release is not a marketing blurb targeted at a single audience. A press release is an informational statement that is read by a wide range of audiences from stockholders to users to strategic partners. A proper press release must not scare the living crap out of any of those audiences. If it does, you're doing it wrong.
It's a work of fiction, though it is pedantically researched in a lot of areas.
If I took the time to research my Slashdot posts to the same degree that I research my novels, I wouldn't have time to post. Or write, for that matter. Or do my day job. Just saying.:-)
Thanks. See that's the sort of information that the Amazon press release should have contained. If it had said, "Local libraries can lend any book that they have on their shelves electronically in a Kindle edition", I wouldn't have jumped to a very wrong conclusion. Instead, the article said Amazon "is making Kindle ebooks available for free in America through 11,000 local public libraries." I'm not sure how to read that sentence other than the way I read it, and the Amazon press release did nothing to change my interpretation of that sentence.
Yes, I did. Nowhere in the Slashdot article or the press release or the blog entry did Amazon say anything about teaming up with anyone, much less the name of the service. Go read it again.
Where did this article mention overdrive? The summary says that Amazon is "making Kindle books available for free". Neither the Slashdot article nor the Amazon press release provided any indication that authors would get paid for this in any way. So my reaction is exactly what Amazon should expect from anyone who isn't already familiar with Overdrive and how they operate....
Speaking as someone in the last stages of preparing content for publication, I'm seriously leaning towards dropping plans for a Kindle edition because of this.
Letting libraries check out books is certainly a useful thing. The mere fact that a library is interested enough in your title to buy a copy is an indication of its quality, and has the potential to drive future sales by exposing more people to your book. However, unless there's a part of the equation that Amazon isn't telling us, this new policy completely destroys the value part of that equation from an author or publisher's perspective.
Previously, if those 11,000 libraries wanted to be able to lend my book, I would have gotten 11,000 sales. Now, if I interpret this correctly, all those people checking out the book translate into zero sales. In effect, Amazon is declaring that it has the right to loan copies of your book to anyone for free without you seeing a penny. This not only cuts the legs right out from under your current book sales, but also all future book sales unless you refuse to publish a Kindle version of your next book.
Worse, for those of us who are anti-DRM, we're completely screwed. I don't want DRM on my books, period, because it limits my readers' options for viewing content that they paid for. However, if my readers aren't paying for it, and are instead using a gratis lending model, a DRM-free book basically means that there's nothing stopping someone from checking it out, copying it to a new file, checking it back in, and basically getting the book for free. And unlike downloading it through bittorrent or whatever, because they obtained it through a legal channel, there is no way to track that behavior, no way to police it, and it isn't even all that easy to explain to users why it is wrong, or under what circumstances it is wrong. So books would have to be DRM-encumbered for lending purposes, and it's not clear if Amazon provides any such distinction, nor is it clear if it is even technically feasible for them to make such a distinction within their current model.
And finally, for the ultimate kick in the teeth, the Kindle edition of any book is inherently a substandard experience compared with the EPUB version because Kindle's support for HTML and CSS is utterly abysmal. This means that if I produce a Kindle edition, the vast majority of the readers of my books are likely to be able to freeload without me seeing a penny, and they will be disinclined to buy future content because the current content won't look as good as it should.
So explain to me again why I should support Kindle at all. At this point, despite the fact that I've wasted a week hacking a copy of my EPUB books to look marginally acceptable on Kindle, I'm strongly leaning towards writing off those extra hours as an unfortunate mistake unless Amazon provides clarification of their policy in a way that assuages these concerns. I will, of course, release EPUB versions for more functional readers like iPad, and (if Adobe fixes the four or five major CSS bugs I filed, including one potential security hole/crasher) possibly Nook.
A fair few areas don't have reliable 3G access anyway. 4G is a long way away for us... gah.
I noticed something rather interesting when looking at one of the cell companies' websites: the LTE coverage area showed solid coverage in a lot of areas where 3G showed poor or no signal. Apparently, LTE does a lot better than 3G at handling stuff like multipath interference, multi-tower interference, and other issues that currently plague areas with high population density, tall buildings, rocky topography, or some combination of the above.
In short, depending on the reason you don't have 3G service, 4G might come sooner than you think.
A high minimum tax which ignores charity not only discourages charity
There's very little actual evidence to back that statement up. You have "gut feelings," but almost nothing in the way of cold, hard data.
If I were rich and I could afford to give 35% of my income to charity, I might elect to do so. I could not afford to give more than 35%, so that's the absolute maximum that I could give.
With the tax write-off for charitable donations, however, that is not true. If I gave 35% of my income to a charity, I would get about 15% of my income back from the tax break, so the effect on my budget would be as though I gave only 20% of my income. Therefore, instead of giving 35% of my income, with the write-off, I could afford to give more like 55-60%.
This really isn't contestable; it's simple mathematics. Those tax breaks mean that everyone, rich or poor alike, can afford to give nearly twice as much as they could otherwise afford to give. In effect, those write-offs are comparable to a government matching grant. Take away those write-offs, and with the possible exception of the *extremely* wealthy, those donations are going to drop roughly in half.
That said, I completely disagree with Obama's approach on this. The focus is entirely misdirected. This is going to hit most of the top several percentiles hard, but the top 1% -- the super-wealthy, who control nearly 40% of the nation's wealth -- only weakly. The wealthiest Americans earn most of their money through capital gains. But naturally, nobody is going to touch the capital gains rate.:P
Actually, that's exactly what this change does, in effect. What Obama is proposing is essentially a variation of the alternative minimum tax with a cap at a million dollars annually. The AMT includes income from all sources, including capital gains, and so would this.
And (not in response to your comment) contrary to the ridiculous Slashdot headline, this change in the tax code is not a "wealthy tax". It's a fair share tax. The new law would make it abundantly clear that the purpose of lower taxes on capital gains is to help people save money for retirement. Right now, by contrast, the primary use of the lower rate of taxation on capital gains is for rich CEOs to hide most of their income from taxation. By paying CEOs in stock options, those CEOs pay a fraction of the taxes that they would otherwise have paid had the company paid them that same money as a cash performance bonus. That is clearly an unfair tax dodge. The proposed change in the tax code would go a long way towards eliminating that tax dodge, while doing so in a way that has minimal impact on people who are using the lower capital gains rate for its intended purpose—saving money for retirement.
Wouldn't matter. In most places, the judge decides the damages, not the jury. And even in places where the jury decides the damages, the judge can generally override it and award more damages than the jury recommended.
Thus, the only way the jury could have helped this college student would have been to find him or her not guilty, which is clearly not the case, or to declare him or her not guilty by reason of jury nullification. And if you even mention jury nullification, the judge is liable to hold you in contempt.
It's change that any billionaire can believe in. Seriously, who comes up with such ludicrous damage awards? The purpose of punitive damages is to punish. Punishing a college student is making them owe $675, not $675,000. Making them owe $675,000 is effectively sentencing them to a lifetime of indentured servitude even if they had 100% of their wages garnished.
If memory serves, our country overthrew its previous British government for exactly the same sort of oppressive behavior—debtors' prisons and the like. The rich aristocracy in power would be wise to take that lesson to heart. For them, $675,000 is a slap on the wrist. For an average person, it's a lifetime of slavery, which last I checked was forbidden by at least a couple of constitutional amendments, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and every law of basic human decency.
The people who made this decision, along with everyone in the Obama administration who supported it, should be arrested and jailed for crimes against humanity, then prohibited from taking part in any aspect of sentencing for the rest of their lives.
Not really. The OS doesn't hide whether a response was encrypted or not from applications. The way Chrome supports DNSSEC is that a DNSSEC response is valid for https, but an unencrypted DNS response is invalid unless the site is signed by a CA cert. I'm assuming that all browsers supporting DNSSEC will do the same.
So it's more correct to say that DNSSEC is only useful against MITM once browsers stop accepting certs from traditional CAs.:-)
so your saying that just because you are reducing the number of CA's (global trusted CA's now to the domain registrars) that while it makes the # of targets less does not remove the single point of failure?
I'm saying that it dramatically changes the equation. With DNSSEC, I (as the owner of a domain) only need to worry about whether my choice of registrar is secure. With the current CA scheme, I have to worry about whether every CA is secure.
More to the point, someone compromising a registrar can compromise only a tiny fraction of the hosts on the Internet, whereas someone compromising a CA today can compromise the entire Internet. So yes, it does remove a single point of failure when looked at in the context of the Internet as a whole rather than the context of a single domain.
Besides, an attack on the registrar can fully compromise the CA system (by allowing an attacker to change the contact info on the domain and request a domain cert), so DNSSEC replaces several dozen attack vectors with only one, and one that is basically unavoidable so long as we have to register domains with a central authority.
it isn't - DNSSEC in it's current incarnation has the exact same single point of failure as the current CA system.
Care to enlighten us? I don't believe that is even remotely true.
Assuming that in the future, all browsers treat a DNSSEC-secured address result and key in the same way as it currently treats a CA cert (such that a URL specified as https requires DNSSEC to prevent stripping of the security during the lookup process), then the DNSSEC model can only be compromised by compromising the domain itself (globally). This means compromising a domain requires compromising that domain's registrar.
By contrast, the current CA model requires compromising any CA, whether that domain ever used it or not.
Sure, if someone compromises the domain's registrar, the DNSSEC scheme fails in the same way as the CA cert scheme, but this is indistinguishable from a real ownership change and/or a real CA change, which means the convergence.io scheme would replace a false sense of security with false positives while adding no discernible benefit.
Also, to be fair, the transition from CAs to DNSSEC will require an interim period during which https URLs still allow CA signatures to qualify, which leaves those browsers with the same single point of failure that we have today, but only because the browsers continue to treat CA certs as trusted.
Mandatory DNSSEC with public keys stored in the DNS record would achieve the exact same level of security without adding all sorts of unnecessary P2P traffic.
The only thing that the CAs ostensibly offered was some indication that the site was owned by an actual brick-and-mortar identity at some physical address, and when they switched to domain validation, even that advantage went away. Thus, they're basically vestigial. I similarly see no reason why a scheme like the one linked above would be any better in a DNSSEC-enabled world.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on how the questions were phrased, it's likely that none of those things are far left.
Far left is not believing that everyone should have a fundamental right to basic medical care, food, shelter, and other necessities, nor believing that there should be enough jobs out there that anyone who wants a job can find one. Far left is believing that everyone should have the right to a high paying job, even without doing the work, without learning the things you need to learn to get such a job, and that it should be illegal to discriminate based on lack of education, intellect, or responsibility. Far left is supporting systems that make it difficult or impossible to fire someone even with cause. Far left is claiming that you should have to put up with the laziest, most incompetent workers in the world simply because someone decided to define being a pothead as a disability or medical condition.... Yeah. Those people are far left.
Far left isn't just believing that it's okay for environmental protection to cost jobs. Far right is believing that it is unacceptable. Anyone anywhere remotely close to the middle understands that any regulation on business inevitably costs jobs, and what matters is to strike the right balance between the extra cost of doing business and the damage those businesses do to the environment. Far right gets you an environment like that of China in just a few years. Far left, by contrast, is believing that saving some obscure species that will probably go extinct anyway despite our efforts is worth a moratorium on construction in a third of the state for five years.
And so on. The fact that you think these middle-of-the-road positions are actually far left is a rather striking demonstration of just how far to the right our country has slid, as it is an indication that you have never been exposed to anyone whose ideas are truly leftist. Hint: they're usually going on about the virtues of socialism, raging about how evil Monsanto and GM crops are, staging topless protest rallies to save the spotted newt, etc.
Undergrad at a branch campus of the University of TN, grad at UC Santa Cruz. There's a huge difference between the two. Still, outside of the social sciences, most of the folks even at UCSC were fairly close to the center, with only a handful of the folks I've met being far enough to the left that I would classify them as loons. (I was in grad school, though, so I was mostly exposed to the engineering side of the house, plus many of the music faculty.)
That said, California is also a lot more liberal as a state than the rest of the country on average. Treating a UC school as being characteristic of institutions of higher learning across the U.S. is like assuming Beavis and Butt-head are archetypical high school students....
Also, the social sciences tend to be dominated by people pretty far to the left, but then again, that's pretty much why people go into a field in social sciences. After all, other than social work, there's not much else you can do with a degree in those fields besides teaching. Much like the Peace Corps, the entire field is kind of self selecting for liberals and ultra-liberals. :-)
There's still the problem of all those pesky particles flying at high speed down the center stripe.
You mean the .pdf part, I assume.
What's depressing is that stupid tricks like this are even still possible in this day and age.
Helpful tip: In Mac OS X's Finder, if you choose "Preferences..." from the "Finder" menu, you'll find a checkbox that says, "Show all filename extensions". Check it. You will never again be at risk from these sorts of malware attacks (unless you or someone else goes back in and unchecks it).
I'm strongly of the opinion that this checkbox should be enabled on every computer in the world, and that a checkbox to hide those extensions should not even exist. The only thing that "feature" does is make trojans like this one possible.
I neither said nor implied any such thing. I live my life in a relatively conservative fashion. I have no objection to anyone else who does so. What makes me socially liberal is that I don't demand that everyone else live their lives the way I live mine. The social conservatives generally do. That, by definition, is intolerance in its purest form, and in my experience, those sorts of attitudes do not survive very long except in relative isolation.
What you talk about as "modern" conservatism is nothing of the sort. What you are describing there is classic conservatism, which is the "fiscal" conservatism that I was speaking about in the other part of my previous post. Those attitudes have about as much to do with the people I was talking about in that paragraph as your interpretation of my post did with what I actually said.
More to the point, the Republican Party is generally even more fiscally wasteful than the Democratic Party. They will never rein in spending because their buddies in industry who give generous campaign contributions are the ones making money off of that spending. The only real difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats pay for their expenditures with taxes, whereas the Republicans pay for it by borrowing money. Both parties are utterly fiscally irresponsible at a level that is just mind-blowing. There are no true conservatives by your definition in politics anywhere except possibly at the municipal level, and probably not even there.
Sure, there are a few radical leftist professors out there—mostly in places like U.C. Berkeley—but they are few and far between. Most college professors are nowhere near that far left of center, and the ones who are generally don't last long.
Accountants are a little different because they set their own rates to a large degree; accountants are usually partners rather than line-level employees. There's a well-understood phenomenon that (at least to a point) people tend to see higher prices as an indication of quality. Thus, businesses (including accountants) who set high prices get more business. More importantly, the fact that people need fewer accountants means that they have to charge more money in order to make a living because they are each getting less work. Thus, what you're seeing is pure supply-and-demand economics.
However, this pattern only applies to people in fields where the worker sets the wage and customers pay them directly. For the vast majority of fields, the employer makes the offer, and the worker either takes it or leaves it. In those situations, salaries depend mainly on the imbalance between graduates and available positions. If an employer can do the same job with one person instead of four, there are now four people competing for one job. Therefore, salaries go down because the employers can get away with paying less.
In pretty much every field, as employers find ways to reduce headcount, worker salaries get squeezed. The exceptions are so few and far between that they are basically a statistical anomaly.
Matters not. That just means that the cost per student should be the same as it was 100 years ago after adjusting for salary inflation. If you need to teach twice as many kids, you hire twice as many teachers, and when you divide it by the number of students, your cost is the same. Therefore, if salaries aren't also skyrocketing, then flat teacher productivity has no bearing on the cost of education, and even if they are skyrocketing, the root cause is the salary increases, not the flat productivity.
This is certainly a problem at larger state schools, although they will tell you that the grants they bring in more than offset the reduced faculty workload. I suspect that this impacts the quality of education (being educated by more junior instructors rather than full professors) more than the cost.
Either way, the cost of small state schools is skyrocketing, too, and they don't do much research at all. So I don't think this one covers it, either, though I won't argue that it doesn't contribute.
That only covers the decrease in the state's portion, which doesn't account for the increases we're seeing.
No, the problems we're seeing now have several causes:
1. Universities used to skate along by underpaying a bunch of part-time faculty, and they're having a harder and harder time doing this because people want to make a living. Thus, fewer (competent) people are going into education. With fewer (competent) people willing to fill those instructor positions, they have to hire more full-time faculty, which costs more money.
And those underpaid instructors are unionizing to demand fair wages and benefits. This also drives the cost up. Don't get me wrong; the notion of permanent instructors is an abuse of the system, so I think it is reasonable for them to expect better treatment than they get. That does not, however, come without a cost.
2. Universities operate on a government budget model in which every dollar in the budget must be spent or it is forfeited, and more to the point, their budget is usually cut by that amount in the following year as well. This actively discourages department heads from saying, "I think we can get by without this for a year because times are tough for the university right now". The result is massive overspending on things that they really don't need.
Also, there are large portions of their budgets that are earmarked for specific expenditures (and thus are unavailable to repurpose for other things). This means that the universities are not able to trim and reallocate those portions of their budgets as state budgets contract.
Worse, the universities are often contractually obligated to pay some portion of those earmarked expenditures. For example, the state might give two million dollars to build a building, but the university might be obligated to pay the remaining million dollars of their own funds. This magnifies the impact of the state's budget cuts by making a disproportionate impact on the day-to-day operations budget that must be countered by a disproportionate increase in tuition.
There are probably some other causes, but those are the two big ones that I'm aware of.
It's not that education draws more liberals so much that education turns off conservatives—not in principle, but in practice. As far as I can tell, the conservative movement in the U.S. (in the bastardized incarnation that is the Republican party) largely consists of two groups of people: people who are fiscally conservative, and people who are socially conservative.
Socially conservative people have two choices: attend a socially conservative school (mostly religious schools) or attend a public school.
If they attend a public school, they tend to become less socially conservative. The very nature of a melting pot institution of higher learning inherently increases tolerance because it exposes you to a wide range of cultures and perspectives. Being in an environment where you encounter people who are different from you makes it harder to dehumanize people who disagree with you. This has nothing to do with the teachers or the institution, and everything to do with the fact that it is a microcosm of the world rather than a homogeneous group.
If they attend a homogeneous private school, their conservative ideologies may be reinforced (depending on the university), in which case they will continue to see public education as a hotbed of liberalism, and if they decide to become teachers, they will generally choose to teach at similarly homogeneous schools.
Thus, socially conservative people tend to either learn tolerance or segregate themselves, which is why you rarely see social conservatives teaching in public higher education.
The other big group in the Republican party are the fiscally conservative. These people presumably have at least a passing understanding of economics (at least enough to know that you don't spend every penny you have coming in), which means that they won't put up with a job that pays them peanuts, working long hours to teach a bunch of kids who don't really want to be there. And the "new conservatives"—the folks who are fiscally conservative because they became rich and now want to keep that money rather than supporting the social programs that helped them get there—have an attitude that doesn't exactly match up with a desire to help others by teaching. You won't see any of those sorts of people in higher education, private or otherwise.
So it's really no surprise that there are few conservatives (of either type) in public education. Want more conservatives in public education? Tell your conservative bureaucrats to triple higher ed salaries so that they can compete with private enterprise and private homogeneous schools. Until you do that, conservative views cannot possibly balance out the liberal voices in higher ed, precisely because the liberals—those who care more about others than their own well being— are the only ones who will take the job... that and people who aren't smart enough to get a job doing something else... and some people who are both....
Ah, but you're not seeing the whole picture. The benefit of the breakup was that AT&T (the long distance carrier) was separate from the wire carriers for a very long time, and that to this day, the wire services are required to allow competitors to use their lines for other services.
An ideal breakup of AT&T and Verizon would be similar: the towers would be owned by two nationwide companies that are both forbidden to lease access to individual customers, and the customer base would be divided among a crapload of companies that initially own the customer base from a particular region (divided up so that each covers the entire country in small, alternating pockets).
This would create dozens of cell provider companies that would immediately compete with one another on a nationwide basis, and two tower providers that could compete for those cell providers' business alongside Sprint and T-Mobile.
So you were expecting me to:
All because Amazon couldn't be bothered to put even one single sentence in their press release targeted at anyone other than end users.
My concerns are also pretty unique among authors in that I'm anti-DRM. For most folks, this would be a non-issue because by authorizing Amazon to use DRM on the title, the rental model would, at least to some extent, "just work". So it's not that I suspected Amazon would jeopardize all of their sales, but rather that this was a stealthy attempt to get publishers and authors to publish content in a locked-in-to-Kindle DRMed format.
And this is why most companies have dozens of people reading over their press releases before they go out. A press release is not a marketing blurb targeted at a single audience. A press release is an informational statement that is read by a wide range of audiences from stockholders to users to strategic partners. A proper press release must not scare the living crap out of any of those audiences. If it does, you're doing it wrong.
It's a work of fiction, though it is pedantically researched in a lot of areas.
If I took the time to research my Slashdot posts to the same degree that I research my novels, I wouldn't have time to post. Or write, for that matter. Or do my day job. Just saying. :-)
Thanks. See that's the sort of information that the Amazon press release should have contained. If it had said, "Local libraries can lend any book that they have on their shelves electronically in a Kindle edition", I wouldn't have jumped to a very wrong conclusion. Instead, the article said Amazon "is making Kindle ebooks available for free in America through 11,000 local public libraries." I'm not sure how to read that sentence other than the way I read it, and the Amazon press release did nothing to change my interpretation of that sentence.
Yes, I did. Nowhere in the Slashdot article or the press release or the blog entry did Amazon say anything about teaming up with anyone, much less the name of the service. Go read it again.
Where did this article mention overdrive? The summary says that Amazon is "making Kindle books available for free". Neither the Slashdot article nor the Amazon press release provided any indication that authors would get paid for this in any way. So my reaction is exactly what Amazon should expect from anyone who isn't already familiar with Overdrive and how they operate....
Speaking as someone in the last stages of preparing content for publication, I'm seriously leaning towards dropping plans for a Kindle edition because of this.
Letting libraries check out books is certainly a useful thing. The mere fact that a library is interested enough in your title to buy a copy is an indication of its quality, and has the potential to drive future sales by exposing more people to your book. However, unless there's a part of the equation that Amazon isn't telling us, this new policy completely destroys the value part of that equation from an author or publisher's perspective.
Previously, if those 11,000 libraries wanted to be able to lend my book, I would have gotten 11,000 sales. Now, if I interpret this correctly, all those people checking out the book translate into zero sales. In effect, Amazon is declaring that it has the right to loan copies of your book to anyone for free without you seeing a penny. This not only cuts the legs right out from under your current book sales, but also all future book sales unless you refuse to publish a Kindle version of your next book.
Worse, for those of us who are anti-DRM, we're completely screwed. I don't want DRM on my books, period, because it limits my readers' options for viewing content that they paid for. However, if my readers aren't paying for it, and are instead using a gratis lending model, a DRM-free book basically means that there's nothing stopping someone from checking it out, copying it to a new file, checking it back in, and basically getting the book for free. And unlike downloading it through bittorrent or whatever, because they obtained it through a legal channel, there is no way to track that behavior, no way to police it, and it isn't even all that easy to explain to users why it is wrong, or under what circumstances it is wrong. So books would have to be DRM-encumbered for lending purposes, and it's not clear if Amazon provides any such distinction, nor is it clear if it is even technically feasible for them to make such a distinction within their current model.
And finally, for the ultimate kick in the teeth, the Kindle edition of any book is inherently a substandard experience compared with the EPUB version because Kindle's support for HTML and CSS is utterly abysmal. This means that if I produce a Kindle edition, the vast majority of the readers of my books are likely to be able to freeload without me seeing a penny, and they will be disinclined to buy future content because the current content won't look as good as it should.
So explain to me again why I should support Kindle at all. At this point, despite the fact that I've wasted a week hacking a copy of my EPUB books to look marginally acceptable on Kindle, I'm strongly leaning towards writing off those extra hours as an unfortunate mistake unless Amazon provides clarification of their policy in a way that assuages these concerns. I will, of course, release EPUB versions for more functional readers like iPad, and (if Adobe fixes the four or five major CSS bugs I filed, including one potential security hole/crasher) possibly Nook.
I noticed something rather interesting when looking at one of the cell companies' websites: the LTE coverage area showed solid coverage in a lot of areas where 3G showed poor or no signal. Apparently, LTE does a lot better than 3G at handling stuff like multipath interference, multi-tower interference, and other issues that currently plague areas with high population density, tall buildings, rocky topography, or some combination of the above.
In short, depending on the reason you don't have 3G service, 4G might come sooner than you think.
Oh, please, no. The sequel was bad enough to horrify a thousand generations....
If I were rich and I could afford to give 35% of my income to charity, I might elect to do so. I could not afford to give more than 35%, so that's the absolute maximum that I could give.
With the tax write-off for charitable donations, however, that is not true. If I gave 35% of my income to a charity, I would get about 15% of my income back from the tax break, so the effect on my budget would be as though I gave only 20% of my income. Therefore, instead of giving 35% of my income, with the write-off, I could afford to give more like 55-60%.
This really isn't contestable; it's simple mathematics. Those tax breaks mean that everyone, rich or poor alike, can afford to give nearly twice as much as they could otherwise afford to give. In effect, those write-offs are comparable to a government matching grant. Take away those write-offs, and with the possible exception of the *extremely* wealthy, those donations are going to drop roughly in half.
Actually, that's exactly what this change does, in effect. What Obama is proposing is essentially a variation of the alternative minimum tax with a cap at a million dollars annually. The AMT includes income from all sources, including capital gains, and so would this.
And (not in response to your comment) contrary to the ridiculous Slashdot headline, this change in the tax code is not a "wealthy tax". It's a fair share tax. The new law would make it abundantly clear that the purpose of lower taxes on capital gains is to help people save money for retirement. Right now, by contrast, the primary use of the lower rate of taxation on capital gains is for rich CEOs to hide most of their income from taxation. By paying CEOs in stock options, those CEOs pay a fraction of the taxes that they would otherwise have paid had the company paid them that same money as a cash performance bonus. That is clearly an unfair tax dodge. The proposed change in the tax code would go a long way towards eliminating that tax dodge, while doing so in a way that has minimal impact on people who are using the lower capital gains rate for its intended purpose—saving money for retirement.
Wouldn't matter. In most places, the judge decides the damages, not the jury. And even in places where the jury decides the damages, the judge can generally override it and award more damages than the jury recommended.
Thus, the only way the jury could have helped this college student would have been to find him or her not guilty, which is clearly not the case, or to declare him or her not guilty by reason of jury nullification. And if you even mention jury nullification, the judge is liable to hold you in contempt.
It's change that any billionaire can believe in. Seriously, who comes up with such ludicrous damage awards? The purpose of punitive damages is to punish. Punishing a college student is making them owe $675, not $675,000. Making them owe $675,000 is effectively sentencing them to a lifetime of indentured servitude even if they had 100% of their wages garnished.
If memory serves, our country overthrew its previous British government for exactly the same sort of oppressive behavior—debtors' prisons and the like. The rich aristocracy in power would be wise to take that lesson to heart. For them, $675,000 is a slap on the wrist. For an average person, it's a lifetime of slavery, which last I checked was forbidden by at least a couple of constitutional amendments, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and every law of basic human decency.
The people who made this decision, along with everyone in the Obama administration who supported it, should be arrested and jailed for crimes against humanity, then prohibited from taking part in any aspect of sentencing for the rest of their lives.
Not really. The OS doesn't hide whether a response was encrypted or not from applications. The way Chrome supports DNSSEC is that a DNSSEC response is valid for https, but an unencrypted DNS response is invalid unless the site is signed by a CA cert. I'm assuming that all browsers supporting DNSSEC will do the same.
So it's more correct to say that DNSSEC is only useful against MITM once browsers stop accepting certs from traditional CAs. :-)
I'm saying that it dramatically changes the equation. With DNSSEC, I (as the owner of a domain) only need to worry about whether my choice of registrar is secure. With the current CA scheme, I have to worry about whether every CA is secure.
More to the point, someone compromising a registrar can compromise only a tiny fraction of the hosts on the Internet, whereas someone compromising a CA today can compromise the entire Internet. So yes, it does remove a single point of failure when looked at in the context of the Internet as a whole rather than the context of a single domain.
Besides, an attack on the registrar can fully compromise the CA system (by allowing an attacker to change the contact info on the domain and request a domain cert), so DNSSEC replaces several dozen attack vectors with only one, and one that is basically unavoidable so long as we have to register domains with a central authority.
Care to enlighten us? I don't believe that is even remotely true.
Assuming that in the future, all browsers treat a DNSSEC-secured address result and key in the same way as it currently treats a CA cert (such that a URL specified as https requires DNSSEC to prevent stripping of the security during the lookup process), then the DNSSEC model can only be compromised by compromising the domain itself (globally). This means compromising a domain requires compromising that domain's registrar.
By contrast, the current CA model requires compromising any CA, whether that domain ever used it or not.
Sure, if someone compromises the domain's registrar, the DNSSEC scheme fails in the same way as the CA cert scheme, but this is indistinguishable from a real ownership change and/or a real CA change, which means the convergence.io scheme would replace a false sense of security with false positives while adding no discernible benefit.
Also, to be fair, the transition from CAs to DNSSEC will require an interim period during which https URLs still allow CA signatures to qualify, which leaves those browsers with the same single point of failure that we have today, but only because the browsers continue to treat CA certs as trusted.
Mandatory DNSSEC with public keys stored in the DNS record would achieve the exact same level of security without adding all sorts of unnecessary P2P traffic.
The only thing that the CAs ostensibly offered was some indication that the site was owned by an actual brick-and-mortar identity at some physical address, and when they switched to domain validation, even that advantage went away. Thus, they're basically vestigial. I similarly see no reason why a scheme like the one linked above would be any better in a DNSSEC-enabled world.