Bad design? Yes. Reason to revote? No. Even if it were numerically significant, which it doesn't appear to be based on the article (10 Buchanan votes, not all of which are inaccurate, per voting location using the ballots). If they revote, it will turn into an absolute zoo, with absolutely rampant vote fraud. I'm already somewhat worried about overseas citizens sending in votes today that wouldn't otherwise have been cast based on the results (believe me, it's not that hard to postmark something back a day, even without resorting to things like bribing post offices, many businesses can do it).
My point of view exactly. Well, I'm also a bit upset that he called Monica Lewinsky "delusional." And said that maybe she was mixing up fantasy and reality. So not only did he commit perjury, but he also committed libel (while simultaneously stroking his ego). Not to mention probable illegal campaign financing, which Gingrich took serious punishment for (several hundred dollars in fines, as I recall). Sure, a canidate's personal life is his own business, but he breaks the laws he's sworn to uphold, I have a problem.
Because the factor that catapulted Japan to success is their self-deprivation. The men spend all their time working, and consume very little, leaving them with vast amounts of capital left over for investment. The Japanese are corrupt (heads of coporations embezzling, politicians taking bribes, and so forth, all exceptionally commonplace), use rampant nepotism, and try to keep people at the same job their whole lives.
Despite all of this, over the last century their economy has grown at almost three times the rate of ours. In the last decade though, as evidenced by the fact that their stock market is STILL about half of what it was at its peak (which was 8 or 9 years ago), this has started to catch up with them. So, the important thing to remember about the Japanese is that working men don't buy anything, it's the women, and out of some quirk in pyschology, young people tend to consume more (worldwide) than old people, so as the above poster states, young women drive the consumer sector of the Japanese economy
America had laissez-faire capitalism at one point. It didn't work. We ended up with unsanitary meat, child labor, excessive hours, and extremely dangerous workplace conditions.
No, we always had this. The Gilded Age simply made people rich enough that they could actually sit back and take notice. Things were most definately improving, but they weren't improving fast enough to suit some people, so political action was taken. Right or wrong, at least realize that free-market capitalism did not produce the bad conditions, they were there before it was introduced.
As for why lack of import tariffs are good, think about those southeast asian sweatshop workers for a minute. The only goods their domestic economy can support are the basics: rough clothing, food, and so forth.
Let's say they can produce 1 pair of sneakers every hour, and they get paid $0.50. The only reason that they'd work for Nike is because that $0.50 is MORE than they could make doing similarly skilled labor elsewhere in the economy. Poor countries are POOR! You can't make them rich just by wishing it so.
If Nike did pay their workers $20 an hour, it would horribly upset the local economy, because they'd be making more than, say, doctors. We want to encourage those in backwards economies to learn skills, not just work for Nike (Nike doesn't want that, but they'll regard it as an acceptable consequence of their trying to find the lowest labor cost possible).
The reason they can't afford Nike shoes is because Nike is not just the southeast laborers, it's also the marketers, the lawyers, the executives, the Nike Town stores, and so forth. Go into a shoe store, and compare the cost of Nike shoes to that of some no name brand, and try to tell me that marketing does not dramatically increase the price you can get for a good.
Okay, I've talked enough about this. The conclusion: import tariffs are bad because they force us to pay higher prices, and they hurt developing economies desperately in need of steady jobs. For a good recent book on free market economics, read Free to Choose, by Milton Friedman.
You can find plenty of economists to agree. I've never heard an economist claim that there's no such thing as productivity gains, what else would you call it if a labor saving device (such as the plow) allows an individual to produce more of a good in a shorter amount of time? Why do you think a full quarter of any macroeconomics class is called "economic growth?"
Check the US Census for (inflation adjusted) statistics on how much incomes have increased. Not to spoil the surprise, but over the last 50 years, ALL classes have increased their wealth. The poor are NOT getting poorer, they are getting richer. This misconception comes about because the poor are not getting richer as fast as the rich (this may also be a problem, but we can debate that another time).
The average (inflation adjusted) growth rate of the GDP in this country is approximately 2.5%. This growth is due to: population increases (duh, this is why GDP per capita growth is what's really important), women entering the labor market (actually, this is one of the primary reasons why the rich are getting richer, because poor women have always worked, but now that rich women are working too, upper class families now have almost double the income they used to), and of course technology.
The Linux operating system, which is freely available to programmers, is considered to be a distant threat to the Windows operating system sold by Microsoft Corp.
Yeah, that's right, for programmers only! All the rest of you, that'll be $100 per copy. And don't think you can get away with just buying one and copying it for all of your friends, the GPL only applies to programmers, dammit!
Seriously, that's really bizarre. Did the author simply misspeak, or did he honestly believe that only programmers could obtain free copies of Linux? Either way, when you think about it, that's really a pretty egregeous error, and will probably help support in many people's minds the myth that only prgrammers can use Linux (not that they won't get the most out of it, but others can use it too:)
Brand name doesn't only matter to consumers. It also matters to other companies. What industry coalition would ever again include Rambus? What motherboard maker would ever put serious effort into supporting Rambus chips? The only way Rambus can stay big is by getting and staying ahead of eveyone else, in order to force those they've doublecrossed to play nice, even though the whole industry hates them. Hell, even OEMs are probably pretty pissed, as royalties mean higher memory prices, and higher memory prices makes it harder to sell those sub $500 computers that are so popular these days. Rambus is going to have a pretty rough time, isolated and without corporate allies.
Another common theory for the cause of the Great Depression (and the one taught to me in both of the macroeconomics courses I've taken) is that it was the Fed restricting the money supply when the crash was starting, causing the banks to fail. Had the Fed responded the way they SHOULD have (increasing the money supply) then the banks would have been able to meet their obligations, the economy would have turned downwards for no more than a couple years (think early 90's), and then we'd start to recover.
The problems you describe explain the recession, but do not explain why we should have had a full blown, 10 year depression. In a capitalist economy, you're always either driving towards inflation, or driving towards recession, it's the nature of large publicly owned company. Publicly owned companies cannot say to their shareholders "we are going to grow right at the rate of natural economic growth: 3% a year, every year, from now until the end of time." Instead they have to say "we're better than everyone else, we're going to grow at 5%!" Anyone who points out the absurdity of this within the company is seen as being afraid of not being able to make his division live up to the standards and is replaced. This boom-bust cycle is clearly visible in the American economy since at least the mid 19th century. It takes government intervention, however, to take a recession and make it into the Great Depression.
Oddly enough, bad monetary policy has plauged the US ever since the Fed was created in (IIRC) 1904. This is why some, such as Milton Friedman, propose replacing the Fed with a set of laws (if output falls 1% in a given quarter, lower interest rates 2 basis points, for example). Programming our economy, so to speak, using monetary policy as the language.
The original survey actually doesn't say anything about telecommuting. They discuss subsidized home pcs, and subsidized internet connections, but they say nothing about telecommuting. Sure, you need a good connection and a pc in order to telecommute, but the latter does not necessarily follow from the former. This poll seems awfully vague to me, with only a couple, very broad, catagories.
Am I the only one who finds it very interesting that despite a mere 2% difference on the Slashdot poll, a good 3/4 of the jokes here are making fun of Dubya? Do the Bush supporters see Gore as beneath contempt, or what?
First of all, as the above poster points out, stock OPTIONS are taxed as income. As is any stock bought and sold within a 1 year period. However, as stock option is an option to buy stock. Gates already owns all his stock, and is actively trying to dump it (a very slow process, because if he tried to sell it all at once, the price would plummet, and if he sold any time other than immediately after publishing a quarterly earnings report, he might be accused of insider trading).
Capital gains tax, which is what applies in this circumstance, which runs currently about 21%, IIRC. Sure, this sounds low, but that's for two reasons: first of all, you can't deduct anything from capital gains, unless you first transfer the stock into a charitable foundation (those people PBS is always thanking, the money in the foundation can ONLY be given to charity, you can't use it to buy things), whereas for regular income tax there's a whole slew of deductions. Second, it can be very easily shown statistically that the rich countries are those who save. Japan's meteoric growth is a perfect example of this. Countries that consume a very small portion of their income are consistently the fastest growing, and since this helps everyone, not just those who invested in the first place, the government wants to encourage it. This is not so much social engineering as economic engineering.
Finally, property tax is set by state and local governments, not federally (Ammendment 18 only gives power to tax based on income, and the only other taxes the government is authorized to levy must have something to do with interstate or international trade, such as import duties). A president would have no authority over this. I believe, however, Oregon has no property taxes, so while it's a little late for the retirees (best thing for them to do is keep voting in local and statewide elections for fiscal conservatives), if this is something that worries you, you're welcome to move.
CmdrTaco HAS used the word barf before, check this out. Of course, it's not in the commentary, it's a link, the UnixBarfBag. C'mon Taco, really, get your sources straight:)
On an unrelated note, I really feel your pain with the video gobbling space thing. I remember when I first tried to record a TV show from my TV tuner. I left, and when I got back, something like 3 gigs were taken up before I ran out of space on the partition with about 5 minutes of video.
Also, La Blue Girl is a touching anime about a young ninja girl and her efforts to keep the world from being overrun by demons, hermaphrodite ninja clans, and cyborgs from another dimension. I'm sick and tired of people dismissing its artistic qualities merely because it contains a few (thousand) tentacle rape scenes.
If we count the ISS as "not on Earth," despite the fact that it's in a fairly low orbit, than this has been the case ever since we started flying enough aircraft that there was always someone off the ground. For that matter, there's probably always someone jumping at any given time. If it only counts for them to be high enough that an unprotected human could not survive, then pressurized aircraft still count. This is a silly story, and reflects the fact that adding "space" (as in, International Space Station) in front of anything makes it seem significant, just like "cyber" or "networked." When we have someone full time on another planet, then it will be news.
I was actually rather shocked. Bush seemed to understand the privacy concerns, and wanted to adress them. Sure, he didn't sound like the raving Slashdot fanatic that we would like him to be, but still, it was a much more intelligent answer than Gore's.
...of the Secret Service raid on SJ Games. To summarize, the SS broke in and confiscated just about everything they could lay their hands on, under the pretext of confiscating Gurps Cyberpunk, which they called "a manual for computer hacking." (It's an rpg supplement)
However, the REAL reason was because Lloyd Blankenship, the author of the book, was running a bbs to discuss cracking, and they assumed that it would have incriminating evidence on it against SOMEONE (the best they came up with was a stolen bit of code from the 911 dialing system that is available for $0.75).
So SJ Games sued, won, got a bunch of money and got most of their computers and some of their equipment back but of course lost all their data. This is also interesting because it was an early EFF case.
So now we just have to figure out the REAL reason why this guy got busted...
I resisted Google for a long time. All my friends told me "oh, it's great, you've got to try it," but Altavista had once found me some obscure information for a school project that no other engine could, and so I still felt almost indebted.
Finally though, I did give it a try, and it is amazing. Seriously, even searching for porn can turn up a couple of decent links, which is mind blowing, and anything else always turns up a large number of great links.
My only complaint is that using things like ANDs and ORs isn't supported.
Okay, sure, who doesn't like being able to play cool three-dee games like Quake [2 3], but things were a lot simpler back in the days when my only concern was "it's SVGA, right?" And of course, it was nice when a budget card meant $40, not $150.
Oh well, I suppose with CPUs getting ever closer to quantum and speed of light limits, they had to find other ways to keep cranking out high performance machines. I just hope that 5 years from now I'm not going to have to read stacks of articles on what the best $150 "budget" model is to buy the new screaming fast keyboards...
It's even funnier than that. Capone's money, of course, came from illegal sources (booze). Tax law, however, makes no exception for illicit income, and so while the government was not able to prove where his money came from, or that it was illegally obtained, they WERE able to prove that he had money, and that he hadn't paid taxes, so somewhere along the line he must have evaded (like a highway speed trap, you don't know how fast the car was going at all times, but you know it must have exceeded the speed limit at some point between the two detectors).
On another note, pre-Clinton underage smoking was the same, you could smoke but you couldn't buy.
I admit I was rather skeptical when this was first announced, but way to go. Perl is a nice little language, and while we could clutter the boards all day with religious wars over which is best, having another option is always good, even if you choose not to use it:)
And for those of you asking why we should care, remember, Slash is coded in Perl, so the better Perl gets, in theory, the easier it should be to make Slash better
They and their allies shake things up by launching a few satallites into orbit, then get swept aside by the Next Big Thing:) We wouldn't want the technology sector to stagnate, now would we?
How odd. Anyway, you can see what I wrote to the other guy who commented on my sig here. Also, we're talking Christianity here. God is He, and God has limitless power (He can speak through whatever he pleases). While I don't know enough about Samuel Butler to know how literally he intended the statement, what I find appealing about it is it's similarity to the statement "history is always written by the winners," and Butler's statement is at least as true as that (the Devil may have had some influence, but certainly no more than the losing side in a war has had, and indeed if mythology is to be believed, the Devil is precisely that: a celestial being who lost a war).
Oh, and to the best of my knowledge none of my relatives are religious:)
Well, I guess you learn something new every day. I still stand by my statement that they should have had the foresight to do a better job of protecting the disks, though:) (and not with chunky, seperately purchased addons like the caddy) Of course, the one thing that the site doesn't mention, which would be the important bit of information, is when did the first cd players go into production? I don't really care, but I guess it would settle the whole tape/vinyl issue. Until those first commercial players went into production, there was still plenty of room to think up improvements in the design.
It depends which sects you ask. Many Christians, however, would say that God controls everything (and therefore, in a sense, wrote all the books). Even those that don't would still say that the Devil exerts much less direct influence over the world than God. The Devil tempts, God guides and controls. The Devil can, at most, grant some boons to his followers, but cannot directly subvert the Earth for his own purposes (if the Devil were as powerful as God, he would have won in his effort to overthrow God, and would be God, instead of a fallen angel). At the very least, the Bible, the work upon which most people form their judgment of the Devil, was written by God, effectively using humans merely as tools to record His message (or so the claim goes). Most other authoritative works concerning God and the Devil were also produced by people claiming divine inspiration. Hope that helps:)
Really I think they were meant more to replace cassette tapes than vinyl. Mostly just audiophiles and people with large existing vinyl collections were still using records by that point. Either way though, who cares what they were supposed to replace? Good design is good design, there's no reason they couldn't have learned a few lessons from computer storage.
As for the caddy, I recall Apple drives that used to have a huge chunky plastic thing that you put the cd in before you could insert it into the drive, is that what you're talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Despite all of this, over the last century their economy has grown at almost three times the rate of ours. In the last decade though, as evidenced by the fact that their stock market is STILL about half of what it was at its peak (which was 8 or 9 years ago), this has started to catch up with them. So, the important thing to remember about the Japanese is that working men don't buy anything, it's the women, and out of some quirk in pyschology, young people tend to consume more (worldwide) than old people, so as the above poster states, young women drive the consumer sector of the Japanese economy
No, we always had this. The Gilded Age simply made people rich enough that they could actually sit back and take notice. Things were most definately improving, but they weren't improving fast enough to suit some people, so political action was taken. Right or wrong, at least realize that free-market capitalism did not produce the bad conditions, they were there before it was introduced.
As for why lack of import tariffs are good, think about those southeast asian sweatshop workers for a minute. The only goods their domestic economy can support are the basics: rough clothing, food, and so forth.
Let's say they can produce 1 pair of sneakers every hour, and they get paid $0.50. The only reason that they'd work for Nike is because that $0.50 is MORE than they could make doing similarly skilled labor elsewhere in the economy. Poor countries are POOR! You can't make them rich just by wishing it so.
If Nike did pay their workers $20 an hour, it would horribly upset the local economy, because they'd be making more than, say, doctors. We want to encourage those in backwards economies to learn skills, not just work for Nike (Nike doesn't want that, but they'll regard it as an acceptable consequence of their trying to find the lowest labor cost possible).
The reason they can't afford Nike shoes is because Nike is not just the southeast laborers, it's also the marketers, the lawyers, the executives, the Nike Town stores, and so forth. Go into a shoe store, and compare the cost of Nike shoes to that of some no name brand, and try to tell me that marketing does not dramatically increase the price you can get for a good.
Okay, I've talked enough about this. The conclusion: import tariffs are bad because they force us to pay higher prices, and they hurt developing economies desperately in need of steady jobs. For a good recent book on free market economics, read Free to Choose, by Milton Friedman.
Check the US Census for (inflation adjusted) statistics on how much incomes have increased. Not to spoil the surprise, but over the last 50 years, ALL classes have increased their wealth. The poor are NOT getting poorer, they are getting richer. This misconception comes about because the poor are not getting richer as fast as the rich (this may also be a problem, but we can debate that another time).
The average (inflation adjusted) growth rate of the GDP in this country is approximately 2.5%. This growth is due to: population increases (duh, this is why GDP per capita growth is what's really important), women entering the labor market (actually, this is one of the primary reasons why the rich are getting richer, because poor women have always worked, but now that rich women are working too, upper class families now have almost double the income they used to), and of course technology.
Yeah, that's right, for programmers only! All the rest of you, that'll be $100 per copy. And don't think you can get away with just buying one and copying it for all of your friends, the GPL only applies to programmers, dammit!
Seriously, that's really bizarre. Did the author simply misspeak, or did he honestly believe that only programmers could obtain free copies of Linux? Either way, when you think about it, that's really a pretty egregeous error, and will probably help support in many people's minds the myth that only prgrammers can use Linux (not that they won't get the most out of it, but others can use it too :)
The problems you describe explain the recession, but do not explain why we should have had a full blown, 10 year depression. In a capitalist economy, you're always either driving towards inflation, or driving towards recession, it's the nature of large publicly owned company. Publicly owned companies cannot say to their shareholders "we are going to grow right at the rate of natural economic growth: 3% a year, every year, from now until the end of time." Instead they have to say "we're better than everyone else, we're going to grow at 5%!" Anyone who points out the absurdity of this within the company is seen as being afraid of not being able to make his division live up to the standards and is replaced. This boom-bust cycle is clearly visible in the American economy since at least the mid 19th century. It takes government intervention, however, to take a recession and make it into the Great Depression.
Oddly enough, bad monetary policy has plauged the US ever since the Fed was created in (IIRC) 1904. This is why some, such as Milton Friedman, propose replacing the Fed with a set of laws (if output falls 1% in a given quarter, lower interest rates 2 basis points, for example). Programming our economy, so to speak, using monetary policy as the language.
Capital gains tax, which is what applies in this circumstance, which runs currently about 21%, IIRC. Sure, this sounds low, but that's for two reasons: first of all, you can't deduct anything from capital gains, unless you first transfer the stock into a charitable foundation (those people PBS is always thanking, the money in the foundation can ONLY be given to charity, you can't use it to buy things), whereas for regular income tax there's a whole slew of deductions. Second, it can be very easily shown statistically that the rich countries are those who save. Japan's meteoric growth is a perfect example of this. Countries that consume a very small portion of their income are consistently the fastest growing, and since this helps everyone, not just those who invested in the first place, the government wants to encourage it. This is not so much social engineering as economic engineering.
Finally, property tax is set by state and local governments, not federally (Ammendment 18 only gives power to tax based on income, and the only other taxes the government is authorized to levy must have something to do with interstate or international trade, such as import duties). A president would have no authority over this. I believe, however, Oregon has no property taxes, so while it's a little late for the retirees (best thing for them to do is keep voting in local and statewide elections for fiscal conservatives), if this is something that worries you, you're welcome to move.
P.S. IANAL (tax, estate, or otherwise)
On an unrelated note, I really feel your pain with the video gobbling space thing. I remember when I first tried to record a TV show from my TV tuner. I left, and when I got back, something like 3 gigs were taken up before I ran out of space on the partition with about 5 minutes of video.
Also, La Blue Girl is a touching anime about a young ninja girl and her efforts to keep the world from being overrun by demons, hermaphrodite ninja clans, and cyborgs from another dimension. I'm sick and tired of people dismissing its artistic qualities merely because it contains a few (thousand) tentacle rape scenes.
That is all.
However, the REAL reason was because Lloyd Blankenship, the author of the book, was running a bbs to discuss cracking, and they assumed that it would have incriminating evidence on it against SOMEONE (the best they came up with was a stolen bit of code from the 911 dialing system that is available for $0.75).
So SJ Games sued, won, got a bunch of money and got most of their computers and some of their equipment back but of course lost all their data. This is also interesting because it was an early EFF case.
So now we just have to figure out the REAL reason why this guy got busted...
Finally though, I did give it a try, and it is amazing. Seriously, even searching for porn can turn up a couple of decent links, which is mind blowing, and anything else always turns up a large number of great links.
My only complaint is that using things like ANDs and ORs isn't supported.
Oh well, I suppose with CPUs getting ever closer to quantum and speed of light limits, they had to find other ways to keep cranking out high performance machines. I just hope that 5 years from now I'm not going to have to read stacks of articles on what the best $150 "budget" model is to buy the new screaming fast keyboards...
On another note, pre-Clinton underage smoking was the same, you could smoke but you couldn't buy.
And for those of you asking why we should care, remember, Slash is coded in Perl, so the better Perl gets, in theory, the easier it should be to make Slash better
Oh, and to the best of my knowledge none of my relatives are religious :)
As for the caddy, I recall Apple drives that used to have a huge chunky plastic thing that you put the cd in before you could insert it into the drive, is that what you're talking about?