Designer Dragon == Raph Koster. Last I knew, Raph Koster was the Lead Designer of Star Wars Galaxies. The philosophies you're talking about can be clearly seen in that game. Sad to say, if most of the complaints about Galaxies are true (haven't played it myself) it seems that this player centric philosophy isn't sufficient for a game to be good - it needs to be correctly and effectvly meshed with quality pre-scripted content. (Which can be cost-prohibitive for games of this size; Everquest is huge because it has been using its revenues to build up the world over the years it has been operating.)
I think their design is firmly in the Uncanny Valley (article on said valley if you don't know what I'm talking about, http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html) . If this thing moves realisticly, I think the mannequin head and torso would be a bit disturbing to dance with. (And I think the guy in the picture agrees, based on his facial expression!)
In an article in Science this April ("Balancing Selection at the Prion Protein Gene Consistent with Prehistoric Kurulike Epidemics"), British scientists suggest that our ancestor's urge to eat brains may have lead to the modern absence of prion-based diseases (such as mad cow disease) in humans. This suggests that, to some extent, at some point evolution selected for brain eating in humans. The actual article requires a paid subscription, but here's a summary from a newspaper.
I wouldn't doubt it. I've bought Games Workshop stuff, and their online store is very poor - it doesn't even do a good job of keeping items in your shopping cart. So, I'm guessing that poor user experience + higher prices means that all the online sales are going to retailers. Of course, the Games Workshop site usually has more information and better pictures than other online stores so when you're shopping online you still need/want to visit their site.
This action against retailers is not out of character for them, I believe that a few months ago they put limits on the discounts that retailers could provide online. Also, they run a good number of bricks and mortar stores that compete with local stores. Quite simply, after years of relying on retailer they now want to own the entire supply chain for their products.
I think there's some confusion because most people aren't going to register to read the article and because of the way this thing was written up, so I'll try and clear some things up.
In response to the question asked in the write-up, "Could this be a turning point in the labor market?" - no. This isn't talking about some specific turning point (and indeed most posts are currently noting that people feel the current workforce is so diminished that a doubling of jobs isn't much growth at all); rather this article is talking about a general demographic trend. We're entering the time period where the baby boomers are starting to retire, and the generations that follow after them do not have as large of a population. According to the article, "between now and 2010, for every new member added to the workforce there will be 2.6 new jobs created."
The title "Tech Jobs Projected to Double by 2010" comes from looking at the table provided at the bottom of the article where it states that the occupation of "Computer software engineers, applications" will grow from a current 380,000 jobs in 2000 to 760,000 jobs in 2010, or 100% growth. Note that that's job growth between 2000 and 2010, not between today and 2010 - so think about employment levels in 2000 instead of today; I know our company was twice as large in 2000 as it is today. The table actually lists 9 different jobs that I would call "Tech Jobs" that have pretty healthy growth rates - the tech slant in the article is that while all jobs are growing (in part due to baby boomer retirement) technology jobs are growing faster than any other jobs.
The implication of the article is that because this job growth rate will lead to a tighter employment market than was seen in the 1990's we will someday soon (well, someday before 2010) see the type of high wage growth and high starting wages in the tech industry that were a signature of the 1990's boom. All due to supply and demand in a labor market where people are retiring faster than new people enter the market.
My personal concern is that as this occurs the cost of Social Security will skyrocket (due to all those retiring folks), and if our federal budget keeps going the way it is we're going to end up with very high taxes that could offset the benefits of higher wages. (Of course, this will end up screwing the poor more than anyone else, of course, because payroll taxes aren't progressive - everyone pays the same percent no matter what.)
On a positive note (for those of us who call ourselves employees), this article should be a wake up call to employers to start treating their workers well, or they might have major problems in 7 years. With all the blogs, messageboards, and websites (F*ed Company comes to mind) that are storing a record of how companies treat their workers, you will end up paying tomorrow for the sins you commit today.
I wonder how many people will write this off as an April Fools joke. I've only skimmed The Discover article, but it is an extremely optimistic piece, and the writer seems chagrinned that he couldn't present a more skeptical case. If this technology was widely deployed it could almost eliminate foreign oil dependence.
The article also talked about no increases in carbon in the environment because oil isn't pulled up from underground, it's created from biological waste (carbon already in the environment). I believe there was a quote in there along the lines of "every living thing becomes a little carbon sink".
Warren Buffett is an investor (via ConAgra) and the field tests should be done by 2005.
In Google every ad is obviously an ad, and there are only a few per page. In Overture my search returned 20 ads that look like results (though a side note hinted otherwise) before it shows actual results. Search for "Flash MX" - result number 21 is Macromedia.com - everything before that is an ad. I don't care how good their search is, with the results formatted like this it seems like they return very low-relevancy links.
How about limiting the prefetching to pages in the same domain as the page doing the prefetching. Perhaps you could explicitly allow addtional domains for prefetching in the head of the document.
A lot of people give Macromedia a hard time about how strictly they control the Flash format, but I have to say that it seems to me that all they're doing is avoiding all the mistakes made with Java on the client side.
Because of the way that Macromedia has done things, it's a lot less likely that Microsoft will be able to wedge in an incompatible version somewhere. People seem to downplay the fall of the ubiquitous Java client, claiming that the client was never the interesting stuff in the first place. But the client is the means by which the MS-monopoly is broken.
Alas, Flash is now our best hope for eroding the power of Microsoft - too bad most of Slashdot can't recognize that.
As far as 3D-accelerators go, the point when people started buying hardware just for games can fairly accurately be pinpointed to the release of GlQuake - which was a free download after Quake shipped allowing hardware acceleration. For a few years after that games shipped with hardware and software rendering, but all the reviews for such games would say "this game looks wicked cool with hardware acceleration, but looks like dog vomit in software mode- only buy this spiffy new game if you have a 3D card". Slowly then games went from software render only, to both software and hardware rendering, to where we are today that all games require hardware acceleration. This trend has repeated itself for various features build into different generations of 3D accelerators.
If I were you, I would write my applications with the Schools Interoperability Framework in mind, so that it can communicte with other programs run by schools.
Read this Jakob Nielsen (coauthor of this study) article to see why you only need 5 users to find 85% of usability problems and around 15 users to find 99.9% of all problems.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
So maybe they don't have 100% of the answers with this study, but it's still a valid study. (Unless you can assault the assertions made in the article about how many users are needed.)
I've seen a couple of highly rated posts here mentioning that everyone should just plant trees and then we wouldn't have this problem. As much as I agree with the sentiment there have been a few studies recently that point to the idea that forests aren't really all that efficient in storing carbon dioxide.
Study from 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2 36000/236276.stm
Also, don't forget that planting vast numbers of trees is something that in many places would be a huge ecological change. Just because they provide lots of nice benefits to people doesn't mean that trees wouldn't kill off native species in areas not currently forested.
That's one of the big new upgrades for Flash. Now there's a method of making Flash movies accessible for screen-readers (and compliant with government accessibility requirements), as well as a way to make a Flash movie use the browser's Back button. The big focus of this upgrade is to address all the usability criticisms that have been aimed at Flash in the past.
You couldn't pay me enough to live there. Nice people. Sheltered world.
I agree completly! That's why I live in Nebraska. So much more metropolitan. Though, I wouldn't want to live in Omaha - I'd probably get shot just walking from my door to my car!
Pay Pal is a mess, and I obstinately refuse to do business through them. I give $10/month to Penny Arcade, but I'd give them squat if they forced me to use Pay Pal.
Who paid for Ernest F. Hollings?
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 2
If we look at the financial contributions listed on opensecrets.orghere, we see that the top three contributors to his 1998 Senate campaign were:
Lawyers/Law Firms $1,197,317
TV/Movies/Music $282,984
Lobbyists $185,762
This nonsense in Congress is nothing but the logical conclusion of his campaign payola.
Yes, but Evenbalance is now supporting Punkbuster for RTCW, and not Half-Life/Conterstrike. All the cheaters made multiplayer Half-Life a waste of time. Also, RTCW multiplayer is better by virtue of its populatrity. With online games, it is often the cluster of people around the game, rather than the game itself that is most important. (Of course, if the game sucked, you'd never good sized group of people in the first place.)
In many states, the money from the goverment for PBS mostly just keeps the transmitters running. When a PBS station wants to produce original content, they may get a goverment grant, but odds are that it will only cover a fraction of the cost. So, either the producing station applies for grants from corporations or foundations, or the station funds it with its own money (which it is probably hoping to make back in direct sales to schools or consumers, and licensing it for broadcast on other PBS stations.) If PBS were 100% government funded, then it would be possible to give assets away, but since money is always sparse, they feel they have to charge. Also, don't forget that some of the original PBS content isn't even produced by PBS stations, it's produced by private production companies and sold to PBS. Some stations create no content at all.
What your tax money is really paying for is a television signal to almost every home. PBS reaches something like 98% of homes. I believe the other networks are somewhere in the 80%'s and cable is in the 70%'s.
Right, but under the Elastic Clause that Constitutional mandate is rather broad. The reason that the 10th Amendment doesn't do anything is that all it says is "any powers the goverment doesn't have the goverment doesn't have." It's a simple statement of a tautology. It was true even without the amendment.
For the 9th and 10th Amendments to make sense (as far as why they're there in the first place) I think it helps to remember that the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments) were immediately to the Constitution after its ratification (proposed by the First Congress and fairly rapidly ratified). At the time, the memory of British oppression was still fresh in people's minds, and many of the states when they ratified the Constitution either asked for a Bill of Rights, or made their ratification dependent on a Bill of Rights being added. The purpose of the Bill was to answer specific objections to the Constitution and to reassure the people that the new government would not be a tyranny.
The 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" is one such reassurance. All it's saying is "don't worry if you don't see one of your rights explicitly spelled out in the Constitution - just because it isn't in there doesn't mean that the Constitution gets rid of it."
The 9th Amendment has been brought up as an argument for the right to privacy, but to my knowledge a court has never accepted that argument. However, the Supreme Court has said that a right to privacy does exist as an implication of some of the other amendments (specifically in the Due Process clause of the 14th amendment.)
The 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" is another amendment that you could say doesn't really do much. The authoritative word on the matter was set down by none other than John Marshall (who is probably most famous for articulating the theory of judicial review in Marbury vs. Madison). In Marshall's decision of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) he said two things - 1) the people who wrote the amendment didn't mean for it to limit the powers of the Federal government because they wrote it to read "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution..." instead of "The powers not [explicitly] delegated to the United States by the Constitution...". It might seem somewhat absurd to parse the sentence so much, but for the most part members of the First Congress, which submitted the amendment in the first place, agreed that the court was interpreting their intent correctly. 2)Marshall pointed out that any document that explicitly enumerated every power of government would be too large, convoluted, and cumbersome a document to even be understood. Remember, we have the Constitution was written by a group of men who considered the Confederation too weak to fix.
What may be confusing, though, is that the history of the 10th Amendment isn't as simple as that. Even though the authoritative decision was made in 1819 the Courts would occasionally use the 10th Amendment to curtail the powers of the federal government. It's generally accepted that the court wasn't doing this because it had stumbled upon a more correct interpretation of the Constitution (after all, James Madison himself agreed with Marshall, and he wrote the Bill of Rights, so he should know!) No, the Court was curtailing Congress's power for political reasons, specifically the fact that most members of the court believed in laszie faire economics. The fact that the Court tried to cut the legs out from under Congress is a great example of the way the 3 branches fight amongst each other, and the reason we need checks and balances. Anyway, speaking of checks and balances, the practice of using the 10th Amendment to cripple Congress came to an end when FDR enacted all those government programs that he's so famous for. Think about it, the Depression era programs have to be the greatest expansion of Federal powers in our history - how was he able to get it past a Court that wanted explicitly wanted a weak federal government. In 1937 FDR checked the power of the Supreme Court by threatening to expand the Supreme Court and to add members who would give him the results he wanted. It's an amazingly dirty tactic, but it did restore the interpretation that is regarded to be the correct interpretation. This interpretation was reiterated by the 1941 case United States v. Darby.
So, what was the point of the 10th Amendment? Just like the 9th amendment it was a statement intended to reassure the people, but not to alter the functioning of the Constitution - it was simply a statement of a truism.
I have to admit though, that the argument isn't 100% dead. Why? Because in 1995 the conservatives of the Supreme Court (the same political types that were invoking the 10th Amendment before FDR) invoked the 10th Amendment again (US vs Lopez) - now, so far this seems to be a fairly limited ruling (because it hasn't affected any laws outside of the original law yet), but it may be that politically inspired use of the 10th Amendment is coming back in vogue. (Mostly depends on if more conservatives get added to the court, the decision to invoke the 10th was one of those 5-4 affairs.)
So, in summary, there's a chance that the Supreme Court would agree with you as far as the 10th Amendment goes, but 1)I doubt they would be correct in so agreeing, and 2)cynically speaking they probably won't do that to a law enacted in this environment by a Republican President. For better arguments than mine, I suggest reading the remarks of the Justices for the cases I've mentioned.
The powers of Congress are not all explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. The last sentence of Article 1 Section 8 says that Congress can make all laws "necessary and proper" to enable their enumerated powers. This might not sound like much, but in practice it has allowed the Government extrodinary latitude. This was a big issue when Hamilton was pushing for a national bank (It doesn't say anything at all in the Constitution about the Government running a bank), but it's been a pretty much resolved issue for about 200 years. I wonder what percentage of current laws would survive without that clause.
After reading this note about Canada, you might say "gosh we've got lost of flat stretches of railroad land, why doesn't someone run fibre under it?"
Someone already has. Qwest was founded to take advantage of this opportunity. The funny thing is that no one bothered to take note that the railroads only had the surface rights to the land- which means that all those lines are running through land that Qwest doesn't own. Now there's a liability that I bet they don't put on their balance sheet... I wonder if buying US West with their over-inflated stock gave them the assets needed to survive such a fiasco.
While I agree with the sentiment that Open Source often seems All-American, and generally jives with the ideals of a young Thomas Jefferson - the Constitution was written by a group of elite individuals (perhaps unique in the world at the time because their elite status was not solely based on their parentage), in a closed and sealed up building, where no one was allowed to report the proceedings to the populous at large. After they had created their new document for government they set about to use the tools of mass media (The Federalist Papers, and other forums) to convince everyone else that their Constitution was The Best Thing for America. (Even though most of them thought of themselves as Virginians, or New Yorkers rather than as Americans - Hamilton being the only obvious exception that springs to mind) And it worked, they convinced us to adopt their method of governing. Sure they had to add a patch that some of the end users demanded (Bill of Rights), but their creation was otherwise untouched....
wait a second, this isn't alt.history.colonial, is it? In brief, Szulik's speech was a nice sentiment, but his vision of how the Constitution was drawn up is imaginary.
85% of $20 is a heck of a lot more than 100% of $0.
Especially because I hate to use credit cards/love to use my debit card, I like sharing the card number as few places as I can get by with. That 15% they lose is the cost of my piece of mind and the convenience of my donation. (Though, like I say, I'll probably make an exception in this case, but that doesn't mean I don't reserve my right to grumble about it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Designer Dragon == Raph Koster. Last I knew, Raph Koster was the Lead Designer of Star Wars Galaxies. The philosophies you're talking about can be clearly seen in that game. Sad to say, if most of the complaints about Galaxies are true (haven't played it myself) it seems that this player centric philosophy isn't sufficient for a game to be good - it needs to be correctly and effectvly meshed with quality pre-scripted content. (Which can be cost-prohibitive for games of this size; Everquest is huge because it has been using its revenues to build up the world over the years it has been operating.)
I think their design is firmly in the Uncanny Valley (article on said valley if you don't know what I'm talking about, http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html) . If this thing moves realisticly, I think the mannequin head and torso would be a bit disturbing to dance with. (And I think the guy in the picture agrees, based on his facial expression!)
In an article in Science this April ("Balancing Selection at the Prion Protein Gene Consistent with Prehistoric Kurulike Epidemics"), British scientists suggest that our ancestor's urge to eat brains may have lead to the modern absence of prion-based diseases (such as mad cow disease) in humans. This suggests that, to some extent, at some point evolution selected for brain eating in humans. The actual article requires a paid subscription, but here's a summary from a newspaper.
This action against retailers is not out of character for them, I believe that a few months ago they put limits on the discounts that retailers could provide online. Also, they run a good number of bricks and mortar stores that compete with local stores. Quite simply, after years of relying on retailer they now want to own the entire supply chain for their products.
In response to the question asked in the write-up, "Could this be a turning point in the labor market?" - no. This isn't talking about some specific turning point (and indeed most posts are currently noting that people feel the current workforce is so diminished that a doubling of jobs isn't much growth at all); rather this article is talking about a general demographic trend. We're entering the time period where the baby boomers are starting to retire, and the generations that follow after them do not have as large of a population. According to the article, "between now and 2010, for every new member added to the workforce there will be 2.6 new jobs created."
The title "Tech Jobs Projected to Double by 2010" comes from looking at the table provided at the bottom of the article where it states that the occupation of "Computer software engineers, applications" will grow from a current 380,000 jobs in 2000 to 760,000 jobs in 2010, or 100% growth. Note that that's job growth between 2000 and 2010, not between today and 2010 - so think about employment levels in 2000 instead of today; I know our company was twice as large in 2000 as it is today. The table actually lists 9 different jobs that I would call "Tech Jobs" that have pretty healthy growth rates - the tech slant in the article is that while all jobs are growing (in part due to baby boomer retirement) technology jobs are growing faster than any other jobs.
The implication of the article is that because this job growth rate will lead to a tighter employment market than was seen in the 1990's we will someday soon (well, someday before 2010) see the type of high wage growth and high starting wages in the tech industry that were a signature of the 1990's boom. All due to supply and demand in a labor market where people are retiring faster than new people enter the market.
My personal concern is that as this occurs the cost of Social Security will skyrocket (due to all those retiring folks), and if our federal budget keeps going the way it is we're going to end up with very high taxes that could offset the benefits of higher wages. (Of course, this will end up screwing the poor more than anyone else, of course, because payroll taxes aren't progressive - everyone pays the same percent no matter what.)
On a positive note (for those of us who call ourselves employees), this article should be a wake up call to employers to start treating their workers well, or they might have major problems in 7 years. With all the blogs, messageboards, and websites (F*ed Company comes to mind) that are storing a record of how companies treat their workers, you will end up paying tomorrow for the sins you commit today.
The article also talked about no increases in carbon in the environment because oil isn't pulled up from underground, it's created from biological waste (carbon already in the environment). I believe there was a quote in there along the lines of "every living thing becomes a little carbon sink".
Warren Buffett is an investor (via ConAgra) and the field tests should be done by 2005.
In Google every ad is obviously an ad, and there are only a few per page. In Overture my search returned 20 ads that look like results (though a side note hinted otherwise) before it shows actual results. Search for "Flash MX" - result number 21 is Macromedia.com - everything before that is an ad. I don't care how good their search is, with the results formatted like this it seems like they return very low-relevancy links.
How about limiting the prefetching to pages in the same domain as the page doing the prefetching. Perhaps you could explicitly allow addtional domains for prefetching in the head of the document.
A lot of people give Macromedia a hard time about how strictly they control the Flash format, but I have to say that it seems to me that all they're doing is avoiding all the mistakes made with Java on the client side.
Because of the way that Macromedia has done things, it's a lot less likely that Microsoft will be able to wedge in an incompatible version somewhere. People seem to downplay the fall of the ubiquitous Java client, claiming that the client was never the interesting stuff in the first place. But the client is the means by which the MS-monopoly is broken.
Alas, Flash is now our best hope for eroding the power of Microsoft - too bad most of Slashdot can't recognize that.
As far as 3D-accelerators go, the point when people started buying hardware just for games can fairly accurately be pinpointed to the release of GlQuake - which was a free download after Quake shipped allowing hardware acceleration. For a few years after that games shipped with hardware and software rendering, but all the reviews for such games would say "this game looks wicked cool with hardware acceleration, but looks like dog vomit in software mode- only buy this spiffy new game if you have a 3D card". Slowly then games went from software render only, to both software and hardware rendering, to where we are today that all games require hardware acceleration. This trend has repeated itself for various features build into different generations of 3D accelerators.
If I were you, I would write my applications with the Schools Interoperability Framework in mind, so that it can communicte with other programs run by schools.
Read this Jakob Nielsen (coauthor of this study) article to see why you only need 5 users to find 85% of usability problems and around 15 users to find 99.9% of all problems.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
So maybe they don't have 100% of the answers with this study, but it's still a valid study. (Unless you can assault the assertions made in the article about how many users are needed.)
I've seen a couple of highly rated posts here mentioning that everyone should just plant trees and then we wouldn't have this problem. As much as I agree with the sentiment there have been a few studies recently that point to the idea that forests aren't really all that efficient in storing carbon dioxide.
. html
2 36000/236276.stm
Study from this April
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSScience0204/10_carbon-ap
Study from 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_
Also, don't forget that planting vast numbers of trees is something that in many places would be a huge ecological change. Just because they provide lots of nice benefits to people doesn't mean that trees wouldn't kill off native species in areas not currently forested.
That's one of the big new upgrades for Flash. Now there's a method of making Flash movies accessible for screen-readers (and compliant with government accessibility requirements), as well as a way to make a Flash movie use the browser's Back button. The big focus of this upgrade is to address all the usability criticisms that have been aimed at Flash in the past.
I agree completly! That's why I live in Nebraska. So much more metropolitan. Though, I wouldn't want to live in Omaha - I'd probably get shot just walking from my door to my car!
Pay Pal is a mess, and I obstinately refuse to do business through them. I give $10/month to Penny Arcade, but I'd give them squat if they forced me to use Pay Pal.
If we look at the financial contributions listed on opensecrets.org here, we see that the top three contributors to his 1998 Senate campaign were:
Lawyers/Law Firms $1,197,317
TV/Movies/Music $282,984
Lobbyists $185,762
This nonsense in Congress is nothing but the logical conclusion of his campaign payola.
Yes, but Evenbalance is now supporting Punkbuster for RTCW, and not Half-Life/Conterstrike. All the cheaters made multiplayer Half-Life a waste of time. Also, RTCW multiplayer is better by virtue of its populatrity. With online games, it is often the cluster of people around the game, rather than the game itself that is most important. (Of course, if the game sucked, you'd never good sized group of people in the first place.)
In many states, the money from the goverment for PBS mostly just keeps the transmitters running. When a PBS station wants to produce original content, they may get a goverment grant, but odds are that it will only cover a fraction of the cost. So, either the producing station applies for grants from corporations or foundations, or the station funds it with its own money (which it is probably hoping to make back in direct sales to schools or consumers, and licensing it for broadcast on other PBS stations.) If PBS were 100% government funded, then it would be possible to give assets away, but since money is always sparse, they feel they have to charge. Also, don't forget that some of the original PBS content isn't even produced by PBS stations, it's produced by private production companies and sold to PBS. Some stations create no content at all.
What your tax money is really paying for is a television signal to almost every home. PBS reaches something like 98% of homes. I believe the other networks are somewhere in the 80%'s and cable is in the 70%'s.
Right, but under the Elastic Clause that Constitutional mandate is rather broad. The reason that the 10th Amendment doesn't do anything is that all it says is "any powers the goverment doesn't have the goverment doesn't have." It's a simple statement of a tautology. It was true even without the amendment.
The 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" is one such reassurance. All it's saying is "don't worry if you don't see one of your rights explicitly spelled out in the Constitution - just because it isn't in there doesn't mean that the Constitution gets rid of it."
The 9th Amendment has been brought up as an argument for the right to privacy, but to my knowledge a court has never accepted that argument. However, the Supreme Court has said that a right to privacy does exist as an implication of some of the other amendments (specifically in the Due Process clause of the 14th amendment.)
The 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" is another amendment that you could say doesn't really do much. The authoritative word on the matter was set down by none other than John Marshall (who is probably most famous for articulating the theory of judicial review in Marbury vs. Madison). In Marshall's decision of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) he said two things - 1) the people who wrote the amendment didn't mean for it to limit the powers of the Federal government because they wrote it to read "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution..." instead of "The powers not [explicitly] delegated to the United States by the Constitution...". It might seem somewhat absurd to parse the sentence so much, but for the most part members of the First Congress, which submitted the amendment in the first place, agreed that the court was interpreting their intent correctly. 2)Marshall pointed out that any document that explicitly enumerated every power of government would be too large, convoluted, and cumbersome a document to even be understood. Remember, we have the Constitution was written by a group of men who considered the Confederation too weak to fix.
What may be confusing, though, is that the history of the 10th Amendment isn't as simple as that. Even though the authoritative decision was made in 1819 the Courts would occasionally use the 10th Amendment to curtail the powers of the federal government. It's generally accepted that the court wasn't doing this because it had stumbled upon a more correct interpretation of the Constitution (after all, James Madison himself agreed with Marshall, and he wrote the Bill of Rights, so he should know!) No, the Court was curtailing Congress's power for political reasons, specifically the fact that most members of the court believed in laszie faire economics. The fact that the Court tried to cut the legs out from under Congress is a great example of the way the 3 branches fight amongst each other, and the reason we need checks and balances. Anyway, speaking of checks and balances, the practice of using the 10th Amendment to cripple Congress came to an end when FDR enacted all those government programs that he's so famous for. Think about it, the Depression era programs have to be the greatest expansion of Federal powers in our history - how was he able to get it past a Court that wanted explicitly wanted a weak federal government. In 1937 FDR checked the power of the Supreme Court by threatening to expand the Supreme Court and to add members who would give him the results he wanted. It's an amazingly dirty tactic, but it did restore the interpretation that is regarded to be the correct interpretation. This interpretation was reiterated by the 1941 case United States v. Darby.
So, what was the point of the 10th Amendment? Just like the 9th amendment it was a statement intended to reassure the people, but not to alter the functioning of the Constitution - it was simply a statement of a truism.
I have to admit though, that the argument isn't 100% dead. Why? Because in 1995 the conservatives of the Supreme Court (the same political types that were invoking the 10th Amendment before FDR) invoked the 10th Amendment again (US vs Lopez) - now, so far this seems to be a fairly limited ruling (because it hasn't affected any laws outside of the original law yet), but it may be that politically inspired use of the 10th Amendment is coming back in vogue. (Mostly depends on if more conservatives get added to the court, the decision to invoke the 10th was one of those 5-4 affairs.)
So, in summary, there's a chance that the Supreme Court would agree with you as far as the 10th Amendment goes, but 1)I doubt they would be correct in so agreeing, and 2)cynically speaking they probably won't do that to a law enacted in this environment by a Republican President. For better arguments than mine, I suggest reading the remarks of the Justices for the cases I've mentioned.
IANAL, but I was a history major.
The powers of Congress are not all explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. The last sentence of Article 1 Section 8 says that Congress can make all laws "necessary and proper" to enable their enumerated powers. This might not sound like much, but in practice it has allowed the Government extrodinary latitude. This was a big issue when Hamilton was pushing for a national bank (It doesn't say anything at all in the Constitution about the Government running a bank), but it's been a pretty much resolved issue for about 200 years. I wonder what percentage of current laws would survive without that clause.
Someone already has. Qwest was founded to take advantage of this opportunity. The funny thing is that no one bothered to take note that the railroads only had the surface rights to the land- which means that all those lines are running through land that Qwest doesn't own. Now there's a liability that I bet they don't put on their balance sheet... I wonder if buying US West with their over-inflated stock gave them the assets needed to survive such a fiasco.
While I agree with the sentiment that Open Source often seems All-American, and generally jives with the ideals of a young Thomas Jefferson - the Constitution was written by a group of elite individuals (perhaps unique in the world at the time because their elite status was not solely based on their parentage), in a closed and sealed up building, where no one was allowed to report the proceedings to the populous at large. After they had created their new document for government they set about to use the tools of mass media (The Federalist Papers, and other forums) to convince everyone else that their Constitution was The Best Thing for America. (Even though most of them thought of themselves as Virginians, or New Yorkers rather than as Americans - Hamilton being the only obvious exception that springs to mind) And it worked, they convinced us to adopt their method of governing. Sure they had to add a patch that some of the end users demanded (Bill of Rights), but their creation was otherwise untouched.... wait a second, this isn't alt.history.colonial, is it? In brief, Szulik's speech was a nice sentiment, but his vision of how the Constitution was drawn up is imaginary.
85% of $20 is a heck of a lot more than 100% of $0.
Especially because I hate to use credit cards/love to use my debit card, I like sharing the card number as few places as I can get by with. That 15% they lose is the cost of my piece of mind and the convenience of my donation. (Though, like I say, I'll probably make an exception in this case, but that doesn't mean I don't reserve my right to grumble about it.)