LOL. Assuming of course that oil prices are all due to them nasty "speculators" and not to the fact that the rate of growth of demand is far outpacing any conceivable rate of growth of supply (including all Iraq, ANWAR, deep-sea, Arctic and what not) and that no feasible increase in supply is going to make a long-term dent.
What you ignore, when you make that assessment, is a pricing equilibrium brought about my normal market forces. Yes, demand is increasing at a rate that will outstrip supply. But, as prices increase, then, demand can and will fall and level off. It might be at $200/bbl, but, the price increases will level off as a greater percentage of the population decides to not have it. That's just the way humanity works. Any increase in supply, thus, is always going to be beneficial, as it will act to either delay or suppress the price increase. Now, you could have an argument with ANWR, but, to say that 200 billion barrels of Iraqi supply cannot make a dent in world prices is absurd.
Ask the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, Japanese, Nazi and Soviet empires. Amongst others.
I want to hold out this silly tripe tjstork had put out for all to see as what passes as "reason" amongst all of these war-hawks
You can call it tripe, as much as you want, but I was only stating facts, and not making any moral judgement. However, you should note that that Roman Empire lasted, in one fashion or another, for nearly 2000 years (dating from the founding of Rome to the fall of Constantinople). The Chinese Empire lasted for 2000 years. The Egyptian Empire lasted for probably 4000 years. The British Empire lasted for 400 years.
The only reason the Japanese, German and Soviet Empires collapsed was because another budding superpower opposed all of them with an economic system that was better than their own. Do read about the Japanese economy running into World War II, and take careful note of comparisons of GDP. Similarly, as much as people rail on about supposed NAZI efficiency, even the "lowly" British produced more aircraft, engaged in quite successful technological research (RADAR, Computer, code breaking), and managed to build quite a successful surface Navy while the Germans could only build a fleet in being. And similarly, the Soviets, masters of an entire continent and a giant population, screwed it all up with central planning. Quite honestly, if the Soviet Empire allowed trade with the rest of the world and free markets in its borders, its quite likely Germany would still be partitioned and the economy might be so good that the Eastern Bloc might not even want to be liberated.
The reason that I say this, is, yes, wheras we can argue pro or con about empires - I'm actually in favor of a total US military withdrawal from everywhere on the planet with a renewed focus on trade. But, you can't just say "empires are stupid and doomed to fail", because, right now, to the best of our knowledge, empires produced the longest lasting and most stable forms of human government -ever-. The USA is the world's oldest Democracy, and its only 250 years. As ages of civilizations go, its not even close to be a contender on the overall test of time among civilizations that are truly, long lasting.
Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.
If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.
Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source , and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!
I just tried doing that, without thinking, and of course I have a big floodlight of a flourescent above my head and so it would difficult to spot... but, the larger problem is that here I was waving rapidly in front of my screen and now everything thinks I'm retarded.
One of the Open Office mantras is that, "people don't need all the features of Office" Pray tell, what is it in Excel or Word that people don't need? I could see ejecting the scripting, but, then, people that pick up add on macro sheets for budgeting don't have that option. I could see getting rid of some of the formatting, except that people who want their stuff to look better don't have that option. I could see getting rid of database integration, but then, small businesses suddenly lose that option.
What exactly is it, that people do not "need"? I would have thought that Microsoft would not have allocated capital to build the feature, unless someone had not requested it?
I grew up on Ultimate I and II and played the board game along with Apple and I'm quite surprised that this early era, where SSI was dominate, along with others, was not indeed the first golden age.
I have to say that I disagree with his assessment of Diablo as an RPG. To me, Diablo fit right into the proud tradition of the likes of Ultimate and was in many ways a spiritual successor.
To me a good RPG is like reading a book - its an individual thing and I think there's alway going to be room for that in gaming...
Which is why, throughout all of human history, there have always been people (non-liberals?) who try to keep knowledge out of the hands of as many people as possible. Giving them the choice between food and knowledge is one way of doing that.
and if professors can't eat, how do they write books? Just a thought.. should MIT sell google ads. Universities are too important of an institution to get screwed up with over political debates. We have an institution that works, works very well, has done everything asked of it, and we should be supporting it.
I mean, students bitching about the price of textbooks should be viewed in the same light as an army recruit bitching about boot camp. It's just part of the deal. In the grand scheme of things, a $100 book that lasts a lifetime is a pretty damn good thing. I -STILL- have some of my college textbooks - at least the ones I didn't take back to the bookstore for beer money.
I'm sorry but I can't sit and watch liberals destroy themselves in the pursuit of free works.
Its one thing that the likes of any number of political musicians might suddenly find themselves without a fat paycheck once CD sales approach zero, its quite another when the very academic backbone on the country is assaulted.
It takes an enormous amount of work to make a good academic text. You can't just learn something like physics by skimming a few blog quotes, or get a real sense of any field, for that matter, by reading books. Is it unfortunate that they cost a lot? Yes, it is. But books have always been historically valuable things and the bulk of that value has been in the content.
I've read MIT Open Courseware and a lot of it actually is not that deep. A few syllabi and class notes and homework assignments is not the same as the book the class refers to!
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. If you have a society where authors do not get paid, you basically wipe out the entire academic basis of learning in the USA, and with it, our country. People's quests for knowledge about the world will not go away when you get rid of books, and, instead of books, they will have their heads filled with muddy, wrong and incorrect web sites all measured more by how many clicks they get from adsense than any real academic measure of the value of the work.
Indeed, there's a lot of that already.
But hey, if all of these professors want to work for free... they are more than welcome to it, but I guarantee them this - preachers -never- work for free, and, if people want to screw over universities because they don't want to pay their authors, then, we'll wind up reverting back to a medieval society.
Because giving one person the power to decide what the law is and enforce it however they want would be a dictatorship? This is generally considered to be a bad idea.
Well, that is a problem. But, there are those who would prefer that, trading out the short term gain of their particular causes for longer term freedoms.
Use of signing statements should be an impeachable offense.
I could agree that the notion of signing statements by a President is a bit outside of our present legal tradition, and, I have thought as much as you have.. the thing is, though, is that, the power of judicial review as presently asserted by the courts is not enumerated by the Constitution, and as such, there is technically no right for the Supreme Court to do what it does today. They asserted themselves the right in Marbury vs Madison and because of an alignment of political stars, they managed to make it stick.
Now, given that the President does have the enumerated powers of commander in chief, and is sworn to uphold the Constitution, and, has an explicit power to veto, one could, make the expansive argument that the Constitution does in fact allow the President a degree of interpretation in the law and thus signing statements are actually constitutional.
After all, if the Congress is allowed to assert a right to legislate the environment as part of a commerce clause.. which is really a fanciful stretch, then why shouldn't the President extend the veto into a larger right to interpret the law?
Actually, you wouldn't because the President (as long as you're talking about the US) doesn't have that power.
The Constitution actually does not give the Supreme Court the power to declare a law unconstitutional. That power was actually asserted by a very early Supreme Court case (Madison vs Marbury) and for political reasons expedient to the time, the other branches of the government went along with it. In doing so, they established a precedent that works, partly because, the elected governments now have a way of punting knotty problems to the appointed courts.
Even to this day, despite arguments of judicial activism, even conservative judges are very careful, to paraphrase Antonin Scalia, to make only those rulings that they think they can get away with it. From an institutional perspective, just because they would not "excessively" use the power, does not mean that they want to give it up. Frodo's ring is worn by many in the US government and they work to assert their own particular branches over others.
Now, you will see from time to time the executive branch can and will assert for itself the right to interpret the constitutionality of the law itself. To some Presidents, notably Bush 2 and Clinton, the Constitutionally enshrined notion of a veto plus the role of a commander in chief plus the oath to defend the constitution implies a wider penumbra of interpreting the law within the Presidency. Clinton put the ideas on paper first and began signing statements, but it is true that Bush really began asserting the right. He, however, has not been able to really make that tradition stick.
Historically, though, there have been cases even before that where Presidents completely -ignored- or sought to subvert the courts. Democrats from the 1940s through the 1960s just used the FBI to do their dirty work... but never really sought to subvert the courts because the rulings tended to go their way. Prior to that, Roosevelt actually tried to jack up the number of supreme court judges as his own New Deal was, in part, declared unconstitutional by a then conservative court.
Even before that, you had the famous "Trail of Tears" case, where the Supreme Court flat out said that the USA had to honor a treaty with the indians, and the then President just asserted that the Supreme Court had to pound sand on that issue and ordered this Indian tribe to be forcibly removed from their lands anyway. The Supreme Court, at the time, could do nothing. The President has the Army, after all, and the President in question was previously a famous general.
It's pretty simple. I'm not giving these people one fricking dime and its not like songs are something that people absolutely can't live without. There's plenty of free stuff on the radio, I have plenty of songs I've paid for already... why do I need to continue to subsidize a subpar industry giving me all of this crap to begin with.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me, that an industry that proclaims itself to be most on the side of the people, the most liberal, that rips any commercial interest of the right wing as morally wrong, has done more to subvert the rights of mankind in the digital age than any other industry.
Next time Michael Moore or Oliver Stone or Spike Lee makes a film telling me how evil George Bush is for illegal wiretaps, perhaps we might ask them, what about all the raids, wiretaps and assaults on PCs born about by their industry. You can't benefit from digital surveillance and iron fisted prosecution of teenagers while proclaiming to be innocent of it.
If I were President, I would pardon every single person that was ever arrested for the supposed crime of copyright violation, and i would reply to every law that congress passed at the industry's behest, with a signing statement declaring such law to be unconstitutional and a refusal to enforce.
J Edgar Hoover came into his own during the Roosevelt Administration and ultimately formed such a powerful force that he became almost a branch of government in his own right. He was universally reviled by every administration over the years from Kennedy to Johnson although they ultimately allowed him to continue.
Now Nixon was mad enough to at least contemplate removing Hoover from FBI, but he ultimately let him stay on because he, as previous administrations though, that Hoover had the goods on him. As it turned out, this decision ultimately lead the number 2 at FBI to go Deep Throat and this ultimately did bring down the Hixon government.
So clearly, the FBI had become a national problem.
In the wake of watergate, a bunch of liberals stormed the national elections, and although they did a lot of stupid stuff, they did form an unusual coalition with libertarians and enacted a number of laws designed to prevent the likes of Hoover from happening again. It is these laws that were torn down during the foolish "we're tougher on terror than the other guy" legislative race between Democrats and Republicans and lead directly to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
The most important point to make is, just because your party has absolute control of government, does not put that government in the right when it abuses civil rights. You can't let yourself be sullied into believing that the targets of immoral arrests and searches are in fact, anything more than political targets. If the police have the evidence, they can cough it up, and have a trial, for any citizen of the United States who is supposedly accused.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this "white America is overtly racist".
Well, white America is overtly racist. I know you talk about social chastisement for being a racists white but I've never met a white guy that wasn't popular for making a black joke every now and then. You really just need to quit pretending that there is any other case. It's just a fact of life. People that think that a few speeches by Martin Luther King and a couple of segregated schools can change the attitudes of a nation in a generation are utterly stupid. Being racist, in many people's eyes, is that they aren't allowed to call black people n---rs any more, and so, because they don't do that, they don't see themselves as racist...
except that...
More white people, if they see a black guy in a Lexus getting pulled over by the cops, will assume that the guy was doing drugs or is some kind of a gangster than a guy with a business or an advanced degree. If alone, they'll cross the street when they see more than one black guy.. if with a bunch of people, they'll sing Sweet Home Alabama and make that black guy go to another block. How is it in America that we have major corporations investing billions of dollars in building up data centers in places from the phillipines to india and you don't as much as even a server placed in an inner city?
There's plenty of white people too, that say that would prefer a white quarterback to their favorite NFL team. There's more to white America than a few suburban towns. All you have to do is take a drive through the civil war museums and you'll find that Confederate flags and merchandise sells on par with that of the Union. If you go into prisons, you immediately find that whites all band up into neo-nazi gangs, and, if there is a criticism of the right wing these days about religion, it is that christianity, with its message of peace, has been used to pollute the white race.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that we'd see confederate flags -everywhere-, should Obama get elected. Like he's seriously going to get a lot of votes in the South.. Come on... where's all the black NASCAR drivers? I see confederate flags more now, than I ever have before. I live in a mixed neighborhood and you have the white side of the street with guys flying the Stars and Bars and on the black side of the street you have a bunch of black guy dressed up like gangstas. People do not talk to each other -at all-, and its no different than it was when blacks and whites were throwing bricks at each other during the race riots of the early 1980s.
If there's any institution out there that is -not- racist, it is the membership of pro sports teams, and the US military. There's plenty of white soldiers that don't like blacks and plenty of whites that don't like black, but, when a black man saves a white man's life, and vice versa, things like race just don't matter, and, in this present war, there's an aweful lot of that going on.
This isn't to say that whites are all devils (Farrakhan joke deliberate), or that blacks are angels. It is to say that racism is far from dead in the USA and quite honestly I do not think it will ever be. There will never be a day where we do not have to have some sort of affirmative action in university or even in some workplaces. There will never be a day where we do not have to constantly police ourselves to ensure that people are not being judged on anything different than their ability. Racism isn't like a disease that you cure, its a chronic condition that requires persistent and determined management by the nation, the government, companies and finally the people.
What planet are you from? I mean, let's call the Democratic nomination for what it is.. Hillary and Obama basically split the white vote but blacks voted for Obama, and boom, he wins the nomimation. Was there a state where Obama got less than 75% of the black vote? Don't think so.
While Dems should do well in this election, as Obama tries to enact their plans, Dems will be back open to the racial charge of being the party that wants to tax white people to give stuff to black people.
Wise man say building all corporate data on excel spreadhseets is building a house of cards.
I couldn't agree with you more, but the more recent trend is to use Excel as the presentation layer, which is much, much safer. You build a web site that pumps the data out of the database, create Excel sheets dynamically, and you got a lot of happy Excel junkies.
Imagine having to install a separate program for every online service you wanted to access
We do this already with messaging. I swear, my wife must have 10 different messaging clients...
What we really needed is easier program installation and an easier way to find the write ones. Trying to shove everything into uber browser just strikes me as retarded.
t they can do that despite using 20 year old spaghetti code
Spaghetti Code can be good stuff. Remember, OOP only happened when computers got fast enough to deal with the concept of objects, not that, OOP was ever the fastest way to do things. The -fastest- way for a program to run is to have all sorts of nasty pointer tricks, pack memory together as tightly together as possible, watch the alignment, twiddle bits, use tricks with the virtual memory space (aka, address), to help classifiy what the pointer is pointing to without having to dereference it explicitly. All of that stuff, my friend, makes for some incomprehensible code, but, you can get systems to go very fast that way. Remember too, that Microsoft culture used to be about being faster and more flexible than mainframes. DOS and early Windows were written in straight assembly language and it wasn't until WinNT that the true realm of big bloat started kicking in.
Or you could NOT be a fucking retard and just use CSV.
CSV is crap. These days, customers that want to use Excel in an application want all the formulas and formatting. Generating Excel XML is rather popular, but the idea of being able to work with an Excel chart and injecting VBA code into an Excel document is downright intoxicating.
Quite honestly, this move to open file formats will entrench Microsoft Office even -more-, as corporations that love Excel will find themselves building applications that use it.
Ultimately, what's going to happen is that Microsoft, or one of its partners, will wind up releasing Excel file builders for.NET, and then you'll see an explosion of Excel content in corporate intranets. There won't be that much CSS and DHTML any more, it will all be just Excel, binary.
I would disagree that the protocol shouldn't be patentable. Especially to contract driven programming, the protocol is really the only thing that matters.
People are looking for 14 different flavors of HTML, different scripting languages, plug ins, sandboxes and more and they somehow want all of this slop to throw in graphics...
maybe, just maybe, the idea of a single application that accesses all information is a dumb idea, and the right place for this sort of integration is on the desktop, after all.
We've had a decade of people trying to ram this product down our throats, and yet, the best we get is that we should appreciate having an IP address that looks like:
Sure, they could just shut them all down to "punish" the states, but they risk losing business if shipping takes longer or they have to raise prices to reflect higher local wages.
It all depends on the difference in sales taxes on the current state versus those of a neighboring state, plus whatever the state throws in to get jobs. Then you also have to factor in the cost of fuel.. maybe the current sites weren't sited with high fuel costs in mind. I know one Amazon center that is foolishly nowhere near a rail line... tsk tsk.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL. Assuming of course that oil prices are all due to them nasty "speculators" and not to the fact that the rate of growth of demand is far outpacing any conceivable rate of growth of supply (including all Iraq, ANWAR, deep-sea, Arctic and what not) and that no feasible increase in supply is going to make a long-term dent.
What you ignore, when you make that assessment, is a pricing equilibrium brought about my normal market forces. Yes, demand is increasing at a rate that will outstrip supply. But, as prices increase, then, demand can and will fall and level off. It might be at $200/bbl, but, the price increases will level off as a greater percentage of the population decides to not have it. That's just the way humanity works. Any increase in supply, thus, is always going to be beneficial, as it will act to either delay or suppress the price increase. Now, you could have an argument with ANWR, but, to say that 200 billion barrels of Iraqi supply cannot make a dent in world prices is absurd.
Ask the Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, Japanese, Nazi and Soviet empires. Amongst others.
I want to hold out this silly tripe tjstork had put out for all to see as what passes as "reason" amongst all of these war-hawks
You can call it tripe, as much as you want, but I was only stating facts, and not making any moral judgement. However, you should note that that Roman Empire lasted, in one fashion or another, for nearly 2000 years (dating from the founding of Rome to the fall of Constantinople). The Chinese Empire lasted for 2000 years. The Egyptian Empire lasted for probably 4000 years. The British Empire lasted for 400 years.
The only reason the Japanese, German and Soviet Empires collapsed was because another budding superpower opposed all of them with an economic system that was better than their own. Do read about the Japanese economy running into World War II, and take careful note of comparisons of GDP. Similarly, as much as people rail on about supposed NAZI efficiency, even the "lowly" British produced more aircraft, engaged in quite successful technological research (RADAR, Computer, code breaking), and managed to build quite a successful surface Navy while the Germans could only build a fleet in being. And similarly, the Soviets, masters of an entire continent and a giant population, screwed it all up with central planning. Quite honestly, if the Soviet Empire allowed trade with the rest of the world and free markets in its borders, its quite likely Germany would still be partitioned and the economy might be so good that the Eastern Bloc might not even want to be liberated.
The reason that I say this, is, yes, wheras we can argue pro or con about empires - I'm actually in favor of a total US military withdrawal from everywhere on the planet with a renewed focus on trade. But, you can't just say "empires are stupid and doomed to fail", because, right now, to the best of our knowledge, empires produced the longest lasting and most stable forms of human government -ever-. The USA is the world's oldest Democracy, and its only 250 years. As ages of civilizations go, its not even close to be a contender on the overall test of time among civilizations that are truly, long lasting.
The F-22 does stuff TO people, Aricebo does stuff FOR people.
Aricebo doesn't do anything for me at all. It's useless.
Meanwhile, the Iraq War has cost the average taxpayer about $12,000 each over the last five years.
If we assume a baseline 100M taxpayers, and an Iraq war cost of 100B a year, then, we're really talking only about $1000 a year on average. Notice, though, that 90% of the taxes in the USA are paid by people making over $250,000 a year, so really, we average stiffs are probably not even paying for the war at all.
Now, let's say that the Iraqis come through and increase their oil production to first 3m bbls/day, and then to 5m / bbls a day, and the benefits of this production increase result in additional 50 billion a year in profits to American companies, PLUS, a reduction in gasoline costs. We can calculate the ultimate profitability of the war based upon a reduction in the price of gasoline per person, knowing that in the USA the per capita consumption of gasoline is about 10 barrels per person per year. Source , and thus, about 30 barrels per taxpayer per year. So we say at 30 x 45 gets us about 1200 gallons of gas per year per taxpayer. We can thus calculate that if the war in Iraq is victorious, AND, nets a global price reduction of about a $1 / gallon, then, each taxpayer would come out ahead about $200 per year, even if the cost of continuing the war is born indefinitely. If, on the other hand, the USA wins the war and a stable semi-US-friendly government emerges and thus we can withdraw the troops, and Iraq still pumps enough to lower the price of gasoline by a $1 a gallon, then the war would basically pay for itself in about 5 years, and then after that, it would be pure profit for the USA. Hey, imperialism can be profitable, which is why countries do it!
have them visit www.ford.com, or any other automotive retailer's website
Maybe some people have the sense to not waste their time going to what is essentially a giant advertisement.
I just tried doing that, without thinking, and of course I have a big floodlight of a flourescent above my head and so it would difficult to spot ... but, the larger problem is that here I was waving rapidly in front of my screen and now everything thinks I'm retarded.
One of the Open Office mantras is that, "people don't need all the features of Office" Pray tell, what is it in Excel or Word that people don't need? I could see ejecting the scripting, but, then, people that pick up add on macro sheets for budgeting don't have that option. I could see getting rid of some of the formatting, except that people who want their stuff to look better don't have that option. I could see getting rid of database integration, but then, small businesses suddenly lose that option.
What exactly is it, that people do not "need"? I would have thought that Microsoft would not have allocated capital to build the feature, unless someone had not requested it?
I grew up on Ultimate I and II and played the board game along with Apple and I'm quite surprised that this early era, where SSI was dominate, along with others, was not indeed the first golden age.
I have to say that I disagree with his assessment of Diablo as an RPG. To me, Diablo fit right into the proud tradition of the likes of Ultimate and was in many ways a spiritual successor.
To me a good RPG is like reading a book - its an individual thing and I think there's alway going to be room for that in gaming...
Which is why, throughout all of human history, there have always been people (non-liberals?) who try to keep knowledge out of the hands of as many people as possible. Giving them the choice between food and knowledge is one way of doing that.
and if professors can't eat, how do they write books? Just a thought.. should MIT sell google ads. Universities are too important of an institution to get screwed up with over political debates. We have an institution that works, works very well, has done everything asked of it, and we should be supporting it.
I mean, students bitching about the price of textbooks should be viewed in the same light as an army recruit bitching about boot camp. It's just part of the deal. In the grand scheme of things, a $100 book that lasts a lifetime is a pretty damn good thing. I -STILL- have some of my college textbooks - at least the ones I didn't take back to the bookstore for beer money.
I'm sorry but I can't sit and watch liberals destroy themselves in the pursuit of free works.
Its one thing that the likes of any number of political musicians might suddenly find themselves without a fat paycheck once CD sales approach zero, its quite another when the very academic backbone on the country is assaulted.
It takes an enormous amount of work to make a good academic text. You can't just learn something like physics by skimming a few blog quotes, or get a real sense of any field, for that matter, by reading books. Is it unfortunate that they cost a lot? Yes, it is. But books have always been historically valuable things and the bulk of that value has been in the content.
I've read MIT Open Courseware and a lot of it actually is not that deep. A few syllabi and class notes and homework assignments is not the same as the book the class refers to!
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. If you have a society where authors do not get paid, you basically wipe out the entire academic basis of learning in the USA, and with it, our country. People's quests for knowledge about the world will not go away when you get rid of books, and, instead of books, they will have their heads filled with muddy, wrong and incorrect web sites all measured more by how many clicks they get from adsense than any real academic measure of the value of the work.
Indeed, there's a lot of that already.
But hey, if all of these professors want to work for free... they are more than welcome to it, but I guarantee them this - preachers -never- work for free, and, if people want to screw over universities because they don't want to pay their authors, then, we'll wind up reverting back to a medieval society.
Because giving one person the power to decide what the law is and enforce it however they want would be a dictatorship? This is generally considered to be a bad idea.
Well, that is a problem. But, there are those who would prefer that, trading out the short term gain of their particular causes for longer term freedoms.
Use of signing statements should be an impeachable offense.
I could agree that the notion of signing statements by a President is a bit outside of our present legal tradition, and, I have thought as much as you have.. the thing is, though, is that, the power of judicial review as presently asserted by the courts is not enumerated by the Constitution, and as such, there is technically no right for the Supreme Court to do what it does today. They asserted themselves the right in Marbury vs Madison and because of an alignment of political stars, they managed to make it stick.
Now, given that the President does have the enumerated powers of commander in chief, and is sworn to uphold the Constitution, and, has an explicit power to veto, one could, make the expansive argument that the Constitution does in fact allow the President a degree of interpretation in the law and thus signing statements are actually constitutional.
After all, if the Congress is allowed to assert a right to legislate the environment as part of a commerce clause.. which is really a fanciful stretch, then why shouldn't the President extend the veto into a larger right to interpret the law?
Actually, you wouldn't because the President (as long as you're talking about the US) doesn't have that power.
The Constitution actually does not give the Supreme Court the power to declare a law unconstitutional. That power was actually asserted by a very early Supreme Court case (Madison vs Marbury) and for political reasons expedient to the time, the other branches of the government went along with it. In doing so, they established a precedent that works, partly because, the elected governments now have a way of punting knotty problems to the appointed courts.
Even to this day, despite arguments of judicial activism, even conservative judges are very careful, to paraphrase Antonin Scalia, to make only those rulings that they think they can get away with it. From an institutional perspective, just because they would not "excessively" use the power, does not mean that they want to give it up. Frodo's ring is worn by many in the US government and they work to assert their own particular branches over others.
Now, you will see from time to time the executive branch can and will assert for itself the right to interpret the constitutionality of the law itself. To some Presidents, notably Bush 2 and Clinton, the Constitutionally enshrined notion of a veto plus the role of a commander in chief plus the oath to defend the constitution implies a wider penumbra of interpreting the law within the Presidency. Clinton put the ideas on paper first and began signing statements, but it is true that Bush really began asserting the right. He, however, has not been able to really make that tradition stick.
Historically, though, there have been cases even before that where Presidents completely -ignored- or sought to subvert the courts. Democrats from the 1940s through the 1960s just used the FBI to do their dirty work... but never really sought to subvert the courts because the rulings tended to go their way. Prior to that, Roosevelt actually tried to jack up the number of supreme court judges as his own New Deal was, in part, declared unconstitutional by a then conservative court.
Even before that, you had the famous "Trail of Tears" case, where the Supreme Court flat out said that the USA had to honor a treaty with the indians, and the then President just asserted that the Supreme Court had to pound sand on that issue and ordered this Indian tribe to be forcibly removed from their lands anyway. The Supreme Court, at the time, could do nothing. The President has the Army, after all, and the President in question was previously a famous general.
It's pretty simple. I'm not giving these people one fricking dime and its not like songs are something that people absolutely can't live without. There's plenty of free stuff on the radio, I have plenty of songs I've paid for already... why do I need to continue to subsidize a subpar industry giving me all of this crap to begin with.
You know, it never ceases to amaze me, that an industry that proclaims itself to be most on the side of the people, the most liberal, that rips any commercial interest of the right wing as morally wrong, has done more to subvert the rights of mankind in the digital age than any other industry.
Next time Michael Moore or Oliver Stone or Spike Lee makes a film telling me how evil George Bush is for illegal wiretaps, perhaps we might ask them, what about all the raids, wiretaps and assaults on PCs born about by their industry. You can't benefit from digital surveillance and iron fisted prosecution of teenagers while proclaiming to be innocent of it.
If I were President, I would pardon every single person that was ever arrested for the supposed crime of copyright violation, and i would reply to every law that congress passed at the industry's behest, with a signing statement declaring such law to be unconstitutional and a refusal to enforce.
J Edgar Hoover came into his own during the Roosevelt Administration and ultimately formed such a powerful force that he became almost a branch of government in his own right. He was universally reviled by every administration over the years from Kennedy to Johnson although they ultimately allowed him to continue.
Now Nixon was mad enough to at least contemplate removing Hoover from FBI, but he ultimately let him stay on because he, as previous administrations though, that Hoover had the goods on him. As it turned out, this decision ultimately lead the number 2 at FBI to go Deep Throat and this ultimately did bring down the Hixon government.
So clearly, the FBI had become a national problem.
In the wake of watergate, a bunch of liberals stormed the national elections, and although they did a lot of stupid stuff, they did form an unusual coalition with libertarians and enacted a number of laws designed to prevent the likes of Hoover from happening again. It is these laws that were torn down during the foolish "we're tougher on terror than the other guy" legislative race between Democrats and Republicans and lead directly to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
The most important point to make is, just because your party has absolute control of government, does not put that government in the right when it abuses civil rights. You can't let yourself be sullied into believing that the targets of immoral arrests and searches are in fact, anything more than political targets. If the police have the evidence, they can cough it up, and have a trial, for any citizen of the United States who is supposedly accused.
I am absolutely sick and tired of this "white America is overtly racist".
Well, white America is overtly racist. I know you talk about social chastisement for being a racists white but I've never met a white guy that wasn't popular for making a black joke every now and then. You really just need to quit pretending that there is any other case. It's just a fact of life. People that think that a few speeches by Martin Luther King and a couple of segregated schools can change the attitudes of a nation in a generation are utterly stupid. Being racist, in many people's eyes, is that they aren't allowed to call black people n---rs any more, and so, because they don't do that, they don't see themselves as racist...
except that...
More white people, if they see a black guy in a Lexus getting pulled over by the cops, will assume that the guy was doing drugs or is some kind of a gangster than a guy with a business or an advanced degree. If alone, they'll cross the street when they see more than one black guy.. if with a bunch of people, they'll sing Sweet Home Alabama and make that black guy go to another block. How is it in America that we have major corporations investing billions of dollars in building up data centers in places from the phillipines to india and you don't as much as even a server placed in an inner city?
There's plenty of white people too, that say that would prefer a white quarterback to their favorite NFL team. There's more to white America than a few suburban towns. All you have to do is take a drive through the civil war museums and you'll find that Confederate flags and merchandise sells on par with that of the Union. If you go into prisons, you immediately find that whites all band up into neo-nazi gangs, and, if there is a criticism of the right wing these days about religion, it is that christianity, with its message of peace, has been used to pollute the white race.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that we'd see confederate flags -everywhere-, should Obama get elected. Like he's seriously going to get a lot of votes in the South.. Come on... where's all the black NASCAR drivers? I see confederate flags more now, than I ever have before. I live in a mixed neighborhood and you have the white side of the street with guys flying the Stars and Bars and on the black side of the street you have a bunch of black guy dressed up like gangstas. People do not talk to each other -at all-, and its no different than it was when blacks and whites were throwing bricks at each other during the race riots of the early 1980s.
If there's any institution out there that is -not- racist, it is the membership of pro sports teams, and the US military. There's plenty of white soldiers that don't like blacks and plenty of whites that don't like black, but, when a black man saves a white man's life, and vice versa, things like race just don't matter, and, in this present war, there's an aweful lot of that going on.
This isn't to say that whites are all devils (Farrakhan joke deliberate), or that blacks are angels. It is to say that racism is far from dead in the USA and quite honestly I do not think it will ever be. There will never be a day where we do not have to have some sort of affirmative action in university or even in some workplaces. There will never be a day where we do not have to constantly police ourselves to ensure that people are not being judged on anything different than their ability. Racism isn't like a disease that you cure, its a chronic condition that requires persistent and determined management by the nation, the government, companies and finally the people.
What planet are you from? I mean, let's call the Democratic nomination for what it is.. Hillary and Obama basically split the white vote but blacks voted for Obama, and boom, he wins the nomimation. Was there a state where Obama got less than 75% of the black vote? Don't think so.
While Dems should do well in this election, as Obama tries to enact their plans, Dems will be back open to the racial charge of being the party that wants to tax white people to give stuff to black people.
Wise man say building all corporate data on excel spreadhseets is building a house of cards.
I couldn't agree with you more, but the more recent trend is to use Excel as the presentation layer, which is much, much safer. You build a web site that pumps the data out of the database, create Excel sheets dynamically, and you got a lot of happy Excel junkies.
Imagine having to install a separate program for every online service you wanted to access
We do this already with messaging. I swear, my wife must have 10 different messaging clients...
What we really needed is easier program installation and an easier way to find the write ones. Trying to shove everything into uber browser just strikes me as retarded.
t they can do that despite using 20 year old spaghetti code
Spaghetti Code can be good stuff. Remember, OOP only happened when computers got fast enough to deal with the concept of objects, not that, OOP was ever the fastest way to do things. The -fastest- way for a program to run is to have all sorts of nasty pointer tricks, pack memory together as tightly together as possible, watch the alignment, twiddle bits, use tricks with the virtual memory space (aka, address), to help classifiy what the pointer is pointing to without having to dereference it explicitly. All of that stuff, my friend, makes for some incomprehensible code, but, you can get systems to go very fast that way. Remember too, that Microsoft culture used to be about being faster and more flexible than mainframes. DOS and early Windows were written in straight assembly language and it wasn't until WinNT that the true realm of big bloat started kicking in.
Or you could NOT be a fucking retard and just use CSV.
CSV is crap. These days, customers that want to use Excel in an application want all the formulas and formatting. Generating Excel XML is rather popular, but the idea of being able to work with an Excel chart and injecting VBA code into an Excel document is downright intoxicating.
Quite honestly, this move to open file formats will entrench Microsoft Office even -more-, as corporations that love Excel will find themselves building applications that use it.
Ultimately, what's going to happen is that Microsoft, or one of its partners, will wind up releasing Excel file builders for .NET, and then you'll see an explosion of Excel content in corporate intranets. There won't be that much CSS and DHTML any more, it will all be just Excel, binary.
I would disagree that the protocol shouldn't be patentable. Especially to contract driven programming, the protocol is really the only thing that matters.
People are looking for 14 different flavors of HTML, different scripting languages, plug ins, sandboxes and more and they somehow want all of this slop to throw in graphics ...
maybe, just maybe, the idea of a single application that accesses all information is a dumb idea, and the right place for this sort of integration is on the desktop, after all.
We've had a decade of people trying to ram this product down our throats, and yet, the best we get is that we should appreciate having an IP address that looks like:
http://20010db885a308d313198a2e03707348/
That -sucks-. ok? it sucks. It may be great for network people, except those that use the addresses, but it suks.
IPv6 : Proud sponsors of unusable addresses.
Welcome my new algae plankton cod fishing baby seal thank god the bears are gone overlord masters!
Sure, they could just shut them all down to "punish" the states, but they risk losing business if shipping takes longer or they have to raise prices to reflect higher local wages.
It all depends on the difference in sales taxes on the current state versus those of a neighboring state, plus whatever the state throws in to get jobs. Then you also have to factor in the cost of fuel.. maybe the current sites weren't sited with high fuel costs in mind. I know one Amazon center that is foolishly nowhere near a rail line... tsk tsk.