Congress has the authority to promote behaviors via the tax code, which is exactly how the individual mandate is implemented. The question in this case is "Is there a substantive difference between taxing someone for NOT doing something (penalties), vs crediting them for DOING something (subsidies)" And I don't think the Constitution on its face answers that question. It's a question of interpretation and case law.
The GPL doesn't bind Oracle to any particular behavior, but it does serve as explicit and implicit permission to others for a particular class of behavior, some of which may be access to related patents.
You know the article is bad when their first example includes a Java language syntax feature that DOESN'T EXIST. Also, wouldn't it be *better* to use a NullPointerException, since you can write the logic for the error-free case without clutter, and then consequently DEAL with the error when it arises?
Apple now runs what's left of the music industry with iTunes
You're kidding me. Every purchased mp3 on my hard drive came from Amazon.com, which has approximately the same selection as the iTMS at same or better prices. With the death of DRM on music (which Apple itself pushed for!) Apple has no power over competitors. The muscle they DO have is against the music industry and every time it's been wielded it's been a benefit for the end user!
If you want to use the words Apple and anticompetitive in the same sentence, you should talk about their ebooks. THERE's a place where their agreements have gotten ridiculous.
You can copyright the fixed expression of an idea, like the Pacman software and promotional artwork. And that covers derivative works, even if you don't use a technical process to translate the old bits to make the new bits.
As I understand it, Akamai also operates slightly differently (and less costly from Comcast's perspective): they colocate some of their CDN nodes with ISPs so external bandwidth isn't used when content hosted there is requested.
There is no magical transformation where it goes from non-human life to human life.
Except conception? I'm willing to concede that conception is a much better-defined state transition than birth, because of the new set of DNA, but still it's a little wild to consider a single cell equivalent to a breathing thinking person
None of the popular thoughts on abortion address the question of WHY it's wrong to terminate a human life. What is the goal behind prohibiting killing people? The answer to that might be instructive in determining what to do with abortion.
That's at least partly the point. People don't help detect cheats if could cost them.
FTFY. In this example, the professor is basically telling the students that they SHOULD have cheated, since everyone has to retake the test, there was a chance he wouldn't have detected it, and the only penalty is a 4 hour ethics class. That's *hurting* the students who are staying honest because they want to learn.
No. The function of the courts isn't to uphold public opinion, even assuming that we at Slashdot have a firm grasp on what the public believes in the first place.
An attack against a high ranking public official is an attack against the state. Assassination is treated as more serious than murder, and so should it be with other crimes.
You don't have to root for one or the other, there's plenty of options. Amazon is a sufficiently good replacement for Gamestop, and has the art of logistics and corresponding costs mastered. Also there's sites like Goozex that are happy to connect you with gamers who want to get rid of their old junk. Also you can troll Gamefly and buy copies when they pare down their inventory (got Arkham Asylum there for $20 MONTHS before Gamestop had it at that price).
The Internet brings a lot of new ways of doing things. Be willing to get creative!
You're absolutely right that the second-hand store has no moral authority to step in and complain, but their margins aren't unreasonable for the business they're trying to do. The biggest problem is inventory. Every day a product fails to move is a day it's depreciating, and the money that was paid for it is losing interest and opportunity value. And then at some point the product reaches the point where it's written off completely (because nobody's going to buy your 5th copy of the first release of MGS 2 for PS2).
So, yes, the margins are quite high if the product can be bought and sold at the same time, but you have to balance that against the odds that it won't be.
IANAL, but such an agreement sounds dangerously close to constituting illegal Restraint of Trade both in the UK and the US, for precisely that reason, as it harms the market. There's a reasonableness test that applies to see whether the restraint would have a positive effect other than the loss of competition, but it seems like even as liberally as it's modernly applied, it would be a stretch to find any justification for this.
You don't need to provide your password for Facebook to access your Google contacts. That's the whole point of the situation. Google provides a mechanism to export your contacts if you authorize a website to access them (in a manner similar to OAuth I suppose). Facebook doesn't, so any new contact information is trapped there unless you spend a long night with copy/paste.
It's not more safe, but after Oracle's actions it's no longer more dangerous. The patent issue used to be a very good reason to avoid Mono, but now for the feature space that Java and.NET occupy, there's no longer a good reason to prefer either of them!
For desktop applications you can tell people to start using Qt (does Nokia have any patents we need to be aware of?), but in the enterprise space is there really anywhere comparable to go?
Only the difference between their Win 7 sales and the sales of XP/Vista they would have made if Win 7 hadn't come out matters. In other words, how much did the release of a new version of Windows inspire people to buy Windows more. Non-zero I'm sure, but not the full amount of Win 7 sales either. Likewise with Office.
Why not come up with a solution that is better aimed at the problem? Like: Pass a law that says, "you want to be in the Health Insurance Game (i.e. Wellpoint, Cigna, Humana, Aetna, United Health, etc), you are REQUIRED to accept pre-existing conditions, and offer insurance to individuals."
I don't know whether you know or not, but that's what they did. The best part of the health insurance law was the creation of "exchanges" where individuals can buy plans at group rates.
The cognitive dissonance is tear-my-hair-out infuriating.
It's not dissonance. The lowest 40% of income earners pay NEGATIVE federal income tax, and pay the vast majority of their effective federal taxes on Social Security and Medicare, both of which contribute to a benefit that they themselves will (hopefully!) receive.
State taxes, of course, are an entirely different animal, but people's state taxes aren't going to pay for new health care programs.
On a related note, I wish to inform the community at large and Ubuntu in particular that not everyone is using a personally-administered workstation with a local file system.
Point taken, but Ubuntu is not for you then. They trade assumptions for simplicity, and their target market, like Apple's, is specifically people for whom those assumptions hold.
Is there room for a Professional-Enthusiast hybrid? I.e. left Gentoo for Debian because he values his time, but uses the unstable branch because he values having up-to-date packages.
Slashdot Mirror
Congress has the authority to promote behaviors via the tax code, which is exactly how the individual mandate is implemented. The question in this case is "Is there a substantive difference between taxing someone for NOT doing something (penalties), vs crediting them for DOING something (subsidies)" And I don't think the Constitution on its face answers that question. It's a question of interpretation and case law.
The GPL doesn't bind Oracle to any particular behavior, but it does serve as explicit and implicit permission to others for a particular class of behavior, some of which may be access to related patents.
There's also "middle click navigates to primary selection" which Chrome doesn't implement, and most people consider a standard for web browsers in X.
You know the article is bad when their first example includes a Java language syntax feature that DOESN'T EXIST. Also, wouldn't it be *better* to use a NullPointerException, since you can write the logic for the error-free case without clutter, and then consequently DEAL with the error when it arises?
Apple now runs what's left of the music industry with iTunes
You're kidding me. Every purchased mp3 on my hard drive came from Amazon.com, which has approximately the same selection as the iTMS at same or better prices. With the death of DRM on music (which Apple itself pushed for!) Apple has no power over competitors. The muscle they DO have is against the music industry and every time it's been wielded it's been a benefit for the end user!
If you want to use the words Apple and anticompetitive in the same sentence, you should talk about their ebooks. THERE's a place where their agreements have gotten ridiculous.
You can copyright the fixed expression of an idea, like the Pacman software and promotional artwork. And that covers derivative works, even if you don't use a technical process to translate the old bits to make the new bits.
I believe his argument is that the problem is solved to the degree that the market has demanded it be solved.
As I understand it, Akamai also operates slightly differently (and less costly from Comcast's perspective): they colocate some of their CDN nodes with ISPs so external bandwidth isn't used when content hosted there is requested.
There is no magical transformation where it goes from non-human life to human life.
Except conception? I'm willing to concede that conception is a much better-defined state transition than birth, because of the new set of DNA, but still it's a little wild to consider a single cell equivalent to a breathing thinking person
None of the popular thoughts on abortion address the question of WHY it's wrong to terminate a human life. What is the goal behind prohibiting killing people? The answer to that might be instructive in determining what to do with abortion.
That's at least partly the point. People don't help detect cheats if could cost them.
FTFY. In this example, the professor is basically telling the students that they SHOULD have cheated, since everyone has to retake the test, there was a chance he wouldn't have detected it, and the only penalty is a 4 hour ethics class. That's *hurting* the students who are staying honest because they want to learn.
No. The function of the courts isn't to uphold public opinion, even assuming that we at Slashdot have a firm grasp on what the public believes in the first place.
An attack against a high ranking public official is an attack against the state. Assassination is treated as more serious than murder, and so should it be with other crimes.
You don't have to root for one or the other, there's plenty of options. Amazon is a sufficiently good replacement for Gamestop, and has the art of logistics and corresponding costs mastered. Also there's sites like Goozex that are happy to connect you with gamers who want to get rid of their old junk. Also you can troll Gamefly and buy copies when they pare down their inventory (got Arkham Asylum there for $20 MONTHS before Gamestop had it at that price).
The Internet brings a lot of new ways of doing things. Be willing to get creative!
You're absolutely right that the second-hand store has no moral authority to step in and complain, but their margins aren't unreasonable for the business they're trying to do. The biggest problem is inventory. Every day a product fails to move is a day it's depreciating, and the money that was paid for it is losing interest and opportunity value. And then at some point the product reaches the point where it's written off completely (because nobody's going to buy your 5th copy of the first release of MGS 2 for PS2).
So, yes, the margins are quite high if the product can be bought and sold at the same time, but you have to balance that against the odds that it won't be.
IANAL, but such an agreement sounds dangerously close to constituting illegal Restraint of Trade both in the UK and the US, for precisely that reason, as it harms the market. There's a reasonableness test that applies to see whether the restraint would have a positive effect other than the loss of competition, but it seems like even as liberally as it's modernly applied, it would be a stretch to find any justification for this.
You don't need to provide your password for Facebook to access your Google contacts. That's the whole point of the situation. Google provides a mechanism to export your contacts if you authorize a website to access them (in a manner similar to OAuth I suppose). Facebook doesn't, so any new contact information is trapped there unless you spend a long night with copy/paste.
It's not more safe, but after Oracle's actions it's no longer more dangerous. The patent issue used to be a very good reason to avoid Mono, but now for the feature space that Java and .NET occupy, there's no longer a good reason to prefer either of them!
For desktop applications you can tell people to start using Qt (does Nokia have any patents we need to be aware of?), but in the enterprise space is there really anywhere comparable to go?
Only the difference between their Win 7 sales and the sales of XP/Vista they would have made if Win 7 hadn't come out matters. In other words, how much did the release of a new version of Windows inspire people to buy Windows more. Non-zero I'm sure, but not the full amount of Win 7 sales either. Likewise with Office.
State taxes don't pay for health care, and federal excise taxes make up a tiny fraction of an individual's overall tax burden.
Why not come up with a solution that is better aimed at the problem? Like: Pass a law that says, "you want to be in the Health Insurance Game (i.e. Wellpoint, Cigna, Humana, Aetna, United Health, etc), you are REQUIRED to accept pre-existing conditions, and offer insurance to individuals."
I don't know whether you know or not, but that's what they did. The best part of the health insurance law was the creation of "exchanges" where individuals can buy plans at group rates.
The cognitive dissonance is tear-my-hair-out infuriating.
It's not dissonance. The lowest 40% of income earners pay NEGATIVE federal income tax, and pay the vast majority of their effective federal taxes on Social Security and Medicare, both of which contribute to a benefit that they themselves will (hopefully!) receive.
State taxes, of course, are an entirely different animal, but people's state taxes aren't going to pay for new health care programs.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/EffectiveTaxRates.shtml#1011537
On a related note, I wish to inform the community at large and Ubuntu in particular that not everyone is using a personally-administered workstation with a local file system.
Point taken, but Ubuntu is not for you then. They trade assumptions for simplicity, and their target market, like Apple's, is specifically people for whom those assumptions hold.
Look closer. December got cut off in the screen-cap.
Well, if you're not going to date your mother then, can I?
Is there room for a Professional-Enthusiast hybrid? I.e. left Gentoo for Debian because he values his time, but uses the unstable branch because he values having up-to-date packages.