This is the real reason why OpenID is so important. Cards/onetime tokens/etc are costly to implement on every minor site. However, by centralizing the security solution you can use a real secure solution.
As for biometrics, I only recommend thumbprints as a compliment to ensure that people don't lend out their primary verification. For actually security checking biometrics suffers from being a static factor. Onetime pads or certificates are better in that regard.
You do realize that a lot more software is sold for consoles than PCs right? The console gaming market is huge, mostly because you just buy a console and any game out for that console will work out of the box
That is the usual console propaganda made by console manufacturers and big retail publishers that want to push people into the locked down console market by using skewed numbers, namely retail sales of the PC platform vs the combined retail sales of the three major consoles. Here are the advantages that consoles have in that comparison:
* Console sales grouped together into one single big number. * Only counting retail sales heavily favors console games, because maybe half of the PC sales are digital nowadays. * Advertising focuses on consoles because the profit margins are larger for publishers due to the closed down platform. * Doesn't include subscription services (MMORPGS, etc) which is common on the PC platform. Leading to the following point. * PC games have a larger time spent per game and person due to mods, community and general openedness of the platform. * PC games are easier to pirate which means that game piracy is more focused around the PC. (While the effect on direct sales can be discussed, one thing is certain. And that is that PC have a higher percentage of the pirated game hours played)
most people I know have a cheap dell with integrated video that couldn't handle something as simple and old as Quake III.)
And yet in the last 3 years 196 million gaming PCs were sold compared to 74.7 of the top three consoles (http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-claims-pc-market-largest. Another big market is the handhelds that also are larger than the console nowadays.
Don't confuse capitalism and the free market. Free markets can exist even under some types of communism. On the other hand, capitalism doesn't nescessarily mean free market. A free market is a place where sellers and buyers can get together and trade a bunch of products based on supply and demand, allowing for the most efficent allocation of resources availible to man. Capitalism on the other hand is just an economic state where private interests controls and decide what is done with the capital, while the goverment enforces the property laws that is needed for that.
What the top tier ISPs are doing is completly capitalistic. They are private entitites owning the capital and are using it to buy (strongarm) regulations that favor themselves. Am I being unfair to capitalism? Many would probably say that what I am talking about isn't capitalism and that US in many part isn't very capitalistic, but I have to disagree. Such complains are no more valid than communists claiming that soviet wasn't a communist state. There is theory and there is reality. Reality has shown time and time again what happens when capitalistic methodology is introduced and let run wild. Just like it has shown what happens when you let a communist methodology run wild. Neither are wanted results. Too much power in the hands of too few is a dangerous thing. It doesn't matter if it is private or goverment hands, because in the end they just become intertwined.
Yes, that is a perfect example of being a "good" grammar nazi. I made a direct mistake confusing two different words. Funny thing is that I know very well how evolve is spelled.
It is either. Languages involve, and there is now a decent amount of people who likes to use virii to symbolize multiple computer viruses. If it is used and understood, it is part of the language. At the very least as a dialect word.
And don't point to some dictionary or something like that. Dictionaries are out of date from the moment they are printed. That doesn't mean that they are useless. They just never contain the whole current language as it is currently used.
If you want to be a language nazi, focus on real mistakes instead like confusing "they're" with "their".
Yeah, tens of thousands of people from service members to engineers at defense contractors to the guys who mopped up on the mid shift lost their jobs. Some economic boost. Seriously, if there was an economic boost it was lost in the noise and then further obscured by the rise that accompanied the Dot-Bomb era.
Yes, people lost jobs from defense contractors and moved to more productive jobs elsewhere. The unemployment during the clinton era went under 5% which it hadn't done since 1973. And unlike most other times in the past where the unemployment went that low it wasn't driven by wasteful wars.
Hello troll, you got me to respond. Do you feel good about yourself. Feel free to masturbate now. So you are implying that posting links to three sites that concerns regulation in the three areas that the grand grand parent implied as not being regulated is a bad argument.
about emissions testing
Which if you don't pass gets your car banned. Sounds like on topic and correct to me
a british site about building code (that doesnt mention stairs in the 3 minutes I looked)
Good damn, you want a site about stair regulations specifically. Just how annoying can you get. Here you go, this time searching on stair regulations specifically instead of building regulations in general.
organization who spends most of its time dealing with poisonous/toxic substances
Including food.
How compelling of an argument...
Did you expect me to list three sites that said all cars, stairs and food is banned from this day on? Only a total idiot would expect that, but that is probably exactly what you are. Anyone with some common sense would see the links for what they really were. Evidence that the topics that the ggp posted about are indeed regulated unlike what was implied.
Btw, to clarify. I don't agree with the Australian regulations. But talking like nothing else is regulated really don't make your case any more sound.
Sigh, why is it that some us citizens love to bring up the flawed "appeal to size" argument in these kind of discussions.
Appealing to size only works when the difficulty of the task at hand has nonlinear scaling. And neither vote counting, nor distributing digital reciever equipment are problems that scale nonlinearly.
But the most important thing to note is that even for those stuck on dsl (fiber isn't every yet) you can still use it without having to worry about caps, because of the underlying fiber networks. While 10/10 or higher symmetrical is nice, it is actually of secondary importance. DSL works perfectly fine if there is good fiber supporting it on the backend. Of course, in the long run you want fiber to each house as it is faster and cheaper to maintain
It's not. Money is just a theoretical construct that helps facilitate trade. It isn't a magical, limited substance that makes something out of nothing. It is just a theoretical notion of stored value.
You get some of it, but still manage to get the whole thing so wrong.
Yes, money is just paper. The real currency is everything that is produced in a country. And that is a limited resource. If you produce one thing you won't have time/resources to produce another thing. Of course, using trading you can make production more efficent. But only to a certain degree.
In the end however, money speaks the truth. If x% of your GDP goes to military spending, then that is x% that isn't spent on more useful things.
You find that situations where everyone spends more money, causes everyone to get more. Everyone does more, so more is produced so everyone has more wealth.
This is only true if you have serious unemployment or production downtime. And even then, the goverment is better off higher people for civilian purposes (like digging down infrastructure) than it is hiring people to blow up other countries.
Also there is the fact that military spending has civilian benefits
Sure, you get the occasional civilian benefit. But, again, you would be better off investing it towards civilian efforts immediatly, getting rid of the 90% that does little but blow up stuff.
that you don't understand economics on a large scale, or both.
Sounds like you are the one who don't understand economy on the big scale. Broken windows aren't good for the economy, even if allows the money to circulate more.
Tell me why throwing teachers at the students will educate them "better". Because that is essentially what you are recommending.
Instead of having the teachers with the best voices and presentation abilities record interactive videos (with all the common questions availible at a mouse click), you are having a mass of teachers of varying quality waste their time doing the same thing, often having to reexplain things to the 1/5 of the class that didn't catch it first time, while 4/5ths sit there bored out of their mind. Oh, and the classroom teacher has far less access to cool demonstration materials.
And I havn't even started to mention how the whole class paradigm with one big class listening to one teacher has proven to be a complete failure due to how different people advance at different speeds in different subjects. No-Child-Left-Behind isn't really a bad idea. The problem is that it doesn't work as long as you stick to the good old fashioned class.
As long as you stick with good old fashioned teaching you will never get away from the class teaching paradigm, because there simply isn't enough manpower (teachers) for any other system to work well.
And then in the next class having the students find the flaw in a mathematical proof covering two blackboards which "proves" that 2+2=5.
Noone says that every minute should be spent infront of computers. Group work and discussion is an important part of school.
However, the current paradigm is far too focused on the teacher preaching infront of the class, which is directly harmful to the large percentage of the class that either already understood the subject at hand or didn't understand the prerequisite subject.
Correction. We will be dealing with it so long as we keep using a heavily outdated rights system where programs have the same rights as the user executing the program.
Modern OS security is based around mainframes and coorporate networks running a few programs from trusted sources. This has proven to be a complete failure, because there is very often a need or want to run programs from less trusted sources. And even those programs that are considered trusted can cause serious problems if they have bugs that can exploited.
Blaming the ignorant end users is just bad form, when even a power user like myself feel uneasy every time I install a new application. And, no. Not having system rights doesn't help. My personal files are just as important as the system and they are always exposed to bad software. I actually take extra security measures using sandboxie to sandbox many of the less trusted programs that I run, but it is not really a smooth process, and not something you can expect an end user to do.
Your money comes from debt which pays interest and therefore requires continual exponential growth to function. It's a pyramid scheme. For which you can thank the bankers.
Incorrect. Interest is trivial to pay back as long as money is circulating (stuff is produced and sold). It is trivial to pay back $10 to someone with a single $1 bill as long as the one you are paying back to buys something from you after each partial payment. And yes, this also applies to fractional reserve banking, for those who got fooled by some of the incorrect claims in "Money as Debt".
you've never had to experience being in a foxhole praying to God for your life".
Would that go something like this:
"Dear god, I don't want to meet you yet because I want to spend more time on this sinful place called earth. I know that heaven is wonderful and all, but unless it has booze and hookers, I would prefer to wait to come there until I die of old age. I am a devoted christian, I promise, so please grant my request."
* Atleast got rid of some of the unemployment and as a result probably prevented a lot of civil unrest. * Created infrastructure still in use today * Created a single bad year with all other years providing very high growth in GDP. (which continued during WW2) * Maintained the GDP/debt ratio (although that went out the window when the war began)
Of course, he wasn't perfect as demonstrated by the one bad year and not managing to completly get rid of the whole 25% (!!!) unemployment. Oh, and the US people being able to spend less on consumer goods, because more got spent on lasting infrastructure. But anyone calling his actions a failure is ignoring real facts.
Saranko indicated that authorities decided to file the child pornography charges to send a strong message to other minors who might consider sending such photos to friends.
Someone please put a bullet through the brains of however is in charge of those authorities. That would count as as really protecting the children.
Then the users have FAR TOO MUCH power. An unidentified program should never be allowed to write to anywhere but a carefully set aside portion of the disk assigned to just that program. It shouldn't be able to query DMI information, or read from the registry, install startup programs (without confirmation I might add!), install itself into the systray. Not just "unless the user is admin", but it shouldn't be doing these things ANYWAY
While I agree with what you are saying, I don't the problem is so much with the users having too much power. Instead, the problem is with the programs having too much power. It originates in the whole idea of user rights being the most important thing in determining access. It worked well as a simplified system on mainframes where the set of applications were limited and trusted. However, in modern computing it has the fatal flaw of assuming that the user has full trust in every program he runs, which is a very bad assumption.
Yup, it is quite like, but slightly different from the broken window fallacy.
Copyright that is. Instead of actually destroying something to create more work, you are instead preventing windows from being created cheaply in the first place so that the window maker earn more money making his "expensive" windows.
However, arguing that piracy is a broken window fallacy is completly false. Without copyright, hit movie number 267 may very well not be created because of less incentives, but the people who would have created that movie can instead do some other useful work. That is very different from the broken window fallacy where the window maker is stuck making a window to replace the broken one, instead of making another window for a new shop or expanding his business to include something more than window making.
The tax base is made significantly wider, and the FairTax is revenue neutral, so each current taxpayer will on average pay less in taxes.
Yes, each current taxpayer will on average pay less. Of course, those current tax payers include the rich who will get the whole gain and more. Funny, how easy it is to bend the truth.
The prebate. Meaning everyone get at the beginning of each month the amount they will pay in taxes throughout that month, up to poverty line spending. Poor people pay nothing in taxes. In fact, this will help their cash flow a bit.
This only moves the burden to the middle class people. It is still a regressive tax, just with a bottom cap.
If you're Bill Gates and you spend big, you pay big. I don't see how this is regressive. Please explain.
A rich person spends a lower perecentage of his income, allowing him to save more. This over time leads to accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands which finally leads to economical collapse.
Any sane tax system needs to deal with two facts, "People love to horde" and "Wealth makes Wealth". Fairtax deals with neither. It encourages hording and it doesn't take more from those who have more wealth to earn wealth.
A progressive income tax deals with the first one indirectly by making sure it is more difficult to obtain wealth in the first place, and it deals with the second by taxing greater incomes more. However, it does have the disadvantage of punishing those who make money while starting with little wealth. That is, the real entreprenaurs in the world.
A wealth tax deals with both problems. It prevents people from hording, and it determines how much potential each person has to make wealth and determines tax from that. It is also the only tax that can fix wealth imbalances retroactivly.
Personally I am pretty sure that a combination of all tax types probably works best. Extremism is rarely a good option.
Think spending money in these ways helps the economy? That is called the broken window fallacy in economics.
True, some things are bad ways to spend money like 90% of the financial sector.
However, one of the real problems in recessions is that real production isn't happening. Factories are standing still because noone is buying anything. The ability to produce is their, as is the labor. There just isn't any demand because those with money prefer to horde it.
What the hell are these evil corrupt, diabolical rich people going to do with these tons of riches that are accumulating? Money is like potential energy. It is worthless until you get something in exchange for it.
They don't horde money. They horde resources/capital/wealth. They seek power via ownership, plain and simple. They don't care if most of the rest of the world starves as long as they get to decide who starves and who don't. Actually, starving isn't a good example. They'll avoid going that far, because that would make it more like for a real revolution where they could lose everything.
Also, calling it evil/corrupt is not fair. They are just human.
It doesn't matter what the percentage is, so long as everyone pays the same percentage.
Why not make it a flat percentage wealth tax. The free market judges companies by how well they use their resources. Why shouldn't the goverment. As I said above, wealth makes wealth, so it should be considered fair.
These wicked rich people, the businessmen and women of America who commit such atrocities as hiring people (creating employment), investing their money in businesses that hire people
Mostly under the assumption that they in the end will end up with an even larger percentage of the total wealth.
are the ones who take huge risks
Gambling/Investing millions when you own billions isn't taking a huge risk. I
Here are a few reasons why computers should be expected to have more updates than cars:
* Unlike cars you don't have to recall the car to refit it, but can instead send the refit to the customer and have it install itself. (This is mostly an argument for more non security updates)
* Computers connected to the internet exist in a hostile environment unlike cars that exist in a relativly friendly environment. (Imagine if other drivers could earn money by pushing your car of the road, and rarely would get punished for it. I would think that you would be more willing to get the car manufacturers latest anti pushing fixes installed)
* Cars mostly exist in a more restricted environment, while the computer environment is more generic. (You'll need far more maintenance on your car if you run offroad, and far less maintenance on your computer if it runs in a lockdowned environment)
I fear that this may be like the Fair Tax Act. The Fair Tax Act is the most thoroughly-researched piece of legislation in history. The facts support it
The facts support it? Introducing a tax change that is favorable to the rich when the rich already have had favorable tax laws for the last 20 years (as evidenced by wealth accumulating into fewer hands).
A real fair tax act would replace the income tax by a flat percentage wealth tax. That is real fairness speaking from a market point of view. If you have more capital, you should be able to make more profit. That is how the market functions. Always moving capital to areas where more profits can be made.
Anyone for the "fair tax act" is for increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. It is an inevitable result as sales taxes favors those who can spend a lesser percentage of their income on goods. Flat income taxes are of course just as bad. Progressive income taxes are better, but have the nasty side effect of punishing those are better at leveraging wealth to earn money. Especially those on their way up through the class system. (as once you are past the max limit there is no more resistance).
Wealth taxes on the other hand focus on the basics which is that the more wealth you own, the more wealth you should be able to earn. Those who make good use of their resources to produce more wealth get richer, while those who make bad use of it grows poorer. Wealth taxes do have some problems, especially when it comes to actually evaluating wealth. But that is a price you have to pay if you really are looking for a fair system.
Why all these comparisons to the New Deal? It didn't work
It worked incredibly well. Unfortunally FDR was relativly conservative which made the depression last longer than it should have. His biggest misstake being the budget balancing in 1937 that immediatly sent the country into a second recession. Fortunally, he corrected the mistake by increasing the efforts again.
All we got in eight years was government debt
The goverment debt/GNP 1933: ~40% The goverment debt/GNP 1941: ~40%
unemployment did not change
Unemployment (using Darby figures which includes those involved in work efforts)
1933: 20.6% 1937: 9.1% 1938: 12.5% 1941: 8.0%
The unadjusted Lebergott numbers that counts a lot of those involved in work efforts as unemployed of course looks slighly worse, but they still show a significant reduction in unemployment. And the GNP increase is there to prove it.
If you can't even get the basics right I won't bother with the rest.
Smart people don't trust anything they download. Every installation is a risk. Unfortunally, that is a risk you have to take every time you try out a new program, because current operating systems suck at isolating installed applications.
The best you can is use one VM or similar setup (I use sandboxie for all my game installations) for each installed application, which is a pain in the ass.
Why should I get infected by malware just by installing xxscrensav3r.exe. Why should a generic program have any rights to do nasty stuff to my machine. And that applies even if I run as an administrator. Just because I trust myself to add/remove files to the system, doesn't mean that I trust any specific application.
The whole idea of making applications have the same rights as users is a catastrophy to start with. Applications should be far more restricted in what they can do than the user himself.
maybe, until you realize that the hoover dam and other infrastructure projects like it actually prolonged the great depression [ucla.edu].
Could you atleast try to read and understand the links you post!!! There are two main theory behind the length of the recession recession. FDR prematurly trying to balance the budget in 1937 and FDRs interference in the private sector in the form of price and salary fixing via promises of anti trust protection.
The article you linked to specifically discusses the second theory. Pay specific attention that this theory does not involve the infrastructure expenditure. Critizing of the FDR infrastructure expenditure pretty much only comes from the usual ideological suspects (libertarians, austrian economists and right wing propaganda tanks), with little to no real fact backing it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the real reason why OpenID is so important. Cards/onetime tokens/etc are costly to implement on every minor site. However, by centralizing the security solution you can use a real secure solution.
As for biometrics, I only recommend thumbprints as a compliment to ensure that people don't lend out their primary verification. For actually security checking biometrics suffers from being a static factor. Onetime pads or certificates are better in that regard.
You do realize that a lot more software is sold for consoles than PCs right? The console gaming market is huge, mostly because you just buy a console and any game out for that console will work out of the box
That is the usual console propaganda made by console manufacturers and big retail publishers that want to push people into the locked down console market by using skewed numbers, namely retail sales of the PC platform vs the combined retail sales of the three major consoles. Here are the advantages that consoles have in that comparison:
* Console sales grouped together into one single big number.
* Only counting retail sales heavily favors console games, because maybe half of the PC sales are digital nowadays.
* Advertising focuses on consoles because the profit margins are larger for publishers due to the closed down platform.
* Doesn't include subscription services (MMORPGS, etc) which is common on the PC platform. Leading to the following point.
* PC games have a larger time spent per game and person due to mods, community and general openedness of the platform.
* PC games are easier to pirate which means that game piracy is more focused around the PC. (While the effect on direct sales can be discussed, one thing is certain. And that is that PC have a higher percentage of the pirated game hours played)
most people I know have a cheap dell with integrated video that couldn't handle something as simple and old as Quake III.)
And yet in the last 3 years 196 million gaming PCs were sold compared to 74.7 of the top three consoles (http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-claims-pc-market-largest. Another big market is the handhelds that also are larger than the console nowadays.
Don't confuse capitalism and the free market. Free markets can exist even under some types of communism. On the other hand, capitalism doesn't nescessarily mean free market. A free market is a place where sellers and buyers can get together and trade a bunch of products based on supply and demand, allowing for the most efficent allocation of resources availible to man. Capitalism on the other hand is just an economic state where private interests controls and decide what is done with the capital, while the goverment enforces the property laws that is needed for that.
What the top tier ISPs are doing is completly capitalistic. They are private entitites owning the capital and are using it to buy (strongarm) regulations that favor themselves. Am I being unfair to capitalism? Many would probably say that what I am talking about isn't capitalism and that US in many part isn't very capitalistic, but I have to disagree. Such complains are no more valid than communists claiming that soviet wasn't a communist state. There is theory and there is reality. Reality has shown time and time again what happens when capitalistic methodology is introduced and let run wild. Just like it has shown what happens when you let a communist methodology run wild. Neither are wanted results. Too much power in the hands of too few is a dangerous thing. It doesn't matter if it is private or goverment hands, because in the end they just become intertwined.
Yes, that is a perfect example of being a "good" grammar nazi. I made a direct mistake confusing two different words. Funny thing is that I know very well how evolve is spelled.
It is either. Languages involve, and there is now a decent amount of people who likes to use virii to symbolize multiple computer viruses. If it is used and understood, it is part of the language. At the very least as a dialect word.
And don't point to some dictionary or something like that. Dictionaries are out of date from the moment they are printed. That doesn't mean that they are useless. They just never contain the whole current language as it is currently used.
If you want to be a language nazi, focus on real mistakes instead like confusing "they're" with "their".
Yeah, tens of thousands of people from service members to engineers at defense contractors to the guys who mopped up on the mid shift lost their jobs. Some economic boost. Seriously, if there was an economic boost it was lost in the noise and then further obscured by the rise that accompanied the Dot-Bomb era.
Yes, people lost jobs from defense contractors and moved to more productive jobs elsewhere. The unemployment during the clinton era went under 5% which it hadn't done since 1973. And unlike most other times in the past where the unemployment went that low it wasn't driven by wasteful wars.
Hello troll, you got me to respond. Do you feel good about yourself. Feel free to masturbate now. So you are implying that posting links to three sites that concerns regulation in the three areas that the grand grand parent implied as not being regulated is a bad argument.
about emissions testing
Which if you don't pass gets your car banned. Sounds like on topic and correct to me
a british site about building code (that doesnt mention stairs in the 3 minutes I looked)
Good damn, you want a site about stair regulations specifically. Just how annoying can you get. Here you go, this time searching on stair regulations specifically instead of building regulations in general.
http://www.the-wooden-hill-company.co.uk/staircase-building-regulations-c89.html
organization who spends most of its time dealing with poisonous/toxic substances
Including food.
How compelling of an argument...
Did you expect me to list three sites that said all cars, stairs and food is banned from this day on? Only a total idiot would expect that, but that is probably exactly what you are. Anyone with some common sense would see the links for what they really were. Evidence that the topics that the ggp posted about are indeed regulated unlike what was implied.
Btw, to clarify. I don't agree with the Australian regulations. But talking like nothing else is regulated really don't make your case any more sound.
"Wow, this is a ridiculous comparison. Maybe they should outlaw cars too? They kill and hurt a lot more people than games do."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection
"How about we outlaw stairs? Single story buildings ONLY. Stairways kill and hurt more people than games do!"
http://www.communities.gov.uk/planningandbuilding/buildingregulations/
"While we're at it, let's outlaw solid food. People choking on solid foods have a higher mortality rate than people playing a video game."
http://www.fda.gov/
You were saying?
Sigh, why is it that some us citizens love to bring up the flawed "appeal to size" argument in these kind of discussions.
Appealing to size only works when the difficulty of the task at hand has nonlinear scaling. And neither vote counting, nor distributing digital reciever equipment are problems that scale nonlinearly.
But the most important thing to note is that even for those stuck on dsl (fiber isn't every yet) you can still use it without having to worry about caps, because of the underlying fiber networks. While 10/10 or higher symmetrical is nice, it is actually of secondary importance. DSL works perfectly fine if there is good fiber supporting it on the backend. Of course, in the long run you want fiber to each house as it is faster and cheaper to maintain
It's not. Money is just a theoretical construct that helps facilitate trade. It isn't a magical, limited substance that makes something out of nothing. It is just a theoretical notion of stored value.
You get some of it, but still manage to get the whole thing so wrong.
Yes, money is just paper. The real currency is everything that is produced in a country. And that is a limited resource. If you produce one thing you won't have time/resources to produce another thing. Of course, using trading you can make production more efficent. But only to a certain degree.
In the end however, money speaks the truth. If x% of your GDP goes to military spending, then that is x% that isn't spent on more useful things.
You find that situations where everyone spends more money, causes everyone to get more. Everyone does more, so more is produced so everyone has more wealth.
This is only true if you have serious unemployment or production downtime. And even then, the goverment is better off higher people for civilian purposes (like digging down infrastructure) than it is hiring people to blow up other countries.
Also there is the fact that military spending has civilian benefits
Sure, you get the occasional civilian benefit. But, again, you would be better off investing it towards civilian efforts immediatly, getting rid of the 90% that does little but blow up stuff.
that you don't understand economics on a large scale, or both.
Sounds like you are the one who don't understand economy on the big scale. Broken windows aren't good for the economy, even if allows the money to circulate more.
Tell me why throwing teachers at the students will educate them "better". Because that is essentially what you are recommending.
Instead of having the teachers with the best voices and presentation abilities record interactive videos (with all the common questions availible at a mouse click), you are having a mass of teachers of varying quality waste their time doing the same thing, often having to reexplain things to the 1/5 of the class that didn't catch it first time, while 4/5ths sit there bored out of their mind. Oh, and the classroom teacher has far less access to cool demonstration materials.
And I havn't even started to mention how the whole class paradigm with one big class listening to one teacher has proven to be a complete failure due to how different people advance at different speeds in different subjects. No-Child-Left-Behind isn't really a bad idea. The problem is that it doesn't work as long as you stick to the good old fashioned class.
As long as you stick with good old fashioned teaching you will never get away from the class teaching paradigm, because there simply isn't enough manpower (teachers) for any other system to work well.
And then in the next class having the students find the flaw in a mathematical proof covering two blackboards which "proves" that 2+2=5.
Noone says that every minute should be spent infront of computers. Group work and discussion is an important part of school.
However, the current paradigm is far too focused on the teacher preaching infront of the class, which is directly harmful to the large percentage of the class that either already understood the subject at hand or didn't understand the prerequisite subject.
Correction. We will be dealing with it so long as we keep using a heavily outdated rights system where programs have the same rights as the user executing the program.
Modern OS security is based around mainframes and coorporate networks running a few programs from trusted sources. This has proven to be a complete failure, because there is very often a need or want to run programs from less trusted sources. And even those programs that are considered trusted can cause serious problems if they have bugs that can exploited.
Blaming the ignorant end users is just bad form, when even a power user like myself feel uneasy every time I install a new application. And, no. Not having system rights doesn't help. My personal files are just as important as the system and they are always exposed to bad software. I actually take extra security measures using sandboxie to sandbox many of the less trusted programs that I run, but it is not really a smooth process, and not something you can expect an end user to do.
Your money comes from debt which pays interest and therefore requires continual exponential growth to function. It's a pyramid scheme. For which you can thank the bankers.
Incorrect. Interest is trivial to pay back as long as money is circulating (stuff is produced and sold). It is trivial to pay back $10 to someone with a single $1 bill as long as the one you are paying back to buys something from you after each partial payment. And yes, this also applies to fractional reserve banking, for those who got fooled by some of the incorrect claims in "Money as Debt".
you've never had to experience being in a foxhole praying to God for your life".
Would that go something like this:
"Dear god, I don't want to meet you yet because I want to spend more time on this sinful place called earth. I know that heaven is wonderful and all, but unless it has booze and hookers, I would prefer to wait to come there until I die of old age. I am a devoted christian, I promise, so please grant my request."
By his manifest failures throughout the 1930s.
The failures that
* Atleast got rid of some of the unemployment and as a result probably prevented a lot of civil unrest.
* Created infrastructure still in use today
* Created a single bad year with all other years providing very high growth in GDP. (which continued during WW2)
* Maintained the GDP/debt ratio (although that went out the window when the war began)
Of course, he wasn't perfect as demonstrated by the one bad year and not managing to completly get rid of the whole 25% (!!!) unemployment. Oh, and the US people being able to spend less on consumer goods, because more got spent on lasting infrastructure. But anyone calling his actions a failure is ignoring real facts.
Saranko indicated that authorities decided to file the child pornography charges to send a strong message to other minors who might consider sending such photos to friends.
Someone please put a bullet through the brains of however is in charge of those authorities. That would count as as really protecting the children.
Then the users have FAR TOO MUCH power. An unidentified program should never be allowed to write to anywhere but a carefully set aside portion of the disk assigned to just that program. It shouldn't be able to query DMI information, or read from the registry, install startup programs (without confirmation I might add!), install itself into the systray. Not just "unless the user is admin", but it shouldn't be doing these things ANYWAY
While I agree with what you are saying, I don't the problem is so much with the users having too much power. Instead, the problem is with the programs having too much power. It originates in the whole idea of user rights being the most important thing in determining access. It worked well as a simplified system on mainframes where the set of applications were limited and trusted. However, in modern computing it has the fatal flaw of assuming that the user has full trust in every program he runs, which is a very bad assumption.
Sounds like the broken window fallacy to me.
Yup, it is quite like, but slightly different from the broken window fallacy.
Copyright that is. Instead of actually destroying something to create more work, you are instead preventing windows from being created cheaply in the first place so that the window maker earn more money making his "expensive" windows.
However, arguing that piracy is a broken window fallacy is completly false. Without copyright, hit movie number 267 may very well not be created because of less incentives, but the people who would have created that movie can instead do some other useful work. That is very different from the broken window fallacy where the window maker is stuck making a window to replace the broken one, instead of making another window for a new shop or expanding his business to include something more than window making.
The tax base is made significantly wider, and the FairTax is revenue neutral, so each current taxpayer will on average pay less in taxes.
Yes, each current taxpayer will on average pay less. Of course, those current tax payers include the rich who will get the whole gain and more. Funny, how easy it is to bend the truth.
The prebate. Meaning everyone get at the beginning of each month the amount they will pay in taxes throughout that month, up to poverty line spending. Poor people pay nothing in taxes. In fact, this will help their cash flow a bit.
This only moves the burden to the middle class people. It is still a regressive tax, just with a bottom cap.
If you're Bill Gates and you spend big, you pay big. I don't see how this is regressive. Please explain.
A rich person spends a lower perecentage of his income, allowing him to save more. This over time leads to accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands which finally leads to economical collapse.
Any sane tax system needs to deal with two facts, "People love to horde" and "Wealth makes Wealth". Fairtax deals with neither. It encourages hording and it doesn't take more from those who have more wealth to earn wealth.
A progressive income tax deals with the first one indirectly by making sure it is more difficult to obtain wealth in the first place, and it deals with the second by taxing greater incomes more. However, it does have the disadvantage of punishing those who make money while starting with little wealth. That is, the real entreprenaurs in the world.
A wealth tax deals with both problems. It prevents people from hording, and it determines how much potential each person has to make wealth and determines tax from that. It is also the only tax that can fix wealth imbalances retroactivly.
Personally I am pretty sure that a combination of all tax types probably works best. Extremism is rarely a good option.
Think spending money in these ways helps the economy? That is called the broken window fallacy in economics.
True, some things are bad ways to spend money like 90% of the financial sector.
However, one of the real problems in recessions is that real production isn't happening. Factories are standing still because noone is buying anything. The ability to produce is their, as is the labor. There just isn't any demand because those with money prefer to horde it.
What the hell are these evil corrupt, diabolical rich people going to do with these tons of riches that are accumulating? Money is like potential energy. It is worthless until you get something in exchange for it.
They don't horde money. They horde resources/capital/wealth. They seek power via ownership, plain and simple. They don't care if most of the rest of the world starves as long as they get to decide who starves and who don't. Actually, starving isn't a good example. They'll avoid going that far, because that would make it more like for a real revolution where they could lose everything.
Also, calling it evil/corrupt is not fair. They are just human.
It doesn't matter what the percentage is, so long as everyone pays the same percentage.
Why not make it a flat percentage wealth tax. The free market judges companies by how well they use their resources. Why shouldn't the goverment. As I said above, wealth makes wealth, so it should be considered fair.
These wicked rich people, the businessmen and women of America who commit such atrocities as hiring people (creating employment), investing their money in businesses that hire people
Mostly under the assumption that they in the end will end up with an even larger percentage of the total wealth.
are the ones who take huge risks
Gambling/Investing millions when you own billions isn't taking a huge risk. I
Here are a few reasons why computers should be expected to have more updates than cars:
* Unlike cars you don't have to recall the car to refit it, but can instead send the refit to the customer and have it install itself. (This is mostly an argument for more non security updates)
* Computers connected to the internet exist in a hostile environment unlike cars that exist in a relativly friendly environment. (Imagine if other drivers could earn money by pushing your car of the road, and rarely would get punished for it. I would think that you would be more willing to get the car manufacturers latest anti pushing fixes installed)
* Cars mostly exist in a more restricted environment, while the computer environment is more generic. (You'll need far more maintenance on your car if you run offroad, and far less maintenance on your computer if it runs in a lockdowned environment)
I fear that this may be like the Fair Tax Act. The Fair Tax Act is the most thoroughly-researched piece of legislation in history. The facts support it
The facts support it? Introducing a tax change that is favorable to the rich when the rich already have had favorable tax laws for the last 20 years (as evidenced by wealth accumulating into fewer hands).
A real fair tax act would replace the income tax by a flat percentage wealth tax. That is real fairness speaking from a market point of view. If you have more capital, you should be able to make more profit. That is how the market functions. Always moving capital to areas where more profits can be made.
Anyone for the "fair tax act" is for increased concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. It is an inevitable result as sales taxes favors those who can spend a lesser percentage of their income on goods. Flat income taxes are of course just as bad. Progressive income taxes are better, but have the nasty side effect of punishing those are better at leveraging wealth to earn money. Especially those on their way up through the class system. (as once you are past the max limit there is no more resistance).
Wealth taxes on the other hand focus on the basics which is that the more wealth you own, the more wealth you should be able to earn. Those who make good use of their resources to produce more wealth get richer, while those who make bad use of it grows poorer. Wealth taxes do have some problems, especially when it comes to actually evaluating wealth. But that is a price you have to pay if you really are looking for a fair system.
Why all these comparisons to the New Deal? It didn't work
It worked incredibly well. Unfortunally FDR was relativly conservative which made the depression last longer than it should have. His biggest misstake being the budget balancing in 1937 that immediatly sent the country into a second recession. Fortunally, he corrected the mistake by increasing the efforts again.
All we got in eight years was government debt
The goverment debt/GNP 1933: ~40%
The goverment debt/GNP 1941: ~40%
unemployment did not change
Unemployment (using Darby figures which includes those involved in work efforts)
1933: 20.6%
1937: 9.1%
1938: 12.5%
1941: 8.0%
The unadjusted Lebergott numbers that counts a lot of those involved in work efforts as unemployed of course looks slighly worse, but they still show a significant reduction in unemployment. And the GNP increase is there to prove it.
If you can't even get the basics right I won't bother with the rest.
Smart people don't trust anything they download. Every installation is a risk. Unfortunally, that is a risk you have to take every time you try out a new program, because current operating systems suck at isolating installed applications.
The best you can is use one VM or similar setup (I use sandboxie for all my game installations) for each installed application, which is a pain in the ass.
Why should I get infected by malware just by installing xxscrensav3r.exe. Why should a generic program have any rights to do nasty stuff to my machine. And that applies even if I run as an administrator. Just because I trust myself to add/remove files to the system, doesn't mean that I trust any specific application.
The whole idea of making applications have the same rights as users is a catastrophy to start with. Applications should be far more restricted in what they can do than the user himself.
maybe, until you realize that the hoover dam and other infrastructure projects like it actually prolonged the great depression [ucla.edu].
Could you atleast try to read and understand the links you post!!! There are two main theory behind the length of the recession recession. FDR prematurly trying to balance the budget in 1937 and FDRs interference in the private sector in the form of price and salary fixing via promises of anti trust protection.
The article you linked to specifically discusses the second theory. Pay specific attention that this theory does not involve the infrastructure expenditure. Critizing of the FDR infrastructure expenditure pretty much only comes from the usual ideological suspects (libertarians, austrian economists and right wing propaganda tanks), with little to no real fact backing it.