>>The rest - skeleton recognition - is not especially hard. And MS doing it not quite well.
As someone who worked for a company that licensed tech to do this about four years ago, I can assure you that single camera skeleton recognition is not an easy problem in the slightest.
>>Yes, government *insurance* is very efficient. See a comparison of Medicare v. Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is one of the most inefficient programs we have. We basically subsidize private insurers to do what Medicare already does more cheaply. >>Government health-care? That's a different ball of wax.
You got it backwards.
Medicare? Medicaid? Cheaply? Only in the sense they underpay for certain services, which means that hospitals compensate by overusing the services they make a profit on, and fucking the taxpayer in the process. If Medicare worked efficiently, it could run on half the money it does know (and incidentally help balance the budget - crazy notion, I know!) Up to half of this - our biggest federal expenditure - goes to waste and fraud.
To compare with the VA system, Medicare/Medicaid costs about $10k per patient covered, including patient contributions. VA, $2,500 per patient covered, including money from third parties. This it's a perfect comparison for a lot of reasons, but it does help show how badly run Medicare/Medicaid is.
(Medicare Advantage is a whole 'nother issue entirely.)
>>Capital gains is income. It may be taxed differently. It may be called "unearned" but it is income.
The point the GP was trying to make is that Capital Gains is not "income" in the sense that you pay income tax on it. They're two different categories, and so a $2B capital gain wouldn't make the slightest difference if there was or wasn't a personal income tax in WA.
On a related note of stupidity, the article summary shows himself to be a moron when he wrote "All of which might make a cynic question what was really important to Microsoft -- public education, or a $2B state income tax-free payday for its CEO?"
Not only would he not pay income tax on the sale, Ex Post Facto laws are illegal in America, so passing the proposition wouldn't have made a single fucking difference to a person selling his stock this year. Or next year. The proposition would have taken effect in 2012 - plenty of time for billionaires to cash out, even if they would be taxed on the sale. Which they wouldn't.
>>Right... rather than simply treat the article on its factual merits, go after the source of the article. Brilliant! Did you invent that strategy yourself?
Because you've never done that yourself? Just poking through your history, I see you say, "What is this, another article submission by a shill for the SSD manufacturers?"
You also say that "Regardless, ad hominem is NEVER ACCEPTABLE and NEVER WARRANTED."
Hypocrite.
What you mean by 'bias' is "someone that disagrees with me."
Frankly, though, examining the source of the article is ALWAYS relevant, it's one of the basic foundations of textual analysis. If I'm reading an article on the Rally to Restore Sanity in DC, it's damn well relevant if its HuffPo or Glenn Beck writing the article. HuffPo is a liberal rag, and sort of the polar opposite of Glenn Beck's The Blaze.
>>Obama only looks "liberal" next to the loud, fascist wing of today's Republican Party.
Fascists are liberals. Well, in the liberal = left wing sense of the word.
Do you think the Socialist in National Socialist was just an accident? The Nazis were called National Socialists to distinguish themselves from International Socialists, i.e. the USSR and the Communist International and all that.
Wally Schirra was pretty critical of The Right Stuff, saying it portrayed some of the astronauts as nothing more than overgrown man children.
I met him once, at the Miramar Air Show, back in the 80s. My grandmother used to work for NASA, so we got a signed copy of Schirra's Space around here somewhere... but anyhow, the point is, you probably shouldn't (just) rely on The Right Stuff to capture an accurate portrayal of the psychological makeup of the early astronauts, as people that were actually there disagreed pretty severely with its facts.
Yeah, seriously. It's not a criticism of the German language, just something I found amusing when I studied it for a (brief) while in middle school.
Even more amusing were the German magazines the teacher would let us read, which contained copious amounts of stuff not normally thought appropriate for middle school students in America. =)
>>I dunno - I don't see too many middle managers at my workplace using algebra at all. At the most they use spreadsheets to evaluate math - never having to solve for a variable.
The cells in spreadsheets are essentially variables, and so all the stuff you do inside of a spreadsheet is essentially algebra, even just very basic stuff like averaging a bunch of data and projecting it out for the next five years will be very error prone if you're trying to do it by rote without having even an inkling of algebra backing you up. Sure, you may never use the binomial theorem, but I'd honestly say that algebra is amazingly more useful than people give it credit for. Less so with trig and geometry, certainly. Calculus is more useful than trig and geometry, though in order to study calculus you have to know trig, I guess, and trig relies on a foundation of geometry and algebra.
So really, the order we teach math makes sense, but ignoring probability and statistics seems criminal to me, since they're much more applicable in real life, and are very useful for logical thinking and bullshit-sorting.
>>Chances are that if you hate algebra and struggle to pass it, then a life in engineering or the physical sciences isn't going to be your cup of tea.
And you're going to be crippled when you get your ideal job as a middle manager of a business and you can't do algebra to calculate how many widgets you need to buy and sell each month.
That's why I said it's important to have useful tools in your toolbox. Things like algebra aren't just used in engineering or the physical sciences.
>>So, why make somebody try to prepare for a handful of careers that they are unlikely to pursue
Since I was about five years old, I knew I'd be a computer science guy and prepared myself for college and a career in it since I was first allowed to make choices in my education. You know which two classes I've used the most in my 20 years of education? AP US History in high school and a literature class in college, followed by all of my computer science classes in college and earlier.
However, for any distance under (say) 600 miles or so, I'd agree: drive. It actually is quicker, and is substantially cheaper without the hassle. An hour to the airport, 1-3 hours waiting, an hour or so in transit, and another hour to get your bags, rental, etc. and then another 30 minutes to 2 hours to your actual destination. Anywhere on the seaboards, I'd say "just drive".
The "seaboards" includes the west coast, which includes LA. Believe me, as someone who drives from Northern California to San Diego and back once or twice a month, it's a lot less painful to go through airport security than it is to drive through LA during any daylight hours.
I fly about half the time, and drive through LA at 4AM the other half.
I also voted for the CA high-speed train. I don't care if it's a boondoggle - LA traffic really is bad enough to be worth any price to bypass.
self described "Patriots" should never be allowed to choose a history curriculum. they view their own country through rose tinted glasses.
Not true. Most are acutely aware of the problems with America, especially the shitty things it did in the past to Africans and Native Americans, but still love the country anyway.
>>glosses over "how my country has screwed over other countries".
What decade did you take history? While your statement is true for the 50s or 60s, for anyone whose answer is after 1980 or so, believe me, the textbooks are filled with examples about how evil America is.
>>We spend a large amount of time and money teaching people a lot of crap that most of them will never use.
This is a horrible way of thinking about it. A friend of my father's is a EE Professor at USC, who has studied all sorts of high level mathematics. He freely admits he's probably never going to use 90% of them, but what's important in life is improving your toolbox so that you can solve the broadest range of problems possible. This doesn't just mean math, either - he passed the bar not too long ago because he found that not having a background in law had screwed him over pretty badly. So he worked to improve himself.
The key point here is that as a high school student, you're not going to know where you're going to end up, or what opportunities will be opened/missed by having/not-having certain skills. Our school system should try to fill out that toolbox with the most commonly used tools... and in that respect, I do think that we're focusing on the wrong kinds of math. Algebra is certainly a useful skill to have (not only as a foundation for all advanced math, but even in real life), but trig, geometry and calculus... maybe not as much as probability and statistics.
Other critically important things in real life that we don't teach in schools: Economics (especially managing personal finance and business management skills) Public speaking (or even just learning to speak in front of small audiences) Leadership / Management Skills (or interpersonal Skills in general)
I think history is also critically important, since understanding your place in the world and how you got there renders you immune to a lot of the manipulation that politicians put on an ignorant populace, and you don't look like a moron at a company picnic when your boss asks for your insight on possibly expanding into communist China.
Sure, I know all about Byron Williams - he's about the only example people have of right-wing violence (which is compared to left-wing violence by people like Code Pink and is totally okay).
I take it you want to ban all inflammatory speech? Is that the solution? Or just someone that disagrees with you? There's a word for beliefs like that, and it's not a pleasant one.
Using your metric, you'd ban Gandhi from speaking, because his words were inflammatory and could have caused violence, even though he was explicitly pacifistic.
>>So lets say I pay $100 a month for 200 channels that is.50 dollars a channel. Tell you what let my buy the channels I want to watch at 4x that and I will be happy. Even better make it automated. Charge me for the channels I watch each month.
They've been talking about a la carte pricing since the 80s. I'm with you - I watch so few channels, that even if they charged $2/month per channel, I'd be paying $10/month for TV instead of the $70 minimum that I have to buy (no real choice in the matter) that I have to get now. Hell, I'd probably even subscribe to HBO, and still pay half of what I do now.
But then again, that's probably why they don't do it.
>>All of this stuff should count as an interface, and therefore not covered by copyright under US law. If they win this, then it sets a very dangerous precedent.
Indeed. There (is supposedly) a clear difference between interface and implementation, and if they're going to claim that copyright extends to interface as well, then it means that reverse-engineering for compatibility - which is legal - will become impossible to do, legally. Because you can't even make a clean room alternative implementation any more, since you can't use the name method names in your API.
Honestly, though, I have to admit I'm really happy this lawsuit is occurring to Google, who has the legal muscle to beat Oracle down hard and hopefully set an ironclad precedent. If they sued Mom and Pop's Software Emporium.../shudder.
>>It is the classic strategy of identifying an "enemy", telling the people how bad that enemy is and what atrocities they are committing, and then standing back and watching what happens.
Along with explicitly saying, repeatedly, that violence is never an answer and that his vision for "restoring" America is not an armed revolution. Yes. Classic. Just like the Nazis, eh? Hitler's Mein Kampf could have been written by Gandhi, am I right?...I also feel obligated to point out that your example article of him exhorting people to kill the Democrats or whatever featured a Barney Frank with fangs and a Twi-vamp hugging him from behind.
It is perhaps somewhat plausible that the article was not intended to be taken literally.
>>There is such a thing as a unilateral contract that involves a promise made by a single party, rather than reciprocal agreements made by all involved parties.
A unilateral contract is just a bilateral contract with one of the names left blank for whoever comes by and wants to fill it out.
This is different from a EULA or whatever-the-hell you'd call a website that tries to bind you to a contract by just visiting it. Honestly, they should be illegal, especially since you can't actually take open software back to most places these days if you do decide to not accept the terms of the "offer".
Not knowing that Glenn is rather adamantly opposed to violence (among other reasons because that he thinks a destabilized society would trend left). But that's okay - because the Tides Foundation CEO says "Beck is a self-described 'Progressive Hunter' who relies on violent rhetoric", so it must be true.
>>If 65% of the American Public believed Glen Beck, they'd have started a civil war by now.
Because he called for a civil war? Or are you just repeating what you think he said? I'm curious why you believe that, other than typical DRD4 soft-headedness.
He's pretty much opposed to violent overthrows of anything (except the British Empire, I guess). Beck that that if Broden's comments were in context, he'd "campaign against him", even though he knew the guy.
This is why it's important to read both left-wing and right-wing news, case in point.
Think about why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, especially since he doesn't try to optimize it, and get back to me on that one. Think about how W2 earners pay taxes versus people that own real estate or stocks. If he actually just got a W2 check for $100M, he'd be well ahead of his secretary on his marginal rate (though he wouldn't be paying SS past $120K or so).
>>Medicare is the most efficient health provider in the country after the VA./snort. Have you ever studied Medicare? It's an absolute disaster... and would be a joke if it wasn't the biggest program in the federal government. Fraud alone costs up to $60B a year (http://www.insurancefraud.org/medicarefraud.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_fraud) and waste (especially needless procedures) make up 10%-30% of the total budget (and that's according to the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/health/30use.html) Essentially, the Medicare schedule of reimbursements for services is one of the worst ideas in human history, and results in hospitals gaming the system. If they lose money on Procedure A, but gain money on Procedure B, guess which one the hospital will order, over and over again? And the whole thing runs on the trust system, so you can bill for patients that don't exist... I shudder to think about how many billions of dollars we've given to organized crime rackets in the last couple decades.
The VA has a budget of $125B and provides health care to 58.7M Americans, a cost of $2,100 per person. This includes funeral services, homelessness programs, and other VA-specific stuff. They pull in about $3.7B from third parties, so let's say those two cancel out.
Medicare and Medicaid cover 98M people at a cost of $750B (including state contributions), or a cost of $7,653 per person. It also doesn't cover everything, leaving seniors to buy Medicare Part B + Medicare Part D + medigap coverage or Medicare Advantage programs at around another $2,500 a year, or perhaps $250B total out of pocket from our seniors, for a total cost per person exceeding $10,000 per year.
These aren't especially good comparisons, because the VA only serves 23M actual veterans (the rest are dependents) and Medicare pretty much covers the elderly (though Medicaid, which is around $290B per annum covers the poor), but it does I think illustrate very nicely the problem.
If we could just eliminate medicare fraud and inefficiency, we'd save between $100B-$200B per year, which we could either use to help balance the budget (heh, funny concept, right?) or provide health care to 50M-100M Americans using the VA model.
>>Every patch was a whiplash to the way things worked.
I quit two or three years ago when it became painfully apparent the designers of WoW had absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I've played a few other MMORPGs since then (DDO, Runes of Magic) which were pretty lame, especially since they tried to be WoW, but couldn't do it as well.
Stronghold Kingdoms was the first MMORPG I have enjoyed in years, and the first one that I'm quitting because it is too engrossing. It literally requires you to log in every 10 or 15 minutes in order to optimize your gameplay, and doing that for 100 days (the alpha just ended an hour ago) makes me really really not want to do it again. I came in 175th out of 18,000 people, which I figure is pretty good, and I accomplished all of my objectives (I became the King of Clowne)... so, yeah. I'm done with it. Hopefully when it releases the difference between the F2P and paid versions won't be as painful as it looks like it will be right now (buying levels and skill points = bad news), but if they get their shit together, I'd highly recommend it. Building castles and laying siege to your neighbors? Woot. =)
>>Oh and yes I believe you are correct - a contract is not binding if it has no been signed, or dollars changed hands (like when you buy Windows Seven NT 6.1).
The biggest thing they're missing is that a contract is an agreement between two parties. Not one party.
>>Regardless, you made a claim that the rich don't care about income taxation when, objectively, tax cuts benefit them the most.
No, they benefit from them the least, proportionally speaking. Sure, 5% of Warren Buffett's income is going to be *numerically* more than 30% of your average taxpayer in the US, but *proportionately*, it is six times less. Even if you doubled his income taxes so he's paying 10% instead of 5%, he's still paying much less proportionately. But the Democrats get to pretend they're sticking it to the rich.
Unless you think all these billionaires are secretly trying to sabotage their hoarded wealth and redistribute it to the poor - and pretending to want to do so doesn't count - you'll see why it's silly to claim that Democrats are anti-rich people. They merely pay lip service to the idea, since people like George Soros are some of the most powerful people in the progressive movement. That's why the rich weren't really worried about Kerry getting elected.
>>As the population ages, taxes need to increase when most government spending is directed toward extremely popular programs for the elderly.
Or efficiency could be increased. Given that we're wasting up to half our money on the biggest expenditure the federal government has (Medicare+Medicaid), I think it's relatively safe to say we should be able to treat all our old people without raising taxes or taking the French solution.
>>That's what people said about E.V. Debs. Look at all the political parties we have now.
Eugene Debs was a Socialist, so it's probably a good thing we don't have them as a viable third party these days, or we'd be no better off than France or Greece.
Slashdot Mirror
>>The rest - skeleton recognition - is not especially hard. And MS doing it not quite well.
As someone who worked for a company that licensed tech to do this about four years ago, I can assure you that single camera skeleton recognition is not an easy problem in the slightest.
>>Yes, government *insurance* is very efficient. See a comparison of Medicare v. Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is one of the most inefficient programs we have. We basically subsidize private insurers to do what Medicare already does more cheaply.
>>Government health-care? That's a different ball of wax.
You got it backwards.
Medicare? Medicaid? Cheaply? Only in the sense they underpay for certain services, which means that hospitals compensate by overusing the services they make a profit on, and fucking the taxpayer in the process. If Medicare worked efficiently, it could run on half the money it does know (and incidentally help balance the budget - crazy notion, I know!) Up to half of this - our biggest federal expenditure - goes to waste and fraud.
To compare with the VA system, Medicare/Medicaid costs about $10k per patient covered, including patient contributions. VA, $2,500 per patient covered, including money from third parties. This it's a perfect comparison for a lot of reasons, but it does help show how badly run Medicare/Medicaid is.
(Medicare Advantage is a whole 'nother issue entirely.)
>>Capital gains is income. It may be taxed differently. It may be called "unearned" but it is income.
The point the GP was trying to make is that Capital Gains is not "income" in the sense that you pay income tax on it. They're two different categories, and so a $2B capital gain wouldn't make the slightest difference if there was or wasn't a personal income tax in WA.
On a related note of stupidity, the article summary shows himself to be a moron when he wrote "All of which might make a cynic question what was really important to Microsoft -- public education, or a $2B state income tax-free payday for its CEO?"
Not only would he not pay income tax on the sale, Ex Post Facto laws are illegal in America, so passing the proposition wouldn't have made a single fucking difference to a person selling his stock this year. Or next year. The proposition would have taken effect in 2012 - plenty of time for billionaires to cash out, even if they would be taxed on the sale. Which they wouldn't.
>>Right... rather than simply treat the article on its factual merits, go after the source of the article. Brilliant! Did you invent that strategy yourself?
Because you've never done that yourself? Just poking through your history, I see you say, "What is this, another article submission by a shill for the SSD manufacturers?"
You also say that "Regardless, ad hominem is NEVER ACCEPTABLE and NEVER WARRANTED."
Hypocrite.
What you mean by 'bias' is "someone that disagrees with me."
Frankly, though, examining the source of the article is ALWAYS relevant, it's one of the basic foundations of textual analysis. If I'm reading an article on the Rally to Restore Sanity in DC, it's damn well relevant if its HuffPo or Glenn Beck writing the article. HuffPo is a liberal rag, and sort of the polar opposite of Glenn Beck's The Blaze.
>>Obama only looks "liberal" next to the loud, fascist wing of today's Republican Party.
Fascists are liberals. Well, in the liberal = left wing sense of the word.
Do you think the Socialist in National Socialist was just an accident? The Nazis were called National Socialists to distinguish themselves from International Socialists, i.e. the USSR and the Communist International and all that.
Wally Schirra was pretty critical of The Right Stuff, saying it portrayed some of the astronauts as nothing more than overgrown man children.
I met him once, at the Miramar Air Show, back in the 80s. My grandmother used to work for NASA, so we got a signed copy of Schirra's Space around here somewhere... but anyhow, the point is, you probably shouldn't (just) rely on The Right Stuff to capture an accurate portrayal of the psychological makeup of the early astronauts, as people that were actually there disagreed pretty severely with its facts.
Yeah, seriously. It's not a criticism of the German language, just something I found amusing when I studied it for a (brief) while in middle school.
Even more amusing were the German magazines the teacher would let us read, which contained copious amounts of stuff not normally thought appropriate for middle school students in America. =)
>>On the other hand, you have German. They have so long words and even longer sentences
What are you talking about? In German, you can have words that are entire paragraphs. =)
For example, the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 1803 ended the Reichsunmittelbarkeit of the HRE.
(And no, Firefox, those wards are not typos, just sentences.)
>>I dunno - I don't see too many middle managers at my workplace using algebra at all. At the most they use spreadsheets to evaluate math - never having to solve for a variable.
The cells in spreadsheets are essentially variables, and so all the stuff you do inside of a spreadsheet is essentially algebra, even just very basic stuff like averaging a bunch of data and projecting it out for the next five years will be very error prone if you're trying to do it by rote without having even an inkling of algebra backing you up. Sure, you may never use the binomial theorem, but I'd honestly say that algebra is amazingly more useful than people give it credit for. Less so with trig and geometry, certainly. Calculus is more useful than trig and geometry, though in order to study calculus you have to know trig, I guess, and trig relies on a foundation of geometry and algebra.
So really, the order we teach math makes sense, but ignoring probability and statistics seems criminal to me, since they're much more applicable in real life, and are very useful for logical thinking and bullshit-sorting.
>>Chances are that if you hate algebra and struggle to pass it, then a life in engineering or the physical sciences isn't going to be your cup of tea.
And you're going to be crippled when you get your ideal job as a middle manager of a business and you can't do algebra to calculate how many widgets you need to buy and sell each month.
That's why I said it's important to have useful tools in your toolbox. Things like algebra aren't just used in engineering or the physical sciences.
>>So, why make somebody try to prepare for a handful of careers that they are unlikely to pursue
Since I was about five years old, I knew I'd be a computer science guy and prepared myself for college and a career in it since I was first allowed to make choices in my education. You know which two classes I've used the most in my 20 years of education? AP US History in high school and a literature class in college, followed by all of my computer science classes in college and earlier.
The "seaboards" includes the west coast, which includes LA. Believe me, as someone who drives from Northern California to San Diego and back once or twice a month, it's a lot less painful to go through airport security than it is to drive through LA during any daylight hours.
I fly about half the time, and drive through LA at 4AM the other half.
I also voted for the CA high-speed train. I don't care if it's a boondoggle - LA traffic really is bad enough to be worth any price to bypass.
Not true. Most are acutely aware of the problems with America, especially the shitty things it did in the past to Africans and Native Americans, but still love the country anyway.
>>glosses over "how my country has screwed over other countries".
What decade did you take history? While your statement is true for the 50s or 60s, for anyone whose answer is after 1980 or so, believe me, the textbooks are filled with examples about how evil America is.
>>We spend a large amount of time and money teaching people a lot of crap that most of them will never use.
This is a horrible way of thinking about it. A friend of my father's is a EE Professor at USC, who has studied all sorts of high level mathematics. He freely admits he's probably never going to use 90% of them, but what's important in life is improving your toolbox so that you can solve the broadest range of problems possible. This doesn't just mean math, either - he passed the bar not too long ago because he found that not having a background in law had screwed him over pretty badly. So he worked to improve himself.
The key point here is that as a high school student, you're not going to know where you're going to end up, or what opportunities will be opened/missed by having/not-having certain skills. Our school system should try to fill out that toolbox with the most commonly used tools... and in that respect, I do think that we're focusing on the wrong kinds of math. Algebra is certainly a useful skill to have (not only as a foundation for all advanced math, but even in real life), but trig, geometry and calculus... maybe not as much as probability and statistics.
Other critically important things in real life that we don't teach in schools:
Economics (especially managing personal finance and business management skills)
Public speaking (or even just learning to speak in front of small audiences)
Leadership / Management Skills (or interpersonal Skills in general)
I think history is also critically important, since understanding your place in the world and how you got there renders you immune to a lot of the manipulation that politicians put on an ignorant populace, and you don't look like a moron at a company picnic when your boss asks for your insight on possibly expanding into communist China.
Sure, I know all about Byron Williams - he's about the only example people have of right-wing violence (which is compared to left-wing violence by people like Code Pink and is totally okay).
I take it you want to ban all inflammatory speech? Is that the solution? Or just someone that disagrees with you? There's a word for beliefs like that, and it's not a pleasant one.
Using your metric, you'd ban Gandhi from speaking, because his words were inflammatory and could have caused violence, even though he was explicitly pacifistic.
>>So lets say I pay $100 a month for 200 channels that is .50 dollars a channel. Tell you what let my buy the channels I want to watch at 4x that and I will be happy.
Even better make it automated. Charge me for the channels I watch each month.
They've been talking about a la carte pricing since the 80s. I'm with you - I watch so few channels, that even if they charged $2/month per channel, I'd be paying $10/month for TV instead of the $70 minimum that I have to buy (no real choice in the matter) that I have to get now. Hell, I'd probably even subscribe to HBO, and still pay half of what I do now.
But then again, that's probably why they don't do it.
>>All of this stuff should count as an interface, and therefore not covered by copyright under US law. If they win this, then it sets a very dangerous precedent.
Indeed. There (is supposedly) a clear difference between interface and implementation, and if they're going to claim that copyright extends to interface as well, then it means that reverse-engineering for compatibility - which is legal - will become impossible to do, legally. Because you can't even make a clean room alternative implementation any more, since you can't use the name method names in your API.
Honestly, though, I have to admit I'm really happy this lawsuit is occurring to Google, who has the legal muscle to beat Oracle down hard and hopefully set an ironclad precedent. If they sued Mom and Pop's Software Emporium... /shudder.
>>It is the classic strategy of identifying an "enemy", telling the people how bad that enemy is and what atrocities they are committing, and then standing back and watching what happens.
Along with explicitly saying, repeatedly, that violence is never an answer and that his vision for "restoring" America is not an armed revolution. Yes. Classic. Just like the Nazis, eh? Hitler's Mein Kampf could have been written by Gandhi, am I right? ...I also feel obligated to point out that your example article of him exhorting people to kill the Democrats or whatever featured a Barney Frank with fangs and a Twi-vamp hugging him from behind.
It is perhaps somewhat plausible that the article was not intended to be taken literally.
>>There is such a thing as a unilateral contract that involves a promise made by a single party, rather than reciprocal agreements made by all involved parties.
A unilateral contract is just a bilateral contract with one of the names left blank for whoever comes by and wants to fill it out.
This is different from a EULA or whatever-the-hell you'd call a website that tries to bind you to a contract by just visiting it. Honestly, they should be illegal, especially since you can't actually take open software back to most places these days if you do decide to not accept the terms of the "offer".
>>liberals read almost exclusively liberal blogs, but conservatives tend to read both
What about Libertarians? =)
But sure, Vshael sounds like the type of guy that would read HuffPo and Media Matters to the exclusion of all others, and derives his only opinion of Glenn Beck from articles like this one:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david/a-peaceloving-sarah-palin_b_773730.html
Not knowing that Glenn is rather adamantly opposed to violence (among other reasons because that he thinks a destabilized society would trend left). But that's okay - because the Tides Foundation CEO says "Beck is a self-described 'Progressive Hunter' who relies on violent rhetoric", so it must be true.
>>If 65% of the American Public believed Glen Beck, they'd have started a civil war by now.
Because he called for a civil war? Or are you just repeating what you think he said? I'm curious why you believe that, other than typical DRD4 soft-headedness.
He's pretty much opposed to violent overthrows of anything (except the British Empire, I guess). Beck that that if Broden's comments were in context, he'd "campaign against him", even though he knew the guy.
This is why it's important to read both left-wing and right-wing news, case in point.
Think about why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, especially since he doesn't try to optimize it, and get back to me on that one. Think about how W2 earners pay taxes versus people that own real estate or stocks. If he actually just got a W2 check for $100M, he'd be well ahead of his secretary on his marginal rate (though he wouldn't be paying SS past $120K or so).
>>Medicare is the most efficient health provider in the country after the VA. /snort. Have you ever studied Medicare? It's an absolute disaster... and would be a joke if it wasn't the biggest program in the federal government. Fraud alone costs up to $60B a year (http://www.insurancefraud.org/medicarefraud.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_fraud) and waste (especially needless procedures) make up 10%-30% of the total budget (and that's according to the NY Times - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/health/30use.html) Essentially, the Medicare schedule of reimbursements for services is one of the worst ideas in human history, and results in hospitals gaming the system. If they lose money on Procedure A, but gain money on Procedure B, guess which one the hospital will order, over and over again? And the whole thing runs on the trust system, so you can bill for patients that don't exist... I shudder to think about how many billions of dollars we've given to organized crime rackets in the last couple decades.
The VA has a budget of $125B and provides health care to 58.7M Americans, a cost of $2,100 per person. This includes funeral services, homelessness programs, and other VA-specific stuff. They pull in about $3.7B from third parties, so let's say those two cancel out.
Medicare and Medicaid cover 98M people at a cost of $750B (including state contributions), or a cost of $7,653 per person. It also doesn't cover everything, leaving seniors to buy Medicare Part B + Medicare Part D + medigap coverage or Medicare Advantage programs at around another $2,500 a year, or perhaps $250B total out of pocket from our seniors, for a total cost per person exceeding $10,000 per year.
These aren't especially good comparisons, because the VA only serves 23M actual veterans (the rest are dependents) and Medicare pretty much covers the elderly (though Medicaid, which is around $290B per annum covers the poor), but it does I think illustrate very nicely the problem.
If we could just eliminate medicare fraud and inefficiency, we'd save between $100B-$200B per year, which we could either use to help balance the budget (heh, funny concept, right?) or provide health care to 50M-100M Americans using the VA model.
>>Every patch was a whiplash to the way things worked.
I quit two or three years ago when it became painfully apparent the designers of WoW had absolutely no idea what they're doing.
I've played a few other MMORPGs since then (DDO, Runes of Magic) which were pretty lame, especially since they tried to be WoW, but couldn't do it as well.
Stronghold Kingdoms was the first MMORPG I have enjoyed in years, and the first one that I'm quitting because it is too engrossing. It literally requires you to log in every 10 or 15 minutes in order to optimize your gameplay, and doing that for 100 days (the alpha just ended an hour ago) makes me really really not want to do it again. I came in 175th out of 18,000 people, which I figure is pretty good, and I accomplished all of my objectives (I became the King of Clowne)... so, yeah. I'm done with it. Hopefully when it releases the difference between the F2P and paid versions won't be as painful as it looks like it will be right now (buying levels and skill points = bad news), but if they get their shit together, I'd highly recommend it. Building castles and laying siege to your neighbors? Woot. =)
>>Oh and yes I believe you are correct - a contract is not binding if it has no been signed, or dollars changed hands (like when you buy Windows Seven NT 6.1).
The biggest thing they're missing is that a contract is an agreement between two parties. Not one party.
>>Regardless, you made a claim that the rich don't care about income taxation when, objectively, tax cuts benefit them the most.
No, they benefit from them the least, proportionally speaking. Sure, 5% of Warren Buffett's income is going to be *numerically* more than 30% of your average taxpayer in the US, but *proportionately*, it is six times less. Even if you doubled his income taxes so he's paying 10% instead of 5%, he's still paying much less proportionately. But the Democrats get to pretend they're sticking it to the rich.
Unless you think all these billionaires are secretly trying to sabotage their hoarded wealth and redistribute it to the poor - and pretending to want to do so doesn't count - you'll see why it's silly to claim that Democrats are anti-rich people. They merely pay lip service to the idea, since people like George Soros are some of the most powerful people in the progressive movement. That's why the rich weren't really worried about Kerry getting elected.
>>As the population ages, taxes need to increase when most government spending is directed toward extremely popular programs for the elderly.
Or efficiency could be increased. Given that we're wasting up to half our money on the biggest expenditure the federal government has (Medicare+Medicaid), I think it's relatively safe to say we should be able to treat all our old people without raising taxes or taking the French solution.
>>That's what people said about E.V. Debs. Look at all the political parties we have now.
Eugene Debs was a Socialist, so it's probably a good thing we don't have them as a viable third party these days, or we'd be no better off than France or Greece.