Democrats have been running the show for 2 years now
Did you read my post?
How exactly do you justify the idea the Democrats have been "running the show" for 2 years?
. Look up Community Reinvestment Act when you get a chance if you're interested in the truth.
You sound as if you'd be surprised to discover that I'm already quite familiar with it -- and its popular usage as a tool of misdirection from failures and malfeasance in the private sector:
Republicans always get blaimed for everything bad that happens in this country. The sad thing is most Americans don't even know which party is in control in Washington. While the Republican hating masses were giving Congress a single digit approval rating, most of them didn't even realize it was the Democrats who were in charge of Congress
Republicans: in charge of the House from 1994-2006, in charge of the Whitehouse from 2001 until three weeks ago, majority of the Senate from 1995-2006 except for a brief period in 2002 when Jeffords' defection gave the Democrats a 1 member lead (and I guess three weeks when Al Gore was still VP and it was briefly split). Supreme Court essentially narrowly split, although you can credibly argue that the Roberts appointment made the court on balance Republican to some approximation. This is essentially Republican control from 2001 until early 2007.
Democrats: majority in the house from 2006, essentially split Senate from 2006, bare majority for Democrats given Sanders and Lieberman's caucus choice. But given the narrow split, the veto stick held by a Republican presidency, and the composition of the Democratic majority (esp. blue dogs in conservative districts), "control" is a pretty tenuous term for even the two houses of congress. Meanwhile, Republicans still hold the presidency and with Alito's appointment the court becomes arguably more Republican.
Who doesn't understand which party has been in control in Washington?
In 2-4 years, the Democrats won't have that excuse anymore, and accountability is important. I have no problem with people calling them out on specific policy positions and voting them out next election if that's what it takes.
But it's ludicrous to assert that Democrats are primarily responsible for the current state of things. And it's a little extra stupid to accuse others who apparently have a better grasp of recent history than you do of not understanding what's going on. U.S. policy for the last decade has been dominated by the Republicans, there's no other reasonable conclusion. Whether the Democrats can do any better is an open question, but it's really only been askable for about three weeks.
The Democrats have always been in the pocket of RIAA/MPAA/Hollywood types
The entertainment industry is huge in California, there's no doubt, and I could guess that some connections between it and Broadcast/Telecom might be driving Feinstein's politics.
The thing is, technology is also huge in California, and at least uneasily allied to some degree at the moment. Opposition to net neutrality is opposition to just about any web-based business, or a lot of hardware makers.... *anybody* who provides hardware or software that's used on one of the ends of the network. And these aren't small companies. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, eBay, Craigslist, Apple... all in Feinstein's constituency. There's no reason the management AND the labor in these companies shouldn't all be lobbying Feinstein's office and couldn't have equal or greater influence to the "content" cartels.
I'll give 'em credit for following the idea of using a WiFi mobile device with VoIP, but that's really not particularly revolutionary. What's needed next is WiMax or a small portable cell-WiFi bridge. If the bandwidth's high enough (EVDO rev a is almost there), then you have affordable unlimited talk and data...
While there's nothing wrong with a dinner reservation at a nice restaurant (who doesn't like good food?), my own experience suggests that a sincere creative gesture is often pretty well-received.
Want to do anything, anything at all and not get busted? Say: my religion says I must do it...
There are some quite ready and obvious counterexamples. You can't get away with relatively harmless things like prayer in public schools or religious drug use (unless you're an American Indian). In general, religious defenses against U.S. and state statutes are rare, and even more rarely successful.
If you're saying that on a social level, some people will extend approval to even some illegal actions, your statement is somewhat defensible, although this isn't particularly a unique feature of religion. But if you're saying that religion is actually a functional defense against criminal behavior (included in "anything, anything at all") then congratulations, you've made your very own contribution to a divorce of rationalism and anti-religion axe grinding.
I DO, however, expect that if Utah deploys REAL ID driver's licenses -- the kind with chips in them -- that they'll start to require electronic age verification just because it's so much harder to forge than a driver's license. Assuming no databases are built, that's a reasonable approach to limiting under-age drinking.
I agree, but I wonder if Utah will go for REAL ID. They're one of several states who've expressed opposition to the idea:
There's also Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Arches, the Grand Staircase National Monument, a couple of state parks of near stature, a bunch of national forests... if you like outdoor recreation, Utah's a pretty fine place to visit or live.
You seem to be confusing a search of your person with a process that will identify your person.
On the contrary, I think anybody who's proposing DNA as an identification technique is confused. It's only correlated with an identity ONLY if it's linked to an identity in a database somewhere.
And if that's the proposal, people should be more wary about the idea than home searches without a warrant.
you would be amazed how many rapists and murders also run red lights and shoplift....
One of the problems I have with this philosophy is that it ends up turning a number of otherwise routine stops into attempts to saddle you with a bigger crime.
I've encountered this personally, particularly in the Sacramento area. I wondered for a while, for example, why I'd get questioned for 5-10 minutes on a number of unrelated topics on a stop that happened one of my brights wasn't working. Eventually I figured out that it's the routine screening philosophy at work. It happens that I'm not guilty of any crime I'm aware of or for which I've been questioned about during these encounters (drug possession, illegal weapon possession, violating parole, driving under the influence...), but it's more than a little unnerving to have a traffic incident turn into an obvious digging effort where the object is apparently to find anything they could possible charge you with.
I suppose some people look at that as being thorough. But for a guy who keeps his nose pretty clean, I've had a pretty disproportionate number of these encounters, so it's pretty easy for me to wonder how often the routine screening philosophy leads to barking up the wrong tree.
So, I don't really want it applied writ large. Especially when it comes to DNA, but really, when it comes down to it "routine screening" sounds a lot like "consistent surveillance," doesn't it?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...
If my DNA isn't part of my person, I don't know what is. If you find it at a crime scene, that's one thing, but the bar for compelling the collection of a DNA sample should be at least as high (and probably higher) than the bar for a warrant for a home search.
he apple apologists need to seriously STFU with this "it isn't apple's fault!" nonsense. They're partners. Apple is not some holy child that hath cometh down from the mountain to bestow upon the unwashed masses all that is holy and good.
I'd tell you to a heaping spoonful of STFU yourself, but I think you've done Apple enthusiasts everywhere a service by serving as a quintessential example of knee-jerk Apple Critic. You certainly don't know what you're talking about with regards to how the DRM works, you seem to be ignorant of Apple's actions and stated intentions with regard to said DRM, you seem to have reflexively confused licensing issues with DRM issues, and you seem generally confused about the value and state of other players in the marketplace.
Exhibit A:
"Bought that song on your computer at work? Want to listen to it on your computer at home? Well guess what, charlie, unless you find some obscure bullshit setting in some hidden window in some far off corner of some far off menu in iTunes, $1 more shall go to the Steve."
Anyone who's ever used iTunes on more than a single computer knows there's a simple solution to this problem. It doesn't involve an obscure menu, in fact, iTunes will *prompt* you for the necessary information as soon as you try to play the song.
Exhibit B:
A moments of thought would reveal that the geographic restrictions on purchases have little to do with DRM and everything to do with licensing, since DRM (on music anyway) isn't tied to a region, and isn't the technology used in restricting the purchase at any rate.
Exhibit C:
"Why do you think people don't use amazon?"
They do, actually. Their MP3 store launched a year and a half ago and sell about 10% of what iTunes does. Some estimates place them as the #2 digital retailer:
Furthermore, that figure almost certainly represents sales mostly taken from iTunes. Almost every iPod/iTunes user I know has switched.
Exhibit D:
"Or why microsoft's VASTLY superior subscription model is ignored?"
I can see value in a subscription model, I've participated in Rhapsody and Satellite Radio before. But at the end of the day, many people -- apparently more people -- happily choose ownership of their selection of media rather than ongoing rent to access to a broader selection, so it's not particularly clear that it's a vastly superior model.
Overall, it appears that the purpose of your post is really to express some ill-defined anger at Apple as a company or to project a straw-man image of people who buy and enjoy their products.
It certainly isn't to express well-considered criticism of some of the company's practices.
What do you have to say about Apple's warm and fuzzy user-friendly DRM now?
Never liked the DRM much, but for a while, even with its encumbrances, it was still one of the most convenient ways to get music online, and it was certainly one of the most convenient legit ways -- in other words, it met a certain set of requirements very well.
Personally, I mostly ditched the iTunes store after a few computer failures which meant I was using up the number of times I could authorize a given machine... and finding Amazon's MP3 store. Still browse every once in a while either because I can't find something elsewhere or it's just interesting. Might use them more as they continue the transition they've already begun away from DRM. Might not.
Glossy is annoying unless you've got perfect control over the lighting in your work environment. If you're using a laptop, chances are you don't some significant portion of the time.
And that's before you even consider the actual color reproduction issues.
Why not just legislate that every time you take a picture, it bleats out "HEY EVERYBODY, I'M TRYING TO TAKE A PICTURE HERE, DO YOU MIND?"
Well, that oughta be enough to end the privacy threat from cameras in orbit. Getting a megaphone powerful enough to reach citizens in the photographed area on satellite cameras is pretty much going to ground them all, right?
Oh, wait, that assumes some kind of symmetric application of the principle involved here...
It's VERY important. In fact, one of the best things we might do to protect against abuse of power is to explicitly PROTECT the use of photographic/video/audio recording devices, because it's obvious that there isn't enough protection right now.
Take the recent case of Oscar Grant. He was fatally shot by a BART officer on New Year's. Witnesses said the man was restrained and essentially helpless when the officer shot him, but of course, the BART spokesman Jim Allison said the victim was not restrained when the gun discharged.
Funny, Mr. Allison, because independent footage taken by a witness with a cellphoneshowed a different story. And guess what? That footage almost wasn't available because an officer attempted to confiscate the camera (see the cbs5.com article: "[Vargas] also said she resisted an officer's attempt to confiscate her camera") -- she's probably lucky she wasn't shot as well.
And take the recent case of Marilyn Parver who was bullied by Jet Blue staff and threatened with actions from being banned from flying to "$10,000 in fines and 25 years in jail" -- because she videotaped an incident on a Jet Blue plane from her seat and refused to delete the footage. I don't know about you, but my reaction to this is to want to contact Jet Blue and ASKING them to put me on their no-fly list until they apologize to this woman and change their policy.
Overall, I think there needs to be law explicitly stating that in any space (public or private) in which there's no reasonable expectation of privacy, recording devices are not only allowed, the right to use them can't be infringed, and that no private entity or public agency can demand either surrender or destruction of the device or recordings (although it does seem reasonable to let the law compel delivery of unaltered copies).
The position of any Keynesian is completely discredited by the historical record
I'm interested, but since you were apparently quite wrong about the relative lengths of historical depressions, forgive me if I'd rather see some citations rather than taking your word for it.
Krugman's position that FDR didn't go far enough is absolutely asinine.
How so?
And you do realize that Krugman doesn't believe that across the policy board, right? Certainly on the demand side, but hardly on the taxation side, where he's criticized both Hoover's and FDR's increases.
categorized Ruby and Javascript together must be completely ignorant of programming
Perhaps I am completely ignorant of programming, though it seems likely that over 25 years of practicing I've learned a few things.
But while I can see some differences between the two languages, I can't say I see enough difference to justify vehement insistence that they couldn't be considered similar. To me, they both appear to be dynamically typed interpreted languages with first class functions and sophisticated object systems. They both have a number of different implementations, they both run on the JVM.
Maybe this is an opportunity for me to learn something new, though.
Why throw JavaScript in there? The rest are server-side languages, while JavaScript is client-side.
Two reasons I can think of:
1) An increasing amount of number of applications are being delivered via the web browser 2) JavaScript increasingly lives a number of other places besides the browser. See Rhino, JScript.NET, Seed, and probably a few other places I'm not thinking of right now.
If the type of either variable is a string, the result is a string. If both are numeric, then the result is numeric. In each case, the interpreter simply does what's required for the operation to make any sense. So:
The key here is that the variables are indeed typed, and you can run tests on them yielding type information: a='1', typeof a yields string. b=1, typeof b yields number.
Javascript is more dynamically typed than weakly typed.
Over the last 8 years, nothing has given the media more joy than kicking Bush around.
My observation is that the people kicking Bush around have been kindof cranky about it, and I'd bet most of the people who did it would have been happier to have a better president and less to talk about.
"What is Obama doing, or planning to do during his administration!"
The reason why these types of discussions tend to segue into the problems Bush presented is that at least one legitimate discussion tack is how Obama plans to try to undo some of what Bush did.
Bush is out of office, but his policies and the consequences are going to be relevant for a while yet, and for the moment, they're at least as relevant as Obama's potential choices.
Near as I can tell, only difference between his assertion and yours was a pretty bare argument amounting to the idea that new private investment is good while new government investment does nothing but take away from that.
There are two big problems with that argument. The first and most obvious being that new private investment is highly limited right now by broken capital markets, and the conventional Friedmanesque tools the Monetarists and some neoclassicists have embraced aren't doing a darn thing, which is why people are even talking about Keynesian stimulus again.
The second problem is the idea that private investment is inherently better than public investment. I'd agree that for many cases market forces tend to correct bad investments more quickly than public policy mechanism. But there's nothing magical about private investment that dictates a person making the capital allocation decisions will automatically make wise growth-yielding choices while a person of similar abilities and education in a public role will make poor ones -- Scott Adams has made a career out of making this very point, sometimes with an economy of hyperbole that's startling.
So the real and big question here isn't public vs private, it's whether or not people making decisions about investments are making good ones that return the genuine value that underlies real economic growth. In short, if a government spends money it took from a valuable private enterprise badly, then yes, there's a net loss. If a government spends money it took from a private system that's barely investing in genuinely valuable enterprises at all on investments of even middling value, then it's a pretty different story.
If all of FDR's spending, regulating, and taxing brought us out of the depression,
The position of a lot of modern Keynesians (including Krugman, who's looking more and more right over a lot of stuff he took crap for 5-10 years ago) is more or less that the spending did indeed help. Some of the regulation and taxation (particularly certain 36/37 tax hikes) not so much.
then why did it last so much longer than any previous depression, when the government didn't have the power for that kind of intervention?
There are certainly a number of suggestible targets: a bigger and less localized collapse, climatic problems on top of economic problems, and some of the tax and trade policy decisions. Spending, not so much.
And which depressions are you arguing were markedly shorter? The "Long Depression" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression ) has been measured from 6 to 24 years. The Panic of 1837 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837 ) is measured at about 5 years. You can credibly argue that inside of 5 years, growth as measured via GDP was on the rise at a rate comparable to pre-crash rates, and inside 8, GDP surpassed peak 1929 levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp20-40.jpg ). Heck, if the top tax rate hadn't been raised to 80%, they might have even avoided that dip there in late 30s.
Seriously, I find it sad that we have an article about geothermal heating and cooling that is used by the private residence of the leader of the free world and it's not mentioned.
Maybe the omission wasn't part of a sinister agenda to deprive W of his due, but not unlike recent Republican distancing from the sitting President. It wouldn't be the first time someone assumed that affiliation with the current leader of the free world might not be the best promotional angle.
Has Bush Derangement Syndrome gotten so bad that saying anything good about Bush is taboo?
It's neat if there's efficient and/or off-the-grid tech in his personal residence, but measuring the positive impact of that choice against the wake of his policies is sortof like crowing about a $.35 coupon for a home mortgage.
Slashdot Mirror
Democrats have been running the show for 2 years now
Did you read my post?
How exactly do you justify the idea the Democrats have been "running the show" for 2 years?
. Look up Community Reinvestment Act when you get a chance if you're interested in the truth.
You sound as if you'd be surprised to discover that I'm already quite familiar with it -- and its popular usage as a tool of misdirection from failures and malfeasance in the private sector:
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
http://www.frbsf.org/news/speeches/2008/0331.html
Republicans always get blaimed for everything bad that happens in this country. The sad thing is most Americans don't even know which party is in control in Washington. While the Republican hating masses were giving Congress a single digit approval rating, most of them didn't even realize it was the Democrats who were in charge of Congress
Republicans: in charge of the House from 1994-2006, in charge of the Whitehouse from 2001 until three weeks ago, majority of the Senate from 1995-2006 except for a brief period in 2002 when Jeffords' defection gave the Democrats a 1 member lead (and I guess three weeks when Al Gore was still VP and it was briefly split). Supreme Court essentially narrowly split, although you can credibly argue that the Roberts appointment made the court on balance Republican to some approximation. This is essentially Republican control from 2001 until early 2007.
Democrats: majority in the house from 2006, essentially split Senate from 2006, bare majority for Democrats given Sanders and Lieberman's caucus choice. But given the narrow split, the veto stick held by a Republican presidency, and the composition of the Democratic majority (esp. blue dogs in conservative districts), "control" is a pretty tenuous term for even the two houses of congress. Meanwhile, Republicans still hold the presidency and with Alito's appointment the court becomes arguably more Republican.
Who doesn't understand which party has been in control in Washington?
In 2-4 years, the Democrats won't have that excuse anymore, and accountability is important. I have no problem with people calling them out on specific policy positions and voting them out next election if that's what it takes.
But it's ludicrous to assert that Democrats are primarily responsible for the current state of things. And it's a little extra stupid to accuse others who apparently have a better grasp of recent history than you do of not understanding what's going on. U.S. policy for the last decade has been dominated by the Republicans, there's no other reasonable conclusion. Whether the Democrats can do any better is an open question, but it's really only been askable for about three weeks.
The Democrats have always been in the pocket of RIAA/MPAA/Hollywood types
The entertainment industry is huge in California, there's no doubt, and I could guess that some connections between it and Broadcast/Telecom might be driving Feinstein's politics.
The thing is, technology is also huge in California, and at least uneasily allied to some degree at the moment. Opposition to net neutrality is opposition to just about any web-based business, or a lot of hardware makers.... *anybody* who provides hardware or software that's used on one of the ends of the network. And these aren't small companies. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, eBay, Craigslist, Apple... all in Feinstein's constituency. There's no reason the management AND the labor in these companies shouldn't all be lobbying Feinstein's office and couldn't have equal or greater influence to the "content" cartels.
I'll give 'em credit for following the idea of using a WiFi mobile device with VoIP, but that's really not particularly revolutionary. What's needed next is WiMax or a small portable cell-WiFi bridge. If the bandwidth's high enough (EVDO rev a is almost there), then you have affordable unlimited talk and data...
While there's nothing wrong with a dinner reservation at a nice restaurant (who doesn't like good food?), my own experience suggests that a sincere creative gesture is often pretty well-received.
... someone probably ought to say something.
Want to do anything, anything at all and not get busted? Say: my religion says I must do it...
There are some quite ready and obvious counterexamples. You can't get away with relatively harmless things like prayer in public schools or religious drug use (unless you're an American Indian). In general, religious defenses against U.S. and state statutes are rare, and even more rarely successful.
If you're saying that on a social level, some people will extend approval to even some illegal actions, your statement is somewhat defensible, although this isn't particularly a unique feature of religion. But if you're saying that religion is actually a functional defense against criminal behavior (included in "anything, anything at all") then congratulations, you've made your very own contribution to a divorce of rationalism and anti-religion axe grinding.
I DO, however, expect that if Utah deploys REAL ID driver's licenses -- the kind with chips in them -- that they'll start to require electronic age verification just because it's so much harder to forge than a driver's license. Assuming no databases are built, that's a reasonable approach to limiting under-age drinking.
I agree, but I wonder if Utah will go for REAL ID. They're one of several states who've expressed opposition to the idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REAL_ID_Act#State_adoption_and_non-compliance
There's also Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Arches, the Grand Staircase National Monument, a couple of state parks of near stature, a bunch of national forests... if you like outdoor recreation, Utah's a pretty fine place to visit or live.
Uh... you are at a crime scene.
Arrests happen other places besides crime scenes.
You seem to be confusing a search of your person with a process that will identify your person.
On the contrary, I think anybody who's proposing DNA as an identification technique is confused. It's only correlated with an identity ONLY if it's linked to an identity in a database somewhere.
And if that's the proposal, people should be more wary about the idea than home searches without a warrant.
you would be amazed how many rapists and murders also run red lights and shoplift....
One of the problems I have with this philosophy is that it ends up turning a number of otherwise routine stops into attempts to saddle you with a bigger crime.
I've encountered this personally, particularly in the Sacramento area. I wondered for a while, for example, why I'd get questioned for 5-10 minutes on a number of unrelated topics on a stop that happened one of my brights wasn't working. Eventually I figured out that it's the routine screening philosophy at work. It happens that I'm not guilty of any crime I'm aware of or for which I've been questioned about during these encounters (drug possession, illegal weapon possession, violating parole, driving under the influence...), but it's more than a little unnerving to have a traffic incident turn into an obvious digging effort where the object is apparently to find anything they could possible charge you with.
I suppose some people look at that as being thorough. But for a guy who keeps his nose pretty clean, I've had a pretty disproportionate number of these encounters, so it's pretty easy for me to wonder how often the routine screening philosophy leads to barking up the wrong tree.
So, I don't really want it applied writ large. Especially when it comes to DNA, but really, when it comes down to it "routine screening" sounds a lot like "consistent surveillance," doesn't it?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...
If my DNA isn't part of my person, I don't know what is. If you find it at a crime scene, that's one thing, but the bar for compelling the collection of a DNA sample should be at least as high (and probably higher) than the bar for a warrant for a home search.
he apple apologists need to seriously STFU with this "it isn't apple's fault!" nonsense. They're partners. Apple is not some holy child that hath cometh down from the mountain to bestow upon the unwashed masses all that is holy and good.
I'd tell you to a heaping spoonful of STFU yourself, but I think you've done Apple enthusiasts everywhere a service by serving as a quintessential example of knee-jerk Apple Critic. You certainly don't know what you're talking about with regards to how the DRM works, you seem to be ignorant of Apple's actions and stated intentions with regard to said DRM, you seem to have reflexively confused licensing issues with DRM issues, and you seem generally confused about the value and state of other players in the marketplace.
Exhibit A:
"Bought that song on your computer at work? Want to listen to it on your computer at home? Well guess what, charlie, unless you find some obscure bullshit setting in some hidden window in some far off corner of some far off menu in iTunes, $1 more shall go to the Steve."
Anyone who's ever used iTunes on more than a single computer knows there's a simple solution to this problem. It doesn't involve an obscure menu, in fact, iTunes will *prompt* you for the necessary information as soon as you try to play the song.
Exhibit B:
A moments of thought would reveal that the geographic restrictions on purchases have little to do with DRM and everything to do with licensing, since DRM (on music anyway) isn't tied to a region, and isn't the technology used in restricting the purchase at any rate.
Exhibit C:
"Why do you think people don't use amazon?"
They do, actually. Their MP3 store launched a year and a half ago and sell about 10% of what iTunes does. Some estimates place them as the #2 digital retailer:
http://mashable.com/2008/03/26/amazon-mp3-takes-2/
Furthermore, that figure almost certainly represents sales mostly taken from iTunes. Almost every iPod/iTunes user I know has switched.
Exhibit D:
"Or why microsoft's VASTLY superior subscription model is ignored?"
I can see value in a subscription model, I've participated in Rhapsody and Satellite Radio before. But at the end of the day, many people -- apparently more people -- happily choose ownership of their selection of media rather than ongoing rent to access to a broader selection, so it's not particularly clear that it's a vastly superior model.
Overall, it appears that the purpose of your post is really to express some ill-defined anger at Apple as a company or to project a straw-man image of people who buy and enjoy their products.
It certainly isn't to express well-considered criticism of some of the company's practices.
What do you have to say about Apple's warm and fuzzy user-friendly DRM now?
Never liked the DRM much, but for a while, even with its encumbrances, it was still one of the most convenient ways to get music online, and it was certainly one of the most convenient legit ways -- in other words, it met a certain set of requirements very well.
Personally, I mostly ditched the iTunes store after a few computer failures which meant I was using up the number of times I could authorize a given machine... and finding Amazon's MP3 store. Still browse every once in a while either because I can't find something elsewhere or it's just interesting. Might use them more as they continue the transition they've already begun away from DRM. Might not.
Oh, who could have predicted such a thing?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=995409&cid=25373917
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=995409&cid=25375879
Glossy is annoying unless you've got perfect control over the lighting in your work environment. If you're using a laptop, chances are you don't some significant portion of the time.
And that's before you even consider the actual color reproduction issues.
Why not just legislate that every time you take a picture, it bleats out "HEY EVERYBODY, I'M TRYING TO TAKE A PICTURE HERE, DO YOU MIND?"
Well, that oughta be enough to end the privacy threat from cameras in orbit. Getting a megaphone powerful enough to reach citizens in the photographed area on satellite cameras is pretty much going to ground them all, right?
Oh, wait, that assumes some kind of symmetric application of the principle involved here...
It's VERY important. In fact, one of the best things we might do to protect against abuse of power is to explicitly PROTECT the use of photographic/video/audio recording devices, because it's obvious that there isn't enough protection right now.
Take the recent case of Oscar Grant. He was fatally shot by a BART officer on New Year's. Witnesses said the man was restrained and essentially helpless when the officer shot him, but of course, the BART spokesman Jim Allison said the victim was not restrained when the gun discharged.
Funny, Mr. Allison, because independent footage taken by a witness with a cellphone showed a different story. And guess what? That footage almost wasn't available because an officer attempted to confiscate the camera (see the cbs5.com article: "[Vargas] also said she resisted an officer's attempt to confiscate her camera") -- she's probably lucky she wasn't shot as well.
And take the recent case of Marilyn Parver who was bullied by Jet Blue staff and threatened with actions from being banned from flying to "$10,000 in fines and 25 years in jail" -- because she videotaped an incident on a Jet Blue plane from her seat and refused to delete the footage. I don't know about you, but my reaction to this is to want to contact Jet Blue and ASKING them to put me on their no-fly list until they apologize to this woman and change their policy.
Overall, I think there needs to be law explicitly stating that in any space (public or private) in which there's no reasonable expectation of privacy, recording devices are not only allowed, the right to use them can't be infringed, and that no private entity or public agency can demand either surrender or destruction of the device or recordings (although it does seem reasonable to let the law compel delivery of unaltered copies).
The position of any Keynesian is completely discredited by the historical record
I'm interested, but since you were apparently quite wrong about the relative lengths of historical depressions, forgive me if I'd rather see some citations rather than taking your word for it.
Krugman's position that FDR didn't go far enough is absolutely asinine.
How so?
And you do realize that Krugman doesn't believe that across the policy board, right? Certainly on the demand side, but hardly on the taxation side, where he's criticized both Hoover's and FDR's increases.
categorized Ruby and Javascript together must be completely ignorant of programming
Perhaps I am completely ignorant of programming, though it seems likely that over 25 years of practicing I've learned a few things.
But while I can see some differences between the two languages, I can't say I see enough difference to justify vehement insistence that they couldn't be considered similar. To me, they both appear to be dynamically typed interpreted languages with first class functions and sophisticated object systems. They both have a number of different implementations, they both run on the JVM.
Maybe this is an opportunity for me to learn something new, though.
Why throw JavaScript in there? The rest are server-side languages, while JavaScript is client-side.
Two reasons I can think of:
1) An increasing amount of number of applications are being delivered via the web browser
2) JavaScript increasingly lives a number of other places besides the browser. See Rhino, JScript.NET, Seed, and probably a few other places I'm not thinking of right now.
a=1
b=1
a+b could be either 11 or 2. Who knows?
If the type of either variable is a string, the result is a string. If both are numeric, then the result is numeric. In each case, the interpreter simply does what's required for the operation to make any sense. So:
a=1, b=1, a+b yields 2.
a='1', b=1, a+b yields 11.
The key here is that the variables are indeed typed, and you can run tests on them yielding type information:
a='1', typeof a yields string.
b=1, typeof b yields number.
Javascript is more dynamically typed than weakly typed.
Over the last 8 years, nothing has given the media more joy than kicking Bush around.
My observation is that the people kicking Bush around have been kindof cranky about it, and I'd bet most of the people who did it would have been happier to have a better president and less to talk about.
"What is Obama doing, or planning to do during his administration!"
The reason why these types of discussions tend to segue into the problems Bush presented is that at least one legitimate discussion tack is how Obama plans to try to undo some of what Bush did.
Bush is out of office, but his policies and the consequences are going to be relevant for a while yet, and for the moment, they're at least as relevant as Obama's potential choices.
Wishing doesn't make it so.
Near as I can tell, only difference between his assertion and yours was a pretty bare argument amounting to the idea that new private investment is good while new government investment does nothing but take away from that.
There are two big problems with that argument. The first and most obvious being that new private investment is highly limited right now by broken capital markets, and the conventional Friedmanesque tools the Monetarists and some neoclassicists have embraced aren't doing a darn thing, which is why people are even talking about Keynesian stimulus again.
The second problem is the idea that private investment is inherently better than public investment. I'd agree that for many cases market forces tend to correct bad investments more quickly than public policy mechanism. But there's nothing magical about private investment that dictates a person making the capital allocation decisions will automatically make wise growth-yielding choices while a person of similar abilities and education in a public role will make poor ones -- Scott Adams has made a career out of making this very point, sometimes with an economy of hyperbole that's startling.
So the real and big question here isn't public vs private, it's whether or not people making decisions about investments are making good ones that return the genuine value that underlies real economic growth. In short, if a government spends money it took from a valuable private enterprise badly, then yes, there's a net loss. If a government spends money it took from a private system that's barely investing in genuinely valuable enterprises at all on investments of even middling value, then it's a pretty different story.
If all of FDR's spending, regulating, and taxing brought us out of the depression,
The position of a lot of modern Keynesians (including Krugman, who's looking more and more right over a lot of stuff he took crap for 5-10 years ago) is more or less that the spending did indeed help. Some of the regulation and taxation (particularly certain 36/37 tax hikes) not so much.
then why did it last so much longer than any previous depression, when the government didn't have the power for that kind of intervention?
There are certainly a number of suggestible targets: a bigger and less localized collapse, climatic problems on top of economic problems, and some of the tax and trade policy decisions. Spending, not so much.
And which depressions are you arguing were markedly shorter? The "Long Depression" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression ) has been measured from 6 to 24 years. The Panic of 1837 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837 ) is measured at about 5 years. You can credibly argue that inside of 5 years, growth as measured via GDP was on the rise at a rate comparable to pre-crash rates, and inside 8, GDP surpassed peak 1929 levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp20-40.jpg ). Heck, if the top tax rate hadn't been raised to 80%, they might have even avoided that dip there in late 30s.
By his manifest failures throughout the 1930s.
Your axe, sir, is it sharp yet?
I'd actually say it's one of the cleaner of the C-syntax'd languages, and it's certainly less convoluted than, say, Perl....
Seriously, I find it sad that we have an article about geothermal heating and cooling that is used by the private residence of the leader of the free world and it's not mentioned.
Maybe the omission wasn't part of a sinister agenda to deprive W of his due, but not unlike recent Republican distancing from the sitting President. It wouldn't be the first time someone assumed that affiliation with the current leader of the free world might not be the best promotional angle.
Has Bush Derangement Syndrome gotten so bad that saying anything good about Bush is taboo?
It's neat if there's efficient and/or off-the-grid tech in his personal residence, but measuring the positive impact of that choice against the wake of his policies is sortof like crowing about a $.35 coupon for a home mortgage.