I'm attempting to manage someone else's PHP code, and I can tell you it can be every bit as awful as maintaining alien Perl code. Throw in a spattering of CSS and DHTML
Stop right there, we have a winner.
In the first place, any decent developer knows dropping more than bare minimum HTML code into PHP (and vice versa) is a bad idea.
In the second place, many non-decent developers write horrid HTML. Nested tables, inlined styles, shim images, and font tags exploding all over the place....
I've walked away from good money rather than deal with it.
I think McCain is the best Presidential candidate I've seen in my lifetime.
I really wanted to like him too. I still do when I listen to him.
But before you vote for him, if you can, talk to people on Senate staff -- anyone who's ever worked for any senator, Democrat or Repbulican. There is a quiet but serious concern exuding from nearly everyone I know who's worked in a Senate office that McCain may not only be a *weak* candidate, he may actually be an unstable person. And the opinions I've heard relayed aren't just rooted in the inevitable political conflicts.
The Reagan "thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow republican" rule has already been tested in the primary. But if what I'm hearing is right, you're going to see something unusual soon: it will be tested *again*, over the months leading up to the election, even after the primary has been sewed up. Watch for be fewer endorsements, unusual crossovers, and possibly even some unusually public inside criticism.
I think Microsoft has finally genuinely started to realize a very simple fact:
Client-side web developers hate them.
And it's probably the one thing MS has thoroughly earned with all the IE bullsh*t over the last 10 years.
This is a really great gesture, it's a good start if they want to allay any of that and gain back trust. But honestly, nobody gets over 10 years of being treated like crap overnight, and the half-life of contempt isn't short.
Personally, I'd like to offer my congratulations to the IE Product management team, and let them know that in time, I'll probably only wish debilitating terminal illness on them, rather than painful and extended death by torture.
(1) Spending some time out of town (in fact, the first time I did this, it wasn't an excuse, I was going to be away for months and wanted to take records to a doctor whose fax machine wasn't working). (2) Going to get a second opinion (3) Going to see a specialist
I think this is pretty interesting, because 100% of the time, I have to fight to get a solid copy of lab reports on blood work, and half the time the staff at the doctor's office (across several offices) will look at me like I'm some kind of freak because I want copies of my own medical tests and doctor's notes. I can ask that copies of whatever's produced by a test be sent to my home address as well as the ordering doctor's office and they never, ever come. Not once.
The only effective way I've found to actually get records is to tell them I want records faxed to another doctor... at a number I receive at.
If my experience is any indication, most patients don't have *access* to their own medical records, let alone control over them.
To have someone deny me that chance based on a childish rivalry would really upset me.
There's *so* much more going on here than that.
The most important thing is that Microsoft would destroy the company as it's known now. They'll mess with the back-end technology, swapping in their own, they'll merge some stuff with Windows Live and vice versa, they'll kill anything that's a threat to their desktop hold or they'll limit its prime interoperability to Microsoft products. Features will become dependent on IE and Silverlight.
In short, its goals will go from being a premiere portal and online services company to being anything that can maintain and enhance Microsoft's dominance. Lots of people who work there would rather work for the former than the later (and it *will* hemorrhage key employees if they're bought for that reason). And some of them even have a damn good argument that the company is worth more long term if it serves the former goal. It's not unlikely they'll achieve it, and especially as the desktop becomes less and less relevant, I think they have the potential to outdo Microsoft in terms of their worth.
Short term, of course, you can get quite a good cash-out on the offer MS made... especially compared to anything else available while the markets in general are struggling. And lots of suits and shareholders don't know how to think any other way than short-term gains.
Barack would say "I have considered your idea and think that this would be the result of your idea, so I have another idea that doesn't have the disadvantage your idea has." He is the only candidate I have seen that actually thinks an idea through. Everybody else (Republican and Democrat) seem to just throw ideas out that sound good, without thinking about it.
Oh, they think about it -- though other than that, I think your observation is very astute. Most political candidates have learned that engaging the public in genuine policy dialogue is hit-and-miss, and they've taken a lesson from that and abandoned it. Instead, they stake out policy positions, in part based on their leanings, figure out how to telegraph certain hot-button values and issues for the audiences they've targeted, and pound on those. In short, they more or less treat their public interaction primarily as an exercise in marketing/PR.
I wouldn't say Obama abstains from this. The truth is anybody who doesn't do this to some extent will have a very short career. But it seems obvious to me that along with that kind of action, he's decided to actually engage the public with some of the thinking behind the policy positions.
It's more than a little winning. It's always hard to say if the public persona matches the private reality, of course, but I'm willing to vote for him almost alone because if he wins, I think we'll see more of this as other politicians realize it can be winning style.
Simple moving money doesn't necessarily lead to economic growth, especially considering international trade where plenty of the money can end up moving overseas.
I was going to say the same thing about investment. Capital crosses borders as easily as goods.
Lending markets provide a great deal of the capital required for economic expansion, and if as you say lower/middle class spending doesn't drop as much then it makes even more sense to move to prop up the lending markets. Focus on keeping money moving and you'll be doing it at the expense of encouraging further growth. At best the moving money approach largely maintains the current state while in reality it lends itself to "leaks". Instead let's look to the future, restoring growth by encouraging investment.
This *is* about encouraging investment. This idea seems funny if you think of investment as essentially a function of the amount of spare cash around, but while that's certainly a variable, it's just not the whole story. Estimated return on investment is more important than available capital.
And so here's the thing. If customers don't buy in, there is no real business growth. And in a recession, lower/middle class spending drops in large part because they just don't have the cash to buy in. Investor confidence is hammered by sales drops and other indications that a potential market just doesn't have the cash to spend, and investors become more cautious, even if they have more to invest.
Conversely, even if you were to cut the available pool of capital by 10% via gains taxes, if you have an economy where customers are buying, investment where they're buying will be attractive. And by letting sales lead capital, you also gain something of a benefit of stronger market forces driving the allocation of funds. Capital markets have their own market forces, but they're simply more speculative and therefore less efficient by nature.
Obviously, this breaks if you cut the pool of capital too drastically, and a better situation is one where the pool of capital is larger AND investment is attractive because of spending. But there's no action that can be taken to do both that doesn't have its own set of drawbacks inside a larger set of considerations.
And all that's not even considering that the current problem is centered in the lending markets... let's fix it at the source.
The lending market obviously really needs help, but its problems has have far less to do with capital gains taxes than they have to do with some seriously screwed up valuation and risk assessments driven by greed and formula over the last 10 years. No tax adjustment is going to change the fact that when the music stopped, not only did some of the players not have chairs (as they knew was part of the game), the players had lied to each other and themselves about the number of chairs. Nobody's gonna enthusiastically play the next round until they figure out how many chairs there really are -- even if people are willing to lend one or two more.
I don't think it's so far out. Tech issues underly quite a few other issues of economics and liberty, and those are certainly as important as foreign policy.
But I think there's an even bigger reason why tech workers *definitely* should be looking at how candidates understand and address issues they understand. Because this is the arena where *you* may actually know enough, as a professional, to really gauge a candidates policy acumen. I doubt most slashdotters are experts in military tactics or nation building. Most of us have a shallow grasp of economics -- yes, even most of you Austrian school autodidacts. Same goes for health care, education, criminology, etc -- Slashdot readers may be smart laymen, but that's all most of us are in those fields.
But lots of us are IT pros. And if a candidate seems to really get it in the area where you can tell buzzspeak and platitudes from real knowledge, that tells you quite a bit about their ability to reach into an issue, understand it, and formulate a plan to do something about it.
So, yeah. I think slashdotters should be concerned about tech issues.
So what you're saying is he wants to do his darnedest to make sure there's less money to expand businesses, less money to hire new employees
What this policy essentially says is that more of the money businesses use to hire or otherwise has to be won in the consumer market rather than lending/equity markets. There's evidence to suggest that in a recession lower/middle class spending drops less than investment does, so it makes sense to put the money where it will move.
implement the current texting business model yourself in a manner which benefits consumers better on a monetary scale
Whether or not *I* can do it is completely irrelevant to the point, which is that the mobile market isn't converging on efficiency, it's converging on what's either collusive pricing or just short of it, and the fact is that as soon as the wireless providers had data channel capability (GPRS, 1xRTT, doesn't matter), they had the capability to do extremely cheap text messaging. What keeps someone else from doing it right now is the fact that mobile devices are locked down to the point where it's often difficult for a layman to install a new app.
But if that changes, you can bet someone will meet exactly the challenge you've dealt out to me. The implementation will be almost trivial, the trick is adoption.
Well speaking as someone outside the US, wouldn't it show greater concern for your troops to not send them out to get shot at?
You'd think that this would be blindingly obvious, but for whatever reason, the idea that supporting the troops means supporting any war seems to have considerable traction.
I don't think it's *entirely* without merit. Telling someone they're fighting in a war that has a serious ethical or strategic problems isn't going to help their morale much.
But then again, most of us understand that when we tell someone their *boss* is incompetent or a little crazy or even somewhat crooked, we're not insulting them for working there.
Why that doesn't transfer over to the military, I don't know.
I thought we believed in free, competitive markets, and that we believed that their magic is such they drive towards lean efficiency which results in more cost effective goods and services for everyone.
Anyway, 90% of the music I download is not covered by SOCAN in the first place, how do those artists get their money?
This is quite possibly the most important question about the whole scheme, because the answer is that most of the artists won't, and that ruins the entire justification for it in the first place, before you even consider the other problems with the setup.
I've seen how this plays out with other collection rackets like ASCAP, and it's very clear that especially as you move down the long tail, artists don't get paid. I know artists who *know* for a fact, their songs are being played on the radio, or in a commercial concert setting, and they're not being paid for those performances because they're too small. I know for a fact that I have tried to *volunteer* royalties to an artist where I was using their work in a setting that wasn't already covered -- and I was turned away. They don't care unless the pickings are big enough, and they don't pay out unless you pass a prevailing statistical threshold. Even some reasonably successful artists don't.
In order to get this stuff right, you have to be tracking exactly what's going through the pipes. And that currently is only possible at a point of sale or broadcast (and I don't think the rentiers have even gotten as far as bringing precision into that realm).
So a tax like this would essentially create a signle online distribution pie, fixed in size by the number of internet users, divied up amongst basically whoever some appointed gatekeeper can justify.
Terrible idea. We have enough of this going on in the industry and I think it's probable most artists and the art would be better off entirely without the gatekeepers, even if it meant forgoing the entire revenue stream. Because for most artists, that's more or less what happens anyway.
Label-free production isn't a new thing -- we're probably at least a decade into the era where anybody could pick up the basic tools to produce an acceptable quality album for less than $3000, and really, that would have even bought you enough time in some conventional studios to have them do it. I've heard some good albums produced circa mid-90s this way.
And internet distribution isn't really that new anymore. That's also been happening to some degree since the late 90s, and it obviously had gathered considerable momentum by 3-4 years ago. We're not at the end of that trend, but once wireless data service becomes ubiquitous, it's pretty safe to say the old distribution channels (record stores & FM radio) will be outmatched.
But there's still going to be a significant distribution challenge, and that's marketing. If anything, I think it's possible it will get harder. I kindof wish I'd gotten myself together and produced something high quality about 3 years ago, because I think someday, people are going to look at 2000-2005 as the easiest period for an indie artist to get attention, just like 1997-2001 was the easiest period to get a start as a high profile blogger. The wide net of participants increasingly means greater competition for attention.
Some people will be willing and able to pay for people to help them get it. Something like a label will exist for that purpose for a long time.
Seriously. I'm not at all sure that having their patent case demolished is good enough.
This kind of blood-sucking behavior is so transparently in bad-faith, so anti-productive, and so greedy, that it ought to carry criminal penalties.
Like the people who throw in clauses that trigger penalties and ridiculous interest rates for early payoff on loans, these are not the kind of people who cooperate in a society, they're psychopathic parasites.
But for whatever reason, right now we live in a society that rewards them instead of punishing them.
Agreed, but have you have noticed that Mormons tend to be really nice people? I'm serious. It's like Romney -- no one can really find fault with him except to say his hair is too perfect, that he's just a successful businessman, or that he's Mormon.
I'm a Mormon, and while I appreciate the kind generalization, I definitely find him lacking on a number of fronts, including his ability to say anything inspiring during faith-related discussion or respond coherently to attacks on that front. There's also the fact that his about-face on several issues seem so conveniently timed it seems likely he's being phony... plus there's his endorsement of (and being endorsed in return by) Ann Coulter, plus the "double guantanamo" statement he made that, and in general a willingness to engage in a kind of republican political rhetoric that was never really high to begin with but is really, really starting to show its wear. Then there's the point that we've already elected a single-term governor from a family dynasty with political connections who has experience in business and managing a sports franchise, and that didn't really didn't work out so well, now, did it? All in all, I'd have to be pretty desperate to vote for him.
He does seem like he's probably a good Mormon, though.:) But see, that's the thing. As a Mormon, I know lots of good Mormons who really, really shouldn't be president.
Mormons, at least in my experience, tend to be shiny happy people that don't really bother anyone. Even the ex-Mormons I've met seem to have few bad things to say and if they do, you can't help but notice there's a certain lingering nostalgia in their eyes. That's not to say their beliefs aren't loony, but if members of cults were as benign as the typical Mormon, I wonder if anyone would notice, or care.
There's two things that I think make Mormons like this. One is that the religion itself is seen very much by its members as a serious spiritual practice as much as anything else -- its cosmological aspects are tied up in that, and it has sociopolitical implications, but it's not a cosmology or sociopolitical blueprint first (there are times in its history when that has been less true, especially the first 60 years, but that's another point). My experience suggests to me that people who have a faith that they take seriously as a spiritual practice tend to also be as you describe -- nice, happy shiny people. This isn't to say I don't think Mormonism has anything particular to distinguish itself, but I think this is the most important element. Having a serious spiritual practice of some kind is grounding and can inspire a real tranquility knowing you have a strong idea about your place in the world and working to play that part as well as you can. Combine it with basic rules of common decency and you get good people.
The other thing -- Mormons have long been different enough (and indeed, for some portion of their history, genuinely persecuted and hated) that they really, really want to be accepted and legitimized by mainstream society. There's also a religious desire to be a "light of the world", "city on a hill" (Matthew 5:14-16) in their communities. It adds up to a desire to excel and succeed that's probably a tad beyond the protestant work ethic, and I think when that combines with the basic decency and spiritual grounding, it does produce people that are respected in their communities.
This is, however, a generalization, and as an insider, I see this community of mine as far from perfect. In particular, I've seen a lot of that desire to be legitimized and excel turn to elitism, materialism, and a misplaced sense of destiny that can border on a naive entitlement (interesting considering there are specific and serious warnings about this hazard in Mormon canon). And the collapsed quasi-Mormon cosmology that passes for political philosophy in staunch Republican Utah can be really, seriously crazy. I say all this partly to acknowledge it's not all shiny happy people
Has tendency to lock people up, either through social pressure or actual locked doors.
I understand and respect the perspective of people who don't find religion credible, but I find it very difficult to respect people who can't readily identify significant differences between social pressure and locked doors, or the Branch Davidians and the Baptists.
You might choose to believe all of it's coercive, but to miss the distinction between social pressure and force is to miss the distinction between a political party/idealogy and organized crime. And make no mistake, Scientology's machinations are much more like the later than the former.
This view is pithy and cute, and captures some degree of the truth that people are all too willing to apply pejoratives to unpopular things or groups they identify as external/other. But it's also functionally incorrect. The word cult is not merely a pejorative. There are real distinctions that can be made between "cult" and "religion", there are credible social scientists who make these distinctions not out of any desire to defend a particular faith but because the distinctions are useful to anyone genuinely studying the field.
No, that's completely not an option. Do you really think that the programmers at Microsoft aren't capable of writing a standards-compliant browser? I know a bunch of people who work there, and I am in no doubt that if they decided that what they should do is get a 100% standards accurate browser, they could do it faster and better than anyone else.
I'm sure some of the individuals there are capable of being part of a team that produces a standards compatible browser. However, there's simply no evidence that Microsoft as an organization is capable of delivering such a thing -- even the efforts they've put out when they led the pack (IE5 for the Mac was really advanced in support for the time, IE5 win was certainly beyond most windows options) have fallen far short, and IE7's progress has been absolutely underwhelming. My guess is that it's not that they don't have talent that could do it, but that the management and organizational will is just missing. Maybe that's a lot like saying "if they wanted to," but I think it's more like "if they wanted to, Lions could eat carrots." Probably true. Unlikely to happen.
It would in fact piss off all the people who have web apps which still rely on IE6 rendering bugs. Those people aren't going to accept "But your old apps were non-standard", their apps worked before and they want them to continue working.
Every version of IE has broken some sites coded for the previous version, but that's beside the point. It would only be slightly less trivial to use the gecko engine for rendering in IE8 and leave the old engine for 6, if slightly more bloated, certainly less work than wrangling the 6/7 codebase into real compliance.
However, they know that doing so wouldn't actually improve their market share.
Market share has nothing to do with this. IE can be branded as Microsoft IE no matter what rendering engine it uses (see: Geo/Chevy Prizm). So it's not a rationale. The only reason you need your own rendering platform these days is if you *plan* to do something that differs from standards efforts.
I agree with you that would have been the better thing to do, especially with foresight towards today's multi-browser universe. The thing is, that's not the environment they made their decision in. At the time, they had a chance to define the standard, and there are worse places to diverge than where the standard itself doesn't make a lot of sense.
What I think is particularly interesting is that your suggestion did find its way into the CSS3 working draft at some point via the "box-width" and "box-height" properties.... which seem to have been dropped in recent draft. Seems odd to me, given the quality of the idea. I have half an inkling that the problem is that someone on the working group is simply allergic to the idea (MS probably suggested it in the 90s, and it's definitely been suggested now, and it has obvious merit) for reasons that aren't clear.
If someone one hands you a standard to implement, you don't say, "hey that's stupid, I'm just going to do it this other way instead."
It depends on *how* stupid it is and what alternatives exist. This particular decision seems pretty stupid, and at the time it was issued, nobody was any more standards compliant than Microsoft was (in fact, MS led the pack for a while). And so MS probably had a good chance of establishing a better concept as the standard, and we might have even been better of if they'd pulled it off and the other browser makers followed suit.
And this brings us to a point I don't think a lot of MS critics understand. The most heinous thing about IE isn't that they sometimes implement their own standard, it's that a good deal of their implementation -- whether it be w3c or home-grown -- is half-assed enough that it's unecessarily difficult (if not impossible) to get the job done with the tools they give you. I don't care if that they have their own weird filter crap for doing opacity -- as long as it works. The bug that makes it so links don't work in containers with the alphaImage filter applied, though, that's blood-boiling. I'd *prefer* there to be standards agreement, but just having an equivalent reliable toolbox would be good enough, and the fact that MS can't follow through there is what bothers me so much about them. They essentially force devs to work on a platform that is not merely different, it's out-and-out broken, and that's the place where the real costs in terms of time and money pile up.
I could easily see support for 'exwidth' become a de-facto part of the standard and implemented in netscape/mozilla/firefox/whatever if enough people wanted it and enough pages used it.
Your suggestion is a good one, and was basically proposed for CSS 3, under the property names box-width and box-height. It even in a working draft, I think... and then it fell out again somehow. So, somebody on the working group apparently doesn't like it for some reason -- what, I can't imagine, I've certainly never heard any good justification for it.
and that would be fine too. (In that at least we wouldn't have the mess we're in now.)
As I said elsewhere, I really don't see the mess here so much. It would be *nice* if there were one box model, but since the proposed standard one is messed up, you already have to do manual calculation to know break the real box width into padding + content dimensions, adding a *height or *width property with the sum (or using a doctype that doesn't trigger quirks mode) really isn't more work.
I've mentioned two cons. I'm not aware of any pros, but I'd be happen to listen to arguments in favor of the w3c way of doing it and why they're compelling enough to justify the problems created.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm attempting to manage someone else's PHP code, and I can tell you it can be every bit as awful as maintaining alien Perl code. Throw in a spattering of CSS and DHTML
Stop right there, we have a winner.
In the first place, any decent developer knows dropping more than bare minimum HTML code into PHP (and vice versa) is a bad idea.
In the second place, many non-decent developers write horrid HTML. Nested tables, inlined styles, shim images, and font tags exploding all over the place....
I've walked away from good money rather than deal with it.
I think McCain is the best Presidential candidate I've seen in my lifetime.
I really wanted to like him too. I still do when I listen to him.
But before you vote for him, if you can, talk to people on Senate staff -- anyone who's ever worked for any senator, Democrat or Repbulican. There is a quiet but serious concern exuding from nearly everyone I know who's worked in a Senate office that McCain may not only be a *weak* candidate, he may actually be an unstable person. And the opinions I've heard relayed aren't just rooted in the inevitable political conflicts.
The Reagan "thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow republican" rule has already been tested in the primary. But if what I'm hearing is right, you're going to see something unusual soon: it will be tested *again*, over the months leading up to the election, even after the primary has been sewed up. Watch for be fewer endorsements, unusual crossovers, and possibly even some unusually public inside criticism.
It's true, and if they can live up to the claim, I think that's great.
However, this is Microsoft. Their behavior in the past has shown they're not above:
(1) hard-coding stuff to make test cases work
(2) bending definitions to claim compliance.
(3) announcing out-and-out vapor to intimidate competition
It's also good to remember they've never before delivered anything like what they're claiming to have.
If I were laying money on an outcome, it would be that IE 8 will continue to lag annoyingly behind the alternatives.
Developers, developers, developers, right?
I think Microsoft has finally genuinely started to realize a very simple fact:
Client-side web developers hate them.
And it's probably the one thing MS has thoroughly earned with all the IE bullsh*t over the last 10 years.
This is a really great gesture, it's a good start if they want to allay any of that and gain back trust. But honestly, nobody gets over 10 years of being treated like crap overnight, and the half-life of contempt isn't short.
Personally, I'd like to offer my congratulations to the IE Product management team, and let them know that in time, I'll probably only wish debilitating terminal illness on them, rather than painful and extended death by torture.
The real giveaway is when a given figure is a multiple of some well-known irrational number or physical constant.
I look forward to the development of advanced greenhouse-hospitals with remarkable amounts of sunlight.
And if so, what's your excuse?
(1) Spending some time out of town (in fact, the first time I did this, it wasn't an excuse, I was going to be away for months and wanted to take records to a doctor whose fax machine wasn't working).
(2) Going to get a second opinion
(3) Going to see a specialist
I think this is pretty interesting, because 100% of the time, I have to fight to get a solid copy of lab reports on blood work, and half the time the staff at the doctor's office (across several offices) will look at me like I'm some kind of freak because I want copies of my own medical tests and doctor's notes. I can ask that copies of whatever's produced by a test be sent to my home address as well as the ordering doctor's office and they never, ever come. Not once.
The only effective way I've found to actually get records is to tell them I want records faxed to another doctor... at a number I receive at.
If my experience is any indication, most patients don't have *access* to their own medical records, let alone control over them.
To have someone deny me that chance based on a childish rivalry would really upset me.
There's *so* much more going on here than that.
The most important thing is that Microsoft would destroy the company as it's known now. They'll mess with the back-end technology, swapping in their own, they'll merge some stuff with Windows Live and vice versa, they'll kill anything that's a threat to their desktop hold or they'll limit its prime interoperability to Microsoft products. Features will become dependent on IE and Silverlight.
In short, its goals will go from being a premiere portal and online services company to being anything that can maintain and enhance Microsoft's dominance. Lots of people who work there would rather work for the former than the later (and it *will* hemorrhage key employees if they're bought for that reason). And some of them even have a damn good argument that the company is worth more long term if it serves the former goal. It's not unlikely they'll achieve it, and especially as the desktop becomes less and less relevant, I think they have the potential to outdo Microsoft in terms of their worth.
Short term, of course, you can get quite a good cash-out on the offer MS made... especially compared to anything else available while the markets in general are struggling. And lots of suits and shareholders don't know how to think any other way than short-term gains.
Barack would say "I have considered your idea and think that this would be the result of your idea, so I have another idea that doesn't have the disadvantage your idea has." He is the only candidate I have seen that actually thinks an idea through. Everybody else (Republican and Democrat) seem to just throw ideas out that sound good, without thinking about it.
Oh, they think about it -- though other than that, I think your observation is very astute. Most political candidates have learned that engaging the public in genuine policy dialogue is hit-and-miss, and they've taken a lesson from that and abandoned it. Instead, they stake out policy positions, in part based on their leanings, figure out how to telegraph certain hot-button values and issues for the audiences they've targeted, and pound on those. In short, they more or less treat their public interaction primarily as an exercise in marketing/PR.
I wouldn't say Obama abstains from this. The truth is anybody who doesn't do this to some extent will have a very short career. But it seems obvious to me that along with that kind of action, he's decided to actually engage the public with some of the thinking behind the policy positions.
It's more than a little winning. It's always hard to say if the public persona matches the private reality, of course, but I'm willing to vote for him almost alone because if he wins, I think we'll see more of this as other politicians realize it can be winning style.
Simple moving money doesn't necessarily lead to economic growth, especially considering international trade where plenty of the money can end up moving overseas.
I was going to say the same thing about investment. Capital crosses borders as easily as goods.
Lending markets provide a great deal of the capital required for economic expansion, and if as you say lower/middle class spending doesn't drop as much then it makes even more sense to move to prop up the lending markets.
Focus on keeping money moving and you'll be doing it at the expense of encouraging further growth. At best the moving money approach largely maintains the current state while in reality it lends itself to "leaks". Instead let's look to the future, restoring growth by encouraging investment.
This *is* about encouraging investment. This idea seems funny if you think of investment as essentially a function of the amount of spare cash around, but while that's certainly a variable, it's just not the whole story. Estimated return on investment is more important than available capital.
And so here's the thing. If customers don't buy in, there is no real business growth. And in a recession, lower/middle class spending drops in large part because they just don't have the cash to buy in. Investor confidence is hammered by sales drops and other indications that a potential market just doesn't have the cash to spend, and investors become more cautious, even if they have more to invest.
Conversely, even if you were to cut the available pool of capital by 10% via gains taxes, if you have an economy where customers are buying, investment where they're buying will be attractive. And by letting sales lead capital, you also gain something of a benefit of stronger market forces driving the allocation of funds. Capital markets have their own market forces, but they're simply more speculative and therefore less efficient by nature.
Obviously, this breaks if you cut the pool of capital too drastically, and a better situation is one where the pool of capital is larger AND investment is attractive because of spending. But there's no action that can be taken to do both that doesn't have its own set of drawbacks inside a larger set of considerations.
And all that's not even considering that the current problem is centered in the lending markets... let's fix it at the source.
The lending market obviously really needs help, but its problems has have far less to do with capital gains taxes than they have to do with some seriously screwed up valuation and risk assessments driven by greed and formula over the last 10 years. No tax adjustment is going to change the fact that when the music stopped, not only did some of the players not have chairs (as they knew was part of the game), the players had lied to each other and themselves about the number of chairs. Nobody's gonna enthusiastically play the next round until they figure out how many chairs there really are -- even if people are willing to lend one or two more.
I don't think it's so far out. Tech issues underly quite a few other issues of economics and liberty, and those are certainly as important as foreign policy.
But I think there's an even bigger reason why tech workers *definitely* should be looking at how candidates understand and address issues they understand. Because this is the arena where *you* may actually know enough, as a professional, to really gauge a candidates policy acumen. I doubt most slashdotters are experts in military tactics or nation building. Most of us have a shallow grasp of economics -- yes, even most of you Austrian school autodidacts. Same goes for health care, education, criminology, etc -- Slashdot readers may be smart laymen, but that's all most of us are in those fields.
But lots of us are IT pros. And if a candidate seems to really get it in the area where you can tell buzzspeak and platitudes from real knowledge, that tells you quite a bit about their ability to reach into an issue, understand it, and formulate a plan to do something about it.
So, yeah. I think slashdotters should be concerned about tech issues.
So what you're saying is he wants to do his darnedest to make sure there's less money to expand businesses, less money to hire new employees
What this policy essentially says is that more of the money businesses use to hire or otherwise has to be won in the consumer market rather than lending/equity markets. There's evidence to suggest that in a recession lower/middle class spending drops less than investment does, so it makes sense to put the money where it will move.
implement the current texting business model yourself in a manner which benefits consumers better on a monetary scale
Whether or not *I* can do it is completely irrelevant to the point, which is that the mobile market isn't converging on efficiency, it's converging on what's either collusive pricing or just short of it, and the fact is that as soon as the wireless providers had data channel capability (GPRS, 1xRTT, doesn't matter), they had the capability to do extremely cheap text messaging. What keeps someone else from doing it right now is the fact that mobile devices are locked down to the point where it's often difficult for a layman to install a new app.
But if that changes, you can bet someone will meet exactly the challenge you've dealt out to me. The implementation will be almost trivial, the trick is adoption.
Well speaking as someone outside the US, wouldn't it show greater concern for your troops to not send them out to get shot at?
You'd think that this would be blindingly obvious, but for whatever reason, the idea that supporting the troops means supporting any war seems to have considerable traction.
I don't think it's *entirely* without merit. Telling someone they're fighting in a war that has a serious ethical or strategic problems isn't going to help their morale much.
But then again, most of us understand that when we tell someone their *boss* is incompetent or a little crazy or even somewhat crooked, we're not insulting them for working there.
Why that doesn't transfer over to the military, I don't know.
It's all about what the market will bear.
I thought we believed in free, competitive markets, and that we believed that their magic is such they drive towards lean efficiency which results in more cost effective goods and services for everyone.
What's that?
Oh.
Anyway, 90% of the music I download is not covered by SOCAN in the first place, how do those artists get their money?
This is quite possibly the most important question about the whole scheme, because the answer is that most of the artists won't, and that ruins the entire justification for it in the first place, before you even consider the other problems with the setup.
I've seen how this plays out with other collection rackets like ASCAP, and it's very clear that especially as you move down the long tail, artists don't get paid. I know artists who *know* for a fact, their songs are being played on the radio, or in a commercial concert setting, and they're not being paid for those performances because they're too small. I know for a fact that I have tried to *volunteer* royalties to an artist where I was using their work in a setting that wasn't already covered -- and I was turned away. They don't care unless the pickings are big enough, and they don't pay out unless you pass a prevailing statistical threshold. Even some reasonably successful artists don't.
In order to get this stuff right, you have to be tracking exactly what's going through the pipes. And that currently is only possible at a point of sale or broadcast (and I don't think the rentiers have even gotten as far as bringing precision into that realm).
So a tax like this would essentially create a signle online distribution pie, fixed in size by the number of internet users, divied up amongst basically whoever some appointed gatekeeper can justify.
Terrible idea. We have enough of this going on in the industry and I think it's probable most artists and the art would be better off entirely without the gatekeepers, even if it meant forgoing the entire revenue stream. Because for most artists, that's more or less what happens anyway.
Label-free production isn't a new thing -- we're probably at least a decade into the era where anybody could pick up the basic tools to produce an acceptable quality album for less than $3000, and really, that would have even bought you enough time in some conventional studios to have them do it. I've heard some good albums produced circa mid-90s this way.
And internet distribution isn't really that new anymore. That's also been happening to some degree since the late 90s, and it obviously had gathered considerable momentum by 3-4 years ago. We're not at the end of that trend, but once wireless data service becomes ubiquitous, it's pretty safe to say the old distribution channels (record stores & FM radio) will be outmatched.
But there's still going to be a significant distribution challenge, and that's marketing. If anything, I think it's possible it will get harder. I kindof wish I'd gotten myself together and produced something high quality about 3 years ago, because I think someday, people are going to look at 2000-2005 as the easiest period for an indie artist to get attention, just like 1997-2001 was the easiest period to get a start as a high profile blogger. The wide net of participants increasingly means greater competition for attention.
Some people will be willing and able to pay for people to help them get it. Something like a label will exist for that purpose for a long time.
Seriously. I'm not at all sure that having their patent case demolished is good enough.
This kind of blood-sucking behavior is so transparently in bad-faith, so anti-productive, and so greedy, that it ought to carry criminal penalties.
Like the people who throw in clauses that trigger penalties and ridiculous interest rates for early payoff on loans, these are not the kind of people who cooperate in a society, they're psychopathic parasites.
But for whatever reason, right now we live in a society that rewards them instead of punishing them.
Agreed, but have you have noticed that Mormons tend to be really nice people? I'm serious. It's like Romney -- no one can really find fault with him except to say his hair is too perfect, that he's just a successful businessman, or that he's Mormon.
:) But see, that's the thing. As a Mormon, I know lots of good Mormons who really, really shouldn't be president.
I'm a Mormon, and while I appreciate the kind generalization, I definitely find him lacking on a number of fronts, including his ability to say anything inspiring during faith-related discussion or respond coherently to attacks on that front. There's also the fact that his about-face on several issues seem so conveniently timed it seems likely he's being phony... plus there's his endorsement of (and being endorsed in return by) Ann Coulter, plus the "double guantanamo" statement he made that, and in general a willingness to engage in a kind of republican political rhetoric that was never really high to begin with but is really, really starting to show its wear. Then there's the point that we've already elected a single-term governor from a family dynasty with political connections who has experience in business and managing a sports franchise, and that didn't really didn't work out so well, now, did it? All in all, I'd have to be pretty desperate to vote for him.
He does seem like he's probably a good Mormon, though.
Mormons, at least in my experience, tend to be shiny happy people that don't really bother anyone. Even the ex-Mormons I've met seem to have few bad things to say and if they do, you can't help but notice there's a certain lingering nostalgia in their eyes. That's not to say their beliefs aren't loony, but if members of cults were as benign as the typical Mormon, I wonder if anyone would notice, or care.
There's two things that I think make Mormons like this. One is that the religion itself is seen very much by its members as a serious spiritual practice as much as anything else -- its cosmological aspects are tied up in that, and it has sociopolitical implications, but it's not a cosmology or sociopolitical blueprint first (there are times in its history when that has been less true, especially the first 60 years, but that's another point). My experience suggests to me that people who have a faith that they take seriously as a spiritual practice tend to also be as you describe -- nice, happy shiny people. This isn't to say I don't think Mormonism has anything particular to distinguish itself, but I think this is the most important element. Having a serious spiritual practice of some kind is grounding and can inspire a real tranquility knowing you have a strong idea about your place in the world and working to play that part as well as you can. Combine it with basic rules of common decency and you get good people.
The other thing -- Mormons have long been different enough (and indeed, for some portion of their history, genuinely persecuted and hated) that they really, really want to be accepted and legitimized by mainstream society. There's also a religious desire to be a "light of the world", "city on a hill" (Matthew 5:14-16) in their communities. It adds up to a desire to excel and succeed that's probably a tad beyond the protestant work ethic, and I think when that combines with the basic decency and spiritual grounding, it does produce people that are respected in their communities.
This is, however, a generalization, and as an insider, I see this community of mine as far from perfect. In particular, I've seen a lot of that desire to be legitimized and excel turn to elitism, materialism, and a misplaced sense of destiny that can border on a naive entitlement (interesting considering there are specific and serious warnings about this hazard in Mormon canon). And the collapsed quasi-Mormon cosmology that passes for political philosophy in staunch Republican Utah can be really, seriously crazy. I say all this partly to acknowledge it's not all shiny happy people
Has tendency to lock people up, either through social pressure or actual locked doors.
I understand and respect the perspective of people who don't find religion credible, but I find it very difficult to respect people who can't readily identify significant differences between social pressure and locked doors, or the Branch Davidians and the Baptists.
You might choose to believe all of it's coercive, but to miss the distinction between social pressure and force is to miss the distinction between a political party/idealogy and organized crime. And make no mistake, Scientology's machinations are much more like the later than the former.
This view is pithy and cute, and captures some degree of the truth that people are all too willing to apply pejoratives to unpopular things or groups they identify as external/other. But it's also functionally incorrect. The word cult is not merely a pejorative. There are real distinctions that can be made between "cult" and "religion", there are credible social scientists who make these distinctions not out of any desire to defend a particular faith but because the distinctions are useful to anyone genuinely studying the field.
No, that's completely not an option. Do you really think that the programmers at Microsoft aren't capable of writing a standards-compliant browser? I know a bunch of people who work there, and I am in no doubt that if they decided that what they should do is get a 100% standards accurate browser, they could do it faster and better than anyone else.
I'm sure some of the individuals there are capable of being part of a team that produces a standards compatible browser. However, there's simply no evidence that Microsoft as an organization is capable of delivering such a thing -- even the efforts they've put out when they led the pack (IE5 for the Mac was really advanced in support for the time, IE5 win was certainly beyond most windows options) have fallen far short, and IE7's progress has been absolutely underwhelming. My guess is that it's not that they don't have talent that could do it, but that the management and organizational will is just missing. Maybe that's a lot like saying "if they wanted to," but I think it's more like "if they wanted to, Lions could eat carrots." Probably true. Unlikely to happen.
It would in fact piss off all the people who have web apps which still rely on IE6 rendering bugs. Those people aren't going to accept "But your old apps were non-standard", their apps worked before and they want them to continue working.
Every version of IE has broken some sites coded for the previous version, but that's beside the point. It would only be slightly less trivial to use the gecko engine for rendering in IE8 and leave the old engine for 6, if slightly more bloated, certainly less work than wrangling the 6/7 codebase into real compliance.
However, they know that doing so wouldn't actually improve their market share.
Market share has nothing to do with this. IE can be branded as Microsoft IE no matter what rendering engine it uses (see: Geo/Chevy Prizm). So it's not a rationale. The only reason you need your own rendering platform these days is if you *plan* to do something that differs from standards efforts.
I agree with you that would have been the better thing to do, especially with foresight towards today's multi-browser universe. The thing is, that's not the environment they made their decision in. At the time, they had a chance to define the standard, and there are worse places to diverge than where the standard itself doesn't make a lot of sense.
What I think is particularly interesting is that your suggestion did find its way into the CSS3 working draft at some point via the "box-width" and "box-height" properties.... which seem to have been dropped in recent draft. Seems odd to me, given the quality of the idea. I have half an inkling that the problem is that someone on the working group is simply allergic to the idea (MS probably suggested it in the 90s, and it's definitely been suggested now, and it has obvious merit) for reasons that aren't clear.
If someone one hands you a standard to implement, you don't say, "hey that's stupid, I'm just going to do it this other way instead."
It depends on *how* stupid it is and what alternatives exist. This particular decision seems pretty stupid, and at the time it was issued, nobody was any more standards compliant than Microsoft was (in fact, MS led the pack for a while). And so MS probably had a good chance of establishing a better concept as the standard, and we might have even been better of if they'd pulled it off and the other browser makers followed suit.
And this brings us to a point I don't think a lot of MS critics understand. The most heinous thing about IE isn't that they sometimes implement their own standard, it's that a good deal of their implementation -- whether it be w3c or home-grown -- is half-assed enough that it's unecessarily difficult (if not impossible) to get the job done with the tools they give you. I don't care if that they have their own weird filter crap for doing opacity -- as long as it works. The bug that makes it so links don't work in containers with the alphaImage filter applied, though, that's blood-boiling. I'd *prefer* there to be standards agreement, but just having an equivalent reliable toolbox would be good enough, and the fact that MS can't follow through there is what bothers me so much about them. They essentially force devs to work on a platform that is not merely different, it's out-and-out broken, and that's the place where the real costs in terms of time and money pile up.
I could easily see support for 'exwidth' become a de-facto part of the standard and implemented in netscape/mozilla/firefox/whatever if enough people wanted it and enough pages used it.
Your suggestion is a good one, and was basically proposed for CSS 3, under the property names box-width and box-height. It even in a working draft, I think... and then it fell out again somehow. So, somebody on the working group apparently doesn't like it for some reason -- what, I can't imagine, I've certainly never heard any good justification for it.
and that would be fine too. (In that at least we wouldn't have the mess we're in now.)
As I said elsewhere, I really don't see the mess here so much. It would be *nice* if there were one box model, but since the proposed standard one is messed up, you already have to do manual calculation to know break the real box width into padding + content dimensions, adding a *height or *width property with the sum (or using a doctype that doesn't trigger quirks mode) really isn't more work.
That's debatable.
I've mentioned two cons. I'm not aware of any pros, but I'd be happen to listen to arguments in favor of the w3c way of doing it and why they're compelling enough to justify the problems created.