I agree with you but how does Google Chrome succeed? "You can't try to get market share and killa release in 3 month"
Lack of plugins - or at least being much less common and quite possibly with a more stable API/ABI. A "security update" that breaks plugins is a sure-fire way to catch Firefox users between a rock and a hard place. It's a typical case of developers coding for developers - who are all on a very recent version and can fix what's broken for them - instead of regular users. Keep going like this and they'll be the #3 browser by Christmas...
So, if American hacks into Chinese server, you agree that it will be ok to extradite said American to China?
So if a Chinese hacks into an American server, you agree they should be immune from prosecution by US courts? It's easy when you want it to work just one way, it's harder when you realize that they won't give up their citizens unless you give up yours. If you're shielding your criminals from our justice system, we'll do the same. I'm not saying it doesn't have complications, but the lack of extradition treaties often means that people get away with everything, including murder. Most extradition treaties require the act to be illegal under both laws, so yes you could be extradited for hacking servers but not badmouthing the Thai king.
Preliminary for june 2010-2011 here. Changes from May:
Chrome: +1.08% IE: -0.25% Firefox: -0.79%
After six months in the lead in Europe, Firefox is now again behind IE. They're backing on every continent except Africa (+0.2%). I don't think rapid-fire will work any better if you don't have the bullets.
Every. Single. Country. who has a longer life expectancy than the US has a nationalized healthcare system that costs much less than ours. Why the HELL aren't the Dems hammering on this point?
Probably because it'll get worse before it gets better. Our system works because it's one system covering everyone, period. The US finally decided to take up one of the good sides - to cover everyone - but ignored the most important part, nobody's playing hot potato with the sick patients. It's not a game to get rid of the unprofitable insurance holders or deny or delay their claims. Patients with relatively small issues get evicted and so grow to having serious conditions because they lack treatment. In short, treatment is given on very different reasons than what would be medically and socioeconomically efficient. Right now the US is picking up burning hot potatoes and it'll be a wild shuffle not be the one stuck with them.
If the US was to get anywhere, like really get anywhere, they would have to nationalize basic healthcare, put all the medical insurance companies out of business - or at least into the much smaller, private extra care market that covers maybe 5% of the market. And that won't happen, the public support isn't there. Sadly I think the republicans got this one right where they want it, they had to let it happen but made it happen in a way that will fail spectacularly and so make sure the US doesn't try it again. That would at least be my prediction of where this is going as soon as the Republicans take over in 2012, unless there's been a major improvement in the economy.
The US unemployment figures are lying badly. What you should be looking is the employment-population ratio. In normal years it should be 62-63%, in December 2009 it hit a low of 58.2% of the population was employed, last month 58.4% in other words the US hasn't recovered at all. I don't think any president could manage to sit through that. And after they take over, the health reform is getting buried. Or turned into an even worse abomination to really drive the point home.
On a wild guess, I'd say a developer commented out some critical authentication code for testing, it somehow pushed to production and the fix was a simple "OMG turn that back on" - five minutes sounds about right for restoring a good version.
There's only one benevolent dictator for life, at that is Linus. One of the subsystem maintainers would probably take over the role as project leader after a vote, but he'd not have nearly the same authority. I don't see the project overall going anywhere though, the entire structure, team and commercial backing would still be there - would Windows or OS X collapse if the lead guy disappeared? By the GPL there's not many other ways to run it than as open source collaboration.
The only thing I see is an increased risk of forks, right now you'd have to have balls the size of a small planet to try a true fork - and not merely a branch to ship a product or try some experimental feature, but one that tries taking over Linux development. It could fracture like the BSDs, but I doubt it. Driver developers and such want one target, not many so I think it'd quickly gravitate back towards one dominant version where most the work happens.
At a late 1970s American Bar Association seminar in New York,[1] Richard "Racehorse" Haynes gave this example: "Say you sue me because you say my dog bit you. Well, now this is my defense: My dog doesn't bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don't believe you really got bit. And fourth, I don't have a dog." Normally such arguments would seem to cancel each other on their face, however, legally "even if" and "anyway" clauses need not be argued; mutually exclusive defenses can be advanced without excuses for their relationship to each other. Of course jurists might be influenced by dual defenses such as "my dog was tied up" and "I don't have a dog", but this must be weighed against the fact that defenses may not be allowed if they are introduced too late.
So formally, there's no reason to complain - but you're not doing your credibility any favors by doing so.
High tech care may be a mixed blessing, but what we do know for certain is that human care will get worse. The ratio of working population to retirees will change a lot over the next 30 years, Already nurses and home aid are on the stop watch, you can't make it that much more effective to matter. Meanwhile a lot of the industry has gone from making a thousand to a million units with robots, automation and computers. A gadget will be getting cheaper and cheaper while human time gets more and more expensive. Politicians can lie as much as they like but looking at the fundamentals you see that it is inevitable.
Those that fight to have their own child, stay in the gene pool. Those that don't and raise someone else's, exit the gene pool. You don't get much stronger evolutionary pressure than that. Also from what I've heard it's not that hard to find people to adopt babies or very young children. Those you find in foster care are often older, taken out of their home because they've suffered neglect, abuse or molestation and alcoholics or junkies as parents. As a result many of them have developed huge problems of their own, which many people are reluctant to adopt. And if you end up with someone that's already in the rebellious phase who likes to point out you're not his real parents, well the amount of bonding you get will be limited. Even if people got other the part about having their own child, don't expect the institutions to be empty.
The case you're thinking of had nothing to do with X years being "limited" and X+n years being "unlimited". Instead, the case had to do with Congress extending the term of copyright not only on new works but on existing works as well. (...) Otherwise, copyrights set to expire after X years could be extended indefinitely through acts of Congress, thus rendering "limited times" a meaningless term.
If you say X+n years on new works is constitutional then that means X+n years has always been within the definition of "limited times", even if past laws have had shorter protection. The whole reductio ad absurdum argument relies on the flawed assumption that if one copyright extension is constitutional, then they are all constitutional thus leading to indefinite copyright.
The logic here is like saying that if Congress could raise fines they could raise them excessively high which would violate the 8th amendment, thus Congress can't raise fines. That is of course complete bollocks, if they're not excessive it is okay. Same with copyright, they can change it within the constitutional bounds and if X+n is within for new works it's within for old works.
After all it does say limited, that is bounded or confined. It has never said fixed, static or immutable. That is a much stricter requirement than staying within some bound and simply not what it says. But I'd sure like to meet the guy who thinks writing something at 20, dying at 100 + 70 = 150 years of copyright is anything like "limited"...
I don't think you need to be a rocket scientist to know that gambling sites take in more money than they give out. While of course people wouldn't mind getting rich, I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding that so many do it for the outcome. Many, if not most people are hooked on the gambling itself, seeing the lights spin, the excitement of the dealer flipping the cards, your heart racing as you wonder if they'll call your bluff or not.
One of my former colleagues is a pretty serious snowboarder, knows a lot of people that went on to do it professionally and many of them play poker for quite serious amounts of money - even the ones that are just breaking even or less. Why? Because of the adrenaline rush, it's exactly the same people that need to do a 720 double backflip to get their kicks. The only time I've done anything similar is when I bought my apartment, thousands of dollars flying in bidding rounds. Honestly I'm not made to throw that kind of money around, but I can see the rush as my heart was pounding.
No. The only reason it's a remotely good science fiction toy is because the robots self-replicate or assimilate - usually by magictech. Built what's essentially a machine gun turret on wheels and it'd be much more effective than a million toy soldiers.
It's just one of the charms of slashdot, at least half the people here think they're ready to be a Supreme Court judge. Particularly when it comes to stretching the constitution so far that they can strike down something Congress did that they disapprove of.
To take one example, what should "limited time" in the copyright clause amount to? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years? There's nothing a court could latch onto and say 49,9 years is limited and 50,1 years is "unlimited". Now, I'm very much for copyright reform but it's Congress that has to pass it, not trying to divine an exact, maximum limit from an extremely vague wording.
Since a company is nothing but a piece of paper, unlike humans, they can be converted from one use to a totally different one.
So can people. And it honestly matters just as little if the mafia boss or drug lord did a honest day's work once before turning to crime, it's what they are now.
...Judge Posner is incorrect. One most certainly can "just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say 'I've lost $130 million.'" That's the problem with the our legal system. Patent trolls do it all the time.
I'd never thought I'd come to the defense of patent trolls, but that is based on what the one who has used it illegally has made, not the one who wrote it. Otherwise you could just take whatever GPL code you can find and say "They've given it away, so their revenue losses are $0 and there's no damages to pay". Could $megacorp have earned $130 million on the patented technology? Yes. Then that belongs to the patent holder. Claiming that your business has suffered $130 million in losses on the other hand requires that you've actually lost $130 millions in revenue - which a fly-by-night, nothing company has not. Unless you can convince the court that without this vicious action your company would have been the next Facebook, but that's an extremely tough sell. Of course it's good that you don't award money to pipe dreams, but it also means you sometimes end up with tactical lawsuits - drain the small challenger's war chest and even if you lose they don't get fully compensated for the growth they could have had.
Personally I'm guessing that's just as much Microsoft competing with "themselves" in forms of pirate versions and people staying on old Office versions. I've worked with a lot of mid size organizations and never seen one whiff of OpenOffice. Staying on old Office versions? Sure, ancient even. Some of that is of course all the compatibility checking, processes, training and so on but cost is very clearly an issue.
Same with Vista, according to statcounter it peaked at about 24% of web browsing computers, even though people were running an OS from 2001. It works, why should we bother to upgrade it? And unlike OS vulnerabilities there doesn't seem to be many macro viruses or other exploits in documents anymore and most of that problem you can block at the email server.
I've tried every Office version from 97 to 2010... maybe some Excel gurus would like 2010 but as far as I'm concerned - and apparently my use is considered advanced but I don't think so - I can get everything I need done at least as far back as Office 2003, possibly even older. For existing businesses who already have a license I see no compelling reason to upgrade. That's who Microsoft is primarily competing against.
The situation isn't really much different than the.com domain today. That's the one everyone wants, now it'll be the TLD. If you're late you get shinyspatulas or shinycars instead of shiny, is it really all that complicated?
Actually, more a latency problem than a bandwidth problem. It's that the pyramid of L1-2-3 cache and system ram is quite a few cycles from the CPU. You can see with multi-core systems that they scale quite nicely as long as you are running well multi-threaded code.
The other question is of course how much of the bottleneck is between chair and keyboard. Very often they'll complain if the computer takes 5 seconds to do some heavy processing while they happily goof off for 5 minutes. And it's not like computers practically lock up under load anymore, you can always do other things while it's working.
Most importantly I've found is that most external companies have no incentive to pay back technical debt. They'd rather have alerts and actions and incidents they can use to bill the customer. They play the numbers solving all the easy cases while the serious ones are left to rot as long as they don't fall below some given response rates. Also, they're strictly sticking to scope because it's on ad hoc work and extra work they can afford their low base prices while the IT department does it more as part of the job. If you think trying to push around an IT department is hard, try a cloud vendor. Now there won't only be the regular problems but a huge legal and billing adventure ahead. The blame game can be bad inside a company too, but at least there some senior exec can tell both departments to get their ass in gear and that the costs will be sorted out afterwards. In at least 95 of 100 cases when you do that with a vendor it means the client will pay, maybe with a token discount. Usually after you've realized you lose even more waiting for the laywers to work it out. At least if you're going to do it, be a big customer for them. Being a small fry customer with a big vendor is just doomed to dissatisfaction.
They're not really that mutually exclusive, fiat money is only representations of value unlike coins of precious metals. If anyone could print dollar bills, the value would be almost zero. However, that is not enough or the Zimbabwean dollar (2008) or the Papiermark (1920s Germany) wouldn't collapse. Sure there are taxes but that use case is marginal, in any collapsed economy you could get enough "junk money" to pay those with a few US dollars.
As weak as the dollar has been lately, it would be very difficult for it to lose all or most of its value overnight
Practically impossible, because there's a huge domestic market with wages in dollars, stores in dollars, loans in dollars, people that will continue to need dollars no matter if it collapses on the international market. Speculators can forego the USD completely and trade in euro or yen or huan or gold or whatever, but most people can't.
That's the essence of what's wrong with Bitcoin, there's no sand in the machinery so to speak. There's nothing to give the short time assurance - like between when you get your paycheck and pay your bills - that the currency will be remotely stable. Without that nobody but speculators will use it, and they'll only be speculating against each other which is a zero-sum game.
I believe that I should be able to choose the sort of law I want to be bound by in any contract that I enter into. I can already do this in business contracts, so why should I not be able to do this with myself?
Contracts are voluntary. But if you're walking down the street and I decide to rob you or beat the shit out of you then we can't agree on a choice of law afterwards. Would you really like to enter another jurisdiction who could have its own absurd laws every time you enter a store? What about on the road, what rules apply when two jurisdictions crash at 55 mph? Contracts are simple to avoid, simply don't agree to anything. But it'd be pretty hard to coexist with other people without laws.
If any private party can claim police power, they can also claim the right to search your property and papers. Oh, and any complaint of illegal searches would go to the same system. That's the end of the 4th amendment.
No State monopoly on Law No State monopoly on courts
I guess you don't believe much in the "with liberty and justice for all" thing. I'd rather not be hauled before a kangaroo court or get no protection if I have no protection money, thank you very much.
No State theft of resources (Taxation)
Without income, there's no public services whatsoever. Go to Somalia or some other anarchist state if that's your ideal society.
Yet another country where the people have been reduced to the level of property; the property of the State.
There are equally bad or worse fates, like being the property of your parents. Children are not pets and even pets have laws against animal cruelty. Any state that lets children grow up with no minimum standard of education is neglecting that child and its human rights. They may be your offspring but they are not your prisoner - physically, intellectually or otherwise. If I was to use as much hyperbole as you, I'd say you demand the right to brainwash your children. My country, Norway, has also outlawed home schooling but there are private schools like Montessori or Waldorf education. They have to document a competent staff, their plans and methods of teaching and adherence to minimum guidelines set forth by the government. And I think it's a good thing, YMMV.
It still amazes me how people seek legislative solutions to what are purely technical problems. Hey politicians: you're doing it wrong.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Politicians pass laws, thus the solution to any problem is to pass laws. I just had the same today from an IT guy who wanted to use an IT solution to solve an error, without realizing it would make the system work but the data utterly useless.
Extra funny that he likes to say "assumption is the mother of all fuckups", yet his solution to that is going so fast you don't even realize the assumptions are flying by. It works much like ramming your head into a brick wall rather than find your way around it.
I think we need a period where products sold in the USA have to be 100% made in the USA, from the first stroke of the pen to the last decal on the front panel.
The problem is that trade is a two way street, if the US refuse access to their markets the rest of the world would retaliate. There would be two large and immediate effects, the Wal-Marts would be empty and a lot of people would scream at vastly increased living costs. The second is that what the US has left of export industry would die causing more unemployment. In time the domestic market might recover but I think long after the one who started it has been tarred and feathered, if not hung from the nearest tree.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you but how does Google Chrome succeed? "You can't try to get market share and killa release in 3 month"
Lack of plugins - or at least being much less common and quite possibly with a more stable API/ABI. A "security update" that breaks plugins is a sure-fire way to catch Firefox users between a rock and a hard place. It's a typical case of developers coding for developers - who are all on a very recent version and can fix what's broken for them - instead of regular users. Keep going like this and they'll be the #3 browser by Christmas...
So, if American hacks into Chinese server, you agree that it will be ok to extradite said American to China?
So if a Chinese hacks into an American server, you agree they should be immune from prosecution by US courts? It's easy when you want it to work just one way, it's harder when you realize that they won't give up their citizens unless you give up yours. If you're shielding your criminals from our justice system, we'll do the same. I'm not saying it doesn't have complications, but the lack of extradition treaties often means that people get away with everything, including murder. Most extradition treaties require the act to be illegal under both laws, so yes you could be extradited for hacking servers but not badmouthing the Thai king.
Preliminary for june 2010-2011 here. Changes from May:
Chrome: +1.08%
IE: -0.25%
Firefox: -0.79%
After six months in the lead in Europe, Firefox is now again behind IE. They're backing on every continent except Africa (+0.2%). I don't think rapid-fire will work any better if you don't have the bullets.
Every. Single. Country. who has a longer life expectancy than the US has a nationalized healthcare system that costs much less than ours. Why the HELL aren't the Dems hammering on this point?
Probably because it'll get worse before it gets better. Our system works because it's one system covering everyone, period. The US finally decided to take up one of the good sides - to cover everyone - but ignored the most important part, nobody's playing hot potato with the sick patients. It's not a game to get rid of the unprofitable insurance holders or deny or delay their claims. Patients with relatively small issues get evicted and so grow to having serious conditions because they lack treatment. In short, treatment is given on very different reasons than what would be medically and socioeconomically efficient. Right now the US is picking up burning hot potatoes and it'll be a wild shuffle not be the one stuck with them.
If the US was to get anywhere, like really get anywhere, they would have to nationalize basic healthcare, put all the medical insurance companies out of business - or at least into the much smaller, private extra care market that covers maybe 5% of the market. And that won't happen, the public support isn't there. Sadly I think the republicans got this one right where they want it, they had to let it happen but made it happen in a way that will fail spectacularly and so make sure the US doesn't try it again. That would at least be my prediction of where this is going as soon as the Republicans take over in 2012, unless there's been a major improvement in the economy.
The US unemployment figures are lying badly. What you should be looking is the employment-population ratio. In normal years it should be 62-63%, in December 2009 it hit a low of 58.2% of the population was employed, last month 58.4% in other words the US hasn't recovered at all. I don't think any president could manage to sit through that. And after they take over, the health reform is getting buried. Or turned into an even worse abomination to really drive the point home.
On a wild guess, I'd say a developer commented out some critical authentication code for testing, it somehow pushed to production and the fix was a simple "OMG turn that back on" - five minutes sounds about right for restoring a good version.
There's only one benevolent dictator for life, at that is Linus. One of the subsystem maintainers would probably take over the role as project leader after a vote, but he'd not have nearly the same authority. I don't see the project overall going anywhere though, the entire structure, team and commercial backing would still be there - would Windows or OS X collapse if the lead guy disappeared? By the GPL there's not many other ways to run it than as open source collaboration.
The only thing I see is an increased risk of forks, right now you'd have to have balls the size of a small planet to try a true fork - and not merely a branch to ship a product or try some experimental feature, but one that tries taking over Linux development. It could fracture like the BSDs, but I doubt it. Driver developers and such want one target, not many so I think it'd quickly gravitate back towards one dominant version where most the work happens.
I'm disappointed that the judge didn't slap them around a bit for working their way through three contradictory theories.
I'm aware this is a German court and not the US, but at least in the US you can claim alternative mutually exclusive defenses.
At a late 1970s American Bar Association seminar in New York,[1] Richard "Racehorse" Haynes gave this example: "Say you sue me because you say my dog bit you. Well, now this is my defense: My dog doesn't bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don't believe you really got bit. And fourth, I don't have a dog." Normally such arguments would seem to cancel each other on their face, however, legally "even if" and "anyway" clauses need not be argued; mutually exclusive defenses can be advanced without excuses for their relationship to each other. Of course jurists might be influenced by dual defenses such as "my dog was tied up" and "I don't have a dog", but this must be weighed against the fact that defenses may not be allowed if they are introduced too late.
So formally, there's no reason to complain - but you're not doing your credibility any favors by doing so.
High tech care may be a mixed blessing, but what we do know for certain is that human care will get worse. The ratio of working population to retirees will change a lot over the next 30 years, Already nurses and home aid are on the stop watch, you can't make it that much more effective to matter. Meanwhile a lot of the industry has gone from making a thousand to a million units with robots, automation and computers. A gadget will be getting cheaper and cheaper while human time gets more and more expensive. Politicians can lie as much as they like but looking at the fundamentals you see that it is inevitable.
Those that fight to have their own child, stay in the gene pool. Those that don't and raise someone else's, exit the gene pool. You don't get much stronger evolutionary pressure than that. Also from what I've heard it's not that hard to find people to adopt babies or very young children. Those you find in foster care are often older, taken out of their home because they've suffered neglect, abuse or molestation and alcoholics or junkies as parents. As a result many of them have developed huge problems of their own, which many people are reluctant to adopt. And if you end up with someone that's already in the rebellious phase who likes to point out you're not his real parents, well the amount of bonding you get will be limited. Even if people got other the part about having their own child, don't expect the institutions to be empty.
The case you're thinking of had nothing to do with X years being "limited" and X+n years being "unlimited". Instead, the case had to do with Congress extending the term of copyright not only on new works but on existing works as well. (...) Otherwise, copyrights set to expire after X years could be extended indefinitely through acts of Congress, thus rendering "limited times" a meaningless term.
If you say X+n years on new works is constitutional then that means X+n years has always been within the definition of "limited times", even if past laws have had shorter protection. The whole reductio ad absurdum argument relies on the flawed assumption that if one copyright extension is constitutional, then they are all constitutional thus leading to indefinite copyright.
The logic here is like saying that if Congress could raise fines they could raise them excessively high which would violate the 8th amendment, thus Congress can't raise fines. That is of course complete bollocks, if they're not excessive it is okay. Same with copyright, they can change it within the constitutional bounds and if X+n is within for new works it's within for old works.
After all it does say limited, that is bounded or confined. It has never said fixed, static or immutable. That is a much stricter requirement than staying within some bound and simply not what it says. But I'd sure like to meet the guy who thinks writing something at 20, dying at 100 + 70 = 150 years of copyright is anything like "limited"...
I don't think you need to be a rocket scientist to know that gambling sites take in more money than they give out. While of course people wouldn't mind getting rich, I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding that so many do it for the outcome. Many, if not most people are hooked on the gambling itself, seeing the lights spin, the excitement of the dealer flipping the cards, your heart racing as you wonder if they'll call your bluff or not.
One of my former colleagues is a pretty serious snowboarder, knows a lot of people that went on to do it professionally and many of them play poker for quite serious amounts of money - even the ones that are just breaking even or less. Why? Because of the adrenaline rush, it's exactly the same people that need to do a 720 double backflip to get their kicks. The only time I've done anything similar is when I bought my apartment, thousands of dollars flying in bidding rounds. Honestly I'm not made to throw that kind of money around, but I can see the rush as my heart was pounding.
No. The only reason it's a remotely good science fiction toy is because the robots self-replicate or assimilate - usually by magictech. Built what's essentially a machine gun turret on wheels and it'd be much more effective than a million toy soldiers.
It's just one of the charms of slashdot, at least half the people here think they're ready to be a Supreme Court judge. Particularly when it comes to stretching the constitution so far that they can strike down something Congress did that they disapprove of.
To take one example, what should "limited time" in the copyright clause amount to? 1 year? 10 years? 100 years? 1000 years? There's nothing a court could latch onto and say 49,9 years is limited and 50,1 years is "unlimited". Now, I'm very much for copyright reform but it's Congress that has to pass it, not trying to divine an exact, maximum limit from an extremely vague wording.
Since a company is nothing but a piece of paper, unlike humans, they can be converted from one use to a totally different one.
So can people. And it honestly matters just as little if the mafia boss or drug lord did a honest day's work once before turning to crime, it's what they are now.
...Judge Posner is incorrect. One most certainly can "just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say 'I've lost $130 million.'" That's the problem with the our legal system. Patent trolls do it all the time.
I'd never thought I'd come to the defense of patent trolls, but that is based on what the one who has used it illegally has made, not the one who wrote it. Otherwise you could just take whatever GPL code you can find and say "They've given it away, so their revenue losses are $0 and there's no damages to pay". Could $megacorp have earned $130 million on the patented technology? Yes. Then that belongs to the patent holder. Claiming that your business has suffered $130 million in losses on the other hand requires that you've actually lost $130 millions in revenue - which a fly-by-night, nothing company has not. Unless you can convince the court that without this vicious action your company would have been the next Facebook, but that's an extremely tough sell. Of course it's good that you don't award money to pipe dreams, but it also means you sometimes end up with tactical lawsuits - drain the small challenger's war chest and even if you lose they don't get fully compensated for the growth they could have had.
Personally I'm guessing that's just as much Microsoft competing with "themselves" in forms of pirate versions and people staying on old Office versions. I've worked with a lot of mid size organizations and never seen one whiff of OpenOffice. Staying on old Office versions? Sure, ancient even. Some of that is of course all the compatibility checking, processes, training and so on but cost is very clearly an issue.
Same with Vista, according to statcounter it peaked at about 24% of web browsing computers, even though people were running an OS from 2001. It works, why should we bother to upgrade it? And unlike OS vulnerabilities there doesn't seem to be many macro viruses or other exploits in documents anymore and most of that problem you can block at the email server.
I've tried every Office version from 97 to 2010... maybe some Excel gurus would like 2010 but as far as I'm concerned - and apparently my use is considered advanced but I don't think so - I can get everything I need done at least as far back as Office 2003, possibly even older. For existing businesses who already have a license I see no compelling reason to upgrade. That's who Microsoft is primarily competing against.
The situation isn't really much different than the .com domain today. That's the one everyone wants, now it'll be the TLD. If you're late you get shinyspatulas or shinycars instead of shiny, is it really all that complicated?
Actually, more a latency problem than a bandwidth problem. It's that the pyramid of L1-2-3 cache and system ram is quite a few cycles from the CPU. You can see with multi-core systems that they scale quite nicely as long as you are running well multi-threaded code.
The other question is of course how much of the bottleneck is between chair and keyboard. Very often they'll complain if the computer takes 5 seconds to do some heavy processing while they happily goof off for 5 minutes. And it's not like computers practically lock up under load anymore, you can always do other things while it's working.
Most importantly I've found is that most external companies have no incentive to pay back technical debt. They'd rather have alerts and actions and incidents they can use to bill the customer. They play the numbers solving all the easy cases while the serious ones are left to rot as long as they don't fall below some given response rates. Also, they're strictly sticking to scope because it's on ad hoc work and extra work they can afford their low base prices while the IT department does it more as part of the job. If you think trying to push around an IT department is hard, try a cloud vendor. Now there won't only be the regular problems but a huge legal and billing adventure ahead. The blame game can be bad inside a company too, but at least there some senior exec can tell both departments to get their ass in gear and that the costs will be sorted out afterwards. In at least 95 of 100 cases when you do that with a vendor it means the client will pay, maybe with a token discount. Usually after you've realized you lose even more waiting for the laywers to work it out. At least if you're going to do it, be a big customer for them. Being a small fry customer with a big vendor is just doomed to dissatisfaction.
They're not really that mutually exclusive, fiat money is only representations of value unlike coins of precious metals. If anyone could print dollar bills, the value would be almost zero. However, that is not enough or the Zimbabwean dollar (2008) or the Papiermark (1920s Germany) wouldn't collapse. Sure there are taxes but that use case is marginal, in any collapsed economy you could get enough "junk money" to pay those with a few US dollars.
As weak as the dollar has been lately, it would be very difficult for it to lose all or most of its value overnight
Practically impossible, because there's a huge domestic market with wages in dollars, stores in dollars, loans in dollars, people that will continue to need dollars no matter if it collapses on the international market. Speculators can forego the USD completely and trade in euro or yen or huan or gold or whatever, but most people can't.
That's the essence of what's wrong with Bitcoin, there's no sand in the machinery so to speak. There's nothing to give the short time assurance - like between when you get your paycheck and pay your bills - that the currency will be remotely stable. Without that nobody but speculators will use it, and they'll only be speculating against each other which is a zero-sum game.
I believe that I should be able to choose the sort of law I want to be bound by in any contract that I enter into. I can already do this in business contracts, so why should I not be able to do this with myself?
Contracts are voluntary. But if you're walking down the street and I decide to rob you or beat the shit out of you then we can't agree on a choice of law afterwards. Would you really like to enter another jurisdiction who could have its own absurd laws every time you enter a store? What about on the road, what rules apply when two jurisdictions crash at 55 mph? Contracts are simple to avoid, simply don't agree to anything. But it'd be pretty hard to coexist with other people without laws.
No State monopoly on security / police
If any private party can claim police power, they can also claim the right to search your property and papers. Oh, and any complaint of illegal searches would go to the same system. That's the end of the 4th amendment.
No State monopoly on Law
No State monopoly on courts
I guess you don't believe much in the "with liberty and justice for all" thing. I'd rather not be hauled before a kangaroo court or get no protection if I have no protection money, thank you very much.
No State theft of resources (Taxation)
Without income, there's no public services whatsoever. Go to Somalia or some other anarchist state if that's your ideal society.
Yet another country where the people have been reduced to the level of property; the property of the State.
There are equally bad or worse fates, like being the property of your parents. Children are not pets and even pets have laws against animal cruelty. Any state that lets children grow up with no minimum standard of education is neglecting that child and its human rights. They may be your offspring but they are not your prisoner - physically, intellectually or otherwise. If I was to use as much hyperbole as you, I'd say you demand the right to brainwash your children. My country, Norway, has also outlawed home schooling but there are private schools like Montessori or Waldorf education. They have to document a competent staff, their plans and methods of teaching and adherence to minimum guidelines set forth by the government. And I think it's a good thing, YMMV.
They said facebook, not /b/
It still amazes me how people seek legislative solutions to what are purely technical problems. Hey politicians: you're doing it wrong.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Politicians pass laws, thus the solution to any problem is to pass laws. I just had the same today from an IT guy who wanted to use an IT solution to solve an error, without realizing it would make the system work but the data utterly useless.
Extra funny that he likes to say "assumption is the mother of all fuckups", yet his solution to that is going so fast you don't even realize the assumptions are flying by. It works much like ramming your head into a brick wall rather than find your way around it.
I think we need a period where products sold in the USA have to be 100% made in the USA, from the first stroke of the pen to the last decal on the front panel.
The problem is that trade is a two way street, if the US refuse access to their markets the rest of the world would retaliate. There would be two large and immediate effects, the Wal-Marts would be empty and a lot of people would scream at vastly increased living costs. The second is that what the US has left of export industry would die causing more unemployment. In time the domestic market might recover but I think long after the one who started it has been tarred and feathered, if not hung from the nearest tree.