If all students have full access to computers with parents knowledgable in the technology, then they are not really needed in school. Parents will teach the kids to use the computers and there is no issue with homework requiring computers getting completed. Reading can be online. School can focus on content exploration
The same is true if all parents are college educated. The parents likely have a knowledge of study skills and the basic taught at school. Therefore if the teachers are lacking, the parents can make up the slack. Teachers don't have start the SAT of AP work from scratch because parents already know.
However I would suggest that the public school has to be mindful of the 20% of the population that did not complete high school or the 80% that never took a college course. Or the majority that do not now know how to use a computer as a productive tool.
It is now fashionable to say the change exists but is not caused by humans. That is because the data has been rehashed and is becoming very convincing. Five years ago it was not if human caused the climate change, but if climate change existed as shown by the controversy over the hockey stick graph. If there comes a time when it is clearly shown that humans have influenced the climate to change, there will be other reasons for inaction. Perhaps the amount of human impact will be small, or something else. The key is that climate change is an opportunity for us to innovate and create a more efficient world, but those who are vested in the ancient inefficient world can't let that happen, as they are not nimble enough to adjust. So they throw money and power to slow down the march of the modern world.
What suprises me is that the law got through the gun nuts. Louisiana, sensibly, does bot have excessive number of laws. Sales happen with minimal meddling, people are free to carry and shoot each other in public, but cannot carry on private property without consent. This law complicates that by requiring private sales to be trackable. This violates the fundamental right for citizens to own guns without the governement knowing about it.
The problem with Ron Paul is that like so many other people their conviction tend to mimic their own interests, and when the conviction and interest don't intersect, they ignore them.
For instance, Ron Paul gave tax payer money to promote shrimp. He is supposed to be libertarian, but when push came to shove he caved into his own interests and promoted his fishing buddies products. Why should others in the seafood industry be attacked by an allegedly libertarian person. Should consumers not make the choice without government coercion?
He also gave tax payer money to build a million dollar bus stop for bribe the voters who chose to live in the middle of nowhere. Now this is a personal decision of the people, and there is no reason for me to subsidize that decision. I have no reason subsidizing busses to go out there and get them, thus keeping their stinky cars off my roads, but there is no reason why i should have to build them a palatial bus stop. They could do that themselves if they wanted to.
Then there his training. Like so many conservatives he used government money to get training, and government money to get rich, but now that he is rich he wants to stop the flow. Frankly if he and his kids paid for what they have taken from the tax payers, along with everyone else who has gotten rich of tax payers, we have no deficit. What Ron Paul wants, and many others, if for the US to be a third world country where a few people have money, and everyone else is their servent.
And I am talking as person who thinks that Libertarianism can be the basis of a society, but won't be because most people think they are chosen to be the one's who decide what is and is not government control.
There are a couple things here that clearly indicate that banks are committing fraud.
First, there is usury. Student loans are unsecured, but federally backed. There is very low risk to the bank. Yet interest rates charged tend to reflect that of high risk loans. Further, while payments are deferred, interest isn't. Not all of this is fully disclosed to the borrower. For instance, do all students know that they are payig interest rates comparable to normal loans, yet with normal loans a borrower can default on a loan. With student loans the must must be paid back, and garnishment of wages and other restrictions on one's livelihood are very easy. Unlike most loans, which are regularly renegotiated, the student loan, with exorbitant interest given the level of risk, is not.
Then there is collusion in the defrauding of the american public. Much of the loan money goes to private distance Universities. These Universities are well known for having very high default rates, and are well known for being victims of straw men loans. In any other financial process, the banks would conduct due diligence to minimize exposure. However, as this is a way to transfer taxpayer money to private banks, there is almost no due diligence. The money is handed out. Banks know or should know the forms are fraudulent. There was one reported case of many forms asking for money to the same address. However, as there is no real risk, and it free money for the bank, no such diligence is performed and banks happily take tax payer money. Unfortunately, all risk and blame is placed on the university and student. While this is appropriate, more blame must be placed on the people who are fundamentally profiting from the fraud. The bankers.
Some people bought into the Android mythos because everything about the software stack was going to be open. This meant that carriers would not be able to limit how the bandwidth was used, and end users could get all the p0rn apps they wanted without a walled garden preventing the entry.
The reality is much different, and now with the lack of real availability and transparency with the source code the differences between Android and other phones is smaller. The development has never been an open source model. Features are still defined by what benefits Google and the carriers.
It is a tautology that Google has no moral obligations to do anything. This is bussiness and saying google has a moral obligation to release code is like say those who owe mortgages have a moral obligation to pay. They don't. Contracts are not covenants. But we do expect people to make at least a small effort to do what they say they are going to do, and in this case Google made a big hullabaloo about Android being open source, and used in marketing copy among other things. So if this is FUD, it is FUD created and promulgated by Google.
The crime is there and in most cases is punished appropriately, meaning that the deterrent is there to stop repeated action. From what I can tell many of these cases get a slap on the wrist or some equivalent. At the basics, this is just child molestation which we have been dealing with for years. It often takes the form of an older boy having sex with a younger girl and then the girl claiming rape, or the parent freaking in general. Parents are going to pretend 'their kids' are saints, and only act badly because of the influence of 'other kids'.
What is new, as opposed to when I was a kid, is that a person can no longer just pay for their crime and then live relatively freely. Because of the sex offenders list a kid who commits these sex offenses, and these are sex offenses and should be punished as such, is now going to be labeled as a sex offender forever and everyone will know they committed a sex offense. It is like being convicted of stealing a car when on is 17, and having that follow you. It makes sense. I don't want to live next to someone who steals cars, but for some reason we have a list of child molesters, even when most children are molested by family members, less so neighbors, and not strangers, while cars are often stolen by strangers.
So it comes down to whitebread suburban families facing the realization that their kid is going to lose opportunity just because they don't have the sense to leave their bra on or zip up. In fact we don't know if such people are more likely to grow up to be child molesters or rapists. We don't know that they should not be proactively on a list. If the purpose of these lists is t save one child from being molested, it may be that such a child will be saved by putting these young potential perverts on a list. We don't know. What should not happen is that we begin to make exceptions to the list so that the 'good' people are given a second chance while the 'bad' people are not.
First, we have to be honest that at some level this is about who gets the money. Do we pay grad students to teach and further learn the material so they may go on and create new knowledge, or do we pay sales people and technicians so they can feed their families. It is tough decision. No everyone can be educated. We need jobs that support the middle of the country with low skilled well paying jobs. OTOH, it is not necessarily a good thing to take jobs away from the educated so that the less educated can have 52" flat screen TV. Every nation must develop local academics.
Beyond this, there is a question of whether software, at this point, does serve the student well. One example in the article is software that is used for remedial teaching. I have extensive experience with the software that U of Pheonix currently uses, and have worked with other software meant to remiate and gain credits so the student is work of college ready. Most legitimate studies say that software is a wash. I think it is not useful for remediation. Most students who need remedial work for college do so because they lack the skills and maturity to study. Having a human motivating them is critical.
Beyond this software has three problems. First, it can be gamed. Software, like video games, follow certain rules. Like a video game if one learns the rules, one can complete the challenge without learning to subject. This is the problem with the software that U of P uses. It is relatively easy to learn the rules and complete the exercises without learning the subject. As a classroom adjunct it is useful because there is a traditional classroom curriculum to back it up and teach concepts that can later be reinforced by the software, but as a software only solution it is lacking. Second, assessment is not very resilient to cheating so that there is no way to really know what a student knows and does not know to allow effective reteaching. Third, most software does not build a community of learners, which really is so critical to a successful college carrer.
This must have happened a long time ago because now it is simply a matter of dragging the PDF to books in itune, then syncing to iBooks. For small files, it is still simpler to email. Not that iTunes is not crap. It is. I don't use the Apple video store very much simply because iTunes is such crap.
From what I can tell, the nice thing about iCloud is that it takes the items that use the most space, music, and stores it for no additional charge. Presumably this costs Apple nothing because they just keep one copy that streams to everyone, but it is an advantage over drop box. To store music online with dropbox I would have to pay over $200 a year.
The other documents do not take that much space. All my online documents is about 10 GB, while my music libray is more like 30 GB. I can store most of all my documents on mobilme for $100 a year, but can't store music because it costs too much. Now I can.
I can use drop box to store half of my documents for free, but that presumably brings no revenue to drop box. The amount they want for 10 GB is prohibitive. As far as online documents, the best thing for that is Google, at least in terms of a free solution. It is collaborative, and you can store pretty much anything you want.
Certainly in the US not all personal data is legally available to the consumer. The data collected by credit agencies must be disclosed, but in my experience the score the consumer gets is not the same as the score the retailer gets. The retailer is the customer, while the consumer is simply a drain on profits.
Millions of people are willing to give retailers personal data in exchange for a discount off inflated prices. The customer in retailer is quickly becoming the firms that buy data. I wonder how much a place like krogers makes of sales of good and how much they make off sales of data. I dare say the later may be the greater.
The piper must be paid, and if the consumer is not paying it, then someone must be paying to derive some advantage from the consumer. Google does not give apps away for the simple sake of "do no evil". Facebook has to make money somehow, and the proprietary data analysis is going to be it or there will be no facebook because the kids aren't going to pay $5 a month for a digital wall. That is why AOL is no longer the biggest ISP. The value of online services to consumers are essentially zero. So when I see something like this I see it as an attack to kill facebook, which is not bad, I don't use and see little value in it, but it seems kind of a childish thing to do. Facebook is likely doing no more harm than TV or video games.
According to the article, the site was chose for political reasons
The Energy Department initially identified nine potential repository sites and conducted environmental assessments for each. The department then nominated five of these sites for further study and, in 1986, recommended the three highest-ranking sites for detailed characterization: Yucca Mountain, Deaf Smith County in Texas, and the Hanford Site in Washington state. Hanford and Deaf Smith County were represented, respectively, by House Majority Leader Tom Foley and Speaker of the House Jim Wright. They joined forces and flexed their political muscle to remove their states from the short list, leaving only Nevada -- a state whose representatives, including then-freshman Senator Harry Reid, had little clout. In 1987 Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to focus solely on Yucca Mountain.
Later the science said it probably be a good site, but everyone knew there were potential issues, 20 years later, with better science and stronger political opposition, it was decided that there was enough political opposition and science to reconsider the effort.
Here is the political and financial reality. No one really wants a permanent nuclear dump site. Firms who are storing the nuclear material are raking in huge amounts of free and unbounded taxpayer dollars. It is likely that if no permanent solution is found, they are guaranteed a profit far into the future. While any area that accepts the nuclear material is going to become very rich, it is also going to cause a great deal of damage. Think mountain top coal mining. It is very profitable, except to the towns that are destroyed with arsenic poisoning, and loss of tourism. Politically, whoever allows their state to become the worlds dumping ground is going to have tough time being reelected, no matter how much money it brings in.
Really there is no good place to dump the material. In Texas there is groundwater issue. Yucca could be the best place to dump the material, but given that the process has taken so long, due to politics, it is reasonable to take a look at the situation again. The politics are often different. We are getting to a point where reprocessing is an option, which means that we might be dealing with larger quantities of less toxic waste. Also, nuclear power is apparently not financially feasible as all plants in the US are going to require huge quantities of taxpayer money to build, so we may have a finite quantity of material rather than the ever growing quantities that were projected in the 80's.
I am not going to say that this guy used fake science to attack someone he did not like, but the article certainly seemed like abusing science to achieve a foregone result.
Android or Apple, RIM loses. RIM has huge fixed costs and only one product. It is not like Amazon who can fund whispernet through the sales of e-books even if they sell not actual Kindles. If RIM phones are not sold, there will be no one to buy subscriptions. What RIM needs a secure email app that runs on iPhone. It is likely that an Android App would be too easy to spoof or hack.
IMHO, an engine needs to built for reliability, power, and efficiency. I do not see any benefit to using more fuel than is needed to do a job, though I do know some people see high fuel consumption as a sign of prowess. In the case of a miata, at cruising speed it consumes on the order of a millilitre a second.
What makes the Miata great, and the RX-7, is everything around the engine. That it can takes curves at higher speed than cars with more powerful engines. That it has a beautiful sound. That one sits at the center of mass. None of this would change with a rotary, except for the excelently low fuel consumption and incredible reliability.
Also scientific proof is different from legal proof. There was enough evidence on Bruce Ivins to go to court. A jury may or may not have found him guilty based on that evidence. This is the only legal need in the US. To be convicted by a jury of your peers. OTOH, scientific proof is more iterative, and more tolerant to refinement.
We will never know if Ivins is guilty by law because the case will never go to court. The scientific exercise is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that he had motive, means, and opportunity. He appeared to have ties with christian extremist of the type that have committed terrorist acts in the past, think Eric Rudolph, against government and people who disagree with them. He had access to high grade anthrax. He had the expertise to handle it. In term of germ warfare, this later is the most important. It is arguably why we don't see more of this. The average person off the street is unlikely to be successful with this.
The case of Troy Davis is different. He was convicted in a court of law and sentenced to death. If one has a death penalty, one has to accept a certain level of mistakes. The government executing a person is not out of the norm for the US. When we go to war, children are killed. We fail to regulate known killers because the cost outweighs the benefits of the life. With the death penalty, the benefits of executions are perceived to outweighs the cost of executing innocent people. Part of this may be that most of the people executed are not white. In the case of Troy Davis many people who bemoaned his death had little problem with an execution that happened the next day. If there benefit from the second execution, then we should accept that the world is not perfect and some innocent people will be harmed. Net good, some people believe, is done.
The one difference is that the tea believed that if certain politicians were elected, things would be better. These people, even though they had no trust of government, believed the government could solve the problems. It can be argued that teabaggers believe that the government causes the problems, and it is true they say less government is necessary, but at the end of they day it is about electing people to redirect government to certain policies, and in the presidential race the tea bag movement has been subsumed by the christian conservative movement. Look at Perry, who believed the rhetoric that jobs and economy was more important than social programming getting wiped because he wanted to protect girls from cancer.
Compared to the tea party, the wall street people are a rag tag group of generally unhappy people. They are not the ones who are hurting because in all cases the people who are hurting do not have time or resources to mount a good protest. Some of them do, but we just call them vagrants or homeless. There is nothing like fresh white faces with thousands of dollars of equipment to spur the public interests and validate a movement.
They have not taken seriously by anyone because they do not shop at walmart, or raise money for politicians, or contribute to PACS. They simply want the bankers who stole billions of dollars to not do it again. While other industries are required to pay for mistakes and take a few quarters of loss, the banks were immediately bailed out and them allowed to keep all the future profits. At least the auto industry was forced to do a mea cupla.
The problem is that conservatives seem to think it is perfectly fine for a tea party person to threaten the president, or spit on a congressman, but one free pesant blocking the drive of the elite requires the use of pepper spray.
The thing to remember is that there is only a small percentage of people who are going to vote for the person. In Texas perry won against a strong fiscal conservative because, even though has shown he is fiscally irresponsible and more interested in himself than running the state, Perry is the conservative christian candidate. I know many people who were going to vote for White, who were essentially pushed by their republican christian peers to vote for Perry. Texas as a whole does not have enough independent voters and districts to elect a person based on who they are.
Likewise, there is a large block that will always vote for the republican candidate even if he is an adulterer, or a drug addict, or porn star, or a tax collector, as long as he says he is a christian conservative now. There is a large block that will always vote for the democratic candidate even if he supports taxing the poor into oblivion. The key then is to identify the districts that enough independent voters to make a difference. Alternatively one can register voters that otherwise would not vote because they know that it really makes no difference. Either party is going to steal from the poor and give to the rich, as was shown with the car bailout that was supported by Bush and Obama.
So the republicans can often win just by, like Perry and Romney do and Bush and Reagan did, pretending to be christian and conservative and racking in the votes. Pray, thank god, tell a teary story, and rake in the cash. However democrats actually have to do work, find the key districts, get the people registered, convince them that helping others is the best way to help themselves(do unto others as you would have them...) and hope that one can squeak by. Obama did a masterful job of this, and, along with the help of Palin, won many districts. This time he will not likely have the help of people like Palin, or Bachman, and at the point of the real election no one will saying Romney is not a christian, so it will be a harder election.
The election, if won by Obama, will be won on the margins, district by district, registering voters in key states. If you do not believe this, then why are republicans making it harder to register voters rather than easier? If one says to prevent voter fraud, then one has drank the republican kool aid and really mean nothing to either party. There are not enough fundamentalist to win an election, so fundamentalist have no individual power.
They are in favor of following current law which in general puts the burden of paying taxes on the individual not the corporation or firm. Under this situation, individuals are not in favor of supporting the infrastructure as they do not pay the taxes due to the state. As I have said before, this can be solved by states setting up new bureaucracy to educate and collect the taxes from the individual. It is a structural problem created by using a system that designed when product was shipped by horse draw carraige in a time when orders are placed instantaneously and shipped across the world overnight.
I can see the benefit of a national clearing house of state taxes run by the feds. It would be less cumbersome all firms if there was on place they could pay taxes on orders. State a fixed rate, say 5%, and all a retailer has to do is send a list of orders along with states shipped and a check for 5%. There is an efficiency to this.
The problem comes in with the special cases. Not everyone pays sales tax. Resellers do not. Do we accept a tax exempt code and then build and fund the infrastructure at the federal level to manage those tax exempt codes, or do let everyone pay taxes and then ask for a rebate at the state level. Clearly the later would be more efficient, yet costs small firms, even churches, a great deal of money. And you know how churches whine about paying for the infrastructure.
Even who pays and gets the money for the program is going to be controversial. How much of cut does the federal government get for running the program, or is it paid as an unfunded mandate. Then in the case where the billing and shipping address are in different states, who gets the money? Does the firm now have to run a double tax system, so local orders pay local sales tax. And what about the city. If you are shipping to a city, and the city has a sales tax, why does the city not get a tax?
Sales tax is a favorite of conservatives because it shifts responsibility to the individual while firms and corporations are often not subject to the tax. A fixed tax on wages, salaries, capital gains, etc, at 5%, less than most of use pay in sales tax, might be simpler and force more to pay a fair share.
I think many analysts missed one key statement at the introduction of the 4S: that Apple believes the feature phone market is gone and everyone is going to want a smart phone. Apple is going to work very hard to meet the needs of the feature phone switchers. The 4S was not designed to upgrade from the 4
Look at what is in the phone. An upgraded camera that will appeal to every parent when combined with the iCloud service. An antennae that solves a well publicized issue. Not things current iPhone owners desperately want, but something that could be the difference between a feature phone owner buying a Android of Apple phone. The other thing are older iPhones for nothing. Clearly Apple is aggressively positioning phones for the mass market.
Unless one is a religious/capitalist wacko who believes in the abiotic origins of oil, at the current rate of consumption petroleum is a finite product.
Economically, petroleum is even more of a finite resource. Currently Saudi and other middle eastern oil keep prices down. Estimates say it costs about $2 a barrel to extract oil in Saudi Arabia. Venezuela oil might costs three times that much to extract. US oil might be as much as $20 a barrel. At these extraction costs a barrel of oil is $80, and it costs over three dollars at the pump in the US. Now, one can blame the greed of the oil companies, but that is not going to change. Explorations costs are not going to decrease either.
OTOH, conservative extraction costs for so-called shale oil, the better name is tar pits, is $75 dollars a barrel. If the oil companies sell at a comparative markup, this means that the selling price would be $300 a barrel. If we just add $60 profit, that would still be $135 a barrel. This puts gas firmly in the $5 a gallon range.
Recall that the oil companies were going bust when oil was below $50 a barrel. This was still a large markup over extraction costs, but oil companies appear to be extraordinarily inefficient and require a large markup. It would be fantasy that the oil companies are going to give away the product. If shale oil forms a large percentage of the petroleum mix prices will go up, consumption will eventually go down as it did a few years ago. Oil companies will either have a choice of selling at higher prices for lower volumes, or find another product.
Therefore shale oil is not an indication of a long term prosperous oil economy, but a clear signal that oil is becoming too costly to base an economy on.
This is what I was thinking. If MS did this we would all be screaming about bloat and the security implications. Sure there may be millions of layers of security, but security has a way of being circumvented.
We are moving into another scary world with very little forethought. We are putting all our data online with free services without thinking deeply about securing that data. This is like when we hooked our computers to the internet without knowing that we were exposing ourselves to every two bit script kiddie. These services have little incentive to do anything beyond token security protocols. There are probably business that are betting everything on the free Google stuff without thinking that every privileged piece of communication is potentially on less that ideal servers for any competitor to hack and steal. Know, without knowing it, everyone who uses chrome is going to expose all their private data to everyone.
As was mentioned, with the equipment most of us had, the sound quality was not all that different. No one I knew bought an album to get better quality. There were only two reasons to buy an album. One was to get cover art. The other was because the marketing departments of the labels developed a relationship between the band and the audience. No one had to buy an album to just get the music. I never bought an album to get better quality. To prove this, many people had two or three copies of the same song. Music was not only bought, it was rebought.
CDs changed that because of the prices that were charged and the difference in marketing. For instance, I was told by the shop I bought music from, in the early 90's, that major labels charged much higher wholesale to them than to the larger shops. Of course we all know the lawsuits that occurred when the major labels tried to fix the price of CDs so they could not be used as loss leaders. At the record shop I visited, a major label CD might be priced between $16 and $20 while a local band would more likely be $15. Local bands were interested in building relationships with their fans through record stores, the major labels wanted to maximize income per unit. Thus music, which up to that point had been more or less a speciality business, quickly became commodity bussiness controlled by Walmart and amazon.
Who pays a markup for a commodity? No one. It becomes an interchangeable widget with little intrinsic value. There is no value added, so when something the same is offered for free, it can't compete. It has little to do with the internet, or quality, and everything to do with insanely bad decisions in customer and channel relations.
There was a time when radio played a lot more songs, not just singles but entire albums. It was trivial to for someone to patch a tape recorder into the radio, or even buy a tape recorder/radio combination, and record the album. At this time, any patch cable or tape recorder with radio clearly constituted a device to circumvent copyright, and it amazes me that such things were allowed to be sold. What is also amazing is that we still bought albums. It was not because of the marginal loss in quality from the analog copying. It was because it was what we did. The cover art and liner notes made the price less annoying. The point is that, at least for pop music, LPs were able to compete with free.
The piracy was even more normalized than that. One person would by an LP or CD and copy it onto to tape for everyone else. Of course when we got CD recorders, we could copy with no generational loss. All this is really an aside as what the industry became worried about was that everyone in the world could share with everyone in the world, but really it was the CD, and the excessive price, that really resulted in the unintended consequence of creating a world in which the marginal price of a track is zero.
There will always be investment in expensive entertainment. What might be different is the profits may be reduced and may be distributed differently.
I do not think that/. has groupthink. Many of my comments are modded up and down. The lame one tend to stay down, while the ones that appeal tend to move up and down. The only thing I have noticed is that a single people who moderte on the basis on personal belief rather than rational discussion. In many cases, if the mod down early, a good comment can be lost n the din of 0 and 1 moderated comment. The one way that this might be prevented is that anyone who negatively moderates a comment(even overrated and the like) that is then predominately overrated would lose a significant amount of karma, or might otherwise put lower in the moderation pool.
You know in real estate, which is a limited resource like spectrum, there is already a solution. It is called property tax. Property tax insures that firms and individuals that cannot fully utilize a resource will eventual have to give it up. It prevents the kind of aristocratic inefficiencies that we know see in spectrum, most notably over the air TV stations. When a agent cannot pay taxes, the property goes back to the state and another more efficient agent can utilize the resources. In my downtown area revitalization only occurred because of this. The firms that would have owned the land without property tax would have never sold at reasonable prices, but as the property was available for a fraction of back taxes, new businesses were allowed to grow and flourish. The state was an eager seller as it wants taxes.
Of course sometimes families lose a home or business over property taxes, but that is simply the cost of having an efficient economy, and is not an issue for spectrum. If spectrum was taxed at a relatively high rate, then firms with excess spectrum would be motivated to sell it or risk having it 'condemned' by the state. It is interesting that these allegedly free market traders do not promote such a tax.
I do not think that the low price represents security, I think it represents uptime and general service. I have used services with low prices and the only issue was uptime. I suppose for very low price services there might be an issue with backups. I also suppose with very low prices, there is going to be an issue of bandwidth and processing power.
As has been shown, even the high end services are extremely vulnerable to attacks. No one seems to have that core competency, or at be willing to pay for it.
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The same is true if all parents are college educated. The parents likely have a knowledge of study skills and the basic taught at school. Therefore if the teachers are lacking, the parents can make up the slack. Teachers don't have start the SAT of AP work from scratch because parents already know.
However I would suggest that the public school has to be mindful of the 20% of the population that did not complete high school or the 80% that never took a college course. Or the majority that do not now know how to use a computer as a productive tool.
It is now fashionable to say the change exists but is not caused by humans. That is because the data has been rehashed and is becoming very convincing. Five years ago it was not if human caused the climate change, but if climate change existed as shown by the controversy over the hockey stick graph. If there comes a time when it is clearly shown that humans have influenced the climate to change, there will be other reasons for inaction. Perhaps the amount of human impact will be small, or something else. The key is that climate change is an opportunity for us to innovate and create a more efficient world, but those who are vested in the ancient inefficient world can't let that happen, as they are not nimble enough to adjust. So they throw money and power to slow down the march of the modern world.
What suprises me is that the law got through the gun nuts. Louisiana, sensibly, does bot have excessive number of laws. Sales happen with minimal meddling, people are free to carry and shoot each other in public, but cannot carry on private property without consent. This law complicates that by requiring private sales to be trackable. This violates the fundamental right for citizens to own guns without the governement knowing about it.
For instance, Ron Paul gave tax payer money to promote shrimp. He is supposed to be libertarian, but when push came to shove he caved into his own interests and promoted his fishing buddies products. Why should others in the seafood industry be attacked by an allegedly libertarian person. Should consumers not make the choice without government coercion?
He also gave tax payer money to build a million dollar bus stop for bribe the voters who chose to live in the middle of nowhere. Now this is a personal decision of the people, and there is no reason for me to subsidize that decision. I have no reason subsidizing busses to go out there and get them, thus keeping their stinky cars off my roads, but there is no reason why i should have to build them a palatial bus stop. They could do that themselves if they wanted to.
Then there his training. Like so many conservatives he used government money to get training, and government money to get rich, but now that he is rich he wants to stop the flow. Frankly if he and his kids paid for what they have taken from the tax payers, along with everyone else who has gotten rich of tax payers, we have no deficit. What Ron Paul wants, and many others, if for the US to be a third world country where a few people have money, and everyone else is their servent.
And I am talking as person who thinks that Libertarianism can be the basis of a society, but won't be because most people think they are chosen to be the one's who decide what is and is not government control.
First, there is usury. Student loans are unsecured, but federally backed. There is very low risk to the bank. Yet interest rates charged tend to reflect that of high risk loans. Further, while payments are deferred, interest isn't. Not all of this is fully disclosed to the borrower. For instance, do all students know that they are payig interest rates comparable to normal loans, yet with normal loans a borrower can default on a loan. With student loans the must must be paid back, and garnishment of wages and other restrictions on one's livelihood are very easy. Unlike most loans, which are regularly renegotiated, the student loan, with exorbitant interest given the level of risk, is not.
Then there is collusion in the defrauding of the american public. Much of the loan money goes to private distance Universities. These Universities are well known for having very high default rates, and are well known for being victims of straw men loans. In any other financial process, the banks would conduct due diligence to minimize exposure. However, as this is a way to transfer taxpayer money to private banks, there is almost no due diligence. The money is handed out. Banks know or should know the forms are fraudulent. There was one reported case of many forms asking for money to the same address. However, as there is no real risk, and it free money for the bank, no such diligence is performed and banks happily take tax payer money. Unfortunately, all risk and blame is placed on the university and student. While this is appropriate, more blame must be placed on the people who are fundamentally profiting from the fraud. The bankers.
The reality is much different, and now with the lack of real availability and transparency with the source code the differences between Android and other phones is smaller. The development has never been an open source model. Features are still defined by what benefits Google and the carriers.
It is a tautology that Google has no moral obligations to do anything. This is bussiness and saying google has a moral obligation to release code is like say those who owe mortgages have a moral obligation to pay. They don't. Contracts are not covenants. But we do expect people to make at least a small effort to do what they say they are going to do, and in this case Google made a big hullabaloo about Android being open source, and used in marketing copy among other things. So if this is FUD, it is FUD created and promulgated by Google.
What is new, as opposed to when I was a kid, is that a person can no longer just pay for their crime and then live relatively freely. Because of the sex offenders list a kid who commits these sex offenses, and these are sex offenses and should be punished as such, is now going to be labeled as a sex offender forever and everyone will know they committed a sex offense. It is like being convicted of stealing a car when on is 17, and having that follow you. It makes sense. I don't want to live next to someone who steals cars, but for some reason we have a list of child molesters, even when most children are molested by family members, less so neighbors, and not strangers, while cars are often stolen by strangers.
So it comes down to whitebread suburban families facing the realization that their kid is going to lose opportunity just because they don't have the sense to leave their bra on or zip up. In fact we don't know if such people are more likely to grow up to be child molesters or rapists. We don't know that they should not be proactively on a list. If the purpose of these lists is t save one child from being molested, it may be that such a child will be saved by putting these young potential perverts on a list. We don't know. What should not happen is that we begin to make exceptions to the list so that the 'good' people are given a second chance while the 'bad' people are not.
Beyond this, there is a question of whether software, at this point, does serve the student well. One example in the article is software that is used for remedial teaching. I have extensive experience with the software that U of Pheonix currently uses, and have worked with other software meant to remiate and gain credits so the student is work of college ready. Most legitimate studies say that software is a wash. I think it is not useful for remediation. Most students who need remedial work for college do so because they lack the skills and maturity to study. Having a human motivating them is critical.
Beyond this software has three problems. First, it can be gamed. Software, like video games, follow certain rules. Like a video game if one learns the rules, one can complete the challenge without learning to subject. This is the problem with the software that U of P uses. It is relatively easy to learn the rules and complete the exercises without learning the subject. As a classroom adjunct it is useful because there is a traditional classroom curriculum to back it up and teach concepts that can later be reinforced by the software, but as a software only solution it is lacking. Second, assessment is not very resilient to cheating so that there is no way to really know what a student knows and does not know to allow effective reteaching. Third, most software does not build a community of learners, which really is so critical to a successful college carrer.
From what I can tell, the nice thing about iCloud is that it takes the items that use the most space, music, and stores it for no additional charge. Presumably this costs Apple nothing because they just keep one copy that streams to everyone, but it is an advantage over drop box. To store music online with dropbox I would have to pay over $200 a year.
The other documents do not take that much space. All my online documents is about 10 GB, while my music libray is more like 30 GB. I can store most of all my documents on mobilme for $100 a year, but can't store music because it costs too much. Now I can.
I can use drop box to store half of my documents for free, but that presumably brings no revenue to drop box. The amount they want for 10 GB is prohibitive. As far as online documents, the best thing for that is Google, at least in terms of a free solution. It is collaborative, and you can store pretty much anything you want.
Millions of people are willing to give retailers personal data in exchange for a discount off inflated prices. The customer in retailer is quickly becoming the firms that buy data. I wonder how much a place like krogers makes of sales of good and how much they make off sales of data. I dare say the later may be the greater.
The piper must be paid, and if the consumer is not paying it, then someone must be paying to derive some advantage from the consumer. Google does not give apps away for the simple sake of "do no evil". Facebook has to make money somehow, and the proprietary data analysis is going to be it or there will be no facebook because the kids aren't going to pay $5 a month for a digital wall. That is why AOL is no longer the biggest ISP. The value of online services to consumers are essentially zero. So when I see something like this I see it as an attack to kill facebook, which is not bad, I don't use and see little value in it, but it seems kind of a childish thing to do. Facebook is likely doing no more harm than TV or video games.
The Energy Department initially identified nine potential repository sites and conducted environmental assessments for each. The department then nominated five of these sites for further study and, in 1986, recommended the three highest-ranking sites for detailed characterization: Yucca Mountain, Deaf Smith County in Texas, and the Hanford Site in Washington state. Hanford and Deaf Smith County were represented, respectively, by House Majority Leader Tom Foley and Speaker of the House Jim Wright. They joined forces and flexed their political muscle to remove their states from the short list, leaving only Nevada -- a state whose representatives, including then-freshman Senator Harry Reid, had little clout. In 1987 Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to focus solely on Yucca Mountain.
Later the science said it probably be a good site, but everyone knew there were potential issues, 20 years later, with better science and stronger political opposition, it was decided that there was enough political opposition and science to reconsider the effort.
Here is the political and financial reality. No one really wants a permanent nuclear dump site. Firms who are storing the nuclear material are raking in huge amounts of free and unbounded taxpayer dollars. It is likely that if no permanent solution is found, they are guaranteed a profit far into the future. While any area that accepts the nuclear material is going to become very rich, it is also going to cause a great deal of damage. Think mountain top coal mining. It is very profitable, except to the towns that are destroyed with arsenic poisoning, and loss of tourism. Politically, whoever allows their state to become the worlds dumping ground is going to have tough time being reelected, no matter how much money it brings in.
Really there is no good place to dump the material. In Texas there is groundwater issue. Yucca could be the best place to dump the material, but given that the process has taken so long, due to politics, it is reasonable to take a look at the situation again. The politics are often different. We are getting to a point where reprocessing is an option, which means that we might be dealing with larger quantities of less toxic waste. Also, nuclear power is apparently not financially feasible as all plants in the US are going to require huge quantities of taxpayer money to build, so we may have a finite quantity of material rather than the ever growing quantities that were projected in the 80's.
I am not going to say that this guy used fake science to attack someone he did not like, but the article certainly seemed like abusing science to achieve a foregone result.
Android or Apple, RIM loses. RIM has huge fixed costs and only one product. It is not like Amazon who can fund whispernet through the sales of e-books even if they sell not actual Kindles. If RIM phones are not sold, there will be no one to buy subscriptions. What RIM needs a secure email app that runs on iPhone. It is likely that an Android App would be too easy to spoof or hack.
What makes the Miata great, and the RX-7, is everything around the engine. That it can takes curves at higher speed than cars with more powerful engines. That it has a beautiful sound. That one sits at the center of mass. None of this would change with a rotary, except for the excelently low fuel consumption and incredible reliability.
We will never know if Ivins is guilty by law because the case will never go to court. The scientific exercise is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that he had motive, means, and opportunity. He appeared to have ties with christian extremist of the type that have committed terrorist acts in the past, think Eric Rudolph, against government and people who disagree with them. He had access to high grade anthrax. He had the expertise to handle it. In term of germ warfare, this later is the most important. It is arguably why we don't see more of this. The average person off the street is unlikely to be successful with this.
The case of Troy Davis is different. He was convicted in a court of law and sentenced to death. If one has a death penalty, one has to accept a certain level of mistakes. The government executing a person is not out of the norm for the US. When we go to war, children are killed. We fail to regulate known killers because the cost outweighs the benefits of the life. With the death penalty, the benefits of executions are perceived to outweighs the cost of executing innocent people. Part of this may be that most of the people executed are not white. In the case of Troy Davis many people who bemoaned his death had little problem with an execution that happened the next day. If there benefit from the second execution, then we should accept that the world is not perfect and some innocent people will be harmed. Net good, some people believe, is done.
Compared to the tea party, the wall street people are a rag tag group of generally unhappy people. They are not the ones who are hurting because in all cases the people who are hurting do not have time or resources to mount a good protest. Some of them do, but we just call them vagrants or homeless. There is nothing like fresh white faces with thousands of dollars of equipment to spur the public interests and validate a movement.
They have not taken seriously by anyone because they do not shop at walmart, or raise money for politicians, or contribute to PACS. They simply want the bankers who stole billions of dollars to not do it again. While other industries are required to pay for mistakes and take a few quarters of loss, the banks were immediately bailed out and them allowed to keep all the future profits. At least the auto industry was forced to do a mea cupla.
The problem is that conservatives seem to think it is perfectly fine for a tea party person to threaten the president, or spit on a congressman, but one free pesant blocking the drive of the elite requires the use of pepper spray.
Likewise, there is a large block that will always vote for the republican candidate even if he is an adulterer, or a drug addict, or porn star, or a tax collector, as long as he says he is a christian conservative now. There is a large block that will always vote for the democratic candidate even if he supports taxing the poor into oblivion. The key then is to identify the districts that enough independent voters to make a difference. Alternatively one can register voters that otherwise would not vote because they know that it really makes no difference. Either party is going to steal from the poor and give to the rich, as was shown with the car bailout that was supported by Bush and Obama.
So the republicans can often win just by, like Perry and Romney do and Bush and Reagan did, pretending to be christian and conservative and racking in the votes. Pray, thank god, tell a teary story, and rake in the cash. However democrats actually have to do work, find the key districts, get the people registered, convince them that helping others is the best way to help themselves(do unto others as you would have them...) and hope that one can squeak by. Obama did a masterful job of this, and, along with the help of Palin, won many districts. This time he will not likely have the help of people like Palin, or Bachman, and at the point of the real election no one will saying Romney is not a christian, so it will be a harder election.
The election, if won by Obama, will be won on the margins, district by district, registering voters in key states. If you do not believe this, then why are republicans making it harder to register voters rather than easier? If one says to prevent voter fraud, then one has drank the republican kool aid and really mean nothing to either party. There are not enough fundamentalist to win an election, so fundamentalist have no individual power.
I can see the benefit of a national clearing house of state taxes run by the feds. It would be less cumbersome all firms if there was on place they could pay taxes on orders. State a fixed rate, say 5%, and all a retailer has to do is send a list of orders along with states shipped and a check for 5%. There is an efficiency to this.
The problem comes in with the special cases. Not everyone pays sales tax. Resellers do not. Do we accept a tax exempt code and then build and fund the infrastructure at the federal level to manage those tax exempt codes, or do let everyone pay taxes and then ask for a rebate at the state level. Clearly the later would be more efficient, yet costs small firms, even churches, a great deal of money. And you know how churches whine about paying for the infrastructure.
Even who pays and gets the money for the program is going to be controversial. How much of cut does the federal government get for running the program, or is it paid as an unfunded mandate. Then in the case where the billing and shipping address are in different states, who gets the money? Does the firm now have to run a double tax system, so local orders pay local sales tax. And what about the city. If you are shipping to a city, and the city has a sales tax, why does the city not get a tax?
Sales tax is a favorite of conservatives because it shifts responsibility to the individual while firms and corporations are often not subject to the tax. A fixed tax on wages, salaries, capital gains, etc, at 5%, less than most of use pay in sales tax, might be simpler and force more to pay a fair share.
Look at what is in the phone. An upgraded camera that will appeal to every parent when combined with the iCloud service. An antennae that solves a well publicized issue. Not things current iPhone owners desperately want, but something that could be the difference between a feature phone owner buying a Android of Apple phone. The other thing are older iPhones for nothing. Clearly Apple is aggressively positioning phones for the mass market.
Economically, petroleum is even more of a finite resource. Currently Saudi and other middle eastern oil keep prices down. Estimates say it costs about $2 a barrel to extract oil in Saudi Arabia. Venezuela oil might costs three times that much to extract. US oil might be as much as $20 a barrel. At these extraction costs a barrel of oil is $80, and it costs over three dollars at the pump in the US. Now, one can blame the greed of the oil companies, but that is not going to change. Explorations costs are not going to decrease either.
OTOH, conservative extraction costs for so-called shale oil, the better name is tar pits, is $75 dollars a barrel. If the oil companies sell at a comparative markup, this means that the selling price would be $300 a barrel. If we just add $60 profit, that would still be $135 a barrel. This puts gas firmly in the $5 a gallon range.
Recall that the oil companies were going bust when oil was below $50 a barrel. This was still a large markup over extraction costs, but oil companies appear to be extraordinarily inefficient and require a large markup. It would be fantasy that the oil companies are going to give away the product. If shale oil forms a large percentage of the petroleum mix prices will go up, consumption will eventually go down as it did a few years ago. Oil companies will either have a choice of selling at higher prices for lower volumes, or find another product.
Therefore shale oil is not an indication of a long term prosperous oil economy, but a clear signal that oil is becoming too costly to base an economy on.
We are moving into another scary world with very little forethought. We are putting all our data online with free services without thinking deeply about securing that data. This is like when we hooked our computers to the internet without knowing that we were exposing ourselves to every two bit script kiddie. These services have little incentive to do anything beyond token security protocols. There are probably business that are betting everything on the free Google stuff without thinking that every privileged piece of communication is potentially on less that ideal servers for any competitor to hack and steal. Know, without knowing it, everyone who uses chrome is going to expose all their private data to everyone.
CDs changed that because of the prices that were charged and the difference in marketing. For instance, I was told by the shop I bought music from, in the early 90's, that major labels charged much higher wholesale to them than to the larger shops. Of course we all know the lawsuits that occurred when the major labels tried to fix the price of CDs so they could not be used as loss leaders. At the record shop I visited, a major label CD might be priced between $16 and $20 while a local band would more likely be $15. Local bands were interested in building relationships with their fans through record stores, the major labels wanted to maximize income per unit. Thus music, which up to that point had been more or less a speciality business, quickly became commodity bussiness controlled by Walmart and amazon.
Who pays a markup for a commodity? No one. It becomes an interchangeable widget with little intrinsic value. There is no value added, so when something the same is offered for free, it can't compete. It has little to do with the internet, or quality, and everything to do with insanely bad decisions in customer and channel relations.
The piracy was even more normalized than that. One person would by an LP or CD and copy it onto to tape for everyone else. Of course when we got CD recorders, we could copy with no generational loss. All this is really an aside as what the industry became worried about was that everyone in the world could share with everyone in the world, but really it was the CD, and the excessive price, that really resulted in the unintended consequence of creating a world in which the marginal price of a track is zero.
There will always be investment in expensive entertainment. What might be different is the profits may be reduced and may be distributed differently.
I do not think that /. has groupthink. Many of my comments are modded up and down. The lame one tend to stay down, while the ones that appeal tend to move up and down. The only thing I have noticed is that a single people who moderte on the basis on personal belief rather than rational discussion. In many cases, if the mod down early, a good comment can be lost n the din of 0 and 1 moderated comment. The one way that this might be prevented is that anyone who negatively moderates a comment(even overrated and the like) that is then predominately overrated would lose a significant amount of karma, or might otherwise put lower in the moderation pool.
Of course sometimes families lose a home or business over property taxes, but that is simply the cost of having an efficient economy, and is not an issue for spectrum. If spectrum was taxed at a relatively high rate, then firms with excess spectrum would be motivated to sell it or risk having it 'condemned' by the state. It is interesting that these allegedly free market traders do not promote such a tax.
As has been shown, even the high end services are extremely vulnerable to attacks. No one seems to have that core competency, or at be willing to pay for it.