Because public sanitation, police and fire are all handled by the state and local governments. The COTUS talks about the Feds.
Doesn't change the argument any.
If The Government (city, county, state, federal, whatever) is justified in providing public sanitation service for the general good of the public it serves, than it is similarly justified in providing financial security for its elderly and disabled.
That's because private charities don't steal their money.
They don't?
Social Security's overhead is less than 1 percent.
If a private non-profit's overhead is less than 20 percent, they're considered extremely efficient.
Its good to know that no one starves or freezes anymore though...
Remember Rumsfeld suggested that because some attacks would be lethal no matter how much armor was in place, that NO military vehicles needed ANY armor? Same thing. Same flaw in your argument.
"Suffer the consequences"! Yeah! That'll teach them a lesson! Maybe in their next lifetime they'll know better than to be ignorant of the importance of long term financial planning!
I'm sorry but "only two people working for every person drawing Social Security" will not work.
It will if those two people put as much into the system as the current 3.3 people (or whatever) per beneficiary today do. Wages usually trend upward over time, y'know?
marriage and childbearing were not happening any earlier [in 1964 than previous]
True, but they weren't happening any later than that. Following the invention of the Birth Control Pill and the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960's and 1970's, people started to wait longer to start families, and to have fewer children once they did.
That is most certainly a broad societal trend that was not and could not have been predicted in 1964.
1) The Social Security Trust Fund is a series of IOU's from the Treasury.
And stock is just a series of IOU's from corporations, and bank accounts are just a series of IOU's from the banks, etc. How is Social Security's investment in the Treasury any different than any other investment in anything?
2) Look to your parents or grandparents and ask them if they would take a 25% cut in their Social Security benefits so that the program may exist when you are their age. 95% of them will laugh at you.
Hmm, my parents and surviving grandparents LOVE me. I'm sorry that yours don't, and you seem to think that's the norm.
5) without privatization of some sort Social Security will always be a Pay As You Go situation where us and our children and our children's children are paying for Grandma and Grandpa to be retired.
And this would be unacceptable because...?
the elderly are now the WEALTHIEST AGE DEMOGRAPHIC.
Based on mean, mode, or median? I'm sure there's a good number of retired multimillionaires out there, but I will guarantee you that there's many more who need their SS benefits just to buy medication.
I expect the number of low-wealth seniors to increase in coming years, too, given the current escalation of real estate costs. Most current retirees own their homes outright and probably have for decades; how many of our own parents are now in their fifties and sixties and still have large amounts of mortgage debt?
I'm not worried that *I* would make bad investments in stocks and bonds and end up penniless come retirement time. I'm worried that *other people* will invest their Social Security funds unwisely and will need new public funding just to stay alive; I don't want my kids and grandkids to have to foot THAT bill in addition to their own retirement planning.
there are digital speakers with built in decoders and amplifiers, but they are just duplicating equipment inside the speaker.
This is exactly my point. The only way to close the analog hole is to keep the signal digital as long as possible -- that means putting the D-A converter and the amplifier directly next to each speaker, inside the speaker cabinets. The receiver unit would become a digital router, directing each audio channel's data stream to the appropriate SmartSpeaker.
Yes, the current system makes a lot more sense. I never said their plans were going to WORK.
Get the top of the line Denon receiver with video switching and HDMI inputs
But I DON'T WANT to get a top of the line receiver. 90% of us don't. And that is why the only way HDMI can hope to gain widespread consumer acceptance is by force of law.
Males score DRASTICALLY higher on tests of abstract and symbolic logic (ie, math).
But how much of that is nature, and how much is nurture? Do males score higher on these tests to due their innate maleness, or is there something in the way mathematics are taught that favors students who are male?
I RTFA, and I still don't understand how this is useful to anyone.
For the DRM to work, the market will need to reach a point where the only input connector that TV's and speakers have will be HDMI ports. I expect this to happen around the year, hmm, let's say 3000. Here we are, a year away from the alleged switch to HDTV, and a huge percentage of the television sets sold still have good old-fashioned analog coaxial antenna jacks on the back of them. Good luck getting Every Electronics Manufacturer In The World to stop offering their customers the feature of analog connections. (We'll have direct-to-brain optical implants running on a descendant of Bluetooth before this happens.)
Audio connections won't go entirely digital until sometime around AD 4500. There's too many audiophiles with investments in $100/foot speaker cable to EVER accept an all-digital interconnect.
Another thing -- my video and audio signals don't output to the same device. The video goes to the TV, and the audio goes to the home theater system. Putting both signals on a single cable doesn't do me any good, I'll just have to break them out further down the chain.
Methinks this standard is just an attempt by Belkin and co. to make a lot of money selling aftermarket HDMI-to-DVI adapters.
Oh noooo, not A LETTER! Better stick with the provider that offers 30% the speed of the other!
I have no idea what my average and peak bandwidth usage is on Comcast, but I routinely have three or four Bittorrent seeds going at the same time, and I never get warning letters from Comcast that I'm using Too Much.
This, I think, is why Apple is going to stay at the top of the portable music market. They seem to be the only ones that realize that the relationship with the customer needs to continue after the device is purchased. (With their business plan being based on iTMS, it's actually crucial that this relationship continues.)
My MP3 player, an Archos Gmini 400, died around New Year's. I'm fairly certain it was a hard drive failure, based on the sounds it was making. I sent a message to Archos' customer service address, outlining what the symptoms were and asking for assistance.
Two weeks later, I got an incomprehensible reply from them. It asked me to take diagnostic steps which were clearly impossible given the symptoms I had already described, it used product names that did not apply to the product I bought, it was written in pidgin English, and several paragraphs were duplicated as a result of a bad cut-and-paste job.
By then, I had already disassembled the device myself (voiding the warranty), identified the model of the broken drive, and ordered a replacement from an Internet supplier.
Archos left me to fend for myself as soon as they had my money. Apple does not do that. If I had it to do over again, I would have bought an iPod instead.
Even though we all love iTunes and the Apple music store most of us still have 90% pirated MP3s
If you're going to make a claim like that, I want to see some proof. I sure as hell don't have anywhere near 90% pirated MP3s -- I'd estimate that about 90% of the digital music I have is stuff I've ripped myself from CD's I own, with another 5% being music I've purchased online, and only the last 5% being "pirated".
I don't claim that my case is representative of the general public either.
One things that bloggers, and journalists in general, can do to ease concerns about transparency is to make a very clear delineation between what they report as fact, and what they speak as opinion.
"The goal is give developers a consistent set of APIs," or application programming interfaces, Montgomery said.
And they're doing this by adding ANOTHER set of graphics APIs to Windows, to complement the ones we have now, and the ones we had five years ago, and the ones we had five years before that, and the ones we had five years before THAT?
If I sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, I'd be in jail for fraud.
Why don't they do the same for software?
If you sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, it's probably because the order that the government placed with you was for a vehicle with an 80-gallon gas tank, that can use gasoline, diesel, compressed air, or vegetable oil and run equally well with each, that is no larger than a stationwagon and weighs less than 1000 pounds.
The only way to meet those specs 100% is to leave the engine out altogether, no?
Project failures can often be traced back to a failure to provide good project specifications.
you should be able to expect police not to be placing things on your car without a court order.
As I understand it. parking enforcement cops routinely put chalk marks on tires to gauge whether a vehicle has remained stationary behind the proscribed time limit.
If this practice has been upheld as being legal without a court order, then it would seem to follow that bugging a car with a GPS device is the same.
Bill's demo of the new media center was _very_ boring
Still it was better than Steve's demo of the Apple Media Center, because there isn't one. They're 2 years behind the rest of the field in the living room convergence market, which coincidentally is also the market I'm shopping in.
Maybe in a few more years, Apple will catch up, just like they've finally gotten around to offering small Flash-based MP3 players like other companies were doing back in the '90s. Or maybe Microsoft will have established market dominance in yet another area. A shame, since Apple is so good at working with multimedia when they're inspired to.
Then why did you bring it up and only mention what servers they were running?
Um... "he" didn't. Timothy, that is.
See, in Slashdot story submissions the italicized text is written by whomever submitted the story, and the text after it is written by whomever approved it for posting. These are often not the same person.
Slashdot Mirror
Because public sanitation, police and fire are all handled by the state and local governments. The COTUS talks about the Feds.
Doesn't change the argument any.
If The Government (city, county, state, federal, whatever) is justified in providing public sanitation service for the general good of the public it serves, than it is similarly justified in providing financial security for its elderly and disabled.
That's because private charities don't steal their money.
They don't?
Social Security's overhead is less than 1 percent.
If a private non-profit's overhead is less than 20 percent, they're considered extremely efficient.
Its good to know that no one starves or freezes anymore though...
Remember Rumsfeld suggested that because some attacks would be lethal no matter how much armor was in place, that NO military vehicles needed ANY armor? Same thing. Same flaw in your argument.
There are many private charities
There aren't enough!
and there would be even more if people weren't paying high taxes, which are simply wasted by government.
Tee hee, your blind optimism is so cute.
Take yourself as an example: if you had an extra $200 per paycheck due to taxes being lowered, you would
A) spend it on yourself
B) give it to charity
I admire you if your answer is B, but one has to acknowledge that most people are going to choose A.
"Suffer the consequences"! Yeah! That'll teach them a lesson! Maybe in their next lifetime they'll know better than to be ignorant of the importance of long term financial planning!
Grow up. We're talking about HUMAN LIVES here.
I'm sorry but "only two people working for every person drawing Social Security" will not work.
It will if those two people put as much into the system as the current 3.3 people (or whatever) per beneficiary today do. Wages usually trend upward over time, y'know?
marriage and childbearing were not happening any earlier [in 1964 than previous]
True, but they weren't happening any later than that. Following the invention of the Birth Control Pill and the Sexual Revolution of the late 1960's and 1970's, people started to wait longer to start families, and to have fewer children once they did.
That is most certainly a broad societal trend that was not and could not have been predicted in 1964.
1) The Social Security Trust Fund is a series of IOU's from the Treasury.
And stock is just a series of IOU's from corporations, and bank accounts are just a series of IOU's from the banks, etc. How is Social Security's investment in the Treasury any different than any other investment in anything?
2) Look to your parents or grandparents and ask them if they would take a 25% cut in their Social Security benefits so that the program may exist when you are their age. 95% of them will laugh at you.
Hmm, my parents and surviving grandparents LOVE me. I'm sorry that yours don't, and you seem to think that's the norm.
5) without privatization of some sort Social Security will always be a Pay As You Go situation where us and our children and our children's children are paying for Grandma and Grandpa to be retired.
And this would be unacceptable because...?
the elderly are now the WEALTHIEST AGE DEMOGRAPHIC.
Based on mean, mode, or median? I'm sure there's a good number of retired multimillionaires out there, but I will guarantee you that there's many more who need their SS benefits just to buy medication.
I expect the number of low-wealth seniors to increase in coming years, too, given the current escalation of real estate costs. Most current retirees own their homes outright and probably have for decades; how many of our own parents are now in their fifties and sixties and still have large amounts of mortgage debt?
I'm not worried that *I* would make bad investments in stocks and bonds and end up penniless come retirement time. I'm worried that *other people* will invest their Social Security funds unwisely and will need new public funding just to stay alive; I don't want my kids and grandkids to have to foot THAT bill in addition to their own retirement planning.
there are digital speakers with built in decoders and amplifiers, but they are just duplicating equipment inside the speaker.
This is exactly my point. The only way to close the analog hole is to keep the signal digital as long as possible -- that means putting the D-A converter and the amplifier directly next to each speaker, inside the speaker cabinets. The receiver unit would become a digital router, directing each audio channel's data stream to the appropriate SmartSpeaker.
Yes, the current system makes a lot more sense. I never said their plans were going to WORK.
Get the top of the line Denon receiver with video switching and HDMI inputs
But I DON'T WANT to get a top of the line receiver. 90% of us don't. And that is why the only way HDMI can hope to gain widespread consumer acceptance is by force of law.
Males score DRASTICALLY higher on tests of abstract and symbolic logic (ie, math).
But how much of that is nature, and how much is nurture? Do males score higher on these tests to due their innate maleness, or is there something in the way mathematics are taught that favors students who are male?
I RTFA, and I still don't understand how this is useful to anyone.
For the DRM to work, the market will need to reach a point where the only input connector that TV's and speakers have will be HDMI ports. I expect this to happen around the year, hmm, let's say 3000. Here we are, a year away from the alleged switch to HDTV, and a huge percentage of the television sets sold still have good old-fashioned analog coaxial antenna jacks on the back of them. Good luck getting Every Electronics Manufacturer In The World to stop offering their customers the feature of analog connections. (We'll have direct-to-brain optical implants running on a descendant of Bluetooth before this happens.)
Audio connections won't go entirely digital until sometime around AD 4500. There's too many audiophiles with investments in $100/foot speaker cable to EVER accept an all-digital interconnect.
Another thing -- my video and audio signals don't output to the same device. The video goes to the TV, and the audio goes to the home theater system. Putting both signals on a single cable doesn't do me any good, I'll just have to break them out further down the chain.
Methinks this standard is just an attempt by Belkin and co. to make a lot of money selling aftermarket HDMI-to-DVI adapters.
Oh noooo, not A LETTER! Better stick with the provider that offers 30% the speed of the other!
I have no idea what my average and peak bandwidth usage is on Comcast, but I routinely have three or four Bittorrent seeds going at the same time, and I never get warning letters from Comcast that I'm using Too Much.
This, I think, is why Apple is going to stay at the top of the portable music market. They seem to be the only ones that realize that the relationship with the customer needs to continue after the device is purchased. (With their business plan being based on iTMS, it's actually crucial that this relationship continues.)
My MP3 player, an Archos Gmini 400, died around New Year's. I'm fairly certain it was a hard drive failure, based on the sounds it was making. I sent a message to Archos' customer service address, outlining what the symptoms were and asking for assistance.
Two weeks later, I got an incomprehensible reply from them. It asked me to take diagnostic steps which were clearly impossible given the symptoms I had already described, it used product names that did not apply to the product I bought, it was written in pidgin English, and several paragraphs were duplicated as a result of a bad cut-and-paste job.
By then, I had already disassembled the device myself (voiding the warranty), identified the model of the broken drive, and ordered a replacement from an Internet supplier.
Archos left me to fend for myself as soon as they had my money. Apple does not do that. If I had it to do over again, I would have bought an iPod instead.
Even though we all love iTunes and the Apple music store most of us still have 90% pirated MP3s
If you're going to make a claim like that, I want to see some proof. I sure as hell don't have anywhere near 90% pirated MP3s -- I'd estimate that about 90% of the digital music I have is stuff I've ripped myself from CD's I own, with another 5% being music I've purchased online, and only the last 5% being "pirated".
I don't claim that my case is representative of the general public either.
you can and should provide multiple icon sizes
Why? You should only need one icon size.
(You are storing the icon as vector graphics and not a bitmap, right...?)
One things that bloggers, and journalists in general, can do to ease concerns about transparency is to make a very clear delineation between what they report as fact, and what they speak as opinion.
Are you listening, michael???
"The goal is give developers a consistent set of APIs," or application programming interfaces, Montgomery said.
And they're doing this by adding ANOTHER set of graphics APIs to Windows, to complement the ones we have now, and the ones we had five years ago, and the ones we had five years before that, and the ones we had five years before THAT?
I don't get it.
If I sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, I'd be in jail for fraud.
Why don't they do the same for software?
If you sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, it's probably because the order that the government placed with you was for a vehicle with an 80-gallon gas tank, that can use gasoline, diesel, compressed air, or vegetable oil and run equally well with each, that is no larger than a stationwagon and weighs less than 1000 pounds.
The only way to meet those specs 100% is to leave the engine out altogether, no?
Project failures can often be traced back to a failure to provide good project specifications.
What if I spray-paint the side of a police building, so I can track its movement more easily?
This is perhaps the worst analogy that's ever been written.
you should be able to expect police not to be placing things on your car without a court order.
As I understand it. parking enforcement cops routinely put chalk marks on tires to gauge whether a vehicle has remained stationary behind the proscribed time limit.
If this practice has been upheld as being legal without a court order, then it would seem to follow that bugging a car with a GPS device is the same.
I'd heard that a new version of the N-Gage hardware will be introduced before Nov. 2005
Didn't they already try that? And wasn't the effect on the market essentially negligible?
Bill's demo of the new media center was _very_ boring
Still it was better than Steve's demo of the Apple Media Center, because there isn't one. They're 2 years behind the rest of the field in the living room convergence market, which coincidentally is also the market I'm shopping in.
Maybe in a few more years, Apple will catch up, just like they've finally gotten around to offering small Flash-based MP3 players like other companies were doing back in the '90s. Or maybe Microsoft will have established market dominance in yet another area. A shame, since Apple is so good at working with multimedia when they're inspired to.
Windows' TCP/IP stack is known to suck compared to various *NIXs.
OS X's TCP/IP stack: uses BSD code
Windows' TCP/IP stack: uses BSD code
Hmm.
Then why did you bring it up and only mention what servers they were running?
Um... "he" didn't. Timothy, that is.
See, in Slashdot story submissions the italicized text is written by whomever submitted the story, and the text after it is written by whomever approved it for posting. These are often not the same person.
Ask Netcraft, they're the ones who brought it up
Yeah, well we all know about Netcraft's bias against BSD-based operating systems.