Poor people currently pay either no taxes at all or very low taxes as proportion of their income.
Poor people pay lots of taxes, just not income tax: they pay sales tax, real estate taxes (directly or indirectly), gas taxes, government fees, and various mandatory government plans and insurances.
And why exactly is the new 11" Air *not* a netbook? Sounds like we are mincing words here...
Because Jobs would then have to admit that he was wrong, and he couldn't possibly do that. So, instead of an "overpriced netbook" he calls it a "revolutionary laptop".
Look, Apple isn't the first to come out with these kinds of ultralight, high-powered laptops. I used to buy them before netbooks came out. If you can't figure out why high resolution on a tiny screen doesn't make much sense or why packing a Core 2 Duo into a tiny package and expecting to run CPU intensive stuff on it doesn't work well, buy one and you'll see. Reducing the thickness from 1" to 0.7" doesn't improve the things that are wrong with such a design.
Yeah, those "VMware" and "Intuit" guys are pretty fly-by-night; I guess I should've waited for the App Store before picking up their apps online.
Well, there are probably some vendors you will trust anyway; that doesn't affect my point: instead of creating a mechanism that allows competition in the software marketplace, they are clearly aiming towards funneling all software purchases through their store, just like they do for the iPhone.
Because it's technically impossible for, say, the OS X packaging and installation mechanism to support dependencies, or replaced with a mechanism that can?
Did I say it was "technically impossible"? I'm just noticing that after a decade, Apple still hasn't done it.
Point is: Apple doesn't innovate much, but they are creating technology that increases their market dominance and will make computing more expensive for their customers.
Oh, the MacBook Air is different from a netbook: it costs 2-5x as much as a netbook (depending on which one you get). For that, you get a machine that's really too small to do serious work on, has uselessly high screen resolution, yet it has a high-powered processor and graphics card that you don't need on such a machine. It's a work of art alright, and about as utilitarian. It's the MacBook Air all over again. If people see you with one, they'll just think "another Apple snob with too much money".
To be precise, it gives you one source of applications for whatever mechanism the App Store uses; nothing requires that you get all your apps from there, but you might have to go through the hideously burdensome process
Yes, it is quite burdensome and a big disadvantage: buy through the app store and get virus-checked, tracked, auto-updating applications, or download some software from some website and take your life into your own hands.
How many dependencies between downloadable components do OS X apps have?
Few, because OS X simply has no way of dealing with them. That's a bad thing. And it's going to continue to be a bad thing and it's one big limitation of OS X.
Linux repositories are a general purpose mechanism; you can point at any "app store" you like with them. Furthermore, they do extensive dependency management and checking.
Apple's App Store gives you one source of applications and it doesn't seem to do much in the way of dependency management.
Apple clearly got the idea from Linux distributions and other commercial vendors, but they are misusing the idea to lock down their machines.
The app store is a rip-off of Linux package systems and other people's online stores, except of course that it will be more restrictive. The new window management is what you have been able to get standard on Linux for many years. And the new MacBook Air is basically a netbook; since OS X and its apps are so heavy-weight, it ended up having to be overpowered and overpriced. And, of course, Jobs talked about it as if they invented it all.
The US mobile phone market is no more "free" than the European mobile phone market: they are both strongly regulated with high barriers to entry.
The European mobile phone market only opened up a couple of years ago; before that, it was in the same bad shape as the US market. There are signs that the US market is changing as well, with cheap prepaid deals becoming more and more available. Just look around.
As far as a holistic ecosystem goes.. Apple has nailed it.
No, they haven't. I went completely Apple for a few years after OS X came out: desktop, laptop, mobile, Mobile Me. It was a frustrating, poor, and expensive solution. It was worse than the Palm Treo I was using before, and it is far worse than Google. Apple's poor PIM functionality was one of the reasons I gave up on Mac and just use it as a glorified media player now.
Many people don't because they think their iPhone is a cloud device; people even sell it that way ("oh, you don't really need a PC, we'll just set it up for you").
Furthermore the "sync" is so slow (even if little has changed) that many people either don't have the patience to wait for it or just assume that something is wrong and disconnect.
If you're in the US and buy a carrier-locked/customized phone, you have to read the fine print and experiment; I've never bought one of those.
In most of the rest of the world, you just buy whatever phone you like unlocked and plug in your SIM card. The HTC Desire is a good choice: nice hardware, good updates, actually useful add-on software.
You can also buy any European Android phone and use it in the US, but you lose 3G; you still get EDGE. In a year or two, they're going to be penta-band Android phones, which will give you 3G worldwide and on AT&T and T-Mobile.
- Tethering (even on pre-2.2 devices and without rooting) - replacement keyboards and input methods, including handwriting - full replacements for built-in apps and dialogs (mail, calendar, camera, image browser, etc.) - full Google Voice support - apps that intercept calling (e.g., redirect some/all calls through calling cards or VoIP) - speech recognition and text-to-speech, fully integrated into the OS - OS task scheduling and context apps - file and data sharing between apps, plus end user apps to manage that - remote phone management - third party app stores - synchronization over wifi - third party music and video stores - in-device scripting and development - third party VPN apps - adult apps
Some iPhone apps try to provide this, but it's pretty much useless. For example, there is a speech recognition app and some handwriting recognition for iPhone, but you can't actually use it to input stuff in other applications.
No, those phones are not very different. They have a different home screen, some different theming, some additional apps, and a slightly different form factor. Once you start an app, they look and work the same way. And if you like, you can install a standard home screen on all of them.
And whaddayaknow, a lot of the customizations actually are nice differentiators without harming or limiting users. If you like Swype and big screens, buy a Samsung. HTC has a nice set of pre-installed widgets and some nice theming, so get those if that's what you like. And S/E did a good job on tiny Android phones. And yet, all of them can be configured to look and work like any of the others.
It's really the best of both worlds: people who don't want to fiddle buy the phone that has the defaults they like, and people who do know how to configure these things can buy any phone just based on specs, price, and hardware.
Are you kidding? There are probably 100x as many locked down Linux machines than Linux desktops; many routers, set-top-boxes, (non-Android) phones, photo frames, webcams, and other devices run some form of Linux and you buy them, use them, and throw them out without ever noticing.
I think that's still a red herring. Android and iOS both have three common screen resolutions each, and Android apps tend to scale better across them. And hardware buttons are also not a big deal: Android games tend to be all-touch, like iOS games, and the hardware buttons aren't used for game controls.
People who just want a no-hassles Android phone can just get one of the mainstream ones; it's pretty obvious just by looking at them, and anything in the iPhone's price category is going to have high resolution and no problems at all.
The oddballs, like the X10 Mini, are pretty self-evident, and even they run most Android software just fine.
The fact that some carriers choose to do something stupid with the platform doesn't make the platform itself closed. If you buy a locked down phone from a restrictive carrier, that's your own fault.
But even the most stupid and restrictive carriers offer access to the Android market, and the market itself is much more open.
A platform is not really "open" if it's only open in a way that 1%ers (1% most technical users) can do anything with it that benefits from openness.
100% benefit from the openness: there are tons of apps that run on Android that Apple simply wouldn't approve. And people can install apps from outside the market.
The biggest manufacturers are fragmenting Android by installing their own worthless bloatware, I mean, end-user experience, over the top.
Android phones have common core apps and the same user interfaces. Manufacturers install their own home apps and some additional apps, but you don't have to see them or use them if you don't like them.
Android "fragmentation" is a marketing myth fabricated by Apple, nothing more.
That's good, because we have established that you are wrong: the slaves would not clearly have been better off under British rule.
That's a direct claim by you that slaves would not have been freed a day earlier [stop being such a silly demagogue] (since that would have made them better off).
It is indeed! And I stand by it. I gave you the four scenarios I can think of, all of which would have resulted in slaves being freed no earlier. And the British empire was a bunch of drug-dealing, oppressive imperialist thugs at the time, not the kind of people who just free slaves (besides, even the freed slaves in the British empire often ended up being no better off anyway).
So, if you want to persist in making the claim that the British would have ended slavery in the US South earlier and improved conditions for slaves, you need to come up with a convincing scenario, because right now, you're simply not credible.
Overall, the total amount of antimicrobials given to food-producing animals in 2001 was less than half that given in 1994, and the time period during which these animals were exposed to antimicrobials was significantly reduced. 17 Usage has increased somewhat since 2001, but in 2008 was still only 60% of 1994 levels.
You wrote:
On page 31 of the report is a section titled Antimicrobial consumption. Nowhere on that page does the number 60% appear. On that same page is a table titled Trends in the estimated total consumption (kg active compound) of prescribed antimicrobials for production animals
The report talks about total amount, which is feed plus prescribed antimicrobials. You keep looking only at prescribed antimicrobials. If you add in the feed antimicrobials for 1994, total in 2008 is 63.8% of 1994, which the report (legitimately) rounds down to 60%.
You haven't been able to figure this one out in, what, a couple of weeks of staring at these two sentences? And you want us to believe that you have a graduate degree? What a joke.
I wasn't talking about murder rate, I was talking about crime rate. Go Google the data yourself; it's out there.
f someone can not ask law enforcement to help settle disputes
Have you been living under a rock? Illegal aliens can and do ask police to "settle disputes"; that's what the Arizona law was intended to change.
The simple solution to that is to open up the gates to legal immigration
I don't see a problem that requires a solution. People choose to be in the country illegally; if they don't like the level of policing, they can choose to leave again.
The US does have fewer criminals to fill up the database with: US crime rates are substantially lower (and decreasing) than, say, in Europe (where they are increasing). And a large part of US crimes is concentrated in illegal alien populations or inner-city (gang?) related.
The primary reason for the high US incarceration rate is longer sentences. Drug laws also contribute. And these ankle bracelets are an attempt to address the incarceration rate, by getting non-violent offenders out of prison. That seems like a good thing overall.
(Still, I think decriminalizing many drugs would be a good thing.)
Look at that. 25% of federal inmates are in there for drug possession. I bet you a good amount of these people wouldn't rob you at gunpoint.
Well, the drug laws are wrong and ineffective. However, that tells you that drugs are not the primary reason for the high US incarceration rate, because even 75% of 3.2% is still high.
So, what do those numbers mean? If you look at the statistics, there is actually more crime overall in Europe than in the US, and the rates are increasing in Europe and decreasing in the US. Furthermore, much of the US crime is concentrated in specific populations--30% of it alone among illegal aliens. That means that if you're a middle class American--the kind likely to vote--your risk of being a crime victim is even lower compared to Europe. Conversely, Europe has higher crime statistics despite having much lower illegal alien populations, better social services, less wealth disparity, supposedly better in-prison rehabilitation, and fewer immigrants.
The primary reason for higher incarceration rates in the US are longer sentences. Harsher drug laws also contribute. I bet more effective policing also does contribute. But given the crime statistics in the US and Europe, European arguments that the US should reduce its sentences are not actually all that convincing.
Personally, I hope the US will decriminalize many drugs and rely more on long-term out-of-prison monitoring for non-violent offenders; that should save money and allow people to re-integrate into society. I don't think the simplistic European approach of lighter sentences is going to be politically feasible, and it certainly has not shown to be effective.
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Poor people currently pay either no taxes at all or very low taxes as proportion of their income.
Poor people pay lots of taxes, just not income tax: they pay sales tax, real estate taxes (directly or indirectly), gas taxes, government fees, and various mandatory government plans and insurances.
And why exactly is the new 11" Air *not* a netbook? Sounds like we are mincing words here...
Because Jobs would then have to admit that he was wrong, and he couldn't possibly do that. So, instead of an "overpriced netbook" he calls it a "revolutionary laptop".
Look, Apple isn't the first to come out with these kinds of ultralight, high-powered laptops. I used to buy them before netbooks came out. If you can't figure out why high resolution on a tiny screen doesn't make much sense or why packing a Core 2 Duo into a tiny package and expecting to run CPU intensive stuff on it doesn't work well, buy one and you'll see. Reducing the thickness from 1" to 0.7" doesn't improve the things that are wrong with such a design.
Ah, another myth: Apple durability and long term support. Looks like Apple's hired astroturfers are out in full force again.
Yeah, those "VMware" and "Intuit" guys are pretty fly-by-night; I guess I should've waited for the App Store before picking up their apps online.
Well, there are probably some vendors you will trust anyway; that doesn't affect my point: instead of creating a mechanism that allows competition in the software marketplace, they are clearly aiming towards funneling all software purchases through their store, just like they do for the iPhone.
Because it's technically impossible for, say, the OS X packaging and installation mechanism to support dependencies, or replaced with a mechanism that can?
Did I say it was "technically impossible"? I'm just noticing that after a decade, Apple still hasn't done it.
Point is: Apple doesn't innovate much, but they are creating technology that increases their market dominance and will make computing more expensive for their customers.
Oh, the MacBook Air is different from a netbook: it costs 2-5x as much as a netbook (depending on which one you get). For that, you get a machine that's really too small to do serious work on, has uselessly high screen resolution, yet it has a high-powered processor and graphics card that you don't need on such a machine. It's a work of art alright, and about as utilitarian. It's the MacBook Air all over again. If people see you with one, they'll just think "another Apple snob with too much money".
To be precise, it gives you one source of applications for whatever mechanism the App Store uses; nothing requires that you get all your apps from there, but you might have to go through the hideously burdensome process
Yes, it is quite burdensome and a big disadvantage: buy through the app store and get virus-checked, tracked, auto-updating applications, or download some software from some website and take your life into your own hands.
How many dependencies between downloadable components do OS X apps have?
Few, because OS X simply has no way of dealing with them. That's a bad thing. And it's going to continue to be a bad thing and it's one big limitation of OS X.
Linux repositories are a general purpose mechanism; you can point at any "app store" you like with them. Furthermore, they do extensive dependency management and checking.
Apple's App Store gives you one source of applications and it doesn't seem to do much in the way of dependency management.
Apple clearly got the idea from Linux distributions and other commercial vendors, but they are misusing the idea to lock down their machines.
The app store is a rip-off of Linux package systems and other people's online stores, except of course that it will be more restrictive. The new window management is what you have been able to get standard on Linux for many years. And the new MacBook Air is basically a netbook; since OS X and its apps are so heavy-weight, it ended up having to be overpowered and overpriced. And, of course, Jobs talked about it as if they invented it all.
The US mobile phone market is no more "free" than the European mobile phone market: they are both strongly regulated with high barriers to entry.
The European mobile phone market only opened up a couple of years ago; before that, it was in the same bad shape as the US market. There are signs that the US market is changing as well, with cheap prepaid deals becoming more and more available. Just look around.
As far as a holistic ecosystem goes.. Apple has nailed it.
No, they haven't. I went completely Apple for a few years after OS X came out: desktop, laptop, mobile, Mobile Me. It was a frustrating, poor, and expensive solution. It was worse than the Palm Treo I was using before, and it is far worse than Google. Apple's poor PIM functionality was one of the reasons I gave up on Mac and just use it as a glorified media player now.
Are you sure your friend backed up his iPhone?
Many people don't because they think their iPhone is a cloud device; people even sell it that way ("oh, you don't really need a PC, we'll just set it up for you").
Furthermore the "sync" is so slow (even if little has changed) that many people either don't have the patience to wait for it or just assume that something is wrong and disconnect.
You get the most flexibility with an Android Dev Phone.
http://developer.android.com/index.html
If you're in the US and buy a carrier-locked/customized phone, you have to read the fine print and experiment; I've never bought one of those.
In most of the rest of the world, you just buy whatever phone you like unlocked and plug in your SIM card. The HTC Desire is a good choice: nice hardware, good updates, actually useful add-on software.
You can also buy any European Android phone and use it in the US, but you lose 3G; you still get EDGE. In a year or two, they're going to be penta-band Android phones, which will give you 3G worldwide and on AT&T and T-Mobile.
Here are just some off the top of my head:
- Tethering (even on pre-2.2 devices and without rooting)
- replacement keyboards and input methods, including handwriting
- full replacements for built-in apps and dialogs (mail, calendar, camera, image browser, etc.)
- full Google Voice support
- apps that intercept calling (e.g., redirect some/all calls through calling cards or VoIP)
- speech recognition and text-to-speech, fully integrated into the OS
- OS task scheduling and context apps
- file and data sharing between apps, plus end user apps to manage that
- remote phone management
- third party app stores
- synchronization over wifi
- third party music and video stores
- in-device scripting and development
- third party VPN apps
- adult apps
Some iPhone apps try to provide this, but it's pretty much useless. For example, there is a speech recognition app and some handwriting recognition for iPhone, but you can't actually use it to input stuff in other applications.
No, those phones are not very different. They have a different home screen, some different theming, some additional apps, and a slightly different form factor. Once you start an app, they look and work the same way. And if you like, you can install a standard home screen on all of them.
And whaddayaknow, a lot of the customizations actually are nice differentiators without harming or limiting users. If you like Swype and big screens, buy a Samsung. HTC has a nice set of pre-installed widgets and some nice theming, so get those if that's what you like. And S/E did a good job on tiny Android phones. And yet, all of them can be configured to look and work like any of the others.
It's really the best of both worlds: people who don't want to fiddle buy the phone that has the defaults they like, and people who do know how to configure these things can buy any phone just based on specs, price, and hardware.
Are you kidding? There are probably 100x as many locked down Linux machines than Linux desktops; many routers, set-top-boxes, (non-Android) phones, photo frames, webcams, and other devices run some form of Linux and you buy them, use them, and throw them out without ever noticing.
I think that's still a red herring. Android and iOS both have three common screen resolutions each, and Android apps tend to scale better across them. And hardware buttons are also not a big deal: Android games tend to be all-touch, like iOS games, and the hardware buttons aren't used for game controls.
People who just want a no-hassles Android phone can just get one of the mainstream ones; it's pretty obvious just by looking at them, and anything in the iPhone's price category is going to have high resolution and no problems at all.
The oddballs, like the X10 Mini, are pretty self-evident, and even they run most Android software just fine.
The fact that some carriers choose to do something stupid with the platform doesn't make the platform itself closed. If you buy a locked down phone from a restrictive carrier, that's your own fault.
But even the most stupid and restrictive carriers offer access to the Android market, and the market itself is much more open.
100% benefit from the openness: there are tons of apps that run on Android that Apple simply wouldn't approve. And people can install apps from outside the market.
Android phones have common core apps and the same user interfaces. Manufacturers install their own home apps and some additional apps, but you don't have to see them or use them if you don't like them.
Android "fragmentation" is a marketing myth fabricated by Apple, nothing more.
I have no problem with being wrong myself.
That's good, because we have established that you are wrong: the slaves would not clearly have been better off under British rule.
That's a direct claim by you that slaves would not have been freed a day earlier [stop being such a silly demagogue] (since that would have made them better off).
It is indeed! And I stand by it. I gave you the four scenarios I can think of, all of which would have resulted in slaves being freed no earlier. And the British empire was a bunch of drug-dealing, oppressive imperialist thugs at the time, not the kind of people who just free slaves (besides, even the freed slaves in the British empire often ended up being no better off anyway).
So, if you want to persist in making the claim that the British would have ended slavery in the US South earlier and improved conditions for slaves, you need to come up with a convincing scenario, because right now, you're simply not credible.
The congressional summary says:
You wrote:
The report talks about total amount, which is feed plus prescribed antimicrobials. You keep looking only at prescribed antimicrobials. If you add in the feed antimicrobials for 1994, total in 2008 is 63.8% of 1994, which the report (legitimately) rounds down to 60%.
You haven't been able to figure this one out in, what, a couple of weeks of staring at these two sentences? And you want us to believe that you have a graduate degree? What a joke.
I wasn't talking about murder rate, I was talking about crime rate. Go Google the data yourself; it's out there.
f someone can not ask law enforcement to help settle disputes
Have you been living under a rock? Illegal aliens can and do ask police to "settle disputes"; that's what the Arizona law was intended to change.
The simple solution to that is to open up the gates to legal immigration
I don't see a problem that requires a solution. People choose to be in the country illegally; if they don't like the level of policing, they can choose to leave again.
Here's an idea: why don't you Google it yourself?
The US does have fewer criminals to fill up the database with: US crime rates are substantially lower (and decreasing) than, say, in Europe (where they are increasing). And a large part of US crimes is concentrated in illegal alien populations or inner-city (gang?) related.
The primary reason for the high US incarceration rate is longer sentences. Drug laws also contribute. And these ankle bracelets are an attempt to address the incarceration rate, by getting non-violent offenders out of prison. That seems like a good thing overall.
(Still, I think decriminalizing many drugs would be a good thing.)
Look at that. 25% of federal inmates are in there for drug possession. I bet you a good amount of these people wouldn't rob you at gunpoint.
Well, the drug laws are wrong and ineffective. However, that tells you that drugs are not the primary reason for the high US incarceration rate, because even 75% of 3.2% is still high.
So, what do those numbers mean? If you look at the statistics, there is actually more crime overall in Europe than in the US, and the rates are increasing in Europe and decreasing in the US. Furthermore, much of the US crime is concentrated in specific populations--30% of it alone among illegal aliens. That means that if you're a middle class American--the kind likely to vote--your risk of being a crime victim is even lower compared to Europe. Conversely, Europe has higher crime statistics despite having much lower illegal alien populations, better social services, less wealth disparity, supposedly better in-prison rehabilitation, and fewer immigrants.
The primary reason for higher incarceration rates in the US are longer sentences. Harsher drug laws also contribute. I bet more effective policing also does contribute. But given the crime statistics in the US and Europe, European arguments that the US should reduce its sentences are not actually all that convincing.
Personally, I hope the US will decriminalize many drugs and rely more on long-term out-of-prison monitoring for non-violent offenders; that should save money and allow people to re-integrate into society. I don't think the simplistic European approach of lighter sentences is going to be politically feasible, and it certainly has not shown to be effective.