The Kahleeforneea legislature needs to get to work on real issues, like the California Performance Review. If this is what they are wasting their time working on, then the legislature should be sent home to save taxpayer money. Leland Yee is the state senator who tried to legislate "feng shui" into the building code.
What is the penalty for not complying? A $500/day penalty was amended out of the bill. This is another regulation that California merchants must keep track of.
Having private property rights and spectrum auctions are required to maximize efficiency, that is, whoever has the most value for any spectrum will own it. Telecom, TV, Radio, Government, Ham, and other users can all bid on the spectrum that they value most. Public spectrum is not necessary, any entity could purchase spectrum, and charge per device for using their 'open' spectrum, rather than charging for service like cellular. I don't think it would cost that much per 2.4GHz device to make up the cost of purchasing that spectrum at market price since that spectrum has little commercial value for other use. An UWB provider could buy or license discounted fragmented spectrum cheaply and charge for use. The spectrum that we do market, cellular, is used efficiently. If we auction the entire spectrum than all of it will be used efficiently and prices would decrease.
If we can overcome interference problems effectively then we can supply more communications with the same spectrum and prices will decrease. If spectrum is truly 'not scarce' than the price of spectrum will be near zero, and end user prices for service will be near zero. If prices are effectively zero than licensed spectrum will be indistinguishable from a commons. If spectrum is now or ever will be 'scarce' than there will be a tragedy of the commons. 'Commons' people simply fail to imagine the free market solving the problems that it does.
We are not running out of oil. In 1982, proven world oil reserves were 696 billion barrels. Since then the world has consumed 452 billion barrels, but proven world reserves are now over 1 trillion barrels. And we still have tremendous coal, natural gas, gas hydrates, and other energy alternatives available.
U.S. oil production is only declining because we have stopped looking and stopped drilling domestically over environmental concerns. Of course it may be our best interest not to drill now and save it for later, the oil deposits are not going anywhere. However, we need to explore how much oil we have now so that we know when best to start extracting. All of the recoverable oil on the planet will eventually be extracted. And if we don't buy Mid-east oil now, someone else will, and terrorism will still be fully funded. And it's probably best that we buy Mid-east oil. We have a real army and are the only country strong enough to get out of bed with the devil when the appropriate time comes.
Scientific advancement will most likely eventually end our oil dependence. There is no shortage of scientists working on the problem, the economic benefit to finding better energy than fossil fuel is enormous. But I don't think that any scientist who wants be a big hero and benefit from solving the world's oil problem is going to want to hear "You're not paying your fair share", "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" if they succeed.
Having private property rights and spectrum auctions are required to maximize efficiency, that is, whoever has the most value for any spectrum will own it. Government can determine the value of reserved spectrum to itself and choose which and how much spectrum not to sell. Public spectrum is not necessary, any entity could purchase spectrum, open it, and charge per device for using that spectrum, rather than charging for service like cellular. I don't think it would cost that much per 2.4GHz device to make up the cost of purchasing that spectrum at market price. We could also sell personal licenses to use spectrum, like for Ham radio. And if we did auction the entire spectrum so that is was used efficiently than the spectrum price would decrease by not having all the demand squished into a limited range. Spectrum fragmentation problems can be solved by combinatorial auctions.
If the Economist is right and technology can overcome interference problems effectively than spectrum prices will decrease dramatically. If spectrum is truly 'not scarce' than the price of spectrum will be near zero, and the license price for transmitters or service will be near zero. If prices are effectively zero than licensed spectrum will be indistinguishable from a commons. If the Economist is wrong and spectrum is now or ever will be 'scarce' than the tragedy of the commons will return. A spectrum commons is wrong, the market is always right.
Still not quite. Taxes take far more money out of the market than fees. Even though the long term cap gain rate was cut in the 90's, the sheer price appreciation meant that a tremendous amount of money was sucked right out of the market from capital gains tax revenues. And government spending is quite slow in getting back into the market.
More elected representatives are good. More government bureaucrats and regulators are bad. The California Performance Review is a good start. It's too bad that all the "Girlie Men" in the California legislature are opposed to any government reform.
A French company want to take away an American company's inalienable right to private property, what a surprise. FairPlay is Apple's private intellectual property, which they can use as they see fit. If it is Apple's best interests to license their IP then it is up to Apple to make that decision. It is not up to government to nationalize anyone's property, intellectual or tangible.
More ignorant foreigners who have never seen a U.S. ballot or voted in a U.S. election.
While your parliamentary ruling party is appointing it's cronies to positions all over the government, we are:
Electing federal, state, local, judicial, school board, etc. and voting on publicly proposed propositions and constitutional amendments. We have hundreds of races all on the same ballot.
Having primary elections with different ballots for different parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race across each state.
Permuting the order of candidates listed in a race to eliminate any first-listing bias.
We handle all of this easily and foreigners who simply put an X next to a party in parliamentary elections call us stupid when we don't get everything perfect all of the time. Automated ballot counting in the U.S. is a must. We don't want to wait till 2020 to learn who is on the school board and who is the 53rd district Judge.
Read the article. The patent holders have been very willing to license patents for free for the mentioned non-profit testing. Patent holders are rational, if there is value and little money they will license patents for free rather than block useful treatment. If there is money, then they will license for an affordable amount because they cannot make any money from patents if they don't license them.
This isn't free software or the third world, American consumers are quite willing and able to spend large amounts of money on patented medical products (drugs) for their health.
Iron is the limiting factor for most ocean biomass growth.
A pound of iron in any form added to the ocean can yield new life enough to sequester anywhere from five to fifty tones of carbon.
California's own Silicon Valley state legislators have absolutely horrible
anti-technology and anti-business voting records.
The Unions and trial lawyers spend far more on them than the technology companies in their own districts, and they vote that way, even worse than the rest of California.
Another way of saying this last result is that for every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional spoiled ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.
It is quite believable that this would be observed with the small sample size in change in Republican registration against the large noise of spoiled ballots.
Only two elections were observed, and more data is needed to make a significant conclusion.
Lott is simply sloppy and does not include standard deviation in his regression.
I have seen far bigger crocks of s**t.
Lichtman and others have shown no cause of black voter disenfranchisement.
Yet many people still claim that black voters were intentionally disenfranchised by Republicans even though Democrats were in charge of all the Counties in question.
Given the tremendous amount of hatred directed at black Republican politicians like Thomas, Rice, Powell, Paige, etc., it is easy to believe that there would be a much wider bias.
A more detailed
precinct level study showed that
African-American Republicans were 50 times more likely to have their ballot thrown out in 2000 Florida election.
And none or the 25 counties with the highest spoilage rates were supervised by a Republican.
Electronic voting fraud is a small risk compared to other methods of rigging elections. And besides, any slashdot reader knows which party most of the hackers capable of rigging an electronic vote would cheat for.
How many here have never voted in a U.S. election or seen a U.S. ballot?
We have races for federal, state, local, propositions, judicial, school board, etc. all on the same ballot.
We have had 135 candidates in one race.
We have primaries with different ballots for different parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race across each state.
We can have multiple votes in a race (party central committee).
We permute the order of candidates listed in a race to eliminate the first-listing bias.
We handle all of this easily and foreigners who simply put an X next to a single candidate in parliamentary elections call us stupid when we don't get everything perfect all of the time.
Having automated ballot counting in the USA is a must. Everyone agrees that there should be a paper trail with evoting in the future as soon as possible. The current debate is whether we should use the existing evoting machines now or go back to paper until verifiable evoting is ready.
Greenpeace has been at the head of banning DDT use worldwide. Careful indoor use of DDT can save hundreds of thousands of lives each year in Africa. Many countries still ban DDT because of Greenpeace, and millions of lives have been lost because of them. They oppose GM designed to grow in bad conditions in poor countries and could save millions of lives from starvation while raising the standard of living. Millions of people respiratory diseases from burning fuel indoors that can be prevented by electricity generation that environmentalists oppose.
Charles Wurster of the EDF said in 1972 about banning DDT:
"So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them and this is as good a way as any."
Radical environmentalism is simply anti-humanity. The terrorists could not even dream of causing as much human death as Greenpeace.
Oregon is the state where Al-Qaida tried to set up a
You might remember how totally outdated the FBI computer systems were during the reign of Louis Freeh. Muller's FBI has been spending it's entire time upgrading the FBI's systems and is still not finished. It would be understandable that the FBI would not want to put any resources into dumping an old database.
SELECT * WHERE organization != "Haliburton" and Country != "Saudi Arabia" and Topic != "Energy" ORDER BY "Contribution Amount"
Results:
Name,Organization,Country,Contributee,Amount
Mochtar Riady,Lippo,Indonesia,Clinton,?
James Riady,Lippo,Indonesia,Clinton,?
Charles Trie,Triad,China,Clinton,>450k
John Huang,Riady,China,Clinton,?
Johnny Chung,,China,Clinton,>350k
Liu Chaoying,PLA,China,Clinton,? ...
It depends on how much you value your life and if you care about how the media may portray your death.
By working in the Middle-East, the chances of your death becoming national news increases dramatically. This is just like if you get shot in a school than your death will become national news. There was all the fuss over profiling likely school shooters when the profile or the classmate most likely to kill your child is one who is behind the wheel and drunk. The media is not a good informer of the real risks you face in life.
You make choices involving life and death, health, and other risks every day. The market does a good job of discovering and pricing the risk premiums of various hazardous activities. The Economist looked at some data and found that the price that Americans put on their life is around $7 million. The question is how much you value your life compared to the market?
Knives -- 800,000 people killed in Rwanda with machetes, right under the UN's nose. The UN could care less because knives are not WMD's
Over 100 Million people were slaughtered or executed by guns and knives so that Communists could stay in absolute power.
Nukes -- The Bomb accounts for less than 1% of the WWII dead.
Saddam's WMD's accounted for less than 10% of the people he butchered.
Most current nuclear proliferation activity is directed over conflict in Israel/Palestine, where hundreds die a year. This is not even a blip in total world conflict.
The worst current conflict is in Sudan, where over
100,000 are expected to be killed this year.
Nobody seems to care about this, nor does anybody seem to care that George Bush is the only world leader who is trying to do anything about this.
People who focus only on technology and not ideology are negligent.
Freedom, liberty, democracy, and capitalism are the weapons that can make all other weapons obsolete.
Now they are trying to ban cell phones in cars, starting with children. They have already passed legislation to make your computer more expensive by adding a fee for your monitor or LCD screen. They have banned the use of notebook computers and other technology in the front seat. They are charging and enforcing a huge use tax on all internet purchases. And this is just a start.
Now Figueroa (D-Fremont) and the Senate are targeting Google personally with SB 1822. All of Silicon Valley voted for this bill except for one abstain, Sher (D-Stanford).
Those in Silicon Valley are going to either buy back they Democrats from the Unions (and they have tons of money to fight back) or vote for Republicans.
Price discrimination is good. Whatever pricing lets an American company (MS) maximize foreign profit is good for America. Product licensing means that foreign prices do not affect domestic prices.
Microsoft is Un-American because they are anti-capitalist.
[Sharp] said governments that standardize on open-source software are hurting their local software vendors as they can't make the money needed to invest in their own software products.
I blame Microsoft for falling for the broken window fallacy and arguing for greater government spending. Government spending reduces investment in the economy because it takes capital away from the economy in taxes and borrowing.
It would help if our own government, especially the California legislature, understood this.
Interest on the debt is income for US bond-holders (except for the foreign debt, and foreigners investing in US bonds is a good thing). Most will simply save the interest in more US bonds, unless they have better use for the money. Then they can sell the bonds to others who have less need for their money. As long as the economy is growing, you can always borrow more money to pay off current bond-holders and interest on the debt.
The government already "defaults" on all of the money it collects in the form of "taxes". The less money that is taken away as taxes and the more the economy grows, the more money will be available to lend to the government. With the revised current deficit figure (3.1% and falling) less than the growth rate of the economy (4.2% and growing), we can easily afford more than the current debt, another tax cut, and trips to the Moon and Mars.
All of the depressions in the US have happened during or immediately following periods of budget surpluses. The last thing I want the government to do is raise taxes to buy bonds.
Slashdot Mirror
The Kahleeforneea legislature needs to get to work on real issues, like the California Performance Review. If this is what they are wasting their time working on, then the legislature should be sent home to save taxpayer money. Leland Yee is the state senator who tried to legislate "feng shui" into the building code.
What is the penalty for not complying? A $500/day penalty was amended out of the bill. This is another regulation that California merchants must keep track of.
Having private property rights and spectrum auctions are required to maximize efficiency, that is, whoever has the most value for any spectrum will own it. Telecom, TV, Radio, Government, Ham, and other users can all bid on the spectrum that they value most. Public spectrum is not necessary, any entity could purchase spectrum, and charge per device for using their 'open' spectrum, rather than charging for service like cellular. I don't think it would cost that much per 2.4GHz device to make up the cost of purchasing that spectrum at market price since that spectrum has little commercial value for other use. An UWB provider could buy or license discounted fragmented spectrum cheaply and charge for use. The spectrum that we do market, cellular, is used efficiently. If we auction the entire spectrum than all of it will be used efficiently and prices would decrease.
If we can overcome interference problems effectively then we can supply more communications with the same spectrum and prices will decrease. If spectrum is truly 'not scarce' than the price of spectrum will be near zero, and end user prices for service will be near zero. If prices are effectively zero than licensed spectrum will be indistinguishable from a commons. If spectrum is now or ever will be 'scarce' than there will be a tragedy of the commons. 'Commons' people simply fail to imagine the free market solving the problems that it does.
We are not running out of oil. In 1982, proven world oil reserves were 696 billion barrels. Since then the world has consumed 452 billion barrels, but proven world reserves are now over 1 trillion barrels. And we still have tremendous coal, natural gas, gas hydrates, and other energy alternatives available.
U.S. oil production is only declining because we have stopped looking and stopped drilling domestically over environmental concerns. Of course it may be our best interest not to drill now and save it for later, the oil deposits are not going anywhere. However, we need to explore how much oil we have now so that we know when best to start extracting. All of the recoverable oil on the planet will eventually be extracted. And if we don't buy Mid-east oil now, someone else will, and terrorism will still be fully funded. And it's probably best that we buy Mid-east oil. We have a real army and are the only country strong enough to get out of bed with the devil when the appropriate time comes.
Scientific advancement will most likely eventually end our oil dependence. There is no shortage of scientists working on the problem, the economic benefit to finding better energy than fossil fuel is enormous. But I don't think that any scientist who wants be a big hero and benefit from solving the world's oil problem is going to want to hear "You're not paying your fair share", "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good" if they succeed.
Having private property rights and spectrum auctions are required to maximize efficiency, that is, whoever has the most value for any spectrum will own it. Government can determine the value of reserved spectrum to itself and choose which and how much spectrum not to sell. Public spectrum is not necessary, any entity could purchase spectrum, open it, and charge per device for using that spectrum, rather than charging for service like cellular. I don't think it would cost that much per 2.4GHz device to make up the cost of purchasing that spectrum at market price. We could also sell personal licenses to use spectrum, like for Ham radio. And if we did auction the entire spectrum so that is was used efficiently than the spectrum price would decrease by not having all the demand squished into a limited range. Spectrum fragmentation problems can be solved by combinatorial auctions.
If the Economist is right and technology can overcome interference problems effectively than spectrum prices will decrease dramatically. If spectrum is truly 'not scarce' than the price of spectrum will be near zero, and the license price for transmitters or service will be near zero. If prices are effectively zero than licensed spectrum will be indistinguishable from a commons. If the Economist is wrong and spectrum is now or ever will be 'scarce' than the tragedy of the commons will return. A spectrum commons is wrong, the market is always right.
Still not quite. Taxes take far more money out of the market than fees. Even though the long term cap gain rate was cut in the 90's, the sheer price appreciation meant that a tremendous amount of money was sucked right out of the market from capital gains tax revenues. And government spending is quite slow in getting back into the market.
More elected representatives are good. More government bureaucrats and regulators are bad. The California Performance Review is a good start. It's too bad that all the "Girlie Men" in the California legislature are opposed to any government reform.
A French company want to take away an American company's inalienable right to private property, what a surprise. FairPlay is Apple's private intellectual property, which they can use as they see fit. If it is Apple's best interests to license their IP then it is up to Apple to make that decision. It is not up to government to nationalize anyone's property, intellectual or tangible.
Electing federal, state, local, judicial, school board, etc. and voting on publicly proposed propositions and constitutional amendments. We have hundreds of races all on the same ballot.
Having primary elections with different ballots for different parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race across each state.
Permuting the order of candidates listed in a race to eliminate any first-listing bias.
We handle all of this easily and foreigners who simply put an X next to a party in parliamentary elections call us stupid when we don't get everything perfect all of the time. Automated ballot counting in the U.S. is a must. We don't want to wait till 2020 to learn who is on the school board and who is the 53rd district Judge.
Read the article. The patent holders have been very willing to license patents for free for the mentioned non-profit testing. Patent holders are rational, if there is value and little money they will license patents for free rather than block useful treatment. If there is money, then they will license for an affordable amount because they cannot make any money from patents if they don't license them.
This isn't free software or the third world, American consumers are quite willing and able to spend large amounts of money on patented medical products (drugs) for their health.
North America is also a huge carbon sink.
California's own Silicon Valley state legislators have absolutely horrible anti-technology and anti-business voting records. The Unions and trial lawyers spend far more on them than the technology companies in their own districts, and they vote that way, even worse than the rest of California.
Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser and John Kerry advisor, illegally removed classified documents from the National Archives during the 9/11 commission investigation by stuffing them into his jacket, pants pockets, and his socks.
Maybe we need p2p to get this story out, since the mainstream media is doing a good job of burying the story.
Lichtman and others have shown no cause of black voter disenfranchisement. Yet many people still claim that black voters were intentionally disenfranchised by Republicans even though Democrats were in charge of all the Counties in question. Given the tremendous amount of hatred directed at black Republican politicians like Thomas, Rice, Powell, Paige, etc., it is easy to believe that there would be a much wider bias.
Electronic voting fraud is a small risk compared to other methods of rigging elections. And besides, any slashdot reader knows which party most of the hackers capable of rigging an electronic vote would cheat for.
We have races for federal, state, local, propositions, judicial, school board, etc. all on the same ballot.
We have had 135 candidates in one race.
We have primaries with different ballots for different parties, with different rules on who can vote in each race across each state.
We can have multiple votes in a race (party central committee).
We permute the order of candidates listed in a race to eliminate the first-listing bias.
We handle all of this easily and foreigners who simply put an X next to a single candidate in parliamentary elections call us stupid when we don't get everything perfect all of the time.
Having automated ballot counting in the USA is a must. Everyone agrees that there should be a paper trail with evoting in the future as soon as possible. The current debate is whether we should use the existing evoting machines now or go back to paper until verifiable evoting is ready.
Greenpeace has been at the head of banning DDT use worldwide.
Careful indoor use of DDT can save hundreds of thousands of lives each year in Africa. Many countries still ban DDT because of Greenpeace, and millions of lives have been lost because of them.
They oppose GM designed to grow in bad conditions in poor countries and could save millions of lives from starvation while raising the standard of living.
Millions of people respiratory diseases from burning fuel indoors that can be
prevented by electricity generation that environmentalists oppose.
Charles Wurster of the EDF said in 1972 about banning DDT:
Radical environmentalism is simply anti-humanity. The terrorists could not even dream of causing as much human death as Greenpeace.
Oregon is the state where Al-Qaida tried to set up a
terrorist training camp.
You might remember how totally outdated the FBI computer systems were during the reign of Louis Freeh. Muller's FBI has been spending it's entire time upgrading the FBI's systems and is still not finished. It would be understandable that the FBI would not want to put any resources into dumping an old database.
Or they might be covering up that the (previous) president's top campaign contributors were foreign agents.
Name,Organization,Country,Contributee,Amount
Mochtar Riady,Lippo,Indonesia,Clinton,?
James Riady,Lippo,Indonesia,Clinton,?
Charles Trie,Triad,China,Clinton,>450k
John Huang,Riady,China,Clinton,?
Johnny Chung,,China,Clinton,>350k
Liu Chaoying,PLA,China,Clinton,?
It would be unthinkable if the president's top contributors were agents of a foreign government. Our president would never sell out our national security to another country.
By working in the Middle-East, the chances of your death becoming national news increases dramatically. This is just like if you get shot in a school than your death will become national news. There was all the fuss over profiling likely school shooters when the profile or the classmate most likely to kill your child is one who is behind the wheel and drunk. The media is not a good informer of the real risks you face in life.
You make choices involving life and death, health, and other risks every day. The market does a good job of discovering and pricing the risk premiums of various hazardous activities. The Economist looked at some data and found that the price that Americans put on their life is around $7 million. The question is how much you value your life compared to the market?
Over 100 Million people were slaughtered or executed by guns and knives so that Communists could stay in absolute power.
Nukes -- The Bomb accounts for less than 1% of the WWII dead.
Saddam's WMD's accounted for less than 10% of the people he butchered.
Most current nuclear proliferation activity is directed over conflict in Israel/Palestine, where hundreds die a year. This is not even a blip in total world conflict.
The worst current conflict is in Sudan, where over 100,000 are expected to be killed this year. Nobody seems to care about this, nor does anybody seem to care that George Bush is the only world leader who is trying to do anything about this.
People who focus only on technology and not ideology are negligent. Freedom, liberty, democracy, and capitalism are the weapons that can make all other weapons obsolete.
Now they are trying to ban cell phones in cars, starting with children. They have already passed legislation to make your computer more expensive by adding a fee for your monitor or LCD screen. They have banned the use of notebook computers and other technology in the front seat. They are charging and enforcing a huge use tax on all internet purchases. And this is just a start.
Now Figueroa (D-Fremont) and the Senate are targeting Google personally with SB 1822. All of Silicon Valley voted for this bill except for one abstain, Sher (D-Stanford).
Those in Silicon Valley are going to either buy back they Democrats from the Unions (and they have tons of money to fight back) or vote for Republicans.
Microsoft is Un-American because they are anti-capitalist.
I blame Microsoft for falling for the broken window fallacy and arguing for greater government spending. Government spending reduces investment in the economy because it takes capital away from the economy in taxes and borrowing.It would help if our own government, especially the California legislature, understood this.
Arnold goes on a trip and brings 800 new "insourced" jobs to Kahleeforneea and all slashdot cares about is that he "outsources" one cough drop?
Interest on the debt is income for US bond-holders (except for the foreign debt, and foreigners investing in US bonds is a good thing). Most will simply save the interest in more US bonds, unless they have better use for the money. Then they can sell the bonds to others who have less need for their money. As long as the economy is growing, you can always borrow more money to pay off current bond-holders and interest on the debt.
The government already "defaults" on all of the money it collects in the form of "taxes". The less money that is taken away as taxes and the more the economy grows, the more money will be available to lend to the government. With the revised current deficit figure (3.1% and falling) less than the growth rate of the economy (4.2% and growing), we can easily afford more than the current debt, another tax cut, and trips to the Moon and Mars.
All of the depressions in the US have happened during or immediately following periods of budget surpluses. The last thing I want the government to do is raise taxes to buy bonds.
tradesports.com has a futures market on the relative price of the IPO. There is another futures market for the time of the IPO