No... it's entirely normal for an intel based laptop to get between 5 and 10 hours depending on the size of the battery and the speed of the chip. I'm not sure I've seen a single AMD laptop (that isn't based on the E-350) with battery life over 4 hours.
Considering that the CPU is only a fraction of the power draw of a laptop, a factor of two difference in battery life is almost certainly not attributable to the difference in CPUs.
The primary reason for the battery life difference is probably that Intel chips are sold in higher end laptops that contain higher capacity batteries.
Intel mobiles perform more processing per watt than AMD, and it's been that way for a few years.
Performance per watt is only tangentially related to battery life. Most laptop CPUs spend 95% of their power on hours idle, which means that the important figure is idle power draw. The fact that the Intel chip could be doing 60% more calculations if it actually had something to do doesn't make the battery last any longer.
That depends on the alternative. If the alternative is coal, it may be wise to make whatever safety improvements are necessary to keep them in safe operation until such time as the alternative is no longer coal. (Of course, this also ignores the alternative of replacing old nuclear with new nuclear. But that would require us to get past the hysterics and recognize that, no matter what your opinions are, newer nuclear plants are objectively safer than older nuclear plants. Which means there is no principled argument against building new plants if the next best alternative is to continue operating the old ones.)
Obvious troll is obvious (especially when Linux still has better than 60% of the server market and an even larger share of small servers), but realistically this isn't the end of the world for open source. This is people replacing Windows with MacOS. Which can only be a good thing for Linux, because it helps break Windows lock-in.
Applications developed only for Windows rarely run properly on Linux. Applications developed with portability to MacOS in mind get a Linux port nearly for free, because MacOS and Linux share the *nix APIs and you've already separated out all of the platform-specific bits of the code to do the Mac port, plus you've then probably used some kind of cross-platform framework like qt and avoided MS lock-in like.NET.
So the win follows: MacOS achieves a critical mass to get third parties to target it as a development platform and stop writing Windows-locked applications. Then those applications are either easily ported to Linux or someone implements a MacOS equivalent of WINE which will be easier to do and more seamless because of the greater level of similarity between two Unix-like operating systems than between Linux and Windows and because unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't go out of their way to keep their platform a moving target to keep Linux from achieving compatibility. Linux then solves one of the greatest long-standing barriers to increased adoption, namely support for third party applications.
Obviously the death of open source, that.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Occupy Flash?
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Incidentally, if you want something that will actually go some way toward fixing what you're talking about (along with a long list of other things), pay attention to Larry Lessig and his anti-corruption movement.
If you don't have time, the bottom line is: Public financing of elections. And if the Occupy movement would get behind that as their single issue, they could dedicate themselves to something tangible and productive that would actually make a difference.
Because if the "wave function" is a real object, then there is no probabilistic nature to quantum shit - it just means we are currently unable to directly measure the "wave function" without "collapsing" it. If it's not probabilistic, all the fuzziness of quantum physics goes away. Schrodinger's cat is dead, Einstein was right when he said God doesn't play dice, entanglement is horse shit, everyone who works with string theory is a moron, etc.
I don't know if this is a stupid question or not, but: What's the practical difference between something having a state before you measure it but you can't know what it is until you do the measurement, and the state being decided only when the measurement is taken? In what way, other than in contemplating the answer to a purely philosophical question, does it change anything? Is there something the laws of physics allow me to do that I couldn't do with the alternative interpretation?
I suspect the answer is no, because otherwise we would seem to have an experiment available that could prove it one way or the other. But if that's the case then I guess the real question is, why does it matter? Can't we just pick one and use it until such time as its veracity is experimentally disproven? (And wouldn't it make more sense to pick the one that better matches our intuitions, rather than confusing the crap out of everyone with probabilistic non-determinism?)
Not only that, they give you time limits on searches. They'll only pay you for e.g. 2 hours to search for prior art for a patent application. And of course, if you do a search and it returns 5000 seemingly relevant results, you haven't the slightest hope of so much as reading the abstracts of all of them in the time allotted, much less doing a thorough job.
Only if by "an entirely different outcome" you mean "we still have a two party system."
The Tea Party doesn't really run candidates against the Republicans. They aren't forming another hopeless third party that never wins any seats, they're changing the nature of one of the existing major parties from the inside. (That is to say, they were before they were co-opted by the Republican campaign apparatus and their message was converted from something in the nature of fighting corruption to something in the nature of "taxes are bad, so we should cut everything other than the things that actually cost money.")
Let me give you an example. Suppose there are three minority groups who each comprise 33% of the population, call them A, B, and C, who each support one issue, 'a', 'b', and 'c', respectively. Each group opposes the two issues other than the one they support, so A opposes 'b' and 'c', B opposes 'a' and 'c', and C opposes 'a' and 'b'.
Now you bring in two candidates, one that opposes all three of the issues against one that supports all three issues. Let's say each group feels about equally strongly about each issue. If the voters are fully informed, the candidate in opposition to everything should naturally win with almost 100% of the vote, because for every voter, the voter agrees with that candidate on two of the three issues and with the other candidate on only one of the three.
So now let's leave the ideal world where all the voters know all the candidates positions and enter the more realistic one where they don't know until someone tells them. In comes the ad man, who runs ads emphasizing issue 'a' in media consumed primarily by Group A, issue 'b' in media consumed primarily by Group B, and issue 'c' in media consumed primarily by Group C. Most members of Group A will then have no idea what either candidate's position is on issues 'b' and 'c', etc. So members of Group A go to the polls and cast their votes based on issue 'a', Group B casts their votes based on issue 'b', and Group C casts their votes based on issue 'c'.
The candidate that each voter agrees with on only one of the three issues then wins over the candidate that each voter agrees with on two out of three, solely because the voters were selectively informed about the candidates' positions.
If some unknown guy wants to run for President, why shouldn't he get the same funding that Rick Perry gets?
Some people say that he should. Naturally that would cost a lot of money.
There is another reasonable alternative, which is what a lot of the states that do state-level public financing do: You require the candidate to raise a threshold amount of money themselves from small donors (e.g. $10 each from at least 10,000 individual donors) before they qualify for public money. That keeps you from having to give millions of tax dollars to a bunch of loons without strictly limiting yourself to major party candidates.
Or what if one of the candidates is a billionaire, and spends a couple billion on his campaign? Should the taxpayer foot a couple billion each for all the other candidates? Or are you going to restrict how much the billionaire is allowed to spend?
There are three reasons why this isn't a problem. The first is that someone spending billions of dollars on a campaign is so rare that paying the money once in a blue moon would hardly bankrupt the government even if every dollar was matched. The second is that ad buys have diminishing returns after a certain threshold level of saturation, so if we had a limit of e.g. $50M of public money for a campaign, a billionaire spending a billion dollars would have an advantage, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the advantage that a millionaire spending a couple million dollars currently has over someone who only has a hundred thousand dollars. And the third is that if you do match the full amount, you won't see as many billionaires wanting to spend outrageous sums because they won't be able to buy elections anymore; in order for spending money to help you, you would actually have to be better candidate, because the population is going to hear more from both sides instead of just from you.
Unless your candidate fits *all* of the criteria -- in which case you are, in fact, finding issues where the candidate disagrees with the majority (or every minority, which amounts to the same thing).
It's really not the same thing at all. Every candidate disagrees with a majority of minorities about something, and if that issue is the only one they have on their minds when they go to the voting booth, you can convince them each to vote against their own interest.
For example, if you're a retired person, you might agree with a candidate on 9/10 issues, but if no one is talking about those issues and the TV tells you that candidate wants to make Medicare more expensive for you, you're liable to vote against them even though it's not in your own self interest. You'll get your Medicare but you'll lose the other 9 issues that together matter to you significantly more than higher copays (because nobody had enough money to tell you that before you went to the voting booth).
No, it's the other way around. The problem is that corporations have more money, so they can buy more speech than the actual candidates. The answer to speech is more speech, so the answer to money is more money. Public financing of elections.
Probably the best way to do it is some kind of anti-matching funds system, where every dollar someone spends against you means that you get an extra dollar of public financing so that you can answer the attack. (I'm not sure whether that is constitutional under the existing caselaw, but it certainly ought to be if it isn't.)
The problem with your argument is reality. We are still building new coal fired plants today. Not just not shutting down old plants, building new plants. Because it's known, cheap, and legal.
So let's go with your argument that geothermal is better than both coal and nuclear for a second. That doesn't change the fact that nuclear is better than coal, does it? So until we shut down all the coal fired plants, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants is an instance of defective prioritization.
The problem is that if you can choose the issues that get media attention then you can choose the winner. As between a candidate that agrees with the majority of a district on 80% of the important issues vs. one that agrees on substantially fewer, you would expect the first candidate to win. But if you throw ten million dollars behind a campaign to bring the the remaining 20% of issues to the forefront of the debate, you cause the "better" candidate to lose. Which you can do merely because you disagree with the candidate on one of the issues for which that candidate agrees with the majority of the district, if you have a big enough pile of money.
You don't even have to find issues where the candidate disagrees with the majority. If the majority of the district supports strong measures against illegal immigration and so does the candidate, but 80% of Spanish-speaking constituents strongly oppose those measures, you run ads describing the candidate's position in Spanish. If the candidate is pro choice, you run ads on religious TV networks. If the candidate is pro life, you run ads on liberal women's networks. If the candidate opposes further unfunded increases in Medicare benefits, you put ads in AARP publications, etc.
It's easy to destroy an honest candidate by telling the truth in inconvenient places.
The problem with corporate "speech" is not when they spend a bunch of money on ads, it's when they hand bags of money to politicians and call them "campaign contributions". Somehow the SCOTUS equate giving money to someone as "speech", which it's not, it's a bribe.
Are you sure about that? I think Citizens United was more about the first one than the second one.
The concern is that advertising sets the tone for a campaign. If a specific candidate supports SOPA and world+dog outside of Hollywood (including the candidate's district) opposes it, advertising that fact will cause the candidate to lose votes. And there will be issues of that nature for any candidate, which de facto allows corporations to crush anyone they don't like merely by bringing up the specific issues that make them unpopular in their home districts.
Not that I'm complaining about it in this specific instance. I'll take any help I can get to kill SOPA, and may all its advocates lose their seats.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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There is plenty of evidence that those involved in the subprime crash knew precisely what they were doing, and purposefully looked the other way because they were making mountains of cash.
Again, there is a law against everything. If you want to take a few of those people and make an example out of them then you can, but they were by far not the only ones at fault. It was everyone. Everyone was reckless.
The problem is this: No one person or company created the mortgage crisis. It was a regulatory failure. Banks were encouraged to make as many mortgage loans as possible, to promote home ownership. Then they were allowed to sell the mortgages to investors, giving them cash with which to make more loans -- and depriving them of any incentive to care whether the borrowers were creditworthy. Nobody really thought about the consequences of doing that because everyone assumed that the worst case was that if someone defaulted, you foreclose on the house, sell it on the market and get back your investment in the loan.
At some point -- after it was too late to stop it, but before it all went to hell -- some smart people no doubt realized that there was a big housing bubble and that when it popped there was going to be a giant hole in the ground where everybody's money used to be, because the foreclosures would be worth less than the loans. Those are the people you're talking about. They did what comes naturally to Wall St. folk: If you see a bubble, you bet against it.
You can say they violated a duty to their investors, or find some SEC regs they violated or whatever you like, but I don't think they could have done anything to make it better by that point. They made a lot of money so it's convenient to point the finger at them, but it wasn't them that caused the problem. They only identified it early enough to profit from it. There wasn't really anything they could have done differently to fix it at that point -- if they had raised the alarm it wouldn't have changed anything.
There were already hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages issued to uncreditworthy borrowers against houses that weren't worth as much as people thought they were, and weren't worth as much as the loans were for. Once they existed, at some point the bubble would have to burst and whoever was holding those mortgages when it did was fucked. Changing who got a chair when the music stopped wouldn't have averted the crisis; somebody had to be left holding the bag. Letting the people who figured it out first win is kind of how it's supposed to work. You can punish them for that if it makes you feel better, but I wouldn't really call it justice.
The other side is that the wealthy have a completely different justice system than the rest of us, and that isn't fair.
I'm not sure how you expect to even evaluate this, much less bring it about. The wealthy don't literally have a different justice system. They don't go to different courts where they apply different laws. What they have is better lawyers and more political influence. You can't exactly pass a law prohibiting rich people from having good lawyers or from being in the same social circle as the governor.
Or to put it a different way: If that's your goal, what's your plan? What thing do you do, what law do you pass, to make it happen?
That's technically true, but what kind of machine is going to come with mandatory secure boot and not also come with a Windows license? Or, to put it a different way, if you're specifically buying a machine that doesn't come with a Windows license then you can easily just get one that doesn't come with secure boot.
The problem with secure boot is that it prevents people from converting older machines. You get a Windows machine, then later discover Linux and want to install it, and you can't because of secure boot. But in that case you already have the Windows license; it doesn't cost anything more.
There is a certain degree of bogosity here though. The preceding is based on the assumption that secure boot doesn't actually work: If you can root Windows, boot Linux and then run Windows in a VM, so can malware. And if that's the case then secure boot just shouldn't exist, because it's worse than useless. It doesn't stop malware and it makes it annoying to run Linux.
Whereas if it does work (and you can't turn it off) then it stops you from running Linux, which is an even more serious problem.
Yeah but the heydays are over the next time you run Windows Update.
So...don't?
1) Install vulnerable Windows. 2) Install Linux, then delete all the bits of Windows not needed to boot Linux. 3) Run Windows in a VM, if at all.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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That is too vague to actually mean anything. It sounds like what you're asking for is some sacrificial lambs from among the "1%" to be hanged as an example to the others. No doubt we could find some and find some laws they broke -- everyone breaks the law all the time. There is a law against everything. So let's say we do that; string up some investment bankers and make everybody feel better.
How does that help you? It isn't going to make the value of your home or your retirement account go up. It isn't going to reduce the unemployment rate or reduce income disparities.
It isn't even going to deter future bad acts, because the banks who lost all their money had more than enough incentive not to do that; the problem was widespread incompetence rather than widespread malice. Country club prison is hardly a more effective deterrent than losing a billion dollars -- the problem is that people over-optimistically expect not to lose, not that the downside is too small.
And it isn't even justice. There is not some small group of people who were at fault. It was everybody. You can't pick out a couple of them to make an example of and call it justice. If you really want justice you have to punish them all, and that is a totally hopeless goal, because there are thousands of them. They would have to close the New York Stock Exchange because all the traders would be in prison.
So justice is not available. There is only revenge. And revenge is a stupid goal, because you spend your resources trying to destroy your "enemies" rather than trying to fix the very real problems we all have to face.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Occupy Flash?
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The problem is that there is no cause. There is no 99%. It's just a bunch of people who collectively agree that they don't like the way things are, but fundamentally disagree on how things should be instead.
It's shades of "change you can believe in." People want change, but what change? Borrowing so much that we can't pay the interest is change. Nuclear war is change. Is that the change we want? Certainly not.
You need to define a platform before you can have a cause. But that dissolves the coalition of the naive who each believe that everyone wants to do the thing they want to do rather than each having their own ideas and goals.
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
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Occupy Flash?
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Because it's more stable. If any threat to the status quo arises, anyone who is currently getting a raw deal will support the threat. If those people are instead living the good life (albeit not as good as you are), they'll oppose the threat as a threat to their own safe and happy lives.
It is much preferable to be a billionaire in a world of millionaires than a trillionaire in a world of people who are starving and trying to eat you.
Plus selling stocks means you pay tax on the income in most western nations meaning that $100,000 earned from selling MSFT does not equal buying $100,000 of bonds.
The tax is generally paid on the difference between the purchase price and the sale price. Since the stock has been flat for a decade, unless you bought in the 90s you won't have much tax to pay if any. And most of the people who bought it in the 90s have already sold it; nobody was buying it as a blue chip in 1997, and nobody who wasn't would have held it this long.
The idea behind investing in blue chip stocks is to keep them for a very long time as they are not meant to grow quickly.
The idea of investing in anything is to evaluate risk vs. reward. You can get big returns on junk bonds, as long as you don't mind a risk of big losses. At the other end, the US treasury isn't going to default on its debts, but the interest rate is something close to nothing. Which means the question is, is the return on Microsoft worth the risk?
I personally don't think it looks very good. The returns are pretty low and there is a not insignificant risk that Microsoft could lose its Windows monopoly in the medium term. Fortunes change fast in the tech sector. If Apple decided they needed to foster their ecosystem more than they need high margins on Macs, they would release a $400 Mac or a $600 iBook that would sell like gangbusters and all but displace Windows in the home. If Google ever decided they were tired of Microsoft leveraging Windows against them all the time they could polish and market a Linux distribution with the same result. There is no small chance that tablets and smart phones will eat a big chunk out of the desktop market. Governments buy software by bidding process and more and more non-Microsoft solutions are able to meet the bidding requirements.
And none of that stuff has to completely displace Windows for Microsoft to be in trouble. It only needs to be the thin end of the wedge. Once you have a Linux or BSD-based OS with a substantial market share that runs the same sort of third party applications as Windows, developers start caring about their software running on multiple platforms. A few years later all your third party software is multi-platform and choice of operating system becomes personal preference rather than business necessity. And then free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-not-tied-to-a-single-vendor become nontrivial advantages in a market of otherwise fungible operating systems.
That doesn't mean I would short the stock or anything. None of that is guaranteed to happen. But neither is the continuation of the status quo. And if your goal is to get relatively low returns for relatively low risk, it seems to me like too much risk for not enough return.
I'm not sure the history negates the unconscionability. The penalty must fit the crime and the accused should have an opportunity to be heard before the penalty is imposed. Seizing property of arbitrary value, which may not even belong to the accused, without any opportunity to be heard before the penalty is executed is an injustice plain and simple.
Which is naturally why we impose it in the war on drugs. Our inability to change human nature and our stubbornness in refusing to admit it has led us to abandon fairness and justice in the pursuit of pride. We cannot accept that some laws are not cost effective to enforce, so we must enforce them no matter the cost.
It would be, to say the least, unwise to follow the same road in Hollywood's war on the American people.
...and then the thing I said would happen, did. The Whigs and the Republicans merged. Lincoln was a Whig before he was a Republican. The fact that most of the former Whigs joined the Republicans rather than the other way around doesn't really change anything. You can't get a stable third party with a first past the post voting system. The incentives for the two most similar parties to merge are too overwhelming.
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No... it's entirely normal for an intel based laptop to get between 5 and 10 hours depending on the size of the battery and the speed of the chip. I'm not sure I've seen a single AMD laptop (that isn't based on the E-350) with battery life over 4 hours.
Considering that the CPU is only a fraction of the power draw of a laptop, a factor of two difference in battery life is almost certainly not attributable to the difference in CPUs.
The primary reason for the battery life difference is probably that Intel chips are sold in higher end laptops that contain higher capacity batteries.
Intel mobiles perform more processing per watt than AMD, and it's been that way for a few years.
Performance per watt is only tangentially related to battery life. Most laptop CPUs spend 95% of their power on hours idle, which means that the important figure is idle power draw. The fact that the Intel chip could be doing 60% more calculations if it actually had something to do doesn't make the battery last any longer.
That depends on the alternative. If the alternative is coal, it may be wise to make whatever safety improvements are necessary to keep them in safe operation until such time as the alternative is no longer coal. (Of course, this also ignores the alternative of replacing old nuclear with new nuclear. But that would require us to get past the hysterics and recognize that, no matter what your opinions are, newer nuclear plants are objectively safer than older nuclear plants. Which means there is no principled argument against building new plants if the next best alternative is to continue operating the old ones.)
Obvious troll is obvious (especially when Linux still has better than 60% of the server market and an even larger share of small servers), but realistically this isn't the end of the world for open source. This is people replacing Windows with MacOS. Which can only be a good thing for Linux, because it helps break Windows lock-in.
Applications developed only for Windows rarely run properly on Linux. Applications developed with portability to MacOS in mind get a Linux port nearly for free, because MacOS and Linux share the *nix APIs and you've already separated out all of the platform-specific bits of the code to do the Mac port, plus you've then probably used some kind of cross-platform framework like qt and avoided MS lock-in like .NET.
So the win follows: MacOS achieves a critical mass to get third parties to target it as a development platform and stop writing Windows-locked applications. Then those applications are either easily ported to Linux or someone implements a MacOS equivalent of WINE which will be easier to do and more seamless because of the greater level of similarity between two Unix-like operating systems than between Linux and Windows and because unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't go out of their way to keep their platform a moving target to keep Linux from achieving compatibility. Linux then solves one of the greatest long-standing barriers to increased adoption, namely support for third party applications.
Obviously the death of open source, that.
Incidentally, if you want something that will actually go some way toward fixing what you're talking about (along with a long list of other things), pay attention to Larry Lessig and his anti-corruption movement.
Lessig has been promoting his message within the Occupy movement and I think he has the right idea. These are a couple of links if you have a couple hours to listen to them: Lessig on Diane Rehm discussing Occupy movement, Lessig lecturing about the issue.
If you don't have time, the bottom line is: Public financing of elections. And if the Occupy movement would get behind that as their single issue, they could dedicate themselves to something tangible and productive that would actually make a difference.
Because if the "wave function" is a real object, then there is no probabilistic nature to quantum shit - it just means we are currently unable to directly measure the "wave function" without "collapsing" it. If it's not probabilistic, all the fuzziness of quantum physics goes away. Schrodinger's cat is dead, Einstein was right when he said God doesn't play dice, entanglement is horse shit, everyone who works with string theory is a moron, etc.
I don't know if this is a stupid question or not, but: What's the practical difference between something having a state before you measure it but you can't know what it is until you do the measurement, and the state being decided only when the measurement is taken? In what way, other than in contemplating the answer to a purely philosophical question, does it change anything? Is there something the laws of physics allow me to do that I couldn't do with the alternative interpretation?
I suspect the answer is no, because otherwise we would seem to have an experiment available that could prove it one way or the other. But if that's the case then I guess the real question is, why does it matter? Can't we just pick one and use it until such time as its veracity is experimentally disproven? (And wouldn't it make more sense to pick the one that better matches our intuitions, rather than confusing the crap out of everyone with probabilistic non-determinism?)
Not only that, they give you time limits on searches. They'll only pay you for e.g. 2 hours to search for prior art for a patent application. And of course, if you do a search and it returns 5000 seemingly relevant results, you haven't the slightest hope of so much as reading the abstracts of all of them in the time allotted, much less doing a thorough job.
That's the problem though. Nobody is buying WP7, so an injunction wouldn't hurt them very much and the damages wouldn't be very high.
Of course, if they found some patents that Windows 7 was infringing...
Only if by "an entirely different outcome" you mean "we still have a two party system."
The Tea Party doesn't really run candidates against the Republicans. They aren't forming another hopeless third party that never wins any seats, they're changing the nature of one of the existing major parties from the inside. (That is to say, they were before they were co-opted by the Republican campaign apparatus and their message was converted from something in the nature of fighting corruption to something in the nature of "taxes are bad, so we should cut everything other than the things that actually cost money.")
Let me give you an example. Suppose there are three minority groups who each comprise 33% of the population, call them A, B, and C, who each support one issue, 'a', 'b', and 'c', respectively. Each group opposes the two issues other than the one they support, so A opposes 'b' and 'c', B opposes 'a' and 'c', and C opposes 'a' and 'b'.
Now you bring in two candidates, one that opposes all three of the issues against one that supports all three issues. Let's say each group feels about equally strongly about each issue. If the voters are fully informed, the candidate in opposition to everything should naturally win with almost 100% of the vote, because for every voter, the voter agrees with that candidate on two of the three issues and with the other candidate on only one of the three.
So now let's leave the ideal world where all the voters know all the candidates positions and enter the more realistic one where they don't know until someone tells them. In comes the ad man, who runs ads emphasizing issue 'a' in media consumed primarily by Group A, issue 'b' in media consumed primarily by Group B, and issue 'c' in media consumed primarily by Group C. Most members of Group A will then have no idea what either candidate's position is on issues 'b' and 'c', etc. So members of Group A go to the polls and cast their votes based on issue 'a', Group B casts their votes based on issue 'b', and Group C casts their votes based on issue 'c'.
The candidate that each voter agrees with on only one of the three issues then wins over the candidate that each voter agrees with on two out of three, solely because the voters were selectively informed about the candidates' positions.
If some unknown guy wants to run for President, why shouldn't he get the same funding that Rick Perry gets?
Some people say that he should. Naturally that would cost a lot of money.
There is another reasonable alternative, which is what a lot of the states that do state-level public financing do: You require the candidate to raise a threshold amount of money themselves from small donors (e.g. $10 each from at least 10,000 individual donors) before they qualify for public money. That keeps you from having to give millions of tax dollars to a bunch of loons without strictly limiting yourself to major party candidates.
Or what if one of the candidates is a billionaire, and spends a couple billion on his campaign? Should the taxpayer foot a couple billion each for all the other candidates? Or are you going to restrict how much the billionaire is allowed to spend?
There are three reasons why this isn't a problem. The first is that someone spending billions of dollars on a campaign is so rare that paying the money once in a blue moon would hardly bankrupt the government even if every dollar was matched. The second is that ad buys have diminishing returns after a certain threshold level of saturation, so if we had a limit of e.g. $50M of public money for a campaign, a billionaire spending a billion dollars would have an advantage, but it wouldn't be anywhere near the advantage that a millionaire spending a couple million dollars currently has over someone who only has a hundred thousand dollars. And the third is that if you do match the full amount, you won't see as many billionaires wanting to spend outrageous sums because they won't be able to buy elections anymore; in order for spending money to help you, you would actually have to be better candidate, because the population is going to hear more from both sides instead of just from you.
Unless your candidate fits *all* of the criteria -- in which case you are, in fact, finding issues where the candidate disagrees with the majority (or every minority, which amounts to the same thing).
It's really not the same thing at all. Every candidate disagrees with a majority of minorities about something, and if that issue is the only one they have on their minds when they go to the voting booth, you can convince them each to vote against their own interest.
For example, if you're a retired person, you might agree with a candidate on 9/10 issues, but if no one is talking about those issues and the TV tells you that candidate wants to make Medicare more expensive for you, you're liable to vote against them even though it's not in your own self interest. You'll get your Medicare but you'll lose the other 9 issues that together matter to you significantly more than higher copays (because nobody had enough money to tell you that before you went to the voting booth).
No, it's the other way around. The problem is that corporations have more money, so they can buy more speech than the actual candidates. The answer to speech is more speech, so the answer to money is more money. Public financing of elections.
Probably the best way to do it is some kind of anti-matching funds system, where every dollar someone spends against you means that you get an extra dollar of public financing so that you can answer the attack. (I'm not sure whether that is constitutional under the existing caselaw, but it certainly ought to be if it isn't.)
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
The problem with your argument is reality. We are still building new coal fired plants today. Not just not shutting down old plants, building new plants. Because it's known, cheap, and legal.
So let's go with your argument that geothermal is better than both coal and nuclear for a second. That doesn't change the fact that nuclear is better than coal, does it? So until we shut down all the coal fired plants, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants is an instance of defective prioritization.
The problem is that if you can choose the issues that get media attention then you can choose the winner. As between a candidate that agrees with the majority of a district on 80% of the important issues vs. one that agrees on substantially fewer, you would expect the first candidate to win. But if you throw ten million dollars behind a campaign to bring the the remaining 20% of issues to the forefront of the debate, you cause the "better" candidate to lose. Which you can do merely because you disagree with the candidate on one of the issues for which that candidate agrees with the majority of the district, if you have a big enough pile of money.
You don't even have to find issues where the candidate disagrees with the majority. If the majority of the district supports strong measures against illegal immigration and so does the candidate, but 80% of Spanish-speaking constituents strongly oppose those measures, you run ads describing the candidate's position in Spanish. If the candidate is pro choice, you run ads on religious TV networks. If the candidate is pro life, you run ads on liberal women's networks. If the candidate opposes further unfunded increases in Medicare benefits, you put ads in AARP publications, etc.
It's easy to destroy an honest candidate by telling the truth in inconvenient places.
The problem with corporate "speech" is not when they spend a bunch of money on ads, it's when they hand bags of money to politicians and call them "campaign contributions". Somehow the SCOTUS equate giving money to someone as "speech", which it's not, it's a bribe.
Are you sure about that? I think Citizens United was more about the first one than the second one.
The concern is that advertising sets the tone for a campaign. If a specific candidate supports SOPA and world+dog outside of Hollywood (including the candidate's district) opposes it, advertising that fact will cause the candidate to lose votes. And there will be issues of that nature for any candidate, which de facto allows corporations to crush anyone they don't like merely by bringing up the specific issues that make them unpopular in their home districts.
Not that I'm complaining about it in this specific instance. I'll take any help I can get to kill SOPA, and may all its advocates lose their seats.
There is plenty of evidence that those involved in the subprime crash knew precisely what they were doing, and purposefully looked the other way because they were making mountains of cash.
Again, there is a law against everything. If you want to take a few of those people and make an example out of them then you can, but they were by far not the only ones at fault. It was everyone. Everyone was reckless.
The problem is this: No one person or company created the mortgage crisis. It was a regulatory failure. Banks were encouraged to make as many mortgage loans as possible, to promote home ownership. Then they were allowed to sell the mortgages to investors, giving them cash with which to make more loans -- and depriving them of any incentive to care whether the borrowers were creditworthy. Nobody really thought about the consequences of doing that because everyone assumed that the worst case was that if someone defaulted, you foreclose on the house, sell it on the market and get back your investment in the loan.
At some point -- after it was too late to stop it, but before it all went to hell -- some smart people no doubt realized that there was a big housing bubble and that when it popped there was going to be a giant hole in the ground where everybody's money used to be, because the foreclosures would be worth less than the loans. Those are the people you're talking about. They did what comes naturally to Wall St. folk: If you see a bubble, you bet against it.
You can say they violated a duty to their investors, or find some SEC regs they violated or whatever you like, but I don't think they could have done anything to make it better by that point. They made a lot of money so it's convenient to point the finger at them, but it wasn't them that caused the problem. They only identified it early enough to profit from it. There wasn't really anything they could have done differently to fix it at that point -- if they had raised the alarm it wouldn't have changed anything.
There were already hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgages issued to uncreditworthy borrowers against houses that weren't worth as much as people thought they were, and weren't worth as much as the loans were for. Once they existed, at some point the bubble would have to burst and whoever was holding those mortgages when it did was fucked. Changing who got a chair when the music stopped wouldn't have averted the crisis; somebody had to be left holding the bag. Letting the people who figured it out first win is kind of how it's supposed to work. You can punish them for that if it makes you feel better, but I wouldn't really call it justice.
The other side is that the wealthy have a completely different justice system than the rest of us, and that isn't fair.
I'm not sure how you expect to even evaluate this, much less bring it about. The wealthy don't literally have a different justice system. They don't go to different courts where they apply different laws. What they have is better lawyers and more political influence. You can't exactly pass a law prohibiting rich people from having good lawyers or from being in the same social circle as the governor.
Or to put it a different way: If that's your goal, what's your plan? What thing do you do, what law do you pass, to make it happen?
That's technically true, but what kind of machine is going to come with mandatory secure boot and not also come with a Windows license? Or, to put it a different way, if you're specifically buying a machine that doesn't come with a Windows license then you can easily just get one that doesn't come with secure boot.
The problem with secure boot is that it prevents people from converting older machines. You get a Windows machine, then later discover Linux and want to install it, and you can't because of secure boot. But in that case you already have the Windows license; it doesn't cost anything more.
There is a certain degree of bogosity here though. The preceding is based on the assumption that secure boot doesn't actually work: If you can root Windows, boot Linux and then run Windows in a VM, so can malware. And if that's the case then secure boot just shouldn't exist, because it's worse than useless. It doesn't stop malware and it makes it annoying to run Linux.
Whereas if it does work (and you can't turn it off) then it stops you from running Linux, which is an even more serious problem.
Yeah but the heydays are over the next time you run Windows Update.
So...don't?
1) Install vulnerable Windows.
2) Install Linux, then delete all the bits of Windows not needed to boot Linux.
3) Run Windows in a VM, if at all.
That is too vague to actually mean anything. It sounds like what you're asking for is some sacrificial lambs from among the "1%" to be hanged as an example to the others. No doubt we could find some and find some laws they broke -- everyone breaks the law all the time. There is a law against everything. So let's say we do that; string up some investment bankers and make everybody feel better.
How does that help you? It isn't going to make the value of your home or your retirement account go up. It isn't going to reduce the unemployment rate or reduce income disparities.
It isn't even going to deter future bad acts, because the banks who lost all their money had more than enough incentive not to do that; the problem was widespread incompetence rather than widespread malice. Country club prison is hardly a more effective deterrent than losing a billion dollars -- the problem is that people over-optimistically expect not to lose, not that the downside is too small.
And it isn't even justice. There is not some small group of people who were at fault. It was everybody. You can't pick out a couple of them to make an example of and call it justice. If you really want justice you have to punish them all, and that is a totally hopeless goal, because there are thousands of them. They would have to close the New York Stock Exchange because all the traders would be in prison.
So justice is not available. There is only revenge. And revenge is a stupid goal, because you spend your resources trying to destroy your "enemies" rather than trying to fix the very real problems we all have to face.
The problem is that there is no cause. There is no 99%. It's just a bunch of people who collectively agree that they don't like the way things are, but fundamentally disagree on how things should be instead.
It's shades of "change you can believe in." People want change, but what change? Borrowing so much that we can't pay the interest is change. Nuclear war is change. Is that the change we want? Certainly not.
You need to define a platform before you can have a cause. But that dissolves the coalition of the naive who each believe that everyone wants to do the thing they want to do rather than each having their own ideas and goals.
Because it's more stable. If any threat to the status quo arises, anyone who is currently getting a raw deal will support the threat. If those people are instead living the good life (albeit not as good as you are), they'll oppose the threat as a threat to their own safe and happy lives.
It is much preferable to be a billionaire in a world of millionaires than a trillionaire in a world of people who are starving and trying to eat you.
Plus selling stocks means you pay tax on the income in most western nations meaning that $100,000 earned from selling MSFT does not equal buying $100,000 of bonds.
The tax is generally paid on the difference between the purchase price and the sale price. Since the stock has been flat for a decade, unless you bought in the 90s you won't have much tax to pay if any. And most of the people who bought it in the 90s have already sold it; nobody was buying it as a blue chip in 1997, and nobody who wasn't would have held it this long.
The idea behind investing in blue chip stocks is to keep them for a very long time as they are not meant to grow quickly.
The idea of investing in anything is to evaluate risk vs. reward. You can get big returns on junk bonds, as long as you don't mind a risk of big losses. At the other end, the US treasury isn't going to default on its debts, but the interest rate is something close to nothing. Which means the question is, is the return on Microsoft worth the risk?
I personally don't think it looks very good. The returns are pretty low and there is a not insignificant risk that Microsoft could lose its Windows monopoly in the medium term. Fortunes change fast in the tech sector. If Apple decided they needed to foster their ecosystem more than they need high margins on Macs, they would release a $400 Mac or a $600 iBook that would sell like gangbusters and all but displace Windows in the home. If Google ever decided they were tired of Microsoft leveraging Windows against them all the time they could polish and market a Linux distribution with the same result. There is no small chance that tablets and smart phones will eat a big chunk out of the desktop market. Governments buy software by bidding process and more and more non-Microsoft solutions are able to meet the bidding requirements.
And none of that stuff has to completely displace Windows for Microsoft to be in trouble. It only needs to be the thin end of the wedge. Once you have a Linux or BSD-based OS with a substantial market share that runs the same sort of third party applications as Windows, developers start caring about their software running on multiple platforms. A few years later all your third party software is multi-platform and choice of operating system becomes personal preference rather than business necessity. And then free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-not-tied-to-a-single-vendor become nontrivial advantages in a market of otherwise fungible operating systems.
That doesn't mean I would short the stock or anything. None of that is guaranteed to happen. But neither is the continuation of the status quo. And if your goal is to get relatively low returns for relatively low risk, it seems to me like too much risk for not enough return.
I'm not sure the history negates the unconscionability. The penalty must fit the crime and the accused should have an opportunity to be heard before the penalty is imposed. Seizing property of arbitrary value, which may not even belong to the accused, without any opportunity to be heard before the penalty is executed is an injustice plain and simple.
Which is naturally why we impose it in the war on drugs. Our inability to change human nature and our stubbornness in refusing to admit it has led us to abandon fairness and justice in the pursuit of pride. We cannot accept that some laws are not cost effective to enforce, so we must enforce them no matter the cost.
It would be, to say the least, unwise to follow the same road in Hollywood's war on the American people.
...and then the thing I said would happen, did. The Whigs and the Republicans merged. Lincoln was a Whig before he was a Republican. The fact that most of the former Whigs joined the Republicans rather than the other way around doesn't really change anything. You can't get a stable third party with a first past the post voting system. The incentives for the two most similar parties to merge are too overwhelming.