Its a pretty good argument really. "The Economy!" is a pretty popular topic in politics and there's never been a politician who said "I want the economy to suffer." At least not in public. And people buying lots of crap they don't need actually does stimulate the economy (unlike say giving massive tax cuts to corporations in the hope that this time trickle down will work even though it never has before..)
But aside from that, the internet is a critical part of the backbone of much of our world these days, from government services to entertainment to learning to (yes) buying lots of crap we don't need. But things like "entertainment" and "learning" aren't really important to policymakers these days, so the buying crap argument is pretty much the strongest.
Well HFT destroyed the stock market, so its definitely not worth playing unless you're also an HFT.
You can still buy stable stocks and ride them out long-term to get slightly better return on investment than a simple savings bond or whatever, but there's no way you can trade your way to a fortune anymore beyond pure dumb luck -- the HFTs have spotted any trend you're following and outbid you before your screen has even finished loading if you do your own trading, and calling up a broker where the latency is measured in minutes at best is just laughable.
Nobody's claiming that video games having lower latency is bad.
What they're claiming is that EA being able to pay an extra $100k/mo to get ultrafast speeds for their latest Battlefield revision means they have a distinct competitive advantage over my FieldBattle offering even if my game is objectively better, simply because I can't afford that kind of extortion while EA can.
If both games were equally prioritized over say, bittorrent and FTP traffic then great nobody's complaining about that (beyond a few hard-line NN zealots who don't even think simple traffic shaping should be done..) Its when your game is prioritized over my game for purely financial (rather than technical) reasons that we start getting pissy about it.
And that's exactly what these companies have been trying to do for over a decade now, and exactly what Tom Wheeler was trying to prevent, and exactly what the companies will start doing again now that NN is gone, give or take a grace period as they're probably not stupid enough to start abusing us until the whole debate has had time to fall out of the public eye.
Depends who you want it to be right for. We (as members of the general population) tend to think "right" means "benefits society," since that in turn benefits us.
People at the top tend to think "right" should mean "benefits myself and if it helps someone else then great if it hurts everyone else then still calling worth."
Unfortunately, the people at the top get to choose which meaning gets applied, almost by definition of "the top." Which is great for them, and sadly most people would make the same choice in the same situation.. but most people will never be in that situation so we're continually getting screwed in order to benefit the 1% (or 0.1% at times.) One of the government's jobs (at least in the US) is of course to protect the people but they're so wrapped up in partisan hatred and corporate bribery that they've forgotten which side they're supposed to be on and we now live in a world where corporations are "persons" and actual humans are just "workers" or "taxpayers" or "consumers."
Presumably the 100Mbps connection is limited based on their subscription rather than technological limitations in the GP's example. No physics need be broken, only the souls of kittens when Verizon's executives come up with these plans.
I should clarify one thing with respect to ISPs specifically though in that there is one short-term difference: Calling it "throttling" would mean that they could immediately start cutting into your existing bandwidth whereas if they call it a "fast lane," it means they can't really remove what you have now but you'll stop getting improvements without paying the extra fast lane fees.
But once the service upgrade rollouts have been completed to the extent that normal service is noticeably behind "fast lane" service, the models will revert to being effectively identical.
The difference is in the sales pitch. One sounds like you're getting screwed, the other sounds like you're getting extra value for your money. The person selling it hasn't changed anything except their wording.
Compressing a 5K image to 10MB is still pretty impressive though. Guess if its mostly flat colors then any RLE format would be able to handle it pretty well though.
One of the worst examples I've seen is code42.com. They don't do it on mobile I don't think but they've got these massive beautiful near-full-screen images that they rotate every 5 seconds or so. I have to run that shit over remote desktop over a VPN periodically over a not-always-fast customer connection. Its pretty brutal trying to use their site when the first image hasn't even finished displaying across all of those hops and layers before the next one is already starting to download. Clicking on anything is an exercise in patience to say the least.
You're looking at it backwards. "Merged" means not being able to run Xcode on any device. We're talking about a regression to the lowest common denominator, not an improvement to make all platforms equally good.
Except that it doesn't work at all in practice. Mice and fingers are two very different pointer footprints.. mice don't have any possibility for multitouch.. screen DPI is significantly different.. etc.
As I've said on other posts.. there's a reason why even layout-simple sites like Slashdot have separate mobile and desktop versions. Trying to mash the two together just doesn't work.
Or for an obligatory car analogy.. there's a reason why we still have cars and pickups rather than everyone driving El Caminos around. Sure it seemed like a fun idea but it ends up doing both jobs half-assed rather than one job well.
"More" similar maybe, but the iPad is still going to be closer to the phone model than the desktop model.
The primary issue isn't screen real estate. The primary issue is that a mouse pointer is small and fairly accurate while a finger is relatively fat and imprecise. Also, mice pretty much universally have at least 2 buttons that you can take advantage of (and often 3 or more plus a scroll wheel) whereas a finger is just a finger.
The touch interface has one pro though that a mouse doesn't, aside from the obvious "not having to carry a mouse around" -- you can have multi-touch. So while detailed pointing work is lacking, tasks like zoom and rotate are much more intuitive with a well-designed touch interface.
Basically what happens when Microsoft (and I guess Ubuntu) attempted to merge the two modes of operation is that you get a least-common-denominator. You can't rely on either the strengths of the mouse interface (so all your UI elements have to be fat enough to accept a touch input..) nor the strengths of the touch input (so you have to still have to come up with clickable UI elements to do zooming/rotating/etc.)
And of course while I'm downplaying them, there are screen issues to deal with. Modern phones and pads have similar or better resolution than your typical desktop, but they're still tiny. An 8pt font on a 25" monitor is barely legible. An 8pt font on a 5.5" phone screen is a dot. And then take into account that desktops are usually in landscape mode (long edge horizontal) while phones are typically used in portrait mode (long edge vertical) so there's that aspect to deal with even if you're ignoring the DPI differences.
Put it this way: There's a reason why even simple (layout-wise) websites like Slashdot have separate mobile and desktop versions, even though HTML was designed from the ground-up to be a "works anywhere" layout language.
I don't trust any industry. But I get a lot closer to trust of industries that are regulated and have to follow at least some sort of minimal guidelines over an industry that's free to sell you whatever the fuck they feel like and tell you whatever bullshit story they think will make you buy it with exactly zero oversight beyond "does this make a profit?"
If these dietary supplements you're taking really have "well-proven science-based benefits" then why aren't the submitted to the FDA for approval? I'm assuming because you mean they're "clinically proven" which is basically an unregulated bullshit slogan that can literally be slapped on anything by anyone. Here is a page worth reading.
Of course I don't know you. Maybe you've done your own research and you've found supplements that are actually well-tested but the makers have a moral qualm with the FDA or something and refuse to get certification for reasons completely unrelated to the reliability of their product or their testing methods. But the vast majority of "supplements" are just the modern day version of snake oil.
I don't know what magic phone you've got but my Android definitely stops working when the battery is drained.
Why Apple does a restart specifically I of course don't know, but I'd be willing to bet that just chose a different trade-off than Google. All electronics will start screwing up in one way or another if they aren't fed enough juice. Perhaps Android devices would indeed suffer reboot problems but Google decided to just go for a full shutdown when that happens instead so that you have a shorter (but fully working) charge time rather than a longer (but possibly screwy) charge time once your battery starts behaving non-optimally..
Obviously I don't design phones or know specifically what choices the two companies made (or if any of the Android manufacturers would have overridden Google's choice and done something completely different) but its no secret that batteries degrade over time so each phone maker has to be handling that scenario in some fashion.
1. Yeah, the dossier got blown way out of proportion (in no small part thanks to Trump's inability to let things go.. it probably would have been forgotten about early on if he and his supporters didn't keep bringing it up.) My only point though was that while the dems may have ran with it, they weren't the ones who initiated it.
2. I don't recall HRC claiming that Trump didn't win. She might not like it, and she might question why the electoral college is allowed to override the popular vote, but Trump got castigated because he was planning to not even concede the election should he lose. That's a whole different level.
3. Being careful and being perfect are not the same thing. Muller is not magic and he can only work with the information he has at the time, and then adjust when new information comes to light. By all accounts, that's exactly what he did. Blaming him for not knowing something that was (at the time) unknowable is not really a great argument.
4. I'm not saying those articles are wrong. I'm just saying that the investigation may involve more than just interviews at the White House. There may be interviews to be done outside the White House. There may be evidence to collect and analyze that isn't in the form of interviews, and at the very least there's a report to write in order to present the findings.
5. We wouldn't spend time and money investigating Russian ties if we already know with certainty whether such ties exist or not. There would be nothing to investigate.
Of course even if Muller proves ties between the Trump campaign (or Trump himself) and Russia, that doesn't directly imply Russian meddling affected the election outcome. And it doesn't much matter at this point anyway.. Trump is indisputably president for now, no matter how he got there. Even if he's impeached tomorrow for whatever reason, this past year doesn't get a do-over.
The bonus this round is that Trump didn't even wait 60 years to repeal the protections put in place after the 2008 collapse! So we can see another recession by 2030 or so! But I mean its kind of necessary. People would get confused if the "dirty thirties" only refers to one of the two centuries.
There's some pretty strong evidence of questionable action within the DNC to promote Hillary and avoid Bernie getting the nomination in spite of all of that.
Of course since Hillary lost, nobody's going to care enough to look into it further as it no longer matters at all anyway. But there's stirrings that they might be preparing similar tactics for 2020. At the same time though, Bernie's gotten even more popular, and there's a lot of Bernie followers running for seats currently occupied by Republicans. So as Trump and the Republican Congress continue to drive their party's ratings into the ground, the DNC may be subject to an internal sea change that's somewhat outside of their control.
Whether any of that will matter of course remains to be seen. If nothing else, it will be a hell of a spectacle if we end up with a Bernie-vs-Trump race in 2020. Two old guys with whacky hair and neither of them are particularly good at holding their tongues when they feel a rant coming on. Should make for some interesting debates if that goes down!
So what you're saying is that a spambot should have equal posting rights on all message boards as you and I? Do you really want an internet like that?
And that's not even getting into the necessary distinction between "simply moving packets around" vs "doing something useful with the data in those packets." Never mind the distinction between a (relatively fixed) set of physical cables that are difficult and expensive to duplicate vs software that anyone with enough time and intelligence can create in their basement. The latter being much more open to real competition and therefore less in need of government protection.
Yep. That's what they call "deregulation" these days. "Remove things we don't like, and add things that stifle competition." Of course "we" referring to "companies with lots of money to buy off politicians."
Not really the definition most of us have in mind when we hear Trump stumbling through his rhetoric yet again.
Kind of both. Scientists seek the truth, but work with evidence. (And yes most scientists realize that an ultimate truth may not be knowable and almost certainly isn't knowable within their lifetimes. That doesn't stop them from trying!)
So.. it was an election? Hillary was similarly tried in the court of public opinion and prosecuted by the media, and now we have Trump for president. Its the way things happen in the modern media-storm world of politics and its unlikely to change any time soon.
In Moore's case, the 14 year old might have a case (should she care to pursue it now that he's out of the spotlight) as child sexual abuse has no statute of limitations in Alabama. Would mostly revolve around whether they decide to call it "abuse" or simple "harassment."
The 16 year old that he threw out of a car after assaulting her may also still have a case, as violent sexual assault also has no statute of limitations. Not sure how much direct evidence they could muster on that one though.
The rest I don't know about so much. A quick Googling suggests they were all 16+ (so legal by AL's law) and unless they can show actual violent rape, any sexual misconduct would be subject to at most a 3 year statute of limitations and thus couldn't be prosecuted (at least I don't think any of them happened in the past 3 years..)
Some quick Googling says the passage you're referring to is Exodus 21:22. But an even more direct reference to abortion is Numbers 5:21-22 where The LORD specifically instructs priests to invoke miscarriage -- ie: an abortion -- albeit only in the specific circumstance of a wife getting pregnant through infidelity.
Who is going to "fire" these people? The president? He isn't their boss -- the citizens are (at least in theory.. most people realize that's not true in practice anymore.. But its still not the president either.)
So lets assume citizens have firing power and the desire to invoke it. That means holding a referendum after every single decision a politician makes to determine whether or not they should retain their seat. And if its decided that they shouldn't, then it ALSO means a special election on top of that, and transition periods and whatever other hoops.
There are lots of problems in politics these days (not just in the US.. most countries have their own share of shortcomings though the US currently stands more than usual out due to Trump's inability to keep his mouth shut and his Tweeting fingers still.) But having terms isn't really one of the problems. It would certainly be better if politics could be more responsive to the people, but its simply not practical and assigning term lengths aims for a happy medium between "having to vote constantly" and "not getting a say at all." Whether 4 years is still that sweet spot is up for grabs, but some length is always going to be required (well, at least until we go full-on fascist and elections are entirely pointless.)
Slashdot Mirror
Its a pretty good argument really. "The Economy!" is a pretty popular topic in politics and there's never been a politician who said "I want the economy to suffer." At least not in public. And people buying lots of crap they don't need actually does stimulate the economy (unlike say giving massive tax cuts to corporations in the hope that this time trickle down will work even though it never has before..)
But aside from that, the internet is a critical part of the backbone of much of our world these days, from government services to entertainment to learning to (yes) buying lots of crap we don't need. But things like "entertainment" and "learning" aren't really important to policymakers these days, so the buying crap argument is pretty much the strongest.
Passing a good law is the right way to do it.
FTFY. Unfortunately the law being proposed sounds like its anything but good. At least for consumers.
Well HFT destroyed the stock market, so its definitely not worth playing unless you're also an HFT.
You can still buy stable stocks and ride them out long-term to get slightly better return on investment than a simple savings bond or whatever, but there's no way you can trade your way to a fortune anymore beyond pure dumb luck -- the HFTs have spotted any trend you're following and outbid you before your screen has even finished loading if you do your own trading, and calling up a broker where the latency is measured in minutes at best is just laughable.
Nobody's claiming that video games having lower latency is bad.
What they're claiming is that EA being able to pay an extra $100k/mo to get ultrafast speeds for their latest Battlefield revision means they have a distinct competitive advantage over my FieldBattle offering even if my game is objectively better, simply because I can't afford that kind of extortion while EA can.
If both games were equally prioritized over say, bittorrent and FTP traffic then great nobody's complaining about that (beyond a few hard-line NN zealots who don't even think simple traffic shaping should be done..) Its when your game is prioritized over my game for purely financial (rather than technical) reasons that we start getting pissy about it.
And that's exactly what these companies have been trying to do for over a decade now, and exactly what Tom Wheeler was trying to prevent, and exactly what the companies will start doing again now that NN is gone, give or take a grace period as they're probably not stupid enough to start abusing us until the whole debate has had time to fall out of the public eye.
Depends who you want it to be right for. We (as members of the general population) tend to think "right" means "benefits society," since that in turn benefits us.
People at the top tend to think "right" should mean "benefits myself and if it helps someone else then great if it hurts everyone else then still calling worth."
Unfortunately, the people at the top get to choose which meaning gets applied, almost by definition of "the top." Which is great for them, and sadly most people would make the same choice in the same situation.. but most people will never be in that situation so we're continually getting screwed in order to benefit the 1% (or 0.1% at times.) One of the government's jobs (at least in the US) is of course to protect the people but they're so wrapped up in partisan hatred and corporate bribery that they've forgotten which side they're supposed to be on and we now live in a world where corporations are "persons" and actual humans are just "workers" or "taxpayers" or "consumers."
Presumably the 100Mbps connection is limited based on their subscription rather than technological limitations in the GP's example. No physics need be broken, only the souls of kittens when Verizon's executives come up with these plans.
I should clarify one thing with respect to ISPs specifically though in that there is one short-term difference: Calling it "throttling" would mean that they could immediately start cutting into your existing bandwidth whereas if they call it a "fast lane," it means they can't really remove what you have now but you'll stop getting improvements without paying the extra fast lane fees.
But once the service upgrade rollouts have been completed to the extent that normal service is noticeably behind "fast lane" service, the models will revert to being effectively identical.
http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-of-warcrafts-rest-system/
The difference is in the sales pitch. One sounds like you're getting screwed, the other sounds like you're getting extra value for your money. The person selling it hasn't changed anything except their wording.
I think he means 5K as in resolution.
Compressing a 5K image to 10MB is still pretty impressive though. Guess if its mostly flat colors then any RLE format would be able to handle it pretty well though.
One of the worst examples I've seen is code42.com. They don't do it on mobile I don't think but they've got these massive beautiful near-full-screen images that they rotate every 5 seconds or so. I have to run that shit over remote desktop over a VPN periodically over a not-always-fast customer connection. Its pretty brutal trying to use their site when the first image hasn't even finished displaying across all of those hops and layers before the next one is already starting to download. Clicking on anything is an exercise in patience to say the least.
You're looking at it backwards. "Merged" means not being able to run Xcode on any device. We're talking about a regression to the lowest common denominator, not an improvement to make all platforms equally good.
Except that it doesn't work at all in practice. Mice and fingers are two very different pointer footprints.. mice don't have any possibility for multitouch.. screen DPI is significantly different.. etc.
As I've said on other posts.. there's a reason why even layout-simple sites like Slashdot have separate mobile and desktop versions. Trying to mash the two together just doesn't work.
Or for an obligatory car analogy.. there's a reason why we still have cars and pickups rather than everyone driving El Caminos around. Sure it seemed like a fun idea but it ends up doing both jobs half-assed rather than one job well.
"More" similar maybe, but the iPad is still going to be closer to the phone model than the desktop model.
The primary issue isn't screen real estate. The primary issue is that a mouse pointer is small and fairly accurate while a finger is relatively fat and imprecise. Also, mice pretty much universally have at least 2 buttons that you can take advantage of (and often 3 or more plus a scroll wheel) whereas a finger is just a finger.
The touch interface has one pro though that a mouse doesn't, aside from the obvious "not having to carry a mouse around" -- you can have multi-touch. So while detailed pointing work is lacking, tasks like zoom and rotate are much more intuitive with a well-designed touch interface.
Basically what happens when Microsoft (and I guess Ubuntu) attempted to merge the two modes of operation is that you get a least-common-denominator. You can't rely on either the strengths of the mouse interface (so all your UI elements have to be fat enough to accept a touch input..) nor the strengths of the touch input (so you have to still have to come up with clickable UI elements to do zooming/rotating/etc.)
And of course while I'm downplaying them, there are screen issues to deal with. Modern phones and pads have similar or better resolution than your typical desktop, but they're still tiny. An 8pt font on a 25" monitor is barely legible. An 8pt font on a 5.5" phone screen is a dot. And then take into account that desktops are usually in landscape mode (long edge horizontal) while phones are typically used in portrait mode (long edge vertical) so there's that aspect to deal with even if you're ignoring the DPI differences.
Put it this way: There's a reason why even simple (layout-wise) websites like Slashdot have separate mobile and desktop versions, even though HTML was designed from the ground-up to be a "works anywhere" layout language.
I don't trust any industry. But I get a lot closer to trust of industries that are regulated and have to follow at least some sort of minimal guidelines over an industry that's free to sell you whatever the fuck they feel like and tell you whatever bullshit story they think will make you buy it with exactly zero oversight beyond "does this make a profit?"
If these dietary supplements you're taking really have "well-proven science-based benefits" then why aren't the submitted to the FDA for approval? I'm assuming because you mean they're "clinically proven" which is basically an unregulated bullshit slogan that can literally be slapped on anything by anyone. Here is a page worth reading.
Of course I don't know you. Maybe you've done your own research and you've found supplements that are actually well-tested but the makers have a moral qualm with the FDA or something and refuse to get certification for reasons completely unrelated to the reliability of their product or their testing methods. But the vast majority of "supplements" are just the modern day version of snake oil.
I don't know what magic phone you've got but my Android definitely stops working when the battery is drained.
Why Apple does a restart specifically I of course don't know, but I'd be willing to bet that just chose a different trade-off than Google. All electronics will start screwing up in one way or another if they aren't fed enough juice. Perhaps Android devices would indeed suffer reboot problems but Google decided to just go for a full shutdown when that happens instead so that you have a shorter (but fully working) charge time rather than a longer (but possibly screwy) charge time once your battery starts behaving non-optimally..
Obviously I don't design phones or know specifically what choices the two companies made (or if any of the Android manufacturers would have overridden Google's choice and done something completely different) but its no secret that batteries degrade over time so each phone maker has to be handling that scenario in some fashion.
1. Yeah, the dossier got blown way out of proportion (in no small part thanks to Trump's inability to let things go.. it probably would have been forgotten about early on if he and his supporters didn't keep bringing it up.) My only point though was that while the dems may have ran with it, they weren't the ones who initiated it.
2. I don't recall HRC claiming that Trump didn't win. She might not like it, and she might question why the electoral college is allowed to override the popular vote, but Trump got castigated because he was planning to not even concede the election should he lose. That's a whole different level.
3. Being careful and being perfect are not the same thing. Muller is not magic and he can only work with the information he has at the time, and then adjust when new information comes to light. By all accounts, that's exactly what he did. Blaming him for not knowing something that was (at the time) unknowable is not really a great argument.
4. I'm not saying those articles are wrong. I'm just saying that the investigation may involve more than just interviews at the White House. There may be interviews to be done outside the White House. There may be evidence to collect and analyze that isn't in the form of interviews, and at the very least there's a report to write in order to present the findings.
5. We wouldn't spend time and money investigating Russian ties if we already know with certainty whether such ties exist or not. There would be nothing to investigate.
Of course even if Muller proves ties between the Trump campaign (or Trump himself) and Russia, that doesn't directly imply Russian meddling affected the election outcome. And it doesn't much matter at this point anyway.. Trump is indisputably president for now, no matter how he got there. Even if he's impeached tomorrow for whatever reason, this past year doesn't get a do-over.
The bonus this round is that Trump didn't even wait 60 years to repeal the protections put in place after the 2008 collapse! So we can see another recession by 2030 or so! But I mean its kind of necessary. People would get confused if the "dirty thirties" only refers to one of the two centuries.
There's some pretty strong evidence of questionable action within the DNC to promote Hillary and avoid Bernie getting the nomination in spite of all of that.
Of course since Hillary lost, nobody's going to care enough to look into it further as it no longer matters at all anyway. But there's stirrings that they might be preparing similar tactics for 2020. At the same time though, Bernie's gotten even more popular, and there's a lot of Bernie followers running for seats currently occupied by Republicans. So as Trump and the Republican Congress continue to drive their party's ratings into the ground, the DNC may be subject to an internal sea change that's somewhat outside of their control.
Whether any of that will matter of course remains to be seen. If nothing else, it will be a hell of a spectacle if we end up with a Bernie-vs-Trump race in 2020. Two old guys with whacky hair and neither of them are particularly good at holding their tongues when they feel a rant coming on. Should make for some interesting debates if that goes down!
To be fair, Ted Cruz is pretty repulsive to the right as well.
So what you're saying is that a spambot should have equal posting rights on all message boards as you and I? Do you really want an internet like that?
And that's not even getting into the necessary distinction between "simply moving packets around" vs "doing something useful with the data in those packets." Never mind the distinction between a (relatively fixed) set of physical cables that are difficult and expensive to duplicate vs software that anyone with enough time and intelligence can create in their basement. The latter being much more open to real competition and therefore less in need of government protection.
Yep. That's what they call "deregulation" these days. "Remove things we don't like, and add things that stifle competition." Of course "we" referring to "companies with lots of money to buy off politicians."
Not really the definition most of us have in mind when we hear Trump stumbling through his rhetoric yet again.
Kind of both. Scientists seek the truth, but work with evidence. (And yes most scientists realize that an ultimate truth may not be knowable and almost certainly isn't knowable within their lifetimes. That doesn't stop them from trying!)
True, but nobody from either side made much noise on that count. It was all about the kiddie touching.
So.. it was an election? Hillary was similarly tried in the court of public opinion and prosecuted by the media, and now we have Trump for president. Its the way things happen in the modern media-storm world of politics and its unlikely to change any time soon.
In Moore's case, the 14 year old might have a case (should she care to pursue it now that he's out of the spotlight) as child sexual abuse has no statute of limitations in Alabama. Would mostly revolve around whether they decide to call it "abuse" or simple "harassment."
The 16 year old that he threw out of a car after assaulting her may also still have a case, as violent sexual assault also has no statute of limitations. Not sure how much direct evidence they could muster on that one though.
The rest I don't know about so much. A quick Googling suggests they were all 16+ (so legal by AL's law) and unless they can show actual violent rape, any sexual misconduct would be subject to at most a 3 year statute of limitations and thus couldn't be prosecuted (at least I don't think any of them happened in the past 3 years..)
Some quick Googling says the passage you're referring to is Exodus 21:22. But an even more direct reference to abortion is Numbers 5:21-22 where The LORD specifically instructs priests to invoke miscarriage -- ie: an abortion -- albeit only in the specific circumstance of a wife getting pregnant through infidelity.
Repeat after me: Government is not a business.
Who is going to "fire" these people? The president? He isn't their boss -- the citizens are (at least in theory.. most people realize that's not true in practice anymore.. But its still not the president either.)
So lets assume citizens have firing power and the desire to invoke it. That means holding a referendum after every single decision a politician makes to determine whether or not they should retain their seat. And if its decided that they shouldn't, then it ALSO means a special election on top of that, and transition periods and whatever other hoops.
There are lots of problems in politics these days (not just in the US.. most countries have their own share of shortcomings though the US currently stands more than usual out due to Trump's inability to keep his mouth shut and his Tweeting fingers still.) But having terms isn't really one of the problems. It would certainly be better if politics could be more responsive to the people, but its simply not practical and assigning term lengths aims for a happy medium between "having to vote constantly" and "not getting a say at all." Whether 4 years is still that sweet spot is up for grabs, but some length is always going to be required (well, at least until we go full-on fascist and elections are entirely pointless.)