Why not just report your odometer reading each year? It could even by done by the service station that performs your annual inspection.
California doesn't do annual inspections. Cars are just assumed to be safe. There are smog checks every two years after the first four (new cars are assumed to be non polluting), but nobody would be able to afford two year's worth of "road tax". Really, even one year's worth of tax would probably be too much for people.
For that matter, gas tax should be percent based rather than volume based. Higher gas prices = higher tax collection.
That's a bad idea. The price of gas has no bearing on either the amount of pollution or the amount of wear and tear on the roads. It'd be just one more reason for the state to look the other way while the oil companies rob us blind.
"Oh, you're closing another profitable refinery to reduce the gasoline supply and drive prices up? Good! That makes our %5 tax bring in more!"
You cannot expect the right to watch TV programs that are funded by advertising dollars while at the same time refusing to watch the advertising. At some point the advertisers will not be willing to pay for it any more, and there will not be anything left to watch
But nobody should consider free-broadcast TV to be a "right". The issue is not so much the expectation by viewers that TV should be free, but the expectation of tv broadcasters that viewers should be forced to watch the commercials. It's all well and good to point out that the business model depends upon advertiser support and that an effective means of obliterating commercials could very well destroy that business model; but I maintain that broadcasters seeking to mandate commercial watching (or prohibit commercial skipping) through force of law are totally in the wrong. If they need to change their business model to subscription based we certainly have no right to complain, but when they go to the feds and make it illegal for us to buy a machine that skips commercials, that's totally unacceptable.
He was 'quibbling' over a disputed birthdate because it happened to be a pet topic of his that he sought out in Wikipedia as a measure of its worth. The problem with that line of logic is that he has set a very arbitrary bar, and while that might be the right bar for a hundred+ year old tome, for a
I think you've hit the nail right on the head here. Cherry picking a single obscure item like that is hardly a representative sample. That's like asking one person at a Libertarian rally who they voted for and then later claiming election fraud because your "exit poll" data projected that Michael Badnarik should have received 100% of the vote. He only uses the Hamilton birth year as a benchmark because it's something he knows and always corrects in any encyclopedia he edits. His encyclopedia doubtless contains a handful of errors that other editors could point to the same way. He'd possibly discount them as "inconsequential", but they wouldn't be any less (more?) important than Hamilton's birth year.
If you can raise a private army, you can enforce your intellectual property rights with shotguns too.
So what? With a private army you can try to enforce anything. You could claim the right to kill anyone who steps on your shadow. The problem with "intellectual property" is that even with a private army (or even with the weight of the US Government for that matter) there's no way you can prevent infringement. You can punish infringers, but that's not the same thing. The problem is that IP isn't actually property. There are no boundaries you can monitor with armed men, there are no property lines you can demarcate with electrified fences. IP is just ideas. How is your private army going to stop a man in Backwoods, VA who overheard your song, or read your book from selling copies to his neighbors? Ideas are infinitely replicable. Real property is not. Copyright law is simply a government-created means by which something that is not property can be treated as if it were property.
Uh, guy, who do you think grants that a particular piece of real estate is, in fact, real, and is the estate of a particular person?
Give up?...the GUV'MINT!
Hogwash. Property rights are an extension of "territory", something even animals understand. A fence and a shotgun are all you need to enforce property rights. Government has taken much of the hassle out of protecting property by setting up rules under which property is held and transferred, but if the government were to disappear tomorrow, the fence and the shotgun will still maintain property rights.
Well, it could actually be significant. When went to Italy a few years ago, I noticed that Coke costs at least 1.5 times as much as it does here -- if you're lucky. I can't imagine that it costs that much more to manufacture it, so I can only assume the difference is coming back here.
More than likely, the difference in price is going to the Italian government in the form of import tariffs and Value Added Taxes. If you look around, you'll notice that it's not just Coke that costs more, it's just about everything else.
Its more a marketing plot by Intel... their 2Ghz perform just about the same as AMD 2000+, which run at 1666 Ghz.
You're going to fault Intel for marketing their chips at the speed they run at?
When they design a chip like the P4 that does less usefull work per clock cycle than the P3 before it for no apparent reason other than "mhz marketing", yeah, why not fault them?
The terms 'aspirin', 'escalator', 'laundromat' and 'celophane' lost trademark status because of the manufacturer's failure to adequately police the mark against people using it as a generic term for the product in question. (Note that 'Aspirin' is still a trademark of Bayer in some other countries for salycilic acid.)
Interesting thing about Bayer's trademark for Aspirin: they were forced to give it up to France Britain, Russia, and the US as part of the reparations stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. So it wasn't really lack of enforcement that lost them the trademark, it was losing a war.
Could the "Free Market" believers just shut the fuck up?
Please?
Thank you.
Give us a reason why we should shut up.
"Oh, so you were sold into slavery? Why don't you just run away? You're free to attempt that at any time! There are lots of places where slavery is not accepted. Move there you long-haired non-hot-rod-poking-lovin' hippie scum! I believe in this, therefore it's right! Might makes right!"
No matter how bad the working conditions are, "at will" employment isn't slavery. If this weak, whiny mockery is the best counterargument you can come up with to the idea that people should just not work for bad employers, you're not gonna win any converts.
He then goes on to talk about why forecasts go wrong.
Hmmm, isn't that itself a forecast prediction, with an 8/9 chance of being wrong?
Actually, it's not. It's a statistical analysis with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. You don't have to make any predictions of the future to figure out why jetpacks, smell-o-vision, and atomic generated electricity so plentiful it's too cheap to meter" didn't happen.
I think these guys should really demand some kind of profit sharing or a percentage of each game's revenues. Of course this probably won't work for the average code-monkey, but at least the lead engineers and game designers should have enough sway to be able to get it. The big game companies are making millions off of their backs so they should at least get some of it.
Should they also shoulder a percentage of the debt if the game totally bombs and brings in less money than it cost to make? If not, why?
Is it me or did the author go overboard with the adjectives in the openening paragraph (crepuscular, mote-strewn, glowering)?
The author is clearly a frustrated hack writer. I think the tortured style is partly (as others mentioned) imitation of "The Da Vinci Code". The other part is a lame attempt at literary journalism. Note his periodic intrusive descriptions of his own experience researching the article, and how they struggle to establish relevance with the subject matter. It's the sort of subject that doesn't lend itself to immersive reporting unless you're going to research and build the dang robot yourself and record your experience. He should've stuck to the old fashioned "pertinent facts only" model of reporting for this one.
Know one of the things that bugs me about the typical Wired writer? Lame attempts to inject dramatic tension in what is, really, just an informational article. Things like this:
We sit in his office and pore over sketches of the cart on folio 812 recto of the Codex Atlanticus. I reach carefully for the espresso his wife has placed on the table, trying not to spill any on a nearby copy of the Italian mathematician Bernadino Baldi's 1589 translation of Heron of Alexandria's Automata. It is a first edition.
Wow! I'm on the edge of my seat! Will he spill his coffee on the 400 year old book? Quick! Click the "next page" link and find out!
Why do all the world's cultures have a flood story?
One reason is that most of the world's earliest settlements were near rivers, a necessity when you're trying to make a go of agriculture. After a generation or two it's fairly certain they experienced a few floods themselves. Not surprising that a fairy tale involving a Great Flood came about. Most folk tales are exaggerrations of ordinary human experiences. The villains are more evil, the heroes stronger, the dangers greater. Nobody wants to hear the story of the Weak Flood Two Years Ago that Covered the Wheat Fields in Water Half Way Up to Our Knees.
Jean-René Dufort, a journalist working for the canadian television (SRC) voted 7 times in different county back in 2000. He filmed it to show how it was easy for anyone to vote multiple times. Because of this, we now have to show a photo ID when voting.
That's just dumb. How many people would have to vote seven times to swing an election? How easy is it to conceal that many people voting that many times? Concealing such a plot would be essentially impossible.
There's no reason in 2004 that we do not have a direct election.
There sure is a reason. The same reason the electoral college system was implemented for in the first place: to prevent candidates from only campaigning in the 10 most populous cities because the vote density is higher there and totally ignoring rural states such as Idaho, Montana, and Iowa. The idea is that the president is supposed to represent the interests of ALL the states, not just those few states with enough people to give him a majority.
There are actual laws dictating which way a person must vote?
Electoral college reps are people chosen to go to Washington and represent their states. Electors' votes aren't a matter of personal freedom. Those people already exercised their right to vote in the election.
That's counter to what the electoral college system (and democracy) is all about, isn't it?
No, it's exactly the way the electoral college system is supposed to work.
If electoral college members are required to vote a particular way, then it's pointless having them in the first place.
Yes, it's pretty much pointless nowadays. It's only done because that's the way the US Constitution says it has to be done. You see, back in the 18th century they didn't have TV, telephones, or telegraph. They actually had to send people in person to ensure that each state's wishes were properly represented. Multiple electors, one for each vote, were sent to keep one crazy elector from tossing all his state's electoral votes to the guy his state DIDN'T select.
I guess there was the "Dixiecrat" stuff going into the '60s or so, but even with that, enough people would have moved since then that the voter registration numbers would have shifted to the Republican side
The "Dixiecrat stuff" has been going on consistently for decades. It has nothing to do with people forgetting to change their party affiliation. You do not have to be a Republican to be conservative, just like you don't have to be a Democrat if you're liberal. Here's the short form of why there are conservative-voting Democrats: southerners, traditionally being of the party OPPOSITE that of Lincoln, were unhappy with the direction the party went starting in the late 40's. While they were able to select conservative democrats in their primaries to run in local races, they increasingly found that the other states' democratic primaries were selecting presidential candidates that were far more liberal than they cared for. They consider themselves democrats and vote for the conservative democrat local politicians they select in their primaries, but there's no way in hell they're gonna vote for some Massachusetts yankee liberal for president.
Your problem is that you think of it as a binary condition in which you are either a New York style Liberal Democrat, or a Montana style Conservative Republican. Real life is far more complicated than that.
Read up a little about the actual Dixiecrat party and it'll make perfect sense why registered Democrats in southern states would vote for a republican when their choice is A) George Bush, Texas Cowboy; or B) John Kerry, Commie Yankee Liberal.
Maybe Kerry (and any other person who might care) isn't making a big fuss because there isn't enough evidence to make a case yet. Seriously, I doubt anybody who had the ability to rig a national election would do it in a sloppy manner that was easy to detect
Like they say, lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working!
Either 5% of the population have started systematically lying to exit pollsters (refusal rates havn't changed significantly), or there is something else odd happening.
The third option is that the statisticians had fouled up again and failed to come up with an accurate method of selecting a representative sample. They clearly missed something last time, so obviously they're not infallible.
The article is totally content free, and reads like it was written in german, translated to french, and then translated to english. "I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it." Yeah, I can tell you "wrote a" this piece, pal. Next time cut the crap with butterflies and hummingbirds and tell us how the hell a piezo drive actually WORKS.
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California doesn't do annual inspections. Cars are just assumed to be safe. There are smog checks every two years after the first four (new cars are assumed to be non polluting), but nobody would be able to afford two year's worth of "road tax". Really, even one year's worth of tax would probably be too much for people.
That's a bad idea. The price of gas has no bearing on either the amount of pollution or the amount of wear and tear on the roads. It'd be just one more reason for the state to look the other way while the oil companies rob us blind.
"Oh, you're closing another profitable refinery to reduce the gasoline supply and drive prices up? Good! That makes our %5 tax bring in more!"
no thanks
But nobody should consider free-broadcast TV to be a "right". The issue is not so much the expectation by viewers that TV should be free, but the expectation of tv broadcasters that viewers should be forced to watch the commercials. It's all well and good to point out that the business model depends upon advertiser support and that an effective means of obliterating commercials could very well destroy that business model; but I maintain that broadcasters seeking to mandate commercial watching (or prohibit commercial skipping) through force of law are totally in the wrong. If they need to change their business model to subscription based we certainly have no right to complain, but when they go to the feds and make it illegal for us to buy a machine that skips commercials, that's totally unacceptable.
I think you've hit the nail right on the head here. Cherry picking a single obscure item like that is hardly a representative sample. That's like asking one person at a Libertarian rally who they voted for and then later claiming election fraud because your "exit poll" data projected that Michael Badnarik should have received 100% of the vote. He only uses the Hamilton birth year as a benchmark because it's something he knows and always corrects in any encyclopedia he edits. His encyclopedia doubtless contains a handful of errors that other editors could point to the same way. He'd possibly discount them as "inconsequential", but they wouldn't be any less (more?) important than Hamilton's birth year.
So what? With a private army you can try to enforce anything. You could claim the right to kill anyone who steps on your shadow. The problem with "intellectual property" is that even with a private army (or even with the weight of the US Government for that matter) there's no way you can prevent infringement. You can punish infringers, but that's not the same thing. The problem is that IP isn't actually property. There are no boundaries you can monitor with armed men, there are no property lines you can demarcate with electrified fences. IP is just ideas. How is your private army going to stop a man in Backwoods, VA who overheard your song, or read your book from selling copies to his neighbors? Ideas are infinitely replicable. Real property is not. Copyright law is simply a government-created means by which something that is not property can be treated as if it were property.
Actually, the common name is "TEMPEST".
Actually, TEMPEST has to do with gathering intelligence via unshielded EM radiation. Hardening against EMPs is a different subject entirely.
You gotta link the comics if you really want people to understand all about the Fruit Fucker:
1 2 3 4 5 6
Give up? ...the GUV'MINT!
Hogwash. Property rights are an extension of "territory", something even animals understand. A fence and a shotgun are all you need to enforce property rights. Government has taken much of the hassle out of protecting property by setting up rules under which property is held and transferred, but if the government were to disappear tomorrow, the fence and the shotgun will still maintain property rights.
More than likely, the difference in price is going to the Italian government in the form of import tariffs and Value Added Taxes. If you look around, you'll notice that it's not just Coke that costs more, it's just about everything else.
You're going to fault Intel for marketing their chips at the speed they run at?
When they design a chip like the P4 that does less usefull work per clock cycle than the P3 before it for no apparent reason other than "mhz marketing", yeah, why not fault them?
Interesting thing about Bayer's trademark for Aspirin: they were forced to give it up to France Britain, Russia, and the US as part of the reparations stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. So it wasn't really lack of enforcement that lost them the trademark, it was losing a war.
Actually, its the Opteron that is competing with the Itanium processor
Actually, Opteron is a specific model in the AMD64 line.
Please?
Thank you.
Give us a reason why we should shut up.
"Oh, so you were sold into slavery? Why don't you just run away? You're free to attempt that at any time! There are lots of places where slavery is not accepted. Move there you long-haired non-hot-rod-poking-lovin' hippie scum! I believe in this, therefore it's right! Might makes right!"
No matter how bad the working conditions are, "at will" employment isn't slavery. If this weak, whiny mockery is the best counterargument you can come up with to the idea that people should just not work for bad employers, you're not gonna win any converts.
Hmmm, isn't that itself a forecast prediction, with an 8/9 chance of being wrong?
Actually, it's not. It's a statistical analysis with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. You don't have to make any predictions of the future to figure out why jetpacks, smell-o-vision, and atomic generated electricity so plentiful it's too cheap to meter" didn't happen.
Yeah, and other than the nausea, diarrhea, amnesia, and possible heart attacks, there's hardly any down side to it!
As an insomniac, I find I'm better off just not sleeping as much. But then again, for some insomniacs it's better than no sleep at all...
Should they also shoulder a percentage of the debt if the game totally bombs and brings in less money than it cost to make? If not, why?
The author is clearly a frustrated hack writer. I think the tortured style is partly (as others mentioned) imitation of "The Da Vinci Code". The other part is a lame attempt at literary journalism. Note his periodic intrusive descriptions of his own experience researching the article, and how they struggle to establish relevance with the subject matter. It's the sort of subject that doesn't lend itself to immersive reporting unless you're going to research and build the dang robot yourself and record your experience. He should've stuck to the old fashioned "pertinent facts only" model of reporting for this one.
Wow! I'm on the edge of my seat! Will he spill his coffee on the 400 year old book? Quick! Click the "next page" link and find out!
One reason is that most of the world's earliest settlements were near rivers, a necessity when you're trying to make a go of agriculture. After a generation or two it's fairly certain they experienced a few floods themselves. Not surprising that a fairy tale involving a Great Flood came about. Most folk tales are exaggerrations of ordinary human experiences. The villains are more evil, the heroes stronger, the dangers greater. Nobody wants to hear the story of the Weak Flood Two Years Ago that Covered the Wheat Fields in Water Half Way Up to Our Knees.
That's just dumb. How many people would have to vote seven times to swing an election? How easy is it to conceal that many people voting that many times? Concealing such a plot would be essentially impossible.
There sure is a reason. The same reason the electoral college system was implemented for in the first place: to prevent candidates from only campaigning in the 10 most populous cities because the vote density is higher there and totally ignoring rural states such as Idaho, Montana, and Iowa. The idea is that the president is supposed to represent the interests of ALL the states, not just those few states with enough people to give him a majority.
Electoral college reps are people chosen to go to Washington and represent their states. Electors' votes aren't a matter of personal freedom. Those people already exercised their right to vote in the election.
That's counter to what the electoral college system (and democracy) is all about, isn't it?
No, it's exactly the way the electoral college system is supposed to work.
If electoral college members are required to vote a particular way, then it's pointless having them in the first place.
Yes, it's pretty much pointless nowadays. It's only done because that's the way the US Constitution says it has to be done. You see, back in the 18th century they didn't have TV, telephones, or telegraph. They actually had to send people in person to ensure that each state's wishes were properly represented. Multiple electors, one for each vote, were sent to keep one crazy elector from tossing all his state's electoral votes to the guy his state DIDN'T select.
The "Dixiecrat stuff" has been going on consistently for decades. It has nothing to do with people forgetting to change their party affiliation. You do not have to be a Republican to be conservative, just like you don't have to be a Democrat if you're liberal. Here's the short form of why there are conservative-voting Democrats: southerners, traditionally being of the party OPPOSITE that of Lincoln, were unhappy with the direction the party went starting in the late 40's. While they were able to select conservative democrats in their primaries to run in local races, they increasingly found that the other states' democratic primaries were selecting presidential candidates that were far more liberal than they cared for. They consider themselves democrats and vote for the conservative democrat local politicians they select in their primaries, but there's no way in hell they're gonna vote for some Massachusetts yankee liberal for president.
Your problem is that you think of it as a binary condition in which you are either a New York style Liberal Democrat, or a Montana style Conservative Republican. Real life is far more complicated than that.
Read up a little about the actual Dixiecrat party and it'll make perfect sense why registered Democrats in southern states would vote for a republican when their choice is A) George Bush, Texas Cowboy; or B) John Kerry, Commie Yankee Liberal.
Like they say, lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working!
Either 5% of the population have started systematically lying to exit pollsters (refusal rates havn't changed significantly), or there is something else odd happening.
The third option is that the statisticians had fouled up again and failed to come up with an accurate method of selecting a representative sample. They clearly missed something last time, so obviously they're not infallible.
The article is totally content free, and reads like it was written in german, translated to french, and then translated to english. "I wrote a this piece on Techworld about it." Yeah, I can tell you "wrote a" this piece, pal. Next time cut the crap with butterflies and hummingbirds and tell us how the hell a piezo drive actually WORKS.