It really pisses me off that Apple is trying to monopolize the market for thin, rectangular tablets and phones. They didn't invent that form factor, they weren't the first to produce devices in it, and they should not have a design patent on it.
So, I'm supporting anybody who fights Apple, including Samsung and HTC.
You may be able to buy hardware more cheaply, but you're not going to beat Amazon on overall cost, once you take even minimal maintenance, power, server room space, etc. into account. You may be able to save money over EC2 by putting in your own labor, just realize that this can be a lot of work.
Yes, indeed. Just keep in mind that a lot of the RIAA agenda is also driven by European music publishers. I'm not saying that to point fingers, but I think that if we want liberalization of copyright laws worldwide, there needs to be a lot more political activity against this kind of stuff in Europe.
This is largely based on the misgivings of European publishers and European IT companies who missed the boat entirely. For years, they have enjoyed near-monopolies themselves, often aided by subsidies and government-imposed fees and price fixing. Now Google has been eating their lunch with cheaper offerings on books, music, video, news, and they are recognizing that they are becoming irrelevant.
This is only one of many attacks they have attempted; they are throwing out shit left and right and see what sticks. A few years ago, they conned the French and German governments into wasting hundreds of millions of Euros on a "Google killer". They have tried pushing legislation that would give European news publishers copyright over the facts contained in news stories. They have tried to set up complicated rules that make digital publishing costly and cumbersome. They have ensured that they get their cut even for books and content they didn't create. They created an anti-Streetview hysteria. Etc.
If they succeed, the people who will suffer will be the Europeans themselves, who will continue to be subject to price fixing and control of their culture and media by a few European media outlets.
Except "we" (the US and Europe) don't: our water and air are a lot cleaner than they have been since the start of the industrial revolution, and the rest of the environment is also being cleaned up.
We change the environment to the point that we're in danger of making a good chunk of the planet uninhabitable, but refuse to acknowledge it.
Bullshit. We sometimes screw up, and then we come up with ways of fixing it. That's not even out of some grand moral principles but simply because destroying land is economically wasteful.
We deforest the planet, without thought to the fact that not only are we using up a renewable resource faster than it grows back, we're also chewing through the planet's primary carbon sink.
Much of the forest that exists today was planted and maintained by humans in the past (probably including the South American rain forests). Yes, it's unfortunate it's being chopped down, but it can be restored if we want to or need to. Planting trees isn't rocket science.
Don't shit in our nest? Absolutely untrue. As a race, we've taken the steroidal version of Ex-Lax, and are wallowing in our own filth.
Stop being such a drama queen. We aren't "wallowing in our own filth", we are living in environments of our own making, like humans have done for thousands of years, and we are a lot better off because of it.
And why the hell not? Europe consumed most of its resources and built western civilization with it. Humanity is now repeating the same pattern globally and building a technological society that way. Yes, oil and ores will run out in a few centuries. That's no surprise to anyone and we can deal with it then.
over breed,
Economic development causes populations to stabilize, so the best way of achieving that is to make people wealthier.
destroy the habitat in which we live,
Except, of course, that the most developed nations are protecting their habitats the most. So, again, development causes habitat protection, not habitat destruction.
die en masse.
There is no evidence for that at all: the human population is larger than it has ever been before, yet people live longer and healthier lives all over the world, and poverty and hunger are decreasing, not just in terms of percentages, but in absolute numbers.
You really need to get out of your dystopian fantasy world and start living in the real world. Everything technology, industrialization and development have achieved have improved the human condition. That's despite the fact that none of it was ever sustainable.
Well, if give credence to the whole peer review thing, and acknowledge the fact that 97% of the world's scientists say it's real and caused at least in part by man:
Yup, there probably has been some global warming caused by man. So what?
In order to conclude that we need to do something about it, you need to show that:
(1) continued emissions will lead to substantially more warming,
(2) the costs of that warming outweigh the benefits of warming (yes, there are benefits) and outweigh the costs of remediation
(3) there is actually realistic steps we can take to prevent it
There is much less agreement on these points. And anybody who presents global warming policy as if it were settled with the "97% agreement" figure is either totally uninformed or is deliberately lying because he has some unrelated political agenda. Which are you?
Because we're in a recession and those private firms would cost orders of magnitude greater than utilizing the US military (which is already doing construction for other countries.)
I'm sorry, but... get real. In general, I don't have a problem with government services: the government is not as inefficient as conservatives make them out to be. But soldiers are a highly trained workforce with expensive equipment and expensive benefits. That training etc. is needed in war zones, it is not needed at home. Having them dig ditches and pave roads in the US would be an enormous waste of money (even disregarding the legal issues). And they tend not to spend much in the general economy either, so they wouldn't help us out of the recession.
This isn't some great outbreak of common sense in the EU, they are just looking down their noses at software. When it comes to other intellectual property (books, music, movies, etc.), the EU is more draconian than the US.
The US military does construction abroad because those nations do not have a functioning free market to do the job. Why would you want the US military to build infrastructure instead of private firms?
I called those languages "teaching languages" because they were actually originally designed for teaching (in the case of Python, it was called ABC back then).
Possibly, but just because some infrastructure spending by the government is good doesn't mean all of it is. In fact, only a tiny fraction of the Federal budget these days goes to those kinds of projects. Most of it goes to entitlements and the military, neither of which contributes to our economy (and the military is mostly doing things for our so-called "friends and allies"). And may I also point out that the kinds of infrastructure projects the WPA undertook wouldn't be possible today because of environmental concerns and extensive lawsuits? So, the "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics with creating this infrastructure back then is the very same kind of "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics that is preventing it today.
So, let's slash military and entitlement spending and focus on infrastructure again. Of course, that proposal attacks both parties' holy cows.
Oh, just have a look at the history of the Christian churches, Judaism, and Islam. They fought entire wars and committed genocide about the state of Mary's reproductive organs and what exactly the meaning of the "holy trinity" is. Muslims proclaim to hate idolatry, yet Islam iconifies the Koran and deifies Mohammed. All of them have desecrated corpses and raped women in the name of God. They engage in sadomasochistic rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder because of their religion.
Followers of the Abrahamic God were nutty from the start; what do you expect from people who follow a nutty and immoral tribal deity like Yahweh? At least the Christians have been tamed somewhat and are not committing mass murder as much.
I do not want to be treated by a doctor who is unwilling to even listen to basic scientific facts. No matter what their religion, people who refuse to even refuse to listen to the evidence have no business at an academic institution, and they shouldn't practice medicine either.
Also keep in mind that driving in the US and in Europe are different. Driving from SF to LA is a pretty relaxing experience year round; driving the same distance on French or German highways is nerve-wrecking, and I imagine doing it in Sweden in the winter would not be pleasant either.
Assuming speed limits remained unchanged, my normal route by car would take around 6:30 hours. Compare this to worst case by public transport: 5 minutes walk to subway, up to 15 minutes wait (though I believe that would only occur if I was trying to depart at 11pm!), 10 minutes on the subway, 5 minutes to the station, an hour until the next train (as if I had just missed one), five hours on the train, and then 10 minutes walk. All in all, 5:45 v. 6:30, worst case for public transport, average case for car. I'd personally certainly rather sit on a train for that time than sit in a car. The possibility of moving around and the fact I can have a table to work on are all massive benefits.
Even in that best of circumstances, you are not taking into account the fact that the train will likely arrive significantly before you actually need to get there; you need to add that wasted time to your travel time. And the problem becomes much worse when you need to take a local train to get to the fast train, as the great majority of people have to do. Travel by train is still pleasant in those circumstances (I take the train frequently), but it is no faster than cars. My point is that with self-driving cars, you get pretty much the same convenience without the disadvantages, and you probably get to your destination faster overall.
And in order to give you even the experience you are having, passenger trains are given priority over freight trains in Europe, pushing large amounts of freight traffic onto the road. That is not efficient. The US has an extensive rail network, but it's mostly used by slow, efficient freight trains that are given priority over the occasional passenger trains.
Note that pretty much everything you said could also be true for long-distance buses. However, they have historically simply not been allowed to compete freely in Europe, which is why you probably haven't even been considering them.
The fact that train travel is as nice as it is in Europe is the result of big subsidies and a history of having a monopoly. And even given all those advantages, trains are barely able to compete with other modes of transportation. Given how much investment Europe has already sunk into its train system, it may be reasonable to keep it a while longer (although self-driving cars would kill it, if/when they arrive). For the US, investing in a new passenger rail system makes little economic sense, although it would be a nice luxury to have.
When I lived in Sweden, there were fast trains to Stockholm twice an hour. Certainly nothing that required wasting hours waiting.
The Swedish situation is quite different from California or the rest of Europe: different settlement patterns, different commute patterns, different history, different weather, different traffic. I don't know whether trains make economic sense in Sweden; they may. They probably do in Switzerland, for example. But those are special cases.
Not really. It is politically feasible. The reality is that undeveloped nations have LOW emissions. Think about how much pollution China is dumping
China and India are developing nation, and they aren't going to agree to it, they have said so.
3rd world nations will likely love it because it allows them to compete better.
That is exactly what this is all about: economic advantages. The participants in the "debate" have been trying to misuse the "climate change issue" to gain an economic advantage, to burden their competitors with taxes and expenses while leaving their own industries more competitive. And depending on how you assign blame, you may disadvantage the US, Europe, China, and/or India. People are never going to agree to anything.
(Personally, I think objectively, Europe is clearly the biggest historical and current producer of carbon emissions, as well as the ecologically most destructive force on the planet.)
Go ahead and sell EU on it. I am sure that they will be happy to spend the money to do that.
The EU is in a financial crisis; they have no money for big reforestation projects or carbon taxes. And their mantra has been "we have lower per capita emissions, the US should bear the brunt".
OTH, if a nation like USA were to start this tax, it WOULD get ALL NATIONS TO CHANGE. Heck, if a nation like UK were to start this, it would force all nations to change.
Fortunatelly, the US isn't going to screw with its economy in that way. And for all their bluster, the Europeans are not going to do shit either, other than wallow in their anti-Americanism for political gain. And the WTO wouldn't allow it anyway.
This really is the fairest of them all. We are not concerned with what happened in the past.
Really? Europe subjugated the world with its carbon emissions, carved out a wonderful standard of living for it, and now it tells other countries to remain in the stone age while it enjoys the fruits of its past sins. I don't think so. Don't take my word for it, developing countries have said they are not going to agree to that.
The only way, is to apply this to EVERY NATION. And the only way to accomplish that, is by nations taxing ALL GOODS.
Not going to happen either; it's politically infeasible.
We need to be concerned with what is happening today and in the future.
Actually, we don't need to be concerned at all, since even if we do nothing, the costs are going to be tiny compared to the size of the US budget.
But if we were concerned, there are tons of things we could do besides postulating silly tax schemes. For example, Europe could reforest and quickly remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.
And the per sq km is the ONLY VIABLE MEANS TO PREVENT NATIONS FROM CHEATING. It is also allows the amount to be fixed to something that is relatively fair.
And what's "fair"? The majority of the extra carbon in the atmosphere is still due to European emissions. Even more is due to the vast deforestation across Europe over the last two millennia. Is Europe willing to absorb, say, 80% of the worldwide cost of reducing carbon in the atmosphere? Because that's what would be "fair".
Asking people to pay and reduce based on current emissions, on the other hand, is not "fair".
The effect of "carbon cutting programs" will simply be that people export the carbon emissions to countries where they are free. Any attempt to put import duties on the products is also going to fail. And trying to impose carbon emission taxes globally isn't going to work either.
So, all this climate change debate is pointless, since nothing can be done about the carbon emissions anyway even if we should. (But we really shouldn't reduce carbon emissions anyway.)
No, none of those things are really true. Trains in Europe are heavily subsidized and still end up more expensive than flying, and they are still losing money. Travel times are not so good once you take limited schedules and changes into account. Train travel is nice, but it's really a luxury.
Rail systems make a lot of sense for freight; that's how the US is using them. Europe uses the road for freight and trains for personal travel, which is fun, but inefficient.
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Come on, it's not hard to hand off a case. She could take off time for personal reasons, or she could just buy some Samsung stock.
It really pisses me off that Apple is trying to monopolize the market for thin, rectangular tablets and phones. They didn't invent that form factor, they weren't the first to produce devices in it, and they should not have a design patent on it.
So, I'm supporting anybody who fights Apple, including Samsung and HTC.
You may be able to buy hardware more cheaply, but you're not going to beat Amazon on overall cost, once you take even minimal maintenance, power, server room space, etc. into account. You may be able to save money over EC2 by putting in your own labor, just realize that this can be a lot of work.
Yes, indeed. Just keep in mind that a lot of the RIAA agenda is also driven by European music publishers. I'm not saying that to point fingers, but I think that if we want liberalization of copyright laws worldwide, there needs to be a lot more political activity against this kind of stuff in Europe.
Brilliant? No, it's just organisms desperate to survive and doing whatever it takes, even if it means eating crap off their own bodies.
This is largely based on the misgivings of European publishers and European IT companies who missed the boat entirely. For years, they have enjoyed near-monopolies themselves, often aided by subsidies and government-imposed fees and price fixing. Now Google has been eating their lunch with cheaper offerings on books, music, video, news, and they are recognizing that they are becoming irrelevant.
This is only one of many attacks they have attempted; they are throwing out shit left and right and see what sticks. A few years ago, they conned the French and German governments into wasting hundreds of millions of Euros on a "Google killer". They have tried pushing legislation that would give European news publishers copyright over the facts contained in news stories. They have tried to set up complicated rules that make digital publishing costly and cumbersome. They have ensured that they get their cut even for books and content they didn't create. They created an anti-Streetview hysteria. Etc.
If they succeed, the people who will suffer will be the Europeans themselves, who will continue to be subject to price fixing and control of their culture and media by a few European media outlets.
Except "we" (the US and Europe) don't: our water and air are a lot cleaner than they have been since the start of the industrial revolution, and the rest of the environment is also being cleaned up.
Bullshit. We sometimes screw up, and then we come up with ways of fixing it. That's not even out of some grand moral principles but simply because destroying land is economically wasteful.
Much of the forest that exists today was planted and maintained by humans in the past (probably including the South American rain forests). Yes, it's unfortunate it's being chopped down, but it can be restored if we want to or need to. Planting trees isn't rocket science.
Stop being such a drama queen. We aren't "wallowing in our own filth", we are living in environments of our own making, like humans have done for thousands of years, and we are a lot better off because of it.
And why the hell not? Europe consumed most of its resources and built western civilization with it. Humanity is now repeating the same pattern globally and building a technological society that way. Yes, oil and ores will run out in a few centuries. That's no surprise to anyone and we can deal with it then.
Economic development causes populations to stabilize, so the best way of achieving that is to make people wealthier.
Except, of course, that the most developed nations are protecting their habitats the most. So, again, development causes habitat protection, not habitat destruction.
There is no evidence for that at all: the human population is larger than it has ever been before, yet people live longer and healthier lives all over the world, and poverty and hunger are decreasing, not just in terms of percentages, but in absolute numbers.
You really need to get out of your dystopian fantasy world and start living in the real world. Everything technology, industrialization and development have achieved have improved the human condition. That's despite the fact that none of it was ever sustainable.
Yup, there probably has been some global warming caused by man. So what?
In order to conclude that we need to do something about it, you need to show that:
(1) continued emissions will lead to substantially more warming,
(2) the costs of that warming outweigh the benefits of warming (yes, there are benefits) and outweigh the costs of remediation
(3) there is actually realistic steps we can take to prevent it
There is much less agreement on these points. And anybody who presents global warming policy as if it were settled with the "97% agreement" figure is either totally uninformed or is deliberately lying because he has some unrelated political agenda. Which are you?
May these efforts die a well-deserved death.
I'm sorry, but ... get real. In general, I don't have a problem with government services: the government is not as inefficient as conservatives make them out to be. But soldiers are a highly trained workforce with expensive equipment and expensive benefits. That training etc. is needed in war zones, it is not needed at home. Having them dig ditches and pave roads in the US would be an enormous waste of money (even disregarding the legal issues). And they tend not to spend much in the general economy either, so they wouldn't help us out of the recession.
This isn't some great outbreak of common sense in the EU, they are just looking down their noses at software. When it comes to other intellectual property (books, music, movies, etc.), the EU is more draconian than the US.
The US military does construction abroad because those nations do not have a functioning free market to do the job. Why would you want the US military to build infrastructure instead of private firms?
I called those languages "teaching languages" because they were actually originally designed for teaching (in the case of Python, it was called ABC back then).
I don't get it... what does this have to do with Ruby? There seems to be no mention of it in the article.
There are a bunch of teaching languages (BASIC, Logo, Python). I suppose Ruby might be OK, but it wouldn't be my first choice.
Possibly, but just because some infrastructure spending by the government is good doesn't mean all of it is. In fact, only a tiny fraction of the Federal budget these days goes to those kinds of projects. Most of it goes to entitlements and the military, neither of which contributes to our economy (and the military is mostly doing things for our so-called "friends and allies"). And may I also point out that the kinds of infrastructure projects the WPA undertook wouldn't be possible today because of environmental concerns and extensive lawsuits? So, the "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics with creating this infrastructure back then is the very same kind of "socialistic-communistic-pinko-liberal" politics that is preventing it today.
So, let's slash military and entitlement spending and focus on infrastructure again. Of course, that proposal attacks both parties' holy cows.
Oh, just have a look at the history of the Christian churches, Judaism, and Islam. They fought entire wars and committed genocide about the state of Mary's reproductive organs and what exactly the meaning of the "holy trinity" is. Muslims proclaim to hate idolatry, yet Islam iconifies the Koran and deifies Mohammed. All of them have desecrated corpses and raped women in the name of God. They engage in sadomasochistic rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder because of their religion.
Followers of the Abrahamic God were nutty from the start; what do you expect from people who follow a nutty and immoral tribal deity like Yahweh? At least the Christians have been tamed somewhat and are not committing mass murder as much.
I do not want to be treated by a doctor who is unwilling to even listen to basic scientific facts. No matter what their religion, people who refuse to even refuse to listen to the evidence have no business at an academic institution, and they shouldn't practice medicine either.
Also keep in mind that driving in the US and in Europe are different. Driving from SF to LA is a pretty relaxing experience year round; driving the same distance on French or German highways is nerve-wrecking, and I imagine doing it in Sweden in the winter would not be pleasant either.
Even in that best of circumstances, you are not taking into account the fact that the train will likely arrive significantly before you actually need to get there; you need to add that wasted time to your travel time. And the problem becomes much worse when you need to take a local train to get to the fast train, as the great majority of people have to do. Travel by train is still pleasant in those circumstances (I take the train frequently), but it is no faster than cars. My point is that with self-driving cars, you get pretty much the same convenience without the disadvantages, and you probably get to your destination faster overall.
And in order to give you even the experience you are having, passenger trains are given priority over freight trains in Europe, pushing large amounts of freight traffic onto the road. That is not efficient. The US has an extensive rail network, but it's mostly used by slow, efficient freight trains that are given priority over the occasional passenger trains.
Note that pretty much everything you said could also be true for long-distance buses. However, they have historically simply not been allowed to compete freely in Europe, which is why you probably haven't even been considering them.
The fact that train travel is as nice as it is in Europe is the result of big subsidies and a history of having a monopoly. And even given all those advantages, trains are barely able to compete with other modes of transportation. Given how much investment Europe has already sunk into its train system, it may be reasonable to keep it a while longer (although self-driving cars would kill it, if/when they arrive). For the US, investing in a new passenger rail system makes little economic sense, although it would be a nice luxury to have.
The Swedish situation is quite different from California or the rest of Europe: different settlement patterns, different commute patterns, different history, different weather, different traffic. I don't know whether trains make economic sense in Sweden; they may. They probably do in Switzerland, for example. But those are special cases.
China and India are developing nation, and they aren't going to agree to it, they have said so.
That is exactly what this is all about: economic advantages. The participants in the "debate" have been trying to misuse the "climate change issue" to gain an economic advantage, to burden their competitors with taxes and expenses while leaving their own industries more competitive. And depending on how you assign blame, you may disadvantage the US, Europe, China, and/or India. People are never going to agree to anything.
(Personally, I think objectively, Europe is clearly the biggest historical and current producer of carbon emissions, as well as the ecologically most destructive force on the planet.)
The EU is in a financial crisis; they have no money for big reforestation projects or carbon taxes. And their mantra has been "we have lower per capita emissions, the US should bear the brunt".
Fortunatelly, the US isn't going to screw with its economy in that way. And for all their bluster, the Europeans are not going to do shit either, other than wallow in their anti-Americanism for political gain. And the WTO wouldn't allow it anyway.
Really? Europe subjugated the world with its carbon emissions, carved out a wonderful standard of living for it, and now it tells other countries to remain in the stone age while it enjoys the fruits of its past sins. I don't think so. Don't take my word for it, developing countries have said they are not going to agree to that.
Not going to happen either; it's politically infeasible.
Actually, we don't need to be concerned at all, since even if we do nothing, the costs are going to be tiny compared to the size of the US budget.
But if we were concerned, there are tons of things we could do besides postulating silly tax schemes. For example, Europe could reforest and quickly remove large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.
And what's "fair"? The majority of the extra carbon in the atmosphere is still due to European emissions. Even more is due to the vast deforestation across Europe over the last two millennia. Is Europe willing to absorb, say, 80% of the worldwide cost of reducing carbon in the atmosphere? Because that's what would be "fair".
Asking people to pay and reduce based on current emissions, on the other hand, is not "fair".
The effect of "carbon cutting programs" will simply be that people export the carbon emissions to countries where they are free. Any attempt to put import duties on the products is also going to fail. And trying to impose carbon emission taxes globally isn't going to work either.
So, all this climate change debate is pointless, since nothing can be done about the carbon emissions anyway even if we should. (But we really shouldn't reduce carbon emissions anyway.)
No, none of those things are really true. Trains in Europe are heavily subsidized and still end up more expensive than flying, and they are still losing money. Travel times are not so good once you take limited schedules and changes into account. Train travel is nice, but it's really a luxury.
Rail systems make a lot of sense for freight; that's how the US is using them. Europe uses the road for freight and trains for personal travel, which is fun, but inefficient.