When everyone can just sit back and minimize their costs by not innovating, instead only copying others as necessary to offset competitive advantages, then nobody innovates
Look at what happened to the companies Apple copied their major technologies from: Xerox, Palm, Diamond, Psion, Nokia, AT&T, etc. They are largely history. So are many of the small apps developers that innovated in the mobile space only to get copied by Apple. Those are the people who actually spent lots of money and effort on innovation, they just didn't manage to compete against Apple's design and marketing juggernaut.
So, don't pretend that these patents and lawsuits Apple keeps winning are rewarding the innovators. The innovators have already gone out of business. What Apple's patents are rewarding is a ruthless company that "shamelessly steals" (a direct Steve Jobs quote) other people's great ideas and doesn't invest a dime in research itself. And shameless stealing is not something we want to reward.
There have been plenty of lawsuits and injunctions based on Apple patent and design claims in Europe as well, and as a consequence, there are many Samsung devices you can't get in Europe either.
Take a look at both the outer design and software of Samsung's phones before and after the iPhone and say with a straight face that Samsung didn't copy at least some elements from Apple.
Who cares? It's fine to copy elements from other devices. It's fine to make look-alike and work-alike devices of other successful devices. That's how progress is made in high tech.
And Apple itself copied most of the iPhone design elements, and much of its functionality from other companies, including key features like desktop sync, MP3 sync, app stores, launchers, and many more. If such copying weren't allowed, there would be no iPhone.
What makes Apple's behavior so wrong and destructive is that they copy liberally from others and then turn around and try to monopolize the market with bad patents.
If you read the paper, it attempted to reproduce the pressure profile during the strokes.
See those nice renderings of photographs as brush strokes? The path of the strokes was generated by hand, only the learned pressure profile was used. And the pressure profile it actually used seems pretty poor.
The paper is pretty much faking its results (although it's at least honest about doing so).
I have health care through a PPO and my recent visit (severe food poisoning) cost me nearly $2,000. If the PPO hadn't negotiated that favorable rate on my behalf, the cost might be from 2-10 times as expensive.
Well, and that's the start of the problem. I had severe food poisoning while traveling. I went to a local family doctor (in Europe), he checked me over, prescribed something, and the whole thing cost less than $100, which I paid out of pocket. You unnecessarily went to an emergency room, they charged you an excessive amount of money, and you didn't care because you didn't have to pay for it.
that the point of insurance is to mitigate the risk that you will be surprised by an accident that may happen before you have the money to pay for it
A laudable goal, but Obamacare is not insurance. Insurance means that unexpected high expenditures are taken care of. Obamacare pays for everything, cradle to grave. Furthermore, you don't pay for yourself, you pay for whatever the old and sick can extract from the system right now, and by the time you actually need health care, you're likely to get a lot less of it.
As for "locking it in even tighter", I don't really think that's the case.
That's exactly the case, because the broken system will be even harder to dislodge now.
No, actually, almost all people would be perfectly fine. Once you average out the costs (which Obamacare is supposed to do), Americans spend upwards of $7000/person/year, from birth. Let's set aside $2000/year for preventive care and common issues (quite generous), that leaves $5000. Invest that over 40 years at real 5%, and you get about $640000 in today's dollars, enough to take care of pretty much every problem. After 60 years, you're up to $1.9 million, and let's say you stop making contributions then. Average lifetime health care expenses are around $300000 including maintenance, so the current "insurance company" is going to pocket pretty much all of that as their profit.
But even worse, with Obamacare, you aren't even going to be guaranteed $300000 in benefits, because you won't be getting benefits based on your contributions, but based on availability of money when you actually need it, which is almost certainly going to be much less (due to demographics).
But actually, if everybody were buying health care on the free market, prices would go down substantially. They are spiraling out of control because people consume it while "socializing" the costs of excessive consumption.
In any case, I'm not opposed to insurance, but Obamacare isn't insurance. Insurance would take care of unexpected high expenditures using rates based on your actual risk, and it would guarantee that you receive the benefits you pay for.
The point of all this is that Obamacare is a really bad deal for everybody. It isn't cost effective insurance, and it will cause costs to continue to spiral out of control.
Whilst this statement is pedantically correct, it should be pointed out that they actually have quite a lot of data, considering that they only have one Earth to collect it from.
That doesn't change the fact that the conclusions fail to be "rock solid"; in fact, they are rather speculative at this point.
I will concur that a lot of the content of IPCC reports is negotiated, but you're just restating the point that expert judgement is required for projecting the consequences of global warming.
Science is based on reproducible facts, not "expert judgment". You may choose to base policy on "expert judgment", but then don't pretend that those are scientific facts.
In any case, you're being misleading: the conclusion that the warming is anthropogenic in nature is not negotiated, it is based upon analysis of data and modelling.
No, you are being misleading. The fact that human carbon emissions have led to some warming is not in question anymore. What is in question is the projections of what this will mean for the planet in the future and what the proper actions are to remediate it.
Statistics, in short
Good that you recognize that. Now realize that most of the proponents on strong action against global warming, including most climatologists, are not experts in statistics, and their "expert judgment" on statistical issues is essentially worthless.
There are plenty of carrier-independent Android phones in the US. Worldwide, in many countries, carrier-independent phones are the norm. Also, Android phones are a lot cheaper than iPhones, so many people just upgrade by buying a new phone.
Here is one of the key conclusions from the IPCC report (Section 5.7):
Limited and early analytical results from integrated analy- ses of the global costs and benefits of mitigation indicate that these are broadly comparable in magnitude, but do not as yet permit an unambiguous determination of an emis- sions pathway or stabilisation level where benefits exceed costs. {WGIII SPM}
In different words: we can't make a solid economic argument that it's better to do something about climate change now, rather than just letting it happen and deal with the consequences.
Since the hard sciences part turned out to be rock solid, staying in denial of it would have been disingenuous.
I suggest you read the IPCC report: most of its conclusions are at best couched in terms like "likely" (meaning >66% probability estimate by experts). The fact that they need to determine probabilities by expert judgment, rather than by statistics on observations, tells you that they don't have much data to go on. The results are not independently reproducible because most of them are retroactive interpretations of data. "Rock solid" is five sigma results obtained in multiple independent experiments.
And that's not even taking into account the fact that in order for "expert judgment" to be worth anything, you need to test and verify that your experts are actually qualified and that they are unbiased, but the IPCC report has been created by a self-selected crowd of people with an ax to grind whose qualifications are all over the place, and whose conclusions were arrived at by negotiation and not statistics.
If you took the money you are spending on health insurance and put it into safe long term investments, you'd have no trouble affording health care and you'd be far better off.
And if we got rid of some of the other monopolies, such as limits on medical degrees, restrictions on drugs, restrictions on importation of drugs, requirements for prescriptions, etc., health care costs would plummet.
Health care in the US is expensive because it's a system designed to funnel money from Americans to a small group of special interests (doctors, drug companies, drugstores, insurance companies), and instead of fixing that problem, Obama locked it in even tighter.
doing those things, then why shouldn't you have to pay it?
Because "the societal cost" often just means "lost revenue for some corporate special interest group".
Or do you think the rest of us should have to subsidize your desire to save a few bucks by destroying the earth and not pay a cent for your health care? Because I guarantee that when you have some devasting health problem you will show up at an ER and demand quality care.
Quality medical care can be delivered for a few hundred dollars per year. The extra thousands of dollars are a luxury, and it's a luxury that is now imposed on everybody, whether they want it or not.
FTFY. Long term bond interest rates are near record lows [treasury.gov]. It would be foolish not to borrow. If we borrow now and invest wisely so that the economy grows by at least 2%, we break even.
No, we don't break even, because we'll still be saddled with the debt. Future borrowing will be more expensive, and the debt will keep ratcheting up when we hit another recession (as we will).
Or we can keep cutting. That worked really well for Spain & Ireland.
Austerity isn't a choice for Spain, Greece, or Ireland, these nations simply cannot borrow at reasonable rates anymore. The only choice these nations have is between bankruptcy or austerity. Ireland chose austerity, and that does seem to be "working well" relative to the alternative.
The US is in a better position: it can still borrow money at good rates. But if we keep borrowing, sooner or later, we are going to face the same choice as these other nations. That's why we should stop borrowing now and enact modest austerity measures before the financial markets force us to adopt draconian austerity measures.
Except that we haven't ever paid back a significant fraction of our national debt in 70 years. So, if we borrow money now, we have to expect to be paying interest on it for a long time. We can really only grow out of it or inflate it away, but the first isn't likely to happen any time soon, and the second has lots of other problems.
And the only rational reason to borrow money is if your expected return exceeds the cost of borrowing. That's never been shown to happen for government programs. Spending billions on unneeded roads, uncompetitive industries, or ineffcient public transportation is not going to produce positive returns, and a lot of stimulus projects will end up exactly like that because money will get distributed based on political considerations, not utility.
Obama is the commander in chief. Whether to maintain troops overseas, whether to keep Guantanamo open, whether to spy on American citizens, and whether to send drones off to kill people overseas, those are all ultimately Obama's decisions.
Even if this were up to Congress, Obama promised to make it happen, and that includes dealing with Congress in whatever way necessary. But, again, it's not up to Congress anyway.
I think it takes a special kind of naivite to think that with an annual national deficit of $1.3 trillion dollars and a national debt of $15 trillion, we are "hoarding money".
Krugman is advocating spending money we don't have, money we need to borrow and repay at significant interest rates, or money we need to remove from the economy through taxation. Either is a bad idea.
Why the hell would a user give a rat's ass if a desktop environment is written in C++, C, or FORTRAN, as long as it works?
See the story: if a desktop environment uses a poorly chosen programming language for most of its code, its developers will eventually call it quits because it becomes too hard to maintain. In addition, I also want to write code for the desktop environment myself, and there the primary programming language used for libraries and most apps also matters, and KDE's C++ doesn't cut it.
This seems rather idiotic.
No, what is "idiotic" is writing a desktop environment in C++. What's even more idiotic is wondering down the road why the developers are quitting.
You think Windows' GUI is written in C? Or Apple's? Think again.
Since I don't rely on either and don't plan on writing GUI apps for them, I don't give a rat's ass what they are written in, and if all their developers were to quit, I'd be happy. But unlike KDE, both Microsoft and Apple saw the light, which is why they have been trying to move away from C++ to other languages (C#, Objective-C), languages that are considerably easier to live with for GUI development than C++.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at what happened to the companies Apple copied their major technologies from: Xerox, Palm, Diamond, Psion, Nokia, AT&T, etc. They are largely history. So are many of the small apps developers that innovated in the mobile space only to get copied by Apple. Those are the people who actually spent lots of money and effort on innovation, they just didn't manage to compete against Apple's design and marketing juggernaut.
So, don't pretend that these patents and lawsuits Apple keeps winning are rewarding the innovators. The innovators have already gone out of business. What Apple's patents are rewarding is a ruthless company that "shamelessly steals" (a direct Steve Jobs quote) other people's great ideas and doesn't invest a dime in research itself. And shameless stealing is not something we want to reward.
If that's what you believe, you really are totally out of touch with what's going on in the world.
There have been plenty of lawsuits and injunctions based on Apple patent and design claims in Europe as well, and as a consequence, there are many Samsung devices you can't get in Europe either.
Who cares? It's fine to copy elements from other devices. It's fine to make look-alike and work-alike devices of other successful devices. That's how progress is made in high tech.
And Apple itself copied most of the iPhone design elements, and much of its functionality from other companies, including key features like desktop sync, MP3 sync, app stores, launchers, and many more. If such copying weren't allowed, there would be no iPhone.
What makes Apple's behavior so wrong and destructive is that they copy liberally from others and then turn around and try to monopolize the market with bad patents.
If you read the paper, it attempted to reproduce the pressure profile during the strokes.
See those nice renderings of photographs as brush strokes? The path of the strokes was generated by hand, only the learned pressure profile was used. And the pressure profile it actually used seems pretty poor.
The paper is pretty much faking its results (although it's at least honest about doing so).
Well, and that's the start of the problem. I had severe food poisoning while traveling. I went to a local family doctor (in Europe), he checked me over, prescribed something, and the whole thing cost less than $100, which I paid out of pocket. You unnecessarily went to an emergency room, they charged you an excessive amount of money, and you didn't care because you didn't have to pay for it.
A laudable goal, but Obamacare is not insurance. Insurance means that unexpected high expenditures are taken care of. Obamacare pays for everything, cradle to grave. Furthermore, you don't pay for yourself, you pay for whatever the old and sick can extract from the system right now, and by the time you actually need health care, you're likely to get a lot less of it.
That's exactly the case, because the broken system will be even harder to dislodge now.
No, actually, almost all people would be perfectly fine. Once you average out the costs (which Obamacare is supposed to do), Americans spend upwards of $7000/person/year, from birth. Let's set aside $2000/year for preventive care and common issues (quite generous), that leaves $5000. Invest that over 40 years at real 5%, and you get about $640000 in today's dollars, enough to take care of pretty much every problem. After 60 years, you're up to $1.9 million, and let's say you stop making contributions then. Average lifetime health care expenses are around $300000 including maintenance, so the current "insurance company" is going to pocket pretty much all of that as their profit.
But even worse, with Obamacare, you aren't even going to be guaranteed $300000 in benefits, because you won't be getting benefits based on your contributions, but based on availability of money when you actually need it, which is almost certainly going to be much less (due to demographics).
But actually, if everybody were buying health care on the free market, prices would go down substantially. They are spiraling out of control because people consume it while "socializing" the costs of excessive consumption.
In any case, I'm not opposed to insurance, but Obamacare isn't insurance. Insurance would take care of unexpected high expenditures using rates based on your actual risk, and it would guarantee that you receive the benefits you pay for.
The point of all this is that Obamacare is a really bad deal for everybody. It isn't cost effective insurance, and it will cause costs to continue to spiral out of control.
That doesn't change the fact that the conclusions fail to be "rock solid"; in fact, they are rather speculative at this point.
Science is based on reproducible facts, not "expert judgment". You may choose to base policy on "expert judgment", but then don't pretend that those are scientific facts.
No, you are being misleading. The fact that human carbon emissions have led to some warming is not in question anymore. What is in question is the projections of what this will mean for the planet in the future and what the proper actions are to remediate it.
Good that you recognize that. Now realize that most of the proponents on strong action against global warming, including most climatologists, are not experts in statistics, and their "expert judgment" on statistical issues is essentially worthless.
There are plenty of carrier-independent Android phones in the US. Worldwide, in many countries, carrier-independent phones are the norm. Also, Android phones are a lot cheaper than iPhones, so many people just upgrade by buying a new phone.
Here is one of the key conclusions from the IPCC report (Section 5.7):
In different words: we can't make a solid economic argument that it's better to do something about climate change now, rather than just letting it happen and deal with the consequences.
I suggest you read the IPCC report: most of its conclusions are at best couched in terms like "likely" (meaning >66% probability estimate by experts). The fact that they need to determine probabilities by expert judgment, rather than by statistics on observations, tells you that they don't have much data to go on. The results are not independently reproducible because most of them are retroactive interpretations of data. "Rock solid" is five sigma results obtained in multiple independent experiments.
And that's not even taking into account the fact that in order for "expert judgment" to be worth anything, you need to test and verify that your experts are actually qualified and that they are unbiased, but the IPCC report has been created by a self-selected crowd of people with an ax to grind whose qualifications are all over the place, and whose conclusions were arrived at by negotiation and not statistics.
is that RIM made lousy management decisions, has a bad product, and is now paying the price for that. That's a good thing.
If you took the money you are spending on health insurance and put it into safe long term investments, you'd have no trouble affording health care and you'd be far better off.
And if we got rid of some of the other monopolies, such as limits on medical degrees, restrictions on drugs, restrictions on importation of drugs, requirements for prescriptions, etc., health care costs would plummet.
Health care in the US is expensive because it's a system designed to funnel money from Americans to a small group of special interests (doctors, drug companies, drugstores, insurance companies), and instead of fixing that problem, Obama locked it in even tighter.
Because "the societal cost" often just means "lost revenue for some corporate special interest group".
Quality medical care can be delivered for a few hundred dollars per year. The extra thousands of dollars are a luxury, and it's a luxury that is now imposed on everybody, whether they want it or not.
Does it really matter? You know where they both go after you are forced to bend over.
No, we don't break even, because we'll still be saddled with the debt. Future borrowing will be more expensive, and the debt will keep ratcheting up when we hit another recession (as we will).
Austerity isn't a choice for Spain, Greece, or Ireland, these nations simply cannot borrow at reasonable rates anymore. The only choice these nations have is between bankruptcy or austerity. Ireland chose austerity, and that does seem to be "working well" relative to the alternative.
The US is in a better position: it can still borrow money at good rates. But if we keep borrowing, sooner or later, we are going to face the same choice as these other nations. That's why we should stop borrowing now and enact modest austerity measures before the financial markets force us to adopt draconian austerity measures.
Except that we haven't ever paid back a significant fraction of our national debt in 70 years. So, if we borrow money now, we have to expect to be paying interest on it for a long time. We can really only grow out of it or inflate it away, but the first isn't likely to happen any time soon, and the second has lots of other problems.
And the only rational reason to borrow money is if your expected return exceeds the cost of borrowing. That's never been shown to happen for government programs. Spending billions on unneeded roads, uncompetitive industries, or ineffcient public transportation is not going to produce positive returns, and a lot of stimulus projects will end up exactly like that because money will get distributed based on political considerations, not utility.
About 3%, possibly more.
Obama is the commander in chief. Whether to maintain troops overseas, whether to keep Guantanamo open, whether to spy on American citizens, and whether to send drones off to kill people overseas, those are all ultimately Obama's decisions.
Even if this were up to Congress, Obama promised to make it happen, and that includes dealing with Congress in whatever way necessary. But, again, it's not up to Congress anyway.
Obama went into the last election creating the image of being a pacifist and a defender of civil rights. In practice, he has turned out to be neither.
I think it takes a special kind of naivite to think that with an annual national deficit of $1.3 trillion dollars and a national debt of $15 trillion, we are "hoarding money".
Krugman is advocating spending money we don't have, money we need to borrow and repay at significant interest rates, or money we need to remove from the economy through taxation. Either is a bad idea.
See the story: if a desktop environment uses a poorly chosen programming language for most of its code, its developers will eventually call it quits because it becomes too hard to maintain. In addition, I also want to write code for the desktop environment myself, and there the primary programming language used for libraries and most apps also matters, and KDE's C++ doesn't cut it.
No, what is "idiotic" is writing a desktop environment in C++. What's even more idiotic is wondering down the road why the developers are quitting.
Since I don't rely on either and don't plan on writing GUI apps for them, I don't give a rat's ass what they are written in, and if all their developers were to quit, I'd be happy. But unlike KDE, both Microsoft and Apple saw the light, which is why they have been trying to move away from C++ to other languages (C#, Objective-C), languages that are considerably easier to live with for GUI development than C++.
I didn't say that either behavior was OK, I just pointed out that the standards by which we have to judge either behavior are legitimately different.
An iPad is awful for note taking. A tablet with a stylus, on the other hand, is great.
I completely agree. C++ is a PITA, doubly so for UI development. I'm not surprised that people are not volunteering to contribute to KDE anymore.