Except NASA's budget goes right back into the pockets of the American people, plus we get space missions.
That's the Democratic version of "trickle down economics", and it is just as dumb as the Republican version. The real question is whether NASA is using the money more efficiently than the people you took it from would have used it, and that's doubtful. NASA has excessively strict safety standards, and it has been wasting huge amounts of money on useless projects like the space shuttle. The analysis you point to on Wikipedia makes the same mistake: it accounts for the benefits that that money yielded, but implicitly assumes that there was no cost beyond the nominal spending, which is of course absurd.
NASA's budget is insignificant compared to the entitlement programs and DOD spending
Can't you read? I said that this is to be seen in the context of larger DOD budget cuts. Across the board budget cuts in discretionary spending are going to make a difference. And furthermore, until discretionary spending gets cut noticeably, people will not realize that there is a problem.
Cutting NASA's budget does little for actually balancing the budget. It's just the least important to that good o' red blooded american voter
Let's assume you're right and most American's don't give a sh*t about NASA. By what justification do you extract their tax dollars then and use them to pay for NASA? NASA has no essential function in government: it doesn't protect our liberties, it doesn't make us safer, it doesn't help with our defense. The only justification for having NASA is that a majority of Americans want it.
(And, in fact, I think most Americans like NASA and would like to see it continue.)
The problem with the budget has always been that politicians do not look at what will be good for the nation's future when making decisions.
No, the problem is that everybody has their pet programs and tries to obfuscate the budget process to save them. The problem isn't politicians, it's voters like you.
This won't do squat about getting the deficit under control.
Spending cuts for NASA by themselves won't, but across-the-board spending cuts for "discretionary funding" will, not just because they actually do have some effect, but also because people actually will notice.
The cause of the deficit is Medicare/Medicaid.... We've known for 3 Presidents exactly what the problem is. We've just refused to do anything about it.
People won't vote to cut entitlements until they start realizing that they have to. And they aren't going to start realizing that until something they actually care about gets cut, like defense, police, roads, and NASA.
the important difference between private and public debt.
There is a difference, but not the one Keynesians pretend there is: public debt is, in effect, simply a large additional tax and redistribution of wealth.
The "delta" measurement is still totally arbitrary. And who decides what "delta" you even measure?
Students and parents are supposed to be the beneficiaries of public schools; why don't you let them decide on the criteria that they, individually, set for each school? Or are you saying that low income parents are simply too stupid to figure what constitutes a good school?
Much as I like NASA, if that's what it takes to get the deficit under control, then that's what needs to happen. Given that the DOD takes the brunt of the cuts, it seems fair. And a billion dollar in cuts for NASA amounts to pocket change when distributed about all the billionaires that are currently financing private space ventures. We'll probably do better altogether by getting the economy going again and having them work on getting to space than to keep financing bloated DOD and other programs an relying on handouts for NASA to get us into space.
As it turns out, it's much easier for software to do that job
As it turns out, that's false. Optimizations are highly dependent on the specific hardware and data, and it's hard for compilers or programmers to know what to do. Modern processors are as fast as they are because they split optimization in a good way between compilers and the CPU. Traditional CISC processors got that wrong, as well as hardcore traditional RISC processors; the last gasp of the latter was the IA64, which proved pretty conclusively that neither programmers nor compilers can do the job by themselves.
Sorry, I'm pretty libertarian myself, but what you wrote is complete nonsense. First of all, what you wrote only applies even approximately to the federal government; local and state governments, of course, have lots of functions beyond that. In fact, local governments really function more like a home owner's association than "government". Second, in the US we don't have "enumerated rights"; that's the European view in which a few rights are given to the people and everything else is retained by the state. In the US, the federal government has an enumerated list of powers, and all rights that aren't limited by federal powers are retained by the states and the people.
Stupid comments like yours are the reason small government and libertarian principles have such a hard time.
While they were being actively developed and promoted, RISC architectures were beating x86 quite heavily on performance
At times, a high end RISC chip would beat a similarly priced high end x86 chip, but performance advantages were modest and didn't last long.
Intel tried to move on from x86 too, with IA64... They failed, largely because of a lack of backwards compatibility...
Backwards compatibility at the instruction set level matters little to people who need high performance. If IA64 had worked well, people would have snapped it up. IA64 failed because it had a lousy cost/performance ratio, in part because it was nearly impossible to write good compilers for it. In different words, it failed because it was a badly designed architecture and a badly designed instruction set.
I know the difference, you simply fail to grasp that it is irrelevant here. It doesn't matter whether Samsung's connectors were "proprietary" or "non-standard", what matters is that the interoperate with standard cables and devices. Apple's connectors fail to do so and they screw their customers and the environment for no reason other than to maximize their own profit.
However, I suggest you do look up the term "proprietary" yourself and then present some evidence that Samsung's connector actually is "proprietary".
Public sector unions are different from private sector unions in that the tax payers back all promises made to workers. So, while a private company goes out of business if it strikes a bad deal with the union, and the unions understand that, in the public sector politicians just make politically convenient promises and leave the tax payer with the bill. Usually, that bill comes due long after the people responsible for the deal are out of office (so you can't punish them with your vote), and since it's government services, you can't choose not to do business with them anymore either. And politicians are uniquely vulnerable to political pressure from unions, which represent large and active voting populations (even if they are a small minority among all voters). In extreme cases, cities may go bankrupt. Even if you move away, you still end up paying for these bad deals, since your property values went down and the cities are likely going to be bailed out in some way.
And, yes, the right to strike can be restricted, and is restricted in many places. But public sector unions don't even need to strike, they can pressure politicians in many other ways.
Really, the only way to deal with these problems is for voters to gain a better understanding of what's going on and force their politicians to make decisions that are in the public interests, instead of being pushovers for public sector union interests.
By themselves, unions are an association of people with common interests and goals, just like corporations, and they are a useful and important component of a free market. They actually increase market efficiency by simplifying negotiations over pay and work conditions.
Unions become a "monopoly" only when membership becomes de-facto mandatory or when they involve the public sector. Unfortunately, that's the case in the US in many cases, but it is not an intrinsic feature of unions.
Another way to go would be to only evaluate principals and give them more leeway to hire/fire teachers they like and use whatever in-house evaluation methods they want.
And who is going to make that evaluation? How are they going to hire and fire?
In essence, you want a free market in education in which parents evaluate schools and outcomes, successful principals win and schools grow, and bad ones get closed. Government has a function in such a market: it can keep schools small and the market free and efficient (instead of having large corporations and churches take over entire counties or states), it can ensure that low income families can afford education for their kids through vouchers, and it can create some public schools to fill in gaps where there are market failures. But that's very different from the all-expenses-paid centrally planned public school system that we have right now.
But privatization? Why should they care? Can't the union accept private school teachers as members and negotiate with private employers just like it negotiates with the City of Chicago?
No, because unions in the private sector work fundamentally differently from public sector unions. In the private sector, if there's a strike, people can take their business elsewhere, and if unions make unreasonable demands, the affected businesses fold and both workers and owners lose. For public sector unions, if there's a strike, government services stop and there is no alternative, and any promises made by politicians are ultimately backed by tax payers.
I'm also curious what would stop the city from hiring scabs
That works for private sector labor disputes, it is politically and in many cases legally impossible in the public sector.
If the Chicago Teacher's Union works like other unions, you are required to pay your dues whether you agree with their activities or not (you can choose not to be a member, but you still have to pay). And because these are public sector jobs, they can hold vital government services hostage and people dependent on these services have no alternatives. That's not a union and collective bargaining anymore, it's a protection racket supported by politicians who use it to advance their own careers. The public and education lose out in the process.
ia32 dates back to the 1970's and is the last bastion of CISC,
The x86 instruction set is pretty awful and Atom is a pretty lousy processor. But that's probably not due to RISC vs. CISC. IA32 today is little more than an encoding for a sequence of RISC instructions, and the decoder takes up very little silicon. If there really were large intrinsic performance differences, companies like Apple wouldn't have switched to x86 and RISC would have won in the desktop and workstation markets, both of which are performance sensitive.
I'd like to see a well-founded analysis of the differences of Atom and ARM, but superficial statements like "RISC is bad" don't cut it.
X11 is used in a lot more places than merely the Linux desktop, including embedded devices, super computer apps, etc. I seriously doubt it is going to be replaced for many decades.
Stop mincing words and confusing the issue with irrelevancies. The Samsung Galaxy S3 has a connector that is fully compatible with micro-USB cables and accessories. The fact that it has additional functionality doesn't change that. Nor is there any indication that Samsung's connector is "proprietary".
Apple could have adopted the same kind of solution: it satisfies all the requirements for modern smart phone connectivity. Instead, they opted to adopt a solution that creates tons of e-waste and makes iPhone accessories and iPhones incompatible with everything else.
Yes, but that is not a standard MicroUSB port on the Samsung. Go count pins.
It is fully compatible with all existing micro-USB. Your quibbling of whether that constitutes a "standard" connector is totally irrelevant. Apple could have adopted the same solution, or the same kind of solution, instead of choosing to implement a completely incompatible, proprietary, and expensive solution.
The S3 doesn't have a micro USB connector. It has a proprietary one
It has a connector that standard micro-USB cables plug into and work, both for host and device usage. For MHL, you need a special cable, but it is not "proprietary".
As I explained elsewhere, you're exactly wrong.
I am right, you are simply trying to distort the facts. The Samsung connector gives you all the functionality I listed above. It is as compatible with all defined, open standards as possible. Apple could easily have adopted exactly the same connector. Instead, they chose one that is incompatible with all standards.
Since the data handling via USB on smartphones is not standardized, meaning that there is not necessarily any interoperability between devices with a particular accessory
USB-to-go and USB host are standard and supported by most smartphones. In addition, MHL-over-micro-USB is a de-facto standard.
If Apple had adopted a standard micro USB connector with Samsung's 11-pin MHL integration, a huge number of accessories would have become instantly available, and would continue to function with Apple and non-Apple products interchangeably for years to come.
I'm surprised it's not common knowledge on Slashdot how Apple has handled that agreement, even for our non-European friends.
Yes, we know about the clause with the adapters. But in the end, Apple is complying with the letter of the agreement, not with the spirit, and they are giving the finger to the EU, their customers and the environment in the process.
- it provides a standard micro-USB connector compatible with existing USB cables and docks - it charges from standard and extended power charger - it works as a standard USB device and as a standard USB host. - it delivers high speed audio and video over MHL and HDMI - it allows simultaneous USB and MHL/HDMI usage - it can use MHL devices using the shared pinout using a small adapter
That does everything the Apple connector is supposed to do, but allows reuse of a huge number of existing adapters and devices. It shows that there is no justification for Apple using a proprietary connector. Apple is screwing the environment and consumers in order to make more profit on overpriced accessories, it's as simple as that.
That' semi-correct, but in practice it's of limited utility. You can have a micro-USB connector, which can work as either USB or MHL, not both at the same time, as you claim.
That's incorrect. The Samsung Galaxy S3 micro-USB connector does both USB and MHL at the same time.
Even for those connectors where simultaneous use isn't allowed, when running in MHL mode, it's the MHL-to-HDMI converter in the connector that also connects to the USB power supply, and it can talk to the USB host without restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the Democratic version of "trickle down economics", and it is just as dumb as the Republican version. The real question is whether NASA is using the money more efficiently than the people you took it from would have used it, and that's doubtful. NASA has excessively strict safety standards, and it has been wasting huge amounts of money on useless projects like the space shuttle. The analysis you point to on Wikipedia makes the same mistake: it accounts for the benefits that that money yielded, but implicitly assumes that there was no cost beyond the nominal spending, which is of course absurd.
Can't you read? I said that this is to be seen in the context of larger DOD budget cuts. Across the board budget cuts in discretionary spending are going to make a difference. And furthermore, until discretionary spending gets cut noticeably, people will not realize that there is a problem.
Let's assume you're right and most American's don't give a sh*t about NASA. By what justification do you extract their tax dollars then and use them to pay for NASA? NASA has no essential function in government: it doesn't protect our liberties, it doesn't make us safer, it doesn't help with our defense. The only justification for having NASA is that a majority of Americans want it.
(And, in fact, I think most Americans like NASA and would like to see it continue.)
No, the problem is that everybody has their pet programs and tries to obfuscate the budget process to save them. The problem isn't politicians, it's voters like you.
Spending cuts for NASA by themselves won't, but across-the-board spending cuts for "discretionary funding" will, not just because they actually do have some effect, but also because people actually will notice.
People won't vote to cut entitlements until they start realizing that they have to. And they aren't going to start realizing that until something they actually care about gets cut, like defense, police, roads, and NASA.
I have: Keynesian economics is bullshit.
There is a difference, but not the one Keynesians pretend there is: public debt is, in effect, simply a large additional tax and redistribution of wealth.
The "delta" measurement is still totally arbitrary. And who decides what "delta" you even measure?
Students and parents are supposed to be the beneficiaries of public schools; why don't you let them decide on the criteria that they, individually, set for each school? Or are you saying that low income parents are simply too stupid to figure what constitutes a good school?
Much as I like NASA, if that's what it takes to get the deficit under control, then that's what needs to happen. Given that the DOD takes the brunt of the cuts, it seems fair. And a billion dollar in cuts for NASA amounts to pocket change when distributed about all the billionaires that are currently financing private space ventures. We'll probably do better altogether by getting the economy going again and having them work on getting to space than to keep financing bloated DOD and other programs an relying on handouts for NASA to get us into space.
As it turns out, that's false. Optimizations are highly dependent on the specific hardware and data, and it's hard for compilers or programmers to know what to do. Modern processors are as fast as they are because they split optimization in a good way between compilers and the CPU. Traditional CISC processors got that wrong, as well as hardcore traditional RISC processors; the last gasp of the latter was the IA64, which proved pretty conclusively that neither programmers nor compilers can do the job by themselves.
Sorry, I'm pretty libertarian myself, but what you wrote is complete nonsense. First of all, what you wrote only applies even approximately to the federal government; local and state governments, of course, have lots of functions beyond that. In fact, local governments really function more like a home owner's association than "government". Second, in the US we don't have "enumerated rights"; that's the European view in which a few rights are given to the people and everything else is retained by the state. In the US, the federal government has an enumerated list of powers, and all rights that aren't limited by federal powers are retained by the states and the people.
Stupid comments like yours are the reason small government and libertarian principles have such a hard time.
At times, a high end RISC chip would beat a similarly priced high end x86 chip, but performance advantages were modest and didn't last long.
Backwards compatibility at the instruction set level matters little to people who need high performance. If IA64 had worked well, people would have snapped it up. IA64 failed because it had a lousy cost/performance ratio, in part because it was nearly impossible to write good compilers for it. In different words, it failed because it was a badly designed architecture and a badly designed instruction set.
I know the difference, you simply fail to grasp that it is irrelevant here. It doesn't matter whether Samsung's connectors were "proprietary" or "non-standard", what matters is that the interoperate with standard cables and devices. Apple's connectors fail to do so and they screw their customers and the environment for no reason other than to maximize their own profit.
However, I suggest you do look up the term "proprietary" yourself and then present some evidence that Samsung's connector actually is "proprietary".
Public sector unions are different from private sector unions in that the tax payers back all promises made to workers. So, while a private company goes out of business if it strikes a bad deal with the union, and the unions understand that, in the public sector politicians just make politically convenient promises and leave the tax payer with the bill. Usually, that bill comes due long after the people responsible for the deal are out of office (so you can't punish them with your vote), and since it's government services, you can't choose not to do business with them anymore either. And politicians are uniquely vulnerable to political pressure from unions, which represent large and active voting populations (even if they are a small minority among all voters). In extreme cases, cities may go bankrupt. Even if you move away, you still end up paying for these bad deals, since your property values went down and the cities are likely going to be bailed out in some way.
And, yes, the right to strike can be restricted, and is restricted in many places. But public sector unions don't even need to strike, they can pressure politicians in many other ways.
Really, the only way to deal with these problems is for voters to gain a better understanding of what's going on and force their politicians to make decisions that are in the public interests, instead of being pushovers for public sector union interests.
By themselves, unions are an association of people with common interests and goals, just like corporations, and they are a useful and important component of a free market. They actually increase market efficiency by simplifying negotiations over pay and work conditions.
Unions become a "monopoly" only when membership becomes de-facto mandatory or when they involve the public sector. Unfortunately, that's the case in the US in many cases, but it is not an intrinsic feature of unions.
And who is going to make that evaluation? How are they going to hire and fire?
In essence, you want a free market in education in which parents evaluate schools and outcomes, successful principals win and schools grow, and bad ones get closed. Government has a function in such a market: it can keep schools small and the market free and efficient (instead of having large corporations and churches take over entire counties or states), it can ensure that low income families can afford education for their kids through vouchers, and it can create some public schools to fill in gaps where there are market failures. But that's very different from the all-expenses-paid centrally planned public school system that we have right now.
Now try to get that past the teachers unions...
No, because unions in the private sector work fundamentally differently from public sector unions. In the private sector, if there's a strike, people can take their business elsewhere, and if unions make unreasonable demands, the affected businesses fold and both workers and owners lose. For public sector unions, if there's a strike, government services stop and there is no alternative, and any promises made by politicians are ultimately backed by tax payers.
That works for private sector labor disputes, it is politically and in many cases legally impossible in the public sector.
If the Chicago Teacher's Union works like other unions, you are required to pay your dues whether you agree with their activities or not (you can choose not to be a member, but you still have to pay). And because these are public sector jobs, they can hold vital government services hostage and people dependent on these services have no alternatives. That's not a union and collective bargaining anymore, it's a protection racket supported by politicians who use it to advance their own careers. The public and education lose out in the process.
The x86 instruction set is pretty awful and Atom is a pretty lousy processor. But that's probably not due to RISC vs. CISC. IA32 today is little more than an encoding for a sequence of RISC instructions, and the decoder takes up very little silicon. If there really were large intrinsic performance differences, companies like Apple wouldn't have switched to x86 and RISC would have won in the desktop and workstation markets, both of which are performance sensitive.
I'd like to see a well-founded analysis of the differences of Atom and ARM, but superficial statements like "RISC is bad" don't cut it.
Smartphones have been around for more than 15 years.
And, yes, there have been plenty of phones that have done this for years, including Nokias and Android phones.
X11 is used in a lot more places than merely the Linux desktop, including embedded devices, super computer apps, etc. I seriously doubt it is going to be replaced for many decades.
If Wayland is to X11 as Unity is to Gnome 2 or KDE 3, it doesn't look like X11 has anything to worry about.
Replacing a mature, working system based on some vague idea of how to do things better rarely works.
Stop mincing words and confusing the issue with irrelevancies. The Samsung Galaxy S3 has a connector that is fully compatible with micro-USB cables and accessories. The fact that it has additional functionality doesn't change that. Nor is there any indication that Samsung's connector is "proprietary".
Apple could have adopted the same kind of solution: it satisfies all the requirements for modern smart phone connectivity. Instead, they opted to adopt a solution that creates tons of e-waste and makes iPhone accessories and iPhones incompatible with everything else.
It is fully compatible with all existing micro-USB. Your quibbling of whether that constitutes a "standard" connector is totally irrelevant. Apple could have adopted the same solution, or the same kind of solution, instead of choosing to implement a completely incompatible, proprietary, and expensive solution.
It has a connector that standard micro-USB cables plug into and work, both for host and device usage. For MHL, you need a special cable, but it is not "proprietary".
I am right, you are simply trying to distort the facts. The Samsung connector gives you all the functionality I listed above. It is as compatible with all defined, open standards as possible. Apple could easily have adopted exactly the same connector. Instead, they chose one that is incompatible with all standards.
USB-to-go and USB host are standard and supported by most smartphones. In addition, MHL-over-micro-USB is a de-facto standard.
If Apple had adopted a standard micro USB connector with Samsung's 11-pin MHL integration, a huge number of accessories would have become instantly available, and would continue to function with Apple and non-Apple products interchangeably for years to come.
Yes, we know about the clause with the adapters. But in the end, Apple is complying with the letter of the agreement, not with the spirit, and they are giving the finger to the EU, their customers and the environment in the process.
The Galaxy S3 does exactly what is required:
- it provides a standard micro-USB connector compatible with existing USB cables and docks
- it charges from standard and extended power charger
- it works as a standard USB device and as a standard USB host.
- it delivers high speed audio and video over MHL and HDMI
- it allows simultaneous USB and MHL/HDMI usage
- it can use MHL devices using the shared pinout using a small adapter
That does everything the Apple connector is supposed to do, but allows reuse of a huge number of existing adapters and devices. It shows that there is no justification for Apple using a proprietary connector. Apple is screwing the environment and consumers in order to make more profit on overpriced accessories, it's as simple as that.
That's incorrect. The Samsung Galaxy S3 micro-USB connector does both USB and MHL at the same time.
Even for those connectors where simultaneous use isn't allowed, when running in MHL mode, it's the MHL-to-HDMI converter in the connector that also connects to the USB power supply, and it can talk to the USB host without restrictions.