Bullshit. I don't want to have to pay ten times as much for a simple drug just because people like you insist on an unreasonable level of safety. And I certainly don't want to die because some potentially effective treatment is kept from the market just because it causes lab mice to develop cancer. Risk assessment should be between me and my doctor, and it should be my decision, not yours or the government's. There should be strong labeling requirements, like "FDA certified" or "did not pass FDA certification", but the ultimate decision should be up to me.
It hardly matters whether Apple borrowed from anybody. What matters is that Apple's claim that the iPhone design is in any way unusual or unobvious is bogus.
Injecting stem cells randomly into the body is probably not a good idea. Stem cells aren't magically fix everything machines. There's a significant risk of cancer if nothing else
I think almost everyone is fine with government regulating dangerous unproven medical treatments with potentially horrific side-effects.
That's not the problem. The problem is deciding what actually is a "dangerous unproven medical treatment with potentially horrific side-effects", and that's far from clear. A big part of our medical costs goes into attempting to ensure an unnecessary degree of safety for drugs and treatments, while problems that kill people in large numbers remain un-addressed.
So, how many thousands of dollars is it worth to you a year to have your risk of death from bad drugs reduced from 1:100000 to 1:1000000?
You're losing it, both logically and grammatically. In any case, if you think that vastly overpriced dual CPU 64 Gbyte desktops with buggy BSD utilities and a lousy third party X11 server are all you ever need, go right ahead and get a Mac. Most actual UNIX users know better.
WOW someone is arguing that the state should be MORE involved in business.
No, I'm saying that RI should sell the business as quickly as possible, but minimize losses for RI taxpayers in the process. But Chafee just threw away many more millions by not paying attention and letting the asset fall apart under his watch. RTFA.
So you say the governor can abolish agencies he doesn't like because he feels like it?
He can't abolish them overnight, but he can certainly work toward that goal, and he can start by not putting his name on an agency that is guilty of wasting tax dollars in this way. Instead, Chafee actually seems to like these kinds of efforts: he apparently thinks that handing out tax dollars in order to attract businesses is a good idea, and that's why he puts his name on the agency. And in that, he is making the same error as his predecessor.
I'm all for space exploration in principle. But what NASA has actually been doing since the 1970's is difficult to distinguish from TARP or the other waste that Tyson complains about.
It will "improve" comments in the same way that the Stasi or the Holy Inquisition "improved comments": minority opinions will be silenced since any form of contrarian opinion is frowned upon, and tends to result in repercussions, by employers, friends, and governments.
Don't be so fucking dumb. It's not like you can walk into office with a bottle of Tippex and erase all the checks that your predecessor wrote; they've already been cashed.
No, but he could have prevented the company from completely self-destructing, thereby reducing RI's liability by tens of millions of dollars. RTFA.
Furthermore, to prevent a repeat, he should have shut down the agency responsible for it. Instead, he is just moving out his predecessor's staff, moving in his own, and putting his name on it.
Try researching things before posting next time, ok?
I did, and I quoted it: Chafee put his name on the agency, meaning that he believes in these kinds of programs in principle. The idea that such an agency under Chafee will make any better investment decisions than it did under Carcieri is silly; the problem is that such agencies exist and have the power to give away large amounts of tax dollars in the first place.
And if you do your research, you'll see that Chafee failed to minimize losses and instead just let the whole thing collapse in on itself; why should he bother doing more, the tax payer is just going to pay for it and he can just blame his predecessor.
Governor Chafee and the RIEDC Board Move to Revitalize and Rebrand Urban Communities, Help Small Businesses
So, in the best case, they would have made a bunch of high tech workers wealthier, and in the (more likely) worst case, they ended up being out $75 million.
For comparison, $75 million is about a quarter of Rhode Island $300 million budget deficit.
Chafee is co-chair of Obama's reelection campaign. These are the kinds of policies that are supposed to help the US economy?
The real piracy platform is iOS: you get shafted first by Apple hardware sales (50% profit margins on the hardware), then by Apple's inflated iTunes prices ($30 for a TV season you get included in Netflix), and then by iOS's "app store", where you pay top dollar for tiny little apps with tons of restrictions. Oh, and Apple "pirated" most of the technology and design of iOS from other companies.
(However, having said that, Android does need better support for native software development.)
Attacking a straw man, I didn't say give more power to government. Government already has all the power it needs to fix this situation and then some, that's not the problem.
You're talking in meaningless generalities now. I'm referring to specific things: carbon taxes, nuclear regulations, federal health care legislation, income tax increases, environmental regulations, bailouts, prisons, stimulus packages, etc. All of those refer to specific things government can either do or not do, and votes do influence the outcome. If many of the representatives who voted for these thing lose reelection, they won't happen again.
But the fact is that many people like increasing the size of government, even though they claim at the same time that they are against "corporate influence". You cannot be simultaneously for increasing the size of government and against corporate influence, because increasing the size of government automatically increases corporate influence.
Catch 22, you can't reduce what government can do to a tolerable minimum without fixing the problems with government.
No Catch-22 involved: you vote politicians out of office who spend too much money; politicians respond to that. And it is already happening, it just needs to happen more often. And by "voting out of office" I mean that: punish incumbents for kowtowing to corporate power and handing out tax dollars to corporations and banks. You'll have an excellent opportunity to punish several incumbents that did just that in the fall: look at who voted for major legislation that resulted in new regulations and expenses.
The two major political movements in recent years, the Tea Party and Occupy, are really pretty much aligned in their opposition to corporate power and crony capitalism. Unfortunately, they each are wearing ideological blinders and think that voting for one party or the other is the solution, when the solution is rather to consistently punish politicians who engage in these misbehaviors.
Of course there is too much corporate interference in government, of course, government is controlled by corporate interests, and of course, the job of government is to maintain a free market. How is giving even more power to the government going to fix that? The decisions of all politicians, from ultra-conservatives to ultra-progressives, are dominated by special interests and lobbies, not because they are evil or corrupt, but because the issues have become far too complex for them to deal with. Most politicians only have a vague second or third hand understanding of what they vote for.
Rational, competent government that puts the people's interests would be great, but although politicians keep promising it, nobody has been capable of delivering it. Obama has been as susceptible (if not more) to control by corporate interests as all of his predecessors. Whether it's bailouts, renewable energy, bank regulations, stimulus packages, or health care, the benefits they produce are balanced by a large amount of corruption hidden in each of them: transfers of vast amounts of money from tax payers to the rich, hurting competitors, erecting trade barriers, etc.
So, until someone figures out how to change the way that government works fundamentally, the only way we have to reduce that harm that corporate control of government does is to reduce what government can do in the first place to a tolerable minimum. We need defense, police, some public education, a legal system and courts, and a few other things. Once you take the inevitable corruption into account, most of the other theoretically beneficial government activities likely become a net loss for society.
You kept talking about "UNIX". People choose UNIX to get specific jobs done: big problems in science, engineering, databases, multimedia, web development. People choose UNIX because stuff keeps working decade after decade, with extremely high backwards compatibility in APIs and commands (but also continuing bug fixes and improvements in their implementation).
OS X is a decent desktop environment, but it isn't a "well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable *UNIX* desktop", because it fails to satisfy the requirements of a professional UNIX environment, starting with the fact that there are no high-end machines running OS X and that Apple keeps discontinuing and neglecting more and more of the things that UNIX users demand.
If your requirements from UNIX are modest, OS X may work for you. But for most people who actually need UNIX, OS X is not a solution because it doesn't get the job done.
What do you mean by "from here on out"? Apple has never invested much in research or innovation; they either copy or buy what they need, and they always have:
(I know that I'm not alone in this path. Many others have taken the same one over the last several years.)
I went down that path, and I came back because it's a dead end. Apple discontinued XServe and their choice of high end machines is limited. Right now, the biggest OS X desktop you can get is a dual CPU machine with 64G of memory. Your range of add-ons and driver support at the high end is extremely limited. Support for headless operation is limited. Package management and dependency management is a headache. Regardless of whether you like the OS X UI, Apple is not a company you can rely on for the kind of high-end computing UNIX has traditionally been used for. OS X is becoming more like Android or iOS: a pretty, thin client that also runs E-mail and some games locally.
Gnome 2 was fine. It really needed very little work beyond bug fixing. The problem was that the Gnome developers wanted something to do and continue to make a name for themselves, and so they tried to come up with the next great thing. Microsoft has been doing the same thing, although for different reasons. The attempt at forcing a switch to a new desktop by fiat is exactly the kind of b.s. we are getting from commercial companies.
My suggestion? Make Gnome Classic the default, split Gnome 3 into a separate project and give it a different name, and make it crystal clear that it is users, not developers, who decide which one they want to use and which one will win in the market.
While you are at it, also make Gnome less monolithic and more respectful of standards (same for other desktops). Right now, running any Linux desktop is more of an all-or-nothing proposition, where any one application starts up a whole lot of infrastructure in the background. Fixing that should be high priority so that users can pick and choose what components they want to built their desktop out of.
Well, geez, how could those problems be taken care of? Let's see... narrowing of patents and patent-based monopolies, more privatization and less regulation of BLM land, and reduction of the government's ability to pick winners and losers in the market place. It seems to me you agree with me: the problem is too much government interference in the market, and the solution is to reduce that.
No, not particularly. I don't think nuclear should be subsidized either, but it also shouldn't be as ridiculously regulated as it is now. China and India are likely going to use nuclear on a big scale anyway even if Europeans get their panties in a knot over it.
I just think if governments stopped messing with the energy market, we'd end up with a much more rational mix of energies.
What about carbon-neutral carbon-based fuels?
I think no fuel should be subsidized or penalized as a matter of public policy. If biodiesel from algae is carbon-negative and can be used for fertilizer, it should win in the market all by itself.
So what about Windows 8 ARM vs Windows 8 x86? Are they really the same OS? The ARM version is missing major features, and the two editions can't run any of the same programs due to the architecture difference
Microsoft's market power these days is largely due to Microsoft Office and the continued incompatibilities they are creating. Windows 8 on ARM will deliver Office. In additional, it will allow major third party vendors to port their software fairly easily.
Same reason Apple does it?
Apple doesn't have vendors, they are just a bunch of control-freaks through-and-through. FWIW, I think Apple (and any other vendor) should also be required to allow installation of alternative operating systems. But despite delusions of grandeur, Apple is still a bit player in the market.
People won't change because you think they should, they will change when they need to, for example when they think they need a new computer but don't have the money to pay for it, or when their virus-infested Windows machine is giving them headaches.
So, wait until they have a reason to change, and at that point the best thing you can do is install the most mainstream Linux installation you feel comfortable with (e.g., Ubuntu), even if it looks different from Windows. You might give them a choice between Gnome Classic, Gnome, and Unity and show them how they can switch at login time.
Help them politely and up to a point, but ultimately make it clear that it is their choice and their decision what they want to run.
The situation is not at all analogous to other ARM-based devices. Google isn't asking device manufacturers to lock down their hardware, they choose to do it. And neither Google nor Apple have OS monopolies, nor are they offering the same OS on desktops and tablets. And Android vendors are moving towards giving you the option of installing other software.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall, namely that people are ditching their desktops and laptops for tablets. So they are trying to leverage their (near) desktop monopoly into a tablet monopoly, namely by trying to flood the market with Surface tablets and locking down the hardware so that you can run nothing other than their software on it. Yes, that is an attempt to gain a monopoly; if that situation had existed for x86 hardware, we wouldn't have Linux or any open operating systems.
Furthermore, if there is nothing to be gained from it, as you argue, why doesn't Microsoft leave it up to vendors, just like they do with x86 hardware?
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. I don't want to have to pay ten times as much for a simple drug just because people like you insist on an unreasonable level of safety. And I certainly don't want to die because some potentially effective treatment is kept from the market just because it causes lab mice to develop cancer. Risk assessment should be between me and my doctor, and it should be my decision, not yours or the government's. There should be strong labeling requirements, like "FDA certified" or "did not pass FDA certification", but the ultimate decision should be up to me.
It hardly matters whether Apple borrowed from anybody. What matters is that Apple's claim that the iPhone design is in any way unusual or unobvious is bogus.
Care to cite any studies/evidence?
That's not the problem. The problem is deciding what actually is a "dangerous unproven medical treatment with potentially horrific side-effects", and that's far from clear. A big part of our medical costs goes into attempting to ensure an unnecessary degree of safety for drugs and treatments, while problems that kill people in large numbers remain un-addressed.
So, how many thousands of dollars is it worth to you a year to have your risk of death from bad drugs reduced from 1:100000 to 1:1000000?
You're losing it, both logically and grammatically. In any case, if you think that vastly overpriced dual CPU 64 Gbyte desktops with buggy BSD utilities and a lousy third party X11 server are all you ever need, go right ahead and get a Mac. Most actual UNIX users know better.
No, I'm saying that RI should sell the business as quickly as possible, but minimize losses for RI taxpayers in the process. But Chafee just threw away many more millions by not paying attention and letting the asset fall apart under his watch. RTFA.
He can't abolish them overnight, but he can certainly work toward that goal, and he can start by not putting his name on an agency that is guilty of wasting tax dollars in this way. Instead, Chafee actually seems to like these kinds of efforts: he apparently thinks that handing out tax dollars in order to attract businesses is a good idea, and that's why he puts his name on the agency. And in that, he is making the same error as his predecessor.
I'm all for space exploration in principle. But what NASA has actually been doing since the 1970's is difficult to distinguish from TARP or the other waste that Tyson complains about.
It will "improve" comments in the same way that the Stasi or the Holy Inquisition "improved comments": minority opinions will be silenced since any form of contrarian opinion is frowned upon, and tends to result in repercussions, by employers, friends, and governments.
No, but he could have prevented the company from completely self-destructing, thereby reducing RI's liability by tens of millions of dollars. RTFA.
Furthermore, to prevent a repeat, he should have shut down the agency responsible for it. Instead, he is just moving out his predecessor's staff, moving in his own, and putting his name on it.
I don't get why you're defending this guy.
I did, and I quoted it: Chafee put his name on the agency, meaning that he believes in these kinds of programs in principle. The idea that such an agency under Chafee will make any better investment decisions than it did under Carcieri is silly; the problem is that such agencies exist and have the power to give away large amounts of tax dollars in the first place.
And if you do your research, you'll see that Chafee failed to minimize losses and instead just let the whole thing collapse in on itself; why should he bother doing more, the tax payer is just going to pay for it and he can just blame his predecessor.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/28/technology/38-studios/index.htm
This is how these people advertise themselves: http://www.riedc.com/
So, in the best case, they would have made a bunch of high tech workers wealthier, and in the (more likely) worst case, they ended up being out $75 million.
For comparison, $75 million is about a quarter of Rhode Island $300 million budget deficit.
Chafee is co-chair of Obama's reelection campaign. These are the kinds of policies that are supposed to help the US economy?
What quality would that be? The ability to sink vast amounts of money into an inefficient bureaucracy?
The real piracy platform is iOS: you get shafted first by Apple hardware sales (50% profit margins on the hardware), then by Apple's inflated iTunes prices ($30 for a TV season you get included in Netflix), and then by iOS's "app store", where you pay top dollar for tiny little apps with tons of restrictions. Oh, and Apple "pirated" most of the technology and design of iOS from other companies.
(However, having said that, Android does need better support for native software development.)
You're talking in meaningless generalities now. I'm referring to specific things: carbon taxes, nuclear regulations, federal health care legislation, income tax increases, environmental regulations, bailouts, prisons, stimulus packages, etc. All of those refer to specific things government can either do or not do, and votes do influence the outcome. If many of the representatives who voted for these thing lose reelection, they won't happen again.
But the fact is that many people like increasing the size of government, even though they claim at the same time that they are against "corporate influence". You cannot be simultaneously for increasing the size of government and against corporate influence, because increasing the size of government automatically increases corporate influence.
No Catch-22 involved: you vote politicians out of office who spend too much money; politicians respond to that. And it is already happening, it just needs to happen more often. And by "voting out of office" I mean that: punish incumbents for kowtowing to corporate power and handing out tax dollars to corporations and banks. You'll have an excellent opportunity to punish several incumbents that did just that in the fall: look at who voted for major legislation that resulted in new regulations and expenses.
The two major political movements in recent years, the Tea Party and Occupy, are really pretty much aligned in their opposition to corporate power and crony capitalism. Unfortunately, they each are wearing ideological blinders and think that voting for one party or the other is the solution, when the solution is rather to consistently punish politicians who engage in these misbehaviors.
Of course there is too much corporate interference in government, of course, government is controlled by corporate interests, and of course, the job of government is to maintain a free market. How is giving even more power to the government going to fix that? The decisions of all politicians, from ultra-conservatives to ultra-progressives, are dominated by special interests and lobbies, not because they are evil or corrupt, but because the issues have become far too complex for them to deal with. Most politicians only have a vague second or third hand understanding of what they vote for.
Rational, competent government that puts the people's interests would be great, but although politicians keep promising it, nobody has been capable of delivering it. Obama has been as susceptible (if not more) to control by corporate interests as all of his predecessors. Whether it's bailouts, renewable energy, bank regulations, stimulus packages, or health care, the benefits they produce are balanced by a large amount of corruption hidden in each of them: transfers of vast amounts of money from tax payers to the rich, hurting competitors, erecting trade barriers, etc.
So, until someone figures out how to change the way that government works fundamentally, the only way we have to reduce that harm that corporate control of government does is to reduce what government can do in the first place to a tolerable minimum. We need defense, police, some public education, a legal system and courts, and a few other things. Once you take the inevitable corruption into account, most of the other theoretically beneficial government activities likely become a net loss for society.
You kept talking about "UNIX". People choose UNIX to get specific jobs done: big problems in science, engineering, databases, multimedia, web development. People choose UNIX because stuff keeps working decade after decade, with extremely high backwards compatibility in APIs and commands (but also continuing bug fixes and improvements in their implementation).
OS X is a decent desktop environment, but it isn't a "well-integrated, fast, stable, good-looking, highly usable *UNIX* desktop", because it fails to satisfy the requirements of a professional UNIX environment, starting with the fact that there are no high-end machines running OS X and that Apple keeps discontinuing and neglecting more and more of the things that UNIX users demand.
If your requirements from UNIX are modest, OS X may work for you. But for most people who actually need UNIX, OS X is not a solution because it doesn't get the job done.
What do you mean by "from here on out"? Apple has never invested much in research or innovation; they either copy or buy what they need, and they always have:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
What has made Apple successful is that they have good taste in what they pick.
I went down that path, and I came back because it's a dead end. Apple discontinued XServe and their choice of high end machines is limited. Right now, the biggest OS X desktop you can get is a dual CPU machine with 64G of memory. Your range of add-ons and driver support at the high end is extremely limited. Support for headless operation is limited. Package management and dependency management is a headache. Regardless of whether you like the OS X UI, Apple is not a company you can rely on for the kind of high-end computing UNIX has traditionally been used for. OS X is becoming more like Android or iOS: a pretty, thin client that also runs E-mail and some games locally.
Gnome 2 was fine. It really needed very little work beyond bug fixing. The problem was that the Gnome developers wanted something to do and continue to make a name for themselves, and so they tried to come up with the next great thing. Microsoft has been doing the same thing, although for different reasons. The attempt at forcing a switch to a new desktop by fiat is exactly the kind of b.s. we are getting from commercial companies.
My suggestion? Make Gnome Classic the default, split Gnome 3 into a separate project and give it a different name, and make it crystal clear that it is users, not developers, who decide which one they want to use and which one will win in the market.
While you are at it, also make Gnome less monolithic and more respectful of standards (same for other desktops). Right now, running any Linux desktop is more of an all-or-nothing proposition, where any one application starts up a whole lot of infrastructure in the background. Fixing that should be high priority so that users can pick and choose what components they want to built their desktop out of.
Well, geez, how could those problems be taken care of? Let's see... narrowing of patents and patent-based monopolies, more privatization and less regulation of BLM land, and reduction of the government's ability to pick winners and losers in the market place. It seems to me you agree with me: the problem is too much government interference in the market, and the solution is to reduce that.
No, not particularly. I don't think nuclear should be subsidized either, but it also shouldn't be as ridiculously regulated as it is now. China and India are likely going to use nuclear on a big scale anyway even if Europeans get their panties in a knot over it.
I just think if governments stopped messing with the energy market, we'd end up with a much more rational mix of energies.
I think no fuel should be subsidized or penalized as a matter of public policy. If biodiesel from algae is carbon-negative and can be used for fertilizer, it should win in the market all by itself.
Microsoft's market power these days is largely due to Microsoft Office and the continued incompatibilities they are creating. Windows 8 on ARM will deliver Office. In additional, it will allow major third party vendors to port their software fairly easily.
Apple doesn't have vendors, they are just a bunch of control-freaks through-and-through. FWIW, I think Apple (and any other vendor) should also be required to allow installation of alternative operating systems. But despite delusions of grandeur, Apple is still a bit player in the market.
I think Facebook's lack of success might be related to Facebook being a fad and not having much of a business model?
People won't change because you think they should, they will change when they need to, for example when they think they need a new computer but don't have the money to pay for it, or when their virus-infested Windows machine is giving them headaches.
So, wait until they have a reason to change, and at that point the best thing you can do is install the most mainstream Linux installation you feel comfortable with (e.g., Ubuntu), even if it looks different from Windows. You might give them a choice between Gnome Classic, Gnome, and Unity and show them how they can switch at login time.
Help them politely and up to a point, but ultimately make it clear that it is their choice and their decision what they want to run.
The situation is not at all analogous to other ARM-based devices. Google isn't asking device manufacturers to lock down their hardware, they choose to do it. And neither Google nor Apple have OS monopolies, nor are they offering the same OS on desktops and tablets. And Android vendors are moving towards giving you the option of installing other software.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall, namely that people are ditching their desktops and laptops for tablets. So they are trying to leverage their (near) desktop monopoly into a tablet monopoly, namely by trying to flood the market with Surface tablets and locking down the hardware so that you can run nothing other than their software on it. Yes, that is an attempt to gain a monopoly; if that situation had existed for x86 hardware, we wouldn't have Linux or any open operating systems.
Furthermore, if there is nothing to be gained from it, as you argue, why doesn't Microsoft leave it up to vendors, just like they do with x86 hardware?