Yes, but the publishers themselves are not providing the value here. Almost without exception the peer-review is done at no charge by academics, and the publisher simply typesets the results -- and even that is increasingly done by academics at no charge.
You are right that the publishers own the properties and can therefore charge rents. But you are wrong in thinking those properties are inherently valuable. It's primarily simple path dependence. If funding agencies mandated open access publishing, then those journals would lose their value quickly and new ones would replace them.
"More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers."
In any case, I'm perfectly willing to give credit where "it's due" --- as long as we both agree that the budget was balanced due to significant tax increases and spending cuts (including military!) passed during the 1990s.
Now that you've pointed out all the good things the Republicans did for us in the past, here's your chance to convert me into a Republican voter today: all you have to do is convince me that today's Republican party will support the same policies again. And moreover, that won't fall into that ugly "Democratic" trap of passing more deficit-financed tax cuts.
The basic story: huge debt from WWII followed by declining debt through the 70s. An explosion of debt during the 80s when Reagan took charge. A decline of debt during the 90s under Clinton. A return to the upward trend in the 2000s with Bush.
They say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but we all have to start with the same facts.
I was under the impression that the Democrats were willing to sign a clean Debt Ceiling increase bill, exactly the same kind we've signed every previous time this happens.
Was I mistaken about this? Have the Democrats tacked on some unreasonable conditions, without which they're willing to let us crash into the debt ceiling?
I believe in political accountability, so if Obama is being unreasonable I want to know it.
This crisis has not been a long time coming, it's been coming since about 2000, when we went from a balanced budget to one that wasn't even close. I say this not to point fingers, but just to point it out: we balanced the budget a decade ago. We can do it again.
That we haven't done so is simply a function of poor policy choices. Identify those problems and rectify them. If you find that your political views lead you to to support politicians who make those choices, stop voting for them. If you can't stop doing voting for them, please move to a different country.
Just as an aside I'd like to point out that we're not really in a debt crisis. A debt crisis happens when investors aren't willing to lend you money --- or will only due so at high interest rates. That's what's happening in Greece right now. When you're in a debt crisis you'll do anything to get out of it --- that's why Greece is proposing huge, unpopular cuts and huge, unpopular tax increases.
The US is not suffering a debt crisis. Interest rates on government debt are at historic lows, and there's no sign that they're going to go any higher. It's nothing at all like Greece.
We have a "debt crisis" in the same way that you might develop a "heart condition" after shooting yourself in the chest. If we keep fucking with the US credit rating we might manufacture a debt crisis, but it will be a problem of our own creation.
Underneath all that I'm trying to make a very simple point. We have to deal with the debt, but the negotiation in Washington is batshit insane. At best it does nothing, at worst it crashes the economy and reduces government revenues to the point that the deficit gets even worse.
We can eliminate the debt the same way we did in the 90s --- by increasing tax rates and gradually cutting back on spending. It doesn't have to happen in a day and it shouldn't happen in a day, and it doesn't require us to dismantle the welfare state. Anyone who says it does is misinformed, or else they're just offering up their policy preferences.
Congress has exclusive power to incur debts. Treasury acknowledged this two days ago.
Yep, but here's the problem. Congress has passed a budget appropriating money and laying out specifically how the Treasury is to spend it. Simultaneously, Congress has decided to prevent the Treasury from issuing new debt to pay for these appropriations.
Thus the question is not whether the Treasury can override Congress. Instead, it's a question of whether Congress can override Congress. Any way this breaks out, the Treasury will be breaking one law or another, and setting some new, dangerous precedents.
You clearly think that the Treasury should break the law by failing to spend money as specified by Congress. That's an interesting theory. But once you've authorized Treasury to break the law, who says how they should break it? Why shouldn't President Obama simply instruct the secretary of the Treasury to zero out every program he finds personally objectionable?
Because this is illegal? That hardly has any meaning anymore.
I think we're deep off into fantasy territory at this point, but --- there is a scenario in which different jurisdictions start to pull away from the Federal government or tacitly support terrorist organizations. You saw this with the KKK in the deep South prior to the 1960s. It takes a strong central government to keep that under control.
Of course, in practice will never happen. The Federal government isn't going to let the country disintegrate over a debt ceiling crisis. The executive will do what it takes to keep things under control, and the laws will simply bend or break to suit that purpose.
This is why it's generally not a good idea to put the rule of law on a collision course with national survival --- the rule of law always comes out the worse for it.
It would frankly be wonderful if enough Congresscritters had the chuzpa to not raise the limit. Force some fiscal responsibility, even if it is probably too late.
The time to force fiscal responsibility is when Congress decides what to spend. All we'll get from a debt-ceiling crash is a temporary crisis, some new ugly precedents, and permanent damage to our economy and national creditworthiness.
(The last point all by itself will undo the benefit of any conceivable spending cuts we could make --- it will become much more expensive to roll over the existing debt, and tax revenues will plummet along as the economy contracts.)
Remember that about a decade ago the Federal budget was balanced. Rather than drive the country off a cliff to solve the problem, it would be more useful to figure out what's changed since that time.
Just for the record, you could ZERO OUT the military budget for this year and STILL have a deficit. We are pathetically profligate no matter which team you're on.
Sure. But we're in the middle of a terrible recession and we just renewed a huge temporary tax cut. So this is the worst possible moment to look at the deficit.
But it's hardly an insoluble problem. For example, the CBO's Extended Baseline Scenario says that if Congress does nothing at all most of the long-term deficit problem will go away. The economy should get better, the tax cuts will expire, the AMT will stop getting patched, the Medicare "doc fix" will vanish, the wars will end, and we wind up in long-term budget balance.
Here's a chart chart that graphically illustrates the difference between the EBS and the likely "Alternative Fiscal Scenario" in which we keep doing all of these things.
Now is Congress actually going to let this happen? Of course not. But they don't need to. We simply need Congress to re-institute strong PAYGO rules, where every spending hike is matched by a cut or a tax increase, and every tax cut is paid for.
This is a big demand, but it's hardly asking for the moon. It's a hell of a lot easier (and better) than asking Americans to eliminate the social safety net or privatize the military.
Nearly every other industrialized country offers universal health care for all of their workers and retirees. For the most part these countries are less well off than the US, and yet they can provide these benefits without drowning themselves in debt.
In my opinion there's no question about whether we can "afford" Medicare. There is a question about our budget priorities, tax levels, and how we manage our money.
Well, if I'm not going to get Medicare in 30 years, why not just cut it today so that I can stop paying all those taxes for the next 30 years? If it will work for me to pay taxes for the next 30 years and not collect a dime, then it will work fine for the previous generation to do the same.
This proposal has never been on the table. Moreover it never will be on the table. Current seniors have too much political clout to let it happen. And selfishness aside, they're basically right on this one --- there's no current crisis that would necessitate getting rid of their Medicare. There is a future crisis, which will have to be dealt with by future Congresses and future Medicare beneficiaries.
Also, when you say that you "won't receive a dime" in benefits I can only assume that you're not very familiar with Medicare as a program. Let me explain how it works: Medicare collects taxes from workers. This creates a generous pool of money that's used to provide medical benefits to retirees. The system sustains itself as long as there are workers.
What does change is the quantity of health care that we can purchase with those dollars. Health care costs are projected to go way up. So even though you'll be getting plenty of financial benefit for the taxes you pay today, the money won't buy as much as it does today.
(Incidentally, you'd have the same problem if you invested your Medicare taxes on the private market. The problem is not money management, it's the price of healthcare.)
The question that a future Congress needs to resolve is: what do we do when when Medicare taxes don't cover the full Medicare benefit package. There are a lot of possible answers to that question --- for one thing, we could simply reduce benefit levels and let individuals make it up out of their private funds. That'd still be more efficient than the privatization plans currently on the table, since centralized Medicare is huge and gets much better rates than private insurers.
And who knows, maybe healthcare costs aren't going to grow out of control for 30 straight years. There are a lot of technical advances we couldn't predict thirty years ago, and I can only assume that there will be similar advances in the future. Also, the country could get a lot richer. We simply don't have the data to make good decisions about Medicare now, which is precisely why current Congresses should be focusing on things they know how to deal with --- current spending --- not speculating about the distant future.
On the other hand, US foreign policy today will impact the kind of world I live in 30 years from now. I don't see a need to be as engaged overseas as we have been, but the fact is that an army is actually one of those things that the Federal Government was created for in the first place.
Oh for god's sake, the Federal Government was not created to maintain a standing army with an unlimited mission at unlimited funding levels. The founders gave us a democracy and assumed that we would know how to use it.
If you, as a voter, believe that the war in Afghanistan is going to make the world better in 30 years, that's excellent. But "the Constitution says we can make war, therefore I turned off my brain" is not an argument.
The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.
Healthcare cost growth is a huge long-term problem, and it's one we're going to need to address. But it has precisely nothing to do with what we spend in 2012, 2013, 2014, etc.
Military spending, on the other hand, really is great issue to address in the yearly budget. We can decide in 2011 how many overseas wars we should be fighting over the next fiscal year. We can decide in 2012 how much we want to spend in 2013, and so on.
As best I can tell, the reason we spend so much time discussing "entitlements" is because politicians don't want to discuss issues that we can address today. So instead we have a stupid and fruitless conversation about problems that we're not facing yet. The inevitable outcome is that nobody wants to put their neck on the line to cut these programs, and all the serious decisions fly under the radar.
Which, when you think about it, is the entire point.
There's a pretty simple way to deal with Medicare spending in the future (note: it's not "entitlements" --- Social Security does not share Medicare's cost growth). Basically, leave it to the future. Oh sure, do what smart things we can do now to make healthcare costs grow less quickly. But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.
If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.
I also believe that the examiner who reviewed the patent should, at the very least, get a mark on his or her record to indicate any patters within the organization with regard to issuing poor patents.
The patents in question were filed nearly 15 years ago. It's possible that the examiner is still working at the USPTO, but more than likely he's moved on to another job or just left the organization.
The problem with most of these patents is that they were examined during the 1990s, when anyone with an ounce of technical skill could command a huge salary from a.com business. So the people who took government salaries at the USPTO at that time were, to a disproportionate extent, drooling morons. The USPTO has somewhat rectified the hiring situation, but the patents are still around.
To play devil's advocate, a consistent response might be -- Some of those other practices and beliefs were overturned via the amendment process, which isn't the case here.
The problem here is that there's nothing to amend. Where in the constitution are minors excluded from First Amendment protection?
Unfortunately, to adopt your approach we would be forced to explicitly amend every single clause of the constitution, if there's even a suspicion that 18th century Americans would have read it differently than the modern understanding.
A century of case law and tacit legislative approval (legislators can always amend the constitution to clarify issues where they believe the court's interpretation is wrong) gets thrown out the window vs. one justice's historical interpretation of a single era.
This makes no sense. Harmonics will not leak through a (properly) encrypted digital stream. If your stream is properly encrypted, the only way to recover voice information is via traffic analysis, and that only works if the codec uses a variable bitrate --- easy enough to fix.
The fact is that at some point, there are some features that matter much more to large corporations. Will I ever use any of the above in my home? Never. But that was the sole reasoning behind a Fortune 500 company clinging to IE6 for a dangerously long time.
The fact is that your employer was dangerously naive and put their entire business at risk in order to preserve a few nice configuration options. Ironically they may have even considered some of these to be security options.
The browser (and email client) are the front door to your organization. It baffles me that some companies invest millions in firewalls and physical security, then allow their employees to essentially give away confidential information by placing it on unpatched XP/IE6 boxes.
That's because his argument, as told to the Court, sucked. He wrote about how he botched it afterwards.
Whatever. I've read Lessig's apologia, and while I appreciate that he's humble about it, there was absolutely no way that the court was going to overrule Congress and the largest media companies in America.
He made a legitimate constitutional argument, the court sidestepped it, and that was that. It would be nice to live in the world where the Supreme Court cared about copyright terms, but we don't live in that world. Lessig should know.
It will be damn small scale. We just looked into solar PV for a similar (AC-hogging, pool) rental property in Florida. To cover the entire bill would require a $75k system.
And it would still require us to purchase power from the grid at night. Yes, we could "sell" back to the grid during the day, but someone somewhere would still be burning fossile fuels for us at night. This plant generates power 24 hours a day.
Do you know how many USD have been lost or destroyed? Does that make using the USD "not ok"?
There aren't 21 million USD, there's an ever increasing supply. The gov't constantly monitors the money supply --- through the imperfect proxy of monitoring prices --- and uses its powers to create more. The goal is to maintain stability plus some inflation.
Thus while it's possible that there are huge hoards of USD left over from the early days of the republic, it's quite unlikely that their sudden introduction would significantly affect the value of the dollar. Thanks to inflation the face value of the hoarded notes just couldn't be that high. Even if it was, the Fed would take steps in response to an influx of money.
With Bitcoin, on the other hand, things go the opposite direction. Coins were easy to create in the early days, and the reward for conducting a transaction was highest. So vast sums were created, either hoarded or lost, but with full knowledge that BTC are likely to get more 'valuable' due to a combination of demand and limited supply. At some future date where a cup of coffee costs 0.0002BTC, someone could flood the market with 10,000BTC. At very least, everyone has to expect that this could happen, and hedge against it.
Coin expiration is probably not the best way to deal with this. But there needs to be some way, otherwise it will be very, very difficult to maintain a predictable BTC value and thus make the currency useful for transactions.
I mean sure, it gives people a little more information about the market, albeit at the cost of increasing the number of transactions, but what exactly would it change?
I would characterize it as a lot more information. It doesn't solve the hoarding problem, but it gives you a much better idea how much risk there is.
Only a change to the coin creation limits will really fix the hoarding problem (my other suggestion, a couple of posts up).
there is a natural expiration date. If some guy in his mom's basement made a billion bitcoin, forgot about it, and it sits there for 50 years, it's dead when his hard drive dies. If he did it on a network server, it dies when he dies and the probate court has no idea what a bitcoin is so they junk it.
Yes, and this means that the supply of BTC is likely to be far below the 21M determined by the spec. And over time the number of BTC will inevitably decline, never increase.
This might be ok if you could determine how many coins were being destroyed, but in the existing network it's impossible. A specification-defined expiration date would make it quite easy to differentiate between hard-drive-crash BTC and the active ones.
That wouldn't work. People would just swap coins between several accounts in order to reset the expiration date.
That's precisely the point. To give users an idea of how many BTC are actively being hoarded, rather than the permanently inaccessible ghosts of coins that were created when some user overwrote their wallet file.
the more likely problem is with floating-point rounding, since (unfortunately) Bitcoin uses floating-point math, but the actual Bitcoin fractions are decimal.
Precisely. Of course you can modify the clients to deal with this, but it requires client modifications. Long before that happens the network will be dead or forked.
The fact that it's fixed is another part of its credibility -- artificial scarcity. If the limits can just be adjusted, then it's no different than a fiat currency.
You don't need a fixed number of coins, you need a fixed rate of coin creation, which is already part of the spec.
But the simple answer to this point is that fiat currencies work, and currencies with limited (and implicitly declining supplies) haven't.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the publishers themselves are not providing the value here. Almost without exception the peer-review is done at no charge by academics, and the publisher simply typesets the results -- and even that is increasingly done by academics at no charge.
You are right that the publishers own the properties and can therefore charge rents. But you are wrong in thinking those properties are inherently valuable. It's primarily simple path dependence. If funding agencies mandated open access publishing, then those journals would lose their value quickly and new ones would replace them.
Organizations like CiteSeer do it at no charge.
"More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042801145.html
You've opened my eyes.
In any case, I'm perfectly willing to give credit where "it's due" --- as long as we both agree that the budget was balanced due to significant tax increases and spending cuts (including military!) passed during the 1990s.
Now that you've pointed out all the good things the Republicans did for us in the past, here's your chance to convert me into a Republican voter today: all you have to do is convince me that today's Republican party will support the same policies again. And moreover, that won't fall into that ugly "Democratic" trap of passing more deficit-financed tax cuts.
Here's a Wikipedia chart showing the public debt (red line) since the 40s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png
The basic story: huge debt from WWII followed by declining debt through the 70s. An explosion of debt during the 80s when Reagan took charge. A decline of debt during the 90s under Clinton. A return to the upward trend in the 2000s with Bush.
They say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but we all have to start with the same facts.
I was under the impression that the Democrats were willing to sign a clean Debt Ceiling increase bill, exactly the same kind we've signed every previous time this happens.
Was I mistaken about this? Have the Democrats tacked on some unreasonable conditions, without which they're willing to let us crash into the debt ceiling?
I believe in political accountability, so if Obama is being unreasonable I want to know it.
This crisis has not been a long time coming, it's been coming since about 2000, when we went from a balanced budget to one that wasn't even close. I say this not to point fingers, but just to point it out: we balanced the budget a decade ago. We can do it again.
That we haven't done so is simply a function of poor policy choices. Identify those problems and rectify them. If you find that your political views lead you to to support politicians who make those choices, stop voting for them. If you can't stop doing voting for them, please move to a different country.
Just as an aside I'd like to point out that we're not really in a debt crisis. A debt crisis happens when investors aren't willing to lend you money --- or will only due so at high interest rates. That's what's happening in Greece right now. When you're in a debt crisis you'll do anything to get out of it --- that's why Greece is proposing huge, unpopular cuts and huge, unpopular tax increases.
The US is not suffering a debt crisis. Interest rates on government debt are at historic lows, and there's no sign that they're going to go any higher. It's nothing at all like Greece.
We have a "debt crisis" in the same way that you might develop a "heart condition" after shooting yourself in the chest. If we keep fucking with the US credit rating we might manufacture a debt crisis, but it will be a problem of our own creation.
Underneath all that I'm trying to make a very simple point. We have to deal with the debt, but the negotiation in Washington is batshit insane. At best it does nothing, at worst it crashes the economy and reduces government revenues to the point that the deficit gets even worse.
We can eliminate the debt the same way we did in the 90s --- by increasing tax rates and gradually cutting back on spending. It doesn't have to happen in a day and it shouldn't happen in a day, and it doesn't require us to dismantle the welfare state. Anyone who says it does is misinformed, or else they're just offering up their policy preferences.
Congress has exclusive power to incur debts. Treasury acknowledged this two days ago.
Yep, but here's the problem. Congress has passed a budget appropriating money and laying out specifically how the Treasury is to spend it. Simultaneously, Congress has decided to prevent the Treasury from issuing new debt to pay for these appropriations.
Thus the question is not whether the Treasury can override Congress. Instead, it's a question of whether Congress can override Congress. Any way this breaks out, the Treasury will be breaking one law or another, and setting some new, dangerous precedents.
You clearly think that the Treasury should break the law by failing to spend money as specified by Congress. That's an interesting theory. But once you've authorized Treasury to break the law, who says how they should break it? Why shouldn't President Obama simply instruct the secretary of the Treasury to zero out every program he finds personally objectionable?
Because this is illegal? That hardly has any meaning anymore.
I think we're deep off into fantasy territory at this point, but --- there is a scenario in which different jurisdictions start to pull away from the Federal government or tacitly support terrorist organizations. You saw this with the KKK in the deep South prior to the 1960s. It takes a strong central government to keep that under control.
Of course, in practice will never happen. The Federal government isn't going to let the country disintegrate over a debt ceiling crisis. The executive will do what it takes to keep things under control, and the laws will simply bend or break to suit that purpose.
This is why it's generally not a good idea to put the rule of law on a collision course with national survival --- the rule of law always comes out the worse for it.
The time to force fiscal responsibility is when Congress decides what to spend. All we'll get from a debt-ceiling crash is a temporary crisis, some new ugly precedents, and permanent damage to our economy and national creditworthiness.
(The last point all by itself will undo the benefit of any conceivable spending cuts we could make --- it will become much more expensive to roll over the existing debt, and tax revenues will plummet along as the economy contracts.)
Remember that about a decade ago the Federal budget was balanced. Rather than drive the country off a cliff to solve the problem, it would be more useful to figure out what's changed since that time.
Sure. But we're in the middle of a terrible recession and we just renewed a huge temporary tax cut. So this is the worst possible moment to look at the deficit.
But it's hardly an insoluble problem. For example, the CBO's Extended Baseline Scenario says that if Congress does nothing at all most of the long-term deficit problem will go away. The economy should get better, the tax cuts will expire, the AMT will stop getting patched, the Medicare "doc fix" will vanish, the wars will end, and we wind up in long-term budget balance.
Here's a chart chart that graphically illustrates the difference between the EBS and the likely "Alternative Fiscal Scenario" in which we keep doing all of these things.
Now is Congress actually going to let this happen? Of course not. But they don't need to. We simply need Congress to re-institute strong PAYGO rules, where every spending hike is matched by a cut or a tax increase, and every tax cut is paid for.
This is a big demand, but it's hardly asking for the moon. It's a hell of a lot easier (and better) than asking Americans to eliminate the social safety net or privatize the military.
Nearly every other industrialized country offers universal health care for all of their workers and retirees. For the most part these countries are less well off than the US, and yet they can provide these benefits without drowning themselves in debt.
In my opinion there's no question about whether we can "afford" Medicare. There is a question about our budget priorities, tax levels, and how we manage our money.
This proposal has never been on the table. Moreover it never will be on the table. Current seniors have too much political clout to let it happen. And selfishness aside, they're basically right on this one --- there's no current crisis that would necessitate getting rid of their Medicare. There is a future crisis, which will have to be dealt with by future Congresses and future Medicare beneficiaries.
Also, when you say that you "won't receive a dime" in benefits I can only assume that you're not very familiar with Medicare as a program. Let me explain how it works: Medicare collects taxes from workers. This creates a generous pool of money that's used to provide medical benefits to retirees. The system sustains itself as long as there are workers.
What does change is the quantity of health care that we can purchase with those dollars. Health care costs are projected to go way up. So even though you'll be getting plenty of financial benefit for the taxes you pay today, the money won't buy as much as it does today.
(Incidentally, you'd have the same problem if you invested your Medicare taxes on the private market. The problem is not money management, it's the price of healthcare.)
The question that a future Congress needs to resolve is: what do we do when when Medicare taxes don't cover the full Medicare benefit package. There are a lot of possible answers to that question --- for one thing, we could simply reduce benefit levels and let individuals make it up out of their private funds. That'd still be more efficient than the privatization plans currently on the table, since centralized Medicare is huge and gets much better rates than private insurers.
And who knows, maybe healthcare costs aren't going to grow out of control for 30 straight years. There are a lot of technical advances we couldn't predict thirty years ago, and I can only assume that there will be similar advances in the future. Also, the country could get a lot richer. We simply don't have the data to make good decisions about Medicare now, which is precisely why current Congresses should be focusing on things they know how to deal with --- current spending --- not speculating about the distant future.
Oh for god's sake, the Federal Government was not created to maintain a standing army with an unlimited mission at unlimited funding levels. The founders gave us a democracy and assumed that we would know how to use it.
If you, as a voter, believe that the war in Afghanistan is going to make the world better in 30 years, that's excellent. But "the Constitution says we can make war, therefore I turned off my brain" is not an argument.
Healthcare cost growth is a huge long-term problem, and it's one we're going to need to address. But it has precisely nothing to do with what we spend in 2012, 2013, 2014, etc.
Military spending, on the other hand, really is great issue to address in the yearly budget. We can decide in 2011 how many overseas wars we should be fighting over the next fiscal year. We can decide in 2012 how much we want to spend in 2013, and so on.
As best I can tell, the reason we spend so much time discussing "entitlements" is because politicians don't want to discuss issues that we can address today. So instead we have a stupid and fruitless conversation about problems that we're not facing yet. The inevitable outcome is that nobody wants to put their neck on the line to cut these programs, and all the serious decisions fly under the radar.
Which, when you think about it, is the entire point.
There's a pretty simple way to deal with Medicare spending in the future (note: it's not "entitlements" --- Social Security does not share Medicare's cost growth). Basically, leave it to the future. Oh sure, do what smart things we can do now to make healthcare costs grow less quickly. But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.
If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.
The patents in question were filed nearly 15 years ago. It's possible that the examiner is still working at the USPTO, but more than likely he's moved on to another job or just left the organization.
The problem with most of these patents is that they were examined during the 1990s, when anyone with an ounce of technical skill could command a huge salary from a .com business. So the people who took government salaries at the USPTO at that time were, to a disproportionate extent, drooling morons. The USPTO has somewhat rectified the hiring situation, but the patents are still around.
To play devil's advocate, a consistent response might be -- Some of those other practices and beliefs were overturned via the amendment process, which isn't the case here.
The problem here is that there's nothing to amend. Where in the constitution are minors excluded from First Amendment protection?
Unfortunately, to adopt your approach we would be forced to explicitly amend every single clause of the constitution, if there's even a suspicion that 18th century Americans would have read it differently than the modern understanding.
A century of case law and tacit legislative approval (legislators can always amend the constitution to clarify issues where they believe the court's interpretation is wrong) gets thrown out the window vs. one justice's historical interpretation of a single era.
It's not a pretty argument.
This makes no sense. Harmonics will not leak through a (properly) encrypted digital stream. If your stream is properly encrypted, the only way to recover voice information is via traffic analysis, and that only works if the codec uses a variable bitrate --- easy enough to fix.
The fact is that your employer was dangerously naive and put their entire business at risk in order to preserve a few nice configuration options. Ironically they may have even considered some of these to be security options.
The browser (and email client) are the front door to your organization. It baffles me that some companies invest millions in firewalls and physical security, then allow their employees to essentially give away confidential information by placing it on unpatched XP/IE6 boxes.
That's because his argument, as told to the Court, sucked. He wrote about how he botched it afterwards.
Whatever. I've read Lessig's apologia, and while I appreciate that he's humble about it, there was absolutely no way that the court was going to overrule Congress and the largest media companies in America.
He made a legitimate constitutional argument, the court sidestepped it, and that was that. It would be nice to live in the world where the Supreme Court cared about copyright terms, but we don't live in that world. Lessig should know.
It will be damn small scale. We just looked into solar PV for a similar (AC-hogging, pool) rental property in Florida. To cover the entire bill would require a $75k system.
And it would still require us to purchase power from the grid at night. Yes, we could "sell" back to the grid during the day, but someone somewhere would still be burning fossile fuels for us at night. This plant generates power 24 hours a day.
There aren't 21 million USD, there's an ever increasing supply. The gov't constantly monitors the money supply --- through the imperfect proxy of monitoring prices --- and uses its powers to create more. The goal is to maintain stability plus some inflation.
Thus while it's possible that there are huge hoards of USD left over from the early days of the republic, it's quite unlikely that their sudden introduction would significantly affect the value of the dollar. Thanks to inflation the face value of the hoarded notes just couldn't be that high. Even if it was, the Fed would take steps in response to an influx of money.
With Bitcoin, on the other hand, things go the opposite direction. Coins were easy to create in the early days, and the reward for conducting a transaction was highest. So vast sums were created, either hoarded or lost, but with full knowledge that BTC are likely to get more 'valuable' due to a combination of demand and limited supply. At some future date where a cup of coffee costs 0.0002BTC, someone could flood the market with 10,000BTC. At very least, everyone has to expect that this could happen, and hedge against it.
Coin expiration is probably not the best way to deal with this. But there needs to be some way, otherwise it will be very, very difficult to maintain a predictable BTC value and thus make the currency useful for transactions.
I would characterize it as a lot more information. It doesn't solve the hoarding problem, but it gives you a much better idea how much risk there is.
Only a change to the coin creation limits will really fix the hoarding problem (my other suggestion, a couple of posts up).
Yes, and this means that the supply of BTC is likely to be far below the 21M determined by the spec. And over time the number of BTC will inevitably decline, never increase.
This might be ok if you could determine how many coins were being destroyed, but in the existing network it's impossible. A specification-defined expiration date would make it quite easy to differentiate between hard-drive-crash BTC and the active ones.
That's precisely the point. To give users an idea of how many BTC are actively being hoarded, rather than the permanently inaccessible ghosts of coins that were created when some user overwrote their wallet file.
Precisely. Of course you can modify the clients to deal with this, but it requires client modifications. Long before that happens the network will be dead or forked.
You don't need a fixed number of coins, you need a fixed rate of coin creation, which is already part of the spec.
But the simple answer to this point is that fiat currencies work, and currencies with limited (and implicitly declining supplies) haven't.