I charge what people will pay. If my costs of providing the product go up, and the amount of money people are willing to pay does not, the costs come out of profits.
And if your business is privately-held, you can do this without serious ramifications. If you're the CEO if a publicly-traded company whose compensation is based on stock price, and your stock takes a 40% hit because your profits took a 10% hit (not unheard of), what do you do?
Who thinks that Verizon could cut back even, just a bit, on advertising, retail stores, gimmicky promotions, and sales commissions for corporate sales, without significantly cutting back on service or increasing customer costs? In 2008, Verizon managed to decrease its cost related to wages and benefits even.
If you don't like the way they're running their business, uh, buy your cell service from someone else? I know, you voted for Obama and you have a difficult time understanding how the free market works.
Getting the government unhooked from the Microsoft money train would have far-reaching effects in the industry.
First, you have a large segment of the IT world who know nothing outside of the Microsoft way of doing things. Changing up what they're familiar with, and many paid to go to school to learn (hello all you MCSEs), renders many of these people unemployable.
Second, for many government systems, there's a lot of aftermarket products commonly used that will be rendered obsolete. Antivirus, backup, etc. etc.
If Obama's worried about saving or creating jobs, brash action isn't the way to go about it.
Direct from CPB @15% yes. But the majority of NPR's funds come from member stations (affiliate fees); those stations also receive the majority of their funds from CPB.
It's a nice shell game that hides the fact that "public" radio was be pretty much kaputt without the taxpayer. We're still probably looking at over half that's directly traceable back to government.
Yet they run commercials, anyway.
But I suppose it's an important function of government. It provides a niche audience programming (while completely ignoring the audience it purports to serve....drive through the 'hood in a major city and see how many radios are blaring classical music from the local government radio station), and provides employment to thousands who failed in commercial radio (the same is true for television...hello Charlie Rose).
What percentage of radio listeners even have an iPhone, or any portable device capable of radio reception at non-extortionate rates? Too small to even matter.
But everyone the author knows does, and they all listen to public radio. Everyone in the entire country is the same, right?
(Hint: in many markets, if Arbitron published ratings for government radio, they'd be in the bottom quarter of the market for ratings. Supported by listeners like you on their 1040 forms.)
Sirius and XM's problems have more to do with a business culture that gave us the dot com crash; I remember seeing photos of the XM studios, and seeing that the entire place was full of aerons.
Sirius, OTOH, completely screwed the first group of shareholders, then got a big credit line enabling them to buy XM. Now they can't afford the payments on that credit line.
End of story.
I just wonder why XM agreed to the merger in the first place. They weren't in great shape, but they also weren't the financial sewer that Sirius is.
Point: the current system is not all that off, and yours (with rounding up) would not be better.
As far as why we have a arbitrary limit, can you come up with something not arbitrary? Yours is arbitrary, too. All the constitution dictates is a proportional representation. Perhaps we should have stuck with what it originally was: 1 rep for every 30,000 people. Then we would be just shy of 10,200 reps. Or we could limit it to something managable.
You did you math differently than what I wrote. By dividing the entire country's population by the smallest state's, you still have issues of favoritism in apportionment. I said to do it for each state, individually, and then round up.
The problem is that the number of electors is not proportional, because the number of electors is the sum of the number of representatives (proportional) plus the number of senators (not proportional). That is why smaller states get a bigger voice than thier population would otherwise allow.
No, it's not. But it's supposed to be more than it is, and the artificial 435 HoR limit really penalizes larger states when it comes to electoral clout.
You need to learn more about how our political process works.
I have a degree in Government from a small liberal arts university with a former US Senator as its President. I also spent eight years working as a reporter/commentator. What about you with your tiny slashdot ID? Did you finish senior government class with a B+, and now you know everything?
Yeah, you could do it that way, too. Really doesn't matter. I spell it out that way most of the time for explaining a simple formula, and to eliminate the argument about some state getting left out because of a rounding down error (which happens now).
As for the floor space, they can find a way to deal with it. Maintaining proportional representation is more important than coddling politicians. I don't care if they have to roll out trailers on the mall for representatives' offices.
I do like the 1/500k idea, too, and have heard it before. My state would get three extra seats under that calculation. And maybe I wouldn't be shoehorned into a gerrymandered minority-majority district with a candidate who's had one real opponent since 1992.
You've also got a situation where the size of the HoR has been artificially limited at 435 for something like 70 years for no real good reason.
The math on it is easy...
1. Do the census. 2. Divide each state's population by the smallest state's population. 3. Take that number, and round the remainder up to the next whole number.
I'd imagine Obama's MoV would have been higher in the EC if the House was truly proportional. Al Gore would have won in 2000. Bush's electoral margin would have been higher in 2004, etc. etc.
But better than this, too, would be to split each state up the way that Maine and Nebraska do. A candidate gets an electoral vote for each congressional district he/she wins, and the winner of the popular vote in the state gets the two for the senators' EC votes./Would also like to see direct elections of the senate ended to go along with it.//Indirect democracy yields better people than direct democracy does.
Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.
No, there's a standalone version w/out 2k8 server. Supposedly you can manage it with anything that has a recent MMC (XP/2k3/Vista/2k8). I tried it out, and gave up after about 2 nights of trying to get the management console to work.
Clinton was, but it wasn't his choice. As for Obama, let's not lose sight of the fact that the stimulus is $825 Billion, and the federal budget deficit is over $1 trillion per year.
Yeah, I do the exact same thing. I do it with my CentOS machines, too.
Thinking about my Linux systems....only two have displays at the moment. One is an older notebook (S3 driver, blackbox, some GNUstep applications). The other is a mythtv box with an nVidia card, only because the onboard graphics didn't really shine trying to push 1920x1080 (fine watching stuff off the drives, but ATSC tuner stuff was completely out of the question). The rest are purpose-built, and I can do everything I need to do on them over ssh or a web interface.
I've used Ubuntu, and it just annoys me most of the time. Then I have to read whatever the fanbois write, which makes me want to use it even less. Then Shuttleworth shoots his mouth off about something, and....
It's like the now-disappeared Gentoo nuts. Only with less GCC knowledge.
That decision was a legal travesty: the foundation of the decision was the 4th Amendment, insinuating that the right to have an abortion is equivalent with the right of the people to be secure in their persons. The decision in this case was just so broad and overreaching that I see its legal foundation as almost laughable.
Actually, that's not the holding at all. A right to privacy, while not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, exists. The 4th Amendment argument merely adds support to that right, which is covered by the 9th and 10th amendments.
And in light of the two decisions that preceded Rowe (Griswold v. Conn., and Eisenstadt v. Baird), no other verdict can really be reached. A right to privacy exists, and absent compelling government interest (in the case of abortion, to protect potential life) that cannot be violated.
The question is at which point that compelling interest attaches.
(Full disclosure....I'm generally conservative, but pro-choice, pro-capital punishment, and don't have a problem with many of these tactics, because they've been used to battle drug trafficking for years. But I support legalization of drugs, too, so we don't have to use them.)
Horrible products for years. Illicit money has been propping this company up for years.
This one is highly unlikely. The federal government recently spent a ton of money on McAfee's host-based security solutions. If they were smart, however, they might consider ditching their consumer-level stuff (it's crap...not saying the enterprise stuff is a lot better, but well....)
For such a use, data loss isn't a big deal; your cache directories blow up, you re-create them, and restart your cache server. I had a similar setup first with Linux/Murder^H^HReiserFS, then with NetBSD/LFS. If the fs where the cache spools were stored got screwed up, I'd just re-make the filesystem.
Softupdates maintains synchronous operation, while giving the illusion of async. Anything that wasn't written before the machine went down is just gone. And an unclean shutdown still requires an fsck after reboot. FreeBSD allows for backgrounding this.
Journalling keeps track of what has actually been put on the disk. It's still not secure for things like mail (this is true of Postfix, too), but it's a lot better for general use.
FreeBSD kind of lost me with the 5 and 6 releases. I haven't tried 7, but maybe it's worth a shot again.
They would be wise to port WAPBL; it looks better than gjournal, seems to perform comparably to Softupdates (which are a data gamble), and doesn't have huge system requirements like ZFS.
If you have spent any amount of time in the tech field you will find that 3/4th of the people in the field are substandard and the other 1/4th carry the weight.
Which is why this push to kill the secret ballot is so popular. Only 2/3rds of that 3/4ths who are substandard need to say "Durh, Union!" And you've got it in your shop.
I'll leave IT if the situation becomes untenable; I will not join a union that protects the lazy and incompetent.
It's very funny, though, the idea that Obama and the Democrats are about change. In my view, Obama's election is the dying gasps of the rust belt (especially Chicago) political machine the Democrats spent the last hundred years fostering. These are just attempts to string it along, and hope that the 2010 census doesn't screw up that base too badly during reapportionment.
Camino, however, was really the first modern, native OSX browser.
Back in the 10.1/10.2 days, you only had a few unappealing choices: IE for Mac with its terminal brokenness, truly horrible non-native Mozilla/Netscape (which was an absolute performance dog on a 350Mhz G3 with 256MB), the then expensive (like $50, iirc) OmniWeb with its ancient rendering engine, etc. etc.
Camino (Cameleon, I think it was called back then?) was a godsend.
I switched to Safari once 10.3 came out, as it performed better on the hardware I was using at the time. I haven't seen anything really all that compelling to make me switch again. Firefox on OSX still makes me shudder. It's not as ugly as it used to be, but it's still very clear it's not an OSX application.
On Windows, I've kind of drifted back and forth. I use IE at work. At home I'm back to Firefox after stints with Safari and Chrome.
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I charge what people will pay. If my costs of providing the product go up, and the amount of money people are willing to pay does not, the costs come out of profits.
And if your business is privately-held, you can do this without serious ramifications. If you're the CEO if a publicly-traded company whose compensation is based on stock price, and your stock takes a 40% hit because your profits took a 10% hit (not unheard of), what do you do?
Who thinks that Verizon could cut back even, just a bit, on advertising, retail stores, gimmicky promotions, and sales commissions for corporate sales, without significantly cutting back on service or increasing customer costs? In 2008, Verizon managed to decrease its cost related to wages and benefits even.
If you don't like the way they're running their business, uh, buy your cell service from someone else? I know, you voted for Obama and you have a difficult time understanding how the free market works.
Getting the government unhooked from the Microsoft money train would have far-reaching effects in the industry.
First, you have a large segment of the IT world who know nothing outside of the Microsoft way of doing things. Changing up what they're familiar with, and many paid to go to school to learn (hello all you MCSEs), renders many of these people unemployable.
Second, for many government systems, there's a lot of aftermarket products commonly used that will be rendered obsolete. Antivirus, backup, etc. etc.
If Obama's worried about saving or creating jobs, brash action isn't the way to go about it.
Include lots of those.
Seriously.
I have to write documents that actually show which checkboxes are selected in the screenshot.
I wish I was kidding.
Direct from CPB @15% yes. But the majority of NPR's funds come from member stations (affiliate fees); those stations also receive the majority of their funds from CPB.
It's a nice shell game that hides the fact that "public" radio was be pretty much kaputt without the taxpayer. We're still probably looking at over half that's directly traceable back to government.
Yet they run commercials, anyway.
But I suppose it's an important function of government. It provides a niche audience programming (while completely ignoring the audience it purports to serve....drive through the 'hood in a major city and see how many radios are blaring classical music from the local government radio station), and provides employment to thousands who failed in commercial radio (the same is true for television...hello Charlie Rose).
What percentage of radio listeners even have an iPhone, or any portable device capable of radio reception at non-extortionate rates? Too small to even matter.
But everyone the author knows does, and they all listen to public radio. Everyone in the entire country is the same, right?
(Hint: in many markets, if Arbitron published ratings for government radio, they'd be in the bottom quarter of the market for ratings. Supported by listeners like you on their 1040 forms.)
Sirius and XM's problems have more to do with a business culture that gave us the dot com crash; I remember seeing photos of the XM studios, and seeing that the entire place was full of aerons.
Sirius, OTOH, completely screwed the first group of shareholders, then got a big credit line enabling them to buy XM. Now they can't afford the payments on that credit line.
End of story.
I just wonder why XM agreed to the merger in the first place. They weren't in great shape, but they also weren't the financial sewer that Sirius is.
Point: the current system is not all that off, and yours (with rounding up) would not be better.
As far as why we have a arbitrary limit, can you come up with something not arbitrary? Yours is arbitrary, too. All the constitution dictates is a proportional representation. Perhaps we should have stuck with what it originally was: 1 rep for every 30,000 people. Then we would be just shy of 10,200 reps. Or we could limit it to something managable.
You did you math differently than what I wrote. By dividing the entire country's population by the smallest state's, you still have issues of favoritism in apportionment. I said to do it for each state, individually, and then round up.
The problem is that the number of electors is not proportional, because the number of electors is the sum of the number of representatives (proportional) plus the number of senators (not proportional). That is why smaller states get a bigger voice than thier population would otherwise allow.
No, it's not. But it's supposed to be more than it is, and the artificial 435 HoR limit really penalizes larger states when it comes to electoral clout.
You need to learn more about how our political process works.
I have a degree in Government from a small liberal arts university with a former US Senator as its President. I also spent eight years working as a reporter/commentator. What about you with your tiny slashdot ID? Did you finish senior government class with a B+, and now you know everything?
DIAF, troll.
Yeah, you could do it that way, too. Really doesn't matter. I spell it out that way most of the time for explaining a simple formula, and to eliminate the argument about some state getting left out because of a rounding down error (which happens now).
As for the floor space, they can find a way to deal with it. Maintaining proportional representation is more important than coddling politicians. I don't care if they have to roll out trailers on the mall for representatives' offices.
I do like the 1/500k idea, too, and have heard it before. My state would get three extra seats under that calculation. And maybe I wouldn't be shoehorned into a gerrymandered minority-majority district with a candidate who's had one real opponent since 1992.
You've also got a situation where the size of the HoR has been artificially limited at 435 for something like 70 years for no real good reason.
The math on it is easy...
1. Do the census.
2. Divide each state's population by the smallest state's population.
3. Take that number, and round the remainder up to the next whole number.
I'd imagine Obama's MoV would have been higher in the EC if the House was truly proportional. Al Gore would have won in 2000. Bush's electoral margin would have been higher in 2004, etc. etc.
But better than this, too, would be to split each state up the way that Maine and Nebraska do. A candidate gets an electoral vote for each congressional district he/she wins, and the winner of the popular vote in the state gets the two for the senators' EC votes. /Would also like to see direct elections of the senate ended to go along with it. //Indirect democracy yields better people than direct democracy does.
Not to mention the cost, free with a Windows Server 2008 license.
No, there's a standalone version w/out 2k8 server. Supposedly you can manage it with anything that has a recent MMC (XP/2k3/Vista/2k8). I tried it out, and gave up after about 2 nights of trying to get the management console to work.
And, maybe AppleTV? I wouldn't imagine a lot of mini owners are gaming on them, and if they can get the price down to reasonable, why not?
Will stick to my 45WAthlonX2/AMD740G mythtv box until AppleTV gets a tuner
But I would like to replace that aging G4 that I occasionally use
But most people under 50k in income don't pay anywhere near $4k in taxes.....so why are they getting the big rebates on taxes they never paid?
Clinton was, but it wasn't his choice. As for Obama, let's not lose sight of the fact that the stimulus is $825 Billion, and the federal budget deficit is over $1 trillion per year.
But, they did categorize every one by who sent them and who received them and then archived them for future use.
So, if they'd done it to monitor spam nets.....?
Same reason Clear Channel laid off 8% while this was going on. :-)
Yeah, I do the exact same thing. I do it with my CentOS machines, too.
Thinking about my Linux systems....only two have displays at the moment. One is an older notebook (S3 driver, blackbox, some GNUstep applications). The other is a mythtv box with an nVidia card, only because the onboard graphics didn't really shine trying to push 1920x1080 (fine watching stuff off the drives, but ATSC tuner stuff was completely out of the question). The rest are purpose-built, and I can do everything I need to do on them over ssh or a web interface.
I've used Ubuntu, and it just annoys me most of the time. Then I have to read whatever the fanbois write, which makes me want to use it even less. Then Shuttleworth shoots his mouth off about something, and....
It's like the now-disappeared Gentoo nuts. Only with less GCC knowledge.
That decision was a legal travesty: the foundation of the decision was the 4th Amendment, insinuating that the right to have an abortion is equivalent with the right of the people to be secure in their persons. The decision in this case was just so broad and overreaching that I see its legal foundation as almost laughable.
Actually, that's not the holding at all. A right to privacy, while not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, exists. The 4th Amendment argument merely adds support to that right, which is covered by the 9th and 10th amendments.
And in light of the two decisions that preceded Rowe ( Griswold v. Conn. , and Eisenstadt v. Baird), no other verdict can really be reached. A right to privacy exists, and absent compelling government interest (in the case of abortion, to protect potential life) that cannot be violated.
The question is at which point that compelling interest attaches.
(Full disclosure....I'm generally conservative, but pro-choice, pro-capital punishment, and don't have a problem with many of these tactics, because they've been used to battle drug trafficking for years. But I support legalization of drugs, too, so we don't have to use them.)
He'll be forced to enforce and expand it. Google for "fairness doctrine."
4) McAfee (let's hope so!)
Horrible products for years. Illicit money has been propping this company up for years.
This one is highly unlikely. The federal government recently spent a ton of money on McAfee's host-based security solutions. If they were smart, however, they might consider ditching their consumer-level stuff (it's crap...not saying the enterprise stuff is a lot better, but well....)
For such a use, data loss isn't a big deal; your cache directories blow up, you re-create them, and restart your cache server. I had a similar setup first with Linux/Murder^H^HReiserFS, then with NetBSD/LFS. If the fs where the cache spools were stored got screwed up, I'd just re-make the filesystem.
Softupdates maintains synchronous operation, while giving the illusion of async. Anything that wasn't written before the machine went down is just gone. And an unclean shutdown still requires an fsck after reboot. FreeBSD allows for backgrounding this.
Journalling keeps track of what has actually been put on the disk. It's still not secure for things like mail (this is true of Postfix, too), but it's a lot better for general use.
Kind of took them long enough...
FreeBSD kind of lost me with the 5 and 6 releases. I haven't tried 7, but maybe it's worth a shot again.
They would be wise to port WAPBL; it looks better than gjournal, seems to perform comparably to Softupdates (which are a data gamble), and doesn't have huge system requirements like ZFS.
Zaphod?
(For those of you who didn't pay attention in English class, look at the sentence again.....)
If you have spent any amount of time in the tech field you will find that 3/4th of the people in the field are substandard and the other 1/4th carry the weight.
Which is why this push to kill the secret ballot is so popular. Only 2/3rds of that 3/4ths who are substandard need to say "Durh, Union!" And you've got it in your shop.
I'll leave IT if the situation becomes untenable; I will not join a union that protects the lazy and incompetent.
It's very funny, though, the idea that Obama and the Democrats are about change. In my view, Obama's election is the dying gasps of the rust belt (especially Chicago) political machine the Democrats spent the last hundred years fostering. These are just attempts to string it along, and hope that the 2010 census doesn't screw up that base too badly during reapportionment.
Camino, however, was really the first modern, native OSX browser.
Back in the 10.1/10.2 days, you only had a few unappealing choices: IE for Mac with its terminal brokenness, truly horrible non-native Mozilla/Netscape (which was an absolute performance dog on a 350Mhz G3 with 256MB), the then expensive (like $50, iirc) OmniWeb with its ancient rendering engine, etc. etc.
Camino (Cameleon, I think it was called back then?) was a godsend.
I switched to Safari once 10.3 came out, as it performed better on the hardware I was using at the time. I haven't seen anything really all that compelling to make me switch again. Firefox on OSX still makes me shudder. It's not as ugly as it used to be, but it's still very clear it's not an OSX application.
On Windows, I've kind of drifted back and forth. I use IE at work. At home I'm back to Firefox after stints with Safari and Chrome.
Debian's been working on kernel independence for years now, both GNU and non-GNU.
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/
http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
Of course, to get attention from fanboi sites, they chose to use Ubuntu.