You talk about those things like they're bad things.
It's slow/minuscule/nonexistent growth.
So what? The original point stands, which is that dividends matter when you are evaluating the performance of a stock. A stock whose price doesn't grow very much but which pays dividends regularly can still be a good stock, it just plays a different role in your portfolio as a risky growth stock. It might even be a better stock, once you discount the growth stock by its risk.
I think part of the issue here is that Microsoft's stock violated people's expectations of invincibility. Some people no doubt were using the past to project the future, which can be a very foolish thing. MS caught a huge wave -- the personal computer -- at just the right time and rode it skillfully for a longer time than was reasonable to expect. They picked up some nice cash cows along the way, which is exactly what you'd want a company that got that lucky to do. But it's not reasonable to expect the kind of growth they had riding the PC boom to continue after the boom was spent. The best you can expect as an investor is that they continue to be profitable and generate cash in their mature businesses, and hope they catch a lucky break in some new ones. Apple not outclassing them so ridiculously with the iPhone or the iPad would have been such a lucky break, but it didn't happen.
MS has never been an innovative company on users; they make money on people who buy technology for other people. That's one of the reasons Windows Phones were so lousy; they catered to the carriers who were running the subsidized phone scam. Apple decided to turn that business model on its head, and the rest is history.
... related to your job. For example he doesn't own the skills you gain working for him. Nor does he own the personal relationships you develop with customers. He might in some jurisdictions be able to contractually restrict what you do with those things after you part ways, but if he doesn't think to do that in advance he's out of luck.
Now let's look at the company's actual claims. They're claiming the guy's follower list and password are trade secrets.
OK, so how about the follower list? Of course if you work for a consultancy, you can't walk of with the entire database of clients. That *is* a trade secret. But this guy's Twitter follower list isn't a secret at all, anyone can look it up, even if you aren't Twitter subscriber. Furthermore that list has never been under the control of the company. So the follower list can't possibly be the company's trade secret because it's not even a secret in the first place. And it can't be *theirs* because it was never under their control.
As for the password to the account, that has never been in the possession of the company either, therefore while it may be a secret, it's hard to see how it is *their* secret. You could argue that the guy was working for the company when he dreamed up the password, and so it was in possession of a company employee (him). That's a stretch, but he could just change the password on the account and give them the old password. That wouldn't satisfy the company because they really don't give a damn about the password. They're after something else that isn't control of secret information. They're trying to control *public* information and so gain control over the fan relationships this guy developed while in their employ. The IP claim is just bogus.
I do think the company might have some legitimate claims to certain things here. I think they might have at least a moral claim they own posts this guy wrote when he was being paid. They probably have a right to his old handle, which he no longer uses. But that's not what they want. They want the relationship this guy has with his subscribers.
It sounds like the company parted ways with this guy, not realizing they were parting ways with his fan base too. Now they're trying to undo the damage that could have been avoided by keeping him on or making advance arrangements (like insisting he use an account that they control) instead of being loosey-goosey. It's too bad for them they didn't think ahead, but that's no excuse for using the threat of legal action to secure de facto control over something they have no right to. That's theft by legal extortion.
And why does the American people still tolerate this again?
Well, what mechanism do the American people have for acting on their *in*toleration, once access to money becomes absolutely essential to getting elected, and wealth is able to exercise the influence without any restrictions?
Surely, in a democracy,...
That's the rub, isn't it? Of course we are *formally* a democratic republic according to our Constitution, but the question is how effectively our republic still *functions* as a democracy. It's not either/or. The people might still be able to throw the bums out over a huge bungle like the Iraq war, and that is unquestionably democracy in action. Still that's a far cry from being able to elect representative who will work in the public interest. There's plenty of bipartisanship in Congress in favor of things like copyright extension, but that has nothing to do with serving the interests of the public. Both sides agree because they can't afford to let the other side have sole access to the money that position attracts.
The private sector will strive to find new ways to make money.
That's not the point. The notion that private industry is going to stop making money is a straw man. Nobody thinks that. Money *will* be made, but money doesn't care *where*. As an investor, the next quarter matters far more to you than the state of a company five years in the future. You're almost certain to have adjusted your stock positions by then. You certainly don't care *where* a company you own stock in will be making its widgets, or whether America makes widgets at all.
But most people aren't planning on changing their national residency every couple of years, if ever. It makes a difference to a citizen whether his country still makes computers or cars, or still has jobs for engineers in ten years' time.
A rational, self-interested investor just isn't concerned with the future of American competitiveness. He doesn't even care if American society goes to hell in ten or twenty years, so long as he's made enough money to insulate himself from that. Most of the country can become an impoverished, polluted dystopia so far as he's concerned, but if he can afford to move to a clean, orderly, wealthy enclave it's not a problem for him.
Money not only doesn't care where it's made, it doesn't care *how* it is made. No business innovates if it can make more money by doing the same old thing. It is competition that forces a business to innovate -- albeit only over the short term -- but no company *likes* having competition. So do you think businesses hire lobbyists to *promote* competition? Of course not. Innovation is risky and expensive. Buying politicians to protect you from competition is cheap and predictable. A society organized solely for the good of business interests is one where those interests don't innovate much because they are protected from competition.
Suppose the country had taken a "private enterprise first and only" course at the end of WW2. There's no question that businesses would have made money, maybe even more money in the short term. They'd certainly keep a lot more of their earnings because tax rates during the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s were high, much higher than today. But without the public investment in research and technology funded by those high taxes we'd still be living in a world of largely 1950 technology. Entire industries would not exist. There would be no computers, no satellite communications or GPS, no Internet, and much less biotechnology. The payback times of these investments are far longer than the planning horizons of any rational private investor. Only someone who is interested in the good of society, and the good of the nation would make those investments.
A society organized solely for the good of private enterprises would be no different from any other society organized for the benefit of a few. It would be aversive to innovation, focusing most of its energy and resources on the maintenance of the status quo. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to be able to envision any kind of world but one organized solely for the benefit of business, or one that is irrationally and implacably hostile to private enterprise. It's like they've thrown out history, even the living memory of the success of moderate, pragmatic economic policy, because the story that tells isn't tidy and simple. People seem to prefer a simpler, more radical world view, and there are plenty on both ends of the political spectrum who are happy to peddle it to them.
I find it kind of spooky that sqrt(5) appears in the formula for the golden ratio and in the closed expression formula to calculate Fibonacci numbers, and here we have it again. Oh, I can do the calculations for the eigenvalues of the Fibonacci matrix and arrive at the closed formula, it's just surprising to see sqrt(5) pop up. I suppose I should expect some irrational number expressed as a power of some rational number to pop up, but 5 seems like such an innocuous number. So far as I know sqrt(3) and sqrt(7) don't have this gatecrashing habit.
You almost couldn't pick a more innocuous looking number than 5. Of course the sqrt(2) shows up all the time, but that makes sense because of our way of seeing things in dualities and halves. If we define pi in terms of the diameter of a circle but define the circle itself in terms of its radius, we pretty much force ourselves to deal with factors of two. But the sqrt(5) thing is like some cosmic trickster looked at the succeeding prime numbers and thought, "Three comes right after two so it's too obvious; seven is too obviously non-obvious; I think I'll go with five."
I don't know. It's not as *immediate* as handing the photo to someone. You've got to ask for their e-mail or write down your web site or facebook account. Plus you've got everyone huddled around somebody's phone rather than passing several photos around.
What I think would be cool is for the photo paper to embedded have digital memory, so you could hand somebody a print and a digital copy at the same time.
I have several friends who keep bees, and they all have bee sting stories. It's a bit like a fish story; the winner is the guy who gets nailed the worst. First time I heard that I asked whether that made them want to give it up, and the response was pretty much, "Nah, I took a couple of benedryls and lay down for a twenty minutes and I was right as rain."
The punchline to these stories isn't that these guys went on keeping bees; it's that they kept taking the shortcuts that got them stung in the first place.
Obviously you're just a pussy who's not man enough to keep bees. Don't feel bad, so am I. But for men (and women) who have the figurative balls to keep bees, keeping them in the house would be cool.
Given that most Android manufacturers have signed licensing agreements with MS, it suggests that the patents are decidedly _NOT_ frivolous.
"Millions for defense, not one penny for tribute," is not how businesses run. Businesses run to maximize profit. Therefore the principle they operate on is "pay up to $999,999.99 in tribute rather than $1,000,000 in defense." If businesses always act to maximize profits, then the validity of the claim is neither here nor there. It's only a contributing factor to the cost of pursuing a claim or defending against it.
Also, if you run out of cash in business, you're bankrupt. Cash flow is the first consideration in deciding to litigate or settle a case. If one party has the cash on hand to pursue litigation and the other doesn't, that party can force a settlement on the other without regard to the merits of the case. A pot of gold at the end of a lawsuit does you no good if you don't have the cash to make it all the way to the end.
So in a nutshell, we have a system that only works if both litigants have enough cash on hand to see them through to the end of a protracted legal battle and no better use for that cash in the interim. Only in that situation can the party with the best case always force a settlement on the party with the weakest case.
The only possible way to fix this is to ensure that bad claims are never made in the first place. To do that we must prevent the granting of weak or overly broad patents, and purge any such patents currently granted. But there's no political will to do this in a climate where the people want government spending curbed and politically connected companies are making money of bogus patents.
Well, maybe the problem is the entire model of college education, which comes to us from medieval times when a young gentleman could go to university, and come home after a few years with a sizable fraction of all human knowledge. Today people have to keep learning all their lives. Why does college education have to look the way it does? Rather than contemplating dumbing down the current system, I think it makes sense to ask whether a different but equally rigorous system might be more successful.
From what I've seen, many people enter college well before they've grown up. That is not necessarily a moral failing, in fact it strikes me as irrational to expect somebody to be as mature at eighteen as he will be at twenty-two. What happens is we send everyone to college at seventeen or eighteen as a kind of experiment to see if they're ready, and obviously many are not ready to get their degree in four years. The result is that ultimate success at university is often related to the affluence of the student's parents, not necessarily the student's ultimate potential. If a student needs another semester to finish, and has no family resources to draw upon, he's stuck. I once knew a guy who was a mediocre student but had a very rich father. His dad pulled some strings so the guy could get into a master's program in public health when he was thirty or so, and from their the guy went on to earn his MD in his late 30s. Yet despite how unfair this was to other people (e.g. to the person who lost his place in med school), this guy went on to be a distinguished surgeon. In this case the exception carved out by money and influence allowed someone to reach his full potential.
I also have a strong suspicion that the brain continues to develop in certain ways well into the 20s. When I went into MIT at 17 years of age I was pretty good at math, but I feel strongly that my natural aptitude for mathematics continued to improve until I was in my late 20s. I'm also reasonably certain that many brains entering college at seventeen and eighteen have not finished developing what psychologists call "executive control functions": being able to direct attention, to control impulses to weigh the present effort against the future rewards.
I just don't think four year university right after high school works for everyone. Nor does it get the most out of many of the people who do manage make it through, but not with distinction. Some people who struggle through four years and make it out by the skin of their teeth might pass with distinction if they just started their college career two or three years later, whether that reflects life experience, brain biology or some mix.
But if the problem is that the design of the current system doesn't meet everyone's needs, then dumbing it down is the worst possible choice. The system *still* wouldn't work for the people it currently doesn't serve well, but the people it *does* serve well are cheated. On the other hand it makes no sense to shortchange students who might have equal potential but don't fit the current system, either because they need a few years seasoning or don't have the money to cushion them through a tight spot.
I'd like to see options that are equally or more rigorous, but more diverse. I'd like to see some students earn their bachelors over six years or even eight years, paying for their with co-op work or national service. Stretching out education this way would in itself would allow students to bring more life experience to classes in social sciences, literature and business management.
I'd also like to see the end of the expectation that somebody can get a bachelor's degree at twenty-one years, and coast on those credentials until he's sixty-five. I'd like to see degrees expire unless you show you've continued to learn into your thirties or beyond.
So their 'secret weapon' is that they think ahead, price aggressively in shrewdly chosen market segments, and take carefully measured strategic risks with their resources?
Does it strike anyone as ironic that it's so unusual for a company to act the way a capitalist company is *supposed* to act that it's called a 'secret weapon'?
"StreetScooter", great name for a product... that isn't a scooter.
The German word for scooter (according to Google Translate) is "Roller", so I'd guess the project name is in Germlish or Engeutch or whatever. Maybe it's like the mock Swedish names IKEA gives things that make your wife say, "Oh, honey, this Dyra skithög is just what we need to organize our string collection!"
Amazon is hardly abandoning e-ink, because you can still buy a Kindle with e-ink -- at lower prices than ever if you can accept their screensaver advertisement scheme.
As far as whether LCD or e-ink is better, I happen to have both a Kindle and a rooted Nook Color with the Kindle Reader software installed. So I always have a choice when I want to read a Kindle book of reading it on e-ink or LCD. There are some situations where e-ink wins hands down (reading in bright ambient light), others were LCD wins (photos; diagrams of almost any kind; reading in darkened rooms or in bed), and others where it is the touchscreen that makes the difference (highlighting text and entering notes).
So given a free choice of reading a book on a e-ink Kindle or an LCD tablet, most of the time I choose the LCD. With a larger, higher resolution touchscreen e-ink display, it might be about even. There's no question that e-ink in bright ambient light is the best for reading text, but I find the UI on the second generation Kindle irritating even after owning it for a couple of years. The semantics of "back" seems to be a bugbear in many UI designs; touchscreen reader UIs tend to use screen gestures to flip pages and buttons to back out of books. I find this works well, so the Kindle Touch probably brings the Kindle up to parity with reading a Kindle book on an Android tablet in the UI department.
Reading a Kindle book on my wife's iPad is even better, because the iPad's rendering is better -- at least if you read books with lots of math in them like I do. The Kindle mangles equations and makes tables a pain in the neck to read. The iPad reader also allows you to zoom in to photos, which as yet neither the nook reader nor the Amazon reader software for Android allow. Sometimes I keep an iPod touch handy when reading on the Nook or Kindle in case the formatting is messed up or I need to get a good look at a photograph or diagram.
As much as I hate to say this, it seems the bet choice in terms of convenience and user experience is using Amazon and Barnes and Noble's reader software on an Apple device.
what is really anti-competitive? Apples legal actions, or the fact that many of these patents are based on software patents which are based on total BS.
That's like asking: what kills more people, guns or bullets?
Patents are inherently anti-competitive. That's the POINT. A patent protects you from competition, but to avail yourself of that protection, you have to have the willingness to take legal action. It follows that a bogus patent is necessarily *immorally* anti-competitive because it threatens force against people who want to do something they have every right to do. The bogus patent is the threat, the legal action is the force that fulfills the threat.
Knowingly filing a questionable patent is the moral equivalent of theft. I don't mean that figuratively like "moral equivalent of war"; I mean that literally. In substance a bogus patent is theft because it improperly deprives people of that which is rightfully theirs. Bogus patents are theft by fraud, but on such a grand scale that if you look too closely it's hard to see. There's no empty, blasted open safe or jimmied doors, only documents that look as legitimate as any other document. And so consumers pay more for less choice, but life goes on, and we start to regard theft as benign. Competitors move into other markets or disappear and are never thought of again because we naturally assume failure means you didn't plan and execute your business well enough. But you can insure yourself against a burglar who steals your physical tools. You can't buy insurance against people who deprive you of your *intellectual* tools.
Future generations will look back on the whole software and business method patent bonanza the way we look back at 19th century people shooting buffalo from the windows of trains and stealing Indian land. We almost can't imagine how otherwise responsible people could have behaved that way, but the bottom line is that even decent people aren't moral philosophers. They take their moral cues from people around them, and if others do it and remain respectable, it must be OK. The exceptions are oddballs like Henry David Thoreau who refuse to take part in a system that is wrong. But being different from most people means they are less respectable than the ordinary person who casually steals or kills in a socially acceptable way.
Which is what makes this interesting. Microsoft is using its desktop monopoly to leverage entrance into the search market. This is the same thing it did to Netscape.
I did (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2504726&cid=37923728).
At my age I've been caught with egg on my face for jumping to conclusions so many times that I've learned to ask, "do I really need to have a settled opinion on this now?" That may seem funny because the question should be "am I see the whole story?", but I've found you *can't* see the whole story once you've committed yourself to a narrative, particularly a narrative involving victimization.
Once you take the attitude that you don't have to choose sides right away, you see how people twist their arguments with appeals to emotions like fear, resentment, and alienation. In this case Dr. Coyne presented a narrative in which he'd been victimized. As a skeptic, I had to ask, "What's the big deal with the video? Why can't he just tell us what his arguments were, and summarize the arguments of the other side?" After all, it's the substance of the debate that matters. It's not like a video in which the cops are caught beating some guy up; nothing on the video is evidence for anything, and so it's entirely inconsequential.
Well, I wouldn't characterize his presentation as sneering, but he doesn't do a very good job of arguing his position, and introduces a lot of distracting emotional arguments about negative things he associates with religion.
Logically, he can argue his case two ways. He can either state his criteria for incompatibility, and show that religion and science meet those criteria. Or he can state his criteria for compatibility, and show that there is at least one criterion which religion and science can never meet.
As is often the case in such philosophical debates, the crux of the difference seems to be in assumptions about terminology. What Coyne shows again and again is that religion and science are *different*, and since he obviously regards that as demonstration of incompatibility, that must be his criterion for incompatibility, a criterion which of course anyone is free to reject.
A more substantive criterion would be that a religious person cannot be a good scientist. Coyne brings this up, but then dismisses the example by claiming that these people are being inconsistent. But ultimately that's a circular argument -- it's begging the question. He concludes they are being inconsistent by assuming that which is to be shown. What he should have done is show that these individuals do poor science as a result of their religious beliefs. Even that's not *proof* of his position, but it would be disproof of these scientists' use in support of the contrary position: that science and religion are compatible if a religious person can do good science.
Another useful inconsistency criterion would be whether science can be done in a society which accepts religious beliefs. Here again he doesn't quite come to grips with the issue. He notes the large number of people who don't believe in evolution, which is certainly a problem if research into evolutionary biology is to be funded. However belief in creationism is hardly a necessary condition to religiosity. Furthermore, Coyne's argument could be turned on its head: Fundamentalists actually agree with him that science and religion are incompatible, they just choose religion over science. Religious people who believe that science and religion are compatible have no difficulty with letting science go where it may. They may be inconsistent in doing so, but once again that is what is to be demonstrated.
By assuming what is to be shown, Coyne is singularly ineffective here. Ironically, he's just preaching to the choir.
Well, using a term like "censorship" loosely is a very bad thing. We know that when somebody uses the term "piracy" to describe fair use, so we ought not make the same mistake.
Suppose I attend a party at your house, and we have an argument that's caught on video. I demand that you publish the video, and you decline. Are you *censoring* me? Of course not. I have a right to my opinions, and I have a right to express my opinions, but I have no right to that video just because it captured me expressing my opinions.
I have no right to even demand that you answer an argument I put forth. If you happen to do so in some situation, I have a right to quote or paraphrase your argument, but I have no right to your *performance*. If you have otherwise not chosen to answer me publicly, I may *want* that performance, but I have no *right* to it.
I don't understand why having the video is so important. Does somebody's debate performance make any difference to the validity of an argument? Let's say you manage to put your opponent on the spot. That's a win for your position! Let's say you make the same argument in an essay, and because your opponent has a little more time to think about it, he manages to come up with a better sounding response. Does that change the truth?
Calling this affair "censorship" is... well it's just plain stupid, as is claiming it's a victory for science, or anything else. It's a victory for one guy's ego, that's all.
You have to love the guy's use of pulled-out-of-his-arse numbers. How do you measure what he's talking about, much less put a date on when one bundle of features will catch up with another?
The claim that the iPhone is better than the entire universe of Android phones is one that has so many variables it can't be proven or disproven; in all probability each platform will be preferred by some users with good reason. It depends on what's important to you. As far as I can see, judged as tool you carry around in your pocket rather than as a lifestyle statement, there isn't really much difference between an iPhone and a quality Android phone, but your mileage may vary.
But take an inherently squishy statement like "The iPhone is better than Android phones" and put a number in it, and suddenly it becomes news because it *sounds* objective: "The iPhone has a two year lead over Android." Of course even if you could quantify the differences between platforms, trusting a claim like requires you also trust the speaker's ability to predict what his competition will come up with over the course of two years. Good luck with that.
About they only way to give that statement more spurious authority would be to add even more precision to the claim: "The iPhone has a twenty-seven month lead over Android."
One side (the religious) doesn't want you to see it.
We don't know that. All we have is one side of the story that says the *other* side is suppressing things. Since it's not urgent for me to take a position, I choose to wait and see if there is something else going on.
Oh, you're not alone, but I think you are misguided.
There are other remarkable features of the Fukukshima incident that are worth studying besides the death count. Unlike the primary damage of the Tsunami, Fukushima unfolded slowly, and so we can study how people thought and reacted as it unfolded. That tells a very interesting story.
The most remarkable feature of the Fukushima disaster was how it kept producing surprises -- things that were not supposed to happen, and which seemed inexplicable when they did. Later as we study the disaster we will turn the inexplicable into the obvious -- in other words we will have learned a lesson.
This also demonstrates a feature of human cognition that it would be well to train out of professionals tasked with handling such situations. That is a bias toward what we see as "normal" or "usual". That bias doesn't come into play when we're planning something new, because that thing is not the status quo. We can therefore look at very unusual situations and make decisions about responding to them, and the actual results in Fukushima show how valuable that kind of forethought was.
Once something becomes a reality, it becomes much harder to rationally judge what we should do about unusual events involving it. We experience "normal" every day, and so the unusual just feels that much more hypothetical.
For instance, after the plant was built new scientific data showed that the maximum likely tsunami was several meters higher than previously thought. A walk-through of the plant with the same mindset employed during the planning phase would have uncovered many possible responses to that new information, some of which would have been quite practical and inexpensive. But the hypothetical tsunami wasn't taken seriously and there was only a token response: the emergency generators were raised by a few centimeters. Had they been raised several meters it is quite possible the reactors that were lost would have been saved.
It so happens that the flooding damage and the Fukushima disaster were both caused by the same instigating event; but otherwise they are unrelated events, each worth studying for its own reason. To see how this is true, imagine that *nobody* had died as a result of flooding and that damage to things other than the nuclear plant was minimal. Would that make the Fukushima incident *more* serious? Of course not. It's seriousness as a nuclear accident is independent of anything else that was going on at the same time.
Sure, but to be a hypocrite in this case you'd have to advocate that Anonymous take on the cartels. I don't think that is what is going on here. As usual the criticism is not very cogently stated, but I take the gist of it to be an attack on Anonymous's naiveté in thinking they could take on the drug cartels, in thinking that the cartels were no different from Anonymous's prior targets.
I'll put an even finer point on it. This incident demonstrates the danger of believing political hyperbole. I believe that HBGary is willing to be an opportunistic leach on the public good, and without somebody like Anonymous there wouldn't be any counter-argument to "everybody else does it." That doesn't obligate me to believe they are the moral equivalent of a Mexican drug gang. HBGary is evil, alright, but it's a contemptibly petty kind of evil, like a shopkeeper who cheats his needy customers. The drug gangs are more like serial murderers. Greedy, unprincipled shopkeepers and serial murderers are both evil, but on a different scale. Being able to see that is a good thing.
So your suggestion is that since things are bad in one area, we should make them as horrible as possible? How about instead we take every inch we can towards making things better?
It seems to me you are missing the point. The poster was questioning the assumption that laws and policies are a true reflection of the will of the people. In other words, justifying a law by saying it is the will of the people, then using the existence of that law as proof of public support *begs the question*. It's a circular argument.
The law in question might well reflect the will of the people. Many laws do. But many other laws most people aren't aware of and address issues most people have never gave any thought to. I suspect the law about defunding any agency that recognizes the Palestinian Authority is one of those. What fraction of the people knew that law was on the books, were aware when it came up for a vote, or know how their own representatives voted on it?
In any case, I can easily refute the notion that "every little bit counts" in policy matters like this. There are true fiscal conservatives, and opportunistic fiscal conservatives. A true fiscal conservative might think nothing should be spent in the federal budget except on defense and law enforcement, and then the least possible. An opportunistic fiscal conservative is someone who uses fiscal conservative arguments against programs he does not like, but abandons them when a program he happens to like is at stake. Such a person might argue from fiscally conservative grounds that UNESCO should be de-funded, but then advocate spending money to discourage birth control around the world, or the funding of a public project in his district he would never support in another district, except as a quid pro quo.
Let's say the true fiscal conservatives make alliance with opportunistic fiscal conservatives to de-fund UNESCO. Is that a small victory for fiscal conservatism? I think not, because history has shown that such opportunistic fiscal conservatives have plenty of other uses for the money saved by such "victories", and there are more opportunistic fiscal conservatives than there are sincere ones.
In other words the hypocrites in your ranks do you no favors. A real fiscal conservative would do better to ally himself with people who don't claim to be principled fiscal conservatives, but can accommodate fiscally conservative measures in order to get other things of value. A deal struck with them really would be a small victory.
So, they did what they always do: they changed their tunes.
You say that like it was a bad thing.
Yet, at the same time, they proclaim that they had it right all along and present a consistent and unchanging universal truth.
Can you cite an instance where they changed their mind on a scientific issue, then claimed they were right all along?
There's lots of legitimate reasons to criticize the Catholic Church. There's hypocrisy on sexual ethics of course, which is itself symptom of an inward looking bureaucracy that's more focused on keeping the ball rolling along than doing what it claims its job is. You don't have to make stuff up. But a lot of people do. They are unaware that even in the dark ages scholars (almost always attached to the church) knew that the Earth was round, and that the distance to the fixed stars was very great, and any number of things we assume they were ignorant of.
Even the Galileo affair (which by the way disproves your assertion the Catholic Church *never* explicitly recants a position) can be better understood in the context of ecclesiastic politics. Galileo had powerful supporters in the church hierarchy, but he managed to alienate them all, especially Pope Urban VIII. Galileo made it too politically costly for his supporters to defend him against the the arch-conservative forces who wanted heliocentrism quashed.
Does that mean they were right to let him be tried and convicted for heresy? Of course not. But the historical evidence shows a more nuanced picture than what we've been taught is "truth". It is better to know the entire truth, even when it does not change your opinion on the issue in dispute.
And so I think in this case of Haught v Coyne, I will withhold judgment. The summary and attached articles only present one side of this case. It may well be the right side, but before I trouble myself to get angry I want to hear both sides.
It's important to note that any expense incurred by the student loan program is a capital expense.
Take the difference between what the student loan program earns and what a normal profit would be for that much tied up capital. That's a real expense. But it's not like taking the money and burning it. You're converting it into a valuable resource; educated people.
This doesn't mean it's money well spent. I could take my inheritance from dear Uncle Moneybags and buy a Ferrari to drive around town. That's a capital expense. Or I can take that money and buy a business. That's also a capital expense. They aren't necessarily equally wise.
So whether a modest loss (compared to normal profit) is acceptable in a program like this depends on how valuable you think education is.
Slashdot Mirror
It's boring. It's low risk.
You talk about those things like they're bad things.
It's slow/minuscule/nonexistent growth.
So what? The original point stands, which is that dividends matter when you are evaluating the performance of a stock. A stock whose price doesn't grow very much but which pays dividends regularly can still be a good stock, it just plays a different role in your portfolio as a risky growth stock. It might even be a better stock, once you discount the growth stock by its risk.
I think part of the issue here is that Microsoft's stock violated people's expectations of invincibility. Some people no doubt were using the past to project the future, which can be a very foolish thing. MS caught a huge wave -- the personal computer -- at just the right time and rode it skillfully for a longer time than was reasonable to expect. They picked up some nice cash cows along the way, which is exactly what you'd want a company that got that lucky to do. But it's not reasonable to expect the kind of growth they had riding the PC boom to continue after the boom was spent. The best you can expect as an investor is that they continue to be profitable and generate cash in their mature businesses, and hope they catch a lucky break in some new ones. Apple not outclassing them so ridiculously with the iPhone or the iPad would have been such a lucky break, but it didn't happen.
MS has never been an innovative company on users; they make money on people who buy technology for other people. That's one of the reasons Windows Phones were so lousy; they catered to the carriers who were running the subsidized phone scam. Apple decided to turn that business model on its head, and the rest is history.
... related to your job. For example he doesn't own the skills you gain working for him. Nor does he own the personal relationships you develop with customers. He might in some jurisdictions be able to contractually restrict what you do with those things after you part ways, but if he doesn't think to do that in advance he's out of luck.
Now let's look at the company's actual claims. They're claiming the guy's follower list and password are trade secrets.
OK, so how about the follower list? Of course if you work for a consultancy, you can't walk of with the entire database of clients. That *is* a trade secret. But this guy's Twitter follower list isn't a secret at all, anyone can look it up, even if you aren't Twitter subscriber. Furthermore that list has never been under the control of the company. So the follower list can't possibly be the company's trade secret because it's not even a secret in the first place. And it can't be *theirs* because it was never under their control.
As for the password to the account, that has never been in the possession of the company either, therefore while it may be a secret, it's hard to see how it is *their* secret. You could argue that the guy was working for the company when he dreamed up the password, and so it was in possession of a company employee (him). That's a stretch, but he could just change the password on the account and give them the old password. That wouldn't satisfy the company because they really don't give a damn about the password. They're after something else that isn't control of secret information. They're trying to control *public* information and so gain control over the fan relationships this guy developed while in their employ. The IP claim is just bogus.
I do think the company might have some legitimate claims to certain things here. I think they might have at least a moral claim they own posts this guy wrote when he was being paid. They probably have a right to his old handle, which he no longer uses. But that's not what they want. They want the relationship this guy has with his subscribers.
It sounds like the company parted ways with this guy, not realizing they were parting ways with his fan base too. Now they're trying to undo the damage that could have been avoided by keeping him on or making advance arrangements (like insisting he use an account that they control) instead of being loosey-goosey. It's too bad for them they didn't think ahead, but that's no excuse for using the threat of legal action to secure de facto control over something they have no right to. That's theft by legal extortion.
And why does the American people still tolerate this again?
Well, what mechanism do the American people have for acting on their *in*toleration, once access to money becomes absolutely essential to getting elected, and wealth is able to exercise the influence without any restrictions?
Surely, in a democracy, ...
That's the rub, isn't it? Of course we are *formally* a democratic republic according to our Constitution, but the question is how effectively our republic still *functions* as a democracy. It's not either/or. The people might still be able to throw the bums out over a huge bungle like the Iraq war, and that is unquestionably democracy in action. Still that's a far cry from being able to elect representative who will work in the public interest. There's plenty of bipartisanship in Congress in favor of things like copyright extension, but that has nothing to do with serving the interests of the public. Both sides agree because they can't afford to let the other side have sole access to the money that position attracts.
The private sector will strive to find new ways to make money.
That's not the point. The notion that private industry is going to stop making money is a straw man. Nobody thinks that. Money *will* be made, but money doesn't care *where*. As an investor, the next quarter matters far more to you than the state of a company five years in the future. You're almost certain to have adjusted your stock positions by then. You certainly don't care *where* a company you own stock in will be making its widgets, or whether America makes widgets at all.
But most people aren't planning on changing their national residency every couple of years, if ever. It makes a difference to a citizen whether his country still makes computers or cars, or still has jobs for engineers in ten years' time.
A rational, self-interested investor just isn't concerned with the future of American competitiveness. He doesn't even care if American society goes to hell in ten or twenty years, so long as he's made enough money to insulate himself from that. Most of the country can become an impoverished, polluted dystopia so far as he's concerned, but if he can afford to move to a clean, orderly, wealthy enclave it's not a problem for him.
Money not only doesn't care where it's made, it doesn't care *how* it is made. No business innovates if it can make more money by doing the same old thing. It is competition that forces a business to innovate -- albeit only over the short term -- but no company *likes* having competition. So do you think businesses hire lobbyists to *promote* competition? Of course not. Innovation is risky and expensive. Buying politicians to protect you from competition is cheap and predictable. A society organized solely for the good of business interests is one where those interests don't innovate much because they are protected from competition.
Suppose the country had taken a "private enterprise first and only" course at the end of WW2. There's no question that businesses would have made money, maybe even more money in the short term. They'd certainly keep a lot more of their earnings because tax rates during the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s were high, much higher than today. But without the public investment in research and technology funded by those high taxes we'd still be living in a world of largely 1950 technology. Entire industries would not exist. There would be no computers, no satellite communications or GPS, no Internet, and much less biotechnology. The payback times of these investments are far longer than the planning horizons of any rational private investor. Only someone who is interested in the good of society, and the good of the nation would make those investments.
A society organized solely for the good of private enterprises would be no different from any other society organized for the benefit of a few. It would be aversive to innovation, focusing most of its energy and resources on the maintenance of the status quo. Unfortunately, most people don't seem to be able to envision any kind of world but one organized solely for the benefit of business, or one that is irrationally and implacably hostile to private enterprise. It's like they've thrown out history, even the living memory of the success of moderate, pragmatic economic policy, because the story that tells isn't tidy and simple. People seem to prefer a simpler, more radical world view, and there are plenty on both ends of the political spectrum who are happy to peddle it to them.
I find it kind of spooky that sqrt(5) appears in the formula for the golden ratio and in the closed expression formula to calculate Fibonacci numbers, and here we have it again. Oh, I can do the calculations for the eigenvalues of the Fibonacci matrix and arrive at the closed formula, it's just surprising to see sqrt(5) pop up. I suppose I should expect some irrational number expressed as a power of some rational number to pop up, but 5 seems like such an innocuous number. So far as I know sqrt(3) and sqrt(7) don't have this gatecrashing habit.
You almost couldn't pick a more innocuous looking number than 5. Of course the sqrt(2) shows up all the time, but that makes sense because of our way of seeing things in dualities and halves. If we define pi in terms of the diameter of a circle but define the circle itself in terms of its radius, we pretty much force ourselves to deal with factors of two. But the sqrt(5) thing is like some cosmic trickster looked at the succeeding prime numbers and thought, "Three comes right after two so it's too obvious; seven is too obviously non-obvious; I think I'll go with five."
I don't know. It's not as *immediate* as handing the photo to someone. You've got to ask for their e-mail or write down your web site or facebook account. Plus you've got everyone huddled around somebody's phone rather than passing several photos around.
What I think would be cool is for the photo paper to embedded have digital memory, so you could hand somebody a print and a digital copy at the same time.
I have several friends who keep bees, and they all have bee sting stories. It's a bit like a fish story; the winner is the guy who gets nailed the worst. First time I heard that I asked whether that made them want to give it up, and the response was pretty much, "Nah, I took a couple of benedryls and lay down for a twenty minutes and I was right as rain."
The punchline to these stories isn't that these guys went on keeping bees; it's that they kept taking the shortcuts that got them stung in the first place.
Obviously you're just a pussy who's not man enough to keep bees. Don't feel bad, so am I. But for men (and women) who have the figurative balls to keep bees, keeping them in the house would be cool.
Given that most Android manufacturers have signed licensing agreements with MS, it suggests that the patents are decidedly _NOT_ frivolous.
"Millions for defense, not one penny for tribute," is not how businesses run. Businesses run to maximize profit. Therefore the principle they operate on is "pay up to $999,999.99 in tribute rather than $1,000,000 in defense." If businesses always act to maximize profits, then the validity of the claim is neither here nor there. It's only a contributing factor to the cost of pursuing a claim or defending against it.
Also, if you run out of cash in business, you're bankrupt. Cash flow is the first consideration in deciding to litigate or settle a case. If one party has the cash on hand to pursue litigation and the other doesn't, that party can force a settlement on the other without regard to the merits of the case. A pot of gold at the end of a lawsuit does you no good if you don't have the cash to make it all the way to the end.
So in a nutshell, we have a system that only works if both litigants have enough cash on hand to see them through to the end of a protracted legal battle and no better use for that cash in the interim. Only in that situation can the party with the best case always force a settlement on the party with the weakest case.
The only possible way to fix this is to ensure that bad claims are never made in the first place. To do that we must prevent the granting of weak or overly broad patents, and purge any such patents currently granted. But there's no political will to do this in a climate where the people want government spending curbed and politically connected companies are making money of bogus patents.
Well, maybe the problem is the entire model of college education, which comes to us from medieval times when a young gentleman could go to university, and come home after a few years with a sizable fraction of all human knowledge. Today people have to keep learning all their lives. Why does college education have to look the way it does? Rather than contemplating dumbing down the current system, I think it makes sense to ask whether a different but equally rigorous system might be more successful.
From what I've seen, many people enter college well before they've grown up. That is not necessarily a moral failing, in fact it strikes me as irrational to expect somebody to be as mature at eighteen as he will be at twenty-two. What happens is we send everyone to college at seventeen or eighteen as a kind of experiment to see if they're ready, and obviously many are not ready to get their degree in four years. The result is that ultimate success at university is often related to the affluence of the student's parents, not necessarily the student's ultimate potential. If a student needs another semester to finish, and has no family resources to draw upon, he's stuck. I once knew a guy who was a mediocre student but had a very rich father. His dad pulled some strings so the guy could get into a master's program in public health when he was thirty or so, and from their the guy went on to earn his MD in his late 30s. Yet despite how unfair this was to other people (e.g. to the person who lost his place in med school), this guy went on to be a distinguished surgeon. In this case the exception carved out by money and influence allowed someone to reach his full potential.
I also have a strong suspicion that the brain continues to develop in certain ways well into the 20s. When I went into MIT at 17 years of age I was pretty good at math, but I feel strongly that my natural aptitude for mathematics continued to improve until I was in my late 20s. I'm also reasonably certain that many brains entering college at seventeen and eighteen have not finished developing what psychologists call "executive control functions": being able to direct attention, to control impulses to weigh the present effort against the future rewards.
I just don't think four year university right after high school works for everyone. Nor does it get the most out of many of the people who do manage make it through, but not with distinction. Some people who struggle through four years and make it out by the skin of their teeth might pass with distinction if they just started their college career two or three years later, whether that reflects life experience, brain biology or some mix.
But if the problem is that the design of the current system doesn't meet everyone's needs, then dumbing it down is the worst possible choice. The system *still* wouldn't work for the people it currently doesn't serve well, but the people it *does* serve well are cheated. On the other hand it makes no sense to shortchange students who might have equal potential but don't fit the current system, either because they need a few years seasoning or don't have the money to cushion them through a tight spot.
I'd like to see options that are equally or more rigorous, but more diverse. I'd like to see some students earn their bachelors over six years or even eight years, paying for their with co-op work or national service. Stretching out education this way would in itself would allow students to bring more life experience to classes in social sciences, literature and business management.
I'd also like to see the end of the expectation that somebody can get a bachelor's degree at twenty-one years, and coast on those credentials until he's sixty-five. I'd like to see degrees expire unless you show you've continued to learn into your thirties or beyond.
So their 'secret weapon' is that they think ahead, price aggressively in shrewdly chosen market segments, and take carefully measured strategic risks with their resources?
Does it strike anyone as ironic that it's so unusual for a company to act the way a capitalist company is *supposed* to act that it's called a 'secret weapon'?
"StreetScooter", great name for a product... that isn't a scooter.
The German word for scooter (according to Google Translate) is "Roller", so I'd guess the project name is in Germlish or Engeutch or whatever. Maybe it's like the mock Swedish names IKEA gives things that make your wife say, "Oh, honey, this Dyra skithög is just what we need to organize our string collection!"
Amazon is hardly abandoning e-ink, because you can still buy a Kindle with e-ink -- at lower prices than ever if you can accept their screensaver advertisement scheme.
As far as whether LCD or e-ink is better, I happen to have both a Kindle and a rooted Nook Color with the Kindle Reader software installed. So I always have a choice when I want to read a Kindle book of reading it on e-ink or LCD. There are some situations where e-ink wins hands down (reading in bright ambient light), others were LCD wins (photos; diagrams of almost any kind; reading in darkened rooms or in bed), and others where it is the touchscreen that makes the difference (highlighting text and entering notes).
So given a free choice of reading a book on a e-ink Kindle or an LCD tablet, most of the time I choose the LCD. With a larger, higher resolution touchscreen e-ink display, it might be about even. There's no question that e-ink in bright ambient light is the best for reading text, but I find the UI on the second generation Kindle irritating even after owning it for a couple of years. The semantics of "back" seems to be a bugbear in many UI designs; touchscreen reader UIs tend to use screen gestures to flip pages and buttons to back out of books. I find this works well, so the Kindle Touch probably brings the Kindle up to parity with reading a Kindle book on an Android tablet in the UI department.
Reading a Kindle book on my wife's iPad is even better, because the iPad's rendering is better -- at least if you read books with lots of math in them like I do. The Kindle mangles equations and makes tables a pain in the neck to read. The iPad reader also allows you to zoom in to photos, which as yet neither the nook reader nor the Amazon reader software for Android allow. Sometimes I keep an iPod touch handy when reading on the Nook or Kindle in case the formatting is messed up or I need to get a good look at a photograph or diagram.
As much as I hate to say this, it seems the bet choice in terms of convenience and user experience is using Amazon and Barnes and Noble's reader software on an Apple device.
what is really anti-competitive? Apples legal actions, or the fact that many of these patents are based on software patents which are based on total BS.
That's like asking: what kills more people, guns or bullets?
Patents are inherently anti-competitive. That's the POINT. A patent protects you from competition, but to avail yourself of that protection, you have to have the willingness to take legal action. It follows that a bogus patent is necessarily *immorally* anti-competitive because it threatens force against people who want to do something they have every right to do. The bogus patent is the threat, the legal action is the force that fulfills the threat.
Knowingly filing a questionable patent is the moral equivalent of theft. I don't mean that figuratively like "moral equivalent of war"; I mean that literally. In substance a bogus patent is theft because it improperly deprives people of that which is rightfully theirs. Bogus patents are theft by fraud, but on such a grand scale that if you look too closely it's hard to see. There's no empty, blasted open safe or jimmied doors, only documents that look as legitimate as any other document. And so consumers pay more for less choice, but life goes on, and we start to regard theft as benign. Competitors move into other markets or disappear and are never thought of again because we naturally assume failure means you didn't plan and execute your business well enough. But you can insure yourself against a burglar who steals your physical tools. You can't buy insurance against people who deprive you of your *intellectual* tools.
Future generations will look back on the whole software and business method patent bonanza the way we look back at 19th century people shooting buffalo from the windows of trains and stealing Indian land. We almost can't imagine how otherwise responsible people could have behaved that way, but the bottom line is that even decent people aren't moral philosophers. They take their moral cues from people around them, and if others do it and remain respectable, it must be OK. The exceptions are oddballs like Henry David Thoreau who refuse to take part in a system that is wrong. But being different from most people means they are less respectable than the ordinary person who casually steals or kills in a socially acceptable way.
Which is what makes this interesting. Microsoft is using its desktop monopoly to leverage entrance into the search market. This is the same thing it did to Netscape.
I did (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2504726&cid=37923728).
At my age I've been caught with egg on my face for jumping to conclusions so many times that I've learned to ask, "do I really need to have a settled opinion on this now?" That may seem funny because the question should be "am I see the whole story?", but I've found you *can't* see the whole story once you've committed yourself to a narrative, particularly a narrative involving victimization.
Once you take the attitude that you don't have to choose sides right away, you see how people twist their arguments with appeals to emotions like fear, resentment, and alienation. In this case Dr. Coyne presented a narrative in which he'd been victimized. As a skeptic, I had to ask, "What's the big deal with the video? Why can't he just tell us what his arguments were, and summarize the arguments of the other side?" After all, it's the substance of the debate that matters. It's not like a video in which the cops are caught beating some guy up; nothing on the video is evidence for anything, and so it's entirely inconsequential.
Well, I wouldn't characterize his presentation as sneering, but he doesn't do a very good job of arguing his position, and introduces a lot of distracting emotional arguments about negative things he associates with religion.
Logically, he can argue his case two ways. He can either state his criteria for incompatibility, and show that religion and science meet those criteria. Or he can state his criteria for compatibility, and show that there is at least one criterion which religion and science can never meet.
As is often the case in such philosophical debates, the crux of the difference seems to be in assumptions about terminology. What Coyne shows again and again is that religion and science are *different*, and since he obviously regards that as demonstration of incompatibility, that must be his criterion for incompatibility, a criterion which of course anyone is free to reject.
A more substantive criterion would be that a religious person cannot be a good scientist. Coyne brings this up, but then dismisses the example by claiming that these people are being inconsistent. But ultimately that's a circular argument -- it's begging the question. He concludes they are being inconsistent by assuming that which is to be shown. What he should have done is show that these individuals do poor science as a result of their religious beliefs. Even that's not *proof* of his position, but it would be disproof of these scientists' use in support of the contrary position: that science and religion are compatible if a religious person can do good science.
Another useful inconsistency criterion would be whether science can be done in a society which accepts religious beliefs. Here again he doesn't quite come to grips with the issue. He notes the large number of people who don't believe in evolution, which is certainly a problem if research into evolutionary biology is to be funded. However belief in creationism is hardly a necessary condition to religiosity. Furthermore, Coyne's argument could be turned on its head: Fundamentalists actually agree with him that science and religion are incompatible, they just choose religion over science. Religious people who believe that science and religion are compatible have no difficulty with letting science go where it may. They may be inconsistent in doing so, but once again that is what is to be demonstrated.
By assuming what is to be shown, Coyne is singularly ineffective here. Ironically, he's just preaching to the choir.
Well, using a term like "censorship" loosely is a very bad thing. We know that when somebody uses the term "piracy" to describe fair use, so we ought not make the same mistake.
Suppose I attend a party at your house, and we have an argument that's caught on video. I demand that you publish the video, and you decline. Are you *censoring* me? Of course not. I have a right to my opinions, and I have a right to express my opinions, but I have no right to that video just because it captured me expressing my opinions.
I have no right to even demand that you answer an argument I put forth. If you happen to do so in some situation, I have a right to quote or paraphrase your argument, but I have no right to your *performance*. If you have otherwise not chosen to answer me publicly, I may *want* that performance, but I have no *right* to it.
Er... why?
I don't understand why having the video is so important. Does somebody's debate performance make any difference to the validity of an argument? Let's say you manage to put your opponent on the spot. That's a win for your position! Let's say you make the same argument in an essay, and because your opponent has a little more time to think about it, he manages to come up with a better sounding response. Does that change the truth?
Calling this affair "censorship" is ... well it's just plain stupid, as is claiming it's a victory for science, or anything else. It's a victory for one guy's ego, that's all.
You have to love the guy's use of pulled-out-of-his-arse numbers. How do you measure what he's talking about, much less put a date on when one bundle of features will catch up with another?
The claim that the iPhone is better than the entire universe of Android phones is one that has so many variables it can't be proven or disproven; in all probability each platform will be preferred by some users with good reason. It depends on what's important to you. As far as I can see, judged as tool you carry around in your pocket rather than as a lifestyle statement, there isn't really much difference between an iPhone and a quality Android phone, but your mileage may vary.
But take an inherently squishy statement like "The iPhone is better than Android phones" and put a number in it, and suddenly it becomes news because it *sounds* objective: "The iPhone has a two year lead over Android." Of course even if you could quantify the differences between platforms, trusting a claim like requires you also trust the speaker's ability to predict what his competition will come up with over the course of two years. Good luck with that.
About they only way to give that statement more spurious authority would be to add even more precision to the claim: "The iPhone has a twenty-seven month lead over Android."
One side (the religious) doesn't want you to see it.
We don't know that. All we have is one side of the story that says the *other* side is suppressing things. Since it's not urgent for me to take a position, I choose to wait and see if there is something else going on.
Oh, you're not alone, but I think you are misguided.
There are other remarkable features of the Fukukshima incident that are worth studying besides the death count. Unlike the primary damage of the Tsunami, Fukushima unfolded slowly, and so we can study how people thought and reacted as it unfolded. That tells a very interesting story.
The most remarkable feature of the Fukushima disaster was how it kept producing surprises -- things that were not supposed to happen, and which seemed inexplicable when they did. Later as we study the disaster we will turn the inexplicable into the obvious -- in other words we will have learned a lesson.
This also demonstrates a feature of human cognition that it would be well to train out of professionals tasked with handling such situations. That is a bias toward what we see as "normal" or "usual". That bias doesn't come into play when we're planning something new, because that thing is not the status quo. We can therefore look at very unusual situations and make decisions about responding to them, and the actual results in Fukushima show how valuable that kind of forethought was.
Once something becomes a reality, it becomes much harder to rationally judge what we should do about unusual events involving it. We experience "normal" every day, and so the unusual just feels that much more hypothetical.
For instance, after the plant was built new scientific data showed that the maximum likely tsunami was several meters higher than previously thought. A walk-through of the plant with the same mindset employed during the planning phase would have uncovered many possible responses to that new information, some of which would have been quite practical and inexpensive. But the hypothetical tsunami wasn't taken seriously and there was only a token response: the emergency generators were raised by a few centimeters. Had they been raised several meters it is quite possible the reactors that were lost would have been saved.
It so happens that the flooding damage and the Fukushima disaster were both caused by the same instigating event; but otherwise they are unrelated events, each worth studying for its own reason. To see how this is true, imagine that *nobody* had died as a result of flooding and that damage to things other than the nuclear plant was minimal. Would that make the Fukushima incident *more* serious? Of course not. It's seriousness as a nuclear accident is independent of anything else that was going on at the same time.
Sure, but to be a hypocrite in this case you'd have to advocate that Anonymous take on the cartels. I don't think that is what is going on here. As usual the criticism is not very cogently stated, but I take the gist of it to be an attack on Anonymous's naiveté in thinking they could take on the drug cartels, in thinking that the cartels were no different from Anonymous's prior targets.
I'll put an even finer point on it. This incident demonstrates the danger of believing political hyperbole. I believe that HBGary is willing to be an opportunistic leach on the public good, and without somebody like Anonymous there wouldn't be any counter-argument to "everybody else does it." That doesn't obligate me to believe they are the moral equivalent of a Mexican drug gang. HBGary is evil, alright, but it's a contemptibly petty kind of evil, like a shopkeeper who cheats his needy customers. The drug gangs are more like serial murderers. Greedy, unprincipled shopkeepers and serial murderers are both evil, but on a different scale. Being able to see that is a good thing.
So your suggestion is that since things are bad in one area, we should make them as horrible as possible? How about instead we take every inch we can towards making things better?
It seems to me you are missing the point. The poster was questioning the assumption that laws and policies are a true reflection of the will of the people. In other words, justifying a law by saying it is the will of the people, then using the existence of that law as proof of public support *begs the question*. It's a circular argument.
The law in question might well reflect the will of the people. Many laws do. But many other laws most people aren't aware of and address issues most people have never gave any thought to. I suspect the law about defunding any agency that recognizes the Palestinian Authority is one of those. What fraction of the people knew that law was on the books, were aware when it came up for a vote, or know how their own representatives voted on it?
In any case, I can easily refute the notion that "every little bit counts" in policy matters like this. There are true fiscal conservatives, and opportunistic fiscal conservatives. A true fiscal conservative might think nothing should be spent in the federal budget except on defense and law enforcement, and then the least possible. An opportunistic fiscal conservative is someone who uses fiscal conservative arguments against programs he does not like, but abandons them when a program he happens to like is at stake. Such a person might argue from fiscally conservative grounds that UNESCO should be de-funded, but then advocate spending money to discourage birth control around the world, or the funding of a public project in his district he would never support in another district, except as a quid pro quo.
Let's say the true fiscal conservatives make alliance with opportunistic fiscal conservatives to de-fund UNESCO. Is that a small victory for fiscal conservatism? I think not, because history has shown that such opportunistic fiscal conservatives have plenty of other uses for the money saved by such "victories", and there are more opportunistic fiscal conservatives than there are sincere ones.
In other words the hypocrites in your ranks do you no favors. A real fiscal conservative would do better to ally himself with people who don't claim to be principled fiscal conservatives, but can accommodate fiscally conservative measures in order to get other things of value. A deal struck with them really would be a small victory.
So, they did what they always do: they changed their tunes.
You say that like it was a bad thing.
Yet, at the same time, they proclaim that they had it right all along and present a consistent and unchanging universal truth.
Can you cite an instance where they changed their mind on a scientific issue, then claimed they were right all along?
There's lots of legitimate reasons to criticize the Catholic Church. There's hypocrisy on sexual ethics of course, which is itself symptom of an inward looking bureaucracy that's more focused on keeping the ball rolling along than doing what it claims its job is. You don't have to make stuff up. But a lot of people do. They are unaware that even in the dark ages scholars (almost always attached to the church) knew that the Earth was round, and that the distance to the fixed stars was very great, and any number of things we assume they were ignorant of.
Even the Galileo affair (which by the way disproves your assertion the Catholic Church *never* explicitly recants a position) can be better understood in the context of ecclesiastic politics. Galileo had powerful supporters in the church hierarchy, but he managed to alienate them all, especially Pope Urban VIII. Galileo made it too politically costly for his supporters to defend him against the the arch-conservative forces who wanted heliocentrism quashed.
Does that mean they were right to let him be tried and convicted for heresy? Of course not. But the historical evidence shows a more nuanced picture than what we've been taught is "truth". It is better to know the entire truth, even when it does not change your opinion on the issue in dispute.
And so I think in this case of Haught v Coyne, I will withhold judgment. The summary and attached articles only present one side of this case. It may well be the right side, but before I trouble myself to get angry I want to hear both sides.
It's important to note that any expense incurred by the student loan program is a capital expense.
Take the difference between what the student loan program earns and what a normal profit would be for that much tied up capital. That's a real expense. But it's not like taking the money and burning it. You're converting it into a valuable resource; educated people.
This doesn't mean it's money well spent. I could take my inheritance from dear Uncle Moneybags and buy a Ferrari to drive around town. That's a capital expense. Or I can take that money and buy a business. That's also a capital expense. They aren't necessarily equally wise.
So whether a modest loss (compared to normal profit) is acceptable in a program like this depends on how valuable you think education is.