Well, the country that has perfected Big Brother techniques to the greatest extent is China. One of the things they've figured out is that you don't have to be harsh all the time. That's crude. You don't have to be looking all the time. That's inefficient.
The key to controlling people is uncertainty. Am I being watched now? Is what I'm doing going to draw attention to myself? That's when people internalize Big Brother. Big Brother needn't be looking, because people do it to themselves.
The important thing is not the cameras, it's the database. It's not the database per se, it's whether the rules for using the database a clear and enforced. China's legal system allows the regime to have its cake and eat it too. They can be harsher than they are, so they get credit for restraint. But restraint actually works better. People don't, in effect, know what the law is, what will trigger legal problems. That's not law in operation. That's power. Governments have to have power to do their job. What makes it tolerable is when governments have rules that they must obey, and accountability for their actions.
Faithful in what way? To the canon? To the idealism? To the optimism? Or to the style?
From J. J. Abrams' interview, the most conscious departure was in style, specifically he was copying the pacing of the original Star Wars. That's a significant departure. Star Trek was never the kind of series where you could understand what was going on with the sound turned off. I'm not sure you'd lose that much from Star Wars.
From what I've heard, the canon departures are what have the few people who are up in arms, up in arms. But I'm not sure you can do a canon faithful film for anybody but fans. On the other hand, fans are doing that for themselves these days, and some of the efforts are actually not horribly bad.
I'd say the most relevant factor is build quality. Somehow I don't think the difference between a $1000 notebook and a $2000 notebook is really specs -- at least the price differential isn't driven by a processor GHz or disk size. It is, largely as you suggest, market segmentation. But part of that segmentation is build quality. You can get a laptop for $1000 that is within spitting distance of a $2000 laptop, but it may have a dreadful keyboard because there's no spec for spec bargain shoppers to compare.
Simply put, Apple and Lenovo make the best built laptops I've seen. Other name brand laptops may spec out as a better bargain than a ThinkPad, but I've been down that road, having the things start to fall apart after six months.
No, translation: it's wrong to take away something people enjoy to make yourself feel better, but exaggerating that wrong isn't a sensible way of opposing it.
No, they're becoming Scandinavians. That's what they were in the Bronze age, anyway. They're just taking an extra century or so to sublimate that barbarian raider energy into obsessive-compulsive social democracy.
I don't know if they are "creating a much bigger problem". What problem is that?
It seems to me that they're passing laws just to make people feel like something is being done. It's not going to do any good, and it's going to do bad -- but just a tiny bit of bad. Certainly not a "much bigger problem" than somebody killing over a dozen people, but still a little bit bad.
I dunno. Have you ever seen the famous photo of the fence that ran directly across a fault line that slipped in an earthquake? It was split into two segments, whose ends were several feet apart.
Being right on top of a fault means that the facility won't just be shaken; different parts of it will move in different directions. Over thousands of years that could add up.
Insurance is a variable cost. If you cut your mileage below a certain point, you can get your premiums lowered. It's not much, but something.
If you can cut a car out, then of course you do cut out a lot of expense. This might seem unreasonable, but you'd be surprised. I live next door to a house that had two adults and two teenagers, and four cars. If one one of the adults could have taken public transit, the certainly could have "got by" on three cars.
The thing about performance is that you go so darn quickly from having plenty of it to having not enough of it. A 5% difference is not just a 5% difference, it may be an extra margin of safety before you fall over the edge of the peformance cliff.
My experiences with Vista were on a dual core 1.6GHz Duo with 1GB; the same with 3GB, then a 2.53GHz Duo with 4GB of RAM. When the older machine was working well, the older machine wasn't perceptibly slower than the much more powerful new one. What happens is that from time to time the old machine simply became unusuable -- more RAM helped of course. The new machine remains usable all the time.
* This data is from the site of the poster's graph, and local spending data becomes available only for 1992. This can be seen by the sudden spike in the early 90% "Government Spending as % of GDP" graph. Since the data is included for 2009 but not for 1991 and earlier, it exaggerates the trends in gvernment spending as percent of GDP. The slight discrepancy between the combined federal and state spending in the table above and the graph is probably due to the graph deducting transfer payments, which were about 3.5% in 2009. This would give a combined Federal, State and Local spending (net of transfers) of 44.66%.
** This large spike is probably an artifact of GDP contraction.
One small point needs to be made about the poster's assertion that the government "swallows" 36% of the GDP. In fact it does no such thing. It turns around and spends that money in the economy, and government spending can just as justifiably be represented as "contributing 36% of the GDP".
If government spending disappeared overnight, and all that tax revenue remained in private hands, then naturally private spending would increase, but not necessarily by 36% withing the US economy, especially during an extended recession when both demand and investment are depressed.
I'm not sure that the kind of things you can determine from an extremely detailed familiarity with the system behavior are so worthless.
The biggest expense in any really complicated project is either (a) effort expended on things you don't need or (b) effort expended to get things you overlooked done by yesterday. Having a punch list containing exactly the things that need to be done is a huge money saver. I've never played WoW, but I doubt there's anything particularly special about the AI or physics simulations or anything like that. If there were, knowing that it was there and necessary would be a big help.
After that you need artistic talent. Where would a country with 1.3 billion people and an undervalued currency find that? I'd be willing to bet there's a lot of value to be found in just re-skinning the old game concepts in an artistically exotic way. I was watching one of my kids play one of those Link games, and was surprised (I guess I shouldn't have been) to see Japanese ukiyo-e influenced art elements.
I remember rifle stock style camera mounts from the late 70s for use with telephotos. This is the first time I've seen an actual rifle stock used; the ones from back then were made from pine and had a simple cable release "trigger". This one looks nicer, and a lot heavier.
I have a nephew who was a Ham radio operator with his Amateur Extra Class, as well as an avid hiker and outdoorsman. He had no plans to go to college right away. He made the mistake of talking to a Marine Recruiter, and they slotted him right away into a particular class of recruit they were looking for. It was like being stalked by Big Brother. They showed up places he hung out at, talked to people he knew, they even started calling him on his cell phone which he never gives out to anyone.
It was stupid, because they actually had a chance of getting him to sign up if they hadn't pulled the Big Brother baloney on him. That freaked him out.
Ah, Watson, but notice this curious "Fucking Bunch of Idiots". A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his nouns.
And exactly where do you think tax money comes from when some companies can evade taxes?
I propose that they come from two places. (1) companies that cannot evade taxes as effectively. (2) Individuals who reduce their consumption to make up for the taxes. Moving the tax burden to these two groups also creates FEWER JOBS.
You've never worked with a lawyer, obviously. At least not a good one. A lawyer almost never tells you something is perfectly OK unless it's some kind of constitutional right. Things involving torts (as these issues would) almost always results in a spectrum of advice and risk mitigation strategies.
I still don't understand the conservative position on taxation. Surely the issue is not taxation, but spending. Once the spending has been decided upon, then clearly there must be either taxation or borrowing to pay for it. It seems to me that borrowing is appropriate for capital expenditures and taxation appropriate for operating expenditures.
I kind of understand the theory that limiting taxation restrains spending. I just haven't seen any proof that it actually happens.
In any case, I don't see why it's a bad thing for the government to add more transactions to the list of taxable ones. Surely, that distorts economic decisions less. Sure, I get out of state sales tax when I buy from Amazon, but they take it out of my hide in other ways. I'd happily pay sales tax on my Amazon purchases, knowing it reduces the tax burden on local businesses. Likewise ad impressions are an economic commodity that are bought and sold. Why should this commodity have an exemption.
Of course when we're talking about "taxing X to pay for Y", it's a bit different. Right off the bat we're talking about deliberate economic distortion. When we tax gas to pay for highways, we're discouraging the use of gas while encouraging the use of highways. Maybe that's a good thing. As a society we get benefits out of being tied together by roads but we are also made vulnerable by our petro addiction.
Taxing Internet revenues to pay for the BBC likewise puts its thumb on the scales of economics. Is that the same kind of thing as gas and highways? I'm not sure. Maybe it would be, if there were some impartial way to pay for news gathering. I don't think that supporting one kind of entertainment over another, but the changes the Internet is creating in news gathering are definitely undesirable.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the country that has perfected Big Brother techniques to the greatest extent is China. One of the things they've figured out is that you don't have to be harsh all the time. That's crude. You don't have to be looking all the time. That's inefficient.
The key to controlling people is uncertainty. Am I being watched now? Is what I'm doing going to draw attention to myself? That's when people internalize Big Brother. Big Brother needn't be looking, because people do it to themselves.
The important thing is not the cameras, it's the database. It's not the database per se, it's whether the rules for using the database a clear and enforced. China's legal system allows the regime to have its cake and eat it too. They can be harsher than they are, so they get credit for restraint. But restraint actually works better. People don't, in effect, know what the law is, what will trigger legal problems. That's not law in operation. That's power. Governments have to have power to do their job. What makes it tolerable is when governments have rules that they must obey, and accountability for their actions.
Faithful in what way? To the canon? To the idealism? To the optimism? Or to the style?
From J. J. Abrams' interview, the most conscious departure was in style, specifically he was copying the pacing of the original Star Wars. That's a significant departure. Star Trek was never the kind of series where you could understand what was going on with the sound turned off. I'm not sure you'd lose that much from Star Wars.
From what I've heard, the canon departures are what have the few people who are up in arms, up in arms. But I'm not sure you can do a canon faithful film for anybody but fans. On the other hand, fans are doing that for themselves these days, and some of the efforts are actually not horribly bad.
I'd say the most relevant factor is build quality. Somehow I don't think the difference between a $1000 notebook and a $2000 notebook is really specs -- at least the price differential isn't driven by a processor GHz or disk size. It is, largely as you suggest, market segmentation. But part of that segmentation is build quality. You can get a laptop for $1000 that is within spitting distance of a $2000 laptop, but it may have a dreadful keyboard because there's no spec for spec bargain shoppers to compare.
Simply put, Apple and Lenovo make the best built laptops I've seen. Other name brand laptops may spec out as a better bargain than a ThinkPad, but I've been down that road, having the things start to fall apart after six months.
No, translation: it's wrong to take away something people enjoy to make yourself feel better, but exaggerating that wrong isn't a sensible way of opposing it.
No, they're becoming Scandinavians. That's what they were in the Bronze age, anyway. They're just taking an extra century or so to sublimate that barbarian raider energy into obsessive-compulsive social democracy.
I don't know if they are "creating a much bigger problem". What problem is that?
It seems to me that they're passing laws just to make people feel like something is being done. It's not going to do any good, and it's going to do bad -- but just a tiny bit of bad. Certainly not a "much bigger problem" than somebody killing over a dozen people, but still a little bit bad.
where you wrangle the croc out of the swimming pool with your bare hands.
Tie me kangaroo down, mate, indeed.
Shelob's spawn.
I dunno. Have you ever seen the famous photo of the fence that ran directly across a fault line that slipped in an earthquake? It was split into two segments, whose ends were several feet apart.
Being right on top of a fault means that the facility won't just be shaken; different parts of it will move in different directions. Over thousands of years that could add up.
Insurance is a variable cost. If you cut your mileage below a certain point, you can get your premiums lowered. It's not much, but something.
If you can cut a car out, then of course you do cut out a lot of expense. This might seem unreasonable, but you'd be surprised. I live next door to a house that had two adults and two teenagers, and four cars. If one one of the adults could have taken public transit, the certainly could have "got by" on three cars.
The thing about performance is that you go so darn quickly from having plenty of it to having not enough of it. A 5% difference is not just a 5% difference, it may be an extra margin of safety before you fall over the edge of the peformance cliff.
My experiences with Vista were on a dual core 1.6GHz Duo with 1GB; the same with 3GB, then a 2.53GHz Duo with 4GB of RAM. When the older machine was working well, the older machine wasn't perceptibly slower than the much more powerful new one. What happens is that from time to time the old machine simply became unusuable -- more RAM helped of course. The new machine remains usable all the time.
Well, the graph is somewhat broken, but 35% is about right if you include Federal AND state spending. This is from data at the same site:
Spending as % GDP
1900: Fed:03% State:05%
1910: Fed:03% State:06%
1920: Fed:08% State:05%
1930: Fed:04% State:09%
1940: Fed:10% State:11%
1950: Fed:15% State:10%
1960: Fed:18% State:12%
1970: Fed:19% State:14%
1980: Fed:21% State:16%
1990: Fed:22% State:17%
2000: Fed:18% State:08% Local:10% *
2008: Fed:21% State:09% Local:11%
2009: Fed:28% State:09% Local:11% **
* This data is from the site of the poster's graph, and local spending data becomes available only for 1992. This can be seen by the sudden spike in the early 90% "Government Spending as % of GDP" graph. Since the data is included for 2009 but not for 1991 and earlier, it exaggerates the trends in gvernment spending as percent of GDP. The slight discrepancy between the combined federal and state spending in the table above and the graph is probably due to the graph deducting transfer payments, which were about 3.5% in 2009. This would give a combined Federal, State and Local spending (net of transfers) of 44.66%.
** This large spike is probably an artifact of GDP contraction.
One small point needs to be made about the poster's assertion that the government "swallows" 36% of the GDP. In fact it does no such thing. It turns around and spends that money in the economy, and government spending can just as justifiably be represented as "contributing 36% of the GDP".
If government spending disappeared overnight, and all that tax revenue remained in private hands, then naturally private spending would increase, but not necessarily by 36% withing the US economy, especially during an extended recession when both demand and investment are depressed.
I'm not sure that the kind of things you can determine from an extremely detailed familiarity with the system behavior are so worthless.
The biggest expense in any really complicated project is either (a) effort expended on things you don't need or (b) effort expended to get things you overlooked done by yesterday. Having a punch list containing exactly the things that need to be done is a huge money saver. I've never played WoW, but I doubt there's anything particularly special about the AI or physics simulations or anything like that. If there were, knowing that it was there and necessary would be a big help.
After that you need artistic talent. Where would a country with 1.3 billion people and an undervalued currency find that? I'd be willing to bet there's a lot of value to be found in just re-skinning the old game concepts in an artistically exotic way. I was watching one of my kids play one of those Link games, and was surprised (I guess I shouldn't have been) to see Japanese ukiyo-e influenced art elements.
Tesla must have been on some shit. Like mushrooms or some other psychotic food additives
Indeed he was. You've heard of "ecstasy"? Well, Tesla was on "imagination".
I remember rifle stock style camera mounts from the late 70s for use with telephotos. This is the first time I've seen an actual rifle stock used; the ones from back then were made from pine and had a simple cable release "trigger". This one looks nicer, and a lot heavier.
Are you really that much of a dumbass? Microsoft changed the ratings which nobody ever understood anyway and they would never explain.
Oh is that what they're up to?
Thank you for your contribution.
German Capitalization, my dear Boy.
Oh, but if you ask...
I have a nephew who was a Ham radio operator with his Amateur Extra Class, as well as an avid hiker and outdoorsman. He had no plans to go to college right away. He made the mistake of talking to a Marine Recruiter, and they slotted him right away into a particular class of recruit they were looking for. It was like being stalked by Big Brother. They showed up places he hung out at, talked to people he knew, they even started calling him on his cell phone which he never gives out to anyone.
It was stupid, because they actually had a chance of getting him to sign up if they hadn't pulled the Big Brother baloney on him. That freaked him out.
You haven't heard of coordinate protests? You undermine freedom by being at the wrong (x,y,z) at the wrong (t).
Ah, Watson, but notice this curious "Fucking Bunch of Idiots". A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his nouns.
you don't know what a page fault is, do you?
It's an electoral liability in the House of Representatives.
Excellent! The top speed of Windows 7 is 7.9 rather than 5.9. That a 34% increase.
And exactly where do you think tax money comes from when some companies can evade taxes?
I propose that they come from two places. (1) companies that cannot evade taxes as effectively. (2) Individuals who reduce their consumption to make up for the taxes. Moving the tax burden to these two groups also creates FEWER JOBS.
You've never worked with a lawyer, obviously. At least not a good one. A lawyer almost never tells you something is perfectly OK unless it's some kind of constitutional right. Things involving torts (as these issues would) almost always results in a spectrum of advice and risk mitigation strategies.
I still don't understand the conservative position on taxation. Surely the issue is not taxation, but spending. Once the spending has been decided upon, then clearly there must be either taxation or borrowing to pay for it. It seems to me that borrowing is appropriate for capital expenditures and taxation appropriate for operating expenditures.
I kind of understand the theory that limiting taxation restrains spending. I just haven't seen any proof that it actually happens.
In any case, I don't see why it's a bad thing for the government to add more transactions to the list of taxable ones. Surely, that distorts economic decisions less. Sure, I get out of state sales tax when I buy from Amazon, but they take it out of my hide in other ways. I'd happily pay sales tax on my Amazon purchases, knowing it reduces the tax burden on local businesses. Likewise ad impressions are an economic commodity that are bought and sold. Why should this commodity have an exemption.
Of course when we're talking about "taxing X to pay for Y", it's a bit different. Right off the bat we're talking about deliberate economic distortion. When we tax gas to pay for highways, we're discouraging the use of gas while encouraging the use of highways. Maybe that's a good thing. As a society we get benefits out of being tied together by roads but we are also made vulnerable by our petro addiction.
Taxing Internet revenues to pay for the BBC likewise puts its thumb on the scales of economics. Is that the same kind of thing as gas and highways? I'm not sure. Maybe it would be, if there were some impartial way to pay for news gathering. I don't think that supporting one kind of entertainment over another, but the changes the Internet is creating in news gathering are definitely undesirable.