Paranoid security and open source browsers are a good match-up. Most people are wrong to be paranoid, but obviously some are right to be. I guess most people are wrong to buy fire insurance too, but erring on the side of paranoid there isn't quite so stigmatized. I bet in Iran secure browsing isn't stigmatized among the people either.
Something the GOP doesn't point out...the DOW has gotten a lot better, in fact it's at 2006 levels
That it was at these levels in 2006 isn't really what most people go by. It first reached these levels in 1999. Of course, that's just nominally.
If you figure in inflation, by current government CPI metrics, it would need to be at $15,100 to be at the same 1999 levels. If you use the 1950-1990's government inflation calculations, it would need to be nearer to $20,000 to be equivalent. That doubling would line up with all of the commodity prices as well.
Just going by CPI, we're closer to 1997 levels presently.
and still climbing... but it's trending upward.
Depends on your timescale, of course. It is up for the month, I'll grant you that. It's also down for the week, the quarter, and the year. The longer-term trends are usually more significant - making the case that this month's performance represents a turn-around is a more difficult argument.
Now give people 40 hours shifts, and better pay and working conditions.
I haven't done a 40-hour 'shift' since College, but boy was that brutal. I wouldn't recommend it.
I'd also not recommending eliminating low-paying jobs, because people who can't get high-paying jobs need low-paying jobs. Walmart shouldn't be a career for most people.
I've never bought into the GMO hysteria, but this article does make me think twice about eating it. If, say, corn, is just digested, I couldn't care less. But if the GMO's DNA will be interacting with my cells, the level of safety concern is different.
I still think most GMO's get a bad rap - people are starving and going blind because of the fear (both worse than any GMO side-effects), but those are 3rd world problems, and I have 1st world problems to worry about.
it can be pretty tricky to find anything that doesn't have at least a $15 base price
How low do you think it can really go in meatspace? That $15/mo probably represents electricity, billing, one or two phone calls a year, and replacing some infrastructure every several years. Plus maybe a few bucks a year into a 'shared pool' to deal with a lightning strike that requires a full local rebuild.
It's already about the same cost as a pizza, or a movie and popcorn. Maybe lunch for two at McDonald's if you spring for the supersize.
JFGI, don't turn your ignorance into indignation. He's right, of course. Even ZFS needs flags to get its block alignment correct, for the time being. Check out BSD's blacklist for why even hard drive manufacturers' data sheets are unreliable.
Personally, if I bought a system from a vendor and he always told me he was just an assembler and to go talk to the parts vendors, I wouldn't buy from him again. The parts vendors wouldn't talk to me either, as OEM parts don't come with end-user support.
The real fun will begin when Microsoft decides to EOL your hardware by not releasing keys for newer versions of Windows, even if the machine has the specs to run it.
Owners of perfectly good PowerPC Macs know just what you're talking about. Truly, Microsoft is imitating Apple in every way.
abolishing the patent system would be horrid. Why don't you try being an inventor for a few years, then get back to me.
BTDT. I've had to scuttle two startups due to the impossibility of navigating the patent minefield without significant investor backing. Did you know every form of onscreen keyboard that's practical to implement is patented? The other product involved a VoIP system, a field which is also entirely patented, sometimes with multiple patents covering the same basic 'invention'. Without the current US patent system, there would be two companies in operating selling useful products - that aren't now because of it (and my desire for a garage-style startup, not a VC burn-fest).
Even if my products were entirely novel and I filed for patents on them, they would have issued after the products had become obsolete already and a new generation had been developed.
As an inventor, can say with first hand experience that abolishing the patent system would be good for inventors. Full disclosure: you'll find my name out there in the patent system (with corporate assignment), but the patent system never encouraged or helped anything I've invented.
Like most life saving medications though, any prospective cure for HIV will probably be developed in the US, and approved in Europe. (Then approved in the US after decades of routine use overseas.)
So, HIV is likely to be wiped out in Africa before the US?
4G/LTE means nothing if the bandwidth limits are so paltry as to effectively make it a metered service.
Metering isn't the problem - it's the rates. Verizon is charging pretty much the same per bit today as they did in 2004 when I got a Treo 650. They're more interested in overage charges than providing a solid network. I'd be happy to be metered at a rate that was some function of cost+plus - price rationing of limited resources (spectrum) usually works well.
But, look at AT&T's proposed merger with T-Mobile. It's so incredibly difficult to put up new towers that AT&T found it easier to buy T-Mobile than to try. And they're AT&T, not some young upstart challenger. With the amount of money in the wireless business, it ought to be ripe for competition, but the FCC precludes that.
No competition = high prices and poor performance. This is always true.
Corporate-shill AC can't seem to differentiate between government and governance or make a point without losing his cool. Way to rock the political philosophy.
I've put a lot of thought into how to do it without an acronym agency and your answer seems best.
Cool. Ownership seems to be compatible with human nature. Africa has (had) big problems with wildlife poachers, elephants for example. In some areas they've assigned ownership rights to the elephants (the owners determine the harvest rates, etc.) and, surprise, surprise, those owners get out there and defend those elephants against the poachers far more effectively than the governments ever did.
When resources are declared to be common goods, the tragedy of the commons rears its ugly heads. If rivers were owned there would be direct property-rights-based recourse for river pollution - same as if your neighbor came by and dumped a barrel of oil on your lawn. Yeah, people need water to live, but people also need food and clothing and housing to live. People also need land to grow food and build houses, but aside from the Georgists and communists, most people are OK with land being privately owned. Keeping those resources public requires a huge bureaucracy to do a poor to mediocre job of protecting them. The price mechanism does at least as good a job through massively-parallel decision making.
Societal norms and societal evolution can't be discounted either. Statists love to tout the Clean Water and Air Acts, but a careful examination of the data will show that the conditions rapidly improved in the decade before they were put into effect. Sure, they had some positive impacts, but at a high cost when technology and societal wealth were already working on the problem. It's reminiscent of Marx's later review of his statistics when he received data on the Industrial Revolution of England for the period for which he had originally done his work.
Our current system pre-dates much of the foundational work of modern economics (~1850-1940) so it's not surprising that there are impedance mismatches.
Why the F... would you put your money in a company you didn't research and make sure they were legit?
At the risk of answering a rhetorical question, there is a real answer: because the government privatizes the gains and socializes the risks and losses through the corporate structure.
I would assume that libertarians would support suing the individuals (not the corporation) most directly culpable.
Yes, maybe. Libertarianism is a political strategy, not a political philosophy (several philosophies converge on promoting individual liberty). A Libertarian may advocate for a return to the pre-Civil-War era concept of weak, limited, or non-existent corporations, but if the corporations are around anyway, they will sue the corporation to protect the environment using property rights. They may prefer to not have to use the court system, or even not have property rights in some wings, but usually they take whichever route is available to maximize individual liberty.
I wish I could sue the midwestern coal plants that make my eyes sting in the summertime here, but the government effectively precludes that option from me.
if we just let mega-corporations do whatever the fuck they want (including pumping whatever shit into the air they feel like), then we would all live in some libertarian utopia.
No, that's the corporatist position. Libertarians tend to be anti-corporate and would advocate for individuals suing those corporations for polluting their property. They favor stronger property rights than is typically* allowed in Western courts.
* sometimes courts do allow this, e.g. MTBE in groundwater, but it's pretty rare.
That doesn't mean tax receipts go down when you raise taxes on the wealthy.
Right, not necessarily - it's dependent on the rate - the setpoint of that curve is what Laffer was getting at. I think this has the data you're looking for:
The individual income tax brought in 7.8% of GDP from 1952 to 1979 when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 92%, 8% of GDP from 1993 to 1996 when the top tax rate was 39.6%, and 8.1% from 1988 to 1990 when the highest individual income tax rate was 28%.... Using IRS data, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley have estimated that realized capital gains accounted for just 13%-22% of reported income among the top 1% of taxpayers from 1988 to 2006, when gains were taxed at 28% â" but that fraction swiftly reached 29%-32% in 1998-2000, when the capital gains tax fell to 20%.... The average tax rate of the top 400 fell to 16.6% in 2007 from 22.9% in 2002. Even though there was no stock market boom as in 1997-2000, real revenues of the top 400 nevertheless doubled again â" to $14.5 billion in 2007 from $6.9 billion in 2002. Instead of paying less when the capital gains tax rate went down in 1997 and 2003, the top 400 instead paid much, much more.
So I repeat my question. Name an economist who says that if you increases taxes, taxes will go down because rich people will avoid them.
You've heard of tax shelters, right? Offshore accounts? Trusts, foundations, personal corporations? It doesn't take an economist to see that without an income tax or a death tax these are unnecessary.
If you insist on hearing it from an economist, I bet there are some on here.
Sadly, I suspect someone thinks users prefer convenience over security
If only computing devices had a way to indicate preferences!:)
Practically, I suspect this will get pushed upstream to CyanogenMod pretty soon. There's enough hardware support in 2.6.38 for hardware acceleration (low power) AES on OMAP which makes it a reasonable thing to do.
I can see many organizations opting for CM when this happens.
Slashdot Mirror
But only on Firefox.
Paranoid security and open source browsers are a good match-up. Most people are wrong to be paranoid, but obviously some are right to be. I guess most people are wrong to buy fire insurance too, but erring on the side of paranoid there isn't quite so stigmatized. I bet in Iran secure browsing isn't stigmatized among the people either.
Something the GOP doesn't point out...the DOW has gotten a lot better, in fact it's at 2006 levels
That it was at these levels in 2006 isn't really what most people go by. It first reached these levels in 1999. Of course, that's just nominally.
If you figure in inflation, by current government CPI metrics, it would need to be at $15,100 to be at the same 1999 levels. If you use the 1950-1990's government inflation calculations, it would need to be nearer to $20,000 to be equivalent. That doubling would line up with all of the commodity prices as well.
Just going by CPI, we're closer to 1997 levels presently.
and still climbing... but it's trending upward.
Depends on your timescale, of course. It is up for the month, I'll grant you that. It's also down for the week, the quarter, and the year. The longer-term trends are usually more significant - making the case that this month's performance represents a turn-around is a more difficult argument.
Now give people 40 hours shifts, and better pay and working conditions.
I haven't done a 40-hour 'shift' since College, but boy was that brutal. I wouldn't recommend it.
I'd also not recommending eliminating low-paying jobs, because people who can't get high-paying jobs need low-paying jobs. Walmart shouldn't be a career for most people.
I've never bought into the GMO hysteria, but this article does make me think twice about eating it. If, say, corn, is just digested, I couldn't care less. But if the GMO's DNA will be interacting with my cells, the level of safety concern is different.
I still think most GMO's get a bad rap - people are starving and going blind because of the fear (both worse than any GMO side-effects), but those are 3rd world problems, and I have 1st world problems to worry about.
it can be pretty tricky to find anything that doesn't have at least a $15 base price
How low do you think it can really go in meatspace? That $15/mo probably represents electricity, billing, one or two phone calls a year, and replacing some infrastructure every several years. Plus maybe a few bucks a year into a 'shared pool' to deal with a lightning strike that requires a full local rebuild.
It's already about the same cost as a pizza, or a movie and popcorn. Maybe lunch for two at McDonald's if you spring for the supersize.
What the fuck does that mean?
JFGI, don't turn your ignorance into indignation. He's right, of course. Even ZFS needs flags to get its block alignment correct, for the time being. Check out BSD's blacklist for why even hard drive manufacturers' data sheets are unreliable.
Personally, if I bought a system from a vendor and he always told me he was just an assembler and to go talk to the parts vendors, I wouldn't buy from him again. The parts vendors wouldn't talk to me either, as OEM parts don't come with end-user support.
The real fun will begin when Microsoft decides to EOL your hardware by not releasing keys for newer versions of Windows, even if the machine has the specs to run it.
Owners of perfectly good PowerPC Macs know just what you're talking about. Truly, Microsoft is imitating Apple in every way.
abolishing the patent system would be horrid. Why don't you try being an inventor for a few years, then get back to me.
BTDT. I've had to scuttle two startups due to the impossibility of navigating the patent minefield without significant investor backing. Did you know every form of onscreen keyboard that's practical to implement is patented? The other product involved a VoIP system, a field which is also entirely patented, sometimes with multiple patents covering the same basic 'invention'. Without the current US patent system, there would be two companies in operating selling useful products - that aren't now because of it (and my desire for a garage-style startup, not a VC burn-fest).
Even if my products were entirely novel and I filed for patents on them, they would have issued after the products had become obsolete already and a new generation had been developed.
As an inventor, can say with first hand experience that abolishing the patent system would be good for inventors. Full disclosure: you'll find my name out there in the patent system (with corporate assignment), but the patent system never encouraged or helped anything I've invented.
You must be pretty wealthy if you think you can afford to sue a power company over their coal plants. That's not a option for most people.
You complain about a legal system set up to protect the corporatocracy and then imply we need to keep the corporatocracy because of it?
Which libertarian are you talking about? I'm not one, so it's not me. I wonder who else.
Did Mozilla go hire some MBAs or something? That's the only rational explanation for this idiocy.
C'mon, now, be fair - that's far from the only rational explanation.
They might have hired Netflix.
Like most life saving medications though, any prospective cure for HIV will probably be developed in the US, and approved in Europe. (Then approved in the US after decades of routine use overseas.)
So, HIV is likely to be wiped out in Africa before the US?
So why can't I get the replacement disk?
You haven't heard of medical tourism?
4G/LTE means nothing if the bandwidth limits are so paltry as to effectively make it a metered service.
Metering isn't the problem - it's the rates. Verizon is charging pretty much the same per bit today as they did in 2004 when I got a Treo 650. They're more interested in overage charges than providing a solid network. I'd be happy to be metered at a rate that was some function of cost+plus - price rationing of limited resources (spectrum) usually works well.
But, look at AT&T's proposed merger with T-Mobile. It's so incredibly difficult to put up new towers that AT&T found it easier to buy T-Mobile than to try. And they're AT&T, not some young upstart challenger. With the amount of money in the wireless business, it ought to be ripe for competition, but the FCC precludes that.
No competition = high prices and poor performance. This is always true.
Corporate-shill AC can't seem to differentiate between government and governance or make a point without losing his cool. Way to rock the political philosophy.
I've put a lot of thought into how to do it without an acronym agency and your answer seems best.
Cool. Ownership seems to be compatible with human nature. Africa has (had) big problems with wildlife poachers, elephants for example. In some areas they've assigned ownership rights to the elephants (the owners determine the harvest rates, etc.) and, surprise, surprise, those owners get out there and defend those elephants against the poachers far more effectively than the governments ever did.
When resources are declared to be common goods, the tragedy of the commons rears its ugly heads. If rivers were owned there would be direct property-rights-based recourse for river pollution - same as if your neighbor came by and dumped a barrel of oil on your lawn. Yeah, people need water to live, but people also need food and clothing and housing to live. People also need land to grow food and build houses, but aside from the Georgists and communists, most people are OK with land being privately owned. Keeping those resources public requires a huge bureaucracy to do a poor to mediocre job of protecting them. The price mechanism does at least as good a job through massively-parallel decision making.
Societal norms and societal evolution can't be discounted either. Statists love to tout the Clean Water and Air Acts, but a careful examination of the data will show that the conditions rapidly improved in the decade before they were put into effect. Sure, they had some positive impacts, but at a high cost when technology and societal wealth were already working on the problem. It's reminiscent of Marx's later review of his statistics when he received data on the Industrial Revolution of England for the period for which he had originally done his work.
Our current system pre-dates much of the foundational work of modern economics (~1850-1940) so it's not surprising that there are impedance mismatches.
Why the F... would you put your money in a company you didn't research and make sure they were legit?
At the risk of answering a rhetorical question, there is a real answer: because the government privatizes the gains and socializes the risks and losses through the corporate structure.
I would assume that libertarians would support suing the individuals (not the corporation) most directly culpable.
Yes, maybe. Libertarianism is a political strategy, not a political philosophy (several philosophies converge on promoting individual liberty). A Libertarian may advocate for a return to the pre-Civil-War era concept of weak, limited, or non-existent corporations, but if the corporations are around anyway, they will sue the corporation to protect the environment using property rights. They may prefer to not have to use the court system, or even not have property rights in some wings, but usually they take whichever route is available to maximize individual liberty.
I wish I could sue the midwestern coal plants that make my eyes sting in the summertime here, but the government effectively precludes that option from me.
if we just let mega-corporations do whatever the fuck they want (including pumping whatever shit into the air they feel like), then we would all live in some libertarian utopia.
No, that's the corporatist position. Libertarians tend to be anti-corporate and would advocate for individuals suing those corporations for polluting their property. They favor stronger property rights than is typically* allowed in Western courts.
* sometimes courts do allow this, e.g. MTBE in groundwater, but it's pretty rare.
That doesn't mean tax receipts go down when you raise taxes on the wealthy.
Right, not necessarily - it's dependent on the rate - the setpoint of that curve is what Laffer was getting at. I think this has the data you're looking for:
So I repeat my question. Name an economist who says that if you increases taxes, taxes will go down because rich people will avoid them.
You've heard of tax shelters, right? Offshore accounts? Trusts, foundations, personal corporations? It doesn't take an economist to see that without an income tax or a death tax these are unnecessary.
If you insist on hearing it from an economist, I bet there are some on here.
the past decades of tax cuts lead to reduced economic growth and reduced tax revenues.
Be careful when changing multiple variables at one time.
There are 10,000+ imperial star destroyers. 3 can turn a standard earth sized planet into nothing but molten mayhem in about 12 hours.
Where do you get that from?
By contrast, in Trek, a small fleet can destroy a planet.
Sadly, I suspect someone thinks users prefer convenience over security
If only computing devices had a way to indicate preferences! :)
Practically, I suspect this will get pushed upstream to CyanogenMod pretty soon. There's enough hardware support in 2.6.38 for hardware acceleration (low power) AES on OMAP which makes it a reasonable thing to do.
I can see many organizations opting for CM when this happens.
Doesn't Blackberry give its keys to hostile governments?