Specifying in that way changes the nature of the bid, though. Instead of going out for a vendor that implements open format, where open is defined as something within the bid, they're going to be bidding for a vendor that does OpenDocument.
This is like going out to bid for a building that looks like a pyramid, rather than for a building that will house Motor Vehicle administration and serve these following functions. You tend to want to spec function in the bid, and include whatever specific restrictions the implementation must fit with.
IP was a touch different. You needed to be speaking the same protocol because other things were already speaking that protocol. If you wanted to communicate, you needed to implement IP. If you wanted Internet, you needed IP. That means that IPX and similar just wouldn't work.
In this case, there are several formats, and the choice the State makes is what will set which of them everyone will be using to communicate. There isn't already a massive established base on the open document "protocol", you could say. MS Word format is unacceptable, because it is not open, the newer WordML stuff seems to be more open, but still restricted with patent and copyright; perhaps more. OpenDocument is the only publisized format out there that meets the requirements, but it still has a niche market share. The same argument that allowed IP to be a requirement doesn't work with OpenDocument.
If OpenDocument was being heavily used, and many people were not using something else, then I wouldn't have made the original comment on the topic. In that case, you'd spec OpenDocument implementation as a requirement in the bid, since you would need that exact format to communicate with other people and institutions.
Yes I'm basically arguing over semantics, but I really think the difference in process matters. This procedural difference could be what gives MS a way to force it off for another few years, or force their own format in.
Perhaps this gets my point across, perhaps not. I hope it does...
No, they didn't do that. They decided the formats up front, not by writing a set of specification and going out to bid with it. They basically did this in such a way that it locks several vendors out of the running, the most prominent being MS. If you go read my previous post again, you see that I said the right way would be for them to draft a spec, and then go to RFP for bid.
Basically, what they did was say "any vendor could be chosen, as long as they support OpenDocument" instead of "any vendor can be chosen, as long as they support an open format". They would also define what "open format" meant. They could have done that in such a way that the only one out there that fit was OpenDocument, even. They didn't go through the set mechanisms to decide these things, either. They goofed, and now there are all kinds of unhappy things going on because of it. Hopefully MS won't get their way because of ITD's screwups.
Anyway, this is what happens when the People elect those that they like, rather than those that are qualified. It's what happens when people take the lazy choice on product rather than the best for the task. We're in this position with MS because we put them there. MS is doing no different than any other entity would do in a similar situation. It's the situation and what we allowed them to do that is the problem you have, from what I can tell.
If you want MS to not do business again, you can either encourage people to not use their products, and not use them yourself, or you can try to get their home state to revoke their corporate charter. You can't just magically decide that they can do no business. No amount of Federal anti-trust law can decide that, either. Hell, most of *those* laws are unconstitutional anyway. Regardless, this either has to happen through the market, or from the State. *I* am doing something about it, are you doing more than whining on Slashdot?
On one hand, MS did get a start into the position they are in due to free market forces. On the other, they have abused government force to finish getting there. However, their practices are not really the point in this one. What is important is that public information should not be in a proprietary format.
However, State ITD is not really going about this the right way. You need to have discussion, specifications need to be drawn up, you need to write an RFP and go to bid, etc. They chose a format without going through the right steps. They didn't necessary choose the right thing, they simply choose the thing they liked. In this way, government is very different from business.
Personally, I agree that OpenDocument is the best option out there. It's a fully opened format that can do everything that needs to be done. That's why I'm changing to the format. If all the Towns are lucky, DLS will change away from MS formats. Maybe then the garbage Excel sheets loaded with subtly broken VBA will go away.
As far as dada21 and the government reduction, etc, there is a good point there. You can track many of the problems in the US to government taking a problem, "fixing it" and then continually having to "fix" the "fix". At the very least, all of the social programs at the Federal level should be dismantled. They are unconstitutional, and far outside the scope appropriate for the programs. The US is not a socialist country, it is a federalist republic. The concentration of power at the Federal level is in direct opposition to that.
Alabama is also not the only place like that, by any means. The Federal has stripped the populace of their money, removed power from State and municipal governments, and uses that tax revenue to control the lower levels. Much of the populace is hovering just above poverty, many schools are failing, and roads are pretty crappy all around. You can blame a lot of that on government forcing things at the wrong level. The people responsible for the work don't get to be involved with the decisions, and don't have the ability to collect the funding to pay for it without "help" from above. It's a recipe that guarantees failure.
The government doing it is usually not the right answer. The Federal doing it is almost always not the right answer. There was a very good reason that it was severely limited by the original Constitution.
It entirely depends on your area. I did K-12 in a public system where the honors classes were all taught by wonderful teachers. The normal and remedial teachers were completely hit and miss. I took a few normal level classes a year or two ahead, and those teachers were horrid. I figured that I understood why your average kid graduates and hates math, can barely read, etc. (I learned there was a lot more to it than that, later on.)
Now, go to a different district, and they'll have some of the most fabulous remedial teachers out there. Go to a different district, and everything is bad, or everything is good.
Going to a good private college, I was disappointed by the quality of teaching. Not that it isn't uncommon for college, but I definitely learned more by ignoring class and doing it myself than my peers who tried to learn from the bad lectures. I was disgusted to find out from transfer students, and from taking classes at other schools, that the teachers I thought were terrible were better than most at other schools!
Even in the last ten years, I've seen the quality of education go down hard. So have a lot of other people, which is why you hear about it so much. The difference is that I'm in the group that knows that throwing money at the problem won't help. We have a lot of unskilled teachers, very bad state mandated cirriculums, and the focus of school is no longer education. If you deal with the latter two, the first would work itself out more. If you deal with the union problems, the first would happen very quickly.
I'm glad that you had the opportunity to have good teachers the whole way through. I wish that was the normal instead of the exception.:(
Just to completely refute your last claim, the State of New York legally sets that teachers work 181 days a year. If you work more than that, it is at your discretion. You are not supposed to, and you are not paid for it.
Teachers, like most other professions, often work outside of the paid hours. That's just the life that we are willing to accept.
The time thing is the same for most government employees. You have a number of hours you need to work in a week. If you go heavy, you use it as personal comp, then if you go light, you owe the time. Some institutions allow comp time within a week, some over a fiscal year. So if you miss time earlier, you simply make it up, either way, only the time scale changes.
BTW, very few people aren't paid for lunch, even on salary. You end up having to add another 30 mins onto the work day as a result. That means many people are "working" 8.5 hours a day. *ALL* full-time employees are required two 15 minute compensated breaks. That is law. If a teacher is not taking it, it is because that teacher chose to not do so. The school *must* allow the breaks, and the 30 mins for lunch. Those 15 or 30 minute blocks cannot be broken up. You take lunch, you get 30 mins, and that's it.
You're right about the hours. I was thinking 8-3 and only counted 6 for some reason. It should be 7, as you're saying.
There have been studies done that teachers are actually teaching ~3.9 hours a day. The rest of the time is grading, class prep, lunch, etc. This is quite in line with all of my direct experience in dealing with K-12 schools. Admittedly, this is not that hefty, since I'm only counting first hand experience. This was with one large school district in one state, a large school department in another state, and a regional vocational district. Everything about the three systems disagrees with you.
If you want to see exactly how this breaks down, just go look at a copy of the local school contract that the teachers union negotiated. It would be quite informative, and perhaps you would stop basing your claims on what appears to be anecdotal evidence.
OK, first of all, anyone paid hourly, which includes a lot of 9-5 type people, are actually not working the hours you claim. They're working 8.30-5 or 9-5.30 or similar. Pretty much nobody gets a paid lunch. It's no surprise that teachers don't get a paid lunch, either. Also, you forgot that most people have to be to work earlier than their start time, so should we consider that a part of their hours, too?
Teachers chose a profession where their tends to be work outside of the 40 hour week. This is a lot like IT, where the same exact thing happens. Neither gets paid for the overtime work, though. Also, you don't get hour lunch breaks. Where do you get that idea from? An hour lunch consists of using your two required 15 minute breaks and your 30 min lunch at the same time. That is not an hour long lunch break.
Also, I have no idea where you went to school, but most of the country doesn't send children in for 8 hour school days, either. They end up with around 6 hours of students; it only goes to 7 if you include time that intrudes into that two hours pad, such as pre- and post- session functions. So when you add those two hours of "pad" in for the teachers, you get 8 hours. They get two 15 minute breaks, and one 30 minute lunch break, which is required by law. They have to be paid for the breaks, but not the lunch, which means 8.5 hour days. That's in line with just about every other job.
So, when we undo all of your incorrect math, and keep the 15 days extra, just in case, we end up with 25% less work days. That makes the salaries:
Teacher High School 25th%ile Median 75th%ile the United States $38,261 $48,289 $56,720 Normalized: $47,826 $60,361 $70,900
That's still not looking at all like they are being lowely paid. As I said before, those salaries still don't include stipends or the better benefit packages most teachers have. Those stipends could be thousands of dollars more, though there is no guarantee that a given teacher would have any.
As for paying for your sick coverage, that depends on where you are, and the terms of your contract. Note that the teachers union negotiates the terms of that contract with the school. The teacher doesn't get to do that. I have *NEVER* heard of paying for your substitute, and I've been working with teachers for many years. This sounds a lot more like your school system being trash for compensation. That policy may even be illegal.
Also, most teachers work for 9 months, not 10. Also, many places do *not* have teachers coming in more than ~180 days. Just because where you are, this happens, does not make it everywhere.
Did you know that in many states, it is actually a legally set requirement that teachers work 180-182 days (depends on the state)? Did you also know that teachers are among the highest paid profession in the country, per hour? They are paid on par with IT, but they get better benefits than most IT workers, for example.
Honestly, between people that buy into this underpaid myth, and the BS that the unions spout, it's no surprise that people who would actually be good teachers don't end up doing it. They think they're going to get nothing for compensation, which that is blatently false.
I posted a little about that in another part of the thread. Related, but not exactly what you're saying. Honestly, I'd put a few other things above the currency problems, because I believe the devaluation is a result of those things. I'm definitely a proponent of a fixed money supply, or, short of that, at least a directly backed supply, such as the gold standard was.
I didn't think about what you call the "counterfeit tax". I'd figured that they released the new style as they old style was brought back and destroyed. It's even worse than I expected if they're releasing the new currency out of proportion to the destruction of old. And I thought the constant addition of currency was bad already!
Quoting my other post:
Also, if you read the Constitution, the US government is barred from creating currency that is anything but coin. The States are to only consider gold and silver coin payment for debt, for example. The Federal can only mint coin, and regulate the value of that coin.
Excerpts that mention money:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Your mother would very likely be much better compensated in a private school rather than a public school. Since she's been in for 30 years, she's really never going to get better pay while working under a teacher union. Longevity is a real annoyance...:(
The obvious counter-argument to you, from a Christian styled religious perspective, would be that it was that person's time to die. That was the plan, or one of a group of plans.
If the earth ceased to exist, it was supposed to happen that way.
This is what makes discussion so difficult when you have one group using observed science, and another using unsubstantiated religion and/or faith. You have observational evidence, they have faith. You can't disprove their faith, because the design of their faith says that you trying to do so was part of the "plan".
It's much nicer to discuss with people that don't try to interpret the Bible, or whatnot, as literal. They tend to understand allegory, among other things.
Also, if you read the Constitution, the US government is barred from creating currency that is anything but coin. The States are to only consider gold and silver coin payment for debt, for example. The Federal can only mint coin, and regulate the value of that coin.
Excerpts that mention money:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
I think the point the GP was trying to make is that money does not endure. If you buy property, you have something that will endure. The same tends to be true about owning a business. However, if you stockpile money, and then take it out 20 years later, it has lost significant power. You have much less than what you started with.
Money has become a means to trade, not to build wealth. It is a means to an end.
Actually, you can blame the salary problems on teacher unions as well. Most have forced pay based on longevity, so it is in the best interest of the teacher to do what they need to stay for as long as possible. The longer you stay, the less work you need to do, as you already have your lesson plans set and every day planned from years before.
There is no merit compensation system, because of the longevity pay. There is no incentive to be outstanding, only the personal desire to do your best. This is why incredible teachers are very uncommon.
Here are numbers for the average teacher after 15 years. After you normalize to offset the months of vacation, the numbers go up approx 30%. (180 days vs. 260 days for most salaried workers) This does not include any of the very common stipends and the better benefits that most teachers get over the average worker.
Teacher High School 25th%ile Median 75th%ile the United States $38,261 $48,289 $56,720 Normalized: $49,739 $62,776 $73,736
So you see, the idea of crap pay for teachers *is* a myth. You just have to work as a teacher for a long period of time to get out of the crap pay base compensation. This is because of teacher unions.
I advocate paying a teacher what they are worth, which is often more than they are paid. Fix the damage the teacher's unions have caused, and this happens more naturally. If you pay a good teacher more because they are a good teacher, teachers will strive to improve their ability. The current system pushed for by these unions works against that.
So basically, if you want salaries closer to private sector compensation, work to rid schools of these types of garbage policies. To do this, you will have to significantly change the trite bs that the unions force on schools.
As for taxes, they aren't out of control because of the debt. They're out of control because of constant power grabs and mismangement. There is a reason why the Federal had been Constitutionally restricted from levying an income tax, and this is why. Once the institution has the power, and has budget, they will work to increase both. The Federal (and State to a lesser extent) uses the massive monies they collect to force lower levels to do what they want. This can happen because the lower levels can only take so much before the residents can't afford to live. With the Federal (and State) taking more and more of that, the lower levels are forced to rely on the Federal giving money back to "help pay" for things. The States can't even collect enough to run their programs without money coming back from the Federal.
Most government institutions will choose these sorts of vendors through a bid process, and then stick with that vendor. This is why you will find situations where there is a cheaper vendor, but the institutions hasn't changed. It can also be a lengthy and tedious process to switch. School budgets are drained largely as a result of programs that don't belong in public schools to begin with, or that are poorly implemented. The choice of one vendor over another does not significantly effect most budgets.
Perhaps, but that was the reason that people were objecting. I didn't want to see ".eu" because I didn't see what purpose it was going to serve compared to what was already there. I know a lot of people were saying that it was for EU multinationals and similar. An EU version of ".com" is acceptable, and I probably could've been convinced on those grounds, had anyone tried. I really would've preferred something closer to ".europe", though, since not every european country is in the EU, and so aren't supposed to register a domain.
The reason I was objecting was that the way it was pitched basically implied that the ccTLDs were obsoleted because new EU member registrations should be under ".eu". I'd like to see the new TLDs disappear and everything register under ccTLD, so this is counter to what I look for.
Personally, I think creating new TLDs right now is a bad idea, anyway. We first need to fix this whole morass with the same oversized behemoths registering every possible variation of every trademark they hold. The ".eu" registration is even going give them preferential treatment, by allowing them to register first.
Maybe someone should propose that we could just shortcut that whole thing by automatically granting domains to everyone that already has a name registered under another TLD. They would only be reverted if you don't pay. In the case where different parties held domains under different TLDs, then it's open bid.
I would certainly support the idea of deprecating.gov and.mil; it *would* be a good show of the US government not having such a hand in the Internet.
The powers that are given to the Federal are reserved to the Federal. It supercedes all lower levels in that regard. The supreme law is the Constitution, which the government *can't* violate (in theory). Then there are things for just the Federal, and which the States are not to interfere with, and then everything else is State. The Consitution says things such as "nobody may", "everyone is guaranteed", "the Federal will/may", "the Federal may not", and "the States may", to summarize.
The Constitution is quite easy to read, and a lot more clear that the Federal has managed to distort it to be with "modern" law and interpretation.
One of the things that States *can't* do is to leave the Union. That was what the US Civil War was started over, and the reason for the desire to leave was basically unfair taxation. If the Constitution had been followed, and the intent preserved, the Civil War wouldn't have happened.
BTW - that the EU is not a country is why so many people, especially in the US, were fighting the decision to create the ".eu" TLD. The member countries are sovereign, not bound into the EU such as the States are to the Federal in the US, and have their own TLDs.
1) Any DRM is bad DRM. If I don't have control over what I'm about to buy, then I'm not going to buy it. If I buy a CD, I have full control over the content. I can shift formats, rip apart the data, whatever. Buying a DRM encumbered lossy format, converting it to Red Book CDDA, and then ripping *that* to another lossy format is stupid. I can tell the difference between the original, the first gen lossy, and the second gen lossy, and I don't have a very good ear for it.
A company will get my business if they give me the product I want, and DRM is not involved with the product I want.
2) Apple gives you a way to remove for now. They could remove this in the future, as they have removed other features involved with ITMS already.
3) A very large percentage of people that *know* about this stuff are definitely *not* okay with it. The average and below don't know what's going on. They buy into the marketing without a clue of the shortcomings.
Anecdotally, out of the 35 or so friends that I spend time with, none of them has bought a CD from a company in the RIAA cartel in the last few years. None of them spends money on ITMS, and it's because of the DRM and the AAC format. Several have bought iPods, and more than that have bought other devices, like stuff from Neuros. To that end, I don't think I know anyone that uses ITMS. I know very few people that have bought *any* CDs. All the DRM, the high prices, and the reprehensible business practices have pushed all of them away. We now go to concerts and buy self-published CDs.
Is there any way to force it to orient that more horizontally, so that it isn't as tall on screen?
amaroK doesn't have a super-small mode either. It'd say it's only a little shorter than that iTunes mini-mode screenshot, but it doesn't include the progress/remaining time guage.
It's also worth pointing out that nobody was using it to distribute music at the time, and also that MPEG-4 is the Quicktime container format. While that 'A' might not stand for Apple, it comes very close. The world was using MPEG-1 layer 3, Windows Media, Ogg Vorbis, and RealAudio, in decreasing order of popularity. Out of the five formats I mentioned, only two are actually realiably distributed without DRM.
If we want open formats, we can't be saying that we want open formats unless (insert company of the day) is doing it, and then DRM is okay.
What I would love is a mode that was as compact but still as useful as Winamp's window shade mode. You got next track, previous track, stop, pause, play, volume, and some other stuff, in something that was approx. the same size as the default Windows title bar.
The tiny player mode for iTunes only gets you a huge play/pause button and something else, but I don't remember what that was. I can't find a screenshot of that mode right now. I remember it didn't display song title though, and some other things I that I liked from Winamp. It was also still bigger than I like.
None of that is nearly as much of an issue since I bought a keyboard with multimedia buttons, though. Never thought I'd like them, but such is progress. I'd still prefer a Sun keyboard on my PC, but I don't want to spend ~100$ to buy an adapter.
Generally, I still prefer a very light-weight media player. On Windows, I still use Winamp, but that's only at work. At home, I run amarok. That takes up around 50MB; certainly more than I like, but about a third of what iTunes used on me for the same collection.
The Quicktime framework is fine. I specifically despise the player application. From the UI perspective, Quicktime player and iTunes don't match the rest of the platform, not on MacOS and not on Windows. That's been a common complaint, especially from UI people, since Apple released either. Of course, this is not a problem when using Quicktime for its libraries.
iTunes on Windows does suck a lot more than the MacOS version, but the things that make iTunes on Windows nothing special are the same as on MacOS. The UIs are closer to the system on MacOS, but still do not follow the design conventions that Apple set. The functionality is nice, but can be frustrating if you locate your store on a network server, or if you don't want an iPod.
I know that Apple doesn't release skinned apps. That wasn't a dig at them.;-) It's just another common thing that people taut as some kind of UI revolution, but of course, makes things harder to use and more bloated.
It does all go to show, Apple only bothers to make things work right with Apple hardware and an Apple OS. Same shenanigans as Microsoft, less market.
1,2,3, and 5 are nothing big. I never was excited over iTunes, since I found it to be a poorly designed application from the first release to now. It made music management popular, and everything from there on was not done well, or was not useful.
The first thing I noticed was that the only way iTunes didn't take up too much screen was when it wasn't on the screen.
The second thing I noticed was that it did I/O so badly that it took more than 1100% of the time to load and parse the tags from my collection as Winamp's library did. That's 45mins versus 5mins, for the same data.
1) and 2) can be summed up as "Apple decided to use a nonstandard format, and other people haven't followed them". They *could* have used Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, or a few of the others, but they didn't. Those are negatives.
3) ITMS is a value-add, and could be easily done with most of the players out there by creating a plugin, so I'm not too worried about that. Or you could just use a webpage and get basically the same thing, but you'll need the plugin to have the nice tie-in with the player. I'll never use it as long as it is copy restricted, and many other people feel the same. I will not accept DRM infestations on my content.
4) I would've said that the reason it stands out is music management. That makes things like iTunes nice to use.
5) Who cares about the visualization. Winamp has very nice visualizations out there, too. I don't know how you could use a computer with a visualization running anyway. That's awfully distracting, and takes up much of the screen.
I generally use amarok, which is basically an iTunes clone. The problem I have with music management in both, and most of the similar software, is that it adds steps to "just play this file I downloaded". I don't always want it in the library, and I don't want constant prompts about it.
Also, *I* give a crap about memory use. I have 1GB RAM because I run a lot of apps simultaneously, not so that developers can be lazy and write bad code with bloated and unoptimized memory structures. There's no point in having more RAM if the only use is to satisfy unskilled programmers and their quest to do less actual work. Just because we have more RAM does not mean that we should ignore some of the basics of data structure design.
For a good example, try using a few of the newer OSS GUI programs at the same time, and for a long period of time. Firefox + Thunderbird + OpenOffice gets you a lot of wasted memory. Throw Eclipse in there, and you can add another 100MB+ to that. That's all before you start doing any work. I don't like that I have over 300MB used to check email, browse the web, and write a document, and be in an IDE. That is unreasonable and is piss poor memory management at work. iTunes does the same kind of thing.
Have to agree with the other poster here. iTunes is one of the more frustrating and obnoixious programs I've used. Poor format support, largest memory footprint I've seen, slower than just about everything, and wastes tremendous amounts of the screen. It also does not follow *anyone's* UI conventions. It's the second worst Apple program I've used, only exceeded by the Quicktime player.
The dock in OSX is also very annoying, with the moving around and resizing things on you. It would be nice if there was more of an immediate visual cue to what those little colored buttons in the corner of windows did, too. Yellow and green do not scream big and little to me.
They (specifically Jobs) have also been known to make really poor decisions in hardware user interface, too. That their software UI can be ocassionally obnoxious is not that much of a surprise.
FWIW, I also think skinning is a stupid idea, and ruins the user experience. It leads to terrible UIs and next to no benefit. Toolkit theming is fine, since it's consistent across all your apps.
Don't think I hate Apple entirely, or exclusively, though. One of the worst UI offenders is MS Office, along with such things that I acually want to use, like Trillian. Also, OSX is, overall, one of the most polished OS' out there.
The US does not only allow US entities to register.com,.org, etc. They only reserve registrations in.gov and.mil. Since the US government and US military created the internet, and have been using it for far longer than anyone else, it would be a necessarily difficult task to relocate the domains.
The States of the US may not be independant, but they do have certain attributes that are supposed to make them nearly so. They were *supposed* to have nearly full authority, except where the Federal was allowed power. The power is not delegated to the States in the way you mention. Any power that is not expressly reserved for the Federal is a State power. That implies that States have power except where delegated to the Federal.
The idea behind personal freedom also means that you are forcing personal responsibility. The hypothetical person in the car crash decided to not wear a seatbelt, and was then in a collision. They need to bear responsibility for the decision to not wear the seatbelt. That means, in part, they were responsible for the the injuries. Allowing law to shape around the idea you mention will result in people no longer taking responsibility for their actions or inactions, since they are pushing it off to government. This is where we are today, with an overbearing government and people blaming everyone else for the things they caused on their own.
I'd say the person didn't want to wear a seatbelt, and this amplified their injuries. After the fact, they wish someone said "you must wear seatbelts", since it would have made the decision for them. Now, if you kept telling people "wear seatbelts", but stopped there, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
I think you accidentally gave some aid to what I was saying before about changing social perception. You're right, did you actually want that Coca-Cola before all the advertising? It's hard to say, because the ads may have convinced you to drink it. In the same way, ads could convince you not to drink Coke, or, more relevant to the discussion, not do drugs, or not abuse alcohol.
Even more basic, I want to live in a place where people have to consider their actions, and take responsibility for them.
Americans complain because it's additional tax. We don't want to be Europe, in theory. Who cares if Americans are complaining about gas prices. You live in Europe, where you are taxes very heavily. We live in America, where we are taxed less heavily. We don't want to do it the European way, and so we whine, complain, and fight when the government tries to force such.
Then you pay for roads the same way you do now. Most of your road maintanance is paid for from local revenues in municipal government. Taxes that you pay for gas and tolls don't tend to end up back with local govs. Gas tax goes partial to State and partial to Federal. Federal does no road maintanance. State maintains state and interstate roadways, many of which also have tolls. A combination of income tax, partial gas tax, and tolls pays for these roads. Also, the Federal gives some monies back to the States in return for doing what they are told.
If you wanted to maintain status quo, you could levy an additional tax on electrical consumption. The government is not getting ready for this "next phase" as you say, they are simply expanding their power to fill available space. If the citizens will allow them to monitor their vehicles at all times, the government will try to do so.
You are highly unlikely to get 50% of the population not driving some vehicle in the US. There is no infrastructure to allow that to function, and it would take much longer than 10 years to put such in place. I'd be surprised if it could be done in 30 years. The way that the country has developed does not lend to massive public transit networks. You would have to either build an unmanagable amount of infrastructure, which would require a whole lot of land takings, or you would have to attempt to get most people to live in and immediately around cities. Neither is likely to be workable.
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Specifying in that way changes the nature of the bid, though. Instead of going out for a vendor that implements open format, where open is defined as something within the bid, they're going to be bidding for a vendor that does OpenDocument.
This is like going out to bid for a building that looks like a pyramid, rather than for a building that will house Motor Vehicle administration and serve these following functions. You tend to want to spec function in the bid, and include whatever specific restrictions the implementation must fit with.
IP was a touch different. You needed to be speaking the same protocol because other things were already speaking that protocol. If you wanted to communicate, you needed to implement IP. If you wanted Internet, you needed IP. That means that IPX and similar just wouldn't work.
In this case, there are several formats, and the choice the State makes is what will set which of them everyone will be using to communicate. There isn't already a massive established base on the open document "protocol", you could say. MS Word format is unacceptable, because it is not open, the newer WordML stuff seems to be more open, but still restricted with patent and copyright; perhaps more. OpenDocument is the only publisized format out there that meets the requirements, but it still has a niche market share. The same argument that allowed IP to be a requirement doesn't work with OpenDocument.
If OpenDocument was being heavily used, and many people were not using something else, then I wouldn't have made the original comment on the topic. In that case, you'd spec OpenDocument implementation as a requirement in the bid, since you would need that exact format to communicate with other people and institutions.
Yes I'm basically arguing over semantics, but I really think the difference in process matters. This procedural difference could be what gives MS a way to force it off for another few years, or force their own format in.
Perhaps this gets my point across, perhaps not. I hope it does...
No, they didn't do that. They decided the formats up front, not by writing a set of specification and going out to bid with it. They basically did this in such a way that it locks several vendors out of the running, the most prominent being MS. If you go read my previous post again, you see that I said the right way would be for them to draft a spec, and then go to RFP for bid.
Basically, what they did was say "any vendor could be chosen, as long as they support OpenDocument" instead of "any vendor can be chosen, as long as they support an open format". They would also define what "open format" meant. They could have done that in such a way that the only one out there that fit was OpenDocument, even. They didn't go through the set mechanisms to decide these things, either. They goofed, and now there are all kinds of unhappy things going on because of it. Hopefully MS won't get their way because of ITD's screwups.
Anyway, this is what happens when the People elect those that they like, rather than those that are qualified. It's what happens when people take the lazy choice on product rather than the best for the task. We're in this position with MS because we put them there. MS is doing no different than any other entity would do in a similar situation. It's the situation and what we allowed them to do that is the problem you have, from what I can tell.
If you want MS to not do business again, you can either encourage people to not use their products, and not use them yourself, or you can try to get their home state to revoke their corporate charter. You can't just magically decide that they can do no business. No amount of Federal anti-trust law can decide that, either. Hell, most of *those* laws are unconstitutional anyway. Regardless, this either has to happen through the market, or from the State. *I* am doing something about it, are you doing more than whining on Slashdot?
On one hand, MS did get a start into the position they are in due to free market forces. On the other, they have abused government force to finish getting there. However, their practices are not really the point in this one. What is important is that public information should not be in a proprietary format.
However, State ITD is not really going about this the right way. You need to have discussion, specifications need to be drawn up, you need to write an RFP and go to bid, etc. They chose a format without going through the right steps. They didn't necessary choose the right thing, they simply choose the thing they liked. In this way, government is very different from business.
Personally, I agree that OpenDocument is the best option out there. It's a fully opened format that can do everything that needs to be done. That's why I'm changing to the format. If all the Towns are lucky, DLS will change away from MS formats. Maybe then the garbage Excel sheets loaded with subtly broken VBA will go away.
As far as dada21 and the government reduction, etc, there is a good point there. You can track many of the problems in the US to government taking a problem, "fixing it" and then continually having to "fix" the "fix". At the very least, all of the social programs at the Federal level should be dismantled. They are unconstitutional, and far outside the scope appropriate for the programs. The US is not a socialist country, it is a federalist republic. The concentration of power at the Federal level is in direct opposition to that.
Alabama is also not the only place like that, by any means. The Federal has stripped the populace of their money, removed power from State and municipal governments, and uses that tax revenue to control the lower levels. Much of the populace is hovering just above poverty, many schools are failing, and roads are pretty crappy all around. You can blame a lot of that on government forcing things at the wrong level. The people responsible for the work don't get to be involved with the decisions, and don't have the ability to collect the funding to pay for it without "help" from above. It's a recipe that guarantees failure.
The government doing it is usually not the right answer. The Federal doing it is almost always not the right answer. There was a very good reason that it was severely limited by the original Constitution.
It entirely depends on your area. I did K-12 in a public system where the honors classes were all taught by wonderful teachers. The normal and remedial teachers were completely hit and miss. I took a few normal level classes a year or two ahead, and those teachers were horrid. I figured that I understood why your average kid graduates and hates math, can barely read, etc. (I learned there was a lot more to it than that, later on.)
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Now, go to a different district, and they'll have some of the most fabulous remedial teachers out there. Go to a different district, and everything is bad, or everything is good.
Going to a good private college, I was disappointed by the quality of teaching. Not that it isn't uncommon for college, but I definitely learned more by ignoring class and doing it myself than my peers who tried to learn from the bad lectures. I was disgusted to find out from transfer students, and from taking classes at other schools, that the teachers I thought were terrible were better than most at other schools!
Even in the last ten years, I've seen the quality of education go down hard. So have a lot of other people, which is why you hear about it so much. The difference is that I'm in the group that knows that throwing money at the problem won't help. We have a lot of unskilled teachers, very bad state mandated cirriculums, and the focus of school is no longer education. If you deal with the latter two, the first would work itself out more. If you deal with the union problems, the first would happen very quickly.
I'm glad that you had the opportunity to have good teachers the whole way through. I wish that was the normal instead of the exception.
Just to completely refute your last claim, the State of New York legally sets that teachers work 181 days a year. If you work more than that, it is at your discretion. You are not supposed to, and you are not paid for it.
Teachers, like most other professions, often work outside of the paid hours. That's just the life that we are willing to accept.
The time thing is the same for most government employees. You have a number of hours you need to work in a week. If you go heavy, you use it as personal comp, then if you go light, you owe the time. Some institutions allow comp time within a week, some over a fiscal year. So if you miss time earlier, you simply make it up, either way, only the time scale changes.
BTW, very few people aren't paid for lunch, even on salary. You end up having to add another 30 mins onto the work day as a result. That means many people are "working" 8.5 hours a day. *ALL* full-time employees are required two 15 minute compensated breaks. That is law. If a teacher is not taking it, it is because that teacher chose to not do so. The school *must* allow the breaks, and the 30 mins for lunch. Those 15 or 30 minute blocks cannot be broken up. You take lunch, you get 30 mins, and that's it.
You're right about the hours. I was thinking 8-3 and only counted 6 for some reason. It should be 7, as you're saying.
There have been studies done that teachers are actually teaching ~3.9 hours a day. The rest of the time is grading, class prep, lunch, etc. This is quite in line with all of my direct experience in dealing with K-12 schools. Admittedly, this is not that hefty, since I'm only counting first hand experience. This was with one large school district in one state, a large school department in another state, and a regional vocational district. Everything about the three systems disagrees with you.
If you want to see exactly how this breaks down, just go look at a copy of the local school contract that the teachers union negotiated. It would be quite informative, and perhaps you would stop basing your claims on what appears to be anecdotal evidence.
OK, first of all, anyone paid hourly, which includes a lot of 9-5 type people, are actually not working the hours you claim. They're working 8.30-5 or 9-5.30 or similar. Pretty much nobody gets a paid lunch. It's no surprise that teachers don't get a paid lunch, either. Also, you forgot that most people have to be to work earlier than their start time, so should we consider that a part of their hours, too?
Teachers chose a profession where their tends to be work outside of the 40 hour week. This is a lot like IT, where the same exact thing happens. Neither gets paid for the overtime work, though. Also, you don't get hour lunch breaks. Where do you get that idea from? An hour lunch consists of using your two required 15 minute breaks and your 30 min lunch at the same time. That is not an hour long lunch break.
Also, I have no idea where you went to school, but most of the country doesn't send children in for 8 hour school days, either. They end up with around 6 hours of students; it only goes to 7 if you include time that intrudes into that two hours pad, such as pre- and post- session functions. So when you add those two hours of "pad" in for the teachers, you get 8 hours. They get two 15 minute breaks, and one 30 minute lunch break, which is required by law. They have to be paid for the breaks, but not the lunch, which means 8.5 hour days. That's in line with just about every other job.
So, when we undo all of your incorrect math, and keep the 15 days extra, just in case, we end up with 25% less work days. That makes the salaries:
Teacher High School 25th%ile Median 75th%ile
the United States $38,261 $48,289 $56,720
Normalized: $47,826 $60,361 $70,900
That's still not looking at all like they are being lowely paid. As I said before, those salaries still don't include stipends or the better benefit packages most teachers have. Those stipends could be thousands of dollars more, though there is no guarantee that a given teacher would have any.
As for paying for your sick coverage, that depends on where you are, and the terms of your contract. Note that the teachers union negotiates the terms of that contract with the school. The teacher doesn't get to do that. I have *NEVER* heard of paying for your substitute, and I've been working with teachers for many years. This sounds a lot more like your school system being trash for compensation. That policy may even be illegal.
Also, most teachers work for 9 months, not 10. Also, many places do *not* have teachers coming in more than ~180 days. Just because where you are, this happens, does not make it everywhere.
Did you know that in many states, it is actually a legally set requirement that teachers work 180-182 days (depends on the state)? Did you also know that teachers are among the highest paid profession in the country, per hour? They are paid on par with IT, but they get better benefits than most IT workers, for example.
Honestly, between people that buy into this underpaid myth, and the BS that the unions spout, it's no surprise that people who would actually be good teachers don't end up doing it. They think they're going to get nothing for compensation, which that is blatently false.
I posted a little about that in another part of the thread. Related, but not exactly what you're saying. Honestly, I'd put a few other things above the currency problems, because I believe the devaluation is a result of those things. I'm definitely a proponent of a fixed money supply, or, short of that, at least a directly backed supply, such as the gold standard was.
I didn't think about what you call the "counterfeit tax". I'd figured that they released the new style as they old style was brought back and destroyed. It's even worse than I expected if they're releasing the new currency out of proportion to the destruction of old. And I thought the constant addition of currency was bad already!
Quoting my other post:
Also, if you read the Constitution, the US government is barred from creating currency that is anything but coin. The States are to only consider gold and silver coin payment for debt, for example. The Federal can only mint coin, and regulate the value of that coin.
Excerpts that mention money:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
I pulled those exact numbers from salary.com, but the numbers from Federal studies are very close to those. I don't have those on hand, though.
z l_compresult_national_ED03000011.html
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http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/sw
Your mother would very likely be much better compensated in a private school rather than a public school. Since she's been in for 30 years, she's really never going to get better pay while working under a teacher union. Longevity is a real annoyance...
The obvious counter-argument to you, from a Christian styled religious perspective, would be that it was that person's time to die. That was the plan, or one of a group of plans.
If the earth ceased to exist, it was supposed to happen that way.
This is what makes discussion so difficult when you have one group using observed science, and another using unsubstantiated religion and/or faith. You have observational evidence, they have faith. You can't disprove their faith, because the design of their faith says that you trying to do so was part of the "plan".
It's much nicer to discuss with people that don't try to interpret the Bible, or whatnot, as literal. They tend to understand allegory, among other things.
Also, if you read the Constitution, the US government is barred from creating currency that is anything but coin. The States are to only consider gold and silver coin payment for debt, for example. The Federal can only mint coin, and regulate the value of that coin.
Excerpts that mention money:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
I think the point the GP was trying to make is that money does not endure. If you buy property, you have something that will endure. The same tends to be true about owning a business. However, if you stockpile money, and then take it out 20 years later, it has lost significant power. You have much less than what you started with.
Money has become a means to trade, not to build wealth. It is a means to an end.
Actually, you can blame the salary problems on teacher unions as well. Most have forced pay based on longevity, so it is in the best interest of the teacher to do what they need to stay for as long as possible. The longer you stay, the less work you need to do, as you already have your lesson plans set and every day planned from years before.
There is no merit compensation system, because of the longevity pay. There is no incentive to be outstanding, only the personal desire to do your best. This is why incredible teachers are very uncommon.
Here are numbers for the average teacher after 15 years. After you normalize to offset the months of vacation, the numbers go up approx 30%. (180 days vs. 260 days for most salaried workers) This does not include any of the very common stipends and the better benefits that most teachers get over the average worker.
Teacher High School 25th%ile Median 75th%ile
the United States $38,261 $48,289 $56,720
Normalized: $49,739 $62,776 $73,736
So you see, the idea of crap pay for teachers *is* a myth. You just have to work as a teacher for a long period of time to get out of the crap pay base compensation. This is because of teacher unions.
I advocate paying a teacher what they are worth, which is often more than they are paid. Fix the damage the teacher's unions have caused, and this happens more naturally. If you pay a good teacher more because they are a good teacher, teachers will strive to improve their ability. The current system pushed for by these unions works against that.
So basically, if you want salaries closer to private sector compensation, work to rid schools of these types of garbage policies. To do this, you will have to significantly change the trite bs that the unions force on schools.
As for taxes, they aren't out of control because of the debt. They're out of control because of constant power grabs and mismangement. There is a reason why the Federal had been Constitutionally restricted from levying an income tax, and this is why. Once the institution has the power, and has budget, they will work to increase both. The Federal (and State to a lesser extent) uses the massive monies they collect to force lower levels to do what they want. This can happen because the lower levels can only take so much before the residents can't afford to live. With the Federal (and State) taking more and more of that, the lower levels are forced to rely on the Federal giving money back to "help pay" for things. The States can't even collect enough to run their programs without money coming back from the Federal.
Most government institutions will choose these sorts of vendors through a bid process, and then stick with that vendor. This is why you will find situations where there is a cheaper vendor, but the institutions hasn't changed. It can also be a lengthy and tedious process to switch. School budgets are drained largely as a result of programs that don't belong in public schools to begin with, or that are poorly implemented. The choice of one vendor over another does not significantly effect most budgets.
Perhaps, but that was the reason that people were objecting. I didn't want to see ".eu" because I didn't see what purpose it was going to serve compared to what was already there. I know a lot of people were saying that it was for EU multinationals and similar. An EU version of ".com" is acceptable, and I probably could've been convinced on those grounds, had anyone tried. I really would've preferred something closer to ".europe", though, since not every european country is in the EU, and so aren't supposed to register a domain.
The reason I was objecting was that the way it was pitched basically implied that the ccTLDs were obsoleted because new EU member registrations should be under ".eu". I'd like to see the new TLDs disappear and everything register under ccTLD, so this is counter to what I look for.
Personally, I think creating new TLDs right now is a bad idea, anyway. We first need to fix this whole morass with the same oversized behemoths registering every possible variation of every trademark they hold. The ".eu" registration is even going give them preferential treatment, by allowing them to register first.
Maybe someone should propose that we could just shortcut that whole thing by automatically granting domains to everyone that already has a name registered under another TLD. They would only be reverted if you don't pay. In the case where different parties held domains under different TLDs, then it's open bid.
I would certainly support the idea of deprecating .gov and .mil; it *would* be a good show of the US government not having such a hand in the Internet.
The powers that are given to the Federal are reserved to the Federal. It supercedes all lower levels in that regard. The supreme law is the Constitution, which the government *can't* violate (in theory). Then there are things for just the Federal, and which the States are not to interfere with, and then everything else is State. The Consitution says things such as "nobody may", "everyone is guaranteed", "the Federal will/may", "the Federal may not", and "the States may", to summarize.
The Constitution is quite easy to read, and a lot more clear that the Federal has managed to distort it to be with "modern" law and interpretation.
One of the things that States *can't* do is to leave the Union. That was what the US Civil War was started over, and the reason for the desire to leave was basically unfair taxation. If the Constitution had been followed, and the intent preserved, the Civil War wouldn't have happened.
BTW - that the EU is not a country is why so many people, especially in the US, were fighting the decision to create the ".eu" TLD. The member countries are sovereign, not bound into the EU such as the States are to the Federal in the US, and have their own TLDs.
1) Any DRM is bad DRM. If I don't have control over what I'm about to buy, then I'm not going to buy it. If I buy a CD, I have full control over the content. I can shift formats, rip apart the data, whatever. Buying a DRM encumbered lossy format, converting it to Red Book CDDA, and then ripping *that* to another lossy format is stupid. I can tell the difference between the original, the first gen lossy, and the second gen lossy, and I don't have a very good ear for it.
A company will get my business if they give me the product I want, and DRM is not involved with the product I want.
2) Apple gives you a way to remove for now. They could remove this in the future, as they have removed other features involved with ITMS already.
3) A very large percentage of people that *know* about this stuff are definitely *not* okay with it. The average and below don't know what's going on. They buy into the marketing without a clue of the shortcomings.
Anecdotally, out of the 35 or so friends that I spend time with, none of them has bought a CD from a company in the RIAA cartel in the last few years. None of them spends money on ITMS, and it's because of the DRM and the AAC format. Several have bought iPods, and more than that have bought other devices, like stuff from Neuros. To that end, I don't think I know anyone that uses ITMS. I know very few people that have bought *any* CDs. All the DRM, the high prices, and the reprehensible business practices have pushed all of them away. We now go to concerts and buy self-published CDs.
Is there any way to force it to orient that more horizontally, so that it isn't as tall on screen?
amaroK doesn't have a super-small mode either. It'd say it's only a little shorter than that iTunes mini-mode screenshot, but it doesn't include the progress/remaining time guage.
It's also worth pointing out that nobody was using it to distribute music at the time, and also that MPEG-4 is the Quicktime container format. While that 'A' might not stand for Apple, it comes very close. The world was using MPEG-1 layer 3, Windows Media, Ogg Vorbis, and RealAudio, in decreasing order of popularity. Out of the five formats I mentioned, only two are actually realiably distributed without DRM.
If we want open formats, we can't be saying that we want open formats unless (insert company of the day) is doing it, and then DRM is okay.
What I would love is a mode that was as compact but still as useful as Winamp's window shade mode. You got next track, previous track, stop, pause, play, volume, and some other stuff, in something that was approx. the same size as the default Windows title bar.
The tiny player mode for iTunes only gets you a huge play/pause button and something else, but I don't remember what that was. I can't find a screenshot of that mode right now. I remember it didn't display song title though, and some other things I that I liked from Winamp. It was also still bigger than I like.
None of that is nearly as much of an issue since I bought a keyboard with multimedia buttons, though. Never thought I'd like them, but such is progress. I'd still prefer a Sun keyboard on my PC, but I don't want to spend ~100$ to buy an adapter.
Generally, I still prefer a very light-weight media player. On Windows, I still use Winamp, but that's only at work. At home, I run amarok. That takes up around 50MB; certainly more than I like, but about a third of what iTunes used on me for the same collection.
The Quicktime framework is fine. I specifically despise the player application. From the UI perspective, Quicktime player and iTunes don't match the rest of the platform, not on MacOS and not on Windows. That's been a common complaint, especially from UI people, since Apple released either. Of course, this is not a problem when using Quicktime for its libraries.
;-) It's just another common thing that people taut as some kind of UI revolution, but of course, makes things harder to use and more bloated.
iTunes on Windows does suck a lot more than the MacOS version, but the things that make iTunes on Windows nothing special are the same as on MacOS. The UIs are closer to the system on MacOS, but still do not follow the design conventions that Apple set. The functionality is nice, but can be frustrating if you locate your store on a network server, or if you don't want an iPod.
I know that Apple doesn't release skinned apps. That wasn't a dig at them.
It does all go to show, Apple only bothers to make things work right with Apple hardware and an Apple OS. Same shenanigans as Microsoft, less market.
1,2,3, and 5 are nothing big. I never was excited over iTunes, since I found it to be a poorly designed application from the first release to now. It made music management popular, and everything from there on was not done well, or was not useful.
The first thing I noticed was that the only way iTunes didn't take up too much screen was when it wasn't on the screen.
The second thing I noticed was that it did I/O so badly that it took more than 1100% of the time to load and parse the tags from my collection as Winamp's library did. That's 45mins versus 5mins, for the same data.
1) and 2) can be summed up as "Apple decided to use a nonstandard format, and other people haven't followed them". They *could* have used Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, or a few of the others, but they didn't. Those are negatives.
3) ITMS is a value-add, and could be easily done with most of the players out there by creating a plugin, so I'm not too worried about that. Or you could just use a webpage and get basically the same thing, but you'll need the plugin to have the nice tie-in with the player. I'll never use it as long as it is copy restricted, and many other people feel the same. I will not accept DRM infestations on my content.
4) I would've said that the reason it stands out is music management. That makes things like iTunes nice to use.
5) Who cares about the visualization. Winamp has very nice visualizations out there, too. I don't know how you could use a computer with a visualization running anyway. That's awfully distracting, and takes up much of the screen.
I generally use amarok, which is basically an iTunes clone. The problem I have with music management in both, and most of the similar software, is that it adds steps to "just play this file I downloaded". I don't always want it in the library, and I don't want constant prompts about it.
Also, *I* give a crap about memory use. I have 1GB RAM because I run a lot of apps simultaneously, not so that developers can be lazy and write bad code with bloated and unoptimized memory structures. There's no point in having more RAM if the only use is to satisfy unskilled programmers and their quest to do less actual work. Just because we have more RAM does not mean that we should ignore some of the basics of data structure design.
For a good example, try using a few of the newer OSS GUI programs at the same time, and for a long period of time. Firefox + Thunderbird + OpenOffice gets you a lot of wasted memory. Throw Eclipse in there, and you can add another 100MB+ to that. That's all before you start doing any work. I don't like that I have over 300MB used to check email, browse the web, and write a document, and be in an IDE. That is unreasonable and is piss poor memory management at work. iTunes does the same kind of thing.
Have to agree with the other poster here. iTunes is one of the more frustrating and obnoixious programs I've used. Poor format support, largest memory footprint I've seen, slower than just about everything, and wastes tremendous amounts of the screen. It also does not follow *anyone's* UI conventions. It's the second worst Apple program I've used, only exceeded by the Quicktime player.
The dock in OSX is also very annoying, with the moving around and resizing things on you. It would be nice if there was more of an immediate visual cue to what those little colored buttons in the corner of windows did, too. Yellow and green do not scream big and little to me.
They (specifically Jobs) have also been known to make really poor decisions in hardware user interface, too. That their software UI can be ocassionally obnoxious is not that much of a surprise.
FWIW, I also think skinning is a stupid idea, and ruins the user experience. It leads to terrible UIs and next to no benefit. Toolkit theming is fine, since it's consistent across all your apps.
Don't think I hate Apple entirely, or exclusively, though. One of the worst UI offenders is MS Office, along with such things that I acually want to use, like Trillian. Also, OSX is, overall, one of the most polished OS' out there.
The US does not only allow US entities to register .com, .org, etc. They only reserve registrations in .gov and .mil. Since the US government and US military created the internet, and have been using it for far longer than anyone else, it would be a necessarily difficult task to relocate the domains.
The States of the US may not be independant, but they do have certain attributes that are supposed to make them nearly so. They were *supposed* to have nearly full authority, except where the Federal was allowed power. The power is not delegated to the States in the way you mention. Any power that is not expressly reserved for the Federal is a State power. That implies that States have power except where delegated to the Federal.
The idea behind personal freedom also means that you are forcing personal responsibility. The hypothetical person in the car crash decided to not wear a seatbelt, and was then in a collision. They need to bear responsibility for the decision to not wear the seatbelt. That means, in part, they were responsible for the the injuries. Allowing law to shape around the idea you mention will result in people no longer taking responsibility for their actions or inactions, since they are pushing it off to government. This is where we are today, with an overbearing government and people blaming everyone else for the things they caused on their own.
I'd say the person didn't want to wear a seatbelt, and this amplified their injuries. After the fact, they wish someone said "you must wear seatbelts", since it would have made the decision for them. Now, if you kept telling people "wear seatbelts", but stopped there, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
I think you accidentally gave some aid to what I was saying before about changing social perception. You're right, did you actually want that Coca-Cola before all the advertising? It's hard to say, because the ads may have convinced you to drink it. In the same way, ads could convince you not to drink Coke, or, more relevant to the discussion, not do drugs, or not abuse alcohol.
Even more basic, I want to live in a place where people have to consider their actions, and take responsibility for them.
Americans complain because it's additional tax. We don't want to be Europe, in theory. Who cares if Americans are complaining about gas prices. You live in Europe, where you are taxes very heavily. We live in America, where we are taxed less heavily. We don't want to do it the European way, and so we whine, complain, and fight when the government tries to force such.
Then you pay for roads the same way you do now. Most of your road maintanance is paid for from local revenues in municipal government. Taxes that you pay for gas and tolls don't tend to end up back with local govs. Gas tax goes partial to State and partial to Federal. Federal does no road maintanance. State maintains state and interstate roadways, many of which also have tolls. A combination of income tax, partial gas tax, and tolls pays for these roads. Also, the Federal gives some monies back to the States in return for doing what they are told.
If you wanted to maintain status quo, you could levy an additional tax on electrical consumption. The government is not getting ready for this "next phase" as you say, they are simply expanding their power to fill available space. If the citizens will allow them to monitor their vehicles at all times, the government will try to do so.
You are highly unlikely to get 50% of the population not driving some vehicle in the US. There is no infrastructure to allow that to function, and it would take much longer than 10 years to put such in place. I'd be surprised if it could be done in 30 years. The way that the country has developed does not lend to massive public transit networks. You would have to either build an unmanagable amount of infrastructure, which would require a whole lot of land takings, or you would have to attempt to get most people to live in and immediately around cities. Neither is likely to be workable.