Suppose we manage to create a gene therapy which restores color sight to humans.
Will this be covered under ObamaCare? More specifically, will the precalculated cost to benefit ratio fit within the guidelines that will be proposed under our equivalent of NICE?
If I oppose something, then I can knock it down with a bulldozer and I'm doing some sort of "societal good."
I also learned elsewhere that it is acceptable to pay someone under the table to commit acts of violence that I can attribute to my opponents.
And I learned elsewhere that sabotage, especially sabotage which threatens the lives of workers--like nails in a tree, for example--is a completely acceptable form of protest. Especially if someone gets hurt.
And ultimately I learned that the ends does not justify the means, unless I really really support the ends. Thus getting a gun to defend myself and my property is bad, unless I'm a tree hugger or support President Obama's policies on health care.
This whole "pursuit of the truth" and "loyal opposition" thing is so overrated.
I think this goes to a theory of mine, which is that all of these changes are linked with the cost of energy.
Most of these changes from the 1880's to the 1950's were not all that revolutionary, when you think about it: what made them available was their wide spread adoption. Most of the devices which created a revolution in the standard of living are associated with devices that required constant, always-on electricity or the wide-spread availability of natural gas. Even other widespread changes, such as the availability of running water, required cheap energy to power the system of pumps to pressurize water through the system and in many areas push it up hill.
The bounding cost of flights to the moon is the energy costs. Flying or hovering cars are problematic because of energy costs. Supersonic passenger aircraft are more expensive than subsonic aircraft in part because of energy costs.
What we need is cheap energy. Unfortunately our society has decided collectively that cheap energy is detrimental to the environment, and so we're now engaged in the wide-spread of newer forms of energy production, such as wind and solar, which are intermittent and have the side effect of raising energy costs, since intermittent energy sources require an equal capacity of stand-by energy production.
Mount Wilson doesn't just hold the observatory but also transmission towers for all of the major broadcast TV stations in Los Angeles, as well as a majority of the radio stations, along with transmission towers for a large percentage of emergency responder communications and commercial transmission, such as trucking logistics. Mount Wilson is a major asset, and the fire crews have been preparing the area for several days in order to save the area.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, but in the case of Mount Wilson, it's clear they've been concentrating as much effort saving the complex as they have in making sure the fires don't reach the residential communities in La Canada/Flintridge and La Crescenta.
I'm more than happy to turn stuff over to the United Nations--just as soon as they become a representative republican government with democratic elections guaranteed for all subordinate States and local governmental regions.
His assertion is, from what I read, that intellectual property is not actually property. I'm fascinated that anyone who supports the GPL would make that assertion, since the GPL is backed by the idea that ideas and speech are not free, but can be constrained by its owner to certain uses--notably to uses that are compatible with the GPL.
So you wouldn't mind at all if I downloaded your Libreria project, stripped off the GPL v3 headers, tossed my own name on it, wrapped it in a GUI and sold it for a profit?
Just sayin'...
There are so many things you can do with an 555 IC that it's not even funny. Digikey has them for 44 cents per unit here. With a handful of descrete components you can create everything from flip flops (with 2 555 ICs) to oscillators to time delay circuits. (some example circuits.)
I suspect with a handful of 555 ICs, descrete circuits, ICs and switches (or just touch wires together), you can easily create a whole host of illustrative experiments that show the idea behind modern gate circuits. And I'm sure you can easily do it all for a few dollars worth of components, though unfortunately breadboards can be quite expensive. (Around $8 for a small breadboard through Digikey, though you may be able to find cheaper.)
Too bad you posted anonymously. Otherwise I could have added special case code to my version formatter to separate version numbers with "#", just so you won't get confused when the version of my software goes from 1#9 to 1#10.
X.Y (B): X: major version as you've outlined.
Y: minor version as you've outlined.
(B): Build number; this is an auto-incrementing number which indicates the build. This is used for QA tracking purposes.
I can also see adding a.Z, as you've also outlined: every public facing build increments Z before shipping, in order to indicate if it is a bug fix. If there is a.Z, then the build number can be hidden from the user--the only purpose it serves is for customer support to know which build the user has so bugs can be tracked appropriately.
I don't see any reason why it needs to be any more complicated than that.
Any time chemicals interact with air, it strikes me there is the potential for air pollution.
Is that the case here? I mean, in theory the chemistry may not result in pollution, but in the real world it only takes a fraction of a percent of the chemistry to take an alternate reactive path to result in unexpected or unwanted impurities...
(1) Get out and go for a long walk. Sometimes it helps clear my head.
(2) Sometimes my mental blocks occur because I can't seem to solve a design problem because mentally it's just gotten to big for me to hold in my brain. Re-examine assumptions and try to simplify--while you're out walking, of course.
(3) Take a day off, and give yourself permission not to look at the problem for that day. If you're sitting there not working, you may as well go have fun--you'll accomplish just as much and you'll feel better.
(4) The two things that get me excited again is watching a good science fiction movie, and listening to music like Supertramp and Rush. Your own turn-ons will probably be different than mine--but sometimes getting excited about something else then bleeds back into being excited about what I do.
For me, I only write great software when I'm excited about writing great software. All of the management tricks, facing reality tricks and the like don't mean squat if I'm not excited and refreshed and relaxed.
Until the code is stable, if you use the new, beta quality garbage collector in production, don't go crying to Sun for help unless you're willing to pay for a support contract.
How is that any different from most open source companies such as Red Hat?
If we're going to create a "bill of rights", then we should be careful that those rights are negative rights--that is, rights which prohibit taking certain actions (such as a right to be anonymous, which really is a right prohibiting authorities from requiring my personal information be gathered and stored), and not positive rights--that is, "rights" which require someone else to cede control or perform certain actions on my behalf. (For example, a "right" to a computer is a positive right--because it requires someone to give me a computer.)
I'm all for piling up the negative rights--after all, they prohibit government from making me do things or making other people do things on my behalf. But positive rights are essentially demands on other people to act on my behalf--and that's no longer a "right", when you get right down to it.
In that context, I can see calling for a right to anonymity, a right to tinker with hardware I own, and a right to free speech on-line regardless of location or local laws. In all three cases we can limit the definition to restrictions on government: government doesn't have the power to discover my identity online, government doesn't have the power to prosecute me if I tinker with hardware I own, government doesn't have the power to prosecute me for speaking my mind. (And I read the "right to anonymity" as meaning I have the right to lie when asked by a web site for my personal identifying information, so long as the lie does not allow me to steal services fraudulently.)
But the rights outlined in the original article (besides anonymity) are all positive rights--they require the other person to behave in certain ways. Network neutrality, for example, requires that ISPs build their networks according to certain, externally imposed standards.
While I'm for net neutrality, I'd be far more comfortable if that was codified as a law rather than enumerated as a fundamental right.
It used to be, perhaps 10 years ago, that developers were hard to come by. Any fool who could write code could get a great development job even if he didn't have a degree. Some folks were being hired without even a HS diploma.
The industry has matured significantly since then.
Right now when I look around at the software architects and principal engineers at various companies in Los Angeles, I see the majority of them have Masters or even Ph.D.s. There are quite a few job opportunities where the job description strongly recommends a masters degree--and in quite a few places where I've done interviews, I've had my boss tell me that person was highly recommended because he had a masters or a Ph.D.
In my opinion, (1) a masters is not worth two years of experience, if you're interested in getting your hands dirty and learning real-world stuff. But (2) a masters will open more doors for you. A Ph.D. will open even more doors.
Used to be the industry was such that simple merit would allow you to work your way up the ladder. Now, you need a degree if you are going to go beyond certain boundaries, regardless of whatever talent and experience you may have.
Generally estimates of transportation by car are done at a fixed price per mile, around 55 cents or so per mile. This amount assumes wear and tear on the car, including costs of repairs, as well as cost of regular maintenance such as oil changes and average depreciation costs of the car itself. (The specific number of 55 cents per mile was pulled from the official IRS tax code.)
If we assume 15,000 miles per year, then at 55 cents a mile it works out to be an annual cost of $8,250/year.
How this somehow turns into a $12,600 year savings make no sense, unless you're getting $4k/year payment to ride the train.
The key sentence in this whole thing: "Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity."
Of course you have to wade down to the very last sentence before you find the motivation of this little bit of astroturf, which is "we need to punish the big users of the 'net because if we don't, your computer will crash."
And note that in the North-Eastern United States where population density is greatest, Amtrak does pretty well.
We don't use trains in America because somehow Americans are stupid or because of some conspiracy by General Motors. We don't use trains because they don't make sense in most places. And where they do make sense, they can run nearly without subsidy: Amtrak's rail system is subsidized only in the mid-west and the west where taking an airplane would be faster and cheaper overall.
Another factor that people forget about the rail system in the United States (and in Europe) is that most of the present long-haul rail lines were built with slave labor. It's the dirty little secret of rail that they were subsidized by hundreds of thousands of Chinese and black slaves being worked to death. So in a real way the rail system of the United States was subsidized twice: first, by being built by slaves, and second by being financed and protected by a set of interlocking legal and tax subsidies going back to the 1800's.
Even with all those advantages, people only take rail when they have to--that is, when it is either cheaper, or faster, than using a different mode of transportation. Trains made sense in the 1800's because they were faster and cheaper than riding a horse. Today, cars and planes are more flexible, cheaper and faster.
That's exactly what happened a few weeks ago: a number of assets were being valued at a fraction of their face value and they're being dumped on the open market at fire-sale prices. It is precisely for this reason that the Treasury was looking at allowing banks to swap long-term bills for short-term treasury paper, in order to bolster the value of the treasury assets held by the banks.
Sadly many of these things seem only available to institutional buyers--otherwise, I'd go out there and start scooping up these cheap bonds myself!!!
Re:Sick and tired of people ragging on mark-to-mar
on
How To Create More Jobs
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· Score: 4, Informative
The problem is how does one value an asset that one is holding and that one has not sold yet, since the real value of an asset is what I could get for it on the open market.
Mark to market simply says that I need to value that asset at the current going rate for similar assets on the open market.
Now here is where the banks got screwed, and the fun part about this example is that it is currently going on today. Say I bought a 10-year treasury bill for $70 five years ago which will mature in 10 years at a face value of $100, earning around 4% annual interest. What is that asset worth?
Well, you could say that the asset's value is growing at 4% compounded interest, so the bond is worth $85 today.
WRONG!!!
Mark to market says that the asset is worth what I could get for it if I sold it today on the open market. Well, in the open market there is such a rush for cash liquidity that people have been dumping their bond holdings (including treasury bonds). And as we all learned in Economics 101, high supply, low demand translates to depressed prices.
Which means that if I tried to sell that $100 treasury on the bond market, I may only get $50 for it.
So, according to mark-to-market accounting, my $100 treasury bought five years ago for $70, whose face value if I simply computed it's value by compound interest would be $85 is actually only worth $50. And it means if I have the regulatory requirement to have a certain asset to liability ratio, my treasury bonds, which are completely and totally secure--the U.S. Government so far has not defaulted on a single treasury--is insufficiently "secure" for accounting purposes.
It's the primary reason why some people want to do away with mark-to-market rules: because many mortgage backed securities were trading at perhaps 10 cents to 20 cents on the dollar, even when the most pessimistic default rates in the mortgage market would cause the underlying assets (the houses themselves) which comprise the mortgage backed security to be worth maybe 85 cents or 90 cents to the dollar. This 9x deflation in the face value of the instrument was what killed AIG: they had no choice but to value the asset lower than the underlying homes would have been worth in the event 50% of the land mass of the United States was destroyed in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
The whole SOX compliance thing was silly.
on
How To Create More Jobs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
SOX was passed so that politicians could look like they were "doing something" after the whole Enron debacle. Okay, fine; politicians have to look like they're "doing something"--but unfortunately for us, "doing something" involves passing new laws, and every law that passes is a minor freedom that is revoked.
The real irony of Enron was not that it was a failure of having the right regulations in place, but a failure of enforcement: the guys running Enron went to jail for breaking pre-SOX laws.
That's the thing that irritates me the most: politicians always have to look like they're doing something, when in fact, the right thing for them to do is nothing, except, perhaps, hold a hearing to find out why enforcement failed. And sadly, enforcement fails more often than not because we don't spend enough money on enforcement because we're busy trying to figure out how to enforce the new legal requirements.
The whole legal framework is bug laden and a perfect example of the Lava Flow Anti-pattern. What we need is for politicians to go through and rewrite the law to simplify it, rather than to add more and more layers of nonsense.
As a footnote, every time someone says that some section of our economy is insufficiently regulated, I laugh out loud: nearly every aspect of the financial system (such as financial derivatives) exist as a side effect of the current regulatory framework. It's not that we don't have enough regulations--it's because the existing framework is buggy.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose we manage to create a gene therapy which restores color sight to humans. Will this be covered under ObamaCare? More specifically, will the precalculated cost to benefit ratio fit within the guidelines that will be proposed under our equivalent of NICE?
If I oppose something, then I can knock it down with a bulldozer and I'm doing some sort of "societal good."
I also learned elsewhere that it is acceptable to pay someone under the table to commit acts of violence that I can attribute to my opponents.
And I learned elsewhere that sabotage, especially sabotage which threatens the lives of workers--like nails in a tree, for example--is a completely acceptable form of protest. Especially if someone gets hurt.
And ultimately I learned that the ends does not justify the means, unless I really really support the ends. Thus getting a gun to defend myself and my property is bad, unless I'm a tree hugger or support President Obama's policies on health care.
This whole "pursuit of the truth" and "loyal opposition" thing is so overrated.
I think this goes to a theory of mine, which is that all of these changes are linked with the cost of energy.
Most of these changes from the 1880's to the 1950's were not all that revolutionary, when you think about it: what made them available was their wide spread adoption. Most of the devices which created a revolution in the standard of living are associated with devices that required constant, always-on electricity or the wide-spread availability of natural gas. Even other widespread changes, such as the availability of running water, required cheap energy to power the system of pumps to pressurize water through the system and in many areas push it up hill.
The bounding cost of flights to the moon is the energy costs. Flying or hovering cars are problematic because of energy costs. Supersonic passenger aircraft are more expensive than subsonic aircraft in part because of energy costs.
What we need is cheap energy. Unfortunately our society has decided collectively that cheap energy is detrimental to the environment, and so we're now engaged in the wide-spread of newer forms of energy production, such as wind and solar, which are intermittent and have the side effect of raising energy costs, since intermittent energy sources require an equal capacity of stand-by energy production.
I doubt it.
Mount Wilson doesn't just hold the observatory but also transmission towers for all of the major broadcast TV stations in Los Angeles, as well as a majority of the radio stations, along with transmission towers for a large percentage of emergency responder communications and commercial transmission, such as trucking logistics. Mount Wilson is a major asset, and the fire crews have been preparing the area for several days in order to save the area.
Nothing in life is guaranteed, but in the case of Mount Wilson, it's clear they've been concentrating as much effort saving the complex as they have in making sure the fires don't reach the residential communities in La Canada/Flintridge and La Crescenta.
I'm more than happy to turn stuff over to the United Nations--just as soon as they become a representative republican government with democratic elections guaranteed for all subordinate States and local governmental regions.
At least both bosses has much of the country believing the answer to governmental excess is more governmental control.
His assertion is, from what I read, that intellectual property is not actually property. I'm fascinated that anyone who supports the GPL would make that assertion, since the GPL is backed by the idea that ideas and speech are not free, but can be constrained by its owner to certain uses--notably to uses that are compatible with the GPL.
So you wouldn't mind at all if I downloaded your Libreria project, stripped off the GPL v3 headers, tossed my own name on it, wrapped it in a GUI and sold it for a profit? Just sayin'...
I hit "submit" just as I realized that 556s are a better bet: two 555s on one chip, and Digikey has them for 55 cents per unit, or 50 pieces for $22.
There are so many things you can do with an 555 IC that it's not even funny. Digikey has them for 44 cents per unit here. With a handful of descrete components you can create everything from flip flops (with 2 555 ICs) to oscillators to time delay circuits. (some example circuits.)
I suspect with a handful of 555 ICs, descrete circuits, ICs and switches (or just touch wires together), you can easily create a whole host of illustrative experiments that show the idea behind modern gate circuits. And I'm sure you can easily do it all for a few dollars worth of components, though unfortunately breadboards can be quite expensive. (Around $8 for a small breadboard through Digikey, though you may be able to find cheaper.)
Too bad you posted anonymously. Otherwise I could have added special case code to my version formatter to separate version numbers with "#", just so you won't get confused when the version of my software goes from 1#9 to 1#10.
X.Y (B): X: major version as you've outlined. .Z, as you've also outlined: every public facing build increments Z before shipping, in order to indicate if it is a bug fix. If there is a .Z, then the build number can be hidden from the user--the only purpose it serves is for customer support to know which build the user has so bugs can be tracked appropriately.
Y: minor version as you've outlined.
(B): Build number; this is an auto-incrementing number which indicates the build. This is used for QA tracking purposes.
I can also see adding a
I don't see any reason why it needs to be any more complicated than that.
"The CO2 from your breath is not the problem. The CO2 from your tailpipe is." So... What you're saying is I shouldn't eat beans?
"Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon." Too late; I already have a cell phone. I'm already being tracked.
Any time chemicals interact with air, it strikes me there is the potential for air pollution.
Is that the case here? I mean, in theory the chemistry may not result in pollution, but in the real world it only takes a fraction of a percent of the chemistry to take an alternate reactive path to result in unexpected or unwanted impurities...
(1) Get out and go for a long walk. Sometimes it helps clear my head.
(2) Sometimes my mental blocks occur because I can't seem to solve a design problem because mentally it's just gotten to big for me to hold in my brain. Re-examine assumptions and try to simplify--while you're out walking, of course.
(3) Take a day off, and give yourself permission not to look at the problem for that day. If you're sitting there not working, you may as well go have fun--you'll accomplish just as much and you'll feel better.
(4) The two things that get me excited again is watching a good science fiction movie, and listening to music like Supertramp and Rush. Your own turn-ons will probably be different than mine--but sometimes getting excited about something else then bleeds back into being excited about what I do.
For me, I only write great software when I'm excited about writing great software. All of the management tricks, facing reality tricks and the like don't mean squat if I'm not excited and refreshed and relaxed.
I think the intent was simple.
Until the code is stable, if you use the new, beta quality garbage collector in production, don't go crying to Sun for help unless you're willing to pay for a support contract.
How is that any different from most open source companies such as Red Hat?
If we're going to create a "bill of rights", then we should be careful that those rights are negative rights--that is, rights which prohibit taking certain actions (such as a right to be anonymous, which really is a right prohibiting authorities from requiring my personal information be gathered and stored), and not positive rights--that is, "rights" which require someone else to cede control or perform certain actions on my behalf. (For example, a "right" to a computer is a positive right--because it requires someone to give me a computer.)
I'm all for piling up the negative rights--after all, they prohibit government from making me do things or making other people do things on my behalf. But positive rights are essentially demands on other people to act on my behalf--and that's no longer a "right", when you get right down to it.
In that context, I can see calling for a right to anonymity, a right to tinker with hardware I own, and a right to free speech on-line regardless of location or local laws. In all three cases we can limit the definition to restrictions on government: government doesn't have the power to discover my identity online, government doesn't have the power to prosecute me if I tinker with hardware I own, government doesn't have the power to prosecute me for speaking my mind. (And I read the "right to anonymity" as meaning I have the right to lie when asked by a web site for my personal identifying information, so long as the lie does not allow me to steal services fraudulently.)
But the rights outlined in the original article (besides anonymity) are all positive rights--they require the other person to behave in certain ways. Network neutrality, for example, requires that ISPs build their networks according to certain, externally imposed standards.
While I'm for net neutrality, I'd be far more comfortable if that was codified as a law rather than enumerated as a fundamental right.
It used to be, perhaps 10 years ago, that developers were hard to come by. Any fool who could write code could get a great development job even if he didn't have a degree. Some folks were being hired without even a HS diploma.
The industry has matured significantly since then.
Right now when I look around at the software architects and principal engineers at various companies in Los Angeles, I see the majority of them have Masters or even Ph.D.s. There are quite a few job opportunities where the job description strongly recommends a masters degree--and in quite a few places where I've done interviews, I've had my boss tell me that person was highly recommended because he had a masters or a Ph.D.
In my opinion, (1) a masters is not worth two years of experience, if you're interested in getting your hands dirty and learning real-world stuff. But (2) a masters will open more doors for you. A Ph.D. will open even more doors.
Used to be the industry was such that simple merit would allow you to work your way up the ladder. Now, you need a degree if you are going to go beyond certain boundaries, regardless of whatever talent and experience you may have.
Generally estimates of transportation by car are done at a fixed price per mile, around 55 cents or so per mile. This amount assumes wear and tear on the car, including costs of repairs, as well as cost of regular maintenance such as oil changes and average depreciation costs of the car itself. (The specific number of 55 cents per mile was pulled from the official IRS tax code.)
If we assume 15,000 miles per year, then at 55 cents a mile it works out to be an annual cost of $8,250/year.
How this somehow turns into a $12,600 year savings make no sense, unless you're getting $4k/year payment to ride the train.
The key sentence in this whole thing: "Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for âoenet hogsâ who use more than their share of capacity."
Of course you have to wade down to the very last sentence before you find the motivation of this little bit of astroturf, which is "we need to punish the big users of the 'net because if we don't, your computer will crash."
Translation: "give us tiered pricing or die."
It's just FUD designed to push an agenda.
And note that in the North-Eastern United States where population density is greatest, Amtrak does pretty well.
We don't use trains in America because somehow Americans are stupid or because of some conspiracy by General Motors. We don't use trains because they don't make sense in most places. And where they do make sense, they can run nearly without subsidy: Amtrak's rail system is subsidized only in the mid-west and the west where taking an airplane would be faster and cheaper overall.
Another factor that people forget about the rail system in the United States (and in Europe) is that most of the present long-haul rail lines were built with slave labor. It's the dirty little secret of rail that they were subsidized by hundreds of thousands of Chinese and black slaves being worked to death. So in a real way the rail system of the United States was subsidized twice: first, by being built by slaves, and second by being financed and protected by a set of interlocking legal and tax subsidies going back to the 1800's.
Even with all those advantages, people only take rail when they have to--that is, when it is either cheaper, or faster, than using a different mode of transportation. Trains made sense in the 1800's because they were faster and cheaper than riding a horse. Today, cars and planes are more flexible, cheaper and faster.
That's exactly what happened a few weeks ago: a number of assets were being valued at a fraction of their face value and they're being dumped on the open market at fire-sale prices. It is precisely for this reason that the Treasury was looking at allowing banks to swap long-term bills for short-term treasury paper, in order to bolster the value of the treasury assets held by the banks.
Sadly many of these things seem only available to institutional buyers--otherwise, I'd go out there and start scooping up these cheap bonds myself!!!
The problem is how does one value an asset that one is holding and that one has not sold yet, since the real value of an asset is what I could get for it on the open market.
Mark to market simply says that I need to value that asset at the current going rate for similar assets on the open market.
Now here is where the banks got screwed, and the fun part about this example is that it is currently going on today. Say I bought a 10-year treasury bill for $70 five years ago which will mature in 10 years at a face value of $100, earning around 4% annual interest. What is that asset worth?
Well, you could say that the asset's value is growing at 4% compounded interest, so the bond is worth $85 today.
WRONG!!!
Mark to market says that the asset is worth what I could get for it if I sold it today on the open market. Well, in the open market there is such a rush for cash liquidity that people have been dumping their bond holdings (including treasury bonds). And as we all learned in Economics 101, high supply, low demand translates to depressed prices.
Which means that if I tried to sell that $100 treasury on the bond market, I may only get $50 for it.
So, according to mark-to-market accounting, my $100 treasury bought five years ago for $70, whose face value if I simply computed it's value by compound interest would be $85 is actually only worth $50. And it means if I have the regulatory requirement to have a certain asset to liability ratio, my treasury bonds, which are completely and totally secure--the U.S. Government so far has not defaulted on a single treasury--is insufficiently "secure" for accounting purposes.
It's the primary reason why some people want to do away with mark-to-market rules: because many mortgage backed securities were trading at perhaps 10 cents to 20 cents on the dollar, even when the most pessimistic default rates in the mortgage market would cause the underlying assets (the houses themselves) which comprise the mortgage backed security to be worth maybe 85 cents or 90 cents to the dollar. This 9x deflation in the face value of the instrument was what killed AIG: they had no choice but to value the asset lower than the underlying homes would have been worth in the event 50% of the land mass of the United States was destroyed in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.
SOX was passed so that politicians could look like they were "doing something" after the whole Enron debacle. Okay, fine; politicians have to look like they're "doing something"--but unfortunately for us, "doing something" involves passing new laws, and every law that passes is a minor freedom that is revoked.
The real irony of Enron was not that it was a failure of having the right regulations in place, but a failure of enforcement: the guys running Enron went to jail for breaking pre-SOX laws.
That's the thing that irritates me the most: politicians always have to look like they're doing something, when in fact, the right thing for them to do is nothing, except, perhaps, hold a hearing to find out why enforcement failed. And sadly, enforcement fails more often than not because we don't spend enough money on enforcement because we're busy trying to figure out how to enforce the new legal requirements.
The whole legal framework is bug laden and a perfect example of the Lava Flow Anti-pattern. What we need is for politicians to go through and rewrite the law to simplify it, rather than to add more and more layers of nonsense.
As a footnote, every time someone says that some section of our economy is insufficiently regulated, I laugh out loud: nearly every aspect of the financial system (such as financial derivatives) exist as a side effect of the current regulatory framework. It's not that we don't have enough regulations--it's because the existing framework is buggy.