Some of that is wasteful - but people disagree on what part.
You might squeeze a little waste out of the system, but the truth of these points will not alter until the nature of humanity alters. Don't hold your breath waiting.
Anyway, most spending cuts just move the taxing and spending around. Federal tax cuts have lowered the money sent to states, so states have raised taxes. (Or they make a lot of noise about "no new taxes", and raise various fees instead. Or they borrow more money: "buy now, tax later".)
you've got a pitifully dismal view of the potential of people in a democracy.
It's been said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a good mark of mental illness.
Recognizing a problem as unsolvable frees up resources to direct toward solvable problems.
Giving money to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to adolescents.
Until universal enlightenment makes the state non-existant or irrelevant, government is inevitable. Given government, taxes are inevitable. Some adjustments are possible, but by and large griping about the fact that governments tax and spend, while a popular pasttime, is about as useful as griping about continental drift. ("Did you know that every year China and Russia get closer to the United States? Stop continental drift now!")
the grandparent was referring to *real* solid state storage, not 1-2 gigs.
Some of us remember a time when "real" storage was 30 megs.
Point being, yesterday's idea of "real" storage is avilable in solid state. By the time today's idea of "real" storage is avilable, today will be yesterday. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Ronald Regan said it best..."Government is like a baby. All appetite at one end, and no responsibility at the other."
And then he went on to prove it by rolling up the national debt like never before, cutting taxes for the rich and spending recklessly. Thus proving that his kind of government is irresponsibile, yes.
If "certain programs get cut", that's not negative, that's positive.
Unless it's your favorite program.
Ask the average conservative about cutting spending by downsizing the military, eliminating corporate welfare, ending the prosecution of consensual crimes (drugs, prostitution, gambling, pornography, et cetera) and shrinking our prison population, reducing spending on police, and so on, and see if they thing "certain programs being cut" is a positive.
If you cut taxes, you have to cut spending. (Assuming you're not dumb enough to keep running up the national credit card...which is apparently not a valid assmuption about the current administration. But we'll assume sanity, for the sake of argument.)
If we're still pretending to be a democracy with armed forced for defense, our military is horribly bloated, and should be a prime candidate for spending cuts
OTOH, if we're going to be an Empire now, let's quit pretending, and just start enslaving the lands we invade so that those of us in the Father^H^H^H^H^H^HHomeland can live in luxury on the backs of the conquered people. If we're going to imitate Romans, why be half-ass about it? We've already got our bread and circuses in the form of Budweiser and "reality TV". Bring on the slaves already.
The justice system is by contitution independent. Therefore any lawsuit currently made regarding mp3 are made by the corporations and are dealt with by an independent court.
The question was not about lawsuits. It was about criminal prosecutions, which are brought by the Attorney General - a political appointee. (Of course judges are appointees too, but many serving judges date back to eariler administrations, giving some balance.)
Re:What, no editorial?
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Red Hat Recap
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To a company the size of Ford, that is trivial. Figure their profit on the sale of a new car is (to pick a number out of the air) $1000. If the offense they generated by cheaping out loses just thirty sales, worldwide, then they're behind what it would have cost to do it right.
The chief advantage I've seen in using it is that you can write pure HTML (or for that matter a non-programming designer type can) and then you place tags (formatted like {TAG}) where you want your dynamic elements to go.
That description applies to PHP itself, except that the tags are formatted like <?php... ?>.
Seems to be that the template engines are a just simplified/dumbed down (pick your bias) version of the same idea.
I don't see much use for them; I keep my application and database logic in separate classes or functions, and my main PHP scripts are pretty simple. I'm trying to move more towards CSS, too.
(The legacy code I'm dealing with is CGI programs, written in poorly organized C/C++. Not FastCGI, but good old fork-me-all-day-long CGI. They output font-tag riddled HTML. Oh, and the data is in flat files and gdbm files. So just getting things like PHP and PostgreSQL in the door has been a challenge; I'll save cleaning up the resulting HTML to use CSS for later.)
The funny thing here is that all appliances that regulate the amount of power they consume will continue to consume the same amount of power
True, but other devices act more like simple resistors, and if less voltage is applied they will consume less power. You PC will self-regulate, but your lightbulbs will get dimmer.
I'll bet that light bulbs and other "simple resistor" devices outweigh PCs and self-regulators several times over.
The "Green Revolution" is not a way of getting more for less. It has a high cost in natural resources, a non-sustainable scheme that is the equivalent of a solving financial crisis by borrowing. It's a credit card, not a cash deposit in humanity's checking account, and the interest is piling up.
All industrial areas gets cheaper over time.
Until the time comes when the pollution needs to be cleaned up and the resources run out. But that's not figured into the cost of the industrial development, it's left as a burden to the taxpayer (or it's just left in place to poison people).
Oh, and then there's the pesky matter of how that industrial farm equipment is powered. OPEC tightened it's grip on the world's balls today by 4%, which will increase the cost of gasoline for tractors (as well as the petroleum feedstocks for synthetic fertilizers).
Didn't anyone ever tell you that a picture is worth a thousand words?
Draw me a picture of the Gettysburg address. Or one of Basho's haiku - that should only take about 1/100 of a picture, right?
For some things, pictures are very useful. For example, circuit digrams are great for figuring out electronics.
For other things, they're useless. You can't draw me a picture that explains why Tennyson's Ulysses is beautiful. (Any more than you could write prose or a poem that gets anywhere near Escher's drawing hands - witness the literal description on the linked page.)
Diagramming software is about as useful as diagramming a plots in a discussion of a novels, or the grammar of sentances - an occasional useful adjunct, but by no means the primary mode of presentation.
Languages are inherently linear.
To the contrary, programming languages took conditionals and iteration from natural language. In a written work, one can skip around amd cross-reference; prose is random-access. And viewing a diagram is just as linear - your attention only focuses on one element at a time, and you trace connections - lines - between them.
Every large project should use some sort of diagramming/planning.
Planning, of course; diagramming, not so much. Design should be done primarily using English (or your local language) text, supplimented with diagrams.
You want a comparison? How about going to a car dealership and having them ask you whether you want your interior molding fastened with plastic screws, snap-locks, or metal bolts.
If you ever work on your own car, you'd love to be asked that question. (I installed my own stero in the first two cars I owned, and had to deal with removing and re-installing interior panels.) It would be fine with me if a car dealer asked, "Do you plan to work on this car yourself?", and asked me a bunch of detailed choices if I did. Just like some software has "advanced" settings that the average user doesn't need to muck about with, but I can.
When I go to download Linux I do not have a butcher telling me what would work best for my life style.
So go hire a Linux geek to be your cyber-butcher.
Perhaps "cyber-tailor" is more appropriate...you can buy "off the rack" from MS and get an ill-fitting garment, or your can get a "tailor-made" solution from a Linux geek. (Even better, your tailor-made is very likely going to cost you less in the long run.)
Choice is not wealth, especially not when 99% of the choices are crap. Having hundreds of different phone plans to choose from does not make me wealthy. Having good companions, good food, nice toys and tools, and a warm dry place to sleep and keep my toys and tools, makes me wealthy. Wealth is satisfaction of needs and wants, which can either come from being satisfied with less, or from having more.
While freedom implies choice, choice does not imply freedom. The condemned man can be offered his choice of methods of execution; the voters may be offered a choice between Democrat and Republican. In either case the system has removed most of the meaning from the choice. ("Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.")
Freedom is clearly not responsibility, as one is often sighted without the other. People have been known to behave responsibly under horrible, unfree conditions, and people with great freedom often have irresponsibly. In fact, what people who claim "freedom == responsibility" mean is that they want to limit the freedom of people whose actions they consider irresponsible. (Though they often have odd definitions of "irresponsible".)
And certainly wealth has nothing to do with responsibility. I've known too many wealthy irresponsible people, and responsible working poor, to ever believe that.
Why can't other player maker come up with better UI? Why can't we come up with something better and original?
Because user interfaces are supposed to be similar.
"Why can't other car makers come up with a better UI than pedals and a wheel? Why can't they come up with something better and original?"
"Why can't other telephone makers come up with a better UI than a 3x4 array of keys with numbers and letters? Why can't they come up with something better and original?"
"Why can't other CD player makers come up with a better UI than a Play/Pause, Stop, FF and Rewind buttons? Why can't they come up with something better and original?"
The area wasn't empty, but there wasn't displacement going on. The Jews moved in, and many Arabs followed because of the jobs that were being created.
Under British rule, there was in fact plenty of displacement going on, and many jobs were reserved for Jews.
Nobody is happy that the Palestinians are forcing the Israelis to kill them
I'm sorry, but if you beleive that resistance to occupation is "forcing" the invaders to kill the native population, you've gone far enough beyond the bounds of reason that futher discussion is pointless.
And once said CIO finds out that it still costs money, but he has to give it away to his *gasp* competetors...
No free software licence requires that you give away derived works. OTOH, the development community is more likely to listen to and address the needs of users who contribute.
The rest of the people, those who want to eat, just want to be able to show a power point presentation to the boss that shows a budget reduction.
And they'll get it with free (as in freedom) software.
Without freedom, your vendor has you over a barrel (see MS's "Software Assurance", for example). "Freedom" isn't just as in free, it's also as in "free market" - competition, as opposed to vendor lock-in.
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You might squeeze a little waste out of the system, but the truth of these points will not alter until the nature of humanity alters. Don't hold your breath waiting.
Anyway, most spending cuts just move the taxing and spending around. Federal tax cuts have lowered the money sent to states, so states have raised taxes. (Or they make a lot of noise about "no new taxes", and raise various fees instead. Or they borrow more money: "buy now, tax later".)
It's been said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a good mark of mental illness.
Recognizing a problem as unsolvable frees up resources to direct toward solvable problems.
Until universal enlightenment makes the state non-existant or irrelevant, government is inevitable. Given government, taxes are inevitable. Some adjustments are possible, but by and large griping about the fact that governments tax and spend, while a popular pasttime, is about as useful as griping about continental drift. ("Did you know that every year China and Russia get closer to the United States? Stop continental drift now!")
Some of us remember a time when "real" storage was 30 megs.
Point being, yesterday's idea of "real" storage is avilable in solid state. By the time today's idea of "real" storage is avilable, today will be yesterday. Lather, rinse, repeat.
U.S. citizens are just about the lowest taxed in the developed world. (Especially for the very wealthiest Americans, who pay a much lower percentage of their incomes as taxes than the rest of us.)
And then he went on to prove it by rolling up the national debt like never before, cutting taxes for the rich and spending recklessly. Thus proving that his kind of government is irresponsibile, yes.
Unless it's your favorite program.
Ask the average conservative about cutting spending by downsizing the military, eliminating corporate welfare, ending the prosecution of consensual crimes (drugs, prostitution, gambling, pornography, et cetera) and shrinking our prison population, reducing spending on police, and so on, and see if they thing "certain programs being cut" is a positive.
If you cut taxes, you have to cut spending. (Assuming you're not dumb enough to keep running up the national credit card...which is apparently not a valid assmuption about the current administration. But we'll assume sanity, for the sake of argument.)
If we're still pretending to be a democracy with armed forced for defense, our military is horribly bloated, and should be a prime candidate for spending cuts
OTOH, if we're going to be an Empire now, let's quit pretending, and just start enslaving the lands we invade so that those of us in the Father^H^H^H^H^H^HHomeland can live in luxury on the backs of the conquered people. If we're going to imitate Romans, why be half-ass about it? We've already got our bread and circuses in the form of Budweiser and "reality TV". Bring on the slaves already.
The question was not about lawsuits. It was about criminal prosecutions, which are brought by the Attorney General - a political appointee. (Of course judges are appointees too, but many serving judges date back to eariler administrations, giving some balance.)
To a company the size of Ford, that is trivial. Figure their profit on the sale of a new car is (to pick a number out of the air) $1000. If the offense they generated by cheaping out loses just thirty sales, worldwide, then they're behind what it would have cost to do it right.
No artichoke hearts I can see if you're in the boonies, but not green olives? Savages!
That description applies to PHP itself, except that the tags are formatted like <?php ... ?>.
Seems to be that the template engines are a just simplified/dumbed down (pick your bias) version of the same idea.
I don't see much use for them; I keep my application and database logic in separate classes or functions, and my main PHP scripts are pretty simple. I'm trying to move more towards CSS, too.
(The legacy code I'm dealing with is CGI programs, written in poorly organized C/C++. Not FastCGI, but good old fork-me-all-day-long CGI. They output font-tag riddled HTML. Oh, and the data is in flat files and gdbm files. So just getting things like PHP and PostgreSQL in the door has been a challenge; I'll save cleaning up the resulting HTML to use CSS for later.)
No disrespect to the Man In Black, but it was written by Shel Silverstein.
See also his "sequel" to it, The Father of the Boy Named Sue.
Nope. 100 cups at $3 each. This one was on Cartoon Network just days ago and I recall that very clearly.
I'm not much a coffee drinker (under three cups a week) but I love that scene.
True, but other devices act more like simple resistors, and if less voltage is applied they will consume less power. You PC will self-regulate, but your lightbulbs will get dimmer.
I'll bet that light bulbs and other "simple resistor" devices outweigh PCs and self-regulators several times over.
<overact class="Shatner">That which you called Ee'd Plebnista was not written for chiefs or kings or warriors or the rich and powerful, but for all the people!</overact>
The "Green Revolution" is not a way of getting more for less. It has a high cost in natural resources, a non-sustainable scheme that is the equivalent of a solving financial crisis by borrowing. It's a credit card, not a cash deposit in humanity's checking account, and the interest is piling up.
Until the time comes when the pollution needs to be cleaned up and the resources run out. But that's not figured into the cost of the industrial development, it's left as a burden to the taxpayer (or it's just left in place to poison people).
Oh, and then there's the pesky matter of how that industrial farm equipment is powered. OPEC tightened it's grip on the world's balls today by 4%, which will increase the cost of gasoline for tractors (as well as the petroleum feedstocks for synthetic fertilizers).
Draw me a picture of the Gettysburg address. Or one of Basho's haiku - that should only take about 1/100 of a picture, right?
For some things, pictures are very useful. For example, circuit digrams are great for figuring out electronics.
For other things, they're useless. You can't draw me a picture that explains why Tennyson's Ulysses is beautiful. (Any more than you could write prose or a poem that gets anywhere near Escher's drawing hands - witness the literal description on the linked page.)
Diagramming software is about as useful as diagramming a plots in a discussion of a novels, or the grammar of sentances - an occasional useful adjunct, but by no means the primary mode of presentation.
To the contrary, programming languages took conditionals and iteration from natural language. In a written work, one can skip around amd cross-reference; prose is random-access. And viewing a diagram is just as linear - your attention only focuses on one element at a time, and you trace connections - lines - between them.
Planning, of course; diagramming, not so much. Design should be done primarily using English (or your local language) text, supplimented with diagrams.
Software is a linguistic construction; blueprints or schematic diagrams are not as useful as they are in electronics or building construction. The fetish for diagrams over text usually indicates someone who can't write decent prose. And if you can't write decent prose well, you can't write decent code. (Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer. -- Dijkstra)
If you ever work on your own car, you'd love to be asked that question. (I installed my own stero in the first two cars I owned, and had to deal with removing and re-installing interior panels.) It would be fine with me if a car dealer asked, "Do you plan to work on this car yourself?", and asked me a bunch of detailed choices if I did. Just like some software has "advanced" settings that the average user doesn't need to muck about with, but I can.
So go hire a Linux geek to be your cyber-butcher.
Perhaps "cyber-tailor" is more appropriate...you can buy "off the rack" from MS and get an ill-fitting garment, or your can get a "tailor-made" solution from a Linux geek. (Even better, your tailor-made is very likely going to cost you less in the long run.)
No.
Choice is not wealth, especially not when 99% of the choices are crap. Having hundreds of different phone plans to choose from does not make me wealthy. Having good companions, good food, nice toys and tools, and a warm dry place to sleep and keep my toys and tools, makes me wealthy. Wealth is satisfaction of needs and wants, which can either come from being satisfied with less, or from having more.
While freedom implies choice, choice does not imply freedom. The condemned man can be offered his choice of methods of execution; the voters may be offered a choice between Democrat and Republican. In either case the system has removed most of the meaning from the choice. ("Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.")
Freedom is clearly not responsibility, as one is often sighted without the other. People have been known to behave responsibly under horrible, unfree conditions, and people with great freedom often have irresponsibly. In fact, what people who claim "freedom == responsibility" mean is that they want to limit the freedom of people whose actions they consider irresponsible. (Though they often have odd definitions of "irresponsible".)
And certainly wealth has nothing to do with responsibility. I've known too many wealthy irresponsible people, and responsible working poor, to ever believe that.
Because user interfaces are supposed to be similar.
"Why can't other car makers come up with a better UI than pedals and a wheel? Why can't they come up with something better and original?"
"Why can't other telephone makers come up with a better UI than a 3x4 array of keys with numbers and letters? Why can't they come up with something better and original?"
"Why can't other CD player makers come up with a better UI than a Play/Pause, Stop, FF and Rewind buttons? Why can't they come up with something better and original?"
Under British rule, there was in fact plenty of displacement going on, and many jobs were reserved for Jews.
I'm sorry, but if you beleive that resistance to occupation is "forcing" the invaders to kill the native population, you've gone far enough beyond the bounds of reason that futher discussion is pointless.
Yes, it is. However, most proprietary software is even more horrible.
No free software licence requires that you give away derived works. OTOH, the development community is more likely to listen to and address the needs of users who contribute.
And they'll get it with free (as in freedom) software.
Without freedom, your vendor has you over a barrel (see MS's "Software Assurance", for example). "Freedom" isn't just as in free, it's also as in "free market" - competition, as opposed to vendor lock-in.