I've heard rumours that Zyprexa might be withdrawn from the market. Please do not take this as medical advice, I am not a medical doctor, but I remember reading that it is rare for a drug, even one with potentially harmful or deleterious side effects, to be completely withdrawn from the market and particularly so for drugs which are NOT simply "lifestyle" medications (i.e. ED, allergies, or minor pain relief). They may recommend that doctors prescribe alternative medications or otherwise attempt to discourage new prescriptions, but the drug usually remains available to those doctors and their patients who wish to continue using it (albeit with new and stronger warning labels).
I for one would love not having to get out of the car to pump gas when it's 10 degrees out, and would easily pay 10 cents per gallon more for the convenience. I live in a warmer part of the United States so that is not a frequent occurrence for me and ten cents more per gallon for every fill-up really starts to add up after a while. However, if using the robot maximizes your utility then by all means, use it.
Obviously you can achieve the same thing with a human attendant, but they tend to be fairly slow in my experience when there are several cars for them to pump simultaneously. I live in a state were gas station attendants are not required and are a distinctive rarity (i.e. there may be some somewhere in the state, but not near where I live). In fact, I cannot remember the last time that I didn't have to pump my own gas.
Given a choice between a station with human attendants and robot attendants I would pick the robots if they were faster and didn't carry additional risks of damaging my car. The risk will not be zero, but it may or may not be better than human attendants.
Assuming ~1000 cars per day filling up 15 gallons each, and 4 machines with negligible operating costs, they'd need to raise the price per gallon by 7 cents to make up the $400,000 investment in one year, after that it could act as a profit center. It is not just a question of making up the cost and then earning profit. The $400,000 could have been invested and earned interest OR (more likely) the gas station owner will have to get a loan to purchase the robots in which case the cost of the loan must be factored in. Depending upon how long the gas station owner plans to stay in the retail gasoline business AND the amount that he can raise the prices after installing the robots (I wouldn't pay more and there are probably plenty of people like me out there in that respect) there may be better alternatives compared to investing or getting a loan of $400,000 for the robots. If the present value of the difference (i.e. difference in price between robots and no robots) of all the expected future fill-ups does not exceed the present value of either the installation costs ($400,000) or the loans ($400,000+) and the opportunity cost of the next best alternative then the investment is not worthwhile.
It would also be true that people might be more likely to go inside and buy items in the convenience store if they don't have to stand around by the pump, so it could be that they would recover the cost without necessarily raising the gas prices by that much. Alright, but you just said that you value the robots because you don't have to exit your vehicle while you fill up. If you have to get out anyway to go into the convenience store then you have negated the advantage of the robots (i.e. you weren't going to get out of your vehicle in the 10 degree weather, but then you get out anyway to go into the convenience store).
I don't know why, but here in MA they never seem to put latches on the gas pumps, so you have to stand there holding the stupid thing to pump up your car when you could be inside buying a drink and some chips Are they all like that (i.e. state law)? If they are then you are right, that is really lame.
Suppose that this robot works perfectly every time without hassling the customers, damaging their vehicles, wasting their time, or generally causing other problems which cost the gas station owner money (a big assumption). From the standpoint of the gas station owner why invest in this robot when your customers already pump their own gas at no additional cost to you? I can think of only three (3) possibilities. First, if your competitors install this robot AND enough of your customers refuse to gas up at your station because you DO NOT have the robot then it might make sense provided that the margin (thin already for independent station owners) is able to support the cost which brings up the next point. Second, your customers are willing to pay more for their gas for the novelty OR the convenience of having a robot pump it for them (perhaps, but certainly a niche. Most people are very price sensitive when it comes to buying gas, driving miles out of their way to save a couple of pennies in some cases). Third, the local laws require a human attendant anyway (Oregon has this type of law) where the present value of the gas station attendant's wages in perpetuity are more than the costs of purchasing and maintaining the robot (provided that the initial assumption about damage to property and persons remains true). In any case it is highly likely that this robot will not be widely used or fill only niche markets because it is a cost center for the gas station owner and not likely to be or become a profit center. At best, it might become a requirement of doing business, but I cannot see many gas station owners installing and using the robot unless they are forced to by either the marketplace or the government.
Although I would like to respond in detail, it think that it would take more words than either one of us really wants to read. However, might I suggest the following video as a good starting point on why forced redistribution produces worse results than economic growth.
The government runs on taxes and government, unless one takes the anarchist point of view, is necessary so it follows that some non-zero amount of tax revenue must be collected in order to run the government. However, and this is important, depending upon the relative elasticities of supply and demand for various goods and services different taxes will have different amounts of what economists call dead weight loss. This is equivalent to saying that some taxes are more efficient than others. Unfortunately, the tax on income, whether personal or corporate wage or dividend, is among the least efficient of all taxes. In the case of taxes the most efficient tax is the one that generates the necessary amount of revenue for the government while minimizing the dead weight loss. The progressives out there will argue that income taxes are the most "fair" of the taxes, but really we should be more concerned about efficiency and relatively less concerned with fairness, at least in an absolute sense. The argument that we should be more concerned with production per person and efficiency, rather than fairness, is a subtle one, which is why it is mostly lost upon those who are ignorant of economics, but there is very strong empirical economic evidence (proofs are difficult to achieve in economics) to back up the efficiency over fairness theory for maximizing the marginal utility of everyone (i.e. more and cheaper goods and services for everyone).
Tax the corporations, and let the individuals keep their wages. Politicians would end up with a lot more votes that way (though a lot less money through corporate sponsorship and whatnot). Unfortunately, it is very difficult in practice to "target" a tax to hit a particular demographic group. This is the same reason why it makes no sense for the Social Security Administration to talk about the "employee's share" and the "employers share". Both shares are paid by the employees (i.e. their wages are lower than they otherwise would be if the employer wasn't paying "their share"). It is a frequent mistake here on Slashdot to ignore what economists call the incidence of a tax. In fact, it is often the very people whom the tax advocates propose to help who are ultimately hurt the most by new taxes.
Another point is that coal can be turned into other useful liquid fuels for use in our vehicles, ships, and aircraft whereas nuclear cannot contribute much in these areas unless battery technology improves drastically in the next few decades (unlikely). So it would be wiser to preserve our reserves of coal for conversion into liquid fuels rather than burning them directly to produce electricity. In fact it might be possible to use waste heat from the nuclear plants (reactors generate way more heat than is needed to actually boil the water into steam and spin the generator turbines) as input energy for the coal to liquids process thereby producing both electricity and liquid fuels from coal.
Which is why government spending should be done only for those areas where there is widespread public support and need Even under those circumstances I am usually reluctant to support government spending to provide these goods or services. I would agree only if the goods or services in question were truly Public Goods AND there was widespread voter support for greater production of those goods or services than would otherwise occur in the private sector. There are many potential spending areas, health care being one of them in my opinion, where this high standard is not met.
The problem with the telecommunications industry is that it is not, in fact, a very free market. Indeed it is highly regulated, and because of this the industry has become adept at the lobbying game. It's the classic case of regulatory capture. I agree completely. It is for this reason that I have long advocated against large government and excessive regulation because it provides increased opportunities for industry to capture and control the mechanisms of government through lobbying and special interests. The inmates end up running the asylum as it were. If the government is small and well defined then there is much less chance of capture, much less value in what can be captured, and much less professional lobbying and special interest power in general.
Because of this, the regulations very much favor incumbents over innovative challengers who could shake up things up. You get nonsense like every county getting to decide which provider to give a monopoly "franchise" to, rather than allowing citizens to choose their own providers through competition. I am always and everywhere in favor of deregulation of industry because it removes one of the principal roadblocks to economic growth and allow the much more effective regime of private property rights to becoming the primary controlling force in preventing abuses and limiting negative externalities.
We're already paying incredible opportunity costs due to these sorts of regulations. So there are two possible solutions - either scrap the artificial regulations so there will be a true competitive market, or accept that it's a highly regulated part of the economy and reform the regulations to better promote our broadband goals. Either one has potential to be an improvement over the status quo. You know which approach I would prefer:D
My view is that we should be aiming for a free market... but let's just remember that when the cable companies start spouting off about the wonders of free markets, they don't really believe it. They've been exploiting the regulatory system for years. Their free market talk is just a tactic to prevent attempts to change the regulations they like into regulations they don't. I couldn't agree more. Companies believe in their bottom lines and they will use whatever tools are available to them, including regulatory capture and Rent Seeking to maximize profits. Understanding that is the first step in solving the problem. The government should deregulate and cut subsidies to prevent regulatory capture and rent seeking behavior from happening in the first place. The free market will work when these companies are submitted to the discipline of the marketplace and they have no choice left but to compete.
But if your conspiracy theory involved something like sharks with freakin lasers, now that's a conspiracy.:) They were trained to cut the cables with their freakin laser beams by the evil doers. It is a vast conspiracy of such brilliant precision and global scope as to be worthy of Dr Evil himself.
The second one was that the reason the US has the health care crisis stems from WWII. During the war the US had wage control laws where employers could raise the wages paid to employees. To allow employers to entice people to work for them though they were allowed to offer employees benefits like health insurance, and the government gave tax breaks for offering these benefits. Though the wage control laws are gone, the tax breaks are still in effect. By allowing employers to pay employees more without making them pay more in taxes, employees could then buy health insurance on their own and with so many buying it it would lower the costs of health insurance. Yes! This is absolutely correct. If the socialists out there desire a more detailed explanation of why this is correct then I whole heartedly recommend the following article: How To Cure Health Care by Milton Friedman.
Great. Now, how do feel about having to pay twice as much money as the person in the next industrialized nation, and that's before you get to the expense of a serious operation or illness. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If there is one universal economic truth it is that there is no free lunch. There is always a price to be paid whether that price is paid in the form of higher taxes, long waits for goods and services, bribes on top of the "official" price, fewer jobs due to high taxes discouraging investment, or any number of other hidden or not so hidden costs. So pick your poison, but for my own part the private out of pocket pay is the least disagreeable among all of those options.
For another, not many Americans are nearly as elitist as you seem to be.
It is not elitist to suggest that people be responsible for themselves. On the contrary, such rugged individualism, personal responsibility, and meritorious advancement are at the heart of what it traditionally means to be American. How else do you suppose that we grew from a rustic backwater into the most advanced and powerful nation on this planet in less than 233 years? I will give you a hint, it wasn't through socialism.
socialized medicine provides better care and costs less money. Period.
That is simply flat wrong sir. There is no possible way that better quality care, at least for regular medical care in small clinic or office settings, could be provided better by centralized bureaucracy with third party payment. Here is a grain of wisdom for you: "No man spends another man's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own."Milton Friedman said that and he was and is absolutely right. When doctors and patients meet together, in privacy, and reach mutually agreeable terms for treatment, including direct payment by the patient and direct service from the doctor, then the best quality health care is produced and consumed at the lowest possible price with the greatest possible efficiency. The markets have proved this time and time again. The problem with socialists, such as yourself, is that you believe that you know how best to spend another man's money OR what he really needs to buy. So you confiscate his money through taxes so that he cannot spend it on what he actually does want to buy at prices that are agreeable to him. That strikes directly against the heart of freedom and self determination by removing from a man his ability to take responsibility for himself and that sir, is among the greatest of all evils.
yet completely ignore waste and inefficiency in business.
I completely ignore it because, and this is important, IT IS NOT MY MONEY. That is the beauty of the free market, other people are free to dispose of their income in whatever manner pleases them so long as they do not violate the rights of others to do the same or use their purchases to deprive their neighbor of his property by force. Taxes are different because I am compelled to pay them on threat of coercion by the government. So of course I care about efficiency when my money is being spent, even though, unfortunately, someone else (i.e. the government) is spending it on my behalf. If I were an investor or owner of the business then I would likewise be concerned because it would be my money at risk.
Ford has flirted with bankruptcy court, and GM has been in it. Both companies continue to give top executives top pay regardless of their performance or how far sales and stock prices fall.
Just because I support the free market does not mean that I support the United States bankruptcy laws. It is true that there are laws which allow unscrupulous individuals and corporations to cheat. However, those opportunities to cheat were afforded by government interventions into the marketplace. If the government had never gotten involved in the first place and
Socialism hasn't failed, it just spent several decades being overthrown by the CIA. They hastened things along in a few cases but Socialism fails quite nicely on its own demerits.
And how's our healthcare system working out for you? Just fine thank you. I have a health savings account which I have been putting money into for years now. I pay out of pocket for just about everything that I do need, which isn't much right now, and by the time my regular medical needs become larger I will have a very large account saved up to pay for them. In the meantime I have high deductible coverage to cover catastrophic events and I am very satisfied with the whole arrangement. My doctor is happy to see me whenever I require his services because I pay in full and I pay promptly. That is the way that 95% of young Americans ought be handling their healthcare (that and not sitting on their asses, eating fast food, and becoming obese), but they would rather have a fancy car, extravagant vacations, and an over-sized McMansion which they cannot really afford. Many of the people, not all mind you, who complain about their healthcare simply have their spending and saving priorities out of whack.
Do you like spending twice as much per patient for worse care as other industrialized nations? Actually I tend to get very good deals health care because I am spending my own money out of my health savings account for services of my choice and my doctor, whom I also chose freely, doesn't get the run around billing the insurance company and having to wait 6 months for the major portion of his fees (yes it really can be that bad, just ask any private practice medical doctor). Both my doctor and I are quite satisfied with these arrangements. I receive timely and quality health care on demand and my doctor receives his payment promptly. It is amazing how well the free market works isn't it?
Indeed. Don't forget how the CEO and the board need their 20% annual pay increases, regardless of performance. Excuse me, but unless you are a shareholder or you have some other ownership interest in the company than it really isn't your business any more than you receiving a raise from your employer is my business as a third party. If you are a shareholder and you don't like the management policies (i.e. raises and bonus for board members) then bring it up at the shareholder meeting or sell your shares otherwise why should you care? It is their money after all not yours. If you don't like a company and you don't own shares then don't buy their products, nobody is forcing you to spend your money on something you don't want to. That is the difference between socialism and central planning at the government level and centralized planning by interested owners of their own property.
In the socialist scenario the government confiscates your money (i.e. taxes) by threat of force whereas the owners are planning how to run their own business with their own money. The great mistake of socialism is the belief that it is possible to do good things (i.e. free health care for all, beer every friday, and subsidized liberal arts college education) by first doing an evil thing (i.e. confiscating the property of another at the point of the sword). That is the difference between the CEO and the board of directors and the government. The company earns your money by selling you what you want to buy, but the government simply takes your money or property by force and then gives you what it thinks you should have.
It's a bad as central planning, just at a different center. Precisely...I did not argue that what we have in the United States right now is a free market solution, but rather that a crash government project to rollout high speed broadband as quickly as possible is unlikely to be cheaper or even better than the alternatives. We don't really know how a market oriented approach to broadband would actually play out because the legacy of the telecommunications industry experience in the United States has largely been one of regulated monopoly and limited choices. Some recent developments, the wireless spectrum auctions for example, hold out the promise of breaking the "last mile" logjams, but I am not holding my breath.
The private sector loses opportunities with higher taxes, but the public sector gains just as many back. The overwhelming majority of recorded economic history strongly suggests that this is NOT the case. If what you say were true then socialism would be running the world right now and not capitalism. The government program which equals or exceeds the efficiency and quality of alternative private sector goods and services with equal cost to society is the rarest of anomalies, the exception rather than the rule. The government should be viewed as the provider of last resort not the first and best choice.
which are often criticized by free market groups, even though those policies have resulted in faster, better connections for smaller total costs. The same criticisms were leveled at the United States when the Soviet Union was, for a time, "ahead" in the space race, but when one considers the difference between the market and central planning (i.e. government control) it is easy to see how things can, in some instances be done more quickly by the command and control method rather than the market. It is sometimes easier to get things done when you can tell people what to do and force them to do it while disallowing any dissent or alternatives. However, one must be more careful about the total costs of central planning command and control vs the market approach. The Soviets had many firsts in the space race, but in return other parts of the economy suffered tremendously and people went without a lot of things, some of them necessities, so that additional resources could be poured into the government run space program. In the same fashion one must consider the opportunity costs of government spending and control. If the government increases taxes or debt to build out the system quickly then that spending takes away from immediate or future alternative investments of those funds by the private sector. Generally speaking, the more often the government does this the more funds are diverted and the opportunity costs spiral ever higher as we give up increasing amounts of alternative goods and services in exchange for what may turn out to be a fast (hopefully, but even that is not guaranteed when one factors in innate government inefficiencies) but ultimately very costly rollout of better high speed networks, or faster progress in the space program, or whatever else the national attention is focused on at that moment. Beware when advocates of government spending proclaim lower total costs. They are frequently neglecting the opportunity costs in their analysis of the costs.
It seems to me that at the center of many system X vs system Y debate(s) lies the fact that binary incompatibility of programs written for different system(s) or hardware(s) continues to exist in spite of the fact that virtualization has shown us the way out. The virtualization can occur at many levels including both the programming level with languages like Java or C# and at the hardware level with virtualization software such as VMWare. Now obviously there will need to be some part of the system at some level that is NOT virtual (i.e. something has to talk to the hardware after all). However, it is in this sense that the Microkernel IMHO has the advantage because it has the potential to minimize, to the extent that such minimization is possible, those parts of the operating system which are NOT contained within the virtualization layers. The less code which is maintained outside the virtualization layers the greater the ease of portability for both the OS and programs written for it. Although I am not intimately familiar with all of the history and nuances of the Torvalds vs Tanenbaum debates, I think that Tanenbaum makes a good point when he says the the Microkernel is frequently misjudged or dismissed merely on the basis of a perceived maturity or present commercial viability rather than on the technical merits.
nobody that I can tell has actually come forward and put the pieces together in a real system intended to be sold. There are probably reasons for this and a few come to mind fairly readily. First, the potential market for these machines is somewhat small and relatively fixed (i.e. it is a niche, a larger one perhaps, but still a niche). Second, the voting hardware has to maintain a high degree of accuracy and quality. For example, it will be made of quality materials and provable micro-programming with good documentation and easy configuration. All of these things would make the products expen$ive, at least to buy, and possibly to maintain as well. Finally, most governments or voting precincts are notoriously cheap and put in bids way below what it would actually cost to produce, provide, and maintain the equipment. All of these factors and perhaps others as well might explain why no private company has stepped up to the plate to provide this type of a system.
It might be well argued then, that given the importance of voting to our democracy and the relative frequency with which it occurs, that these product(s) and service(s) should be financed and standardized across all states and localities by the federal government. Generally I take the Libertarian view about the government providing goods and services (i.e. let the private sector do it) but in this case the combination of circumstances and the "public good" quality of the service makes it a good candidate for government funding (one of a very few exceptions to the private sector rule that I make).
I have always thought that it should be possible to achieve the best of both worlds by combining the two technologies so that they reinforce each others' strengths while minimizing, to the extent possible, their individual weaknesses. The electronic touch screen can provide simplicity while the Scantron provides verifiable, human or otherwise, accuracy to within a very good tolerance of error. Those who want to forgo the electronic voting machine altogether can still use the #2 pencil on a blank Scantron, but those who want the convenience and ease of the electronic voting machine can make their choices on the touch screen(s) and then print those choices onto a Scantron which they can review personally, if they wish, and submit to the ballot box, just as if they had used the #2 pencil manually. Machine assisted Scantron printing provides the best of both worlds while at the same time proving fallback options for those who do not wish to use the electronic voting machine to print their ballot OR if power is lost or unavailable.
You are correct on both counts. This IS a case of "engineered expectations" so that a "reasonable compromise" can be reached AND also serves the simultaneous purpose of providing a hunk of meat for the activists to sink their teeth into while the real proposal flies in below the radar. They really ought to make the collected works of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's Art of War required reading in high school so that people are actually prepared for the types of things that go on in the real world these days. It is frustrating to see the same tired old plays from the same dusty old political play book succeed again and again for the RIAA when really their actions are so transparent that anyone willing to take more than a casual glance at their activities would spot the ploys immediately. I suppose that people are either ignorant or they don't care or both.
What it would mean is that instead of bringing one "John Doe" suit to get the names and addresses of the 27 people, they would have to bring 27 different "John Doe" suits. Which they could certainly try, perhaps with "form" litigation where the filing papers are all templated so that the complaints become boilerplate. However, how long could this go on before, as the grand parent suggested, the judges become tired of having their time wasted by the RIAA in "trivial" matters OR as those in the legal profession say, "De minimis non curat lex" (The law does not deal in trifles)?
The MPAA/RIAA knows exactly what they are doing and how to exploit those they are attacking and it sucks, bad. Hmmm...maybe the answer is to incite the MPAA/RIAA into attacking Scientology thereby drawing them into a long and bitter legal fight with an equally exploitative and ruthless opponent and occupying both organizations for the better part of a decade. Perhaps then the rest of us could have a bit of peace.
Indeed this is what is meant by "pretexting" in the summary. For more detailed information, including sample conversation transcripts and other stories of pretexting and the early hacking days of Kevin Mitnick, you may want to take a look at The Art of Deception. The more recent examples of similar types of activities include spamming and phishing of course, but the old phone pretexting techniques are still just as serviceable today as they were before, during, and even after the golden age of phone preaking because many people (unfortunately) simply never learn.
If it is included in the compulsory install and cannot be removed in a straightforward fashion then for most people it is effectively part of the OS whether that is *technically* true or not. This is especially true if the compulsory components are set to run at startup automatically (whether they ever get used or not). The one point where Microsoft really went wrong with Vista, although not the only one, was the whole DRM operating system concept. As other posters have said this necessitated the removal of hardware support for some hardware features by absorbing them into the OS which is always going to be slower than any decent hardware implementation. They were forced to do this because the PC hardware manufacturers mostly don't give a rip about DRM as long as they meet the minimum standard to put the DVD or other appropriate logo on their packaging. The lesson to Microsoft from Vista should be this: Your paying customers DON'T CARE about DRM and they will not tolerate any performance hits or bloat and especially not for a "feature" that nobody actually wants. Hopefully Microsoft will learn from this mistake and limit future DRM attempts, misguided though they may be, to the appropriate software products like Windows Media Player so that those who chose not to put up with DRM (i.e. sell me DRM free content or I will do without your content) can use something else without the OS getting in their way.
Note: To any entertainment industry types who read Slashdot. I will NOT spend one cent of my money on ANY content which uses DRM I don't care what it is or how cool you think it is. As far as I am concerned, DRM == NO SALE, so if you want NO revenues then just keep pushing that DRM and see how that works for you.
I have always been of the opinion that many of the trivial tasks to which "multitasking" is applied by humans in the corporate environment would be much better handled with automation and as a programmer I abhor having to do tasks which I know that I could automate relatively easily with a couple of days of programming work. The computer specializes in running multiple threads of execution and doing it quickly and accurately (where accurate means exactly how the programmer told them to do it, including bugs). The human specializes in high order abstract thinking of the type needed to design and build the appropriate automation. Therefore, it makes sense to automate the mindless tasks and free up the valuable human resources for more focused work on interesting problems which require creativity and abstract thinking. Of course, trying to explain these concepts to managers or even argue about the more fundamental weaknesses of human multitasking itself is usually a waste of time. The managers will never be convinced by any amount of scientific evidence that they cannot multitask quickly and accurately. They will always think of themselves as the one exception to the general rule, that is why they are the manager (or so they want to believe) and the rest of us are working under them. Sigh.
I wonder whether coming generations of this gun could shoot unmanned exploration vehicles or satellites out into space. This has been considered many times over the years and some startups are even working on some pie in the sky concepts, but basically there are two (2) major problems with the gun-type or single energy input launch mechanisms. First, the package being launched has to be hardy enough to survive the massive acceleration G forces and shock of hitting the atmosphere at orbital velocity right from the start (i.e. sea level) which brings up the second point. The package must also be able to survive a trip through the atmosphere, with continuous deceleration due to air resistance, at speeds high enough to approximate orbital velocity once the package reaches the altitude of low earth orbit, all without slowing down too much or burning up along the way (think re-entry in reverse). Neither of these are trivial problems and compared to the ever improving rocket technologies, which allow variable rates of acceleration during the trip into orbit (a huge plus and the reason why almost all launch vehicles are liquid fueled), the unknowns involved in the gun launch mechanism are simply too great to warrant serious attention at this time (although some private startups are having a go at it anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose that this robot works perfectly every time without hassling the customers, damaging their vehicles, wasting their time, or generally causing other problems which cost the gas station owner money (a big assumption). From the standpoint of the gas station owner why invest in this robot when your customers already pump their own gas at no additional cost to you? I can think of only three (3) possibilities. First, if your competitors install this robot AND enough of your customers refuse to gas up at your station because you DO NOT have the robot then it might make sense provided that the margin (thin already for independent station owners) is able to support the cost which brings up the next point. Second, your customers are willing to pay more for their gas for the novelty OR the convenience of having a robot pump it for them (perhaps, but certainly a niche. Most people are very price sensitive when it comes to buying gas, driving miles out of their way to save a couple of pennies in some cases). Third, the local laws require a human attendant anyway (Oregon has this type of law) where the present value of the gas station attendant's wages in perpetuity are more than the costs of purchasing and maintaining the robot (provided that the initial assumption about damage to property and persons remains true). In any case it is highly likely that this robot will not be widely used or fill only niche markets because it is a cost center for the gas station owner and not likely to be or become a profit center. At best, it might become a requirement of doing business, but I cannot see many gas station owners installing and using the robot unless they are forced to by either the marketplace or the government.
Although I would like to respond in detail, it think that it would take more words than either one of us really wants to read. However, might I suggest the following video as a good starting point on why forced redistribution produces worse results than economic growth.
Living Within Our Means
The government runs on taxes and government, unless one takes the anarchist point of view, is necessary so it follows that some non-zero amount of tax revenue must be collected in order to run the government. However, and this is important, depending upon the relative elasticities of supply and demand for various goods and services different taxes will have different amounts of what economists call dead weight loss. This is equivalent to saying that some taxes are more efficient than others. Unfortunately, the tax on income, whether personal or corporate wage or dividend, is among the least efficient of all taxes. In the case of taxes the most efficient tax is the one that generates the necessary amount of revenue for the government while minimizing the dead weight loss. The progressives out there will argue that income taxes are the most "fair" of the taxes, but really we should be more concerned about efficiency and relatively less concerned with fairness, at least in an absolute sense. The argument that we should be more concerned with production per person and efficiency, rather than fairness, is a subtle one, which is why it is mostly lost upon those who are ignorant of economics, but there is very strong empirical economic evidence (proofs are difficult to achieve in economics) to back up the efficiency over fairness theory for maximizing the marginal utility of everyone (i.e. more and cheaper goods and services for everyone).
Another point is that coal can be turned into other useful liquid fuels for use in our vehicles, ships, and aircraft whereas nuclear cannot contribute much in these areas unless battery technology improves drastically in the next few decades (unlikely). So it would be wiser to preserve our reserves of coal for conversion into liquid fuels rather than burning them directly to produce electricity. In fact it might be possible to use waste heat from the nuclear plants (reactors generate way more heat than is needed to actually boil the water into steam and spin the generator turbines) as input energy for the coal to liquids process thereby producing both electricity and liquid fuels from coal.
Great. Now, how do feel about having to pay twice as much money as the person in the next industrialized nation, and that's before you get to the expense of a serious operation or illness. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If there is one universal economic truth it is that there is no free lunch. There is always a price to be paid whether that price is paid in the form of higher taxes, long waits for goods and services, bribes on top of the "official" price, fewer jobs due to high taxes discouraging investment, or any number of other hidden or not so hidden costs. So pick your poison, but for my own part the private out of pocket pay is the least disagreeable among all of those options.
For another, not many Americans are nearly as elitist as you seem to be.
It is not elitist to suggest that people be responsible for themselves. On the contrary, such rugged individualism, personal responsibility, and meritorious advancement are at the heart of what it traditionally means to be American. How else do you suppose that we grew from a rustic backwater into the most advanced and powerful nation on this planet in less than 233 years? I will give you a hint, it wasn't through socialism.
socialized medicine provides better care and costs less money. Period.
That is simply flat wrong sir. There is no possible way that better quality care, at least for regular medical care in small clinic or office settings, could be provided better by centralized bureaucracy with third party payment. Here is a grain of wisdom for you: "No man spends another man's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own." Milton Friedman said that and he was and is absolutely right. When doctors and patients meet together, in privacy, and reach mutually agreeable terms for treatment, including direct payment by the patient and direct service from the doctor, then the best quality health care is produced and consumed at the lowest possible price with the greatest possible efficiency. The markets have proved this time and time again. The problem with socialists, such as yourself, is that you believe that you know how best to spend another man's money OR what he really needs to buy. So you confiscate his money through taxes so that he cannot spend it on what he actually does want to buy at prices that are agreeable to him. That strikes directly against the heart of freedom and self determination by removing from a man his ability to take responsibility for himself and that sir, is among the greatest of all evils.
yet completely ignore waste and inefficiency in business.
I completely ignore it because, and this is important, IT IS NOT MY MONEY. That is the beauty of the free market, other people are free to dispose of their income in whatever manner pleases them so long as they do not violate the rights of others to do the same or use their purchases to deprive their neighbor of his property by force. Taxes are different because I am compelled to pay them on threat of coercion by the government. So of course I care about efficiency when my money is being spent, even though, unfortunately, someone else (i.e. the government) is spending it on my behalf. If I were an investor or owner of the business then I would likewise be concerned because it would be my money at risk.
Ford has flirted with bankruptcy court, and GM has been in it. Both companies continue to give top executives top pay regardless of their performance or how far sales and stock prices fall.
Just because I support the free market does not mean that I support the United States bankruptcy laws. It is true that there are laws which allow unscrupulous individuals and corporations to cheat. However, those opportunities to cheat were afforded by government interventions into the marketplace. If the government had never gotten involved in the first place and
In the socialist scenario the government confiscates your money (i.e. taxes) by threat of force whereas the owners are planning how to run their own business with their own money. The great mistake of socialism is the belief that it is possible to do good things (i.e. free health care for all, beer every friday, and subsidized liberal arts college education) by first doing an evil thing (i.e. confiscating the property of another at the point of the sword). That is the difference between the CEO and the board of directors and the government. The company earns your money by selling you what you want to buy, but the government simply takes your money or property by force and then gives you what it thinks you should have.
It seems to me that at the center of many system X vs system Y debate(s) lies the fact that binary incompatibility of programs written for different system(s) or hardware(s) continues to exist in spite of the fact that virtualization has shown us the way out. The virtualization can occur at many levels including both the programming level with languages like Java or C# and at the hardware level with virtualization software such as VMWare. Now obviously there will need to be some part of the system at some level that is NOT virtual (i.e. something has to talk to the hardware after all). However, it is in this sense that the Microkernel IMHO has the advantage because it has the potential to minimize, to the extent that such minimization is possible, those parts of the operating system which are NOT contained within the virtualization layers. The less code which is maintained outside the virtualization layers the greater the ease of portability for both the OS and programs written for it. Although I am not intimately familiar with all of the history and nuances of the Torvalds vs Tanenbaum debates, I think that Tanenbaum makes a good point when he says the the Microkernel is frequently misjudged or dismissed merely on the basis of a perceived maturity or present commercial viability rather than on the technical merits.
It might be well argued then, that given the importance of voting to our democracy and the relative frequency with which it occurs, that these product(s) and service(s) should be financed and standardized across all states and localities by the federal government. Generally I take the Libertarian view about the government providing goods and services (i.e. let the private sector do it) but in this case the combination of circumstances and the "public good" quality of the service makes it a good candidate for government funding (one of a very few exceptions to the private sector rule that I make).
I have always thought that it should be possible to achieve the best of both worlds by combining the two technologies so that they reinforce each others' strengths while minimizing, to the extent possible, their individual weaknesses. The electronic touch screen can provide simplicity while the Scantron provides verifiable, human or otherwise, accuracy to within a very good tolerance of error. Those who want to forgo the electronic voting machine altogether can still use the #2 pencil on a blank Scantron, but those who want the convenience and ease of the electronic voting machine can make their choices on the touch screen(s) and then print those choices onto a Scantron which they can review personally, if they wish, and submit to the ballot box, just as if they had used the #2 pencil manually. Machine assisted Scantron printing provides the best of both worlds while at the same time proving fallback options for those who do not wish to use the electronic voting machine to print their ballot OR if power is lost or unavailable.
You are correct on both counts. This IS a case of "engineered expectations" so that a "reasonable compromise" can be reached AND also serves the simultaneous purpose of providing a hunk of meat for the activists to sink their teeth into while the real proposal flies in below the radar. They really ought to make the collected works of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's Art of War required reading in high school so that people are actually prepared for the types of things that go on in the real world these days. It is frustrating to see the same tired old plays from the same dusty old political play book succeed again and again for the RIAA when really their actions are so transparent that anyone willing to take more than a casual glance at their activities would spot the ploys immediately. I suppose that people are either ignorant or they don't care or both.
Indeed this is what is meant by "pretexting" in the summary. For more detailed information, including sample conversation transcripts and other stories of pretexting and the early hacking days of Kevin Mitnick, you may want to take a look at The Art of Deception . The more recent examples of similar types of activities include spamming and phishing of course, but the old phone pretexting techniques are still just as serviceable today as they were before, during, and even after the golden age of phone preaking because many people (unfortunately) simply never learn.
If it is included in the compulsory install and cannot be removed in a straightforward fashion then for most people it is effectively part of the OS whether that is *technically* true or not. This is especially true if the compulsory components are set to run at startup automatically (whether they ever get used or not). The one point where Microsoft really went wrong with Vista, although not the only one, was the whole DRM operating system concept. As other posters have said this necessitated the removal of hardware support for some hardware features by absorbing them into the OS which is always going to be slower than any decent hardware implementation. They were forced to do this because the PC hardware manufacturers mostly don't give a rip about DRM as long as they meet the minimum standard to put the DVD or other appropriate logo on their packaging. The lesson to Microsoft from Vista should be this: Your paying customers DON'T CARE about DRM and they will not tolerate any performance hits or bloat and especially not for a "feature" that nobody actually wants. Hopefully Microsoft will learn from this mistake and limit future DRM attempts, misguided though they may be, to the appropriate software products like Windows Media Player so that those who chose not to put up with DRM (i.e. sell me DRM free content or I will do without your content) can use something else without the OS getting in their way.
Note: To any entertainment industry types who read Slashdot. I will NOT spend one cent of my money on ANY content which uses DRM I don't care what it is or how cool you think it is. As far as I am concerned, DRM == NO SALE, so if you want NO revenues then just keep pushing that DRM and see how that works for you.
I have always been of the opinion that many of the trivial tasks to which "multitasking" is applied by humans in the corporate environment would be much better handled with automation and as a programmer I abhor having to do tasks which I know that I could automate relatively easily with a couple of days of programming work. The computer specializes in running multiple threads of execution and doing it quickly and accurately (where accurate means exactly how the programmer told them to do it, including bugs). The human specializes in high order abstract thinking of the type needed to design and build the appropriate automation. Therefore, it makes sense to automate the mindless tasks and free up the valuable human resources for more focused work on interesting problems which require creativity and abstract thinking. Of course, trying to explain these concepts to managers or even argue about the more fundamental weaknesses of human multitasking itself is usually a waste of time. The managers will never be convinced by any amount of scientific evidence that they cannot multitask quickly and accurately. They will always think of themselves as the one exception to the general rule, that is why they are the manager (or so they want to believe) and the rest of us are working under them. Sigh.