It was probably not the "long distance charges" in this case that rang up the large bill, but rather the types of numbers that were being auto-dialed. Notice that "premium numbers" were mentioned in the article which seems to imply that numbers which incurred additional charges, which phone network operators are required by law to collect and then remit to the owners of the "premium number", are the culprit. Probably some number in Nigeria which costs $20 per minute, or whatever the maximum allowed by law is, to call or some such. There are always small companies and unscrupulous service providers who take advantage of the telecom laws in various countries to gouge unsuspecting callers. The phone companies don't much like these people either, but they are required by law to service calls to those numbers.
The actual effect of laws like this will be to increase the number of people who are never told the reason why they weren't hired. It already happens quite often here in California because the employment laws with regard to discrimination are so strict. In California you will never be told the real reason you weren't hired for a job, the attorneys have told companies to give out boiler plate statements like, "there were other more qualified candidates" (whether there actually were or not) or simply to say that, "they do not discuss internal HR decisions". The only way you will ever find out is to take them to court and get a court order for discovery of emails, documents, or any other evidence of discrimination. The companies rely upon the expense of bringing such a lawsuit as being insurmountable for the average unemployed person. So basically, unless they broadly discriminate over a large class of people and get hit with a class action discrimination lawsuit, as Walmart did for discriminating against women in general, they can effectively stonewall anyone who wants to find out why they weren't hired.
You make some good points, but I would like to add one more that you may have overlooked. There is a vast special interest in the law enforcement and judicial community in keeping marijuana illegal because it provides a reliable source of defendants to run through the system and keep all of them steadily employed. The private sector also benefits from the war on drugs, with many defense contractors having a very profitable sideline selling equipment to the government for drug enforcement purposes, not to mention sales of military hardware to South American countries for use in their own drug wars. The war on drugs now costs US taxpayers more than ~$40 billion dollars per year with many trillions of dollars having been spent since this war was declared by the Nixon administration in 1971. Lots of people have a pretty big financial stake in continued prohibition of drugs and I wouldn't expect that they will allow their livelihood to go up in smoke because some laid back Californians want to make it legal. There is a reason why law enforcement groups oppose California propositions like 19 and it has little or nothing to do with altruism or "concern for the public welfare" on the part of local law enforcement.
Sheer military numbers and size of the country would make life difficult even for multiple nations invading, possibly to the point of defeat. At the very least,
Indeed, wasn't it Stalin who said something to the effect of, "quantity has a quality all its own"? Of course, why would anyone, least of all the US want to invade China? They have no oil and the rare earths and coal that they do have are equally or more abundant here in the United States. Leave the mess in China for the Chinese to clean up.
The Chinese are wholly incapable of beating the United States Navy in a blue water conflict. They know this and so do we. An invasion of the US Homeland by the Chinese, at least for now, is a logistical impossibility. Besides, the Chinese have no need to engage us militarily. They do whatever they wish in Africa and elsewhere while the Europeans and Obama here in the United States politely admonish them, but do nothing to stop them.
The spending vs GDP percentages do not show whether the absolute GDP increased or decreased for the years that you cite. For example, isn't it possible for GDP to decline and for spending also to decline, causing a reduction of spending vs GDP? If GDP declines will that not hurt the average American whether or not government spending declines along with it? You seem to want to use GDP vs government spending as a proxy for economic prosperity or the satisfaction of the voters during those periods of decreased spending, but that does not seem to fit in all cases. For example, the Carter administration was not very popular by the end of his first term and the people voted him out, even though spending relative to GDP decreased during his presidency.
While you want to claim the Dems have had control since 2007, only a true blind idiot would have missed the intentional obstructionism that has been the republicans only goal since then
There have been Senate majority leaders in the past who where successful in getting legislative business done, despite minority obstructionism. Consider for example, the period of time between the years of 1955 - 1981 when the Republicans were the continual minority in the United States Senate. Those Democrats were still able to act during those years. The health care brouhaha didn't begin in earnest until Obama was already in office, so the Republicans must have been pretty good obstructionists to continually checkmate the sizable majorities of Pelosi and Reid for two years before Obama was sworn in; either way, it doesn't speak well of the governing abilities (or lack thereof) of Pelosi and Reid.
When les than 60% of the senate wants to govern, it's pretty hard to get anything done.
For purely budgetary items the Dems could have used the Senate reconciliation procedures which only require a simple majority.
CBO projects the revenue, and the spending,
The CBO does a pretty good job of collecting the numbers after the fact, as you pointed out, because once all the amounts are known with certainty (i.e. they are in the past) they can no longer be disputed. However, when the CBO projects into the future it is bound by one very specific disadvantage that private businesses are not: The CBO must take Congress at their word when making projections. For example, if Congress says that it will cut spending by 20 percent in two years the CBO is obligated to assume that this will happen, even if everyone else can see that the probability of that happening is low. In private business they consider the likelihood of projected eventualities in their calculations whereas the CBO is required to believe 100% that Congress will do whatever it says it will. It would be interesting to see a history of the relative accuracy of the CBO's projections vs what the actual numbers eventually turned out to be. The CBO would probably argue that their rules require them to ascribe complete faith to statements of intent by Congress and they would be right, but their accuracy in projecting would suffer all the same.
It does get harder when they do budget projections, because yes, they leave out off-budget items. That said, one reason why the official budget projections of Bush were massively lower than the end deficits was because he intentionally left off all sorts of spending.. like.. ALL of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In the end however, it does come out
It is true that items get intentionally left out of the official budget and this is unfortunate, but even the staunchest paleo conservatives didn't argue that wars cost nothing. In any case, the Republicans are hardly the first ones to hit upon the idea of leaving things out of the official budget, the Dems have been running that play for decades.
It's interesting that every special election since Obama became president was a "referendum on Obama's policies"
This stupidity again? Obama may have been in office that long, but he's only been working on his budget for the last year... prior to that
Nancy Pelosi became Speaker when the 110th Congress convened on January 4, 2007, what where they doing between that date and January 20, 2009 when Obama was sworn in? The Dems have been ipso facto in charge of the purse for nearly 4 years now. Are you going to tell me that Bush, lacking a majority in both houses of Congress during the later half of his second term, had them so off balance and distracted that they couldn't find the time to put forth a sensible budget? Please.
with projected surpluses of 3 trillion over the next 10 years
You know how the government "projects" right? If they plan to spend X trillion but only spend X/2 trillion then they call it a "surplus", but they conveniently forget to mention that actual tax revenues from those years don't even amount to X/2 so the difference between the true tax receipts and X/2 trillion is the actual deficit. It's a cheap accounting trick, but some people keep falling for it year after year.
republican presidents have increased spending vs GDP by 43.7%, while democratic presidents have reduced spending vs GDP by 75.7%.
Citation please?
He is turning it around...
He had better hurry up. The American people are rapidly loosing their patience and persistently high unemployment grinds down approval ratings like nothing else. The Misery Index is up 3.02% so far under Obama and he still ~2.5 years to go.
but it's a slow process because of how very severely fucked up Bush caused things to be.
Let me ask you a question: At what point does it become Obama's fault? Suppose, for example, that 2012 rolls around and things are still just as bad or even worse. Will you still be an Obama apologist even then? The voters will have an opportunity to pass judgment soon enough come November; I don't believe that they will be as forgiving as you seem to be. Are you better off now than you were almost 4 years ago in January 2007 when the Dems took control? Most Americans would have to answer "no" to that question and like it or not, the November elections are a referendum on Obama and his failed policies.
putting us in the deepest hole we've ever been in.
Which Obama and the Democrats promptly doubled in size. Indeed, Obama Added More to National Debt in First 19 Months Than All Presidents from Washington Through Reagan Combined. Check out the official Congressional Budget Office PDF reports linked in the article, the numbers don't lie. How much longer will the left "blame Bush" for the failures of the Obama administration? President Obama is in charge, not Bush. He wanted the job and he is responsible, like it or not, for failing to turn things around. The buck stops with the siting President and what do we have to show for 19 months of Obama? Steady 9%+ unemployment? The worst business environment in a generation? Naive foreign policy? Filing lawsuits instead of securing our borders? What a mess.
The tax measure that's expiring will not add any more jobs whether or not it expires.
Have you considered the possibility that allowing the tax measure to expire, thereby increasing taxes relative to prevailing levels during the measure, might result in even more job losses? Asking businesses to pay more taxes during the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression is undeniably stupid. Indeed, the biggest problem with the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, IMHO, is that they continually inject large amounts of uncertainty into the economy: uncertainty about tax rates, uncertainty about long term health care costs, uncertainty about environmental regulation and compliance costs. Is it any wonder that businesses and citizens are hoarding their cash and cutting their spending? If there is one thing that kills jobs and business it's uncertainty. In my view Obama has made the wrong decisions on just about every meaningful matter that has come before him. I can count on one hand the right decisions that he has made so far in his administration. When all of this is combined with Nancy Pelosi's disastrous leadership of the Congress we have a one-two combination punch to an economy that is still struggling to get back on its feet. If you are currently unemployed and looking work, do yourself a favor and vote the Dems out; the job you save may be your own.
The difference, at least in principle (i.e when the government does not bail them out), is that inefficient and wasteful private businesses can be forced into bankruptcy and eliminated either by more efficienct competitors or their own incompetence. The US government on the other hand cannot by definition go bankrupt, no matter how wasteful or incompetent, because they control the currency in which their debts are denominated. Private companies cannot compel your cooperation or participation in their schemes whereas the government, under threat or actual use of coercion, can. It does not bother me that private corporations may be inefficient because I am not forced to buy their products or use their services whereas taxes are not voluntary in the same way that discretionary spending is. In fact, it seems that I receive very little individual benefit from all of my taxes (the government has come out way ahead on me thus far in my life in terms of cost vs taxes paid). I know for a fact that I could make better use as an investor of the money that I now pay in taxes than the federal government can and does. For example, they spend billions of dollars every year on worthless pork barrel projects to research pseudo scientific bullshit (I am not talking about legitimate R&D funding like JPL or NASA here). For example, how about $4,545,000 for wood utilization research? After 10,000 years of human civilization is there still 4 million dollars worth of wood using knowledge that we don't already possess? Please. Private corporations may be wasteful, but the government is unmatched in either size or stupidity of wastefulness by even the worst private corporations.
No, actually it wouldn't. At the very least they now have you on destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. The "plausible deniability" afforded by TrueCrypt's hidden volume/OS feature is actually ideal because, provided that the appropriate security precautions have been observed (as outlined in the docs in the Security Requirements and Precuations section), it is well nigh impossible to prove that hidden volume(s)/OS exist. Any "evidence" of such is likely to be circumstantial at best, most probably along the lines of: "everyone who uses TrueCrypt uses the hidden volume/OS feature so defendant must be using it too!" or perhaps they analyze the disk and attempt to show that certain portions of the disk have been written to much more frequently than others (which doesn't really prove anything). The "official" judicial proceeding is exactly the situation where "plausible deniability" is designed to help. Now, if you find yourself in less civilized hands, the Iranians for example, then you can probably expect the rubber hose treatment or any number of other inventive and persuasive techniques. However, the British, at least for now, are far too civilized to resort to such crude and brutal methods, particularly when their own citizens are involved and the stakes are a few pictures of his 17 year old girlfriend's boobies.
Given the recent history of IBM and other major corporations and their aggressive outsourcing of formerly well paying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) jobs, ironically the very sort of jobs that Obama is desperately trying to promote amongst America's brightest high school students, why should we accept their PR crap without looking at what they really want. No doubt IBM is hoping to use and then discard bright high school students, taking advantage of their brilliance and naivete about the real world to squeeze lots of low cost work out of them before burning them out and discarding them. How are we supposed to get bright high school students excited about the years of schooling and study required to get a STEM job only to finish years later and find that no job is waiting for them? Surely these bright high school students can see through this charade? Well, one can hope anyway. IBM and the others have much work to do if they are to regain the trust of perspective science and technology students. Perhaps if they are wise, and I'm not holding my breath, they can start here by promising not to use and then discard these bright students as they have been known to do with their present employees; loyalty is a two way street after all.
How many platforms does.NET run on? [answer: 1 - Windows].
Ever heard of Mono? No, I don't suppose that you have.
even PHP is a more popular development tool than C#
Number of people using a particular language or tool is not as important as how they feel about using it. Ask most C# and.NET Framework devs whether or not they like their tools and you will hear affirmative answers in almost every case. Lots of people use PHP, and they piss and moan about how much it sucks, whereas C# and.NET really are a pleasure to use. In fact you would be hard pressed to pick a more powerful general purpose programming language with more features, varied syntax and sheer number of options than C# these days.
was discovered to be *very* badly remotely exploitable
And yet PHP, by way of comparison, has never had security problems, amazing! Bugs are found and bugs get fixed, 'nuf said.
Which development platform is conservative adding features (not worrying about 'trendy' features that get deprecated on the next release) so that massive investments on code are not deprecated by the need of a vendor to sell you a new IDE version every two years?
One can be too conservative too. If your language and platform are constantly lagging behind the newer niche languages, Ruby for example, then people are going to dump your platform. It is the opinion of many that Java has been too conservative with regard to answering features offered by.NET and C#. The new features in C# are not just a passing fad, in fact Microsoft didn't invent most of them. Microsoft simply took the best parts of existing languages from various other programming languages, including functional style languages, and included them in C#. Java should have been doing the same.
You can keep your shiny new features that affect 2% of your codebase and survive for two years before something replaces them. I'll stick to saving myself time, my customers money, all the while keeping their systems safe..NET is good for the desktop, it blows in the enterprise
Have you even used.NET in an enterprise situation? As for J2EE, don't make me laugh, its short comings are legendary among devs who actually know their craft.
Do you have any reasoned analyses that indicate that your post is realistic? I'd like to read them, if only to raise my spirits.
Regardless of whether or not we agree to exchange goods and services for US dollars or not, people still need to eat and are still willing to work to achieve their desires and goals. As long as people are willing to contribute to capital production, the particular medium of exchange is not important as long there is one. The United States has tremendous stored capital in the form of educated population, existing infrastructure, manufacturing capacity (despite popular perception), natural resources and unparalleled human capital (i.e. Scientists, Engineers, Businessmen, Entrepreneurs, etc). Whether or not we conduct our business in Dollars, Euros or Renminbi does not diminish this existing productive capital. The Chinese on the other hand are destroying their long term productive capital. They are poisoning their air, polluting their water and destroying their childrens' health. This is not damage that is easily undone. The Chinese have created the trade imbalance by lowering their standards, but what good is money if you poison yourself to death? They will spend far more on goods and services to repair the long term damage than the short term profits they realized by sacrificing their environment. Think about what true wealth is: it is the ability to have clean air and water, abundant food, clean energy and sustainable production (increased sustainable production per person increases standards of living; money can contribute to this by increasing exchange efficiencies, but it does nothing to produce wealth alone). So, one must not confuse the medium of exchange, money, with the true long term stores of wealth in a society.
I would rather have the choice of whether or not to enable these features. IMHO, the federal government has long since lost the right to say, "trust us" when it comes to these sorts of "surveillance society" issues because they have proven time and time again that they are incompetent and cannot be trusted. The same is true for law enforcement. Indeed, there are so many stupid laws these days it's enough to make one nostalgic for the days when people wore guns on their hips and weren't obligated to retreat any farther than the air at their back. You talk about kidnappers being tracked by phone, but I would rather turn off tracking on my phone and blow the kidnappers' heads off with my.44 magnum revolver, Dirty Harry style. When citizens are armed, criminals think twice and thrice before committing crimes against peoples' bodies; an armed society is a polite society.
The Chinese have the rest of the world "by the balls" as it were.
Except that they don't. The United States could completely wipe out the national debt and bring lots of production back to US shores simply by printing enough money to pay for it all. The reason we don't do that is because we don't have to. As long as the Chinese are willing to trade real products for promises to pay with nothing more than intangible bit and bytes (i.e. balances stored in electronic accounts maintained by the Federal Reserve) why should we care? The current account deficit is a natural byproduct of China's willingness to completely trash their environment in exchange for pieces of paper. The Unite States will continue to pay them with pieces of paper (i.e. electronic funds transfers) as long as it suits the Chinese to continue accepting them. If we ever reach a point where the Chinese have had enough, then the flow of goods will reverse and the Chinese will begin handing us back our promissory notes in exchange for goods and services; except this time it will cost them more than when our situations were reversed because unlike China, the United States actually has environmental standards. The endgame will be a materially richer United States at the expense of a polluted, poorer and resource depleted China. Winner: United States. The future lies in sustainable production and preservation of environmental capital. The Americans and Europeans have recognized and internalized this while the Chinese seem to be living in the 19th century with regard to environmental protection (or effective lack thereof).
This is yet another example of a multinational corporation taking advantage of corrupt governments in Mexico and Latin America to push undesirable and invasive technologies and business practices upon ignorant and disadvantaged populations. Of course, even the ignorant can become informed and once the people of Leon see the sorts of uses to which corrupt government officials will put this new technology the backlash will begin: el pueblo unido jamás será vencido.
They probably would have had they known about it or how known how popular the trilogy would become. However, Jackson very astutely filmed all three films simultaneously over a period of 8 years before the first film was even released. So by the time the Unions knew that some crazy little project in New Zealand was going to become the biggest and highest grossing trilogy of all time, most of the shots, minus editing and special effects, where probably already in the can. In other words, by the time they knew it was too late to object.
The benefit of all is better served by standing together.
This is mostly true for most actors, but not for A list stars like McKellen, Weaving or Bloom whose membership in the guild seems to be more of a formality now than a necessity. It all depends upon what McKellen chooses to do, since he and possibly Ian Holm (as Bilbo), Hugo Weaving (as Elrond), or Orlando Bloom (as Legolas), are the only ones from the previous films who could realistically reprise their roles for the hobbit. Even then, only McKellen as Gandalf and Hugo Weaving as Elrond are really essential. Golum is computer generated so the voice could probably be mimicked pretty well if Andy Serkis refused to reprise his voice role. Am I forgetting someone else who could possibly come back for the Hobbit? Perhaps Viggo Mortensen could have a brief background appearance as "Strider" when the party stop(s) at Rivendell? Anyway, I think they will all work it out after some negotiations, there is too much profit at stake in the film to let it go down the tubes due to petty squabbling.
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It was probably not the "long distance charges" in this case that rang up the large bill, but rather the types of numbers that were being auto-dialed. Notice that "premium numbers" were mentioned in the article which seems to imply that numbers which incurred additional charges, which phone network operators are required by law to collect and then remit to the owners of the "premium number", are the culprit. Probably some number in Nigeria which costs $20 per minute, or whatever the maximum allowed by law is, to call or some such. There are always small companies and unscrupulous service providers who take advantage of the telecom laws in various countries to gouge unsuspecting callers. The phone companies don't much like these people either, but they are required by law to service calls to those numbers.
The actual effect of laws like this will be to increase the number of people who are never told the reason why they weren't hired. It already happens quite often here in California because the employment laws with regard to discrimination are so strict. In California you will never be told the real reason you weren't hired for a job, the attorneys have told companies to give out boiler plate statements like, "there were other more qualified candidates" (whether there actually were or not) or simply to say that, "they do not discuss internal HR decisions". The only way you will ever find out is to take them to court and get a court order for discovery of emails, documents, or any other evidence of discrimination. The companies rely upon the expense of bringing such a lawsuit as being insurmountable for the average unemployed person. So basically, unless they broadly discriminate over a large class of people and get hit with a class action discrimination lawsuit, as Walmart did for discriminating against women in general, they can effectively stonewall anyone who wants to find out why they weren't hired.
You make some good points, but I would like to add one more that you may have overlooked. There is a vast special interest in the law enforcement and judicial community in keeping marijuana illegal because it provides a reliable source of defendants to run through the system and keep all of them steadily employed. The private sector also benefits from the war on drugs, with many defense contractors having a very profitable sideline selling equipment to the government for drug enforcement purposes, not to mention sales of military hardware to South American countries for use in their own drug wars. The war on drugs now costs US taxpayers more than ~$40 billion dollars per year with many trillions of dollars having been spent since this war was declared by the Nixon administration in 1971. Lots of people have a pretty big financial stake in continued prohibition of drugs and I wouldn't expect that they will allow their livelihood to go up in smoke because some laid back Californians want to make it legal. There is a reason why law enforcement groups oppose California propositions like 19 and it has little or nothing to do with altruism or "concern for the public welfare" on the part of local law enforcement.
Sheer military numbers and size of the country would make life difficult even for multiple nations invading, possibly to the point of defeat. At the very least,
Indeed, wasn't it Stalin who said something to the effect of, "quantity has a quality all its own"? Of course, why would anyone, least of all the US want to invade China? They have no oil and the rare earths and coal that they do have are equally or more abundant here in the United States. Leave the mess in China for the Chinese to clean up.
The Chinese are wholly incapable of beating the United States Navy in a blue water conflict. They know this and so do we. An invasion of the US Homeland by the Chinese, at least for now, is a logistical impossibility. Besides, the Chinese have no need to engage us militarily. They do whatever they wish in Africa and elsewhere while the Europeans and Obama here in the United States politely admonish them, but do nothing to stop them.
The spending vs GDP percentages do not show whether the absolute GDP increased or decreased for the years that you cite. For example, isn't it possible for GDP to decline and for spending also to decline, causing a reduction of spending vs GDP? If GDP declines will that not hurt the average American whether or not government spending declines along with it? You seem to want to use GDP vs government spending as a proxy for economic prosperity or the satisfaction of the voters during those periods of decreased spending, but that does not seem to fit in all cases. For example, the Carter administration was not very popular by the end of his first term and the people voted him out, even though spending relative to GDP decreased during his presidency.
While you want to claim the Dems have had control since 2007, only a true blind idiot would have missed the intentional obstructionism that has been the republicans only goal since then
There have been Senate majority leaders in the past who where successful in getting legislative business done, despite minority obstructionism. Consider for example, the period of time between the years of 1955 - 1981 when the Republicans were the continual minority in the United States Senate. Those Democrats were still able to act during those years. The health care brouhaha didn't begin in earnest until Obama was already in office, so the Republicans must have been pretty good obstructionists to continually checkmate the sizable majorities of Pelosi and Reid for two years before Obama was sworn in; either way, it doesn't speak well of the governing abilities (or lack thereof) of Pelosi and Reid.
When les than 60% of the senate wants to govern, it's pretty hard to get anything done.
For purely budgetary items the Dems could have used the Senate reconciliation procedures which only require a simple majority.
CBO projects the revenue, and the spending,
The CBO does a pretty good job of collecting the numbers after the fact, as you pointed out, because once all the amounts are known with certainty (i.e. they are in the past) they can no longer be disputed. However, when the CBO projects into the future it is bound by one very specific disadvantage that private businesses are not: The CBO must take Congress at their word when making projections. For example, if Congress says that it will cut spending by 20 percent in two years the CBO is obligated to assume that this will happen, even if everyone else can see that the probability of that happening is low. In private business they consider the likelihood of projected eventualities in their calculations whereas the CBO is required to believe 100% that Congress will do whatever it says it will. It would be interesting to see a history of the relative accuracy of the CBO's projections vs what the actual numbers eventually turned out to be. The CBO would probably argue that their rules require them to ascribe complete faith to statements of intent by Congress and they would be right, but their accuracy in projecting would suffer all the same.
It does get harder when they do budget projections, because yes, they leave out off-budget items. That said, one reason why the official budget projections of Bush were massively lower than the end deficits was because he intentionally left off all sorts of spending.. like.. ALL of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In the end however, it does come out
It is true that items get intentionally left out of the official budget and this is unfortunate, but even the staunchest paleo conservatives didn't argue that wars cost nothing. In any case, the Republicans are hardly the first ones to hit upon the idea of leaving things out of the official budget, the Dems have been running that play for decades.
It's interesting that every special election since Obama became president was a "referendum on Obama's policies"
Except
This stupidity again? Obama may have been in office that long, but he's only been working on his budget for the last year... prior to that
Nancy Pelosi became Speaker when the 110th Congress convened on January 4, 2007, what where they doing between that date and January 20, 2009 when Obama was sworn in? The Dems have been ipso facto in charge of the purse for nearly 4 years now. Are you going to tell me that Bush, lacking a majority in both houses of Congress during the later half of his second term, had them so off balance and distracted that they couldn't find the time to put forth a sensible budget? Please.
with projected surpluses of 3 trillion over the next 10 years
You know how the government "projects" right? If they plan to spend X trillion but only spend X/2 trillion then they call it a "surplus", but they conveniently forget to mention that actual tax revenues from those years don't even amount to X/2 so the difference between the true tax receipts and X/2 trillion is the actual deficit. It's a cheap accounting trick, but some people keep falling for it year after year.
republican presidents have increased spending vs GDP by 43.7%, while democratic presidents have reduced spending vs GDP by 75.7%.
Citation please?
He is turning it around...
He had better hurry up. The American people are rapidly loosing their patience and persistently high unemployment grinds down approval ratings like nothing else. The Misery Index is up 3.02% so far under Obama and he still ~2.5 years to go.
but it's a slow process because of how very severely fucked up Bush caused things to be.
Let me ask you a question: At what point does it become Obama's fault? Suppose, for example, that 2012 rolls around and things are still just as bad or even worse. Will you still be an Obama apologist even then? The voters will have an opportunity to pass judgment soon enough come November; I don't believe that they will be as forgiving as you seem to be. Are you better off now than you were almost 4 years ago in January 2007 when the Dems took control? Most Americans would have to answer "no" to that question and like it or not, the November elections are a referendum on Obama and his failed policies.
putting us in the deepest hole we've ever been in.
Which Obama and the Democrats promptly doubled in size. Indeed, Obama Added More to National Debt in First 19 Months Than All Presidents from Washington Through Reagan Combined. Check out the official Congressional Budget Office PDF reports linked in the article, the numbers don't lie. How much longer will the left "blame Bush" for the failures of the Obama administration? President Obama is in charge, not Bush. He wanted the job and he is responsible, like it or not, for failing to turn things around. The buck stops with the siting President and what do we have to show for 19 months of Obama? Steady 9%+ unemployment? The worst business environment in a generation? Naive foreign policy? Filing lawsuits instead of securing our borders? What a mess.
The tax measure that's expiring will not add any more jobs whether or not it expires.
Have you considered the possibility that allowing the tax measure to expire, thereby increasing taxes relative to prevailing levels during the measure, might result in even more job losses? Asking businesses to pay more taxes during the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression is undeniably stupid. Indeed, the biggest problem with the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, IMHO, is that they continually inject large amounts of uncertainty into the economy: uncertainty about tax rates, uncertainty about long term health care costs, uncertainty about environmental regulation and compliance costs. Is it any wonder that businesses and citizens are hoarding their cash and cutting their spending? If there is one thing that kills jobs and business it's uncertainty . In my view Obama has made the wrong decisions on just about every meaningful matter that has come before him. I can count on one hand the right decisions that he has made so far in his administration. When all of this is combined with Nancy Pelosi's disastrous leadership of the Congress we have a one-two combination punch to an economy that is still struggling to get back on its feet. If you are currently unemployed and looking work, do yourself a favor and vote the Dems out; the job you save may be your own.
The difference, at least in principle (i.e when the government does not bail them out), is that inefficient and wasteful private businesses can be forced into bankruptcy and eliminated either by more efficienct competitors or their own incompetence. The US government on the other hand cannot by definition go bankrupt, no matter how wasteful or incompetent, because they control the currency in which their debts are denominated. Private companies cannot compel your cooperation or participation in their schemes whereas the government, under threat or actual use of coercion, can. It does not bother me that private corporations may be inefficient because I am not forced to buy their products or use their services whereas taxes are not voluntary in the same way that discretionary spending is. In fact, it seems that I receive very little individual benefit from all of my taxes (the government has come out way ahead on me thus far in my life in terms of cost vs taxes paid). I know for a fact that I could make better use as an investor of the money that I now pay in taxes than the federal government can and does. For example, they spend billions of dollars every year on worthless pork barrel projects to research pseudo scientific bullshit (I am not talking about legitimate R&D funding like JPL or NASA here). For example, how about $4,545,000 for wood utilization research? After 10,000 years of human civilization is there still 4 million dollars worth of wood using knowledge that we don't already possess? Please. Private corporations may be wasteful, but the government is unmatched in either size or stupidity of wastefulness by even the worst private corporations.
Those who stand up for their rights in China are machine-gunned right back down again.
Will this constant erosion of freedom ever stop?
Yes, when the real life UK becomes like the one portrayed in the film V for Vendetta. After that there will be no meaningful freedoms left to lose.
No, actually it wouldn't. At the very least they now have you on destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice. The "plausible deniability" afforded by TrueCrypt's hidden volume/OS feature is actually ideal because, provided that the appropriate security precautions have been observed (as outlined in the docs in the Security Requirements and Precuations section), it is well nigh impossible to prove that hidden volume(s)/OS exist. Any "evidence" of such is likely to be circumstantial at best, most probably along the lines of: "everyone who uses TrueCrypt uses the hidden volume/OS feature so defendant must be using it too!" or perhaps they analyze the disk and attempt to show that certain portions of the disk have been written to much more frequently than others (which doesn't really prove anything). The "official" judicial proceeding is exactly the situation where "plausible deniability" is designed to help. Now, if you find yourself in less civilized hands, the Iranians for example, then you can probably expect the rubber hose treatment or any number of other inventive and persuasive techniques. However, the British, at least for now, are far too civilized to resort to such crude and brutal methods, particularly when their own citizens are involved and the stakes are a few pictures of his 17 year old girlfriend's boobies.
Reminds me of some lines from the film Ronin:
Sam: Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. That's the first thing they teach you.
Vincent: Who taught you?
Sam: I don't remember. That's the second thing they teach you.
Given the recent history of IBM and other major corporations and their aggressive outsourcing of formerly well paying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) jobs, ironically the very sort of jobs that Obama is desperately trying to promote amongst America's brightest high school students, why should we accept their PR crap without looking at what they really want. No doubt IBM is hoping to use and then discard bright high school students, taking advantage of their brilliance and naivete about the real world to squeeze lots of low cost work out of them before burning them out and discarding them. How are we supposed to get bright high school students excited about the years of schooling and study required to get a STEM job only to finish years later and find that no job is waiting for them? Surely these bright high school students can see through this charade? Well, one can hope anyway. IBM and the others have much work to do if they are to regain the trust of perspective science and technology students. Perhaps if they are wise, and I'm not holding my breath, they can start here by promising not to use and then discard these bright students as they have been known to do with their present employees; loyalty is a two way street after all.
Step one, never ever, link a computer that is critical and or military in nature.
I don't think they get Battlestar Galactica over there in Iran...
How many platforms does .NET run on? [answer: 1 - Windows].
Ever heard of Mono? No, I don't suppose that you have.
even PHP is a more popular development tool than C#
Number of people using a particular language or tool is not as important as how they feel about using it. Ask most C# and .NET Framework devs whether or not they like their tools and you will hear affirmative answers in almost every case. Lots of people use PHP, and they piss and moan about how much it sucks, whereas C# and .NET really are a pleasure to use. In fact you would be hard pressed to pick a more powerful general purpose programming language with more features, varied syntax and sheer number of options than C# these days.
was discovered to be *very* badly remotely exploitable
And yet PHP, by way of comparison, has never had security problems, amazing! Bugs are found and bugs get fixed, 'nuf said.
Which development platform is conservative adding features (not worrying about 'trendy' features that get deprecated on the next release) so that massive investments on code are not deprecated by the need of a vendor to sell you a new IDE version every two years?
One can be too conservative too. If your language and platform are constantly lagging behind the newer niche languages, Ruby for example, then people are going to dump your platform. It is the opinion of many that Java has been too conservative with regard to answering features offered by .NET and C#. The new features in C# are not just a passing fad, in fact Microsoft didn't invent most of them. Microsoft simply took the best parts of existing languages from various other programming languages, including functional style languages, and included them in C#. Java should have been doing the same.
You can keep your shiny new features that affect 2% of your codebase and survive for two years before something replaces them. I'll stick to saving myself time, my customers money, all the while keeping their systems safe. .NET is good for the desktop, it blows in the enterprise
Have you even used .NET in an enterprise situation? As for J2EE, don't make me laugh, its short comings are legendary among devs who actually know their craft.
Steve Mobs? Is that you? It's insanely great to hear from you!
Do you have any reasoned analyses that indicate that your post is realistic? I'd like to read them, if only to raise my spirits.
Regardless of whether or not we agree to exchange goods and services for US dollars or not, people still need to eat and are still willing to work to achieve their desires and goals. As long as people are willing to contribute to capital production, the particular medium of exchange is not important as long there is one. The United States has tremendous stored capital in the form of educated population, existing infrastructure, manufacturing capacity (despite popular perception), natural resources and unparalleled human capital (i.e. Scientists, Engineers, Businessmen, Entrepreneurs, etc). Whether or not we conduct our business in Dollars, Euros or Renminbi does not diminish this existing productive capital. The Chinese on the other hand are destroying their long term productive capital. They are poisoning their air, polluting their water and destroying their childrens' health. This is not damage that is easily undone. The Chinese have created the trade imbalance by lowering their standards, but what good is money if you poison yourself to death? They will spend far more on goods and services to repair the long term damage than the short term profits they realized by sacrificing their environment. Think about what true wealth is: it is the ability to have clean air and water, abundant food, clean energy and sustainable production (increased sustainable production per person increases standards of living; money can contribute to this by increasing exchange efficiencies, but it does nothing to produce wealth alone). So, one must not confuse the medium of exchange, money, with the true long term stores of wealth in a society.
I would rather have the choice of whether or not to enable these features. IMHO, the federal government has long since lost the right to say, "trust us" when it comes to these sorts of "surveillance society" issues because they have proven time and time again that they are incompetent and cannot be trusted. The same is true for law enforcement. Indeed, there are so many stupid laws these days it's enough to make one nostalgic for the days when people wore guns on their hips and weren't obligated to retreat any farther than the air at their back. You talk about kidnappers being tracked by phone, but I would rather turn off tracking on my phone and blow the kidnappers' heads off with my .44 magnum revolver, Dirty Harry style. When citizens are armed, criminals think twice and thrice before committing crimes against peoples' bodies; an armed society is a polite society.
The Chinese have the rest of the world "by the balls" as it were.
Except that they don't. The United States could completely wipe out the national debt and bring lots of production back to US shores simply by printing enough money to pay for it all. The reason we don't do that is because we don't have to. As long as the Chinese are willing to trade real products for promises to pay with nothing more than intangible bit and bytes (i.e. balances stored in electronic accounts maintained by the Federal Reserve) why should we care? The current account deficit is a natural byproduct of China's willingness to completely trash their environment in exchange for pieces of paper. The Unite States will continue to pay them with pieces of paper (i.e. electronic funds transfers) as long as it suits the Chinese to continue accepting them. If we ever reach a point where the Chinese have had enough, then the flow of goods will reverse and the Chinese will begin handing us back our promissory notes in exchange for goods and services; except this time it will cost them more than when our situations were reversed because unlike China, the United States actually has environmental standards. The endgame will be a materially richer United States at the expense of a polluted, poorer and resource depleted China. Winner: United States. The future lies in sustainable production and preservation of environmental capital. The Americans and Europeans have recognized and internalized this while the Chinese seem to be living in the 19th century with regard to environmental protection (or effective lack thereof).
This is yet another example of a multinational corporation taking advantage of corrupt governments in Mexico and Latin America to push undesirable and invasive technologies and business practices upon ignorant and disadvantaged populations. Of course, even the ignorant can become informed and once the people of Leon see the sorts of uses to which corrupt government officials will put this new technology the backlash will begin: el pueblo unido jamás será vencido.
Did they object during the first 3 films?
They probably would have had they known about it or how known how popular the trilogy would become. However, Jackson very astutely filmed all three films simultaneously over a period of 8 years before the first film was even released. So by the time the Unions knew that some crazy little project in New Zealand was going to become the biggest and highest grossing trilogy of all time, most of the shots, minus editing and special effects, where probably already in the can. In other words, by the time they knew it was too late to object.
The benefit of all is better served by standing together.
This is mostly true for most actors, but not for A list stars like McKellen, Weaving or Bloom whose membership in the guild seems to be more of a formality now than a necessity. It all depends upon what McKellen chooses to do, since he and possibly Ian Holm (as Bilbo), Hugo Weaving (as Elrond), or Orlando Bloom (as Legolas), are the only ones from the previous films who could realistically reprise their roles for the hobbit. Even then, only McKellen as Gandalf and Hugo Weaving as Elrond are really essential. Golum is computer generated so the voice could probably be mimicked pretty well if Andy Serkis refused to reprise his voice role. Am I forgetting someone else who could possibly come back for the Hobbit? Perhaps Viggo Mortensen could have a brief background appearance as "Strider" when the party stop(s) at Rivendell? Anyway, I think they will all work it out after some negotiations, there is too much profit at stake in the film to let it go down the tubes due to petty squabbling.
Sony has been thoughtful enough to entertain me lately with all these stories of them cutting off various appendages in order to spite their face.
Only Sony...like no other.