I haven't looked at the details of the so-called "Fair Tax" myself, but everyone I've talked to who has (and who doesn't just rave about it and Ron Paul like they were the second coming) has said that it is great for the very rich and the very poor--and bad for everyone else.
The flat tax, of course, is good only for the very rich.
How do you stop the Romneys, the Perots, the Gates of the world from spending their own money on commercials. [sic]
You stop them from spending their money on commercials by stopping anyone from spending money on paid political television commercials--again, speech which is only available to those with lots of money--outside certain well-regulated circumstances.
I recognize that it's something of an extreme view, but I believe that the only way to really ensure that our government is elected by votes, not dollars, is to:
Have a common pool of money for all candidates for any particular public office, which is to be divided equally among them.
Have there be a reasonable minimum that anyone has to raise to become an officially recognized candidate for said office--that is, a particular amount of money that you have to put into the pool to be recognized. What this minimum should be for any given race, I don't know; I don't have the resources to do that kind of research. However, it should be high enough to prevent any old wack-job from becoming a candidate, but low enough that anyone with real support can become one. This would have the side benefit of removing the decision about who gets to even run for positions from the hands of the 2 major parties, and give theoretically viable third parties a fighting chance.
Forbid all newspaper and television advertisements from anyone but the campaigns in a limited time and space around the election. Again, I don't know what the specific limits should be, but I would say that a good place to start is the district and 2 months before the election for legislative elections, and the whole country and from the time the candidates are officially chosen to Election Day for Presidential elections.
And yes, as I said, I'm working from a premise that none of this violates the First Amendment, because I don't believe that protecting speech that costs money in this way is within the spirit of the amendment. I realize this isn't ever likely to happen, but I think that a system like this is what is necessary to ensure that we can never get back into the situation we're in today.
Speech is something that everyone has equally. Anyone can take a box to a street corner, stand on it, and start talking. Anyone can take a web browser to blogger.com, create a blog, and start writing (assuming they have internet access, which the vast majority of people at least have access to).
Money is not something that everyone has equally. When money becomes protected as speech, then suddenly a very few people--and, worse, non-people--have a lot more speech than the rest of us. Their words can get out in ways that ours cannot. Microsoft (just as a ridiculously rich example) could buy ads on television across the country with content very carefully crafted to never tell an outright lie, but make people believe that (just, again, as an example) Barack Obama will order the murdering of thousands of kittens if he's elected as president.
I know that the Supreme Court has found that spending money is protected under the first amendment as "expression," but can't see how that is justifiable, given both what the first amendment was designed to protect in the first place, and how that freedom is being used--and abused--by very rich corporations and others whose interests are significantly against those of the American public at large.
A simply non-tweakable flat-tax or FairTax would be the single largest transfer of power back to the people from the government... since our government has to implement it, it's why it'll never happen.
It would also be the single largest transfer of money from the poor to the rich. That is why it'll never happen: because there is still some sanity in government, even if it's not much.
We definitely need some people with this kind of mandate and power, provided there are enough checks on said power to prevent it being used for Evil instead of Good...
Well, not all users are as in the loop as you assume.
The only people at the (small) company where I work who are remotely technical are IT. The majority of the users are of the type who can follow simple instructions and policies, as long as they don't interfere too much with The Way They've Always Done Things. There's plenty of the "real world" where users have little to no technical capability, and depend entirely on IT to keep things running.
In any case, it's the admins who decide to get a NAS or RAID, and have the power to purchase it for the users to back up to, whether or not the users are bright enough to know it's a good idea.
Anyone that's actually an intelligent user (rofl) is moving their stuff over to a RAID equipped server or NAS anyway.
'Cause, y'know, everyone who's intelligent enough to know that a nice redundant storage system is a Good Idea has the money to blow on a separate server with a RAID array or a NAS, for their home.
Right. Why don't you call me when "intelligent" actually means "well-paid" in the significant majority of cases?
I haven't read the article, and doubt I would have any chance of understanding the details of the patent, but from the summary it sounds like this patent might actually be a reasonable one: it's a particular method for increasing speed in a particular part of a processor, not "a patent on speeding up computers".
For once, might the patent system actually be doing what it's supposed to?
But should they teach simple stuff such as using javac and Ant in University ? Sorry to sound like an elitist asshole, but it is pretty reasonable to expect a CS undergraduate student to be able to figure these details by himself.
Don't be an elitist asshole.
If they shouldn't teach simple stuff such as using javac and ant, why should they teach foundations or principles at all? Why shouldn't they just teach the high level stuff, and let the CS undergraduate students figure out all the details themselves?
If the course is for people who are already grounded in the basics of programming, and who understand how to use the command line to begin with, then perhaps you can dispense with teaching them how to use javac and ant, but you still need to at least tell them which tools they should be using.
If, on the other hand, the course is for people who have never programmed before, you absolutely need to teach them about how to use javac and ant.
Your attitude is the kind that drives perfectly good people away from programming, and computers in general, because they feel like everyone shoves them out into the cold and says, "Figure it out for yourself. It was good enough for me, so anyone who can't do it is obviously an idiot."
News flash: Apple doesn't want to be Dell. They don't want to be in the commodity market, competing on price with razor-thin margins.
If they did that, they wouldn't be Apple. They are good at what they do, and they are not particularly good at what Dell does, so why on earth do you think they would want to try competing with them?
You bring up, if indirectly, a problem I have with Apple. Apple doesn't have a good range of Macs.
I believe this is largely due to two major factors. First, Apple isn't a huge company. Yeah, they're worth plenty, but they don't have anything like the number of employees that, say, Dell has, and, though I wouldn't even know where to go to look it up, I rather suspect their budget is similarly smaller. That means that they can't easily afford to make the thousands of different configurations that are possible with Dell.
The second reason is one of philosophy: Apple has always been very much about not confusing the user (sometimes taken to extremes: see the one-button mouse). I can tell you from personal experience that even smart, moderately computer-savvy (for a non-geek) people trying to look at stuff on Dell's site can get very bewildered by the dizzying range of options. Apple's way gives very clear, easy-to-understand product lines, with a few different choices within those lines, and then a small amount of build-to-order customization available. It's not going to satisfy a geek who really likes to build boxes from scratch, but plainly, Apple doesn't care.
Maybe if they grow to 50 times their current size, then they'll be both willing and able to cater to all the different market segments that Dell does, but for now, it's just not what they do. It means that some people can't find a computer that really fits them at the Apple Store—but I guess Apple's willing to live with that. It's really not easy to be all things to all people, and do it well for every one of them.
...I'm far too lazy to do anything responsible and researchly like looking up SEC filings, but I thought I remembered that Microsoft had then sold almost all its Apple stock?
We won't know that there is competition in the marketplace until another monopoly has replaced Microsoft's monopoly.
Why does everyone seem to assume that there will necessarily always be one superdominant monopoly player in the computer industry?
If Microsoft had not risen to become what they are, there would be none. There would be standards that most people follow, and at least a half-dozen different OSes that implement them sharing the lion's share of the market.
When Microsoft's power is finally broken, I expect that a similar situation will result. Apple will gain marketshare, sure, and so will Linux. But eventually, as people are forced to come to understand, at least to some degree, what an OS really is, more viable choices will appear.
I seriously doubt that when Microsoft's monopoly disappears, it will be replaced with another similar monopoly.
You elected them. You can not elect them again, or you can shoot them, whatever works. Above all, career politicians are interested in job security (their own, not their voters'). So if a large part of the population openly turns against them, they will follow, because they fear for their re-election.
Unfortunately, Tom, it's not that simple. (Disclaimer: I don't know any of the legal details of this and am working purely from a general picture off the top of my head:)
You see, our congresscritters also have the power to decide just who it is who elects them—that is, they are the ones who get to redraw the voting districts. Thus, over the decades, they have carefully gerrymandered themselves into districts where the vast majority of them can be at least 85-90% sure that they will defeat any opposition, and at least 50% sure that they will do so by a wide margin. So even if 90% of the country hates a particular Representative, you can be sure that the 10% that love him are all in his own district—and that even those who aren't too happy about what he's doing still like him better than the other guy.
Personally, I think this system is insane, as demonstrated by the scandal in Texas a few years ago, where the Democrats in the state government all left the state for a while to make sure that the Republicans there couldn't get a quorum together to gerrymander the districts so that certain key Democrats would not get re-elected.
(It kinda makes me think of certain areas of BattleMaster, except that there they self-select, people who dislike certain leaders who never, ever lose elections leaving the realm, so that said leaders are always assured of the support of most of their realms...and thus remain in power for what is, in game terms, lifetimes...)
You seem to have a serious prejudice against non-city-dwellers.
You also seem to have formed a very bizarre belief that anyone who doesn't live in a big city lives in "the sticks."
Well, I live in a small town, 20 minutes from a small city, 1 hour from a large-ish city (Syracuse, NY). (Oh, and I don't work in either of the cities. You can work in suburban and rural areas, too! Wow!) It's not the sticks. I know people who live in the sticks, and out there you can't get broadband. Well, if your location is good you can probably get satellite, but not cable, and not DSL.
I pay ~$50 for cable internet that's generally between 3 and 4 Mbps down, and about 384 up—so better than the guy you replied to, but not by a huge amount. The DSL around here is, from what I've heard, slightly worse. There are no plans that I know of to get any faster service out here (fiber or whatever).
So get your head out of the city and realize that yes, there are other people in the country. People who don't want to live in a city, and have no need to. But we still need services. And, y'know, maybe the tiniest smidgen of respect—or at least common courtesy/
Like I said, it's a fine line....maybe I need to rethink where it should be drawn.
Perhaps all that needs to be done is that if a newspaper prints an editorial supporting or criticizing one of the candidates, they simply have to also print any and all letters to the editor commenting on the election, as well.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that the situation we have now is dangerously unbalanced.
So, you are going to forbid newspapers (at least those that are paid for)from publishing political opinion?
There's definitely still a fine line. Political opinion on the editorial page is obviously just that: opinion, fully protected under the First Amendment. A big full-page spread of Candidate A's face with block letters saying, "VOTE FOR CANDIDATE A!" is pretty clearly an ad that wouldn't be protected. Where exactly the line should be drawn in between those, I'm not sure. However, I believe that such a line can be drawn in such a way as to preserve the fundamental rights of the people and the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
I don't care one whit about preserving profits for the super-rich, though.
So, because I am rich enough to own a newspaper, radio station, or television station, I get to talk politics, but you can't get together with a couple hundred of your buddies and pool your resources and buy exposure for your political ideas from me?
No; obviously, it's a little more complicated than I originally said—you would have to also restrict media that most people would have to pay for from running ads etc under their own power.
In general, if it takes money to get it, it's not protected speech.
When "free speech" costs money, it isn't free or Free.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about someone making $40,000/year?
What about a family making $80,000/year?
I haven't looked at the details of the so-called "Fair Tax" myself, but everyone I've talked to who has (and who doesn't just rave about it and Ron Paul like they were the second coming) has said that it is great for the very rich and the very poor--and bad for everyone else.
The flat tax, of course, is good only for the very rich.
Dan Aris
You stop them from spending their money on commercials by stopping anyone from spending money on paid political television commercials--again, speech which is only available to those with lots of money--outside certain well-regulated circumstances.
I recognize that it's something of an extreme view, but I believe that the only way to really ensure that our government is elected by votes, not dollars, is to:
And yes, as I said, I'm working from a premise that none of this violates the First Amendment, because I don't believe that protecting speech that costs money in this way is within the spirit of the amendment. I realize this isn't ever likely to happen, but I think that a system like this is what is necessary to ensure that we can never get back into the situation we're in today.
Dan Aris
Speech is something that everyone has equally. Anyone can take a box to a street corner, stand on it, and start talking. Anyone can take a web browser to blogger.com, create a blog, and start writing (assuming they have internet access, which the vast majority of people at least have access to).
Money is not something that everyone has equally. When money becomes protected as speech, then suddenly a very few people--and, worse, non-people--have a lot more speech than the rest of us. Their words can get out in ways that ours cannot. Microsoft (just as a ridiculously rich example) could buy ads on television across the country with content very carefully crafted to never tell an outright lie, but make people believe that (just, again, as an example) Barack Obama will order the murdering of thousands of kittens if he's elected as president.
I know that the Supreme Court has found that spending money is protected under the first amendment as "expression," but can't see how that is justifiable, given both what the first amendment was designed to protect in the first place, and how that freedom is being used--and abused--by very rich corporations and others whose interests are significantly against those of the American public at large.
Dan Aris
It would also be the single largest transfer of money from the poor to the rich. That is why it'll never happen: because there is still some sanity in government, even if it's not much.
Dan Aris
Sounds like an Imperial Auditor to me...
We definitely need some people with this kind of mandate and power, provided there are enough checks on said power to prevent it being used for Evil instead of Good...
Dan Aris
Well, not all users are as in the loop as you assume.
The only people at the (small) company where I work who are remotely technical are IT. The majority of the users are of the type who can follow simple instructions and policies, as long as they don't interfere too much with The Way They've Always Done Things. There's plenty of the "real world" where users have little to no technical capability, and depend entirely on IT to keep things running.
In any case, it's the admins who decide to get a NAS or RAID, and have the power to purchase it for the users to back up to, whether or not the users are bright enough to know it's a good idea.
Dan Aris
If it's for a business, then the business's admins will handle it, not the users you mentioned.
It may be a small distinction, but it certainly makes a difference when determining what you're talking about.
Dan Aris
'Cause, y'know, everyone who's intelligent enough to know that a nice redundant storage system is a Good Idea has the money to blow on a separate server with a RAID array or a NAS, for their home.
Right. Why don't you call me when "intelligent" actually means "well-paid" in the significant majority of cases?
Dan Aris
I haven't read the article, and doubt I would have any chance of understanding the details of the patent, but from the summary it sounds like this patent might actually be a reasonable one: it's a particular method for increasing speed in a particular part of a processor, not "a patent on speeding up computers".
For once, might the patent system actually be doing what it's supposed to?
Dan Aris
And with government crippled, how do you expect to actually hold them responsible?
Dan Aris
I hope you'll forgive my cynicism, but a) I'll believe it when I see it, and b) not everywhere is a major metropolitan area.
Dan Aris
...'cause, y'know, everywhere you might go has WiMAX.
Right.
Dan Aris
Selling drugs is illegal no matter who you're selling them to. The same is not true of copyrighted content.
Dan Aris
Don't be an elitist asshole.
If they shouldn't teach simple stuff such as using javac and ant, why should they teach foundations or principles at all? Why shouldn't they just teach the high level stuff, and let the CS undergraduate students figure out all the details themselves?
If the course is for people who are already grounded in the basics of programming, and who understand how to use the command line to begin with, then perhaps you can dispense with teaching them how to use javac and ant, but you still need to at least tell them which tools they should be using.
If, on the other hand, the course is for people who have never programmed before, you absolutely need to teach them about how to use javac and ant.
Your attitude is the kind that drives perfectly good people away from programming, and computers in general, because they feel like everyone shoves them out into the cold and says, "Figure it out for yourself. It was good enough for me, so anyone who can't do it is obviously an idiot."
Dan Aris
Hey, I know Rick Decker! Not only was he my professor in college, I went to high school with his son ;-)
He is one cool, cool guy. Good professor, too.
And yes, he taught from his books :-)
Dan Aris
News flash: Apple doesn't want to be Dell. They don't want to be in the commodity market, competing on price with razor-thin margins.
If they did that, they wouldn't be Apple. They are good at what they do, and they are not particularly good at what Dell does, so why on earth do you think they would want to try competing with them?
Dan Aris
I believe this is largely due to two major factors. First, Apple isn't a huge company. Yeah, they're worth plenty, but they don't have anything like the number of employees that, say, Dell has, and, though I wouldn't even know where to go to look it up, I rather suspect their budget is similarly smaller. That means that they can't easily afford to make the thousands of different configurations that are possible with Dell.
The second reason is one of philosophy: Apple has always been very much about not confusing the user (sometimes taken to extremes: see the one-button mouse). I can tell you from personal experience that even smart, moderately computer-savvy (for a non-geek) people trying to look at stuff on Dell's site can get very bewildered by the dizzying range of options. Apple's way gives very clear, easy-to-understand product lines, with a few different choices within those lines, and then a small amount of build-to-order customization available. It's not going to satisfy a geek who really likes to build boxes from scratch, but plainly, Apple doesn't care.
Maybe if they grow to 50 times their current size, then they'll be both willing and able to cater to all the different market segments that Dell does, but for now, it's just not what they do. It means that some people can't find a computer that really fits them at the Apple Store—but I guess Apple's willing to live with that. It's really not easy to be all things to all people, and do it well for every one of them.
Dan Aris
...I'm far too lazy to do anything responsible and researchly like looking up SEC filings, but I thought I remembered that Microsoft had then sold almost all its Apple stock?
Dan Aris
Why does everyone seem to assume that there will necessarily always be one superdominant monopoly player in the computer industry?
If Microsoft had not risen to become what they are, there would be none. There would be standards that most people follow, and at least a half-dozen different OSes that implement them sharing the lion's share of the market.
When Microsoft's power is finally broken, I expect that a similar situation will result. Apple will gain marketshare, sure, and so will Linux. But eventually, as people are forced to come to understand, at least to some degree, what an OS really is, more viable choices will appear.
I seriously doubt that when Microsoft's monopoly disappears, it will be replaced with another similar monopoly.
Dan Aris
Unfortunately, Tom, it's not that simple. (Disclaimer: I don't know any of the legal details of this and am working purely from a general picture off the top of my head:)
You see, our congresscritters also have the power to decide just who it is who elects them—that is, they are the ones who get to redraw the voting districts. Thus, over the decades, they have carefully gerrymandered themselves into districts where the vast majority of them can be at least 85-90% sure that they will defeat any opposition, and at least 50% sure that they will do so by a wide margin. So even if 90% of the country hates a particular Representative, you can be sure that the 10% that love him are all in his own district—and that even those who aren't too happy about what he's doing still like him better than the other guy.
Personally, I think this system is insane, as demonstrated by the scandal in Texas a few years ago, where the Democrats in the state government all left the state for a while to make sure that the Republicans there couldn't get a quorum together to gerrymander the districts so that certain key Democrats would not get re-elected.
(It kinda makes me think of certain areas of BattleMaster, except that there they self-select, people who dislike certain leaders who never, ever lose elections leaving the realm, so that said leaders are always assured of the support of most of their realms...and thus remain in power for what is, in game terms, lifetimes...)
Dan Aris
You seem to have a serious prejudice against non-city-dwellers.
You also seem to have formed a very bizarre belief that anyone who doesn't live in a big city lives in "the sticks."
Well, I live in a small town, 20 minutes from a small city, 1 hour from a large-ish city (Syracuse, NY). (Oh, and I don't work in either of the cities. You can work in suburban and rural areas, too! Wow!) It's not the sticks. I know people who live in the sticks, and out there you can't get broadband. Well, if your location is good you can probably get satellite, but not cable, and not DSL.
I pay ~$50 for cable internet that's generally between 3 and 4 Mbps down, and about 384 up—so better than the guy you replied to, but not by a huge amount. The DSL around here is, from what I've heard, slightly worse. There are no plans that I know of to get any faster service out here (fiber or whatever).
So get your head out of the city and realize that yes, there are other people in the country. People who don't want to live in a city, and have no need to. But we still need services. And, y'know, maybe the tiniest smidgen of respect—or at least common courtesy/
Dan Aris
You seem to have managed to completely ignore Hillary's 2 main competitors: John Edwards and Barack Obama.
Both of them have reasonably strong support, and are much more electable than Hillary.
Dan Aris
Like I said, it's a fine line....maybe I need to rethink where it should be drawn.
Perhaps all that needs to be done is that if a newspaper prints an editorial supporting or criticizing one of the candidates, they simply have to also print any and all letters to the editor commenting on the election, as well.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that the situation we have now is dangerously unbalanced.
Dan Aris
There's definitely still a fine line. Political opinion on the editorial page is obviously just that: opinion, fully protected under the First Amendment. A big full-page spread of Candidate A's face with block letters saying, "VOTE FOR CANDIDATE A!" is pretty clearly an ad that wouldn't be protected. Where exactly the line should be drawn in between those, I'm not sure. However, I believe that such a line can be drawn in such a way as to preserve the fundamental rights of the people and the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
I don't care one whit about preserving profits for the super-rich, though.
Dan Aris
No; obviously, it's a little more complicated than I originally said—you would have to also restrict media that most people would have to pay for from running ads etc under their own power.
In general, if it takes money to get it, it's not protected speech.
When "free speech" costs money, it isn't free or Free.
Dan Aris