Huge Government spending of the 80's focused on military technology R & D and when those technologies hit the private industry you got high paying tech sector jobs with stock options thanks to Reagan.
What dumbass college did you get your economics degree from? I'm not an economist and even I know increased government spending and trickle-down economics are unrelated concepts.
You're perfectly right when you say more spending into high tech sectors of society accelerates technological development and profit from that development, but reagan did that despite of trickle-down economics, not because of them.
Cutting the taxes while drastically increasing spending is a short-cut to the poor-house and debtor's prison.
For a normal country, yes, but the US is so central in the world's economy they can actually afford to run insane fiscal policies and not care about all the stuff other countries have to pay attention to, like debts and deficits. Nobody is going to stop giving them loans, because that would send the world economy into a deep depression.
Besides, the rest of the world pumps 2 trillion dollar of investment into the US economy every year. That's an investment surplus, mind you, not an absolute figure, so that's 2 trillion more than the US invests in the rest of the world. Because of that the US can bleed up to 2 trillion dollars a year away in dumbass fiscal policies without it actually mattering. And the craziest thing? That investment surplus is still growing.
OK, so I'm jealous MY country can't do that. It's no fair america gets to cheat the rules of global economics.
"Subsidizing rural Christian lifestyle"? That's a good one.
The US farming industry gets the most subsidies of any farming industry in the world. It would be cheaper to buy the food from foreign countries than to keep paying americans to grow it, although woefully politically unpopular.
That's what happens when you have a political system that is designed to give some people more power than others, those people use that power to get benefits they don't really deserve.
The irony is the US has been expanding these subsidies, instead of shrinking them like the EU has been doing with theirs. As a result, though the EU gets a lot of flack over their subsidies, they are dwarfed by those of the US in absolute and relative values.
But if price were no issue, the commercial applications would rule the roost! THATS a no brainer... IMHO of course.
That's because of the inherent problem with software GUI development: it can not be parallellized to a great degree. There is nothing comparable to a central knowledgeable UI tzar or core team when you need a mainstream usable environment. Most open source projects still let just about anyone who has submitted more than a few lines of code to the project tinker with the UI, and as a result most open source projects have UI's that are horrible compromises and seem designed by committee.
How much does 5 megabytes cost apple? I can't see bandwidth cost being the real reason. Besides, not everyone would redownload their stuff. I know I'm not that likely to redownload my itunes-purchased songs, since I keep backup copies anyway.
Just like ancient maps with "Here be dragons" scrawled across unknown areas, those with religious beliefs apply their belief to everything that is unknown.
That's why some people mockingly call Him "the God of the gaps." What a lot of people who fight so hard to bring religion to non-religious regions of life don't seem to realise is that they are taking a huge gamble. The one guarantee you have to be free to hold the religion of your choice is that society doesn't consider you a treath, and so has no reason to be offended by your religion. As soon as you start to behave in a way that most people consider harmful (like insisting in teaching religious dogma in public schools), your religious freedom becomes heavily undermined.
Ofcourse, I've heard it argued that the religious people who do this have such weak religions that they require the religious persecution and the fight to hold on to their faith despite all their doubts and trials.
But just like with the walkman and the discman, there will be cheaper players, there will be better players, but it will still be the standard that everything is measured by, and that sells consistently well.
I've been running a software RAID-1 setup for years, on a 2.2 kernel (still haven't bothered to upgrade the kernel). It's been generally stable and fast. The one time I got into trouble was when I tried to compile in journaling filesystem support, which at the time wasn't compatible. As with most things in the kernel, the issues are well known, and as long as you read up on them before you'll do fine.
I do remember it being a bitch to set up though, especially so I could boot off either drive (a requirement I had for quick recovery from primary disk failure). Maybe the process has gotten easier, I haven't read up on it.
You should at least have a legal avenue if you can prove it happens, because unless there is an explicit permit to export personal data, it is in violation of the EU data protection laws (which should be british law soon, if they aren't already). That's the whole reason they made such a big deal about the extra data the US wanted for in-bound travellers from europe.
I have no idea what the Belgium post office thinks it can accomplish with the.post TLD. If they think they can get people's minds to believe "Oh, that's a postal facility, I'll check under.post first", well, maybe they're right, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The belgian post office's website is known simply as www.post.be. But now that they can scoop up www.be.post, I'm sure their site will be much, much easier to find.
This.post domain is only reinforcing the idea in my mind that icann should be spelt icant.
Can someone explain why viewing NFL games outside the specified market area is illegal? I mean... what the hell is a real-life analogy to this rule?
It would be a breach of contract. There are licensing restrictions on tivo, contingent on contractual obligations. If tivo were not to honor these geographical restrictions, I'm pretty sure the content providers would have a way to sue them for breach of contract.
I never gotta the bottom of whether it's./ or FF fault. Anyone know?
Apparently it's both. Slashdot's markup is pretty queer, and non-standard, and it triggers a bug in firefox's page reflow mechanism. That makes this bug timing related. Type slashdot in bugzilla.mozilla.org's id field, it'll take you to the bug.
In the end, I would say it's mostly firefox's fault though, since after all it is possible to render slashdot correctly without necessarily rendering standards-compliant sites incorrectly, and slashdot existed long before firefox did.
All national ID cards have centralized databases, the difference seems to be biometrics, which in practice is not that much of a difference, since identifying you by your name and picture, or by your fingerprint, does not make a big difference.
I think this entire thing is overblown. Most countries in Europe have national ID cards. My country too. We don't have militaristic juntas running the country, we don't have government spying on people more than the british one does (with all the CCTV cameras). We do have less identity theft. After all, all westernized nations have cards used to identify you, be they driver's licenses, credit cards or what have you. And there are always centralized government databases with your basic data in them. People just focus on this ID card because it's an easy target, but the difference to privacy and civil rights is negligible.
Fair use tax? I take it you mean fairtax.org's proposal, which would decrease the budget for the government (a bad thing since there wouldn't necessarily be a spending cut, and there's already a deficit), and which is actually regressive but hides it by making exceptions for the poor. It's essential effect is to shift the tax burden (as a percentage of income) to the middle class. Do the math, you'll see.
And as for privatized SS, it'll never work. Yes, in theory it makes sense, but in practice you need to bridge the gap between the time people move their money to private accounts and the time your obligations to existing SS beneficiaries end. I don't remember how much it costs to bridge that, but I remember it's so big as to basically be impossible to afford. If bush privatizes SS, he'll bankrupt the nation, or he'll have to dramatically cut SS services, neither of which is particularly digestible politically, so it's not likely to happen.
Besides, for someone claiming to be a conservative you have funny values. You sound more libertarian to me. Conservatives traditionally wanted a balanced budget, respect for the constitution, and a cap on the size of government. You've gotten none of that with bush, and all are more likely with kerry.
I own a cd-based mp3 player. It sucks ass in comparison to the ipod. No quick access to a specific album, since everything is spread across cd's, more than twice the physical size (and then all those cd's you have to lug around), no capability to make music collection wide playlists, and no solitaire!;)
That's why I got the ipod. For playing music it kicks ass. And it does let you copy music in both directions, just not with itunes. A trade-off made to the record industry so they could open the itms. There's plenty of software that will copy music back, or even replace itunes completely.
If you think the ipod has nothing to offer likely you have little taste and little need for convenience. The ipod makes your music collection available. That is its purpose. It's not a music copying device, it's not a movie storage device, it's not a text reader, even though it can be coaxed into doing all those things. But for its primary purpose it absolutely kicks ass.
Musicmatch was a major downside listed in every ipod review. Porting itunes to windows was just smart business, since it got rid of one of the major downsides of the ipod. There is no such comparable business case to be made for iphoto if itunes does the photo syncing to the ipod, and it does.
the music catalogue is vastly inferior to the US version : Gene Ammons for instance has ONE CD on the belgian iTMS, while the US version has some 15 CD's or so... Very frustrating. I hope they sync the catalogues fast...
The rights for europe are wholly separate from those for the US, which is the entire reason they couldn't open pan-european in the first place. This means that the catalogues will never be fully synced. I take it they opened with the subset of the US catalogue that they had rights for belgium for. If apple does their job in time you'll see a lot of belgian/european content that the US store doesn't have.
It's cool the itms is available in belgium. Now I can buy missy higgins' album without paying crazy shipping fees.
Is it just me or is nobody noticing here that the only thing this gambas thing does that no other IDE (like kdevelop) hasn't yet is offer a basic-like language? I mean seriously, other than the basic thing what does this thing do that's so new?
I'd rather not have basic available to learn to program in. It makes it too easy to avoid learning proper programming practices, and it damaged my ability to code for a long time.
Ah, but the catch is you need something that is trademarkable, meaning no one can have a product with the same name in your field, or a field related to your field. That's why phoenix had to become firebird (phoenix the biosmaker intends to build browsers into their bioses), and firebird had to become firefox (pressure from the firebird database community, plus non-trademarkability).
but ya, in retrospect a bit more I know what you mean, but here's a question-a challenge really-quick, name a browser! Something non weird, easy to remember, catchy, and indicates it is in fact a browser (or search engine, your choice).
webskimmer netfiend jani (just another net interface, pronounced janey) inkwire (a poor pun, but say it out loud)
webskimmer seems to not be a good choice though, since there's already a technology company using the name for one of their products. I guess it's too obvious.
It's supposed to sound like either something that will help you look around the net/web, or something friendly.
With firefox they went a different direction though. They specifically looked for a name that portrayed eagerness, a desire to take on the vested powers. The name has almost nothing to do with the function of the software, but more with the role they intend for it.
WTF else are you gonna do with a Centris? Play Marathon?! Or Spectre VR?
Turn it into a VNC or X terminal, logged into your main desktop. Lets people check their email without you having to give up your PC. And if your PC is beefy enough you won't notice the performance hit at all.
I've been intending to turn my trusty SE/30 (68030, 8 megs of ram, 40 meg HD, ethernet card) into an X terminal (I got my hands on the old X server software for OS7). I really have to get around to doing that. Though I will admit that right now I only use it to play lemmings:)
So do people in most other countries, which Americans would realize if they actually traveled abroad. Even in Paris, people couldn't have been nicer as I tried to communicate in my heavily yankee-accented broken French:)
You were speaking french. That's why you got the good response. What the french despise is the stereotype of the american, who refuses to try to speak the local language. Much as americans wouldn't take favorably to a frenchman who came to the US and tried to speak french.
Still, I don't think there's any particular hate for americans in europe (I'm belgian). Maybe fringes of it, and a desire to pounce on any american who doesn't apologize for their government, and definitely plenty of hate for american foreign policy, but hating the actual people, no, not that. Though all bets are off if bush wins the election. Everyone is cutting the people who voted for bush last time some slack, because they hadn't had the opportunity to see him in action, but if he's re-elected I expect most of europe is going to take a "well, you made your bed, you sleep in it now" attitude. I know I will.
Many scifi enthusiasts often assume that our outlook on life is primitive, and that alien races advanced enough to be space-faring races would "clearly" be more civilized than us. I have never seen the logic in that.
I believe the reasoning is that if a race manages to survive long enough after the discovery of atomic power, it will be civilized enough, and atomic power should reasonably come centuries before the ability to travel to other stars.
It could very well be that alien races only contact other alien races once they've had the power to wipe out their entire race for a specific amount of time, like half a millenium. If I were the aliens, that would be the policy I'd have anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Huge Government spending of the 80's focused on military technology R & D and when those technologies hit the private industry you got high paying tech sector jobs with stock options thanks to Reagan.
What dumbass college did you get your economics degree from? I'm not an economist and even I know increased government spending and trickle-down economics are unrelated concepts.
You're perfectly right when you say more spending into high tech sectors of society accelerates technological development and profit from that development, but reagan did that despite of trickle-down economics, not because of them.
Cutting the taxes while drastically increasing spending is a short-cut to the poor-house and debtor's prison.
For a normal country, yes, but the US is so central in the world's economy they can actually afford to run insane fiscal policies and not care about all the stuff other countries have to pay attention to, like debts and deficits. Nobody is going to stop giving them loans, because that would send the world economy into a deep depression.
Besides, the rest of the world pumps 2 trillion dollar of investment into the US economy every year. That's an investment surplus, mind you, not an absolute figure, so that's 2 trillion more than the US invests in the rest of the world. Because of that the US can bleed up to 2 trillion dollars a year away in dumbass fiscal policies without it actually mattering. And the craziest thing? That investment surplus is still growing.
OK, so I'm jealous MY country can't do that. It's no fair america gets to cheat the rules of global economics.
"Subsidizing rural Christian lifestyle"? That's a good one.
The US farming industry gets the most subsidies of any farming industry in the world. It would be cheaper to buy the food from foreign countries than to keep paying americans to grow it, although woefully politically unpopular.
That's what happens when you have a political system that is designed to give some people more power than others, those people use that power to get benefits they don't really deserve.
The irony is the US has been expanding these subsidies, instead of shrinking them like the EU has been doing with theirs. As a result, though the EU gets a lot of flack over their subsidies, they are dwarfed by those of the US in absolute and relative values.
Microsoft Offers to License the Internet
vs
Is Microsoft Ready to Assert IP Rights over the Internet?
is a big difference, that awards 'caution, biased story alert'.
Yeah, but in slashdot's defense, reality and history are biased against microsoft in these matters.
But if price were no issue, the commercial applications would rule the roost! THATS a no brainer... IMHO of course.
That's because of the inherent problem with software GUI development: it can not be parallellized to a great degree. There is nothing comparable to a central knowledgeable UI tzar or core team when you need a mainstream usable environment. Most open source projects still let just about anyone who has submitted more than a few lines of code to the project tinker with the UI, and as a result most open source projects have UI's that are horrible compromises and seem designed by committee.
No but they do lose money in bandwidth.
How much does 5 megabytes cost apple? I can't see bandwidth cost being the real reason. Besides, not everyone would redownload their stuff. I know I'm not that likely to redownload my itunes-purchased songs, since I keep backup copies anyway.
Just like ancient maps with "Here be dragons" scrawled across unknown areas, those with religious beliefs apply their belief to everything that is unknown.
That's why some people mockingly call Him "the God of the gaps." What a lot of people who fight so hard to bring religion to non-religious regions of life don't seem to realise is that they are taking a huge gamble. The one guarantee you have to be free to hold the religion of your choice is that society doesn't consider you a treath, and so has no reason to be offended by your religion. As soon as you start to behave in a way that most people consider harmful (like insisting in teaching religious dogma in public schools), your religious freedom becomes heavily undermined.
Ofcourse, I've heard it argued that the religious people who do this have such weak religions that they require the religious persecution and the fight to hold on to their faith despite all their doubts and trials.
But just like with the walkman and the discman, there will be cheaper players, there will be better players, but it will still be the standard that everything is measured by, and that sells consistently well.
I've been running a software RAID-1 setup for years, on a 2.2 kernel (still haven't bothered to upgrade the kernel). It's been generally stable and fast. The one time I got into trouble was when I tried to compile in journaling filesystem support, which at the time wasn't compatible. As with most things in the kernel, the issues are well known, and as long as you read up on them before you'll do fine.
I do remember it being a bitch to set up though, especially so I could boot off either drive (a requirement I had for quick recovery from primary disk failure). Maybe the process has gotten easier, I haven't read up on it.
You should at least have a legal avenue if you can prove it happens, because unless there is an explicit permit to export personal data, it is in violation of the EU data protection laws (which should be british law soon, if they aren't already). That's the whole reason they made such a big deal about the extra data the US wanted for in-bound travellers from europe.
I have no idea what the Belgium post office thinks it can accomplish with the .post TLD. If they think they can get people's minds to believe "Oh, that's a postal facility, I'll check under .post first", well, maybe they're right, but I wouldn't bet on it.
.post domain is only reinforcing the idea in my mind that icann should be spelt icant.
The belgian post office's website is known simply as www.post.be. But now that they can scoop up www.be.post, I'm sure their site will be much, much easier to find.
This
Can someone explain why viewing NFL games outside the specified market area is illegal? I mean... what the hell is a real-life analogy to this rule?
It would be a breach of contract. There are licensing restrictions on tivo, contingent on contractual obligations. If tivo were not to honor these geographical restrictions, I'm pretty sure the content providers would have a way to sue them for breach of contract.
I never gotta the bottom of whether it's ./ or FF fault. Anyone know?
Apparently it's both. Slashdot's markup is pretty queer, and non-standard, and it triggers a bug in firefox's page reflow mechanism. That makes this bug timing related. Type slashdot in bugzilla.mozilla.org's id field, it'll take you to the bug.
In the end, I would say it's mostly firefox's fault though, since after all it is possible to render slashdot correctly without necessarily rendering standards-compliant sites incorrectly, and slashdot existed long before firefox did.
All national ID cards have centralized databases, the difference seems to be biometrics, which in practice is not that much of a difference, since identifying you by your name and picture, or by your fingerprint, does not make a big difference.
I think this entire thing is overblown. Most countries in Europe have national ID cards. My country too. We don't have militaristic juntas running the country, we don't have government spying on people more than the british one does (with all the CCTV cameras). We do have less identity theft. After all, all westernized nations have cards used to identify you, be they driver's licenses, credit cards or what have you. And there are always centralized government databases with your basic data in them. People just focus on this ID card because it's an easy target, but the difference to privacy and civil rights is negligible.
Fair use tax? I take it you mean fairtax.org's proposal, which would decrease the budget for the government (a bad thing since there wouldn't necessarily be a spending cut, and there's already a deficit), and which is actually regressive but hides it by making exceptions for the poor. It's essential effect is to shift the tax burden (as a percentage of income) to the middle class. Do the math, you'll see.
And as for privatized SS, it'll never work. Yes, in theory it makes sense, but in practice you need to bridge the gap between the time people move their money to private accounts and the time your obligations to existing SS beneficiaries end. I don't remember how much it costs to bridge that, but I remember it's so big as to basically be impossible to afford. If bush privatizes SS, he'll bankrupt the nation, or he'll have to dramatically cut SS services, neither of which is particularly digestible politically, so it's not likely to happen.
Besides, for someone claiming to be a conservative you have funny values. You sound more libertarian to me. Conservatives traditionally wanted a balanced budget, respect for the constitution, and a cap on the size of government. You've gotten none of that with bush, and all are more likely with kerry.
I own a cd-based mp3 player. It sucks ass in comparison to the ipod. No quick access to a specific album, since everything is spread across cd's, more than twice the physical size (and then all those cd's you have to lug around), no capability to make music collection wide playlists, and no solitaire! ;)
That's why I got the ipod. For playing music it kicks ass. And it does let you copy music in both directions, just not with itunes. A trade-off made to the record industry so they could open the itms. There's plenty of software that will copy music back, or even replace itunes completely.
If you think the ipod has nothing to offer likely you have little taste and little need for convenience. The ipod makes your music collection available. That is its purpose. It's not a music copying device, it's not a movie storage device, it's not a text reader, even though it can be coaxed into doing all those things. But for its primary purpose it absolutely kicks ass.
Musicmatch was a major downside listed in every ipod review. Porting itunes to windows was just smart business, since it got rid of one of the major downsides of the ipod. There is no such comparable business case to be made for iphoto if itunes does the photo syncing to the ipod, and it does.
the music catalogue is vastly inferior to the US version : Gene Ammons for instance has ONE CD on the belgian iTMS, while the US version has some 15 CD's or so... Very frustrating. I hope they sync the catalogues fast...
The rights for europe are wholly separate from those for the US, which is the entire reason they couldn't open pan-european in the first place. This means that the catalogues will never be fully synced. I take it they opened with the subset of the US catalogue that they had rights for belgium for. If apple does their job in time you'll see a lot of belgian/european content that the US store doesn't have.
It's cool the itms is available in belgium. Now I can buy missy higgins' album without paying crazy shipping fees.
Is it just me or is nobody noticing here that the only thing this gambas thing does that no other IDE (like kdevelop) hasn't yet is offer a basic-like language? I mean seriously, other than the basic thing what does this thing do that's so new?
I'd rather not have basic available to learn to program in. It makes it too easy to avoid learning proper programming practices, and it damaged my ability to code for a long time.
Ah, but the catch is you need something that is trademarkable, meaning no one can have a product with the same name in your field, or a field related to your field. That's why phoenix had to become firebird (phoenix the biosmaker intends to build browsers into their bioses), and firebird had to become firefox (pressure from the firebird database community, plus non-trademarkability).
MiX? Or something else?
No, apple-made. It's only X11R5, so I don't know how compatible it is, but I've been meaning to try.
but ya, in retrospect a bit more I know what you mean, but here's a question-a challenge really-quick, name a browser! Something non weird, easy to remember, catchy, and indicates it is in fact a browser (or search engine, your choice).
webskimmer
netfiend
jani (just another net interface, pronounced janey)
inkwire (a poor pun, but say it out loud)
webskimmer seems to not be a good choice though, since there's already a technology company using the name for one of their products. I guess it's too obvious.
It's supposed to sound like either something that will help you look around the net/web, or something friendly.
With firefox they went a different direction though. They specifically looked for a name that portrayed eagerness, a desire to take on the vested powers. The name has almost nothing to do with the function of the software, but more with the role they intend for it.
WTF else are you gonna do with a Centris? Play Marathon?! Or Spectre VR?
:)
Turn it into a VNC or X terminal, logged into your main desktop. Lets people check their email without you having to give up your PC. And if your PC is beefy enough you won't notice the performance hit at all.
I've been intending to turn my trusty SE/30 (68030, 8 megs of ram, 40 meg HD, ethernet card) into an X terminal (I got my hands on the old X server software for OS7). I really have to get around to doing that. Though I will admit that right now I only use it to play lemmings
So do people in most other countries, which Americans would realize if they actually traveled abroad. Even in Paris, people couldn't have been nicer as I tried to communicate in my heavily yankee-accented broken French :)
You were speaking french. That's why you got the good response. What the french despise is the stereotype of the american, who refuses to try to speak the local language. Much as americans wouldn't take favorably to a frenchman who came to the US and tried to speak french.
Still, I don't think there's any particular hate for americans in europe (I'm belgian). Maybe fringes of it, and a desire to pounce on any american who doesn't apologize for their government, and definitely plenty of hate for american foreign policy, but hating the actual people, no, not that. Though all bets are off if bush wins the election. Everyone is cutting the people who voted for bush last time some slack, because they hadn't had the opportunity to see him in action, but if he's re-elected I expect most of europe is going to take a "well, you made your bed, you sleep in it now" attitude. I know I will.
Many scifi enthusiasts often assume that our outlook on life is primitive, and that alien races advanced enough to be space-faring races would "clearly" be more civilized than us. I have never seen the logic in that.
I believe the reasoning is that if a race manages to survive long enough after the discovery of atomic power, it will be civilized enough, and atomic power should reasonably come centuries before the ability to travel to other stars.
It could very well be that alien races only contact other alien races once they've had the power to wipe out their entire race for a specific amount of time, like half a millenium. If I were the aliens, that would be the policy I'd have anyway.