In 1972, Tonie Nathan became the first woman to receive an Electoral College vote (for Vice President).
She was the 1972 Libertarian VP candidate, on the ticket with John Hospers. Roger MacBride, a "faithless" Republican elector from Virginia, refused to vote for Richard Nixon, and cast the vote for Hospers and Nathan.
Carmakers can't just shut down marginal dealers. Under state franchise laws car companies must show good cause to terminate a dealer's franchise agreement. A federal law gives a terminated dealer the right to sue for "bad faith" by the car company. Try telling a jury that putting two dozen workers on the unemployment line was done in good faith.
These laws aren't going to change. Dealers have traditionally been prominent businessmen with political clout in state legislative chambers. (Ever wonder why you can't buy a car online?)
Nor can carmakers streamline their networks by moving an outlet wherever they see fit. In Texas and Florida, among other states, dealers have the right to block any new or relocated store within 20 miles. When there's a conflict, it's referred to a state motor vehicles board, a place where relocation deals often go to die.
"...marijuana legalization -- replacing prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation -- would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it might generate as much as $6.2 billion annually."
These billion mice (along with the billions of other plastic mass-produced products out there) will one day end up in a landfill somewhere, and will take hundreds of years to break down.
They probably will never break down. Most landfills are anoxic and try to avoid break down (since it results in dangerous and greenhouse-causing methane gas).
Of course, we have plenty of landfill space, so there really is no problem, it is a tradeoff of having useful technology to improve humanity (development of new drugs, playing cool video games).
The main thing that caused the Great Depression and the same thing that is causing our current financial crisis is wild asset speculation funded by easy credit.
What made the Depression "Great" was that the Fed engaged in monetary contraction to pierce the "overspeculation bubble" starting in 1928 and did not stop until 1933 (in 1933, the dollar was devalued and a recovery began, though slowed by the NRA and other New Deal legislation).
You are probably correct regarding the existence of a debt-based stock speculative bubble in the late 1920's, however the Fed actions to dramatically reduce the money supply and cause deflation turned a possible recession when that bubble would pop into the depression when they popped it and stepped on the throat of the economy for four years.
the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money.
This is just untrue.
TCP/IP protocol was developed with taxpayer dollars, and some early research networks that are now a small part of the Internet were built with taxpayer money, but most of the infrastructure of the modern Internet was privately paid for.
Subprime lending has very little to do with the current recession. The default rate is only slightly higher than average. The real problems have to do with derivatives, naked shorting and other financial shenanigans that Washington has refused to regulate.
You are correct that mortgage default rates are not particularly higher now than they were during the 2001 "pseudo-recession". But there are two problems:
1) if you defaulted a few years ago, the bank could sell your house and would break even or possibly make money. Today, the bank would sell your house and lose money because real etstate prices are dropping like a rock. 2) Altogether, the US has lost $4 to $5 trillion in perceived real estate wealth with tremendous "negative wealth effect" problems.
Had real estate prices continued to rise, complex asset based securities would have been fine (they were created to reduce early pay-off and random default risk, as well as to get around regulations on bank capital requirements). Perhaps better regulation could have been done on those financial products, but even without them, the real estate bubble burst would have been devastating.
While most of the international women students come to Carnegie Mellon without an extensive knowledge of computers, they all have a high sense of self-efficacy in math. Several students told us that not until coming to the U.S. did they encounter the attitude that women are not suited for math and science. They told us that girls (if they were lucky enough to go to high school in the first place) pursue math and science at the same rate and with the same expectations as boys, at least through the high school level
I blame object-oriented programming for the increasing gender gap.
OK, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I do think that object-oriented hype has made learning programming overly complex and abstract. Perhaps there are benefits to OO in large projects, but a lot of good software was written in procedural languages.
And don't get me started about functional languages!
or all i can tell, the guy registered "broadcast.com" in the 90s, created a pretty business plan, and sold out for billions at exactly the right time, and bought a basketball team
Mark was definately a pioneer in early webcasting. AudioNet really made RealAudio popular. RealAudio was the first usable streaming audio system available to most unicast dial-up Internet users.
As Wikipedia sez:
"Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems. In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million. He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and annual revenues near $100 million. In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock."
I live and work in the South Pacific. Let me assure you that, while paper and pencils are in short supply, it's mostly because paper doesn't last very long in any useful state in a tropical climate.
The OLPC, on the other hand, is standing up quite well to the elements in the pilot project we're running here.
We have a reasonable amount of uranium and then a huge supply of thorium after that. Nuclear fission works. Just keep people away from the waste.
A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor.
This is a political problem. Argentina didn't "become poor", it simply did not grow very quickly for a long period of time while the US and others grew tremendously. Economic growth has returned to Argentina (~6% per year), as well as other countries like Chile.
Keep in mind Korea was exceedingly poor after the war, now South Korea is at "western" wealth levels.
Oh, and you WILL get screwed with a liberal arts degree
I don't know why this isn't more appreciated. I think very bright people can get, say, an English degree and then manage to squeeze out something (often involving additional specialty training, good connections, or grad school), but I think a lot of folks end up on the losing side of the equation with a liberal arts degree, especially if they do it with debt.
I think high school seniors should be forced to understand what it is to live on $30,000 a year before they are allowed to major in liberal arts!
if you work in the media, say as a reporter, your job is to go out and gather information. gathering information leads to left-leaning opinions, simply out of acceptance of the definition of the concepts of liberalism and conservativism.
I'd argue that becoming a reporter is self-selective for individuals that are not interested in performing deep, fact-based analysis, otherwise one would be more interested in pursuing science or engineering. Also becoming a reporter means you must not be too interested in making money, thus you are less interested in the details of business or economics. As a reporter, loving language and narrative, you want to tell an emotional story. Moreover, that is what sells papers: emotion, rhetoric, and sophistry over facts, reality, and analysis.
Then you go to college with a bunch of similar-minded people, and work with similar-minded people, and the constant confirmation of your peers further strengthen your mindset.
I don't see how it could be different - that's life. But I think we need to recognize the biases of reporters, scientists, politicians, etc. as we read the news. Fortunately, the Internet gives us access to a lot of the primary sources previously only available to reporters, so we can check on things ourselves.
You're confusing network layers. Please turn in your geek badge at the front counter.
There is no network layer in digital television. MPEG-2 transport stream packets are modulated into 8VSB. That's the point. No network, no MAC, no acceptance of bursty interference, just raw data and physical interface. Meanwhile, wireless network devices can contend with each other at a bunch of different layers, retransmit network packets, even retransmit video IP packets.
"So let me say that this is NOT A TECHNICAL PROBLEM."
This is a technical problem, because high-power large-area live MPEG-2 transport stream broadcasts are apples, and point-to-point TCP/IP (which can retransmit missed packets) is oranges. Whitespace mixes apples and oranges, and the oranges are going to step on the apples. Your neighbors apples.
The Glass-Steagall act probably should be reinstated,
Except there isn't any evidence that "unified banks" are any riskier than split banks, infact they have proven to be less riskier (to date), and were so even during the Great Depression. Glass-Steagall was a New Deal political gift to a particular business family.
we are only now seeing the full effects of the Clinton presidency
It may be true that the reduction on capital gains taxes on sales of houses during the Clinton administration may have been a part of the real-estate bubble, but there is so much other blame to go around between bad risk models in private institutions and other bipartisan support for "affordable housing".
You rarely see true shortages in free market economies unless there are price controls (or implicit price controls because of fear of "price gouging" laws).
The The secure capacity C (W, g, A) of a stego-channel give W [noise], g [steganalyzer], and A [attack] is given by C (W, g, A) = sup I(X;Z) for X an element of S0.
I is the spectral inf-mutual information rate for the pair of general sequences.
Z is the stego channel after encoding, noise, and attack (before decoding).
S0 is the secure input set, the set of encoded data that remains impossible to steganalyze after the addition of noise (but not necessarily attack).
I think mathematicians like to make their papers overly complex.
Maybe I'm just silly, but iPhone needs a simpler language. Objective C is freaky. We need something like Python with a simplified group of graphics and communication classes.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the Earth's magnetic poles are about to flip.
Supposedly it won't kill us all....
In 1972, Tonie Nathan became the first woman to receive an Electoral College vote (for Vice President).
She was the 1972 Libertarian VP candidate, on the ticket with John Hospers. Roger MacBride, a "faithless" Republican elector from Virginia, refused to vote for Richard Nixon, and cast the vote for Hospers and Nathan.
Actually dealers are part of the problem of American automobile companies...
Dealer Surplus
Carmakers can't just shut down marginal dealers. Under state franchise laws car companies must show good cause to terminate a dealer's franchise agreement. A federal law gives a terminated dealer the right to sue for "bad faith" by the car company. Try telling a jury that putting two dozen workers on the unemployment line was done in good faith.
These laws aren't going to change. Dealers have traditionally been prominent businessmen with political clout in state legislative chambers. (Ever wonder why you can't buy a car online?)
Nor can carmakers streamline their networks by moving an outlet wherever they see fit. In Texas and Florida, among other states, dealers have the right to block any new or relocated store within 20 miles. When there's a conflict, it's referred to a state motor vehicles board, a place where relocation deals often go to die.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume most readers have never climbed about 10,000 ft.
I found myself feeling "a little silly in my head" after driving up to the top of Pike's Peak (14,110 ft.) Definitely worth a trip!
if something like marijuana would legalized, the taxes collected on that would be staggeringly huge
A statement signed by 500 economists including Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman, George A. Akerlof, and Vernon L. Smith states:
"...marijuana legalization -- replacing prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation -- would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it might generate as much as $6.2 billion annually."
These billion mice (along with the billions of other plastic mass-produced products out there) will one day end up in a landfill somewhere, and will take hundreds of years to break down.
They probably will never break down. Most landfills are anoxic and try to avoid break down (since it results in dangerous and greenhouse-causing methane gas).
Of course, we have plenty of landfill space, so there really is no problem, it is a tradeoff of having useful technology to improve humanity (development of new drugs, playing cool video games).
The main thing that caused the Great Depression and the same thing that is causing our current financial crisis is wild asset speculation funded by easy credit.
What made the Depression "Great" was that the Fed engaged in monetary contraction to pierce the "overspeculation bubble" starting in 1928 and did not stop until 1933 (in 1933, the dollar was devalued and a recovery began, though slowed by the NRA and other New Deal legislation).
You are probably correct regarding the existence of a debt-based stock speculative bubble in the late 1920's, however the Fed actions to dramatically reduce the money supply and cause deflation turned a possible recession when that bubble would pop into the depression when they popped it and stepped on the throat of the economy for four years.
the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money.
This is just untrue.
TCP/IP protocol was developed with taxpayer dollars, and some early research networks that are now a small part of the Internet were built with taxpayer money, but most of the infrastructure of the modern Internet was privately paid for.
Subprime lending has very little to do with the current recession. The default rate is only slightly higher than average. The real problems have to do with derivatives, naked shorting and other financial shenanigans that Washington has refused to regulate.
You are correct that mortgage default rates are not particularly higher now than they were during the 2001 "pseudo-recession". But there are two problems:
1) if you defaulted a few years ago, the bank could sell your house and would break even or possibly make money. Today, the bank would sell your house and lose money because real etstate prices are dropping like a rock.
2) Altogether, the US has lost $4 to $5 trillion in perceived real estate wealth with tremendous "negative wealth effect" problems.
Had real estate prices continued to rise, complex asset based securities would have been fine (they were created to reduce early pay-off and random default risk, as well as to get around regulations on bank capital requirements). Perhaps better regulation could have been done on those financial products, but even without them, the real estate bubble burst would have been devastating.
An interesting "natural experiment" can be found in comparing international CS students to US CS students....
While most of the international women students come to Carnegie Mellon without an extensive knowledge of computers, they all have a high sense of self-efficacy in math. Several students told us that not until coming to the U.S. did they encounter the attitude that women are not suited for math and science. They told us that girls (if they were lucky enough to go to high school in the first place) pursue math and science at the same rate and with the same expectations as boys, at least through the high school level
I blame object-oriented programming for the increasing gender gap.
OK, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I do think that object-oriented hype has made learning programming overly complex and abstract. Perhaps there are benefits to OO in large projects, but a lot of good software was written in procedural languages.
And don't get me started about functional languages!
or all i can tell, the guy registered "broadcast.com" in the 90s, created a pretty business plan, and sold out for billions at exactly the right time, and bought a basketball team
Mark was definately a pioneer in early webcasting. AudioNet really made RealAudio popular. RealAudio was the first usable streaming audio system available to most unicast dial-up Internet users.
As Wikipedia sez:
"Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company's largest clients was Perot Systems. In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to CompuServe--then a subsidiary of H&R Block--for $6 million. He retained approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and annual revenues near $100 million. In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock."
Here is a post from Mark from 1995 about AudioNet.
I live and work in the South Pacific. Let me assure you that, while paper and pencils are in short supply, it's mostly because paper doesn't last very long in any useful state in a tropical climate.
The OLPC, on the other hand, is standing up quite well to the elements in the pilot project we're running here.
Do you have a URL for this project?
We're running out of oil.
We have a reasonable amount of uranium and then a huge supply of thorium after that. Nuclear fission works. Just keep people away from the waste.
A few countries, such as Argentina, have already gone from rich to poor.
This is a political problem. Argentina didn't "become poor", it simply did not grow very quickly for a long period of time while the US and others grew tremendously. Economic growth has returned to Argentina (~6% per year), as well as other countries like Chile.
Keep in mind Korea was exceedingly poor after the war, now South Korea is at "western" wealth levels.
By the way, there is $350 billion in securitized student loans, and now they're having trouble.
Oh, and you WILL get screwed with a liberal arts degree
I don't know why this isn't more appreciated. I think very bright people can get, say, an English degree and then manage to squeeze out something (often involving additional specialty training, good connections, or grad school), but I think a lot of folks end up on the losing side of the equation with a liberal arts degree, especially if they do it with debt.
I think high school seniors should be forced to understand what it is to live on $30,000 a year before they are allowed to major in liberal arts!
if you work in the media, say as a reporter, your job is to go out and gather information. gathering information leads to left-leaning opinions, simply out of acceptance of the definition of the concepts of liberalism and conservativism.
I'd argue that becoming a reporter is self-selective for individuals that are not interested in performing deep, fact-based analysis, otherwise one would be more interested in pursuing science or engineering. Also becoming a reporter means you must not be too interested in making money, thus you are less interested in the details of business or economics. As a reporter, loving language and narrative, you want to tell an emotional story. Moreover, that is what sells papers: emotion, rhetoric, and sophistry over facts, reality, and analysis.
Then you go to college with a bunch of similar-minded people, and work with similar-minded people, and the constant confirmation of your peers further strengthen your mindset.
I don't see how it could be different - that's life. But I think we need to recognize the biases of reporters, scientists, politicians, etc. as we read the news. Fortunately, the Internet gives us access to a lot of the primary sources previously only available to reporters, so we can check on things ourselves.
You're confusing network layers. Please turn in your geek badge at the front counter.
There is no network layer in digital television. MPEG-2 transport stream packets are modulated into 8VSB. That's the point. No network, no MAC, no acceptance of bursty interference, just raw data and physical interface. Meanwhile, wireless network devices can contend with each other at a bunch of different layers, retransmit network packets, even retransmit video IP packets.
"So let me say that this is NOT A TECHNICAL PROBLEM."
This is a technical problem, because high-power large-area live MPEG-2 transport stream broadcasts are apples, and point-to-point TCP/IP (which can retransmit missed packets) is oranges. Whitespace mixes apples and oranges, and the oranges are going to step on the apples. Your neighbors apples.
The Glass-Steagall act probably should be reinstated,
Except there isn't any evidence that "unified banks" are any riskier than split banks, infact they have proven to be less riskier (to date), and were so even during the Great Depression. Glass-Steagall was a New Deal political gift to a particular business family.
we are only now seeing the full effects of the Clinton presidency
It may be true that the reduction on capital gains taxes on sales of houses during the Clinton administration may have been a part of the real-estate bubble, but there is so much other blame to go around between bad risk models in private institutions and other bipartisan support for "affordable housing".
The gas lines were due to OPEC's manipulation of the market
No, the gas lines were because of oil price controls, first put into place by Nixon, and not fully removed until Ronald Reagan came into office.
You rarely see true shortages in free market economies unless there are price controls (or implicit price controls because of fear of "price gouging" laws).
I firmly believe that Barack Obama is going to bring the change we need to alter the way the world see us.
The world will hate the US again soon enough - they'd prefer to blame their own problems on us.
The The secure capacity C (W, g, A) of a stego-channel give W [noise], g [steganalyzer], and A [attack] is given by C (W, g, A) = sup I(X;Z) for X an element of S0.
I is the spectral inf-mutual information rate for the pair of general sequences.
Z is the stego channel after encoding, noise, and attack (before decoding).
S0 is the secure input set, the set of encoded data that remains impossible to steganalyze after the addition of noise (but not necessarily attack).
I think mathematicians like to make their papers overly complex.
Maybe I'm just silly, but iPhone needs a simpler language. Objective C is freaky. We need something like Python with a simplified group of graphics and communication classes.