but if they use it in commerce they are opening themselves up to lawsuits for failing to adhere to standards
It isn't in the SI standards for units. What is your motivation for trying to frighten and mislead people on this issue?
I'm just a fan of the SI. I guess it has to do with being trained as a physical scientist.
However, you are right - the SI did not actually define units for bits and bytes - just the prefixes. I guess when you think about it bits and bytes are dimensionless - they're essentially counting units, like dozens and moles (though the latter is a bit odd in that it tends to be an inexact count proxied by mass).
You're suggesting that the SI aren't an authority on the matter of unit definitions?
Not for data.
That kind of argument just leads to no standard at all. Not for data. Not for surveying. Not for electronics. Not for engineering.
Every industry defining its own quirky standards sounds nice until you actually start to interoperate with the rest of the world.
But hey, keep calling 1024 bytes a kilobyte. You can keep explaining to your users that everybody else is doing it wrong. I doubt you'll change the storage industry.
Just about every product has exclusive services or features not available on other platforms, they aren't rent-seeking behavior.
It is if there is an ongoing revenue stream associated with the service and it can only be provided by a single source.
In your mind, just what IS rent-seeking behavior? Do you dispute that the concept even exists?
Of course, they aren't technically compatible, but the competition absolutely is there.
The barriers to compatibility are not technical in nature. The barriers stem from the fact that the consoles refuse to run code that is not cryptographically signed. The only competition is on the original purchase of the console - after that it is all network effects and tie-in.
Oh bullshit, that sort of rubbish means designing a console or PC or phone or tablet that only works with ARM binaries and not x86 ones would be rent-seeking behavior or proprietary.
Hardly. The issue isn't with devices that have compatibility requirements. The issue is with things like crytographic signatures. An ARM-based Android device that allows the user to install 3rd-party applications is not fundamentally rent-seeking. An ARM-based Android device that does not allow the user to install 3rd-party applications is. The problem isn't the instruction set - it is the lock-in.
It isn't instruction set compatibility that is keeping Netflix from offering an application that runs on the XBox. They could just make a game disc that connects to their service and plays video. The reason that can't do that is that MS would refuse to sign it if they did, because they want to be the gatekeepers to online services.
They are physically incompatible with a decimal unit and therefore with the SI model.
Bits and bytes are numbers. Binary and decimal are nothing more than ways of representing a number. There is nothing physically incompatible between them. Given an arbitrary number in binary representation you can represent it in decimal.
And this isn't just any industry. We could drop SI before dropping computing.
Uh, you might want to note that just about every aspect of manufacturing a computer involves SI units. Your computer wouldn't work all that well without engineers, miners, chemists, oil rig operators, power plants, and daycare workers to watch over the kids of all the above. Everything is related, which is the whole reason SI exists in the first place.
"Great. Do you mind explaining what the point of metric units are if not consistent use of powers of 10?"
The si units exist for easy conversion, they are base 10 units.
Bits by definition are not base 10 units. You convert them in base 2 not base 10.
Then they aren't metric units. That's nice, but around here we use the metric system, and for use in commerce this is actually required by law in many places. If programmers want to call gigabytes 2^30 that is nice, but if they use it in commerce they are opening themselves up to lawsuits for failing to adhere to standards. Fortunately most of these errors tend to work out in the consumer's favor so they're relatively safe.
You can ignore the SI if you want to, but the inevitable result is situations like this where SI and non-SI units get mixed together.
You can measure your distances in miles if you like while you're at it, and you'll end up with similar confusion where nautical, statue, and survey miles end up bumping into each other.
Asking the SI to stay out of defining standard units is a joke of a proposal - that's all they do.
But it wasn't an established position, it's been like that from the start. And of course they need to compete, they have to compete with the same service(s) available on the PS3, Wii, PC, etc...
This is pretty typical as well. Exclusive add-on services are rent-seeking behavior, and they're very common.
Sure, when you look at the total package there is some level of competition. But, just try to switch between an X-Box and a PS3 and you'll find that you have to throw out all your games, lose all your online friends, etc. Network effects are fundamentally anticompetitive, and designing your console to only work in one network is rent-seeking behavior as a result.
Rent-seeking behavior isn't the absence of any choice at any level whatsoever. It is about reducing your ability to choose once you're tied into a relationship with a provider of some kind. It is still rent-seeking behavior even if it is disclosed in advance.
Economic rent is about extracting money from somebody after you sold them a product. Rent-seeking behavior is about contraining consumer choice so that they are more likely to give you that money. If MS set up an online service for the X-Box where you are free to use their service, or others are free to offer competing services that are potentially equivalent then that would not be rent-seeking. When they tie the console to a single service then that is.
If your car manufacturer said that they'd only honor the warranty if you bought your parts and consumables from them, then that would be the same. This behavior has actually been made illegal, but it can still be an uphill battle if you choose to exercise your legal rights.
Hmm, I still see it there, indeed. I think there was talk of this on the lists, but maybe it never happened, or it is still pending. It is a bit of a mess to maintain in general (all those repackaged libs/etc).
It can be done in your head using compatible binary units as well as long as you stay within a given unit be it KB, MB, GB etc you can shift decimal places all day long.
Well, you could say the same of using rods to the hoghead. As long as you only work in rods to the hoghead there are no issues at all. The whole point of SI is that it is a set of units that are internally consistent so that you can use watts for mechanical power and use watts for electrical power and it all just works out.
If every industry defined its own set of units you'd end up with a mess. Perhaps SI isn't ideal within any particular domain, but it is certainly ideal across all of them.
The rent-seeking behavior is making it impossible to play a multiplayer game on an X-Box or stream Netflix movies without buying that networking service FROM THEM.
Rent-seeking behavior is when you use an established position (often gained through legitimate competition) to extract revenue in another area without the need to compete.
There is only one company that provides online content/services for owners of XBox hardware, and that is Microsoft. That makes it rent-seeking behavior almost by definition.
Yes, I know that many other companies do this as well, and that is why there is a term for it. That doesn't change the fact that it is rent-seeking behavior, anticompetitive, and bad for the economy.
If Netflix COULD have made its service available to X-Box owners without a monthly revenue stream to Microsoft but CHOSE not to do so, then that wouldn't be economic rent. However, Mircosoft does not allow people who make software for the X-Box to do this. If you want to have online services, you have to go through them.
It was a separate context where 1024 and 1048576 and 1073741824 and 1099511627776 made sense.
Kind of like in a separate context where 12 and 36 and 5280 make sense? What's the point in having standard and compatible units/prefixes if we allow every domain to redefine them? If I have a wire with a 1 kilovolt potential across it and 1 kiloamp of current is passing through, then it is carrying 1 megawatt of power, and it has 1 ohm of resistance. If the wire is 1cm long then it has a resistivity of 100 ohms/meter. If I used it to power a water pump it could pump 102 metric tons of water up a 1 meter distance per second.
Now imagine how that would look if the union of electricians and the union of surveyors couldn't agree to just use SI prefixes? The only constant in that entire conversion if the acceleration due to gravity - it would be a mess if time, length, power, and energy all used different unit conventions.
However, when developing software, you would be well advised to use the same terminology that's used in the underlying hardware for reporting its size.
You'd think that would be almost the whole reason for having a standards body in the first place.
Imagine if kilo meant something different when applied to grams, meters, seconds, amps, and watts? Imagine if a kilowatt was 1.024 kiloamp-volts, but a kilowatt was 1 amp-kilovolt!
No one gives a flying fuck that the SI says. They are not an authority on the matter.
You're suggesting that the SI aren't an authority on the matter of unit definitions? Every industry on the planet that isn't still stuck in the dark ages uses SI units.
I assure you that if you are building any kind of memory storage device you're going to be very concerned with SI units.
And how many square meters of surface area does a 1 TB drive with a storage density of 50MB/mm^2 require?
This can be done in your head if you use base-10 units, and not if you're mixing base-2/base-10. Since the whole point of SI is to have a consistent set of units across many different domains of measurement it is only natural that they're going to use the same prefixes as are used in EVERY SINGLE OTHER INDUSTRY ON THE PLANET.
No one ever uses that terminology in the real world (well, maybe a handful of standards-crazy Linux developers, but that's about it). There was an attempt to shove it down everyone's throat on Wikipedia a couple years ago and it was decisively beaten back. No one wanted this baby-talk in their articles. The Commodore 64 didn't have 64 "kibibytes" of RAM (I feel silly even typing that), it had 64 KILOBYTES of RAM. That's how prefixes have always been used in the IT world and always will be. The International System of Units can go to hell.
Great. Do you mind explaining what the point of metric units are if not consistent use of powers of 10?
If the density of an object is 1.2 kg/kL, then it is 1.2 g/L.
If the memory storage density of a holographic cube is 1.2Tb/kL, then the density is NOT 1.2 Gb/L if you're using power-of-two based units. It is if you're using SI units.
The only reason that programmers don't run into these issues is that most of them don't actually mix bits with any other unit. The whole point of the metric system is to allow the easy mixing of units so that you can work with things like Farads that are (kg^1)(m^2)(s^4)(A^2) and not things like what would result if anybody bothered to come up with a similar English unit.
About the only time powers of two really make sense to work with is when you're dealing with pointers/arrays/etc and other implementation details. Even when you're talking about the applications of software it makes far more sense to use SI-based units, and certainly when you're talking about the physical implementation of computer hardware they make sense as well.
Uh, I recall a demonstration video with Bill Gates bragging about being able to plug 255 devices into a PC running Windows. That was Windows 95, and I'm not sure if it was even released at that point. USB is older than native Windows TCP/IP support.
Not sure, but I doubt that Debian would distribute it - that would need to be purely on Google's part.
Chromium might get shipped by Debian, but not Chrome. The latter is closed-source, trademarked, etc. They don't even ship Firefox under that name, so the chances of them shipping Chrome are VERY low.
I run Gentoo and they've dropped Chrome. Being closed source it is just a pain to support in general. It packages everything under the sun internally, etc. Chromium is nearly the same and while it takes work it is possible to strip out most of the 3rd-party stuff so that you're linking against system libraries (Gentoo has been one of the leaders in that). For kicks try downloading the source tarball and run du -s * and you'll see just how much junk it bundles.
RHEL is a bit unusual in that it tends to be used as a basis for installing unpackaged software. On most distros the distro itself would build/distribute a browser, in which case the supported browsers are whatever the distro decides to support.
Certainly you wouldn't find a browser on Debian saying that Debian isn't supported, since if nothing else Debian would just patch out the warning.
A few state legislatures have at least noodled the idea of confiscating federal tax payments, taking out the federal support funds and then sending the rest along.
I can't see that working. For starters the money going to the IRS probably was never in their state to begin with. If you work for a big corporation then you probably get paid by the corporate office in another state. If you work for a small company there is a good chance that the small company sends the money to an accounting firm in another state, and they cut you a check.
Then even if the money is in the state all you end up with is companies who get busted by one set of authorities or another if they don't end up paying taxes twice. If you don't pay taxes directly to the IRS they'll just phone up your bank (in another state) and tell them to freeze your accounts. Even if the bank is in your state, that just puts them in-between two governments, and the Fed has them over a barrel.
Secessionist fantasies don't really work out on any serious level unless you're willing to start shooting at people, and then they don't end pretty. You end up with farmers in California worried about getting busted by the Feds, and so on. When it is just social policy there probably won't be more than posturing, but start affecting money and push will come to shove.
It used to be that when you had a billion dollars and you didn't know what to do with it you used it to build a factory and make a product, or loan/invest it in somebody who is going to do that. However, on paper you can't make 40% annually starting on day 1 from that kind of an investment. So, bankers created derivatives that let you do just that.
The result is that the REAL economy (the factories and services actually done by ordinary workers) is shrinking, while tons of money are floating around chasing promises written on paper. However, all derivatives in the end tie back to something in the real economy, so it is just a big house of cards that is falling.
That's what drives me nuts about the bailouts. If you want to employ people at least have them repair bridges or something which creates something of long-term value to the country that serves more than just some corporate bottom-line. It also makes doing business IN THE USA more efficient, and thus creates jobs long-term. Giving money to a bunch of bankers just keeps the games going on, and does nothing for the average american.
Not quite. When congress mandated that government retirement fund only buy AAA bonds, the only plausible market move was to make enough AAA bonds for that huge market.
I'm convinced that the boomer's retirement funds are one HUGE bubble that still has not burst. Think about it - how does an entire generation "save up money" in an economy. Saving money works fine for individuals because it is against a much larger backdrop of economic activity. When you have a huge chunk of people who all want to basically stop working and start collecting for a few decades it doesn't really work. Oh, they might have a ton of assets in their accounts, but all of it is paper-based and only worth what you can get for it. What happens when everybody starts selling their index funds? The fund drops. What happens when everybody wants to go out to eat using the cash they saved up? Restaurants raise their prices due to demand, and workers demand more wages due to demand. I suspect there will be significant inflation, and those counting on those funds to retire will find themselves in a bad place.
Going back to your comment - it isn't just the government retirement funds doing this sort of thing. All of these pension funds need to invest a TON of money, and even more importantly they need to MAKE a ton of money (otherwise, heaven forbid, employers might actually have to contribute more towards employee pensions). When you are investing $1k you can buy any stock you want and sell it at any time. When you are investing $1B it isn't like you can just phone up the local broker and buy $1B of stock in some startup that you think will go up. When you have a million other institutions doing the same basically there is this huge demand for things to invest in, and the economy itself isn't big enough to support those investments, so suddenly you have derivatives on derivatives just so that there is some piece of paper to sell to some guy who wants to buy a piece of paper...
That is the point of a for-profit company, especially when they provide something people are willing to pay for.
Not sure that most economists would agree with that - this is generally considered "rent-seeking behavior" and it is almost universally considered bad for the economy.
Sure, I can see why company executives do it, just as I can see why rapists rape people. However, I would not say that the "point of" anybody is to prey on those weaker than themselves.
There are at least 3 major flaws in this plan: 1. You are aware that not all people in this country have easy access to email, right? There are millions of people who's only access to any kind of computer (including smartphones) is by going to a public library and waiting in line (potentially for hours) for a chance to use one.
I can't believe that the cost of giving everybody a free (low-end) computer and (low-speed) internet connection is higher than the cost of having somebody walk to their house every day to deliver paper. This could of course be means-tested as well.
2. Email is never guaranteed to be delivered. You've set up a specific requirement that recipients are legally accountable for messages sent, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that they actually received the message, whereas there is with certified mail.
This would have guaranteed delivery. The servers would be government-owned - they could issue a token when accepting mail. You could of course not actually check your mail, just as you can with the mailbox, but that doesn't eliminate your legal responsibility. The reliability of a government-run email system would certainly be higher than that of a paper-based system where short of getting delivery confirmation there is no way to know a message was delivered, and you could have that for free on every message with email.
3. Intercepting and reading someone else's email without being noticed is easy. Intercepting and reading someone else's mail without being noticed is much harder.
There is no reason this couldn't be reasonably secure. It would not be sent unencrypted over the internet. Most likely the servers would not accept mail except via authenticated connections from the original sender, and would not deliver except by authenticated connections to the recipient (which might be via a web client/etc in many cases).
This is meant to be a replacement for paper mail, not a replacement for what is defined in the RFCs as email today. It would most likely not be free (to send) either, perhaps with an exception for official government correspondence (you shouldn't have to pay a fee to respond to a summons - like you do today).
And there is absolutely no resources from Microsoft involved.
They developed the app, maintain it, host it and the content goes through their network.
True, but there is no reason they HAVE to do it this way. They could let Netflix develop, maintain, and distribute it. MS is only doing the work because they can make a boatload of money by forcing everything to go through them.
The $5/month fee is ridiculous. Sure, they might be adding some value, but the same is true of the guys who run up to your car and wash your windows when you're stuck in traffic - they aren't providing a service that the consumer needs to buy FROM THEM.
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It isn't in the SI standards for units. What is your motivation for trying to frighten and mislead people on this issue?
I'm just a fan of the SI. I guess it has to do with being trained as a physical scientist.
However, you are right - the SI did not actually define units for bits and bytes - just the prefixes. I guess when you think about it bits and bytes are dimensionless - they're essentially counting units, like dozens and moles (though the latter is a bit odd in that it tends to be an inexact count proxied by mass).
It's not metric units though.
Then they should be abandoned in favor of metric units, as with all other non-metric units...
Not for data.
That kind of argument just leads to no standard at all. Not for data. Not for surveying. Not for electronics. Not for engineering.
Every industry defining its own quirky standards sounds nice until you actually start to interoperate with the rest of the world.
But hey, keep calling 1024 bytes a kilobyte. You can keep explaining to your users that everybody else is doing it wrong. I doubt you'll change the storage industry.
Just about every product has exclusive services or features not available on other platforms, they aren't rent-seeking behavior.
It is if there is an ongoing revenue stream associated with the service and it can only be provided by a single source.
In your mind, just what IS rent-seeking behavior? Do you dispute that the concept even exists?
Of course, they aren't technically compatible, but the competition absolutely is there.
The barriers to compatibility are not technical in nature. The barriers stem from the fact that the consoles refuse to run code that is not cryptographically signed. The only competition is on the original purchase of the console - after that it is all network effects and tie-in.
Oh bullshit, that sort of rubbish means designing a console or PC or phone or tablet that only works with ARM binaries and not x86 ones would be rent-seeking behavior or proprietary.
Hardly. The issue isn't with devices that have compatibility requirements. The issue is with things like crytographic signatures. An ARM-based Android device that allows the user to install 3rd-party applications is not fundamentally rent-seeking. An ARM-based Android device that does not allow the user to install 3rd-party applications is. The problem isn't the instruction set - it is the lock-in.
It isn't instruction set compatibility that is keeping Netflix from offering an application that runs on the XBox. They could just make a game disc that connects to their service and plays video. The reason that can't do that is that MS would refuse to sign it if they did, because they want to be the gatekeepers to online services.
They are physically incompatible with a decimal unit and therefore with the SI model.
Bits and bytes are numbers. Binary and decimal are nothing more than ways of representing a number. There is nothing physically incompatible between them. Given an arbitrary number in binary representation you can represent it in decimal.
And this isn't just any industry. We could drop SI before dropping computing.
Uh, you might want to note that just about every aspect of manufacturing a computer involves SI units. Your computer wouldn't work all that well without engineers, miners, chemists, oil rig operators, power plants, and daycare workers to watch over the kids of all the above. Everything is related, which is the whole reason SI exists in the first place.
"Great. Do you mind explaining what the point of metric units are if not consistent use of powers of 10?"
The si units exist for easy conversion, they are base 10 units.
Bits by definition are not base 10 units. You convert them in base 2 not base 10.
Then they aren't metric units. That's nice, but around here we use the metric system, and for use in commerce this is actually required by law in many places. If programmers want to call gigabytes 2^30 that is nice, but if they use it in commerce they are opening themselves up to lawsuits for failing to adhere to standards. Fortunately most of these errors tend to work out in the consumer's favor so they're relatively safe.
You can ignore the SI if you want to, but the inevitable result is situations like this where SI and non-SI units get mixed together.
You can measure your distances in miles if you like while you're at it, and you'll end up with similar confusion where nautical, statue, and survey miles end up bumping into each other.
Asking the SI to stay out of defining standard units is a joke of a proposal - that's all they do.
But it wasn't an established position, it's been like that from the start. And of course they need to compete, they have to compete with the same service(s) available on the PS3, Wii, PC, etc...
This is pretty typical as well. Exclusive add-on services are rent-seeking behavior, and they're very common.
Sure, when you look at the total package there is some level of competition. But, just try to switch between an X-Box and a PS3 and you'll find that you have to throw out all your games, lose all your online friends, etc. Network effects are fundamentally anticompetitive, and designing your console to only work in one network is rent-seeking behavior as a result.
Rent-seeking behavior isn't the absence of any choice at any level whatsoever. It is about reducing your ability to choose once you're tied into a relationship with a provider of some kind. It is still rent-seeking behavior even if it is disclosed in advance.
Economic rent is about extracting money from somebody after you sold them a product. Rent-seeking behavior is about contraining consumer choice so that they are more likely to give you that money. If MS set up an online service for the X-Box where you are free to use their service, or others are free to offer competing services that are potentially equivalent then that would not be rent-seeking. When they tie the console to a single service then that is.
If your car manufacturer said that they'd only honor the warranty if you bought your parts and consumables from them, then that would be the same. This behavior has actually been made illegal, but it can still be an uphill battle if you choose to exercise your legal rights.
Hmm, I still see it there, indeed. I think there was talk of this on the lists, but maybe it never happened, or it is still pending. It is a bit of a mess to maintain in general (all those repackaged libs/etc).
It can be done in your head using compatible binary units as well as long as you stay within a given unit be it KB, MB, GB etc you can shift decimal places all day long.
Well, you could say the same of using rods to the hoghead. As long as you only work in rods to the hoghead there are no issues at all. The whole point of SI is that it is a set of units that are internally consistent so that you can use watts for mechanical power and use watts for electrical power and it all just works out.
If every industry defined its own set of units you'd end up with a mess. Perhaps SI isn't ideal within any particular domain, but it is certainly ideal across all of them.
The rent-seeking behavior is making it impossible to play a multiplayer game on an X-Box or stream Netflix movies without buying that networking service FROM THEM.
Rent-seeking behavior is when you use an established position (often gained through legitimate competition) to extract revenue in another area without the need to compete.
There is only one company that provides online content/services for owners of XBox hardware, and that is Microsoft. That makes it rent-seeking behavior almost by definition.
Yes, I know that many other companies do this as well, and that is why there is a term for it. That doesn't change the fact that it is rent-seeking behavior, anticompetitive, and bad for the economy.
If Netflix COULD have made its service available to X-Box owners without a monthly revenue stream to Microsoft but CHOSE not to do so, then that wouldn't be economic rent. However, Mircosoft does not allow people who make software for the X-Box to do this. If you want to have online services, you have to go through them.
It was a separate context where 1024 and 1048576 and 1073741824 and 1099511627776 made sense.
Kind of like in a separate context where 12 and 36 and 5280 make sense? What's the point in having standard and compatible units/prefixes if we allow every domain to redefine them? If I have a wire with a 1 kilovolt potential across it and 1 kiloamp of current is passing through, then it is carrying 1 megawatt of power, and it has 1 ohm of resistance. If the wire is 1cm long then it has a resistivity of 100 ohms/meter. If I used it to power a water pump it could pump 102 metric tons of water up a 1 meter distance per second.
Now imagine how that would look if the union of electricians and the union of surveyors couldn't agree to just use SI prefixes? The only constant in that entire conversion if the acceleration due to gravity - it would be a mess if time, length, power, and energy all used different unit conventions.
However, when developing software, you would be well advised to use the same terminology that's used in the underlying hardware for reporting its size.
You'd think that would be almost the whole reason for having a standards body in the first place.
Imagine if kilo meant something different when applied to grams, meters, seconds, amps, and watts? Imagine if a kilowatt was 1.024 kiloamp-volts, but a kilowatt was 1 amp-kilovolt!
And what happens when you're mixing units, like gigabytes per kilogram? That's the whole point of SI - the world isn't just a single measurement.
No one gives a flying fuck that the SI says. They are not an authority on the matter.
You're suggesting that the SI aren't an authority on the matter of unit definitions? Every industry on the planet that isn't still stuck in the dark ages uses SI units.
I assure you that if you are building any kind of memory storage device you're going to be very concerned with SI units.
And how many square meters of surface area does a 1 TB drive with a storage density of 50MB/mm^2 require?
This can be done in your head if you use base-10 units, and not if you're mixing base-2/base-10. Since the whole point of SI is to have a consistent set of units across many different domains of measurement it is only natural that they're going to use the same prefixes as are used in EVERY SINGLE OTHER INDUSTRY ON THE PLANET.
and by the same standards, 2^10 is a KiB
No one ever uses that terminology in the real world (well, maybe a handful of standards-crazy Linux developers, but that's about it). There was an attempt to shove it down everyone's throat on Wikipedia a couple years ago and it was decisively beaten back. No one wanted this baby-talk in their articles. The Commodore 64 didn't have 64 "kibibytes" of RAM (I feel silly even typing that), it had 64 KILOBYTES of RAM. That's how prefixes have always been used in the IT world and always will be. The International System of Units can go to hell.
Great. Do you mind explaining what the point of metric units are if not consistent use of powers of 10?
If the density of an object is 1.2 kg/kL, then it is 1.2 g/L.
If the memory storage density of a holographic cube is 1.2Tb/kL, then the density is NOT 1.2 Gb/L if you're using power-of-two based units. It is if you're using SI units.
The only reason that programmers don't run into these issues is that most of them don't actually mix bits with any other unit. The whole point of the metric system is to allow the easy mixing of units so that you can work with things like Farads that are (kg^1)(m^2)(s^4)(A^2) and not things like what would result if anybody bothered to come up with a similar English unit.
About the only time powers of two really make sense to work with is when you're dealing with pointers/arrays/etc and other implementation details. Even when you're talking about the applications of software it makes far more sense to use SI-based units, and certainly when you're talking about the physical implementation of computer hardware they make sense as well.
USB has been out for over a decade.
Uh, I recall a demonstration video with Bill Gates bragging about being able to plug 255 devices into a PC running Windows. That was Windows 95, and I'm not sure if it was even released at that point. USB is older than native Windows TCP/IP support.
Not sure, but I doubt that Debian would distribute it - that would need to be purely on Google's part.
Chromium might get shipped by Debian, but not Chrome. The latter is closed-source, trademarked, etc. They don't even ship Firefox under that name, so the chances of them shipping Chrome are VERY low.
I run Gentoo and they've dropped Chrome. Being closed source it is just a pain to support in general. It packages everything under the sun internally, etc. Chromium is nearly the same and while it takes work it is possible to strip out most of the 3rd-party stuff so that you're linking against system libraries (Gentoo has been one of the leaders in that). For kicks try downloading the source tarball and run du -s * and you'll see just how much junk it bundles.
RHEL is a bit unusual in that it tends to be used as a basis for installing unpackaged software. On most distros the distro itself would build/distribute a browser, in which case the supported browsers are whatever the distro decides to support.
Certainly you wouldn't find a browser on Debian saying that Debian isn't supported, since if nothing else Debian would just patch out the warning.
A few state legislatures have at least noodled the idea of confiscating federal tax payments, taking out the federal support funds and then sending the rest along.
I can't see that working. For starters the money going to the IRS probably was never in their state to begin with. If you work for a big corporation then you probably get paid by the corporate office in another state. If you work for a small company there is a good chance that the small company sends the money to an accounting firm in another state, and they cut you a check.
Then even if the money is in the state all you end up with is companies who get busted by one set of authorities or another if they don't end up paying taxes twice. If you don't pay taxes directly to the IRS they'll just phone up your bank (in another state) and tell them to freeze your accounts. Even if the bank is in your state, that just puts them in-between two governments, and the Fed has them over a barrel.
Secessionist fantasies don't really work out on any serious level unless you're willing to start shooting at people, and then they don't end pretty. You end up with farmers in California worried about getting busted by the Feds, and so on. When it is just social policy there probably won't be more than posturing, but start affecting money and push will come to shove.
It used to be that when you had a billion dollars and you didn't know what to do with it you used it to build a factory and make a product, or loan/invest it in somebody who is going to do that. However, on paper you can't make 40% annually starting on day 1 from that kind of an investment. So, bankers created derivatives that let you do just that.
The result is that the REAL economy (the factories and services actually done by ordinary workers) is shrinking, while tons of money are floating around chasing promises written on paper. However, all derivatives in the end tie back to something in the real economy, so it is just a big house of cards that is falling.
That's what drives me nuts about the bailouts. If you want to employ people at least have them repair bridges or something which creates something of long-term value to the country that serves more than just some corporate bottom-line. It also makes doing business IN THE USA more efficient, and thus creates jobs long-term. Giving money to a bunch of bankers just keeps the games going on, and does nothing for the average american.
Not quite. When congress mandated that government retirement fund only buy AAA bonds, the only plausible market move was to make enough AAA bonds for that huge market.
I'm convinced that the boomer's retirement funds are one HUGE bubble that still has not burst. Think about it - how does an entire generation "save up money" in an economy. Saving money works fine for individuals because it is against a much larger backdrop of economic activity. When you have a huge chunk of people who all want to basically stop working and start collecting for a few decades it doesn't really work. Oh, they might have a ton of assets in their accounts, but all of it is paper-based and only worth what you can get for it. What happens when everybody starts selling their index funds? The fund drops. What happens when everybody wants to go out to eat using the cash they saved up? Restaurants raise their prices due to demand, and workers demand more wages due to demand. I suspect there will be significant inflation, and those counting on those funds to retire will find themselves in a bad place.
Going back to your comment - it isn't just the government retirement funds doing this sort of thing. All of these pension funds need to invest a TON of money, and even more importantly they need to MAKE a ton of money (otherwise, heaven forbid, employers might actually have to contribute more towards employee pensions). When you are investing $1k you can buy any stock you want and sell it at any time. When you are investing $1B it isn't like you can just phone up the local broker and buy $1B of stock in some startup that you think will go up. When you have a million other institutions doing the same basically there is this huge demand for things to invest in, and the economy itself isn't big enough to support those investments, so suddenly you have derivatives on derivatives just so that there is some piece of paper to sell to some guy who wants to buy a piece of paper...
That is the point of a for-profit company, especially when they provide something people are willing to pay for.
Not sure that most economists would agree with that - this is generally considered "rent-seeking behavior" and it is almost universally considered bad for the economy.
Sure, I can see why company executives do it, just as I can see why rapists rape people. However, I would not say that the "point of" anybody is to prey on those weaker than themselves.
There are at least 3 major flaws in this plan:
1. You are aware that not all people in this country have easy access to email, right? There are millions of people who's only access to any kind of computer (including smartphones) is by going to a public library and waiting in line (potentially for hours) for a chance to use one.
I can't believe that the cost of giving everybody a free (low-end) computer and (low-speed) internet connection is higher than the cost of having somebody walk to their house every day to deliver paper. This could of course be means-tested as well.
2. Email is never guaranteed to be delivered. You've set up a specific requirement that recipients are legally accountable for messages sent, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that they actually received the message, whereas there is with certified mail.
This would have guaranteed delivery. The servers would be government-owned - they could issue a token when accepting mail. You could of course not actually check your mail, just as you can with the mailbox, but that doesn't eliminate your legal responsibility. The reliability of a government-run email system would certainly be higher than that of a paper-based system where short of getting delivery confirmation there is no way to know a message was delivered, and you could have that for free on every message with email.
3. Intercepting and reading someone else's email without being noticed is easy. Intercepting and reading someone else's mail without being noticed is much harder.
There is no reason this couldn't be reasonably secure. It would not be sent unencrypted over the internet. Most likely the servers would not accept mail except via authenticated connections from the original sender, and would not deliver except by authenticated connections to the recipient (which might be via a web client/etc in many cases).
This is meant to be a replacement for paper mail, not a replacement for what is defined in the RFCs as email today. It would most likely not be free (to send) either, perhaps with an exception for official government correspondence (you shouldn't have to pay a fee to respond to a summons - like you do today).
And there is absolutely no resources from Microsoft involved.
They developed the app, maintain it, host it and the content goes through their network.
True, but there is no reason they HAVE to do it this way. They could let Netflix develop, maintain, and distribute it. MS is only doing the work because they can make a boatload of money by forcing everything to go through them.
The $5/month fee is ridiculous. Sure, they might be adding some value, but the same is true of the guys who run up to your car and wash your windows when you're stuck in traffic - they aren't providing a service that the consumer needs to buy FROM THEM.