Without that repetitive, mind-numbing homework, you can't just breeze through the tests.
That is hardly true. I breezed through numerous tests without doing homework for classes I excelled at. I really only did homework to the extent that it was graded, and that was essentially a waste of time. Forcing some kids to do work because other kids need to do it teaches the wrong lesson - that work is arbitrary and has value for its own sake.
Well, i'm just taking a guess here, but intelligent people are usually concerned with accurate definitions
As an intelligent person (TM), I know that the definition of a word is whatever two people agree it is. You say genius is 140+, he says it is 130+. Great, now you and anybody with an IQ of 100+ can understand what you're saying. Anything else is quibbling for its own sake.
So, I won't go tit-for-tat - I think if you read the literal wording of your questions and my answers you'll probably find them legit. However, quibbling over wording isn't terribly productive, as you're getting at at the end of your post.
3)I can't tell you what age a fetus becomes sentient, so instead I use the 'can it survive outside the mothers body with appropriate medical care' as the cut off.
Well, I can at least see the logic in that. That is much of my debate about abortion - actual birth isn't really a very logical place to make the demarcation. Once the fetus is viable in incubation there really isn't any imposition on the mother to care for it. Before then there is an imposition.
There are actually a lot of things about the nature of parent-child relationships that could arguably be changed, For instance, does it really make sense to make a parent legally responsible for the care of their kids? They don't do it anyway, so you're just making a kid suffer with somebody who'd rather they were out of the picture. Why not let parents turn over their kids if they don't care to raise them.
Then if you step back and look at the big picture, why do we license drivers but not parents? Parents cause a heck of a lot more damage to kids than any car is capable of causing. Perhaps pregnancy should be prohibited without a license. If you stop unwanted pregnancies in the first place the whole abortion debate goes away entirely. Either stick people on contraception of some kind from puberty (assuming you can work out the medical issues with that), or forced abortion at a very early point in development. The world would look a lot different if kids were planned for. That would be something out of Ringworld though...
Certainly part of their mission, but quality in the FDA realm has a peculiar definition. Quality is measured by presence/absence of paperwork for the most part. Sure, there are guides on what kinds of paperwork need to exist, but for the most part the FDA is much better at finding issues with the paperwork that is there than they are with finding issues with the paperwork that isn't there.
Most FDA types are doctors or scientists or such. You don't really get people thinking in terms of computer security.
I work with software tested to "FDA standards" all the time, though not with medical devices. I'm fairly confident that if I wanted to bypass the security in almost any of this software it would be fairly trivial to do so. Like most industrial control software, the software in health applications tends to be secure against casual intrusion. A doctor trying to guess passwords probably couldn't hack in, but there are a million other ways to get in that the people doing this kind of work don't think of. Lots of software implements the business logic on a client installed locally, which is almost impossible to secure.
There is obviously a risk balance, but any attack mountable over RF against a life support device of any kind HAS to be rigorously prevented. You don't want somebody with a directional antenna to kill 300 people in a large hospital from halfway across town.
Sure, but any of those pacemakers can administer shocks to your heart. Whether they normally operate one way or another probably has little impact on whether somebody who can hack them can get them to do whatever. My understanding is that many pacemakers are capable of many modes of operation, since in terms of the hardware there isn't much difference. Kind of like how the ECU hardware in a sports car and a compact car might be the same, though the software might be different. Either way if somebody tells the thing to fire the spark when the cylinder is traveling up it will ruin your engine fast.
A fetus, in my eyes, does not have rights. Once it is able to survive without the mother, it has rights.
I think that is a reasonable proposal, but I don't think most people will be OK with denying human rights to children until the age of 20. With the current job market it might be closer to 30.
Before birth there is a placenta, and after birth there are bottles, spoons, and then more traditional utensils. However, the fact remains that there is a continuum of life support provided to children up until what is now a fairly advanced age. For some, that life support can be even more invasive than that of the placenta - do those with end stage renal failure qualify for human rights? Even a fetus can generate its own urine...
As far as Christianity goes - I don't see how abortion has anything to do with Christianity/Islam/etc. Should Christians pay for the medical care of those who are unable to sustain some of their own bodily functions but who still are neurologically functional - absolutely. But, so should everybody else. Unless we plan to only tax people for Medicare on the basis of their religious beliefs I'm not sure what they have to do with the care of children/fetuses/etc.
As to your questions:
1) are your neighbors capable of surviving outside of your body without medical intervention?
Most are. Am I free to kill those who are not?
2) are you responsible for your neighbors, to the point where if your neighbors continue to live you will be held legally responsible for caring for them?
Yes. Last time I checked my last paycheck had medicare, social security, and various income taxes deducted. A decent percentage of my neighbors benefit from these directly.
3) is it possible for you to be forced to carry your neighbors in your body for 9 months and then be required to care for them (or give them up to be cared for by other parties) if you are raped?
Nope, though I'm forced to care for them financially whether I am raped or not. And per my guidelines anybody who is raped or just feels like it could have an abortion - as long as they do so before the child is sentient. To allow abortion after that point is to simply kill one of the victims of the rape.
4) what percentage of people in the US believe human sacrifice is religiously necessary, and what percentage of the US population I believes abortion is acceptable?
Frankly, I don't care. What percentage of the country thinks that killing people who look like muslims as suspected terrorists is acceptable? Per the constitution human rights are NOT granted by a majority of the population - they are endowed at birth.
Right now, a sufficient number of people in the US think abortion should be legal for it to be legal.
That amounts to little more than might makes right.
allowing abortion takes rights away from no one who is a capable of consenting
Again, might makes right. So, killing anybody who is incapable of complaining about it is acceptable? Can a two-year old consent to anything? Legally we don't even let 17-year-olds consent to things, though clearly they are at least capable.
My problem with abortion is this - there is little difference between a kid shortly before and after birth. Many kids even require life support after birth, but killing those kids is illegal.
In general I'm not a fan of telling people what they can/can't do with their own bodies. The issue with pregnancy is that there is more than one body involved.
How does the cost/performance compare when you include the motherboard? From what I've seen with Intel you pay quite a bit more for comparable features on the board.
Unless that was the original intention? And then to study what happens after that. Maybe they're researching the effect of a simulation becoming aware of it's own simulation?
I dunno - seems pretty arrogant to assume that if our universe is a simulation of sentient life that it is the FIRST such simulation ever run by the simulators...
For all we know some guy forgot to turn off the computer before going home after work and we're all just waiting for the moment when there is another job to submit to the mainframe.
Well, it is all simply religion until you actually come up with an experimental result one way or another. Since it seems like just about everything we can measure about our universe is quantized, all you need to do to simulate the universe is to do so at the quantum scale, and then any occupant of the universe wouldn't know. Or, perhaps we DO know but we just interpret quantum mechanics as a natural phenomenon when in fact it is an artificial one. Either way makes for a lovely story, but the fact is that there is no experiment that can demonstrate it one way or another, unless one of our overlords cares to write their name on the sky.
You have a point, as time would be a parameter of the simulation, but to the extend that we can make any statements about such an "outer" computer it'll still follow the same rules as our own Turing machines, everywhere QM is simulated in the "virtual" universe it'll quickly run up exponentially growing resource consumption.
That's why they made the universe so small. Problems that scale exponentially are not a problem for small cases. I can factor lots of numbers in my head just fine. I'm working on a nice little program right now which works just fine for thousands of records but which cannot handle millions in a reasonable period of time without quite a bit of brute force.
I don't see how it can be proven that our universe is a simulation. I can make hand-waving arguments, like looking for length-scales or time-scales or velocity-scales or mass-density-scales that cause the laws of physics to break down, but hey, we have examples of all of those in real life. So, is that just how universes are supposed to work, or is that all proof of a simulation?
You're simply asking for the freedom to starve. At least, that is what it is for most people. Sure, maybe you can make a living at the moment, but most people simply are not capable of doing so.
Give it another few decades, and you won't be able to earn a living - why would somebody pay you to do something when somebody or something else will do it for less? There isn't a task performed by a human which won't someday be performed by a robot.
For some members of society that change came centuries ago. For others it came decades ago. For others it happened only in the last few years. And for some like us it hasn't happened yet.
Ask yourself, what should be the fate of a person who is born mentally retarded and with no limbs? Then, ask yourself other than a matter of degree, what separates you from them?
That is my problem with a purely libertarian outlook. It works great for me now, but it reduces the world to complete Darwinism in a race we're all doomed to fail some day.
Romney/Ryan: Their faiths say that abortion is wrong and they want to change the rules so even if you aren't a member of their respective religions, you have to live by those rules.
Obama/Biden: Their faiths say that abortion is wrong, but they do NOT want to change the rules; if you are not an adherent of their faiths they won't try to force you to live by those rules.
I'm fairly libertarian, but I don't think this issue is nearly as clear-cut as you suggest.
Suppose my religion teaches that human sacrifice is fine. Yours does not. What gives you the right to force me to live by your rules? If I want to sneak into my neighbor's house in the middle of the night and knife them, why shouldn't I be able to do so?
My problem with abortion is this - how is killing somebody 10 seconds after birth any different than killing them 10 seconds before birth? It seems to me that birth is a poor point in time to assign basic human rights. I'd think that the point at which a child is sentient would be a better place to make that distinction, whether that happens to be before or after birth. Is that less convenient legally? Sure. However, since when was morality supposed to be a matter of convenience?
Even then, Perot certainly wasn't the only other guy on the ballot.
The insane ballot requirements for 3rd parties already filters out complete cranks. Why not just make the debates open to anybody who is on the ballot in a sufficient number of states to obtain an electoral college victory? Of course the reality is that with any significant 3rd-party vote Congress will simply end up selecting the president, as happens in any parliamentary system of government. If we simply allowed proportional election of representatives then we'd basically be a parliamentary system as a result. I'd consider that a change for the better.
Does that even require a rule change? All you have to do is put the item that doesn't have a 60% majority up for a vote, and now the filibusters have to put up or the vote goes through.
I think the issue is that nobody in the Senate is dedicated enough to actually want to go through with it. To really have a filibuster the minority party has to keep enough people on hand to defeat any vote for cloture that might come up, and have somebody stand up and talk all day without yielding the floor (I don't think you get to get back up once you sit down aside from recesses for biological necessities). To defeat the filibuster the majority party has to keep people around to actually call for a vote for cloture once the minority party wears down. Both parties would rather go back home and campaign for re-election so they just don't bother to dispute the matter.
I don't think he was arguing that stimulus spending was a good thing. He was just saying that the need for it in the first place was in part because rich people having more money to spend doesn't really get the economy moving.
You just need to assume that his plan will result in a huge amount of economic growth. Cut taxes by 50%, grow economy by 1000%, problem solved.
Of course, the cut taxes by 50% happens now, and when he's up for re-election in 4 years with the national debt tripled no doubt he'll be saying that we need to wait just a little longer for the economic growth to kick in. That is, if he even enacts his tax plan as stated in the first place. Most likely he'll enact a few provisions and stop there, just like Obama did for the most part with his big promises.
Lots of problems are easy to solve if you just assume everybody will make more money...
Uh, the fact that Europe isn't much better off doesn't really change the fact that at the rate things are going our fancy Navy vessels might start looking like the old Soviet ones. Kind of hard to run a big Navy when nobody accepts your currency as a form of payment, including your own citizens.
The name of the disease with the link would have been helpful.
Otherwise why don't we just use this summary for 90% of the articles out there:
Researchers backed by an institution have just discovered a new technology. This technology promises to make lives better, and may be available to ordinary consumers soon. The story was published by a real news site with more details, but we're going to link to some guy's blog which you can read here...
This might do for the other 10%:
A politician just said something that is guaranteed to make you upset. Please discuss how this development is going to ruin your life. Oh, and try to forget that this is a news for nerds site...
Some of that is driven by the console market. The consoles haven't been coming out as often lately, and since game makers target consoles their PC versions render well on contemporaneous hardware. The graphics hardware on the PS3 looked pretty nice at the time, but it is cheap to get a comparable video card for a PC today. The CPU/RAM in current consoles is starting to look more and more comparable to what you find in a decent smartphone these days.
When the next generation of consoles comes out get ready to upgrade your PC...
The PSTN still has to plan for maximum capacity. Maximum capacity doesn't mean everybody using the system at once - it means the highest volume you'd normally expect to see.
Most of the time most of the phone lines in the country are idle, especially the last mile. However, copper wire is fairly cheap and lasts decades, so that isn't such a big deal. Computer/console hardware able to play the latest games has neither virtue.
They were doomed anyway - their partners control the content and just as with all the other streaming services out there the partners will control their profit margins and roll out competing services once they are viable. Especially for stuff like games which are software. I think the only reason Netflix does as well as it does is that they managed to get their stuff installed on household appliances that don't get replaced often, and that the movie industry doesn't grok software.
I agree that cutting off EA was a dumb move. However, long-term if EA saw them making lots of money they'd just offer their own software and cut out the middle man.
[...] the idea that investors will run to invest in markets they patently dont understand doesnt speak well for the efficiency of the capital markets.
No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money.
Market efficiency has nothing to do with whose money gets lost. Market efficiency is about how well a market values a company. Any bubble is a sign of market inefficiency no matter who loses their money.
You are simply arguing that other types of markets are also inefficient, and I'll agree with that. It doesn't invalidate the parent's point.
As far as who lost their money goes, I wouldn't count on it only being rich people who inherited more money than brains. Pension plans and such often end up in these kinds of things as well.
I think the issue that for most parts there is competition with aftermarket parts, but with airbags there isn't (or at least there isn't supposed to be). Thus no price pressure.
Obviously quality standards for an explosive based on a highly toxic powder also have to be pretty high. That has to cost something as well. Then there is all the liability. But, I think lack of competition is the main culprit.
I don't get why the designs aren't just standardized - dictate a few seat/wheel geometries and then have standard bags to go with them. Then anybody could make them.
I'm sure that if China wanted lower-level aerial footage of the base they could have it. Taiwan isn't that big - I'm sure aircraft pass over most of it all the time, and you don't have to pass directly over a location to take a photo.
Plus, I'd think the more sensitive thing about a fancy radar station would be its emissions, and those aren't exactly easy to hide if it can scan targets on the far side of China (though no doubt they operate it differently in peacetime).
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Without that repetitive, mind-numbing homework, you can't just breeze through the tests.
That is hardly true. I breezed through numerous tests without doing homework for classes I excelled at. I really only did homework to the extent that it was graded, and that was essentially a waste of time. Forcing some kids to do work because other kids need to do it teaches the wrong lesson - that work is arbitrary and has value for its own sake.
Well, i'm just taking a guess here, but intelligent people are usually concerned with accurate definitions
As an intelligent person (TM), I know that the definition of a word is whatever two people agree it is. You say genius is 140+, he says it is 130+. Great, now you and anybody with an IQ of 100+ can understand what you're saying. Anything else is quibbling for its own sake.
So, I won't go tit-for-tat - I think if you read the literal wording of your questions and my answers you'll probably find them legit. However, quibbling over wording isn't terribly productive, as you're getting at at the end of your post.
3)I can't tell you what age a fetus becomes sentient, so instead I use the 'can it survive outside the mothers body with appropriate medical care' as the cut off.
Well, I can at least see the logic in that. That is much of my debate about abortion - actual birth isn't really a very logical place to make the demarcation. Once the fetus is viable in incubation there really isn't any imposition on the mother to care for it. Before then there is an imposition.
There are actually a lot of things about the nature of parent-child relationships that could arguably be changed, For instance, does it really make sense to make a parent legally responsible for the care of their kids? They don't do it anyway, so you're just making a kid suffer with somebody who'd rather they were out of the picture. Why not let parents turn over their kids if they don't care to raise them.
Then if you step back and look at the big picture, why do we license drivers but not parents? Parents cause a heck of a lot more damage to kids than any car is capable of causing. Perhaps pregnancy should be prohibited without a license. If you stop unwanted pregnancies in the first place the whole abortion debate goes away entirely. Either stick people on contraception of some kind from puberty (assuming you can work out the medical issues with that), or forced abortion at a very early point in development. The world would look a lot different if kids were planned for. That would be something out of Ringworld though...
Certainly part of their mission, but quality in the FDA realm has a peculiar definition. Quality is measured by presence/absence of paperwork for the most part. Sure, there are guides on what kinds of paperwork need to exist, but for the most part the FDA is much better at finding issues with the paperwork that is there than they are with finding issues with the paperwork that isn't there.
Most FDA types are doctors or scientists or such. You don't really get people thinking in terms of computer security.
I work with software tested to "FDA standards" all the time, though not with medical devices. I'm fairly confident that if I wanted to bypass the security in almost any of this software it would be fairly trivial to do so. Like most industrial control software, the software in health applications tends to be secure against casual intrusion. A doctor trying to guess passwords probably couldn't hack in, but there are a million other ways to get in that the people doing this kind of work don't think of. Lots of software implements the business logic on a client installed locally, which is almost impossible to secure.
There is obviously a risk balance, but any attack mountable over RF against a life support device of any kind HAS to be rigorously prevented. You don't want somebody with a directional antenna to kill 300 people in a large hospital from halfway across town.
Sure, but any of those pacemakers can administer shocks to your heart. Whether they normally operate one way or another probably has little impact on whether somebody who can hack them can get them to do whatever. My understanding is that many pacemakers are capable of many modes of operation, since in terms of the hardware there isn't much difference. Kind of like how the ECU hardware in a sports car and a compact car might be the same, though the software might be different. Either way if somebody tells the thing to fire the spark when the cylinder is traveling up it will ruin your engine fast.
A fetus, in my eyes, does not have rights. Once it is able to survive without the mother, it has rights.
I think that is a reasonable proposal, but I don't think most people will be OK with denying human rights to children until the age of 20. With the current job market it might be closer to 30.
Before birth there is a placenta, and after birth there are bottles, spoons, and then more traditional utensils. However, the fact remains that there is a continuum of life support provided to children up until what is now a fairly advanced age. For some, that life support can be even more invasive than that of the placenta - do those with end stage renal failure qualify for human rights? Even a fetus can generate its own urine...
As far as Christianity goes - I don't see how abortion has anything to do with Christianity/Islam/etc. Should Christians pay for the medical care of those who are unable to sustain some of their own bodily functions but who still are neurologically functional - absolutely. But, so should everybody else. Unless we plan to only tax people for Medicare on the basis of their religious beliefs I'm not sure what they have to do with the care of children/fetuses/etc.
As to your questions:
1) are your neighbors capable of surviving outside of your body without medical intervention?
Most are. Am I free to kill those who are not?
2) are you responsible for your neighbors, to the point where if your neighbors continue to live you will be held legally responsible for caring for them?
Yes. Last time I checked my last paycheck had medicare, social security, and various income taxes deducted. A decent percentage of my neighbors benefit from these directly.
3) is it possible for you to be forced to carry your neighbors in your body for 9 months and then be required to care for them (or give them up to be cared for by other parties) if you are raped?
Nope, though I'm forced to care for them financially whether I am raped or not. And per my guidelines anybody who is raped or just feels like it could have an abortion - as long as they do so before the child is sentient. To allow abortion after that point is to simply kill one of the victims of the rape.
4) what percentage of people in the US believe human sacrifice is religiously necessary, and what percentage of the US population I believes abortion is acceptable?
Frankly, I don't care. What percentage of the country thinks that killing people who look like muslims as suspected terrorists is acceptable? Per the constitution human rights are NOT granted by a majority of the population - they are endowed at birth.
Right now, a sufficient number of people in the US think abortion should be legal for it to be legal.
That amounts to little more than might makes right.
allowing abortion takes rights away from no one who is a capable of consenting
Again, might makes right. So, killing anybody who is incapable of complaining about it is acceptable? Can a two-year old consent to anything? Legally we don't even let 17-year-olds consent to things, though clearly they are at least capable.
My problem with abortion is this - there is little difference between a kid shortly before and after birth. Many kids even require life support after birth, but killing those kids is illegal.
In general I'm not a fan of telling people what they can/can't do with their own bodies. The issue with pregnancy is that there is more than one body involved.
How does the cost/performance compare when you include the motherboard? From what I've seen with Intel you pay quite a bit more for comparable features on the board.
Unless that was the original intention? And then to study what happens after that. Maybe they're researching the effect of a simulation becoming aware of it's own simulation?
I dunno - seems pretty arrogant to assume that if our universe is a simulation of sentient life that it is the FIRST such simulation ever run by the simulators...
For all we know some guy forgot to turn off the computer before going home after work and we're all just waiting for the moment when there is another job to submit to the mainframe.
Well, it is all simply religion until you actually come up with an experimental result one way or another. Since it seems like just about everything we can measure about our universe is quantized, all you need to do to simulate the universe is to do so at the quantum scale, and then any occupant of the universe wouldn't know. Or, perhaps we DO know but we just interpret quantum mechanics as a natural phenomenon when in fact it is an artificial one. Either way makes for a lovely story, but the fact is that there is no experiment that can demonstrate it one way or another, unless one of our overlords cares to write their name on the sky.
You have a point, as time would be a parameter of the simulation, but to the extend that we can make any statements about such an "outer" computer it'll still follow the same rules as our own Turing machines, everywhere QM is simulated in the "virtual" universe it'll quickly run up exponentially growing resource consumption.
That's why they made the universe so small. Problems that scale exponentially are not a problem for small cases. I can factor lots of numbers in my head just fine. I'm working on a nice little program right now which works just fine for thousands of records but which cannot handle millions in a reasonable period of time without quite a bit of brute force.
I don't see how it can be proven that our universe is a simulation. I can make hand-waving arguments, like looking for length-scales or time-scales or velocity-scales or mass-density-scales that cause the laws of physics to break down, but hey, we have examples of all of those in real life. So, is that just how universes are supposed to work, or is that all proof of a simulation?
You're simply asking for the freedom to starve. At least, that is what it is for most people. Sure, maybe you can make a living at the moment, but most people simply are not capable of doing so.
Give it another few decades, and you won't be able to earn a living - why would somebody pay you to do something when somebody or something else will do it for less? There isn't a task performed by a human which won't someday be performed by a robot.
For some members of society that change came centuries ago. For others it came decades ago. For others it happened only in the last few years. And for some like us it hasn't happened yet.
Ask yourself, what should be the fate of a person who is born mentally retarded and with no limbs? Then, ask yourself other than a matter of degree, what separates you from them?
That is my problem with a purely libertarian outlook. It works great for me now, but it reduces the world to complete Darwinism in a race we're all doomed to fail some day.
Uh, you do realize that Congress passes the budget, right? Failure to do so reflects collectively on those in office, not just on the President.
The big one for me is this:
Romney/Ryan: Their faiths say that abortion is wrong and they want to change the rules so even if you aren't a member of their respective religions, you have to live by those rules.
Obama/Biden: Their faiths say that abortion is wrong, but they do NOT want to change the rules; if you are not an adherent of their faiths they won't try to force you to live by those rules.
I'm fairly libertarian, but I don't think this issue is nearly as clear-cut as you suggest.
Suppose my religion teaches that human sacrifice is fine. Yours does not. What gives you the right to force me to live by your rules? If I want to sneak into my neighbor's house in the middle of the night and knife them, why shouldn't I be able to do so?
My problem with abortion is this - how is killing somebody 10 seconds after birth any different than killing them 10 seconds before birth? It seems to me that birth is a poor point in time to assign basic human rights. I'd think that the point at which a child is sentient would be a better place to make that distinction, whether that happens to be before or after birth. Is that less convenient legally? Sure. However, since when was morality supposed to be a matter of convenience?
Even then, Perot certainly wasn't the only other guy on the ballot.
The insane ballot requirements for 3rd parties already filters out complete cranks. Why not just make the debates open to anybody who is on the ballot in a sufficient number of states to obtain an electoral college victory? Of course the reality is that with any significant 3rd-party vote Congress will simply end up selecting the president, as happens in any parliamentary system of government. If we simply allowed proportional election of representatives then we'd basically be a parliamentary system as a result. I'd consider that a change for the better.
Does that even require a rule change? All you have to do is put the item that doesn't have a 60% majority up for a vote, and now the filibusters have to put up or the vote goes through.
I think the issue is that nobody in the Senate is dedicated enough to actually want to go through with it. To really have a filibuster the minority party has to keep enough people on hand to defeat any vote for cloture that might come up, and have somebody stand up and talk all day without yielding the floor (I don't think you get to get back up once you sit down aside from recesses for biological necessities). To defeat the filibuster the majority party has to keep people around to actually call for a vote for cloture once the minority party wears down. Both parties would rather go back home and campaign for re-election so they just don't bother to dispute the matter.
I don't think he was arguing that stimulus spending was a good thing. He was just saying that the need for it in the first place was in part because rich people having more money to spend doesn't really get the economy moving.
You just need to assume that his plan will result in a huge amount of economic growth. Cut taxes by 50%, grow economy by 1000%, problem solved.
Of course, the cut taxes by 50% happens now, and when he's up for re-election in 4 years with the national debt tripled no doubt he'll be saying that we need to wait just a little longer for the economic growth to kick in. That is, if he even enacts his tax plan as stated in the first place. Most likely he'll enact a few provisions and stop there, just like Obama did for the most part with his big promises.
Lots of problems are easy to solve if you just assume everybody will make more money...
Uh, the fact that Europe isn't much better off doesn't really change the fact that at the rate things are going our fancy Navy vessels might start looking like the old Soviet ones. Kind of hard to run a big Navy when nobody accepts your currency as a form of payment, including your own citizens.
The name of the disease with the link would have been helpful.
Otherwise why don't we just use this summary for 90% of the articles out there:
Researchers backed by an institution have just discovered a new technology. This technology promises to make lives better, and may be available to ordinary consumers soon. The story was published by a real news site with more details, but we're going to link to some guy's blog which you can read here...
This might do for the other 10%:
A politician just said something that is guaranteed to make you upset. Please discuss how this development is going to ruin your life. Oh, and try to forget that this is a news for nerds site...
Some of that is driven by the console market. The consoles haven't been coming out as often lately, and since game makers target consoles their PC versions render well on contemporaneous hardware. The graphics hardware on the PS3 looked pretty nice at the time, but it is cheap to get a comparable video card for a PC today. The CPU/RAM in current consoles is starting to look more and more comparable to what you find in a decent smartphone these days.
When the next generation of consoles comes out get ready to upgrade your PC...
The PSTN still has to plan for maximum capacity. Maximum capacity doesn't mean everybody using the system at once - it means the highest volume you'd normally expect to see.
Most of the time most of the phone lines in the country are idle, especially the last mile. However, copper wire is fairly cheap and lasts decades, so that isn't such a big deal. Computer/console hardware able to play the latest games has neither virtue.
They were doomed anyway - their partners control the content and just as with all the other streaming services out there the partners will control their profit margins and roll out competing services once they are viable. Especially for stuff like games which are software. I think the only reason Netflix does as well as it does is that they managed to get their stuff installed on household appliances that don't get replaced often, and that the movie industry doesn't grok software.
I agree that cutting off EA was a dumb move. However, long-term if EA saw them making lots of money they'd just offer their own software and cut out the middle man.
No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money.
Market efficiency has nothing to do with whose money gets lost. Market efficiency is about how well a market values a company. Any bubble is a sign of market inefficiency no matter who loses their money.
You are simply arguing that other types of markets are also inefficient, and I'll agree with that. It doesn't invalidate the parent's point.
As far as who lost their money goes, I wouldn't count on it only being rich people who inherited more money than brains. Pension plans and such often end up in these kinds of things as well.
I think the issue that for most parts there is competition with aftermarket parts, but with airbags there isn't (or at least there isn't supposed to be). Thus no price pressure.
Obviously quality standards for an explosive based on a highly toxic powder also have to be pretty high. That has to cost something as well. Then there is all the liability. But, I think lack of competition is the main culprit.
I don't get why the designs aren't just standardized - dictate a few seat/wheel geometries and then have standard bags to go with them. Then anybody could make them.
I'm sure that if China wanted lower-level aerial footage of the base they could have it. Taiwan isn't that big - I'm sure aircraft pass over most of it all the time, and you don't have to pass directly over a location to take a photo.
Plus, I'd think the more sensitive thing about a fancy radar station would be its emissions, and those aren't exactly easy to hide if it can scan targets on the far side of China (though no doubt they operate it differently in peacetime).