According to the brief filed by the economists in Eldred vs. Ashcroft there is little incentive to make copyrights last longer than 50 years. When you do what finance types would call "discounting to present value" you learn that earnings more than 50 years away essentially have almost no value. Thus they don't factor into the creation of new work (the purpose of copyrights). The only good thing about Eldred vs. Ashcroft is that the ruling means that congress SHOULD be able to retroactively REDUCE the term of copyright (since they can extend it retroactively according to SCOTUS).
Let's reverse the question. How can you say that constituents (voters) don't taint the system? It's all about candidates making promises to the evil "average likely voter" and screw doing what's right. Campaigning should be illegal (let's just appoint them all).
On Taxes:
Actually the idea should be to flatten the rates down to one or maybe two, eliminate most deductions and raise the standard deduction. This would keep the tax system "fair" while avoiding some of the economic pitfalls of higher RATES (it is primarily tax rates, not the total tax bite that has the effect of altering our behavior in ways that are less than optimal) I would also prefer to tax all income the same (wage, capital gains, interest, rent, etc).
On Spending:
Question, why SHOULD the federal government be subsidizing state/local programs. Instead of congress doling out money to the states, why don't they shift the tax burden by lowering federal taxes and raising state taxes. (Even with state and local taxes, the federal government still takes more than both state and local combined.) Besides, states would do a much better job with most of the social spending as they are closer to the population they are serving and have a better idea about the relative cost of living, and relative poverty etc.
Obviously military spending isn't the culprit of our current problems as it has been steadily declining (in relative terms to revenue and other spending) over the last 20 years or so. (though i can think of plenty of ways to "reallocate" how we are spending our money there).
The government didn't "subsidize" putting up all the lines, the only subsidy that the gov't gave for the bell's was to pay to wire rural areas that weren't economic enough to run wires to. But anyone who lives in a city/town with more than like 10 people isn't using that subsidy money. Yes there was a subsidy, but it is exteremly narrow. The gov only subsidized lines that the telecos would have otherwise refused to lay.
I agree that most people don't know there are alternatives. OTOH many people have all sorts of problems with IE that using MyIE2 won't fix, especially spyware type things. I see machines all the time where IE is behaving wierdly and even removing spyware doesn't always fix it. Of course since IE is part of the OS now you can't just uninstall and reinstall it, you need to reinstall (probably format and reinstal)l to get it to work propery again. Thus why firefox holds such appeal. (or opera etc)
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And what point of view are we supposed to use as an unbiased reference. Let's face it, it's not possible to have an unbiased press, truthful maybe, but not unbiased.
ummm, how are you gonna run it if x isn't set??
But I do agree, If you must use SysV init, then it is easier to use the distro tools to change all of the stupid simlinks.
The problem with your suggestion of MyIE2 is that using it doesn't really solve the underlying security and stabilty issues and general borken behavior that only reinstalling windows can fix(in some cases). Yeah it might addd certain kinds of functionality like tabbed browsing, popup blocking, but all the spyware and security issues remain, because YOU ARE STILL USING IE/MSHTML. Plastering over the GUI shell with cool features doesn't fix the structural rot that is Internet Explorer.
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The FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate cable and internet communication the same way it does radio and broadcast TV. The proliferation of cable and internet news are a much better explaination for the trend than what little change has occured in the FCC over the last 30 years.
Umm let's see, I'm sure that the Unreal games are. Actually the game situation on the Mac is much better now than in years past. Most of the more popular games do work on the Mac. But not nearly as many as on windows, but that's to be expected I guess. It's just fine if you are only an occasional gamer and aren't super picky about your games.
Your analogy is not a good one because the company actually takes part of the (scarce) road built by the government and prevents people from using it. This would not be true for software in the public domian.
I think it was FA Hayek who said that people hate freedom/capitalism because they are forced to choose, they are forced to make tradeoffs. Summarily, communism is attractive because these people BELIEVE that these tradeoffs somehow magically disappear because they aren't the ones doing the choosing anymore. Basically, it's appealing to a certain psycological mindset that we have to want things simpler. The morlocks and eloi as it were.
Hardware has a marginal cost to make that is far from zero, and software doesn't.
Thus even if hardware becomes commoditized, which it pretty much is in the PC world, It still isn't ever free (not for real). Software, OTOH, essentially has a marginal cost of zero. Thus it makes more sense for a company to sell hardware and give away software that adds value to the product than to do it the other way around. They want to spread the fixed software costs over a lot of hardware units. Thus one makes (or utilizes open source) software to make their hardware more valuable to the end user.
I think it would be more accurate to say that IBM is in a service and hardware business. The reason they like linux is that they can sell it across all their hardware platforms. Linux commoditizes the OS for IBM. IBM, like apple, only sells the OS to sell their hardware and services, so anything that makes that easier for IBM is good for them.
How is N Korea a "Bigger boy" than Iraq, and you can't say nukes, because the US believed that Iraq had more WMD's than N korea. (at least when the war started). Guess your logic doesn't make any sense.
The US has tons of coal and oil too, its just that we don't use it for environmental and economic reasons. The middle east is the lowest cost producer of oil, and they can set oil prices low enough to make US oil investment (or other energy investment) unattractive. The environmental reasons are well known.
Japan uses NTSC too.
I wouldn't say the US is lazy, I would say that the switching costs are much higher because the standards you list are highly entrenched. That's one of the reasons the US is slow to move to broadband and wireless is that highly entrenched and cheep local phone service.
The US tax system doesn't "encourage" gas guzzling vehicles, it just doesn't extract nearly the punishment for them that other countries do. They certainly aren't subsidized at the expense of other vehicles, which is what your statement suggests.
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Bzzt. The Russians only got involved after hitler broke the non-aggression pact he signed with them. He broke it by invading Russia (the USSR).
According to the brief filed by the economists in Eldred vs. Ashcroft there is little incentive to make copyrights last longer than 50 years. When you do what finance types would call "discounting to present value" you learn that earnings more than 50 years away essentially have almost no value. Thus they don't factor into the creation of new work (the purpose of copyrights). The only good thing about Eldred vs. Ashcroft is that the ruling means that congress SHOULD be able to retroactively REDUCE the term of copyright (since they can extend it retroactively according to SCOTUS).
Let's reverse the question. How can you say that constituents (voters) don't taint the system? It's all about candidates making promises to the evil "average likely voter" and screw doing what's right. Campaigning should be illegal (let's just appoint them all).
On Spending: Question, why SHOULD the federal government be subsidizing state/local programs. Instead of congress doling out money to the states, why don't they shift the tax burden by lowering federal taxes and raising state taxes. (Even with state and local taxes, the federal government still takes more than both state and local combined.) Besides, states would do a much better job with most of the social spending as they are closer to the population they are serving and have a better idea about the relative cost of living, and relative poverty etc.
Obviously military spending isn't the culprit of our current problems as it has been steadily declining (in relative terms to revenue and other spending) over the last 20 years or so. (though i can think of plenty of ways to "reallocate" how we are spending our money there).
Did the problems with WD drives extend to RAID 1 as well?
The government didn't "subsidize" putting up all the lines, the only subsidy that the gov't gave for the bell's was to pay to wire rural areas that weren't economic enough to run wires to. But anyone who lives in a city/town with more than like 10 people isn't using that subsidy money. Yes there was a subsidy, but it is exteremly narrow. The gov only subsidized lines that the telecos would have otherwise refused to lay.
I agree that most people don't know there are alternatives. OTOH many people have all sorts of problems with IE that using MyIE2 won't fix, especially spyware type things. I see machines all the time where IE is behaving wierdly and even removing spyware doesn't always fix it. Of course since IE is part of the OS now you can't just uninstall and reinstall it, you need to reinstall (probably format and reinstal)l to get it to work propery again. Thus why firefox holds such appeal. (or opera etc)
And what point of view are we supposed to use as an unbiased reference. Let's face it, it's not possible to have an unbiased press, truthful maybe, but not unbiased.
ummm, how are you gonna run it if x isn't set?? But I do agree, If you must use SysV init, then it is easier to use the distro tools to change all of the stupid simlinks.
The problem with your suggestion of MyIE2 is that using it doesn't really solve the underlying security and stabilty issues and general borken behavior that only reinstalling windows can fix(in some cases). Yeah it might addd certain kinds of functionality like tabbed browsing, popup blocking, but all the spyware and security issues remain, because YOU ARE STILL USING IE/MSHTML. Plastering over the GUI shell with cool features doesn't fix the structural rot that is Internet Explorer.
The FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate cable and internet communication the same way it does radio and broadcast TV. The proliferation of cable and internet news are a much better explaination for the trend than what little change has occured in the FCC over the last 30 years.
It doesn't let you download them??
Umm let's see, I'm sure that the Unreal games are. Actually the game situation on the Mac is much better now than in years past. Most of the more popular games do work on the Mac. But not nearly as many as on windows, but that's to be expected I guess. It's just fine if you are only an occasional gamer and aren't super picky about your games.
samsung s56?
Your analogy is not a good one because the company actually takes part of the (scarce) road built by the government and prevents people from using it. This would not be true for software in the public domian.
is what ever happened to ogg tarkin (the 'new' codec, not based on VP3)
I think it was FA Hayek who said that people hate freedom/capitalism because they are forced to choose, they are forced to make tradeoffs. Summarily, communism is attractive because these people BELIEVE that these tradeoffs somehow magically disappear because they aren't the ones doing the choosing anymore. Basically, it's appealing to a certain psycological mindset that we have to want things simpler. The morlocks and eloi as it were.
Hardware has a marginal cost to make that is far from zero, and software doesn't. Thus even if hardware becomes commoditized, which it pretty much is in the PC world, It still isn't ever free (not for real). Software, OTOH, essentially has a marginal cost of zero. Thus it makes more sense for a company to sell hardware and give away software that adds value to the product than to do it the other way around. They want to spread the fixed software costs over a lot of hardware units. Thus one makes (or utilizes open source) software to make their hardware more valuable to the end user.
I think it would be more accurate to say that IBM is in a service and hardware business. The reason they like linux is that they can sell it across all their hardware platforms. Linux commoditizes the OS for IBM. IBM, like apple, only sells the OS to sell their hardware and services, so anything that makes that easier for IBM is good for them.
How is N Korea a "Bigger boy" than Iraq, and you can't say nukes, because the US believed that Iraq had more WMD's than N korea. (at least when the war started). Guess your logic doesn't make any sense.
The US has tons of coal and oil too, its just that we don't use it for environmental and economic reasons. The middle east is the lowest cost producer of oil, and they can set oil prices low enough to make US oil investment (or other energy investment) unattractive. The environmental reasons are well known.
Japan uses NTSC too. I wouldn't say the US is lazy, I would say that the switching costs are much higher because the standards you list are highly entrenched. That's one of the reasons the US is slow to move to broadband and wireless is that highly entrenched and cheep local phone service.
They aren't saying that you have to have an MX record, just a valid reverse address, as opposed to DYN-diailup108.aol.com.
The US tax system doesn't "encourage" gas guzzling vehicles, it just doesn't extract nearly the punishment for them that other countries do. They certainly aren't subsidized at the expense of other vehicles, which is what your statement suggests.
I would assume that the cases stay on a HD too.