If you put all of the FICA taxes and T-bills owned by the Social Security Administration towards what they're supposed to be going for, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are doing collectively just fine right now, and will continue to be more-or-less just fine for decades.
The problem is that instead the significant surpluses in FICA were used to cover up even-more-massive deficits in the general treasury. And where and when those deficits came isn't a mystery: In short, blame can be laid pretty squarely at the feet of Ronald Reagan (notice the huge inflection point between 1945 and 2010).
Basically, Reagan claimed he could cut taxes without affecting revenue. The effect of trying this was that he effectively proved that this was utter nonsense. But everybody likes paying less in taxes, so people who pointed out that it was nonsense were effectively told "Shhhh! Don't give the game away".
Unix, Linux, the GNU Project, Apache, and gazillions of other very useful bits of software were created without specifically funding them. In most cases, the software came first, the funding later. While the early developers of each of those packages used resources that had to come from somewhere, most of those resources were scrounged and repurposed stuff. All of them operated on a "write working code now, worry about logistics and organization later" system very early on.
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it."
The thing is, story line that Republicans have fed the public for decades is essentially "Democrats have taken your money via high taxes and given it to black crackhead felons in the inner cities as 'welfare', who use it to buy drugs, bling, and fancy cars." So when someone who's heard nothing but this story and never spent significant time in the inner cities thinks about welfare recipients, what they think is not "that guy in my church who gets by on a government check" but "urban black crackhead felon". So what he's actually saying is "stop giving my hard-earned cash to urban black crackhead felons".
This perception doesn't match reality (most welfare recipients are white, many are rural, most aren't felons, most aren't using illegal drugs), but when it's the only message you've ever heard about the issue, it's what you're going to believe, not because you're stupid but because simply because you've never heard or seen anything to the contrary. It would be sort of like living in a time when everyone knows that all the celestial bodies move around the Earth: It sure looks that way, and you've been hearing your priest (who's almost definitely the most educated guy in town, remember) talk about how God made it that way all your life. Chances are you'd believe it.
If you want quality talent, and people more difficult to bribe/influence, you MUST pay them well.
Your proposal has 3 major problems: 1. How well? What's comparable to a president, senator, or representative? I mean, if we're going to pay the president the same as a CEO of a major corporation, we're going to be talking about $50 million a year. If we put senators and representatives at a bit lower on the pay scale, then $10 million wouldn't be unreasonable.
2. If you're going to spend that kind of money on politicians, you're going to need to pay for it somehow. Who are you going to tax, or what agency are you going to cut, in order to pay for it? You're talking about $50 billion here, which isn't exactly chump change.
3. There's no clear correlation between bribery and politician salary. For instance, it wouldn't be hard to argue that bribery in the US is more widespread than in the UK, even though MPs are paid less than Congressmen.
No, clearly this is part of the great conspiracy known as NASA! They're hiding something, I tell you! It's the aliens, the same ones that helped them fake the moon landing! So yeah, this "finding" has to be part of the great cover-up. It couldn't be simply the laws of physics.
(this is the commenter's physician: a sedative has been administered, and he's been returned to his padded cell)
Got to hit the IP like Tim Berners-Lee. Mash the keyboard, set up the d-words. See if its a MIPS, get to backbone from SLIP Find the SSH key like the great Trinity Hey! Uh!
Na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na I need somebody to help me type it one time (Na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na) Wo--ow!
I described the Social Network Cycle here on/. not too far back. Basically, the story is that young social networks are fantastic, because they serve users' needs, are unobtrusive, maintain privacy, etc etc. Lots of people sign up. Then business folks see this site with lots of users, and think "I can make a big pile of money off of that, if we just 'monetize' that user base." They then add in lots of obnoxious ads, sell user data, and stop doing what users really need them to do in an attempt to turn the user base into profits.
Then some college kid comes along thinking "I could build this better", and builds a new social network, which goes through the exact same cycle.
Your first link states, without citation, something that's just plain misleading:
There is no evidence of the "natural monopoly" story ever having been carried out- of one producer achieving lower long-run average total costs than everyone else in the industry and thereby establishing a permanent monopoly.
While technically true, the primary reason why the permanent monopoly has never happened is that governments have stepped in to break up the monopoly. For instance, Standard Oil was at 88% market share and climbing when antitrust suits started heading its way. Or Intel, who is extremely close to eliminating its only major competitor, AMD.
Or, in this instance, what happened to the Baby Bells - shortly after the breakup, they started buying each other up. Assuming that they all did so rationally, one has to assume that the optimum number of phone companies (from a market standpoint) is no more than 3.
But what good would be alerting the common person that they are infected?
First off, it means they're less likely to put in, say, their credit card information or bank account numbers.
Secondly, the ISP could provide a referral service for a pro to come clean up the machine. It may be the Geek Squad or something, but there's a good chance it will help.
The basic problem is that a lot of people look at the possibility of being the go-to Internet identity service as being a huge money raiser. There are big network effects - you need a critical mass of websites so that anyone who wanted to do anything online would have to sign up for your service, and a critical mass of users so that any website that wanted to be quick and convenient would have to sign up for your service.
But once that critical mass was achieved, that's when the big fun begins, because you now as the established middleman have 4 potential sources of revenue: 1. Fees from each website that wants to use your service to verify identity. 2. Fees from each user that wants to use your service to identify themselves. 3. The sale of user's personal data to advertisers. (In the "achieving critical mass" phase, of course, they'll put in a privacy policy that says that they won't do this, but once they have enough users to dominate they'll quietly change the policy.) 4. Advertising on the website that you use to sign up. And because you're the tool everybody is using, every new user or website pretty much has to use your service or risk being out in the cold.
A lot of companies have tried to get themselves in this position: Microsoft took a stab at it, Facebook and Twitter are still pushing for it, etc etc.
Seriously, whatever made him think that consumer machines, particularly Windows machines, were even close to being secure? Remember that you're dealing with Aunt Tillie who may still be running Windows ME here.
Now, one thing ISPs could do that might make sense is to have an automated system that contacts a user if they see something suspicious (e.g. several hundred thousand emails at 3 AM) from their connection. That of course assumes that the ISP deletes the data in question within a reasonable time frame.
Here's the real story on this: Actually solving the environmental problems we collectively have is really expensive and inconvenient. But thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of environmentalists, the masses generally believe that the environmental problems like climate change exist and should be fixed, but at the same time don't want to pay for fixing them. What's happened over the last decade or so is that the PR and business types have figured out that it's far cheaper to pretend you're doing something about it than it is to actually do something about it. The public wants environmentalism at little-to-no personal cost, so what these folks are doing is pretending to give them just that.
I'll give you a good example of this: thanks to the efforts of a lot of farmers and hippies going back since the 1970's, organic produce has developed a reputation (deservedly or not) for being tastier, more environmentally friendly, healthier, and better for small farmers. However, you could really only get the stuff at farmer's markets or food coops. So what the big agribusinesses did was went to the USDA, got words like "organic" and "free-range" defined for marketing purposes, put together farms that technically met that definition but were nothing like what the hippies were doing, and started selling the stuff in grocery stores as if it were the same thing (and in some cases, lying about that too, and just slapping the"organic" label on non-organic produce).
As opposed to the southeastern USA, where the first person to find a viable way to convert kudzu to biofuel will become the next John Rockafeller. If you could do that, you wouldn't event need to try to grow the stuff.
1. Python should not be lumped in with PHP. I've worked professionally in both languages, and in PHP it's far easier to write terrible code than it is to write good code, whereas in Python it's the other way around.
2. The value of automated tests is to prove that your code does what you think it's supposed to do. Now, you're correct that sometimes doing what you think is right is still wrong, but it picks up a surprisingly large number of bugs.
3. The value of TDD is that you are encouraged to have code that does what it's supposed to do, but nothing more than that. That's because you define the expected behavior (your test case) first, then ensure your code can do that.
4. The name for broad, interface level testing is an "end-to-end" test. This is a good thing to do, but it's no substitute for testing smaller components. Consider, for instance, 7 layers where each layer can do 2 different things based on the input. If you test each layer plus 2 end-to-end sanity tests, that's 16 tests. If you test only the whole thing, that's at least 128 tests. Because 128 tests is far more work than 16 tests, it typically doesn't happen at all, leading to bugs.
I'll give you an example: In Connecticut, a more labor-oriented Democrat Ned Lamont challenged Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Lamont won, and started focusing on his Republican opposition (not much of one, since Connecticut is a heavily Democratic state). But the Democratic Party bosses and their supporters in banking and insurance wanted Lieberman, not Lamont, so they used their political connections and massive wealth to support Lieberman as an independent against their own party's candidate, and underfunded Lamont's campaign. Lamont predictably lost in the general election.
That's also why if a Dennis Kucinich or a Ron Paul managed to win their party's respective primaries, they'd be almost guaranteed to lose in the general election.
Professor Cronon did just that. It's not his personal correspondence that's at stake here.
His problem with the request is twofold: 1. It was clearly done in retaliation for his writing about the American Legislative Exchange Council, since what the request is looking for is information that could be taken out of context to portray him as a left-wing nutcase on the payroll of the unions that are opposing Scott Walker. He's not at all keen on attempts to create a chilling effect on free speech.
2. Much of his professional correspondence is expected to be confidential, such as conversations with students, working with colleagues on peer reviews of not-yet-published material, or work on the boards of professional organizations he belongs to. If he were working for a private company, he'd have confidentiality and trade secret laws to help protect that stuff.
Yeah, that's exactly why his first autobiography was entitled I Am Not Spock.
Leonard Nimoy has always been very very clear that he has a life outside of his career, and a career outside of Mr Spock. So while he created a highly beloved character, it's not like he's actually a Vulcan.
If the correct charge is $0.01, and I'm instead charged $4.80, that's a 4700% difference but a significantly different matter than, say, getting charged $480 rather than $1. When it comes to people being overcharged, I'd much rather have the absolute figures as our measurement of how much SBC is being a corporate jackass.
Anyone who does usability studies can assure you that people won't read confirmations, they'll just blindly click OK. And it's worth noting here that this was entirely an ID10T error, not a computer glitch, although I'm sure a fair number of folks will try to blame it on the computer.
So you believe the correct answer is to install a second, hardened odometer that provides no benefits whatsoever to the owner. You work as a contractor, don't you?
No, he must design DRM software. After all, that's exactly the same concept.
Slashdot Mirror
If you put all of the FICA taxes and T-bills owned by the Social Security Administration towards what they're supposed to be going for, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are doing collectively just fine right now, and will continue to be more-or-less just fine for decades.
The problem is that instead the significant surpluses in FICA were used to cover up even-more-massive deficits in the general treasury. And where and when those deficits came isn't a mystery: In short, blame can be laid pretty squarely at the feet of Ronald Reagan (notice the huge inflection point between 1945 and 2010).
Basically, Reagan claimed he could cut taxes without affecting revenue. The effect of trying this was that he effectively proved that this was utter nonsense. But everybody likes paying less in taxes, so people who pointed out that it was nonsense were effectively told "Shhhh! Don't give the game away".
Forget the previous version - I wanna see ponies!
Software needs funding before it exists.
Not necessarily.
Unix, Linux, the GNU Project, Apache, and gazillions of other very useful bits of software were created without specifically funding them. In most cases, the software came first, the funding later. While the early developers of each of those packages used resources that had to come from somewhere, most of those resources were scrounged and repurposed stuff. All of them operated on a "write working code now, worry about logistics and organization later" system very early on.
GP also seems to be ignoring IBM, which is doing just fine.
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it."
The thing is, story line that Republicans have fed the public for decades is essentially "Democrats have taken your money via high taxes and given it to black crackhead felons in the inner cities as 'welfare', who use it to buy drugs, bling, and fancy cars." So when someone who's heard nothing but this story and never spent significant time in the inner cities thinks about welfare recipients, what they think is not "that guy in my church who gets by on a government check" but "urban black crackhead felon". So what he's actually saying is "stop giving my hard-earned cash to urban black crackhead felons".
This perception doesn't match reality (most welfare recipients are white, many are rural, most aren't felons, most aren't using illegal drugs), but when it's the only message you've ever heard about the issue, it's what you're going to believe, not because you're stupid but because simply because you've never heard or seen anything to the contrary. It would be sort of like living in a time when everyone knows that all the celestial bodies move around the Earth: It sure looks that way, and you've been hearing your priest (who's almost definitely the most educated guy in town, remember) talk about how God made it that way all your life. Chances are you'd believe it.
If you want quality talent, and people more difficult to bribe/influence, you MUST pay them well.
Your proposal has 3 major problems:
1. How well? What's comparable to a president, senator, or representative? I mean, if we're going to pay the president the same as a CEO of a major corporation, we're going to be talking about $50 million a year. If we put senators and representatives at a bit lower on the pay scale, then $10 million wouldn't be unreasonable.
2. If you're going to spend that kind of money on politicians, you're going to need to pay for it somehow. Who are you going to tax, or what agency are you going to cut, in order to pay for it? You're talking about $50 billion here, which isn't exactly chump change.
3. There's no clear correlation between bribery and politician salary. For instance, it wouldn't be hard to argue that bribery in the US is more widespread than in the UK, even though MPs are paid less than Congressmen.
No, clearly this is part of the great conspiracy known as NASA! They're hiding something, I tell you! It's the aliens, the same ones that helped them fake the moon landing! So yeah, this "finding" has to be part of the great cover-up. It couldn't be simply the laws of physics.
(this is the commenter's physician: a sedative has been administered, and he's been returned to his padded cell)
(apologies to Wilson Pickett)
Got to hit the IP like Tim Berners-Lee.
Mash the keyboard, set up the d-words.
See if its a MIPS, get to backbone from SLIP
Find the SSH key like the great Trinity
Hey! Uh!
Na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na
I need somebody to help me type it one time
(Na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na)
Wo--ow!
I described the Social Network Cycle here on /. not too far back. Basically, the story is that young social networks are fantastic, because they serve users' needs, are unobtrusive, maintain privacy, etc etc. Lots of people sign up. Then business folks see this site with lots of users, and think "I can make a big pile of money off of that, if we just 'monetize' that user base." They then add in lots of obnoxious ads, sell user data, and stop doing what users really need them to do in an attempt to turn the user base into profits.
Then some college kid comes along thinking "I could build this better", and builds a new social network, which goes through the exact same cycle.
Your first link states, without citation, something that's just plain misleading:
There is no evidence of the "natural monopoly" story ever having been carried out- of one producer achieving lower long-run average total costs than everyone else in the industry and thereby establishing a permanent monopoly.
While technically true, the primary reason why the permanent monopoly has never happened is that governments have stepped in to break up the monopoly. For instance, Standard Oil was at 88% market share and climbing when antitrust suits started heading its way. Or Intel, who is extremely close to eliminating its only major competitor, AMD.
Or, in this instance, what happened to the Baby Bells - shortly after the breakup, they started buying each other up. Assuming that they all did so rationally, one has to assume that the optimum number of phone companies (from a market standpoint) is no more than 3.
But what good would be alerting the common person that they are infected?
First off, it means they're less likely to put in, say, their credit card information or bank account numbers.
Secondly, the ISP could provide a referral service for a pro to come clean up the machine. It may be the Geek Squad or something, but there's a good chance it will help.
The basic problem is that a lot of people look at the possibility of being the go-to Internet identity service as being a huge money raiser. There are big network effects - you need a critical mass of websites so that anyone who wanted to do anything online would have to sign up for your service, and a critical mass of users so that any website that wanted to be quick and convenient would have to sign up for your service.
But once that critical mass was achieved, that's when the big fun begins, because you now as the established middleman have 4 potential sources of revenue:
1. Fees from each website that wants to use your service to verify identity.
2. Fees from each user that wants to use your service to identify themselves.
3. The sale of user's personal data to advertisers. (In the "achieving critical mass" phase, of course, they'll put in a privacy policy that says that they won't do this, but once they have enough users to dominate they'll quietly change the policy.)
4. Advertising on the website that you use to sign up.
And because you're the tool everybody is using, every new user or website pretty much has to use your service or risk being out in the cold.
A lot of companies have tried to get themselves in this position: Microsoft took a stab at it, Facebook and Twitter are still pushing for it, etc etc.
Seriously, whatever made him think that consumer machines, particularly Windows machines, were even close to being secure? Remember that you're dealing with Aunt Tillie who may still be running Windows ME here.
Now, one thing ISPs could do that might make sense is to have an automated system that contacts a user if they see something suspicious (e.g. several hundred thousand emails at 3 AM) from their connection. That of course assumes that the ISP deletes the data in question within a reasonable time frame.
Here's the real story on this: Actually solving the environmental problems we collectively have is really expensive and inconvenient. But thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of environmentalists, the masses generally believe that the environmental problems like climate change exist and should be fixed, but at the same time don't want to pay for fixing them. What's happened over the last decade or so is that the PR and business types have figured out that it's far cheaper to pretend you're doing something about it than it is to actually do something about it. The public wants environmentalism at little-to-no personal cost, so what these folks are doing is pretending to give them just that.
I'll give you a good example of this: thanks to the efforts of a lot of farmers and hippies going back since the 1970's, organic produce has developed a reputation (deservedly or not) for being tastier, more environmentally friendly, healthier, and better for small farmers. However, you could really only get the stuff at farmer's markets or food coops. So what the big agribusinesses did was went to the USDA, got words like "organic" and "free-range" defined for marketing purposes, put together farms that technically met that definition but were nothing like what the hippies were doing, and started selling the stuff in grocery stores as if it were the same thing (and in some cases, lying about that too, and just slapping the"organic" label on non-organic produce).
As opposed to the southeastern USA, where the first person to find a viable way to convert kudzu to biofuel will become the next John Rockafeller. If you could do that, you wouldn't event need to try to grow the stuff.
You've made a lot of mistakes here.
1. Python should not be lumped in with PHP. I've worked professionally in both languages, and in PHP it's far easier to write terrible code than it is to write good code, whereas in Python it's the other way around.
2. The value of automated tests is to prove that your code does what you think it's supposed to do. Now, you're correct that sometimes doing what you think is right is still wrong, but it picks up a surprisingly large number of bugs.
3. The value of TDD is that you are encouraged to have code that does what it's supposed to do, but nothing more than that. That's because you define the expected behavior (your test case) first, then ensure your code can do that.
4. The name for broad, interface level testing is an "end-to-end" test. This is a good thing to do, but it's no substitute for testing smaller components. Consider, for instance, 7 layers where each layer can do 2 different things based on the input. If you test each layer plus 2 end-to-end sanity tests, that's 16 tests. If you test only the whole thing, that's at least 128 tests. Because 128 tests is far more work than 16 tests, it typically doesn't happen at all, leading to bugs.
Trouble is, that alone doesn't work either.
I'll give you an example: In Connecticut, a more labor-oriented Democrat Ned Lamont challenged Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Lamont won, and started focusing on his Republican opposition (not much of one, since Connecticut is a heavily Democratic state). But the Democratic Party bosses and their supporters in banking and insurance wanted Lieberman, not Lamont, so they used their political connections and massive wealth to support Lieberman as an independent against their own party's candidate, and underfunded Lamont's campaign. Lamont predictably lost in the general election.
That's also why if a Dennis Kucinich or a Ron Paul managed to win their party's respective primaries, they'd be almost guaranteed to lose in the general election.
Yeah, they might convince more people to switch to PostGres!
Professor Cronon did just that. It's not his personal correspondence that's at stake here.
His problem with the request is twofold:
1. It was clearly done in retaliation for his writing about the American Legislative Exchange Council, since what the request is looking for is information that could be taken out of context to portray him as a left-wing nutcase on the payroll of the unions that are opposing Scott Walker. He's not at all keen on attempts to create a chilling effect on free speech.
2. Much of his professional correspondence is expected to be confidential, such as conversations with students, working with colleagues on peer reviews of not-yet-published material, or work on the boards of professional organizations he belongs to. If he were working for a private company, he'd have confidentiality and trade secret laws to help protect that stuff.
Why not? Great wine, great mamoiselles, great food, nice places to live, friendly labor laws ...
Trust me, if my French didn't completely suck, and I had the opportunity, I'd probably take it.
Yeah, that's exactly why his first autobiography was entitled I Am Not Spock.
Leonard Nimoy has always been very very clear that he has a life outside of his career, and a career outside of Mr Spock. So while he created a highly beloved character, it's not like he's actually a Vulcan.
If the correct charge is $0.01, and I'm instead charged $4.80, that's a 4700% difference but a significantly different matter than, say, getting charged $480 rather than $1. When it comes to people being overcharged, I'd much rather have the absolute figures as our measurement of how much SBC is being a corporate jackass.
Anyone who does usability studies can assure you that people won't read confirmations, they'll just blindly click OK. And it's worth noting here that this was entirely an ID10T error, not a computer glitch, although I'm sure a fair number of folks will try to blame it on the computer.
So you believe the correct answer is to install a second, hardened odometer that provides no benefits whatsoever to the owner. You work as a contractor, don't you?
No, he must design DRM software. After all, that's exactly the same concept.
Reminds me of something a wise friend once said: 1672 hit points, but no life.