but what you have to realize about that kind of stuff is that policy like that is unlikely to be lasting. In fact such policies probably would not survive more than a few weeks after Trump leaves office.
Presidents are around for 8 years, a legislators career is often long. Trump would not be able to get that sort of idiocy codified. I would be quite surprised if a President Trump could get much of anything thru congress. He might be a good negotiator but Congress plays by very different rules.
I suspect with Trump, while he might rubber stamp a GOP agenda item or two his own policy will be mostly accomplished through executive action and when he goes so will it.
I think my number (1) pretty well covers (4). Do nothing is the 'right thing to do' but politically its not going happen. If you stop people like Trump and Cruz from solving the problem in their lousy but not all together bad for you and I way, you will get Hilliary, Jeb, or Marco doing something that will be a whole lot more shitty.
It will be like when Jesse Ventura got elected in MN. Trump will probably tackle ISIS and have some success even if you don't approve of his methods. The rest of his time will be spent working on narcissistic Trump-isms that won't mean much to the rest of us. I suspect if electeded Trump like Ventura will be embarrassing but mostly harmless. The other possible candidates scare me a lot more because they are much more likely to make lasting changes to our society that I mostly find repugnant.
I absolutely do not support Trump's proposal, but guys like you are precisely the sort of idealists that he will steamroll over without any effort in the public spotlight. Everyone else out there can see that as a matter of fact, the Internet enables terrorist recruitment probably 10x better than broadcast media did in the 60s to late 80s/early 90s.
The way I talk about the Internet is the way most gun rights activists talk about guns. I care more about freedom than security. "If it saves one life" is not an argument to me. I'd rather lose lives in the name of freedom than save lives in the name of security.
In this case Trump might be right. I know I am going to get flamed into oblivion for saying so but you have to consider the alternatives. The lone wolf threat is probably the most impossible one we face. The talking heads and G-men have been quick to argue there was little or no communication with ISIS. That is not really true though it ignores the fact the one-way communication is still communication. Its also the hardest to cope with because even if we can known who has heard or seen what, in America we don't punish people for listening to things.
I see three options here:
1) Do nothing, This would be best but politically will be impossible after another attack or two.
2) EFF's nightmare, we start monitoring and logging just about everything that happens on the Internet, no more anonymity, broken encryption and systems with backdoors. Government thought police to knock on your physical door when you post the wrong kind of comment. All of this being ineffective to boot as criminals and terrorists will find ways to use side channels, steganography, and other methods to pass information around the Internet anyway. Innovation stifled as 'legitimate' applications can't be used until the government has facility to manage and monitor them.
3) Cut the cord, Great Firewall of America. We stop routing traffic to and from unfriendly parts of the world. For this work we have be willing to cast a broad net. You can't say lets cut off Afghanistan and Syria but let Pakistan and Iraq stay connected. After all the boarders weak and ISIS/Taliban/What have you will use the coffee shot the next town over if that is what they have to do. We would need to consider cutting off 'allies' (I use the term loosely) like Turkey and Saudi Arabia in regions know to be terror hot beds as well unless they are prepared to police things somewhat like option (2) although that is more practical in their societies.
I don't like option 3, but its a hell of a lot better than option 2. Politically speaking we are going to get (2) if we don't support something 'crazy' like (3). That is the current political reality. We build the Internet if proves to be to dangerous or we are to afraid to allow just anyone to use it however they like, than I say lets keep it for ourselves and for western society and culture rather than destroying it for ourselves, in the name of it being a small world or something.
Clothing, aside there are still plenty of domestic source of most construction materials. It does not a huge amount of investment to expand the production facility for most of those things either. We are not talking about high si chip manufacturing or even automobile assembly. If prices rise even a little and there is more margin to capture, getting the financing store more gypsum and rollers to press a little more dry wall should not be problem; if you can show unmet demand to the bank.
U.S. Senators are requesting information about federal agencies' encounters with ransomware malware, and whether Uncle Sam might have paid ransoms,
I mean the Obama administration has pretty publicly failed to up hold the 'US does not negotiate with terrorists' line. That is the sort of precedent that gets set at the top. When the President is out there doing prisoner swaps with the Taliban its pretty hard to expect some mid level IT bureaucrat to spine up and tell his bosses they fucked up don't have backups and got hit with crypt malware. Much easier to submit an expense report for "consulting services" and hope the issue is forgotten quickly.
Like being shaken down for "protection" money. But the mob is doing such a good job that they can offer you a 50% off deal. It might be less painful, but it is not a "benefit" in any way.
Depends. protection money is a racket because of course if you opt not to pay than something terrible *will* happen to you, perpetrated by your would be protector. On the other hand in a lot cases various places around the would I have heard about from people you absolutely do get some *protection* for your money. There is usually some symbol like placing a statue of saint or something in a window that lets other criminal gangs know you are client of one of their rivals. They than leave you and your establishment alone because they know if something happens and your protectors think it was them they will seek retribution.
Well the moral of the story here is you should not pass laws you can't enforce you should not outlaw things people generally don't see as terribly objectionable.
Letting people use apps t get rides and paying people to take them places in cars does not offend anyone other than rent seeking cabbies. The result is you get a general public that breaks the law. Ditto for soft drugs like weed, gambling, more discrete prostitution eg call girls who do happy endings, etc.
Other people see people they know and respect being scoff laws and respect for the law is lost. After that its only short mental leap to 'i probably won't get caught so what the hell' and that is why we can't have nice things.
blah blah blah, you'd put over half the U.S. population into poverty since they wouldn't be able to buy things to meet their basic needs, as they are made in China.
Right because China completely cut off trade with us if we put reasonable tariffs in place and turned the heat up (tariff size slowly) until they either adopted similar labor and environmental standards.
No they won't do that because we are the biggest market and if they had to stop selling into our market in large quantity their own economy would completely collapse. The time to end free-trade and use access to our market as a lever to affect Chinese policy is NOW not later after they have expanded their domestic market. If we force China to reform today they won't be able to roll back those reforms in the future even if we are no longer as large a trade partner as a percentage of their overall economy. Its not like you can get a workforce accustom to safe conditions and fair wages and than take it away without revolts.
No it would not plunge the US into poverty. Poverty is about not meeting ones basic needs, food, heat, shelter. Those things for the most part don't come from China. Its electronics gadgets nobody really needs that would shoot up in price. Now that might also mean some medical equipment and less elastic goods as well. Provide we don't completely shut down trade overnight the effects could be controlled. The quality of life might fall a little bit for the upper middle class and the well healed, that is alright. It will be short while domestic industry pops up to provide a source of the cheap goods we are no longer bringing in from China, it should also create jobs and push wages up here, which will help close down the wage gap everyone is so worried about.
'Free' Trade with China, while they don't play by the rules and are permitted to play games with their currency, bring labor to market in ways our sensibilities would never allow, and operate excessively dirty industry rather than investing in cleaner improved processes is dumb. Its bad policy that has been hurting us for the last 30 years and it should be stopped.
I agree though, clearly the pretext itself failed. Obviously Reuben Styles decided he wanted to meet someone audacious enough to edit wikipedia and pretend to be his step-brother. So I say good for both of them.
Step-brother / brother was a questionable choice. I don't think I have ever met anyone who can't name the siblings and step siblings, paternity claims and such aside.
On the hand had he claimed to be a second cousin or something. That might fly with some people. I have known a lot of far flung families that are not very close where someone might not be able to name the children of their cousins, especially easy to image if their parent came from a large family or if their aunts or uncles had a large family.
by killing programs that serve the working class/poor - effectively raising tax rates for the services they still receive
Those programs are why we have working class poor. If you giving things to 'working' poor you or subsidizing labor, and pushing wages down below market rate. Programs for the working poor are not giveaways to the poor they are giveaways to 1%er corporate owners. They enable the expanding wage gap.
If you really want to help the working poor, you fix illegal immigration so everyone working in America has access to a common system of legal protections and nobody can be paid less than the minimum wage. That is the first step.
The next thing you need to do is start rolling pack all those social support programs, you need force people to do what they need to do to make ends meet. If that means leaving coasts for Midwest that is what needs to happen. We need to incite people to go where they can earn a living wage with the skills they possess.
we will pay capital gains taxes when our shares are sold by the LLC
He says that like its a good thing. Honestly I would argue anyone not doing everything they can within the law to optimize their tax situation is doing HARM. The government is only going to use the revenue to kill people on the other side of the world we don't need to be involved with, needlessly spy on us, our friends, and neighbors, and general interfere with the pursuit of life liberty and happiness.
Failing to to minimize your lawful tax burden does not make you some kind of patriot in my book, it makes you part of the problem.
the US cares about everybody getting corporate-provided insurance
No they care about all of us participating in some corporate health management scheme, independent of if we need to or not and with the primary focus on profits for the companies with best lobbying capability. Any focus that does exist on 'outcomes' is all based on dubious game-able statistics and not on if anyone is actually satisfied with their care.
Finally lets remember what Obamacare really did. It did not expand access to insurance. I wish people would stop using that word. It expanded/required access to health management. If anything Obamacare made actual insurance in the traditional sense of what insurance used to mean illegal for all practical intents.
True for most apps, not always true for some of the fanciest games. I actually don't think putting together a compatibility layer that would enable the vast vast majority of Android apps to work would be a terrible technical problem.
No matter what though there will always be the occasional app that does not work and it will probably be a constant source of frustration for some users.
Android also has a lot of well Androidisms, around how notifications are delivered to the user, switching between 'activities' is handled what apps get broadcast messages and so fourth. Unless Microsoft mostly clones the Android UI the workflow will be different inside a lot of apps. Android apps don't operate in a vacuum quite the way typical desktop applications do. For example you encounter a certain media type your android app might send a message to something else to handle it, what that something else is, it does not know and when you are done the Android operating systems UI is depended upon to provide the 'back button' to get the previous activity, or to return you there otherwise.
It would be like running Windows apps in Wine on Linux or OSX, where there is always some oddities around file pickers, windows controls, associations, cut paste interop, etc. It mostly works, and you can figure out what you need to do but it does not always feel right. The only difference is it will be even more pronounce on a phone.
Nobody switches to Linux so they can run Windows apps on WINE. WINE lets them keep that one app they need so they can switch platforms for other reasons. I don't think you attract anyone to your platform by being the 'next best place to run their favorite apps'. So on that score Ballmer is wrong. Microsoft's entire mobile strategy is wrong. They need to admit they made some bad calls on their first gen smart device platform (Windows CE + Windows Phone -lt 6 ) and were simply to late to the party in the 'app' era. If they do anything they should focus on producing Apps for the other platforms. Give business users what they really want, full Exchange/Outlook support with all the manageability, some sort of Sharepoint application viewer, etc. That is where their bread is buttered. Microsoft should focus on being the top shelf app vendor, for their mobile play IMHO.
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts.
No it isn't moving the goal posts. Unless you are literal believer in the story of Methuselah, we have never observed any human living longer than 125 years or so. Plenty of people have lived into their 100s before most of what we consider modern medicine was available. They just had to be incredibly lucky to live that long without something else coming along to kill them first.
Now more and more people are living to that age, they don't have to be as lucky because many of the things that would have killed them, modern median can now treat. Yet even people who spent most of their lives 'living clean' and have access to the best care still tend to expire between 80-115. They just keel over at some point or don't wake up one morning.
It may be that are some genetic switches to throw turn off the expiration date. That would not surprise me. It seems to me evolution might very well have selected for the ability to live long enough to help care for a grand generation or two but mostly for us to die off before we are total invalids who would only consume resources from the herd rather than contribute.
As you say we are likely to discover more problems that need to be solved even if we can do this. Cancer is a perfect example it was not a major cause of death until we were able to cure the things that killed most folks before they'd lived long enough to die of common cancers. So here is the question: if you can give me some gene therapy that will prevent me from just sorta shutting down in my middle 90s, as so many of my relatives have great, but how does that mean I die ultimately. Does it mean I am going stroke out or something. Does it mean I am going to live for years with conditions that are debilitating? Is that even what I want.
I have a 97 year old grandfather. He is nearly blind and getting near to deaf every day. He still has his wits though and enough physical strength and stamina to get around for the most part. He will tell you that he has no wish to die but is very frustrated that his body will no longer let him do the things his mind wants to do. He therefor has told us not to take any steps to extend his life if something happens. He can't see well enough to read a large print book. It takes a great deal of fiddling and tinker with hearing devices for him to be able to catch most words of an audio book, setting up those things are also hard for him because he can't see them well. He can't go on walks much beyond the yard of his cottage, not because he lacks the physique but because he can't see the path and has to stick to places he knows by memory and can count on not changing. He has lived a long full life, mostly in excellent health. Now that that is slipping away as far as he is concerned about it, he is just sorta 'done'.
The other problem with determining self interest that you assume you know what someone wants in the first place.
Extending your example. Lets say I know I can rig one of the few video games my girlfriend is will to play. There is a zero chance I will be discovered. She isn't going to look into the source code and see that I added:
die_roll +=1 if player == 1 && die_roll 6
You might assume I would want to win. After all she may attribute my victories to a superior sense of strategy and deeper understanding of the game. After all it might make me seem smart and you would assume I'd like to impress her. I know on the other hand she can become frustrated with games she never wins at and if she can't win at least some of the time she will loose interest and I'll be stuck playing against the terrible computer AI again. So I actually have no incentive to rig the game in my favor, I might even want to rig it in her favor.
Its hard to say what she could have done. Their balance sheet isn't all that bad. Probably the thing to do was and still is turn it into an investment house. By that I don't mean the lets buy and re-brand start-ups kind of investment, I mean the Berkshire Hathaway type of operation.
A lot of people suggested Microsoft should go in that direction around 1999-2001 or so. Frankly in terms of maximizing shareholder value they were probably correct. MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after they got some focus back and started producing 'quality' well marketable software again. Here we are in 2015 and I kinda think they are headed back off the deep end trying to change the revenue model for Windows and Office and continuing to muck around in the mobile space where they are simply to late to the party. MS has remembered where their bread is buttered before and probably will again.
Yahoo I am way less optimistic. In terms of technology, they have produced a gem or two along the way like 'web pipes' I think called it? Most of those never really took off though. In terms of their technology being relevant in the market place they have been floundering since before Google showed up. With the resources they have handy they could probably print money if they had a plan, but they don't seem to have a plan.
As recently as 2007, they were still listed as the #2 search engine.
Yea but in the perspective of internet history, that is like saying As recently as 215 yeas ago France owned most of the land west of the Mississippi river.
From what I can tell now they're an investment company, with Alibaba being the bulk of their value.
Yes and all those shares in Alibaba at that are not exactly unencumbered in terms of legal questions surrounding their value. It depends on Alibaba doing what they promise to do with the subsidiary the shares are actually in.
What legal recourse the share holders have if Alibaba ultimately decides to alter the terms is an open question. It also supposed the Chinese government won't for whatever reason decide to interfere with something that is well playing a bit fast and loose with their foreign investment laws.
While (G|W)all St. has largely convinced itself the Alibaba deal is 'ok' I still would not put a dime into that stock. There are plenty of other companies with similarly good growth prospects to gamble on. I'd rather invest in something where there is legal clarity about what I actually own and how it may be converted than forgo that safety just to net another few points.
A safe space where you can talk with people sympathetic to your position
You mean an echo chamber with people who will tell you what you want to hear. I would say yours is actually the perfect argument why there should never be 'safe spaces'.
I think there is big difference between aborting a viable baby and one that has not a chance of being carried to term or could not survive post birth even with every available medical intervention.
That is the problem. You complain about the people 'preying on people at their weakest' but the vast majority of those people heading into the abortion clinic are about to kill a perfect healthy baby. To me and a lot of other people that is murder! So if a little unfair metal anguish is inflicted upon someone like your friend, that is sad but if those protesters convince even one person not to murder someone than I would have to say it was all worth it.
You can't separate the political opposition of something like abortion form accosting people on the streets. The reality is we do have a republic. Most politicking is local, its canvassers going house to house making the case for their issue or candidate. Its getting out in front of an event and bringing attention of the public to an issue.
The pro-murder group wants to control where the political debate takes place, they want to control the language and cast their position as something about choice, (hint is a hind unless you are rape victim you already made a choice) and not about murdering to avoid consequences. Why do they want to do this? They don't want enable a real debate at all. Its all about obfuscating the issue, the same thing you are doing making anecdotal arguments, making a big issue out rare cases where there is a clearly identifiable reason why a child cannot survive.
All costs of living should be based on ability to pay.
No this is not correct at all. In fact this type of thinking is one of the core reasons the wealth gap exists. If someone cannot afford to live where they are the NEED TO LEAVE. If transportation and bridge tolls make it to expensive for you to earn a living working in the city you need to move out of the city.
The fact the middle class taxes go to subsides and safety net programs are what allow the super rich to get away with not paying living wages.
If you want to fix the income gap here is how you do it:
1) Fix the illegal immigrant problem so there are a large number of agriculture jobs, low skill factory and mining / mineral extraction work, or service work available that actually will pay minimum wage. It is possible to live on minimum wage in large parts of the middle west and south.
2) Tax foreign labor as an import. US business that utilize offshore labor should pay payroll taxes on employees over seas. Unless they can show that employees effort does not contribute materially to their US operations.
3) Kill off public housing and food subsidies for people who live in high cost densely populated areas. Provide them instead with free bus fair to (1). This will reduce the supply of cheap labor in densely populated areas. Either it will trigger the export of jobs to lower cost regions or it will trigger higher wages to maintain the labor supply. The going wage at Starbucks in Palo Alto should be $15 dollars an hour not because the minimum wage is $15 but because their won't be a barista to higher for less because they won't otherwise be able to live near by otherwise and will move away.
Things like cost of living indexed taxation, and residential subsides don't really help the poor do anything other than stay poor. What they do provide is the very wealthy with a heavily discounted labor pool at the expense of the middle class.
Look I count myself among the windows haters but there is plenty wrong and deficient in Windows to complain about without making false statements. There are several variants of 32-bit Windows that do PAE
The problem is metadata is a description that only makes sense in context. One person's metadata is data to someone else.
Even with the the phone company. What cell you were connected to and when is metadata to the billing division. To them data is which customer, using what service, for how long. (roaming aside) What cells you were using are not important that is data about where the other data came from. To the groups that do network operations and capacity planning: They don't care about who mostly, that is data about where their data about where, what, and for how long came from.
Same thing if I am developing a filesystem, than what extents are used, where is content on the disk logically etc is the data, the content is just 'content'. As a user of a filesystem everything besides the content is metadata.
I don't think the legal system should be trying to declare what is or isn't metadata, certainly not for the sake of making some qualitative judgment about if its subject to constitutional protections. We should stick to the reasonable expectation of privacy test, that has been used in the past. If someone would reasonably expect the known dispositions of whatever data they are sending/producing/modifying would be private the government should need a warrant!
Slashdot Mirror
Right,
but what you have to realize about that kind of stuff is that policy like that is unlikely to be lasting. In fact such policies probably would not survive more than a few weeks after Trump leaves office.
Presidents are around for 8 years, a legislators career is often long. Trump would not be able to get that sort of idiocy codified. I would be quite surprised if a President Trump could get much of anything thru congress. He might be a good negotiator but Congress plays by very different rules.
I suspect with Trump, while he might rubber stamp a GOP agenda item or two his own policy will be mostly accomplished through executive action and when he goes so will it.
I think my number (1) pretty well covers (4). Do nothing is the 'right thing to do' but politically its not going happen. If you stop people like Trump and Cruz from solving the problem in their lousy but not all together bad for you and I way, you will get Hilliary, Jeb, or Marco doing something that will be a whole lot more shitty.
It will be like when Jesse Ventura got elected in MN. Trump will probably tackle ISIS and have some success even if you don't approve of his methods. The rest of his time will be spent working on narcissistic Trump-isms that won't mean much to the rest of us. I suspect if electeded Trump like Ventura will be embarrassing but mostly harmless. The other possible candidates scare me a lot more because they are much more likely to make lasting changes to our society that I mostly find repugnant.
I absolutely do not support Trump's proposal, but guys like you are precisely the sort of idealists that he will steamroll over without any effort in the public spotlight. Everyone else out there can see that as a matter of fact, the Internet enables terrorist recruitment probably 10x better than broadcast media did in the 60s to late 80s/early 90s.
The way I talk about the Internet is the way most gun rights activists talk about guns. I care more about freedom than security. "If it saves one life" is not an argument to me. I'd rather lose lives in the name of freedom than save lives in the name of security.
In this case Trump might be right. I know I am going to get flamed into oblivion for saying so but you have to consider the alternatives. The lone wolf threat is probably the most impossible one we face. The talking heads and G-men have been quick to argue there was little or no communication with ISIS. That is not really true though it ignores the fact the one-way communication is still communication. Its also the hardest to cope with because even if we can known who has heard or seen what, in America we don't punish people for listening to things.
I see three options here:
1) Do nothing, This would be best but politically will be impossible after another attack or two.
2) EFF's nightmare, we start monitoring and logging just about everything that happens on the Internet, no more anonymity, broken encryption and systems with backdoors. Government thought police to knock on your physical door when you post the wrong kind of comment. All of this being ineffective to boot as criminals and terrorists will find ways to use side channels, steganography, and other methods to pass information around the Internet anyway. Innovation stifled as 'legitimate' applications can't be used until the government has facility to manage and monitor them.
3) Cut the cord, Great Firewall of America. We stop routing traffic to and from unfriendly parts of the world. For this work we have be willing to cast a broad net. You can't say lets cut off Afghanistan and Syria but let Pakistan and Iraq stay connected. After all the boarders weak and ISIS/Taliban/What have you will use the coffee shot the next town over if that is what they have to do. We would need to consider cutting off 'allies' (I use the term loosely) like Turkey and Saudi Arabia in regions know to be terror hot beds as well unless they are prepared to police things somewhat like option (2) although that is more practical in their societies.
I don't like option 3, but its a hell of a lot better than option 2. Politically speaking we are going to get (2) if we don't support something 'crazy' like (3). That is the current political reality. We build the Internet if proves to be to dangerous or we are to afraid to allow just anyone to use it however they like, than I say lets keep it for ourselves and for western society and culture rather than destroying it for ourselves, in the name of it being a small world or something.
Exactly.
Clothing, aside there are still plenty of domestic source of most construction materials. It does not a huge amount of investment to expand the production facility for most of those things either. We are not talking about high si chip manufacturing or even automobile assembly. If prices rise even a little and there is more margin to capture, getting the financing store more gypsum and rollers to press a little more dry wall should not be problem; if you can show unmet demand to the bank.
U.S. Senators are requesting information about federal agencies' encounters with ransomware malware, and whether Uncle Sam might have paid ransoms,
I mean the Obama administration has pretty publicly failed to up hold the 'US does not negotiate with terrorists' line. That is the sort of precedent that gets set at the top. When the President is out there doing prisoner swaps with the Taliban its pretty hard to expect some mid level IT bureaucrat to spine up and tell his bosses they fucked up don't have backups and got hit with crypt malware. Much easier to submit an expense report for "consulting services" and hope the issue is forgotten quickly.
Like being shaken down for "protection" money. But the mob is doing such a good job that they can offer you a 50% off deal. It might be less painful, but it is not a "benefit" in any way.
Depends. protection money is a racket because of course if you opt not to pay than something terrible *will* happen to you, perpetrated by your would be protector. On the other hand in a lot cases various places around the would I have heard about from people you absolutely do get some *protection* for your money. There is usually some symbol like placing a statue of saint or something in a window that lets other criminal gangs know you are client of one of their rivals. They than leave you and your establishment alone because they know if something happens and your protectors think it was them they will seek retribution.
Well the moral of the story here is you should not pass laws you can't enforce you should not outlaw things people generally don't see as terribly objectionable.
Letting people use apps t get rides and paying people to take them places in cars does not offend anyone other than rent seeking cabbies. The result is you get a general public that breaks the law. Ditto for soft drugs like weed, gambling, more discrete prostitution eg call girls who do happy endings, etc.
Other people see people they know and respect being scoff laws and respect for the law is lost. After that its only short mental leap to 'i probably won't get caught so what the hell' and that is why we can't have nice things.
blah blah blah, you'd put over half the U.S. population into poverty since they wouldn't be able to buy things to meet their basic needs, as they are made in China.
Right because China completely cut off trade with us if we put reasonable tariffs in place and turned the heat up (tariff size slowly) until they either adopted similar labor and environmental standards.
No they won't do that because we are the biggest market and if they had to stop selling into our market in large quantity their own economy would completely collapse. The time to end free-trade and use access to our market as a lever to affect Chinese policy is NOW not later after they have expanded their domestic market. If we force China to reform today they won't be able to roll back those reforms in the future even if we are no longer as large a trade partner as a percentage of their overall economy. Its not like you can get a workforce accustom to safe conditions and fair wages and than take it away without revolts.
No it would not plunge the US into poverty. Poverty is about not meeting ones basic needs, food, heat, shelter. Those things for the most part don't come from China. Its electronics gadgets nobody really needs that would shoot up in price. Now that might also mean some medical equipment and less elastic goods as well. Provide we don't completely shut down trade overnight the effects could be controlled. The quality of life might fall a little bit for the upper middle class and the well healed, that is alright. It will be short while domestic industry pops up to provide a source of the cheap goods we are no longer bringing in from China, it should also create jobs and push wages up here, which will help close down the wage gap everyone is so worried about.
'Free' Trade with China, while they don't play by the rules and are permitted to play games with their currency, bring labor to market in ways our sensibilities would never allow, and operate excessively dirty industry rather than investing in cleaner improved processes is dumb. Its bad policy that has been hurting us for the last 30 years and it should be stopped.
They told me, but then I got cocky and told them how I'd got in.
Lesson don't drop your pretext before you have met the objective.
It worked in the sense he got to meet the band!
I agree though, clearly the pretext itself failed. Obviously Reuben Styles decided he wanted to meet someone audacious enough to edit wikipedia and pretend to be his step-brother. So I say good for both of them.
Step-brother / brother was a questionable choice. I don't think I have ever met anyone who can't name the siblings and step siblings, paternity claims and such aside.
On the hand had he claimed to be a second cousin or something. That might fly with some people. I have known a lot of far flung families that are not very close where someone might not be able to name the children of their cousins, especially easy to image if their parent came from a large family or if their aunts or uncles had a large family.
by killing programs that serve the working class/poor - effectively raising tax rates for the services they still receive
Those programs are why we have working class poor. If you giving things to 'working' poor you or subsidizing labor, and pushing wages down below market rate. Programs for the working poor are not giveaways to the poor they are giveaways to 1%er corporate owners. They enable the expanding wage gap.
If you really want to help the working poor, you fix illegal immigration so everyone working in America has access to a common system of legal protections and nobody can be paid less than the minimum wage. That is the first step.
The next thing you need to do is start rolling pack all those social support programs, you need force people to do what they need to do to make ends meet. If that means leaving coasts for Midwest that is what needs to happen. We need to incite people to go where they can earn a living wage with the skills they possess.
we will pay capital gains taxes when our shares are sold by the LLC
He says that like its a good thing. Honestly I would argue anyone not doing everything they can within the law to optimize their tax situation is doing HARM. The government is only going to use the revenue to kill people on the other side of the world we don't need to be involved with, needlessly spy on us, our friends, and neighbors, and general interfere with the pursuit of life liberty and happiness.
Failing to to minimize your lawful tax burden does not make you some kind of patriot in my book, it makes you part of the problem.
the US cares about everybody getting corporate-provided insurance
No they care about all of us participating in some corporate health management scheme, independent of if we need to or not and with the primary focus on profits for the companies with best lobbying capability. Any focus that does exist on 'outcomes' is all based on dubious game-able statistics and not on if anyone is actually satisfied with their care.
Finally lets remember what Obamacare really did. It did not expand access to insurance. I wish people would stop using that word. It expanded/required access to health management. If anything Obamacare made actual insurance in the traditional sense of what insurance used to mean illegal for all practical intents.
Android apps are really Java apps
True for most apps, not always true for some of the fanciest games. I actually don't think putting together a compatibility layer that would enable the vast vast majority of Android apps to work would be a terrible technical problem.
No matter what though there will always be the occasional app that does not work and it will probably be a constant source of frustration for some users.
Android also has a lot of well Androidisms, around how notifications are delivered to the user, switching between 'activities' is handled what apps get broadcast messages and so fourth. Unless Microsoft mostly clones the Android UI the workflow will be different inside a lot of apps. Android apps don't operate in a vacuum quite the way typical desktop applications do. For example you encounter a certain media type your android app might send a message to something else to handle it, what that something else is, it does not know and when you are done the Android operating systems UI is depended upon to provide the 'back button' to get the previous activity, or to return you there otherwise.
It would be like running Windows apps in Wine on Linux or OSX, where there is always some oddities around file pickers, windows controls, associations, cut paste interop, etc. It mostly works, and you can figure out what you need to do but it does not always feel right. The only difference is it will be even more pronounce on a phone.
Nobody switches to Linux so they can run Windows apps on WINE. WINE lets them keep that one app they need so they can switch platforms for other reasons. I don't think you attract anyone to your platform by being the 'next best place to run their favorite apps'. So on that score Ballmer is wrong. Microsoft's entire mobile strategy is wrong. They need to admit they made some bad calls on their first gen smart device platform (Windows CE + Windows Phone -lt 6 ) and were simply to late to the party in the 'app' era. If they do anything they should focus on producing Apps for the other platforms. Give business users what they really want, full Exchange/Outlook support with all the manageability, some sort of Sharepoint application viewer, etc. That is where their bread is buttered. Microsoft should focus on being the top shelf app vendor, for their mobile play IMHO.
This is in no small part due to a moving of the goal-posts.
No it isn't moving the goal posts. Unless you are literal believer in the story of Methuselah, we have never observed any human living longer than 125 years or so. Plenty of people have lived into their 100s before most of what we consider modern medicine was available. They just had to be incredibly lucky to live that long without something else coming along to kill them first.
Now more and more people are living to that age, they don't have to be as lucky because many of the things that would have killed them, modern median can now treat. Yet even people who spent most of their lives 'living clean' and have access to the best care still tend to expire between 80-115. They just keel over at some point or don't wake up one morning.
It may be that are some genetic switches to throw turn off the expiration date. That would not surprise me. It seems to me evolution might very well have selected for the ability to live long enough to help care for a grand generation or two but mostly for us to die off before we are total invalids who would only consume resources from the herd rather than contribute.
As you say we are likely to discover more problems that need to be solved even if we can do this. Cancer is a perfect example it was not a major cause of death until we were able to cure the things that killed most folks before they'd lived long enough to die of common cancers. So here is the question: if you can give me some gene therapy that will prevent me from just sorta shutting down in my middle 90s, as so many of my relatives have great, but how does that mean I die ultimately. Does it mean I am going stroke out or something. Does it mean I am going to live for years with conditions that are debilitating? Is that even what I want.
I have a 97 year old grandfather. He is nearly blind and getting near to deaf every day. He still has his wits though and enough physical strength and stamina to get around for the most part. He will tell you that he has no wish to die but is very frustrated that his body will no longer let him do the things his mind wants to do. He therefor has told us not to take any steps to extend his life if something happens. He can't see well enough to read a large print book. It takes a great deal of fiddling and tinker with hearing devices for him to be able to catch most words of an audio book, setting up those things are also hard for him because he can't see them well. He can't go on walks much beyond the yard of his cottage, not because he lacks the physique but because he can't see the path and has to stick to places he knows by memory and can count on not changing. He has lived a long full life, mostly in excellent health. Now that that is slipping away as far as he is concerned about it, he is just sorta 'done'.
The other problem with determining self interest that you assume you know what someone wants in the first place.
Extending your example. Lets say I know I can rig one of the few video games my girlfriend is will to play. There is a zero chance I will be discovered. She isn't going to look into the source code and see that I added:
die_roll +=1 if player == 1 && die_roll 6
You might assume I would want to win. After all she may attribute my victories to a superior sense of strategy and deeper understanding of the game. After all it might make me seem smart and you would assume I'd like to impress her. I know on the other hand she can become frustrated with games she never wins at and if she can't win at least some of the time she will loose interest and I'll be stuck playing against the terrible computer AI again. So I actually have no incentive to rig the game in my favor, I might even want to rig it in her favor.
Its hard to say what she could have done. Their balance sheet isn't all that bad. Probably the thing to do was and still is turn it into an investment house. By that I don't mean the lets buy and re-brand start-ups kind of investment, I mean the Berkshire Hathaway type of operation.
A lot of people suggested Microsoft should go in that direction around 1999-2001 or so. Frankly in terms of maximizing shareholder value they were probably correct. MS had really lost its way there for awhile. Shortly after they got some focus back and started producing 'quality' well marketable software again. Here we are in 2015 and I kinda think they are headed back off the deep end trying to change the revenue model for Windows and Office and continuing to muck around in the mobile space where they are simply to late to the party. MS has remembered where their bread is buttered before and probably will again.
Yahoo I am way less optimistic. In terms of technology, they have produced a gem or two along the way like 'web pipes' I think called it? Most of those never really took off though. In terms of their technology being relevant in the market place they have been floundering since before Google showed up. With the resources they have handy they could probably print money if they had a plan, but they don't seem to have a plan.
As recently as 2007, they were still listed as the #2 search engine.
Yea but in the perspective of internet history, that is like saying As recently as 215 yeas ago France owned most of the land west of the Mississippi river.
From what I can tell now they're an investment company, with Alibaba being the bulk of their value.
Yes and all those shares in Alibaba at that are not exactly unencumbered in terms of legal questions surrounding their value. It depends on Alibaba doing what they promise to do with the subsidiary the shares are actually in.
What legal recourse the share holders have if Alibaba ultimately decides to alter the terms is an open question. It also supposed the Chinese government won't for whatever reason decide to interfere with something that is well playing a bit fast and loose with their foreign investment laws.
While (G|W)all St. has largely convinced itself the Alibaba deal is 'ok' I still would not put a dime into that stock. There are plenty of other companies with similarly good growth prospects to gamble on. I'd rather invest in something where there is legal clarity about what I actually own and how it may be converted than forgo that safety just to net another few points.
A safe space where you can talk with people sympathetic to your position
You mean an echo chamber with people who will tell you what you want to hear. I would say yours is actually the perfect argument why there should never be 'safe spaces'.
I think there is big difference between aborting a viable baby and one that has not a chance of being carried to term or could not survive post birth even with every available medical intervention.
That is the problem. You complain about the people 'preying on people at their weakest' but the vast majority of those people heading into the abortion clinic are about to kill a perfect healthy baby. To me and a lot of other people that is murder! So if a little unfair metal anguish is inflicted upon someone like your friend, that is sad but if those protesters convince even one person not to murder someone than I would have to say it was all worth it.
You can't separate the political opposition of something like abortion form accosting people on the streets. The reality is we do have a republic. Most politicking is local, its canvassers going house to house making the case for their issue or candidate. Its getting out in front of an event and bringing attention of the public to an issue.
The pro-murder group wants to control where the political debate takes place, they want to control the language and cast their position as something about choice, (hint is a hind unless you are rape victim you already made a choice) and not about murdering to avoid consequences. Why do they want to do this? They don't want enable a real debate at all. Its all about obfuscating the issue, the same thing you are doing making anecdotal arguments, making a big issue out rare cases where there is a clearly identifiable reason why a child cannot survive.
No the procedure abortion in that case is still entirely avoidable.
Its just not reasonable in the moral system even the majority of pro-lifers (like my self use).
All costs of living should be based on ability to pay.
No this is not correct at all. In fact this type of thinking is one of the core reasons the wealth gap exists. If someone cannot afford to live where they are the NEED TO LEAVE. If transportation and bridge tolls make it to expensive for you to earn a living working in the city you need to move out of the city.
The fact the middle class taxes go to subsides and safety net programs are what allow the super rich to get away with not paying living wages.
If you want to fix the income gap here is how you do it:
1) Fix the illegal immigrant problem so there are a large number of agriculture jobs, low skill factory and mining / mineral extraction work, or service work available that actually will pay minimum wage. It is possible to live on minimum wage in large parts of the middle west and south.
2) Tax foreign labor as an import. US business that utilize offshore labor should pay payroll taxes on employees over seas. Unless they can show that employees effort does not contribute materially to their US operations.
3) Kill off public housing and food subsidies for people who live in high cost densely populated areas. Provide them instead with free bus fair to (1). This will reduce the supply of cheap labor in densely populated areas. Either it will trigger the export of jobs to lower cost regions or it will trigger higher wages to maintain the labor supply. The going wage at Starbucks in Palo Alto should be $15 dollars an hour not because the minimum wage is $15 but because their won't be a barista to higher for less because they won't otherwise be able to live near by otherwise and will move away.
Things like cost of living indexed taxation, and residential subsides don't really help the poor do anything other than stay poor. What they do provide is the very wealthy with a heavily discounted labor pool at the expense of the middle class.
which 32-bit Windows can't handle
Look I count myself among the windows haters but there is plenty wrong and deficient in Windows to complain about without making false statements. There are several variants of 32-bit Windows that do PAE
The problem is metadata is a description that only makes sense in context. One person's metadata is data to someone else.
Even with the the phone company. What cell you were connected to and when is metadata to the billing division. To them data is which customer, using what service, for how long. (roaming aside) What cells you were using are not important that is data about where the other data came from. To the groups that do network operations and capacity planning: They don't care about who mostly, that is data about where their data about where, what, and for how long came from.
Same thing if I am developing a filesystem, than what extents are used, where is content on the disk logically etc is the data, the content is just 'content'. As a user of a filesystem everything besides the content is metadata.
I don't think the legal system should be trying to declare what is or isn't metadata, certainly not for the sake of making some qualitative judgment about if its subject to constitutional protections. We should stick to the reasonable expectation of privacy test, that has been used in the past. If someone would reasonably expect the known dispositions of whatever data they are sending/producing/modifying would be private the government should need a warrant!