Doesn't this mean that they're effectively impotent from this point forward, or am I misreading it?
Of course not. First of all, the FCC rule change is not overturned yet. The Senate can't "veto" anything. It still has to pass the House, and it has to not be vetoed by the President. If vetoed, it would need 2/3 majorities in both houses to overturn the veto, reinstate the measure, and "veto" the FCC ruling. Unless an awful lot of people lose their heads, that ain't going to happen.
Second, so the regulatory body's (FCC's) ruling is rendered inoperable by a new law. So what. Big deal. There's no automatic implication of failure on the part of the regulators. What a bizarre thought. It's just the system working as per design.
I'm English... if parliament vetoed something like this it would spell the end of the agency.
That explains it:-) We could have taken the simple route in the US after the War Of Independence, and kept some parliamentary form. Instead we put a lot of thought into it and came up with something much better. If the people vote for someone here, we figure that means they've made more than a fly by night choice, the term of the chosen guy gets served out regardless, and his appointments stand. Hey, if he's bad enough, he can be impeached. In the case of many of the states, the Governors can be recalled (er, well, admittedly a rogue court can interfere with all this, as we see today, but you will see that will get slapped down by higher court).
"... we know enough that reaching another star system will not happen in our lifetimes."
It's not about what we do know; it's about what we don't know yet. In the golden age, we didn't know how to do it, and now we still don't know how to do it. Gee. Sounds like the same condition to me.
I think you can believe me when I assert that virtually no one in the golden age thought there would be interstellar flight in their lifetimes. You're right that if anything we're more pessimistic about the timeline now, but that's not the point. Then, as now, it was all about hope and enthusiasm for the future. Not knowing the details of how to make that future happen is no reason not to have hope and entusiasm. There have to be other reasons for this.
P.S. - you're dead on target about the DMCA and the rest of the medieval-thinking crap.
I understand the part where the restaurant prints the menus on Monday, and inflation is so bad they can't use the menus on Tuesday. I can see where this could be a pretty serious problem. Even in the 1970s in the US, with comparatively mild inflation, I remember the prices in all my mail order catalogs could only be taken with a grain of salt. I used to include a "contingency" in my orders, over and above the calculated amount, to cover inflation. I relied on them returning any unused contingency.
Actually I follow almost all of it. Right up to "They abandoned their paper money in favor of a different paper money."
1) Do you mean "they" all just decided through consensus to use relatively stable US dollars, or something like that, instead of the domestic currency? This might work because the present/past (but probably not future) world situation is pretty unusual, with the US currency being the 800 lb gorilla. This wouldn't be much of an option though if the US underwent hyperinflation. I doubt the Euro could withstand supporting both Europe and the US.
2) Do you mean they revalued their own currency? I don't see that this in itself solves anything. I always wondered why people seemed upset at the notion of being paid in quintillion dollar bills, and paying a quadrillion dollars for a hamburger. So what? It's still the same fraction of their pay. And the people in the Weimar republic carrying their grocery money in wheelbarrows... were the authorities stupid? Why didn't they just print much larger denominations? (Actually I think this particular visualization turns out to be bogus)
You've never read an economics textbook, have you?
Er, actually I have. There are some glaring holes in your supposed explanation.
1) The government never lets you count its stache of gold. In fact no one is allowed to even view the gold in Fort Knox. Maybe you are a trusting fellow, so when they tell you they have x million pounds of it, you believe them.
2) I doubt the paper money was intended to have "the same value" as gold. That would be $35.00 per ounce (in historic times at least). I think you will find it has rather more value than that. A single bill weighing a small fraction of an ounce is worth, as one example $100.00. You don't like me using dollars as a measure of value? OK, an ounce of gold will buy 35 bags of potato chips, and the much lighter bill will buy 100 bags.
3) Who says inflation is a bad thing? Scarcely any economic authorities, you'll be interested to hear. Just about all of them agree that a small amount of inflation is necessary and/or desirable. Ponzi rules, it would seem.
4) Even if inflation is bad, how is seizing some of the people's holdings by printing money and thus causing inflation, worse than seizing some of the people's holdings by grabbing it in the form of taxes before they even see it?
LOL! I think what Robert A. Heinlein meant is that history marches on. There is no hint that he is the only one allowed/able to read it. The idea is simply that you'd best not count on being able to stop it.
Money has utility only if it has a reliable value. This is why people liked the Gold Standard -- it was a value that was very hard to tinker with. It was objective -- one could weigh the gold pieces and determine the value directly. With fiat money, it's based on trust and future production (e.g., debt-based). The only thing allowing people to continue to accept paper/fiat money is a relatively stable value. In other words, free of inflation and deflation at too great a value (more that a few percent at most).
With respect, I see this oft-quoted (in one form or another) conventional explanation as mumbo-jumbo.
The idea that gold has some kind of magic inherent value, difficult to "tinker with", strikes me as just plain weird. Sure, gold has some utilitarian niche value (largely in the form of gold plating, where a tiny amount goes an amazing distance), but mostly its perceived value as a jewelry constituent is just a form of carnival trickery inflicted on the rubes. Who says gold is worth $35.00 per ounce, year after year? A governmental trust - a fiat, essentially. It has nothing more or less supporting its value than the paper money you criticize. Either one works to the extent you keep inflation at bay and get the preponderance of the people to buy into. Today a bag of potato chips is worth $1.00 or 1/35 of an ounce of gold. Next year, it's $1.05 or 1/33 of an ounce; whatever. Inflation has nothing to do with the medium of currency. It has to do with supply versus demand, and the total amount of currency.
You would do far better to use, say, platinum instead of gold. At least there is a very real, and non-substitutable, requirement for platinum in the operation of industry and life as we know it. But it is still not fundamentally superior to paper money.
And no, I don't think people will refuse to accept paper money if inflation rises above some arbitrary level of "a few percent at most". As if they had a real alternative. "Excuse me, Mr. Employer, I would prefer you to pay me in food, fuel, rent vouchers, and some precious metals." See just how far you get if you insist on your own arrangement. You get shown the front door, that's what.
There are plenty of instances in the recent past, if not the present, where inflation rose above anyone's idea of "a few percent" - multiple tens of percent, or even 100+ percent - for multiyear periods - and those countries did not abandon paper money.
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]
She was absolutely dead-nuts right at the time. But lately it seems the corporations, with fiduciary responsibility only to the stockholders, have turned into evil monsters, exporting jobs, discarding workers like yesterday's trash, yet somehow enriching those at the top more and more, often just for being there, to an outrageous, absurd extent.
I used to think we were headed for 1929. Now I think maybe we are headed for October 1917.
Government doesn't need to seize money they can just print more of it.
I think it's safe to say just about all governments have convinced themselves that's not a viable method of operating - else none of them would need to raise a cent of taxes. The end result of just printing money would be identical, save the elimination of tax collection expenses and tax preparation expenses - hence more efficient. Inflation would reduce the citizens' buying power, but not as much as it is currently reduced by taxes.
Does anyone know why they just don't do it the easy way, and lighten the load a little on the people?
As you noted, a government has no money of its own. The only way a gov can do ANYTHING is to seize and redistribute from the citizens.
Well, actually a government can own its own industry and thus generate its own wealth. The USSR did that. But that is arguably seizure, by seizing the marketplace.
The only government which never redistributes wealth does NOTHING; they call that anarchy.
You are right in a literal sense. But merely seizing money and spending it is not at the core of what is commonly called redistribution.
Largesse is.
When the government seizes money and doles out largesse to those it deems worthy, and NOT to those it deems unworthy, that is true redistribution for redistribution's sake. Right or wrong. Heck, the US government is now in the sorry state of handing out tax rebates to citizens WHO HAVE NOT PAID FEDERAL INCOME TAXES! But it doesn't have the integrity to call those payments what they are: Federal welfare payments.
If the government were to seize money and then redistribute it, that's called.. oh I dunno.. COMMUNISM.
No, that's called THE CURRENT US GOVERNMENT. They are just going about it in a half baked way. The Communists went about it with more dedication (still not complete, though; there were still plenty of privileged classes in the USSR) and failed abjectly. Will the US fail just as abjectly?
I thought I was the only one bothered by this. On my machine, I sometimes have to wait up to 30 seconds after double clicking a shortcut - with no feedback whatsoever that anything is going on! Sheesh!
Maybe we're both missing some configuration item where you can enable an hourglass type feedback (note the question mark in the subject line), but assuming we're not (and I have looked pretty hard)...
<rant> This is an INSANE behavior. It causes me to doubt that the designers take the most elementary fundamentals of GUI design seriously. </rant>
A close second to the annoyance factor of this missing feature is:
Why force us to double click the shortcuts in the first place? Why can't we configure for single click launching? Requiring a double click where there is no necessity to demand it is my pet peeve. Double click technique is difficult to explain, and non-trivial to master, especially for users who are not very dexterous. In Windows and KDE, I can set it up so I don't have to double click.
I would like to be shown the clueless user, by somewhat showing how to fix these nuisances. But even if it is possible to fix them, I must ask why fixing them is not the default.
Jeeze, there's nothing like taking a bunch of idosyncratic preferences and treating them as best practice, let alone enforcing them at a workplace.
I note that Pike doesn't even come close to labeling his piece "Best Practice For C Coding" - for which I thank him.
He does have points that are at least arguably valid, but he lost me at the end.
"Include files should never include files" ?! Pure bull-freaking-crap hogwash. Rather the opposite is the case! Every include file should include every dependency include file. And order dependency of include files is a no-no. It is quite easy to eliminate all order dependencies, and if I have a religious rule, this is it.
Even with a DNS over the internet site names will run out far before addresses do.
Sure they would - if it was a simple flat namespace. Maybe that's why the internet is hierarchical. Right now you usually have machine.domain.com. But there's no reason you can't use more levels, like dmv.state.ma.us.
So for your refrigerator, maybe it would be refrigerator.17312.main-street.mytown.mystate.us.
Hmm... we don't NEED money. But it helps. Without money, I would need to learn how to slaughter animals, raise crops, build a house, generate electricity, etc. etc. With money, I choose a profession, and people pay me to do my job, and I pay other people to do their job. It makes life a lot easier in a way.
No, without money you could still choose a profession and barter professional services for all those things.
The air bursts (when the blast doesn't actually touch the ground) wouldn't have been that bad except for the initial EMP and radiation burst. Air bursts don't create fallout and are thus much cleaner then surface bursts (but I still wouldn't want to be around one).
Oh, really? Hiroshima was an air burst (around 2000 feet; no crater was created). Are you really saying there was no fallout at Hiroshima? I know there is less fallout than there is with ground bursts, but none?
Well, you could make a stab at proving that the date of posting was at or before a given date by displaying the page in a browser and photographing the display with a copy of today's newspaper next to it.
The trouble is, you could load the page from a local hard drive and then just type in anything for the URL in the Explorer or Netscape address line.
It's difficult to see how you could ever have ironclad proof.
Sorry to put it this way, but you have butchered/misunderstood what Myers says.
Actually, I bet you've been bit by HTML syntax, which renders plaintext invisible. Here's to proofreading:-)
Neither Myers, nor any other proficient C++ programmer, would claim that vector is an ill-conceived specialization and not a container. What he says is that vectorbool is an ill-conceived specialization and not a container.
vector is a well engineered general container, and an excellent replacement for C arrays in most cases (C arrays are Bad Things in general). vectorbool is a specialization of conceived in such a way that it doesn't even behave like a vector. It is bad.
The legal definition of extortion is: the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right. 18 U.S.C. S 1951(b)(2).
That is not the definition in the real world. Merriam Webster: "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power : wring." INTIMIDATION. That's the part of what's going on that we're taking issue with here.
If you work the numbers, you will see that this is a manifestly false conclusion based on the example given.
PayPal's merchant fees are 2.2% plus 30 cents, or 0.7% plus 30 cents for those with "Preferred" accounts.
On the $50 example transaction, that is $1.40, or $0.65 (65 cents) for Preferred. Compare that with the interest earned on a money market deposit or similar investment for two weeks - 5% annual yield equates to 0.192% over two weeks, which brings in 9.6 cents. Even if you assume a more risky mutual fund investment yielding 10% annually, it is still only 19.2 cents, and there will be a risk to account for which is not present in the upfront fee collection. Not to mention that not a whole lot of mutual fund or other investments are yielding double digit returns (many of them are well into negative territory for some time now).
You can multiply 9.6 or 19.2 cents by thousands if you want, but I'd much prefer to multiply 65 cents or $1.40 by thousands:-)
I agree with most points (up to a point:-), but I have some small caveats.
1) You say "... freedom is the natural state of humans". Well. In a sense, it is quite to the contrary. Liberty requires careful culturing, a never-ending vigilance, and an occasional nourishing with the blood of heroes. The entropic state is for a society to lapse into despotism.
2) You say "The very fact that a corporation has chosen the internet filtering sector as its market means that the... employees working for it have no compunction against this technology..." Friendly bulletin - some of us accept employment at corporations whose policy we do not entirely agree with. Family obligations come first, and we can't all write our own ticket. So yes, to an extent, most of us do compromise some principles.
3) You say "... corporations have no other obligation than to make money...". On the contrary, they have an obligation to abide by laws promulgated by the government for the common good. Should they renege on this latter obligation, they are in a HEAP of trouble.
... the owner of the house is the one responsible for making sure the door is locked.
Well, I can't accept the kind of topsy-turvy view this implies (or maybe I'm just inferring it).
It is not unlawful and immoral to fail to lock your door. It is unlawful and immoral to enter the private property behind that door and trash it or steal things. Let's not lose sight of who is doing the wrongdoing.
Is blatantly lax security unwise? Hell, yes! Do we want to settle for a society where every single thing has to be locked down tight, or vultures will vandalize and steal everything? Hell, no! Lock up to a reasonable extent, but at the same time, track down and prosecute the bejesus out of the real wrongdoers.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't this mean that they're effectively impotent from this point forward, or am I misreading it?
:-) We could have taken the simple route in the US after the War Of Independence, and kept some parliamentary form. Instead we put a lot of thought into it and came up with something much better. If the people vote for someone here, we figure that means they've made more than a fly by night choice, the term of the chosen guy gets served out regardless, and his appointments stand. Hey, if he's bad enough, he can be impeached. In the case of many of the states, the Governors can be recalled (er, well, admittedly a rogue court can interfere with all this, as we see today, but you will see that will get slapped down by higher court).
Of course not. First of all, the FCC rule change is not overturned yet. The Senate can't "veto" anything. It still has to pass the House, and it has to not be vetoed by the President. If vetoed, it would need 2/3 majorities in both houses to overturn the veto, reinstate the measure, and "veto" the FCC ruling. Unless an awful lot of people lose their heads, that ain't going to happen.
Second, so the regulatory body's (FCC's) ruling is rendered inoperable by a new law. So what. Big deal. There's no automatic implication of failure on the part of the regulators. What a bizarre thought. It's just the system working as per design.
I'm English... if parliament vetoed something like this it would spell the end of the agency.
That explains it
"... we know enough that reaching another star system will not happen in our lifetimes."
It's not about what we do know; it's about what we don't know yet. In the golden age, we didn't know how to do it, and now we still don't know how to do it. Gee. Sounds like the same condition to me.
I think you can believe me when I assert that virtually no one in the golden age thought there would be interstellar flight in their lifetimes. You're right that if anything we're more pessimistic about the timeline now, but that's not the point. Then, as now, it was all about hope and enthusiasm for the future. Not knowing the details of how to make that future happen is no reason not to have hope and entusiasm. There have to be other reasons for this.
P.S. - you're dead on target about the DMCA and the rest of the medieval-thinking crap.
I understand the part where the restaurant prints the menus on Monday, and inflation is so bad they can't use the menus on Tuesday. I can see where this could be a pretty serious problem. Even in the 1970s in the US, with comparatively mild inflation, I remember the prices in all my mail order catalogs could only be taken with a grain of salt. I used to include a "contingency" in my orders, over and above the calculated amount, to cover inflation. I relied on them returning any unused contingency.
... were the authorities stupid? Why didn't they just print much larger denominations? (Actually I think this particular visualization turns out to be bogus)
Actually I follow almost all of it. Right up to "They abandoned their paper money in favor of a different paper money."
1) Do you mean "they" all just decided through consensus to use relatively stable US dollars, or something like that, instead of the domestic currency? This might work because the present/past (but probably not future) world situation is pretty unusual, with the US currency being the 800 lb gorilla. This wouldn't be much of an option though if the US underwent hyperinflation. I doubt the Euro could withstand supporting both Europe and the US.
2) Do you mean they revalued their own currency? I don't see that this in itself solves anything. I always wondered why people seemed upset at the notion of being paid in quintillion dollar bills, and paying a quadrillion dollars for a hamburger. So what? It's still the same fraction of their pay. And the people in the Weimar republic carrying their grocery money in wheelbarrows
You've never read an economics textbook, have you?
Er, actually I have. There are some glaring holes in your supposed explanation.
1) The government never lets you count its stache of gold. In fact no one is allowed to even view the gold in Fort Knox. Maybe you are a trusting fellow, so when they tell you they have x million pounds of it, you believe them.
2) I doubt the paper money was intended to have "the same value" as gold. That would be $35.00 per ounce (in historic times at least). I think you will find it has rather more value than that. A single bill weighing a small fraction of an ounce is worth, as one example $100.00. You don't like me using dollars as a measure of value? OK, an ounce of gold will buy 35 bags of potato chips, and the much lighter bill will buy 100 bags.
3) Who says inflation is a bad thing? Scarcely any economic authorities, you'll be interested to hear. Just about all of them agree that a small amount of inflation is necessary and/or desirable. Ponzi rules, it would seem.
4) Even if inflation is bad, how is seizing some of the people's holdings by printing money and thus causing inflation, worse than seizing some of the people's holdings by grabbing it in the form of taxes before they even see it?
LOL! I think what Robert A. Heinlein meant is that history marches on. There is no hint that he is the only one allowed/able to read it. The idea is simply that you'd best not count on being able to stop it.
Money has utility only if it has a reliable value. This is why people liked the Gold Standard -- it was a value that was very hard to tinker with. It was objective -- one could weigh the gold pieces and determine the value directly. With fiat money, it's based on trust and future production (e.g., debt-based). The only thing allowing people to continue to accept paper/fiat money is a relatively stable value. In other words, free of inflation and deflation at too great a value (more that a few percent at most).
With respect, I see this oft-quoted (in one form or another) conventional explanation as mumbo-jumbo.
The idea that gold has some kind of magic inherent value, difficult to "tinker with", strikes me as just plain weird. Sure, gold has some utilitarian niche value (largely in the form of gold plating, where a tiny amount goes an amazing distance), but mostly its perceived value as a jewelry constituent is just a form of carnival trickery inflicted on the rubes. Who says gold is worth $35.00 per ounce, year after year? A governmental trust - a fiat, essentially. It has nothing more or less supporting its value than the paper money you criticize. Either one works to the extent you keep inflation at bay and get the preponderance of the people to buy into. Today a bag of potato chips is worth $1.00 or 1/35 of an ounce of gold. Next year, it's $1.05 or 1/33 of an ounce; whatever. Inflation has nothing to do with the medium of currency. It has to do with supply versus demand, and the total amount of currency.
You would do far better to use, say, platinum instead of gold. At least there is a very real, and non-substitutable, requirement for platinum in the operation of industry and life as we know it. But it is still not fundamentally superior to paper money.
And no, I don't think people will refuse to accept paper money if inflation rises above some arbitrary level of "a few percent at most". As if they had a real alternative. "Excuse me, Mr. Employer, I would prefer you to pay me in food, fuel, rent vouchers, and some precious metals." See just how far you get if you insist on your own arrangement. You get shown the front door, that's what.
There are plenty of instances in the recent past, if not the present, where inflation rose above anyone's idea of "a few percent" - multiple tens of percent, or even 100+ percent - for multiyear periods - and those countries did not abandon paper money.
It's called the earned income tax credit. Rather a misnomer as it has evolved, no? See, e.g., CNN Issue Brief On Earned Income Tax Credit
"America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to 'the common good,' but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance -- and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way." [Ayn Rand]
She was absolutely dead-nuts right at the time. But lately it seems the corporations, with fiduciary responsibility only to the stockholders, have turned into evil monsters, exporting jobs, discarding workers like yesterday's trash, yet somehow enriching those at the top more and more, often just for being there, to an outrageous, absurd extent.
I used to think we were headed for 1929. Now I think maybe we are headed for October 1917.
Government doesn't need to seize money they can just print more of it.
I think it's safe to say just about all governments have convinced themselves that's not a viable method of operating - else none of them would need to raise a cent of taxes. The end result of just printing money would be identical, save the elimination of tax collection expenses and tax preparation expenses - hence more efficient. Inflation would reduce the citizens' buying power, but not as much as it is currently reduced by taxes.
Does anyone know why they just don't do it the easy way, and lighten the load a little on the people?
As you noted, a government has no money of its own. The only way a gov can do ANYTHING is to seize and redistribute from the citizens.
Well, actually a government can own its own industry and thus generate its own wealth. The USSR did that. But that is arguably seizure, by seizing the marketplace.
The only government which never redistributes wealth does NOTHING; they call that anarchy.
You are right in a literal sense. But merely seizing money and spending it is not at the core of what is commonly called redistribution.
Largesse is.
When the government seizes money and doles out largesse to those it deems worthy, and NOT to those it deems unworthy, that is true redistribution for redistribution's sake. Right or wrong. Heck, the US government is now in the sorry state of handing out tax rebates to citizens WHO HAVE NOT PAID FEDERAL INCOME TAXES! But it doesn't have the integrity to call those payments what they are: Federal welfare payments.
If the government were to seize money and then redistribute it, that's called.. oh I dunno.. COMMUNISM.
No, that's called THE CURRENT US GOVERNMENT. They are just going about it in a half baked way. The Communists went about it with more dedication (still not complete, though; there were still plenty of privileged classes in the USSR) and failed abjectly. Will the US fail just as abjectly?
I thought I was the only one bothered by this. On my machine, I sometimes have to wait up to 30 seconds after double clicking a shortcut - with no feedback whatsoever that anything is going on! Sheesh!
...
Maybe we're both missing some configuration item where you can enable an hourglass type feedback (note the question mark in the subject line), but assuming we're not (and I have looked pretty hard)
<rant>
This is an INSANE behavior. It causes me to doubt that the designers take the most elementary fundamentals of GUI design seriously.
</rant>
A close second to the annoyance factor of this missing feature is:
Why force us to double click the shortcuts in the first place? Why can't we configure for single click launching? Requiring a double click where there is no necessity to demand it is my pet peeve. Double click technique is difficult to explain, and non-trivial to master, especially for users who are not very dexterous. In Windows and KDE, I can set it up so I don't have to double click.
I would like to be shown the clueless user, by somewhat showing how to fix these nuisances. But even if it is possible to fix them, I must ask why fixing them is not the default.
Jeeze, there's nothing like taking a bunch of idosyncratic preferences and treating them as best practice, let alone enforcing them at a workplace.
I note that Pike doesn't even come close to labeling his piece "Best Practice For C Coding" - for which I thank him.
He does have points that are at least arguably valid, but he lost me at the end.
"Include files should never include files" ?! Pure bull-freaking-crap hogwash. Rather the opposite is the case! Every include file should include every dependency include file. And order dependency of include files is a no-no. It is quite easy to eliminate all order dependencies, and if I have a religious rule, this is it.
I agree with you, but you have invoked a pet peeve of mine.
[pedantic]
They are braces, not "curly brackets", let alone "brackets".
These things have perfectly good names.
() parentheses
[] brackets
{} braces
[/pedantic]
Even with a DNS over the internet site names will run out far before addresses do.
Sure they would - if it was a simple flat namespace. Maybe that's why the internet is hierarchical. Right now you usually have machine.domain.com. But there's no reason you can't use more levels, like dmv.state.ma.us.
So for your refrigerator, maybe it would be refrigerator.17312.main-street.mytown.mystate.us.
No, without money you could still choose a profession and barter professional services for all those things.
... chinese economic ladder is skewed too -- so actually the average family subsides on 100-150 dollars per month ...
"Subsides", or "subsists"?
The air bursts (when the blast doesn't actually touch the ground) wouldn't have been that bad except for the initial EMP and radiation burst. Air bursts don't create fallout and are thus much cleaner then surface bursts (but I still wouldn't want to be around one).
Oh, really? Hiroshima was an air burst (around 2000 feet; no crater was created). Are you really saying there was no fallout at Hiroshima? I know there is less fallout than there is with ground bursts, but none?
I suppose you don't have deep corporate pockets to sue the bejeezus out of those scum.
/different from/ government dictation - exactly HOW?
That's what the difference is, of course.
Corporate dictation - better than
Well, you could make a stab at proving that the date of posting was at or before a given date by displaying the page in a browser and photographing the display with a copy of today's newspaper next to it.
The trouble is, you could load the page from a local hard drive and then just type in anything for the URL in the Explorer or Netscape address line.
It's difficult to see how you could ever have ironclad proof.
Sorry to put it this way, but you have butchered/misunderstood what Myers says.
:-)
Actually, I bet you've been bit by HTML syntax, which renders plaintext invisible. Here's to proofreading
Neither Myers, nor any other proficient C++ programmer, would claim that vector is an ill-conceived specialization and not a container. What he says is that vectorbool is an ill-conceived specialization and not a container.
vector is a well engineered general container, and an excellent replacement for C arrays in most cases (C arrays are Bad Things in general). vectorbool is a specialization of conceived in such a way that it doesn't even behave like a vector. It is bad.
The legal definition of extortion is: the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right. 18 U.S.C. S 1951(b)(2).
That is not the definition in the real world. Merriam Webster: "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power : wring." INTIMIDATION. That's the part of what's going on that we're taking issue with here.
If you work the numbers, you will see that this is a manifestly false conclusion based on the example given.
:-)
PayPal's merchant fees are 2.2% plus 30 cents, or 0.7% plus 30 cents for those with "Preferred" accounts.
On the $50 example transaction, that is $1.40, or $0.65 (65 cents) for Preferred. Compare that with the interest earned on a money market deposit or similar investment for two weeks - 5% annual yield equates to 0.192% over two weeks, which brings in 9.6 cents. Even if you assume a more risky mutual fund investment yielding 10% annually, it is still only 19.2 cents, and there will be a risk to account for which is not present in the upfront fee collection. Not to mention that not a whole lot of mutual fund or other investments are yielding double digit returns (many of them are well into negative territory for some time now).
You can multiply 9.6 or 19.2 cents by thousands if you want, but I'd much prefer to multiply 65 cents or $1.40 by thousands
I agree with most points (up to a point :-), but I have some small caveats.
... employees working for it have no compunction against this technology ..." Friendly bulletin - some of us accept employment at corporations whose policy we do not entirely agree with. Family obligations come first, and we can't all write our own ticket. So yes, to an extent, most of us do compromise some principles.
...". On the contrary, they have an obligation to abide by laws promulgated by the government for the common good. Should they renege on this latter obligation, they are in a HEAP of trouble.
1) You say "... freedom is the natural state of humans". Well. In a sense, it is quite to the contrary. Liberty requires careful culturing, a never-ending vigilance, and an occasional nourishing with the blood of heroes. The entropic state is for a society to lapse into despotism.
2) You say "The very fact that a corporation has chosen the internet filtering sector as its market means that the
3) You say "... corporations have no other obligation than to make money
... the owner of the house is the one responsible for making sure the door is locked.
Well, I can't accept the kind of topsy-turvy view this implies (or maybe I'm just inferring it).
It is not unlawful and immoral to fail to lock your door. It is unlawful and immoral to enter the private property behind that door and trash it or steal things. Let's not lose sight of who is doing the wrongdoing.
Is blatantly lax security unwise? Hell, yes! Do we want to settle for a society where every single thing has to be locked down tight, or vultures will vandalize and steal everything? Hell, no! Lock up to a reasonable extent, but at the same time, track down and prosecute the bejesus out of the real wrongdoers.